Operations Leadership

For fifteen years I was the general manager of a glass materials and equipment company. We sold the supplies and gear that glassblowing artists use to do their work, everything from the raw materials to the torches and tools, and I had my hands on nearly every part of how that business ran. Not in the abstract, org-chart sense. In the close the gate at night, answer the phone when it rings, figure out why the shipment is late kind of sense.

Owning the whole thing

The job was wide. I owned sourcing and purchasing, which meant building relationships with suppliers, negotiating, and deciding what to stock and how much of it before the demand showed up. I owned operations and fulfillment, so when an order came in, getting it picked, packed, and out the door correctly was on me. I owned sales, which is its own kind of education in listening to what a customer actually needs versus what they think they want. And underneath all of it I had to genuinely know the gear, because you cannot sell, source, or support equipment you do not understand.

When you wear that many hats at once, you stop being able to hide behind any one of them. A purchasing mistake shows up as an angry customer two weeks later. A sloppy fulfillment process shows up as returns and lost trust. Everything is connected, and you feel every connection personally because there is no one else to hand it to. That is a hard way to learn, and it is also the most honest one I know.

The community part

The thing I am proudest of has nothing to do with logistics. It is the community that grew up around the business. Glassblowing is a tight world, full of people who care deeply about their craft and who notice when you treat them well. Over the years we built a base of customers who came back, who called to talk shop, who trusted us to point them toward the right tool instead of the most expensive one. You do not get that from a slick catalog. You get it from showing up, year after year, and being the person who actually knows the answer.

That loyalty was the whole ballgame. It meant I could not cut a corner without someone I respected noticing. It kept the standard high in a way no policy document ever would. And it taught me that the systems and the people are not two separate problems. A good system exists so the people can do their best work, and a business that forgets that ends up with neither.

What the real world taught me

I came up running a business with my hands before I ever made a living wiring enterprise systems together, and I am convinced that order matters. When you have personally stocked the shelves, chased the late freight, and apologized to a customer for something that went sideways, you understand on a gut level what a process is supposed to protect. You stop seeing a workflow as boxes on a diagram and start seeing it as the difference between a calm Tuesday and a terrible one for the person living inside it.

So much of what I do now, getting finance, sales, and operations onto one set of numbers, building integrations that hold up over time, automating the busywork, is just a more technical version of what I did for fifteen years. The tools changed. The problem did not. It is still about making the messy real-world parts of a business talk to each other so the humans can stop fighting the same fire twice. Software is leverage on top of that understanding. It is not a substitute for it.

I will also be the first to admit I made plenty of mistakes along the way. Overbought on inventory I was sure would move and watched it sit. Trusted a supplier I should have double-checked. Every one of those left a mark, and every mark turned into a rule I still follow. That is the part you cannot shortcut. You can read about operations all you want, but the lessons that stick are the ones that cost you something.

The through-line

If there is a single thread connecting the glass company to the integration work I do today, it is this: a business is a system made of people, and the best systems are the ones that make those people faster, calmer, and harder to fool. I spent fifteen years learning that the slow, expensive way. It is the lens I bring to every project now, and honestly, it is the part of the resume I would keep if I had to throw the rest away.