Daily Choices, Lasting Impact
Career Experiences
20+ years in technology operations at Honda, Dell, HomeAway, Expedia, and ZenBusiness showed me what drives sustainable growth. Success comes from building teams that iterate quickly, fail forward, and stay healthily paranoid about competition while never losing sight of what customers actually need.
The best operations leaders know their numbers cold but get their hands dirty solving real problems alongside their teams. Whether it's navigating M&A integrations, managing hypergrowth, or rebuilding technology platforms mid-flight, the work always comes back to people first.
System Building
The image above was from a workshop I participated in at HomeAway. The company was introducing features to property managers that provided dashboards for rates management based on historical trends and current customer demands. It was one of the most exciting times of my tenure at HomeAway, where I was able to contribute from my experience in property investments. Enabling action from data is an incredible opportunity to help companies accelerate growth.
Building systems has to take 3 things into consideration: People, Processes and Technology. As you change one, you have to consider the impact of the other two elements. Implementing AI is perfect example. I recently implemented AI for a company with the intention of deflecting contacts (email, text and eventually phone). This not only reduced contacts from humans by 70%, it put pressure on the People and Processes of the company. People: the roles of the individuals responding to customers had to change from responding to questions, to setting guardrails for AI to operate (more on this in another topic). Processes: the SOPs (standard operating procedures) had to be rewritten to avoid discrepancy and ambiguity. ​
The more overlap between these 3 circles of influence, the more complicated a change becomes and the more risk it introduces to the business.
Transformations
You've probably heard "don't let a good crisis go to waste" or that "challenges make you stronger". In March of 2020, the pandemic caused me to operate through both of those forces. Early in the pandemic, hospitality was one of the hardest impacted industries. No travel meant no revenue being received, and cancellations meant cash was flowing out of our accounts to service refunds. Everyone, in almost every industry was impacted by the pandemic, but it's how you handle the situation that sets yourself apart.
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I was responsible for a $700M budget and had to take drastic measures to cut costs. We spent years building relationships with vendors that we could call partners. Now I had to lean on those partnerships to ensure we had something that was sustainable. Over a period of 6 months, we were able to reduce our committed spend by over 40%. Because of the size of the company, our pricing was already very competitive. These conversations were difficult, pushing on margins that were already thin and both sides knowing we needed each other to survive this crisis. This came at a sacrifice for our partners, but also a commitment to a longer and stronger relationship. We weathered the storm and as a result everyone benefited from the rise of travel in 2021 and 2022.
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From a personal perspective, we built a family business on hospitality and had employees to consider. We made a commitment that we would not lay off anyone and that we would spend the time in "lockdown" to focus on becoming more operationally effective and efficient. We survived with our cash reserves, and when travel demand came back, we were ready to scale. The business grew 4x over the next two years and had everyone in the company to thank for it!
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Commitment to each other (partners and employees) is what gets you through tough times. Being selfish is a short-term game. Nobody wins in the business or in life by doing it alone.
Business growth is a funny thing. Having a great idea isn't sufficient for being successful. There are many great ideas that ultimately fail because they didn't have the right vision or operational mechanics to succeed. Sony Betamax was an example of a superior product compared to VHS, but lost because VHS knew it's customer base and was able to establish contracts that made its product less expensive and more accessible to key players in the market.
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The same is true with small businesses today. Many start and find early success because they benefit from friends, family and early adopters, but fail to scale because they don't identify and adapt to the broader market. In my own experience, we encountered plateaus where we were marketing to the Total Addressable Market and not focused on our Serviceable Market. We spent the time to understand the type of customer that most benefited from our product and was willing to buy it. We made some product adjustments and redirected our marketing focus, ultimately driving 7x revenue growth in 4 years.
It's important to understand the differences between the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the Serviceable Available Market (SAM). You can't be everything to everyone and most companies don't have the resources to be everywhere. So understand your segment of the TAM and make your product as compelling and irresistible to your specific customer profile.
Contact
I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities. Let's connect.
512-994-8312