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Vice President of Event Operations

Broward Center for the Performing Arts

Fort Lauderdale, FL

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JOB DETAILS
SKILLS
Alliance/Partner Management, Benchmarking, Best Practices, Budgeting, Business Strategy, Cadence, Change Management, Channel Strategies, Communication Skills, Communications Protocols, Construction, Continuous Improvement, Cost Control, Cross-Functional, Customer Relations, Data Modeling, Emergency Planning, English Language, Event Management, Feasibility Analysis, Finance, Financial Management, Financial Operations, Financial Services, Food and Beverage Industry, Home Security, Hospitality and Tourism, Leadership, Marketing, Mentoring, Music, Needs Assessment, Onboarding, Operational Audit, Operational Improvement, Operational Strategy, Operational Support, Operations Management, Operations Planning, Operations Security (OPSEC), Organizational Culture, Performance Analysis, Performance Management, Performing Arts, Process Improvement, Profit & Loss, Purchasing/Procurement, Relationship Management, Resolve Customer Issues, Revenue Growth, Security Protocols, Set Goals, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), Strategic Planning, System Integration (SI), Talent Management, Team Lead/Manager, Team Player, Trend Analysis, Vendor/Supplier Evaluation, Vendor/Supplier Relations, Workforce Planning
LOCATION
Fort Lauderdale, FL
POSTED
Today
Before Proceeding Start Here: BCPA Vice President of Event Operations Position Profile

*All submissions are confidential*

**Your application MUST include a cover letter with your resume.**

***Applications without a coverletter will NOT be considered.***

POSITION SUMMARY

The Vice President of Event Operations (VP) is a senior leader responsible for the strategic direction, operational excellence, and performance of all event operations, guest experience, front-of-house functions, parking operations, and event security coordination across the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, The Parker, and managed venues. As a key member of the leadership team, this role ensures a seamless, high-quality guest journey from arrival through departure, while driving operational consistency, service excellence, and financial performance. The VP also oversees the Managed Venues division and serves as t the primary organizational advocate for the managed venue General Managers at Aventura Arts and Cultural Center and the Miniaci Performing Arts Center at NSU, ensuring these venues have the institutional access, operational support, and organizational connectivity to serve their communities and partners as full members of the Broward Center family.

This role is the front-of-house operational counterpart to the AVP, Production & Venue Services, who holds the back-of-house domain (production, facilities, technical, and event technician programs). Together, these two roles cover the full operational envelope of the organization. In addition to stabilizing and elevating existing operations at the Broward Center and The Parker, the VP will lead operational readiness planning for a new live music venue currently in design development, funded, board-approved, and projected to operate approximately 300 nights per year on the Riverwalk and part of the main campus.

