Almost 4 years ago I did something insane — and really lucky — and joined a startup. All in, there were 5 people and me in a small office in downtown San Mateo. I was hired to make outbound calls to sell service professionals on the platform, delight customers with amazing customer support, and launch cities. I showed up wearing a suit and, most importantly, had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

We started launching cities. We delighted customers. Our service pros loved us.

It worked.

Around 3 years ago The Home Depot acquired Redbeacon, the startup that I poured myself into. We were 18 people. We moved to a bigger office in Foster City. The work I did transitioned to the phenomenal Home Depot Associates, Customer Care, and new Redbeacon sales teams — roles that are pivotal to our success today. We worked to achieve massive scale by integrating Redbeacon into 2,300 Home Depot stores, supporting almost 450,000 associates, and helping millions of users within the marketplace.

It’s been quite a journey for me, and a journey I have loved, but it’s time that journey ended.

I’m ready to do it again.

We wouldn’t be here today without everyone’s support, dedication, and hard work. The talent has never been better, eyes never bigger, and team never more favorable positioned to make a difference for millions and millions of people.

It’s never easy to say goodbye, which is why I’d prefer to say, “Keep in touch.”

Yaron, Austin, Joe — Thanks for taking the risk on teenage me. I have tried to count the number of mistakes I have made and was unable to come to a conclusive number. It’s a lot.

Yaron — As much as I hate to admit it, you’ve offered some sage advice, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” and “it’s always better to sleep at home, no matter how long” are two I’ll keep in mind for the next venture.

Austin — If there were an Excel and/or Sequel competition, I’d challenge you first, but only because you taught me everything I know. Also, I’m thinking about moving to Austin, TX, — can I stay with Wolf?

Joe — Best man! Three B’s coffee and China Bee pot stickers on me for life

Patrick, John P. and Monica — SBMF Wolfpack (Don’t let Denise in)\

Monica — best. big. sister. ever.

Arod — You’ve constantly challenged me, put me in situations where you thought I might fail, and pushed me to boundaries I thought unknown. If you need the same advice for your next Ironman, let me know ☺.

Wizards (both past, present, and future) — Working alongside each and every one of you has taught me something new. You’ve challenged me as much as I have (hopefully) have challenged you. Keep pushing the peanut!

Product team — Looking forward to the seeing the awards this year for ‘most improved app’ and ‘best contractor experience’

Curry — Crush dust!

Erin Ladd — My grammar would be in the shitter if it weren’t for you. Thanks for sticking through the times when it was 10 dudes in a room, we all owe you more than we can ever repay.

Mazi, Matt T., Daniel, Chao, Lorenzo and the rest of the Engineers (+Schulte) — Ya’ll are fucking amazing. I hope I get to work with you again someday.

Matt Wells — Move to the valley. We need more of you.

Aaron Lee, aka the doctor — Hopefully you have some time to advise in the near future.

Jon H. — #RedbeaconMafia

Daisy — Puzzle Bobble + In-n-Out. Don’t tell Patrick, but I’ll miss you the most.

Iana — Stick figures never looked so good!

With love and admiration,

Garrett

If it’s done right, during the really early days at a startup, customer support is owned by the CEO. He/she handles customer emails personally, alleviates customer tension points, and prioritizes bugs and product fixes all the while maintaining an overall vision to cater future features and growth plans to user requests.

These were the early days at Redbeacon, an online marketplace with the tagline ‘Whatever you need. Done.’ Redbeacon was originally created to cater the needs of everyone and correspondingly filled the supply side of the marketplace with high quality pros. Think handymen, dog walkers, boat captains, photographers, and hundreds of other verticals to meet the demands of customers looking for the perfect pro. Redbeacon has since found a more niche market and now caters specifically to home-service needs. The platform matches customers with pre-screened and pre-approved home-service pros who bid real-time on submitted jobs.

One of the problems a quickly growing startup, such as Redbeacon, encounters is that as the vision, team, business, and priorities expand, customer support very abruptly moves down on the CEO’s priority totem pole.

I was the 3rd hire at Redbeacon and I had a very specific focus on marketplace sales and support. The support ‘beacon’ had already been passed to our COO, and quickly thereafter to our Head of Business Development. Here are some of the things I learned as we grew the business and support team 100x both pre and post-acquisition by the world’s largest home improvement retailer: The Home Depot.

