“On Homegrown Leadership and Positive Self-Promotion” — goodr

Host: Garrett Schwartz, Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

Guests: Stephen Lease, goodr CEO and Ashley Craft, goodr Head of Account Management

Transcript

Garrett Schwartz 

At the sunglasses brand goodr, fashion and form meet affordability. Culture is unique at goodr. Everything is animal-themed from the actual product packaging right down to the company mascot, Carl the Flamingo. goodr’s teams are one-of-a-kind too. The company thrives on collaboration and an unwavering work ethic. Everyone must be all in — especially on the customer service team, where goodr employees drive ticket numbers down but sales and satisfaction up.

In this episode, CEO Stephen Lease and Head of Account Management Ashley Craft, or “Crafty” for short, explore how leadership and shared values can accomplish positive impressions for customers and spur company innovation. This is what teamwork at goodr looks like.

Stephen Lease
 

Change is hard, but anybody can do it. Anybody can create change in their team and their company, in their culture, customer service team, product team. It doesn’t matter. You just have to get really, really comfortable with challenging the status quo.

Ashley Craft

Hi, my name’s Ashley Craft. I go by Crafty at goodr. I am the head of account management, and I’ve been with the company for three and a half years.

Stephen Lease
 

I’m Stephen Lease. I’m the CEO and co-founder of goodr. I’m 16% flamingo, and I’m still bonded with Bosley, the basset hound who is no longer with us.

Ashley Craft

Long live the king.

Stephen Lease

That’s right.

Garrett Schwartz

Long live the king. And you guys have this unique philosophy and culture at goodr.

Stephen Lease

Yeah, we have two core values at goodr. We have fun and authenticity. The mantra for fun is “We’re recklessly committed to fun, blah, blah, blah, sunglasses.” That was actually our mission for a while. And then our core value of authenticity. The mantra there is “If the goal is being authentic and people don’t like you, it’s okay because we don’t ever need to be liked. We just need to be ourselves.” 

And so we are very big on everybody here showing up as themselves. I don’t actually believe in work-life separation. I think that we spend a lot of time working. It’s work-life integration. And so the ability to show up as yourself at goodr is very important.

Garrett Schwartz

You have some special names for what you call managers, teams, and departments at goodr.

Stephen Lease

Yep.

Garrett Schwartz 

Can you explain that a little bit?

Stephen Lease

Yeah. So a department is called a “herd,” a team is called a “flock,” and an individual is called the “flamingo.” You know, we have six departments which are herds. We have 22 flocks and 140 people. And then every flock has a, we call it a lame name but basically it’s the name for the outside world, like our design team, our copy team.

But internally, there’s just a fun nickname. And every team kind of takes on its own identity.

Garrett Schwartz

When it comes to leadership, you first tried a very specific kind of organizational structure, right? What was that, and did it work for goodr?

Stephen Lease

Originally, I wanted to have a completely flat reporting structure. I wanted to have no bosses at goodr, and we tried to do it until we were about 25, 30 people. And it worked until it didn’t. And I think the main reason it didn’t work is if you have 25 people like Crafty, it would actually work. But it gets really hard for one person like me to hold 25 people accountable.

And so that’s when we went to flocks, and we try to keep it still pretty flat there. So we grew to 13 teams and all 13 leaders reported to me. Then I was missing things and wasn’t doing my job as a leader. So then we reorganized in 2021 to the current structure now where we have herds, flocks, and people.

Garrett Schwartz

In terms of the structure today, what does your involvement look like?

Stephen Lease

So I do a number of things. I think the prime thing that I focus on is getting 130 people moving in the same direction. So that is vision, that is planning, I do a culture talk every other week in front of the company, a lot of coaching, and I am a huge problem-solver, so a ton of working sessions.

So if somebody on the team has a problem, I will happily get in the room and go. And then also I’m an agitator, so that also happens.

Garrett Schwartz

Stephen also sees his role as inspiring the staff on a weekly basis. Like everything at goodr, their biweekly stand-ups are unique.

