The elusive roadrunner

In May of this year, I had already bought tickets for quite a bit of travel for a month and a half November and early December. Since the only person working on Last Minute Gear is still me, I knew I needed to find someone to cover me in terms of request fulfillment. Luckily, November and early December is not a good time for either camping or snowsports, so I never anticipated a high volume of requests. However, I needed to make sure that people could rely on Last Minute Gear (which literally launched a week before I left).

Of course, I’ve already written about how hard it is to find a co-founder, but the naïve part of me thought that filling a simple customer fulfillment role would be relatively easy.

How wrong I was!

I gave myself one solid month to find someone. Despite posting in every job forum for SF-based colleges (because it would work best from a logistics point of view if the person were in San Francisco), on Craigslist, and then in a last ditch effort spamming all my friends by email and posting on Couchsurfing, I only ever got a total of 7leads (2 from Craigslist, 1 person who I emailed directly, 3 from friends, 1 from Couchsurfing). And this was a paid position for which I was offering $30/hour (sure the flexibility in schedule required probably was a little off-putting, but I figured the relatively higher rate combined with the low expected volume of requests would more than make up for that).

To further complicate matters, it quickly became clear to me that what I had thought was an easy low-skill job was not necessarily that. Despite pulling together the most detailed SOP (statement of procedure) I have ever done in my life, a dry run of the rental process and procedure still failed. And by detailed SOP, I mean I had gotten everything down to an “If-then” flow chart, complete with template emails. For a moment, I wondered if too much instruction was hindering the candidate’s native creativity and problem solving skills… but I realized this couldn’t be the case because some of the most fundamental elements of customer service just were missing.

In the end, I split the role into: 1 person manages customer side (holds inventory, answers requests, assigns delivery/pickup roadrunners) and 3–4 people actually do delivery/pickup as needed (to be cute, I called this position “roadrunner”… maybe that was the turn-off). Once again testifying to the power of people you know, all of these folks came about through personal connections. Think of a taxi-dispatch and taxi-drivers. This was to accommodate not only the additional complexity that the job required but also the fact that I couldn’t find one person who could promise to consistently be available for delivery and pickup. Both outcomes were surprising to me, but the latter especially so — San Francisco, after all, is at the heart of the sharing economy and microentrepreneurship controversy, where people spend their days as Lyft drivers and Taskrabbits.

And still, this isn’t necessarily a satisfactory outcome — if someone makes a super last minute request, all 3–4 volunteer drivers might not be available (and Taskrabbit doesn’t allow same day requests).

This was an extremely valuable lesson in hiring employees — don’t underestimate the skills required for a job or the time it takes to fill a role, regardless of context. My only hope is that if I can find someone good, they’ll also be around to cover future travel — that is, if I haven’t yet learned the bigger lesson to never leave town again!