Community Engagement Manager

About Bells of Steel Inc.

At Bells of Steel, our mission is to make fitness and strength training approachable, affordable, and fun. We design and manufacture high-quality strength and exercise equipment for home gym owners and fitness professionals, helping people of all experience levels achieve their goals.

We’re not your typical fitness equipment brand. We’re down-to-earth, a little cheeky, and focused on making fitness more rewarding and less intimidating. If you enjoy a fast-paced, no-BS environment and want to help shape the future of strength training, you’ll fit right in.

Our Core Values: A.C.T.

Adaptability – Raise the Bar

We challenge the status quo, learn quickly, and continuously improve. We embrace change, seek better ways of working, and take initiative to drive results.

Customer Centricity – Always Spot the Customer

Everything we do is focused on helping our customers succeed. We lead with empathy, build trust through action, and create value for both external and internal customers.

Teamwork – We Win Together

We operate with honesty, transparency, trust, and respect. We collaborate openly, take shared ownership of outcomes, and succeed as a team.

Why this role exists

Bells of Steel grew in Canada by becoming endemic to the strength community — showing up in online conversations, at gyms, and events, until the brand was trusted by name.

We're now scaling in Australia and the UK, while still growing in Canada and the USA, and expanding into Germany, France, and the broader EU. We can't get to scale on ads alone. We need a human face in those communities — someone who builds trust the same way we built it here, in parallel with paid spend, so every dollar behind ads lands on a foundation of real awareness. This role owns that work.

This role also owns the execution of our 3-year vision to transform our showrooms in Calgary, Toronto, and Indianapolis into community hubs — places where the local strength community gathers, not just shops.

What you'll do

Online engagement

• Reply to all comments on paid ad posts and organic social content across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube — maintaining brand voice, engaging authentically, and turning objections into trust-building moments
• Escalation to CS: Route support-related comments/DMs (order issues, shipping, returns, defects) to CS via Gorgias with appropriate tagging and context. This role handles engagement and community; CS handles support resolution.
• Be active and known in r/homegym, r/powerlifting, r/CrossFit, FB groups, and niche forums — useful, never salesy. Daily Reddit/community scraping with claude and replying with useful info
• Engage on creator content beyond our own; build relationships with strength community voices we admire
• Launch/grow a dedicated Facebook group, participate in home gym Facebook groups from personal account (we can’t use a business account to join)
• Creating quick/raw/native responses using POV videos, photos, unlisted shorts, etc

Grass-roots community building (NA + international)

• Run gym seeding programs across priority UK, Australia and EU launch markets
• Build community ecosystem maps (gyms, podcasts, creators, events, charities) for every market we are in, and every market we expand into
• Show up at events - powerlifting meets, CrossFit comps, strongman events, garage gym gatherings

Ambassador \& sponsorship program

• Build and run our local ambassador program — 5–10 passionate customers per priority market with discount codes, early access, and a direct line to the team
• Own community-level sponsorships (events, podcasts, local fitness orgs) and our charity giving (equipment donations to youth strength programs, adaptive athletics, community gym builds)
• Coordinate with the Affiliate/Influencer Manager to ensure ambassador and sponsorship work feeds into the broader content pipeline

Brand localization \& cross-functional support

• Partner with brand and email teams to localize content per market - copy, photography, regional references
• Build and grow pipeline of local community content to paid ads and all other marketing channels
• Surface community signal back to product, paid, brand, and merchandising (what people want, what's missing, what's working)

Develop Showrooms into Community Hubs

• Work with retail teams in Calgary, Toronto and Indy to build towards our 3-year goal of each showroom being a community hub
• Set up a regular calendar of community moments: lifting competitions, launch events, charity partnerships, open gym nights, meetups
• Track showroom event attendance, community engagement, and contribution to local brand awareness

Who you are

• In the strength community — powerlifting, CrossFit, garage gym, strongman, weightlifting — with credibility because you live it
• 3+ years in community management, brand partnerships, grass-roots marketing, retail/event marketing, or athlete management
• Comfortable showing up at gyms, events, on camera, in DMs, and on Reddit threads
• Strong written communicator (a Reddit comment that doesn't read like marketing; a partnership email that closes)
• Organized — juggling dozens of relationships without dropping things
• Willing to travel \~10% (events, gyms, showrooms, occasional EU)

Plus: content creation experience, existing creator/ambassador relationships, German fluency, prior DTC or fitness-brand experience.

You're not: a social media manager, a PR person, or an agency-style account manager. We don't run scripts from Canada — we want a human face in the field.

What’s In It For You

• $55,000–$60,000 base salary, depending on experience
• Health Spending Account
• Hybrid schedule based out of a Calgary office you’ll actually want to come into
• Employee discounts on all our gear
• Access to our staff gym
• Every other Friday off during our non-peak season (February to October)

The pay range for this role is:

55,000 - 60,000 CAD per year(Calgary)