Executive Assistant & Volunteer Lead

The Gathering is a 13-year-old festival that brings 2,500 brand leaders to Banff every October. CULT Collective is the client services agency that sits alongside it. Together we run a multi-stream operation across festival tickets, partnerships, executive retreats, event production, agency services, and CULT Studios.

There is a lot moving at once. That is the job.

We need someone who can support two senior leaders, run one of the most visible parts of our festival culture (the volunteer program), and think in systems well enough to make the whole operation run leaner than it does today.

If that sounds energizing instead of exhausting, keep reading.

THE ROLE

You are the operating layer between two senior leaders and everything else. You protect their time, turn intent into action, and make sure nothing important falls through the cracks.

You also own the volunteer program from recruitment through closeout.

This is not a coordinator role. It is a chief-of-staff-adjacent role that requires judgment, writing chops, and AI fluency.

WHAT YOU'D OWN

1. Executive Support — Gathering President & Chief Revenue Officer

• Calendar management across multiple time zones, with clear rules of engagement for each leader
• Inbox triage: read, prioritize, surface what needs them, handle what does not
• Pre-meeting briefings and post-meeting follow-ups with owners and dates attached
• Travel coordination, fully owned: flights, hotels, ground transport, itineraries, restaurant bookings, anything needed
• Expense reporting and reconciliation for both, weekly cadence, no backlog
• Draft emails, partner outreach, and internal updates in our voice
• Maintain a stakeholder file: contacts, history, last touch, open follow-ups

2. Stakeholder & Relationship Management

You are the first person a partner, speaker, sponsor, or VIP hears from. That sets the tone for every interaction that follows.

• Inbound requests handled fast.
• Coordinate across the team so Mandy and Brad are not bottlenecks on their own relationships
• Close loops before they become problems
• Hold the line on partner experience during festival week, retreat weeks, and around the podcast

3. Operations, Systems & AI

This role is built for someone who already works with AI as a teammate and operational partner.

• Use Claude daily: meeting transcripts to strategy briefs, weekly leadership updates, email drafts, financial summaries, partner and speaker research
• Run Notion as the operating system: clean databases, current SOPs, project dashboards, no orphaned pages
• Keep HubSpot data clean: contacts current, pipeline accurate, follow-ups logged
• Build workflows that remove manual steps. If something is done by hand more than twice, it is a system you have not built yet.
• Maintain the prompt library and shared context docs that keep both leaders moving
• Prepare weekly resorts and dashbaords
• Stay current on what's actually useful in the AI/tooling space and bring the best of it back to the team

4. Coordination Across Festival, Retreats, Podcast & Travel

• Festival: support the Operations and Production leads on cross-functional deadlines and workback schedules
• Retreats: Experience Labs and pop-up activations; logistics, briefs, and stakeholder coordination
• Podcast: guest scheduling, prep materials, asset handoffs
• Run-of-show, contact sheets, logistics grids — built once, maintained always

5. Volunteer Program Lead

• Own recruitment, screening, and onboarding for the Banff festival
• Build and maintain the volunteer handbook, role-specific SOP cards, training materials
• All volunteer communication from application through post-event thank-you
• Schedule and assign shifts: hospitality, production, VIP, registration, content
• Day-of deployment coordinated with Operations and Production
• Track show-up rates and satisfaction; improve them every year
• Year-one targets: 95% show-up rate, 90%+ volunteer satisfaction
• Build a program people want to come back to. Belonging is the bar.

CONFIDENTIALITY

You will see compensation, leadership conversations, partner negotiations, financials, and sensitive personnel matters. That stays with you. We take this seriously and so should you.

YOU ARE

• Two steps ahead. The brief is drafted before anyone asks for it.
• A systems thinker. You see a manual process and immediately want to replace it.
• AI-fluent in practice, not in theory. Claude and Notion are part of how you actually