Week 3 at Sunright — Diving into the deep end

I went back to New York to help my girlfriend move, so I didn’t get a chance to post my week. So now I’m making up for my week 3 missed update.

The one question I wanted to answer my first two weeks on the job was: “where should I focus my time?”

The first week, I spent mostly with my dad, the second week I started interacting with sales, and this week more with customer/tech support. I found that I was getting pulled left and right by everyone.

After 2 weeks, I’d still not had the time to review our financials and interview our dealers. I was getting frustrated because I wasn’t able to spend the time necessary to really evaluate where I should focus my time.

Then at some point this week, I realized that instead of spending my energy trying to decide whether or not I should help with an inbound request, I should just say ‘Yes’ to everything. This isn’t sustainable and scalable, but it is the best way for me to get context on every part of the business. If I want to form an informed opinion about the business, then I can’t just rely on interviews and numbers, I have to rely on my own experiences.

When starting a startup, you have to do things that don’t scale to get you over an activation point. I think when getting onboarded, I should be taking the same approach. Being overloaded with information and responsibilities, will expose me to the real problems of the company, force me to get organized, work with everyone, and then deprioritize what’s not important.

With that realization, I decided to dive into the deep end.

Details of my week below:

Monday 10/23

• Ran Weekly Leadership Meeting
• DC2DC Converter installation
• Walk Alyssa through Trello and new product ordering process
• Call ex-colleague from XO to learn about licensing
• Fixing helmets with Dad
• Call friend about experience being licensor
• DC2DC Converter communication with China

Our first Weekly Leadership meeting was today. I felt it was a necessary meeting because our functions (sales, customer support) lacked direction, focus, and cooperation. This meeting is a platform to get the functional leaders together, review our previous weeks results, and coordinate a direction. To provide some structure, each leader gives an update about their functional areas (I work with my dad on product, Robert updates on sales, Jim reviews customer/tech support, and I review business development and finance). We then talk about any questions/issues focus areas. The prep work to collect the information for the meeting is just as important as the meeting itself. It gives each leader a chance to reflect and opportunity to share updates with each other.

I’d made a promise to myself that I’d stop work before 7PM each night so that I have time for myself. Tonight, I broke that rule. I took a late night call with a friend to learn about his experiences licensing products.

After that, I communicated with one of the factories in China to see if we can make some headway on a customer issue for an electric golf cart we launched this year. Our customer support team has been trying to make sense of the parts and instructions they sent to fix the issue. Unfortunately the instructions were in broken English and the parts didn’t seem to match what’s in the instructions. Meanwhile, the customer was getting impatient. I got in touch with the factory and confirm our tech teams suspicion — they sent the wrong part. So we are getting the parts from them, in addition to more descriptive instructions.

The experience made me realize the challenges that Chinese factories face in trying to launch products in the US. It’s not just about building a product and selling it. It’s about all the infrastructure that needs to be setup to support the customer after they’ve bought the product. This is why distributors have a role to play in the supply chain for motorsports vehicles.

Tuesday 10/24

• Sales strategy meeting with Robert, Ronald, Mike
• Call with experienced license expert to talk about licensing
• Update inventory sheet to be more sales friendly
• Dinner with Wells Fargo banker for Sunright

Our first Sale strategy meeting was today. The intent of the meeting is similar to our weekly leadership meeting, but one level-down at the Sales team level. Since sales is such a critical function for us, I felt it was necessary to hold a weekly meeting just to talk about that.

Since it was the first meeting, I lead it. I didn’t get to prepare for the meeting, and so it lacked direction and became unfocused. We did generate one focus, which is to improve the design of our marketing emails.

At the end of the meeting, I asked Robert to lead the meeting in the future, since it is his functional area.

Also had the most informative conversation about licensing agreements today. He was the first real expert I talked to, and the level of thinking and information he provided was significantly different. Makes me realize the importance of finding the right people to seek advice!

At the end of the day, I had dinner with our banker from Wells Fargo. It was informative to hear from him about how we can improve our chances of getting a loan approved. It comes down to less leverage and cleaner/easier to understand financial statements. Because we have many different products, he suggested we categorize and split them into different businesses, so the underwriters can understand the business better.

