Director of Marketing & Growth

Director of Marketing & Growth

About Making Waves

Making Waves Swim School helps families build water safety and confidence, one lesson at a time. We're a multi-location swim school built on genuine care for our swimmers, parents, and staff - and we're entering our next stage of growth. That means it's time to build a marketing function to match.

The Opportunity

We're hiring a Director of Marketing & Growth to build a world-class marketing function that turns Making Waves into a brand families love, talk about, and stay with - while creating a predictable growth engine for the business.

This isn't a classic "Director of Marketing" role built around brand, agencies, and an annual plan. It's a senior functional leader who connects Brand → Customer Experience → Acquisition → Conversion → Retention → Revenue into one strategy, reporting directly to our CEO and sitting on our leadership team.

What You'll Do

• Own full-funnel growth - connect brand, acquisition, conversion, and retention into one strategy, with conversion tracked alongside leads, and close the gap on a registration trend that's declined year over year
• Turn existing families into a growth channel - own lifecycle marketing (CRM, email, SMS), referral strategy, and customer research on why families stay, refer, or leave
• Drive acquisition and new-location launches - own acquisition strategy, customer segmentation, and growth of our entry-level programs, and build a repeatable playbook for marketing new locations
• Manage our agency of record - Paid Ads, SEO, and Website - against a documented KPI brief and budget, holding them accountable for ROI
• Lead and develop our Marketing Specialist, growing their ownership of lead nurturing, events, social, community management, and reporting
• Set the brand's voice - real stories over constant promotions - and own media relations, reputation management, and how our brand shows up consistently across locations
• Build our reporting rhythm - weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual, including a competitive audit that doesn't exist today
• Build location-specific marketing plans that reflect each location's real constraints, instead of one national campaign trying to solve every location's problem

What You Bring

• A senior marketing leader who's owned a growth-accountable function end to end, comfortable reporting directly to a CEO and sitting at the leadership table
• Experience marketing a service-based, multi-location, B2C business - swim schools, fitness/wellness, childcare, healthcare, home services, or similar
• Experience managing marketing across more than one brand or sub-brand under a shared parent organization
• Growth marketing fluency - you think natively in conversion and retention, and don't see storytelling and performance as being in tension
• Real ROI accountability in agency management - you hold agencies to KPIs and budget, not just receive their reports
• A genuine track record of developing people into bigger roles
• Working knowledge across paid media, SEO, website/CRO, social, email/lifecycle marketing, events, community management, and PR
• Comfort owning a budget and scorecard and a weekly numbers cadence
• A hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves approach alongside strategic thinking - you're as comfortable writing the brief as presenting the strategy
• A customer-service mindset toward our location managers - you treat their input like a customer's, not a report-in
• Comfort using AI in your day-to-day work, for design, content, and communication

Nice to have: B2B marketing experience, experience with subscription/membership or recurring-revenue businesses, experience stepping into a role handed off informally, and franchise or multi-unit business experience

Our Core Values

These aren't wall art - they're how we expect this role to be done, especially given how much of it runs through location managers, families and a small, growing team:

• Service-Oriented > We care A LOT about people! Whether it's a swimmer, parent, or staff member, we believe in doing whatever it takes to make someone's day.
• Self-Driven > We're always levelling up! We work hard and never stop looking for ways to improve.
• Optimistic > We dream big! Even when stuff gets hard, we keep going, learn from mistakes, and focus on what's possible.
• Highly Adaptive > Things change, and that's okay! We stay flexible, learn fast, and figure things out together.
• Fun Energy > Fun is kind of our thing! We bring energy, cheer, and good vibes wherever we go.

Details

• Expected compensation range: $120,000–$130,000
• Reports to: CEO
• Location: On-site (Brampton, ON), with occasional travel across all Making Waves locations
• Vacancy: this is an existing vacancy
  
• AI: Making Waves uses artificial intelligence to assist with screening, assessing and/or selecting applicants as part of our recruitment process