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
  • Serve as a strategic partner to the President & CEO, helping define organizational priorities and operational strategy.
  • Provide enterprise-wide leadership across audience-facing operations, ensuring alignment and effective execution.
  • Establish and model a culture of service excellence, accountability, and high performance across the organization, translating organizational values into visible, daily leadership behaviors and team expectations.
  • Identify opportunities to enhance operational efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance.
EVENT OPERATIONS & EXECUTION
  • Provide executive oversight of all event operations across venues.
  • Build and formalize operational standards, staffing models, and execution protocols, including many that do not yet exist in consistent form, creating the operational infrastructure appropriate to the organization's scale and complexity.
  • Ensure readiness, coordination, and accountability for all event execution.
  • Drive continuous improvement in operational performance and delivery.
  • Lead operational readiness planning for the new on-campus live music venue, currently in design development. This includes staffing models, systems integration, SOP development, and coordination with construction and programming teams to ensure a successful opening.
  • Establish consistent operational leadership at The Parker, which currently operates without a dedicated venue manager following a recent organizational restructuring. Stabilizing Parker's day-to-day operations is an early and visible priority for this role.
  • Develop, maintain, and actively administer Emergency Action Plans across all venues. EAPs must be treated as living documents: built to the specific operational profile of each venue, trained against on a consistent cadence with all staff, volunteers, and contractors, reviewed and updated after every activation, near-miss, or significant change to venue configuration or staffing, and socialized continuously so that emergency preparedness is a practiced behavior, not a binder on a shelf.
GUEST EXPERIENCE & FRONT-OF-HOUSE
  • Lead guest experience strategy and front-of-house operations, understanding that the guest relationship begins before arrival and extends well beyond the final bow. The VP is operationally responsible for what happens on-site; strategically responsible for how those moments connect to the broader, lasting relationship between this organization and the people it serves.
  • Establish service standards that reflect the full arc of the guest journey, from the first point of contact through the post-event experience and the long-term relationship that follows.
  • Oversee guest services, ushers, and volunteer programs, including volunteer training.
  • Foster a culture of genuine hospitality that originates in leadership and works its way outward to every audience-facing team member.
  • Own the enterprise-wide guest experience standards program. While first-line complaint resolution lives with the department closest to the issue (Ticketing for transactional issues, Front of House for in-venue concerns, Development and Foundation for donor and member matters), the VP EO establishes the service standards, escalation protocols for sensitive or repeat complaints, centralized tracking and reporting to identify patterns and recurring failures, and consistent guidelines for service recovery, refunds, and upgrades that make guest experience ownership consistent across the organization rather than departmentally variable.
PARKING, SECURITY & GUEST JOURNEY
  • Oversee the full guest journey from arrival to departure.
  • Lead parking operations and traffic flow. Event Operations holds primary end-to-end accountability for the guest parking experience; Security and Guest Experience hold defined coordinating roles. The parking garage transitions to direct BCPA operational management on July 1, 2026; the VP will own this transition and the ongoing operator relationship.
  • Partner with and supervise the Director of Security in integrating safety and security operations with the guest experience mission, including show-night protocols, contracted security vendor relationships, ingress/egress management, and emergency preparedness across all venues.
  • Ensure a safe and welcoming environment.
MANAGED VENUES & PARTNERSHIPS
  • Directly supervise the General Managers at Aventura AACC and Miniaci PAC at NSU. Set clear performance expectations, evaluate outcomes, and serve as their primary organizational resource. The character of this supervision is advocacy-forward: ensuring each GM has the institutional access, shared services alignment (marketing, box office, event technicians, systems), and organizational weight behind their requests that allow them to lead their venues and serve their communities effectively.
  • Ensure operational consistency and financial accountability.
  • Oversee contracts and partner relationships.
  • Deepen and strengthen the managed venue relationships, ensuring Aventura AACC and Miniaci PAC at NSU receive consistent operational support, marketing resources, and institutional access. As direct supervisor of both GMs, the VP is responsible for the performance and organizational health of these venues, not just their advocacy within the broader organization.
FINANCIAL & OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE
  • Partner with Finance on budgeting and planning.
  • Monitor performance and cost control.
  • Drive revenue growth and efficiency.
  • Align operations with financial goals.
  • Develop and steward the organization's Net Promoter Score (NPS) program as a reliable, growing benchmark for guest experience performance. Establish consistent measurement cadences across all venues, interpret results with operational and programming teams, identify trends and their operational causes, and socialize the data broadly so that every team whose work touches the guest experience understands how the organization is performing and why it matters. The goal is for NPS to grow from a new initiative into a shared organizational language for quality.
HOSPITALITY & FOOD & BEVERAGE (FUTURE PORTFOLIO)
  • Lead the strategic planning and organizational readiness for future food & beverage and hospitality operations.
  • Partner with executive leadership to define the operating model, timing, and investment approach.
  • Support evaluation of partnership, vendor, or in-house models.
  • Prepare operational standards, staffing frameworks, and guest experience integration.
  • Food & beverage currently reports outside the Event Operations structure. Integration into this portfolio requires close partnership with existing leadership and a sequenced transition aligned with organizational readiness and established trust. Operational oversight will be implemented on a timeline determined in consultation with the CEO.
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION
  • Serve as the primary integrating force across historically independent operational functions, including front-of-house, security, guest experience, hospitality, and managed venues, actively building cross-departmental communication, shared protocols, and a culture of coordinated accountability.
  • Maintain a close working relationship with the AVP, Production & Venue Services, who holds the back-of-house operational domain. These two roles together cover the full operational envelope of the organization; alignment between them is essential to show-night execution, event planning, and organizational culture.
  • Represent Event Operations in leadership discussions.
  • Support strategic growth initiatives.
ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AND EXPANSION
  • This organization is in active, intentional growth, expanding its community reach through new venue partnerships, new programming models, and deeper engagement within the South Florida region. The VP is a participant in that growth, not a bystander to it.
  • Support the operational evaluation and onboarding of new managed venues as they enter the portfolio, ensuring that operational standards, systems, and culture travel with the organization as it expands.
  • Serve as an operational voice in growth discussions, helping the leadership team assess the feasibility and resource requirements of new opportunities before commitments are made. Growth that outpaces operational capacity undermines the mission; the VP is a guardrail as much as a driver.
PEOPLE LEADERSHIP
  • Lead, mentor, and develop Directors and General Managers with intention, helping each person understand where they are, where they can go, and what it will take to get there.
  • Foster accountability and high performance while creating a working environment where natural friction is addressed openly rather than avoided, and where people feel safe to speak honestly, make mistakes, and grow from them without fear.
  • Establish clear goals, performance expectations, and development pathways for each direct report.
  • Partner with HR on workforce planning.
  • Understand that the employee experience is a leadership responsibility from recruiting through offboarding. The way staff are treated is a direct indicator of how they are expected to treat each other and every guest. A culture of genuine hospitality starts with how the organization treats the people who deliver it.
CORE COMPETENCIES
  • Strategic Leadership - Sets and advances a clear organizational vision, aligning resources and teams to achieve long-term institutional and financial goals.
  • Financial Acumen - Demonstrates strong financial management experience, including budget ownership, P&L accountability, and the ability to speak fluently to operational and personnel cost drivers. Brings financial discipline to direct reports and models data-informed decision-making across all areas of responsibility.
  • Operational Excellence - Drives consistent, high-quality execution by establishing standards, optimizing processes, and continuously improving performance across all areas of responsibility.
  • Guest Experience Focus - Champions an exceptional internal and external guest experience by understanding and responding to the needs of guests while maintaining relevance in a constantly changing service landscape.
  • Collaboration & Influence - Builds trusted relationships and effectively aligns diverse stakeholders to achieve shared outcomes across the organization.
  • Leadership & Talent Development - Builds resilient, adaptable teams by developing talent, leading through change, and fostering a culture of accountability and growth.
  • Customer Focus- Understand the needs of the customer (internal & external) and act accordingly to create an exceptional experience.
  • Teamwork- Work as a collaborative member of a group contributing to the overall mission, strategies and goals.
  • Accountability- Take ownership for deliverables and actions and contribute value to the organization. Accept responsibility for actions and outcomes.
DIRECT SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES
  • Director of Event Operations
  • Director of Guest Experience
  • Director of Security
  • General Managers, Managed Venues (Aventura AACC; Miniaci PAC at NSU)
  • Parking Operations
DESIRED EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION
  • 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in performing arts center or live entertainment venue operations, including direct management of multi-venue portfolios and oversight of front-of-house, security, and guest experience functions. Experience with governmental or institutional partner relationships, and organizational change management is strongly preferred.
  • Multi-venue operations experience required. Experience overseeing multiple venues or sites simultaneously, including managing through general managers or venue leaders, is required.
  • Proven team leadership and results delivery.
  • Active professional network in performing arts center or live entertainment operations, with a demonstrated record of accomplishment of importing external best practices and benchmarking against peer institutions.
  • Experience leading a team or organization through significant transition or restructuring, including building trust with long-tenured staff while raising operational standards.
  • Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree preferred, or extensive equivalent professional experience
KNOWLEDGE AND ABILITIES
  • Ability to maintain a physical presence at designated work locations, maintaining regular attendance, punctuality and work a flexible schedule including nights, weekends, holidays, and events, is required.
  • This role operates on a performing arts schedule. Nights, weekends, and holidays are core to the position, not exceptions. A typical week during the performance season includes multiple show nights and weekend events across venues. Candidates should self-select on this basis.
  • Availability for operational issues and emergencies.
  • Able to communicate effectively in English, both in writing and verbally.

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

The Broward Center for the Performing Arts operates as the Performing Arts Center Authority (PACA), an independent special district of the State of Florida. Employees are public employees. The organization operates on a governmental fiscal year (October 1 through September 30), is subject to Florida Sunshine Laws and public procurement requirements. Candidates with experience navigating governmental or institutional operational environments will have a meaningful advantage in both day-to-day operations and long-term organizational strategy.

Equal Opportunity Employer
This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.

About the Company

B

Broward Center for the Performing Arts

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