Project Manager

Project Manager

The Project Manager is a high-visibility role operating at the center of the organization's executive activity. Reporting directly to the CEO, this person is responsible for ensuring that strategic initiatives, cross-functional projects, and executive commitments stay on track — not by doing all of the work themselves, but by building the systems, visibility, and accountability structures that ensure others do.

This is fundamentally a role about tracking, reporting, and accountability. You will maintain the company's project portfolio in Zoho, monitor the status of active initiatives, surface risks, and delays before they escalate, and produce clear, consistent reporting that keeps the CEO and executive team informed. You will attend key meetings, follow up relentlessly on commitments, and serve as the connective tissue between the CEO's office and the rest of the organization.

The ideal candidate is exceptionally organized, a clear and confident communicator, and skilled at holding senior leaders accountable with diplomacy and professionalism. You are comfortable operating at the executive level without losing sight of the operational details that drive results. You understand that your job is not to execute — it is to make sure the right people are executing, and that commitments are kept.

What You Will Do:

Project Tracking & Portfolio Management

• Own and maintain the organization's project portfolio in Zoho Projects, ensuring all active initiatives are accurately reflected, consistently structured, and up to date.
• Build and manage project workspaces in Zoho, establishing tasks, milestones, owners, dependencies, and due dates for every initiative.
• Develop and enforce consistent project intake, naming, and tracking conventions across the organization so that Zoho is a reliable single source of truth.
• Maintain a real-time view of all active, pending, and at-risk projects, and ensure the CEO and leadership team always have accurate, current visibility.
• Proactively identify projects that are off-track, missing owners, stalled, or lacking clear milestones, and escalate appropriately.

Executive Accountability & Follow-Through

• Track action items, commitments, and decisions made in executive meetings; ensure every item has an owner, a deadline, and a follow-up plan.
• Follow up with executives, department heads, and project owners on a regular cadence to confirm progress and surface blockers.
• Hold people accountable to their commitments with confidence and diplomacy; escalate persistent delays or issues to the CEO when needed.
• Maintain a clear record of what has been decided, who is responsible, and what has been completed across all tracked initiatives.
• Serve as the organizational memory for executive commitments, ensuring that priorities set in one meeting do not disappear before the next.

Reporting & Executive Communication

• Prepare and deliver regular project status reports for the CEO that are concise, accurate, and clearly highlight what is on track, what is at risk, and what requires a decision.
• Build and maintain Zoho dashboards and reporting views that give leadership real-time visibility into project health across the organization.
• Synthesize multi-workstream project data into executive-level summaries appropriate for leadership meetings, quarterly business reviews, and board updates.
• Develop recurring reporting cadences (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and maintain them with discipline and consistency.
• Communicate proactively and directly with the CEO when projects are at risk, when blockers arise, or when executive intervention is required.
• Produce written updates that are clear, well-organized, and useful to senior leaders who need to make fast, informed decisions.

Cross-Functional Coordination

• Serve as the central coordination point across departments for all tracked projects and executive initiatives.
• Work directly with executives and department heads to define project scope, establish realistic timelines, assign clear ownership, and set measurable milestones.
• Facilitate project kickoff meetings, recurring check-ins, and retrospectives; keep teams aligned and moving forward.
• Identify and surface cross-departmental dependencies and bottlenecks before they cause delays or confusion.
• Prevent misalignment and duplication of effort by ensuring clear communication and shared visibility across teams.

Zoho Platform Ownership

• Own the configuration and ongoing administration of the organization's Zoho project management environment (Zoho Projects, Zoho CRM, and/or Zoho One as applicable)
• Serve as the internal subject matter expert on Zoho — training staff and leaders, driving adoption, resolving issues, and ensuring data integrity across the platform.
• Continuously improve how the organization uses Zoho to increase efficiency, visibility, and accountability as the company grows.
• Evaluate and implement new Zoho features, integrations, or workflow enhancements that improve the team's ability to track and manage work.

Process & Documentation

• Document and continuously improve the organization's project management processes, templates, and standards.
• Identify recurring patterns in project failures or delays and recommend structural changes to prevent them.
• Build and maintain a project knowledge base capturing lessons learned, post-mortems, and best practices for organizational reference.

What You Bring to Table:

• 4+ years of experience in project management, program management, operations, or a closely related role
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated ability to communicate clearly and credibly with C-suite executives and senior leaders.
• Proficiency with Zoho Projects, Zoho CRM, or the Zoho One platform — hands-on experience is required.
• Proven track record of holding others accountable to deadlines and deliverables, including people more senior than you, through influence rather than authority.
• Strong analytical and reporting skills; experience building dashboards, tracking KPIs, and presenting project status in a way that is useful and actionable for leadership.
• High degree of organizational rigor and follow-through — you keep meticulous records, follow up without being asked, and never let commitments disappear.
• Comfortable managing a large number of concurrent initiatives without losing visibility into any of them.
• A natural self-starter who can identify problems, ask hard questions, and drive resolution with minimal direction.

Preferred

• PMP, CAPM, or equivalent project management certification
• Prior experience working closely with or reporting to C-suite executives.
• Experience in a company undergoing rapid growth, operational scaling, or organizational change.Bachelor's degree in Business, Operations, Communications, or a related field.
• Background in payroll, human capital management, software or tech-enabled service industry a plus.

Location: Charlotte, NC, Hybrid Schedule

Total Rewards and Growth:

• A start to a career within a fast-growing company
• A competitive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• 100% company-paid life, short-term, and long-term disability benefits.
• 401(k) Safe Harbor plan with up to a 4% company match with vesting from day one (1).
• Generous discretionary paid time off package with immediate eligibility.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

In this role, success means the CEO and executive team always know exactly where every major initiative stands — and that the answer is never 'I'm not sure.' You will have succeeded when projects no longer stall due to unclear ownership or missed follow-ups, when Zoho is a trusted, well-maintained source of truth that the whole organization relies on, and when executives across the company view you as a trusted operational partner who makes their work easier.

This role demands someone who is proactive, diplomatically direct, and unafraid to hold senior leaders to their commitments. The best person for this job will have a bias for clarity and accountability, a talent for synthesizing complexity into simple and useful reporting, and the interpersonal skills to work effectively at the executive level every day.

Mpay is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.