You have to fight for your customers. Startups move quickly. This means product launches happens fast. Unfortunately, due to a lack of resources, this can often result in the inability to optimize previously launched features. We’d launch a mobile app one week, a new online bid flow the next, and an entirely different pro CRM two weeks later. This meant our support team was flooded with issues, bugs, and questions. Because engineering/product were so engrained to launch, launch, launch, they moved slowly in understanding, quantifying, and improving the previously launched features. It was operation’s responsibility to speak up for customers, prioritize bugs, and review launch data — ops has to give users a unified voice.

Visibility matters. In order to understand the needs of your customers, you need to spend time with them. It is crucial that you personally provide the service experience you are building, observe customer frustrations, and use the product your building for customers. This is why everyone at The Home Depot, from C-Level executive to Online Associate, works in-store at least a couple days a year. They do everything from taking support calls, to loading lumber, to finding the perfect paint for a customer. In an online business, this is a little more complex, but even more important. I remember the second week our current CEO started. He was on the phone at 6 AM calling customers to understand how they were using our product. The next week, to maximize sales volume, our Head of Business Development (credit to Austin Vedder) assigned sales targets to engineers. He exposed the builders to the customers they were building product for and it was unbelievably valuable. Engineers began to understand and prioritize their own fixes and they could speak intimately to the product they were building — it forced engineers to think outside their own dev box.

External training is really hard. When you’re the only one taking calls, it’s easy to understand how everything is done and what issues to expect. And having engineers next to you to answer questions certainly makes it easy to get things fixed. All this changes when you spin up an external team. An external team requires a lot planning and definition, both of which are solely lacking during the early days at a startup. During the time we were building-up our external support team at Redbeacon, our motto became ‘Test internally. Launch externally.’ All new features and processes were tested by an in-house support team before we updated our knowledge base with the appropriate training docs (KPIs, SLAs, FAQs, etc.) and trained our external teams. This forced scalability through internal due diligence.

Data is your best friend. Because of Redbeacon’s unique business model, we built our own in-house CRM solution. But we made some mistakes along the way —reminder: do not harbor support email in individual Support Agent inboxes. This resulted in sexy data schematics like Ducksboard not being an option, on-top of many other issues.

Engineers were slammed with launches and bugs and they simply didn’t have time to build data dashboards. In order to establish SLAs/KPIs, the ops team was forced to get creative. With the help of an engineer, I quickly learned MySQL and started pulling core metrics like effective utilization, ASA, and FCR on a daily basis. Other members of my team jumped on the data pulls as well; some even learned Python to build out additional tools. Having data on-hand made quantifying and speaking to our business exponentially easier. As an added bonus, it made us less reliant on engineers and product teams. My personal motto quickly became, ‘ask for forgiveness, not for permission.’

Sometimes adding cost is the only option. Investors do not want to hear that their most recently funded startup needs to scale up a triple-digit call center. Isn’t that what technology is for? — Unfortunately, no. Sometimes the only option is to build a highly qualified and available support team. And frankly, in our customer-first generation, it’s expected (thanks Zappos & Nordstrom). There were particular processes involved in our offline marketplace exchange that required extensive handholding. There was simply no other way to solve issues such as escalations, guarantee handling, service provider no-shows, etc. Ultimately, supporting the business should be the first goal of any ops team and you simply cannot be the piece holding back the business from potential growth. It’s easier to search and solve for efficiency once the business has been proven, than to hinder growth by being unable to support the business.

Thanks for reading this far! If you got value out of this article, it would mean a lot to me for you to scroll down a bit farther and hit the recommend button.

After thinking about it for weeks, I finally pulled the trigger. I registered for the 2014 full Ironman in Whistler, Canada.

I now have twenty-one weeks to reach the best physical condition of my life. I just started swimming after 10+ years out of the pool, I cycle for fun with a group of friends 2-3x a week, and I’ve never run a marathon. All things considered, I seriously think I might die.

Still, I’ve committed to completing the Ironman, and finishing below my avg. age groups time: I’ve registered for the event, told family and close friends about my goal, and planned out my next twenty-one weeks of training. Everyone I’ve told immediately asks, “what’s an Ironman?” After I give a quick explanation, they typically respond with “why would you do that?”