Stephen Lease

Yeah. So we have an all-staff meeting every other Tuesday. Basically, it’s called Tuesdays with Carl because Carl the Flamingo is our mascot. It is a full-on produced event. It’s two hours. There’s a showrunner, Hannah. We have a stage, everybody. It’s a rotating host, so everybody who works at goodr gets to host the TWC, if you’re here long enough. 

We share financials, where were we at, where their revenue at, where’s our expenses at. We share real-life dashboards for every department where they’re projects like customer service years, our customer service tickets, their rating, our DC shares their dashboard.

Garrett Schwartz

Almost everything at goodr comes down to these dashboards. One in particular, customer service. That’s where Crafty comes in. In 2019, Crafty was hired to be flock leader for the customer service team. It’s a direct-to-consumer model and there’s a nickname, of course they call it “Squawk and Awe.”

Stephen Lease

Crafty, what’s the origin of “Squawk and Awe?”

Ashley Craft 

Oh, so they’re parrots. They’re known as our customer service parrots because they’re just, they keep repeating, “We’ll reshape your order” or “Check your tracking.” They just keep repeating the same thing. Currently, there are seven people on the team. One of them is doing social media, the other five are doing regular inbound customer service tickets. And then there’s the flock leader.

Ashley Craft 

Last summer, we had nine people on that team. This is before we broke it off. There are nine people plus me as a flock leader plus two seasonals. So it was a humongous team. That’s kind of when we realized that we needed to branch this off into two different teams.

Garrett Schwartz

Crafty ran the customer service team for three and a half years. Confidence was key in her leadership success.

Ashley Craft 

Initially when I was hired, I was going to take a full year to be training and there was going to be the person that was the head of customer service before me was going to mentor me. I was actually given the reins after about three months, and I was trying to fill the shoes of my predecessor until I kind of had a self-realization that that’s not why I was hired.

I was hired for my expertise and what I brought to the table. So once that sunk in, I was able to start to build a bridge between myself and all my team members, and start to build their path that goodr, but additionally build the path and the vision for the team. So as soon as I had that, all that confidence, everything kind of fell into place, which took about a year.

Everything just started to work together. I was building processes. I onboarded some software programs to just ease the customer service tickets that were coming in. I created new roles, and I did work with everybody on their individual growth paths. One of the most successful moments over that whole three and a half years was actually watching five people earn new roles during migration last October.

Garrett Schwartz

And did you have background in customer service?

Ashley Craft

I was in retail for 12 years and then I was the director of customer experience at a higher education company for six years before goodr.

Garrett Schwartz

Ashley, can you give us some insight into how you got into your current position? I understand that goodr’s promotion practices are kind of unique.

Ashley Craft

I just switched roles about six months ago. I was actually lucky enough to be included in the ideation phase of this new role and this new team that I have. And I was also invited to build out what the vision looks like for this role as well. Once the role in the new flock was actually approved, I still had to apply for it just like everybody else.

I interviewed with Stephen, I interviewed with Dan, and I was still nervous that I wasn’t going to get the job, even though I was such a heavy part of even thinking this into existence.

Stephen Lease

All leaders are going to lead by example. I mean, you do not become a leader here if you are not showing up every day doing really hard work. And when you talk about a trickle down, nobody gets to slide. The higher you are up at goodr, the harder I am on you.

And then last year we did a huge restructure. We had this new role where basically we wanted to build out a B2B customer service team. So taking all the amazing work we did with our consumers and then doing a white glove service for all of our retailers, and our global accounts, and a team of account managers. So Crafty left her role and raised somebody up from beneath her and started this new team. Account managers, the lame name — the nickname’s “Beehive.” What’s the origin there, Crafty?

Ashley Craft 

B is for B2B so it’s –.

Stephen Lease

Oh thank you.

