Yes, you can hire me as a consultant.

What I know: Marketplace Operations

I am an expert at building high-performing operations for engineering-first tech companies — usually marketplace companies.

The work I've done has spanned every bit of operations, from building high performing teams, a culture of excellence, integrating technology to support amazing ops, and strategic planning.

I usually work for engineering-first marketplace/tech companies, like ride-sharing, logistics, and e-commerce companies. These companie sbuild platforms, apps, and killer business models. But they usually leave physical operations to people like me.

Tech company founders often think things like: "OK, we will get a warehouse and hire a manager. It's expensive short term, but once we prove the unit economics, we'll get more efficient with our physical operations." But while they're great at hiring engineers, finding specialists to work on the physical ops and delivering those unit economics is very hard.

Physical ops is "where the rubber hits the road" for companies like Lyft, Uber, Amazon, Rent the Runway, Groupon, Bird, Lime, or Scoot. It's where people meet products and products get to customers.

Physical ops is also never the core of the business. But that doesn't mean it can be ignored. Hire me, and I'll get your physical ops performing so well that you don't have to think about it.

Doing physical ops isn't hard. It just requires someone who can think logically, corral a lot of people into following a simple set of guidelines, and someone who can train others to lead — and then leave.

Availability

I am on full-time assignment through February 2020 (with another project pending).

During this period I'm available for remote consulting only, from an hour to two days.

My fees

My fees* are (all USD)

  • Per month, in-country: $50,000 + expenses**
  • Per week, in-country: $15,000 + expenses
  • Per day, in-country: $4,000 + expenses
  • Per week, remote: $10,000
  • Per day, remote: $2,500
  • Per hour for consultations: $500/hr (schedule time), with a 30 minute minimum

If I need a larger team to support you, I have other consultants on standby.

* Where relevant, fees include all applicable taxes (e.g. sales tax)
** Expenses include accommodation and per diems, capped at ~15% of fees.

Examples of past work

Here are a few companies I've worked for recently.

Wing (A drone delivery service, owned by Alphabet)

  • Restructured organisation around growth verticals
  • Defined strategy for short term (6-month) 20x growth in deliveries
  • Built a system to maximise throughput and defined a team and processes to manage it

Wind (A European scooter company) — 2019

  • Launched "Wind 3.0" scooter — Bordeaux, France
  • Improved operations to increase deployment ratio — Malaga, Spain
  • Restructured warehouse ops to get supply back up — Tel Aviv, Israel
  • Redesigned charger incentives — Tel Aviv, Israel

You can find a description of my work with Wind here.

Lyft (all across USA) — 2016-2018 (USA, Canada)

  • Built the "Lyft Retail" team from a few disparate sites to an integrated organisation, growing to 200 sites across 20+ cities and with 750 team members. Rolled out training, tech, culture, processes, etc.
  • Designed and built the Lyft Retail tech platform, coding it myself before we got any engineering budget
  • Implemented extended hours in-person support — coordinating every city in a 2-week effort that won me an award
  • Launched the Toronto office (first in Canada)
  • Launched the "Express Drive" rental program in four major cities

Groupon (Beijing, China)

  • Led the Revenue Management team for all of China
  • Built and ran the "Deal Management" team of people designed to ensure that our front-page deals were ready to be published (every day)
  • Ran China operations integration for all lead-generation practise

What is marketplace operations?

These companies create software to match drivers, scooters, motorcycles or cars to passengers and drivers.

They're good at building apps apps, matching algorithms, and running sophisticated marketing campaigns, to constantly lower customer acquisition cost, manage a balanced marketplace to optimise for profit, and to maximise customer and supplier retention.

But marketplace companies are NOT good at physical operations. This is usually an afterthought, and something that companies say "we'll get more efficient over time".

So these companies are not so good  Meanwhile, companies run driver training centers, in-person customer support, car-rental sites, scooter repair warehouses or charging centers without clearly knowing how they're going to optimise them and run them like machines. This is what I do.

I answer questions like

  • How do you run an efficient scooter warehouse? (Wind, 2018-19)
  • How do manage teams of chargers to maximise scooter supply? (Wind, 2019)
  • How do you run a driver service center that solves problems and maximises retention? (Lyft, 2017-18)
  • How do you run an efficient car rental site? (Lyft, 2017-18)
  • How do you do anything more efficiently?

What people say about me

Here are a few verbatim reviews from people I've worked with. Feel free to check with them for more specific feedback.

"Dana is magic" - Matthew Turzo, COO Europe, Wind
"He's very strong" - David Mayer, VP Ops of various companies, deadlifts 500+ lb
"Super good" - Christian Macht, Chairman of Element AI
"My saviour" - David Kunst, GM NorCal, Lyft
"Something" - Neha Ajmera, Lyft (but she did get me Employee of the Month at Lyft)

If you want an overview of my experience, check out my about page.