Wednesday 10/25

• Respond to one dealer who asked for rebates on freight, due to a new promotion that was a better deal than the one they had
• Coordinate with accounting on inventory sheet update
• Think about how to improve communication at company
• Talk with friend who is an ex-COO/CEO about his experiences. Insights on focus and ROI for successful startups
• Shared those stories with Dad and talked about how we can focus
• Lunch with Kenny (one of the Sunright employees) and asked him to think about better customer support

I’ve been feeling like that team communication is a big problem at Sunright, and I couldn’t pinpoint why. Today, I found one of the reasons. We’re lazy about how we communicate. In two separate emails, one to make a request to another team member and the other to get an answer on a question, the sender sent one line emails and didn’t provide any context to the recipient. Because of that, it resulted in multiple back and forth emails. The issues took a whole day to resolve instead of 10 minutes. This causes a lot of delays, frustrations and unnecessary time.

I’ll be keeping an eye on these types of situations. If it happens more, then it’ll require asking everyone to be more thorough in their requests.

Thursday 10/26

• Resolve dealer’s request for better freight and receivables rates
• Sunright clearance sheet
• Completed better email template
• Remind team to prep for 200/400 product launch
• Inventory sheet sync

Traveled to NYC early this morning and spent most of the day at Think Coffee in NYC. Used the time to work on a better email template for Sunright. I’m rolling up my sleeves to help in many parts of Sunright now. They’re not always the most important, but I think it’s important to work on these in the short-term to get the full context of the problem, and also to set an example of what good work is.

Also realized that we don’t have any sort of playbook for product launches. As a result, we often find ourselves unprepared when new products arrive in our warehouses. This results in Sales Teams not being informed about what to sell, Dealers not knowing why they should buy the new product, and Tech/Customer support not being able to properly support customer issues and dealer inquiries. I asked everyone what information we needed to properly support a product launch, and we’re going to make sure this scenario never happens again.

Friday 10/27

• Kaizen
• Update Bus Development
• Update Product Inventory

Ran our second Kaizen remotely from New York. With one week under our belt, it went a lot better than last week. We generated quite a few action items and assigned them to different team members.

There were tense moments too. In particular, my dad demanded the sales team to be more autonomous in making their own decisions. Our sales team responded that they needed more information around margins and authority to quote freights to make that happen.

This touched on a sore spot. Being a family business, my parents have always been reluctant to disclose profit information to employees. Allowing employees to see the margins on products is very unnerving. But as a consequence of this opacity, all sales decisions have to be review and approved by my dad. This causes delays and a lot of unnecessary back and forth communication.

While I wasn’t at the office, I was told later that my dad was very tense during the entire exchange. He was being aggressive in pointing the finger at the sales team. I stepped in and defended their position, and suggested we figure out a solution that works for everyone.

Ultimately, in order to scale and operate better, I believe we have to relinquish some level of control on decision making and provide more transparency on the business.

This exchange was a good example of the power of kaizens. In a group setting, people feel more comfortable speaking up about problems, and there are more people to help lend perspectives and helping hands on resolving them.

Hopefully this is the start of Sunright transforming from a top-down organization to a feedback loop driven one. To make it all work, the action items from the Kaizens have to be completed. So that ideas can turn into concrete results that can be evaluated.

Saturday 10/28

• Update Finance, Bus Dev, Product weekly

Helped my girlfriend move for a big part of the day. Spent a little time updating the dashboards. Iterated on the dashboards by adding in customer sales info and creating some summary reviews that can be directly pasted into the Weekly Leadership Updates. A mentor once told me, never manually do the same thing three times if you don’t have too.

Sunday 10/29

• Send out updates to Jim, Ronald, and Robert
• Project M negotiation planning

Tomorrow there is a meeting with the licensors for Project M. This is new territory for me, since I’ve never had to do business development before. Spent a little time thinking of a script and points I wanted to cover. Spend the rest of the time taking a break from a busy week.