Business Associate - Internal Startup (Minneapolis, MN) - General Mills

As the Business Associate on the Emerging Brand Center of Excellence team, you will have the opportunity to join Disruptive Growth as we work to build, invest, and partner to create the next growth engine for General Mills. Disruptive Growth brings together the external venture capital arm (301 INC), our internal venture studio (G-Works), and our Growth Equity fund within Gold Medal Ventures focused on building food solutions for tomorrow’s families today. The Emerging Brand COE (center of excellence) is a cross-functional team of General Mills savvy, startup scrappy experts providing indispensable partnership and guidance across our Disruptive Growth portfolio of companies.

The Business Associate will partner with G-Works Co-founder teams to lead project management tasks and track, manage, and ensure execution against new products/business strategies in the timelines created. In this highly cross-functional role, they work closely with the Co-Founders to create, build, and launch new businesses that accelerate our enterprise growth initiatives. Additionally, they will play an integral role with Co-founders to manage relationships with agency partners as well as leading the process of setting up new items in General Mills systems. Seeking a self-starter who is highly collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity, and passionate about role modeling an entrepreneurial mindset and approach.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Help co-founders identify priorities, help to plan and move things forward, follow up with key contributors and revisit regularly to assess progress
• Lead executional project management tasks (overall timeline & key dates across brand and marketing, sales, supply chain, logistics, new item setup)
• Coordinate weekly cross functional meeting check in to review key dates that will advance business planning & operations; provide recaps and relevant check-ins/follow up
• Act as a key thought partner, brainstorming and identifying solutions to challenges, wins, losses and areas of improvement and opportunity
• Schedule and facilitate working sessions and/or workshops relevant to business planning initiatives
• Own PO creation, tracking & management; partner with finance on budget management and hold weekly budgeting meeting to align expenses to line items
• Navigate the G-Works & General Mills ecosystem to align meetings with the Co-Founders, Emerging Brand COE, & external partners to secure people and their time to advance business plans
• Lead brand activation plans/manage vendors for trade shows such as Expo West & Coordinate sample requests and package flats for customer needs
• Lead Co-founders through experimentation projects and leverage learnings to drive strategy and grow the business
• Leverage capabilities such as pitchbook to create competitive analysis and understand market trends to advise strategies
• Ensure full team has performance data/summaries, gleans implications from data and reports
• Partner cross-functionally to build ongoing weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports to assess how well we are doing concerning velocity, quality, and scale.
• Create OPLs that capture learnings and processes unique to G-Works and educate cross-functional partners how to execute

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s Degree OR Associate's Degree and 4+ years of related experience 
• 2+ years of experience managing complex cross-functional projects 
• Strong attention to detail and ability to manage multiple tasks
• Growth mindset and highly adaptable to new methods and ways of working
• Ability to challenge the status quo and drive innovation, high comfort operating in ambiguity
• Ability to influence others without formal authority

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• External Startup Experience
• Experience with Project Management tools such as Asana, Monday, etc.
• Experience with SAP and New Item Setup Processes such as CPW, STEP, and EClips
• PO Creation and Budget Management Experience

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS:

• This position will be based out of our headquarters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
• International relocation or international remote working arrangements (outside of the US) will not be considered

We exist to make food the world loves. But we do more than that. Our company is a place that prioritizes being a force for good, a place to expand learning, explore new perspectives and reimagine new possibilities, every day. We look for people who want to bring their best — bold thinkers with big hearts who challenge one other and grow together. Because becoming the undisputed leader in food means surrounding ourselves with people who are hungry for what’s next.