Ashley Craft

So now we have a “Beehive” who does business to business, and there are five account managers. I’m sorry, there’s four account managers on that team, plus me as a flock leader. And then we will be hiring three seasonals between the two teams as well this year. So both teams offer support through email. The “Beehive” offers customer service through phones and live chat as well, and then we also have a bank of templated responses for frequently asked questions and they’re written in Carl’s voice as we like to call it, and just make sure that all of our branding comes through all correspondence.

Garrett Schwartz

What was the thought process around breaking that into two separate teams?

Stephen Lease

At a certain point, I think it’s really hard for one person to lead a team of 10 people and actually lead them. And so we kind of have this method here where we try to not have teams of more than 10. This was just kind of coming to a, it was getting bigger and we actually ended up hiring more people.

We realized, “Oh, we should break this into two teams instead of having one customer service team, let’s have one direct consumer customer service team, then one that focuses on B2B so that we can just get better.” So then each team can have a focus and really they get really narrowed on what they do. And then, you know, it also enables more leaders to be raised up and goodr, you know, Crafty, raised somebody up on her team.

And so it wasn’t downsizing. It was a strategic move to get better at two different things.

Garrett Schwartz

Ashley, what is the new team you are on, and what role do you currently hold?

Ashley Craft

So I’m now the head of account management for the Asset Management Team, and my role is really to make sure that our account managers have all the information, the training, resources, tools, everything that they have to get their job done, so to service our business-to-business customers.

It’s really important to note all of our fun titles. So I’m the Beekeeper. I have Mr. World Hive on the team, Royal Bee, and Little Stinger. And then we have one more account manager that started this week that doesn’t have a fun title yet.

Garrett Schwartz

In that B2B role for team building, what does success look like for this new team that you’re building out?

Ashley Craft

I mean, this first year we’re really trying to find all of the issues that we’ve maybe not recognized in the past and just trying to get ahead of everything so that we can create solutions for our customers. We want ordering with us to be seamless and easy, and we just don’t want anyone to experience shipping delays. 

Success for us is when we get minimal reactive emails and we’re getting people asking us order suggestions, “Hey, I’m about to place my first order. What should I buy?” We want people to ask us how to style our sunglasses. I mean, a huge wild success for me would be even for retailers to request us to go into their store and do product knowledge events with their stores.

Garrett Schwartz

Stephen, I want to ask you about this self-promotion strategy that you have goodr — how does that work?

Stephen Lease

Any role at goodr gets posted anybody can apply outside world, inside. Last year, last fall, we had to give a 12-month hiring plan and really encouraged people internally to move up, move across teams, move to other things they might want to do. And we’ve seen an amazing success. I mean, Crafty out of the customer service team, how many people graduated to another team?

Ashley Craft

Five.

Stephen Lease

Yeah, which is amazing. Out of our leadership in general, flock stars and flock leaders over the course of our entire history, 68% of our leadership have been promoted internally. Now, the thing that’s really “promoted” is a really interesting word there, because Crafty, although she’s a rock star, still had to show up and pitch an interview for this job.

Nothing is given to anyone. They have to legit show up and ball out and earn a role. And the magic in that is you find out really quickly how hard somebody wants to work for something. And it’s really a breath of fresh air when somebody like Ashley, who is incredible, still doesn’t phone it in, it still just is like, “No, no, I want to lead this new team, and so I’m going to show up and rip it from your hands.” And that is the advice I would give you. I don’t care how good you’ve been, you need to show up and rip this job from somebody else’s hands and it’s incredible.

Garrett Schwartz

And goodr celebrates the movement of people to other teams, right? Does that core in your retention of employees and employee satisfaction? Have you seen any anything like that?

Stephen Lease

We have an amazing culture and even celebrate people leaving the company, but I think sometimes with a culture like ours, people can make the mistake that it is like a family. No, you still have to show up every day and crush it.