Here’s what I tell them:

The Coupled Physical/Psychological Breakdown — After riding a bike for 112 miles in a hunched over position, I will jump off, change my shoes, and immediately run a full marathon. Until yesterday, I didn’t think it could get any worse. Then I read the Ironman rules..no music or headphones allowed. If this doesn’t make me better prepared to face life’s challenges, nothing will.

The Gear — I’m the first to admit it, I get overly excited about new gear. My new Cannondale tri-bike is sitting in my living room for everyone to see. I’m already thinking about which set of Zipp carbon wheels I’m going to rock on race day. And I‘ve filled my Pocket app with articles focused on the math behind aerodynamic drag and efficiency when using a tri helmet, arm sleeves, or shoe covers. I’m addicted.

The Perfect Diet — Before 2014, I was a Mountain Dew and Redbull junky who weighed 45 lbs more than I do today. Training for an Ironman forces me to make the right eating decisions. As an added bonus, I can get away with eating pretty much whatever I want after a six-hour bike ride. You wouldn’t believe the amounts of cheese and Muscle Milk I currently consume. #livingthedream

The Tribe — Finishing an Ironman puts you in an exclusive club; < 50,000 people compete in a full Ironman every year and 5-15% of athletes DNF. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise those who do finish permanently mark the feat with an Ironman M-Dot tattoo. You can bet I’ll be adding the accomplishment to my resume.

The End Goal — Swimming, running, and cycling are all things I enjoy doing as hobbies. Competing in an Ironman gives me a reason to push myself harder, wake up earlier, and justify exhausting myself to the point of puking.

The Beautiful Places— The locations for Ironman events are unbelievable. From Whistler, Canada to Nice, France to Hokkaido, Japan, Ironman events feature spectacular scenery and amazing crowds. Ironman events provide a reason to discover new places I’d otherwise never consider going.

The Work Life Balance — I’m terrible at balancing work life and.. everything else. Being committed to an Ironman forces me to get out of the office once-in-a-while and learn how to live a life outside of work. 80-100 hour weeks aren’t feasible when training and aren’t maintainable without burning out. I’ve always worked hard, but now I’m learning how to work smart. This means empowering my team, checking email in the middle of the night after a long workout, and prioritizing action items.

So here’s to pushing myself to unknown boundaries over the next twenty-one weeks. Worst-case scenario: I DNF, delete this blog post, tell my friends I was kidding, and pretend like this never happened.

Being part of the early days at a start-up (< 5 people) means that everyone is expected to do things outside of their comfort zone. Server down? Buck up, front-end girl. Receive a data request from a VC? Get your presentation skills on lock, sales lead.

Initially, each employee is required to step up and play whatever role is required of them to make the company a success. As the business begins to scale, some responsibilities are passed on to new-hires who are employed to single handedly crush specific job duties. This allows you to focus your efforts. You should feel ecstatic, but you feel terrified — and justifiably so. Things you’ve worked relentlessly to learn and master (you probably didn’t actually master — but it’s fine. You still got it done) are ripped from your grip and become the responsibility of someone else. The good news you can now focus on what you were originally hired to do — and chances are, if you are still at the company, your job duties have scaled in capacity x-fold.

For the most part, this is great. But when the company scales to a point where there are ‘multiple levels of distance’, problems can quickly arise. Imagine Tim — Tim oversees a sales org and is directly responsible for several supervisors. The supervisors are in-turn responsible for the success of 40 sales reps. What if Tim never makes calls? What if Tim spends his days writing reviews, looking at numbers, and presenting slideshows to his CEO? How can Tim effectively mentor, facilitate, and grow his team?

Managers understand what their team is doing and how they are doing it. Leaders are the masters of what their team is doing and are the lookout for innovative ways to drive success. Whether that’s hopping on a customer service call, sitting with an engineer to understand a bug, brainstorming in a product review session, or taking a meeting with an affiliate in marketing, leaders just do. Leaders are committed to executing everything they do in the best way possible; no rest days, no going the easy route, no ‘I tried.’

The problem is this isn’t always easy. If you’re at the ‘top’, why do the work at the ‘bottom’? That’s why you’ve worked so hard, right? Wrong.

My advice for success? Invert the pyramid. If you can’t do what your team is doing, and do it as good as or better than anyone else, how can you drive success? Most importantly: how can you expect your team to look at you as a leader?

Thanks for reading this far! If you got value out of this article, it would mean a lot to me for you to scroll down a bit farther and hit the recommend button.