If you can think of an ecom operations snafu, Kathleen Sullivan Garman has seen it.
A Kickstarter campaign that logged 60,000 pre-orders across 180 countries for a product line that didn’t apply any SKUs.
A $25 million business that had no warehouse management system and, instead, relied on spreadsheets.
Another brand that, turns out, was spending 29 hours of manual operations labor any time it needed to do a procurement run.
Yet these are examples of the generalized chaos that Kathleen loves.
After 15 years building ecommerce brands and a few exits, Kathleen launched SullyGarman & Associates, a boutique consultancy that, as her LinkedIn profile so succinctly puts it, “helps small and midsize companies run more efficient businesses.” She also consults with order operations provider, Pipe17.
Profitability Hiding in Plain Sight
“People – founders in particular, to no fault of their own – often look at ops as overhead and not a revenue center. It’s typically one of the last things to formalize and get expertise,” says Kathleen. “And when they’re late to the game on ops, there are always things that are in dire need of attention. Those are the things I love tackling with brands because there is, in fact, profitability in well run operations.”
“Inventory management, warehouse management, supply chain, vendor management, tech, compliance, forecasting, the customer experience – ops touches just about everything within a brand. It has the ability to optimize countless parts of the business. And when things are optimized and there’s less waste or unnecessary redundancies, profitability goes up.”
Unlocking that profitability starts with what Kathleen calls The Ops Bible.
The Ops Bible
“For brands without formalized operations offices, everything is everywhere. SOPs – if they exist – are floating around in someone’s Google Drive. Login credentials to different tools are in someone’s Apple Notes. Partner contacts for things like EDI are siloed. It’s just this rat’s nest of stuff.”
The Ops Bible pulls everything into one place. All SOPs are organized and linked. The tech stack is fully documented. All partner contacts are logged and organized. Internal staff roles and daily responsibilities are documented. 3PL info and packaging requirements are defined. Contracts and agreements are linked too. Case dimensions and weights are spelled out. So too are storage requirements. There’s supplier info, packaging info, distributor info, ERP info, accounting info, EDI codes and document types, order flow and return flow information, chargeback prevention plans, fraud prevention, and links to the master SKU list, production planning documents, freight and shipping tools and so so so much more.
“The Ops Bible is great for organizing the chaos and detaching the department from a single or a few individuals. Just by having that one source of truth a brand’s ops department can go from a two to an eight – which has a meaningful impact on profitability.”
Beyond profitability, The Ops Bible equips brands with the ability to pivot because if one thing is true about consumer ecommerce it’s that things can change in an instant.
“Ops is all about the pivot,” says Kathleen. “ The Ops Bible makes it significantly easier for brands to execute plans B and C when plan A hits turbulence. This builds a proactive culture within an ops department and a company in general. A reactive ops environment will one hundred percent cost a brand money.”
ACTION ITEM 1: If an Ops Bible has you nodding, you should contact Kathleen. In the meantime, start organizing your information in the following buckets:
- Admin
- 3PL Info
- Suppliers
- Packaging
- Tech Stack
- Production Planning
- Order Management
- Freight and Shipping
- Fraud, Chargebacks, Deductions
- Staff
Circular Org Charts
Most fast-growing ecommerce brands have a standard, hierarchical org chart. Founder/CEO down to executive leadership team down to senior management and so on. Departments are siloed. Customer service is often out there on its own island.
Kathleen doesn’t buy it. This approach silos information. The founder/CEO is managing all departments. Staff members are reporting to multiple departments. It’s a recipe for burnout.
“I make the org chart circular. This creates a natural flow of information. You have sales and marketing informing ops ‘Here’s what we’re doing that’s going to impact you.’ Ops then feeds that knowledge to finance because finance absolutely needs to know what sales, marketing and ops are doing and what the inventory will cost. Finance can then tell technology what’s coming, ensure budgeting and set pricing targets for sales. Tech can prepare accordingly and let sales and marketing know that it’s ready.”
“At the center of this circle is customer service. They’re the heart and soul of a company. They need to know everything. They need to know what marketing is doing. They need to know from finance why prices are what they are. They need to know from ops what logistical challenges may impact the customers. And on the backend, they need to turn that customer interaction back to everyone else in the company.”
“This is how you do sales and operations planning – and it can have a massive effect on profitability.”
Equally important, this strategy is a savior for the burnt out founder/CEO.
“This is usually a big growth moment for a company. When the founder CEO is removed from these systems, they’re able to step into that role of visionary leader. They’re free to dream up new ideas and think deeply on what’s coming next. It can take some coaching. Their brand is their baby. Not doing everything for it typically feels unnatural. But more often than not, they’re burnt out because they’ve been doing everything.”
ACTION ITEM 2: Create a Circular Org Chart for your company. What workflows fall under each of the four primary buckets? Take it to your CEO and see what they think.
What About the Sharpies?
The title of this profile mentions Sharpies and up until now, said article hasn’t shown the strong smelling marker any love. Here’s the story…
Kathleen is supremely organized. Mapping things out on those giant tear-away paper whiteboards is core to her process. One Christmas, her husband asked her what she might like as a gift.
With dead seriousness, she replied, “Sharpies.”
He laughed. She didn’t.
“As much as I live and operate in a tech-first world, there’s something powerful in scribbling out requirements and checklists and workflows. It’s how I initially detangle things and get a sense of what needs to happen so we can get to where we want to go.”
And in case you’re wondering, she got a stocking full of Sharpies.