Ashley Craft

It’s rewarding. It’s so rewarding to see people live up to what they’ve been working for for the last year. Jasmine specifically came to me last year, I think January of 2022 and said, I want to be the flock leader someday. And it’s kind of like, oh, well, that’s my role, but okay, yeah, let’s get you there. And so putting these people on the paths and carving out this thing and saying, “Okay, if you work on this project, this is going to get you face time with this team.”

Or if you work on this project, it’s going to actually enhance your skills here and just watching them do the hard work, and then it’s really rewarding to see them earn that role. I’ve been watching Jasmine from afar and I’m just kind of gazing over at her, just watching her run this team and doing things that I never even thought to do.

And additionally, I think I just told Stephen this, it feels like that team just needed a bigger fish tank and that’s kind of what she provided. It’s really cool. It’s really rewarding to see people move on and just crush these paths that you’ve carved out for them.

Garrett Schwartz

Let’s get into specifics with winning strategy, Stephen. What is Project Golden Gate?

Stephen Lease

It’s Crafty’s that’s spearheading Golden Gate, so she should talk about it. I’m just a grease monkey in the background.

Ashley Craft

So, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has a really unique approach to maintenance. You start at one side of the gate and you paint the bridge in its entirety, and by the time you get to the other side, everything’s all rusted and everything. And so you have to go back and start all over again. So you’re basically going from point A to point B, then you start from point B and go back to point A, and so on. So it’s never ending. 

Operation Golden Gate is goodr’s first official B2B2B outreach program, and this is one that I created. We’re calling each of our specialty retailers, which is about 2,500 retailers in the US, and it’s just the approach that we’re taking with account management. So there’s always going to be new issues that pop up.

But we also want to make sure that we’re asking questions that we’ve never asked before. And what we’re learning right now is that our retailers are so excited to hear from us. Some of them are even answering all the questions that we have on our list before we even get to them because they’re so excited to have us on the phone.

Yeah, so that’s Operation Golden Gate. We’re going to start from the beginning of our book of business and go down to the end and then start over again.

Garrett Schwartz

Customer service tickets are the bane of every product business. At goodr, one of the key metrics for driving sales starts in an unexpected place — at the end of the product cycle with Crafty’s customer service team. What is the overall goal of the customer success team at goodr?

Ashley Craft

I want to provide the best customer service in the galaxy and that’s by getting ahead of reactive issues that will lead to less inbound tickets and just offer proactive customer service.

Stephen Lease

Yeah, we like to create connection with our customers.

Garrett Schwartz

Got it. So the core of every customer service strategy is tickets, right? You’ve got a big strategy to drive them down. Can you walk us through the process from identifying the problem to the approach you use and how you arrive at a solution to mitigate those tickets coming in?

Stephen Lease

Every business should know this. Your customer service team is a glaring admission that you’re not perfect, right? We have problems with our shipping. We have problems with product, that’s what this is. And once you understand that, it allows you to give really good customer service and not shame and blame people, take ownership. And then for us, we focus on driving those tickets down and Crafty can talk to you any number of ways that we’ve done that.

Ashley Craft

I mean, our CS teams, both of them, they communicate really well with each other and also with all the other flocks that directly touch our teams in the company and with our customers. If one of our teams is seeing a recurring issue, we will immediately notify the other customer service team. “Hey, are you seeing this issue too with shipping or whatever the issue could be?”

From there, if we’re both experiencing it, we will reach out to the flock that could possibly help solve it. Or we now have a role which is a solutions project leader, and sometimes they have to step in and just it becomes a project. If it’s an immediate solve, then that’s great. If not, we try to get ahead of communicating with our customers how this could impact people in the future to make sure that we’re not getting those reactive emails in the future.

Garrett Schwartz

How does the number of tickets relate to the number of customers you have?

Ashley Craft

Last year, my main initiative was getting tickets down and so we were actually down 10% to the year before. But we actually saw a 50% increase in customers.

Stephen Lease

That’s a giant number.

Ashley Craft

A giant number. And then additionally, what came of last year was the rolling 36 for tickets just so that we actually have a good idea monthly, quarterly trimester and annually on where our tickets are and where they should be just so that we can keep a close eye on it moving forward.

Garrett Schwartz

Now, you said “rolling 36.” What is that?

Stephen Lease

Well you’re familiar with the “rolling 12,” which is, you know, your budget for the next 12 months and you close March, then you add on March of next year. So we have a “rolling 36.” So we have a 36-month view of our revenue by channel, our expenses by team, our customer service tickets, and how many numbers of SKUs we plan to buy.

Garrett Schwartz

I want to come back to customer satisfaction rates right now. Do you have numbers on what they are? Have they always been that good? How did you get them there?

Ashley Craft

So since day one I walked in the door at goodr, our customer service rates have always been in the 90s. Right now it’s teetering between an 89 and 91. First of all, we never say “no” without providing an alternate solution for our customers. For me as a consumer, I want to have as little touchpoints as possible.

That’s how I built the customer service training plan over the last couple of years is just to get ahead of the foreseeable questions that customers may have. But trying to just do one-touch ticket sales is a huge thing for us. We actually send out a customer service satisfaction score to everybody who interacts with our customer service team.

As soon as we solve a ticket, they get served. The question is “How is your interaction with our good our employees today?” I was reading some of the good satisfaction ratings that we’ve been receiving recently, in the last six months, and they’re all just general customer service. It’s pointing our B2B customers to the direction of resources, and sometimes it’s even just providing an event discount code.

Our customers love us because we’re helpful.

Garrett Schwartz

I understand customers love you, but you definitely have to have complaints right? How do you infuse your company ethos, this fun, energetic atmosphere in this culture into dealing with probably the not-so-friendly customers or the complaints that come in?

Ashley Craft

Stephen and I came up with this a couple of years ago. I think Stephen came up with it, but it’s fine, I’m going to take credit for it too. I’m taking half credit. You can choose to be happy or you can choose to be right, and we choose to be happy. So at goodr, our reply is always start with the solution and then we just sprinkle a little bit of fun inside.

Stephen Lease

Would you rather be right or happy? What is so great about being right all the time? And believe me, I’m a person who will find myself being like, “What do you care about this?” And if you free yourself to be happy, then you could just give amazing customer service or be really generous with your friends or not get in a fight with your partner over something stupid.

Garrett Schwartz

And you’re also doing something specific when it comes to employee recognition. What are the Flamingo Awards, and how does that tie back into customer service?

Stephen Lease

We do a ton of different stuff. The Flamingo Award, I think, is the crown jewel. We have gold stars, so there’s a channel where we encourage everybody to give gratitude for people at the company. At Tuesday’s at Carl, our staff meeting, there’s a section carved out for people to sign up and it’s full every week to give people recognizing you basically give gratitude, and so there’s that.

We’ve also just created this thing this year called herd points which think about it like Harry Potter, like how, you know, a Gryffindor gets eight points. So each department is their own herd. They have a coat of arms and every team gets a fair amount of points to give away every trimester. So there’s a constant culture of recognition and gratitude.

And then in the year we have a black-tie gala. Think Academy Awards meets goodr. That’s what it is. And it’s legit a really high-end event. Everybody gets dressed up. We let people expense a really nice outfit and bring a plus one. 

It really came from this place of, you know when I was a child I was super blue collar family.Dad was a golfer, a superintendent, and the one time every year my parents would get dressed up was for his holiday party. And I remember this vividly. And once goodr got big enough, I’m like, “Hey, I wanted to do something really, really special.” And so we created this thing called the Flamingo Awards. Every quarter there’s a nomination process it goes through and I’m the final decision-maker.

Stephen Lease

But the brief is to inspire awe.

Garrett Schwartz

So one more award that I want to ask about. Can you talk about a very special award, the Failure Award?

Stephen Lease

The flock-up of the year which is to play big and to do great things, you have to fail. And so every team has to nominate their biggest failure from the year. But the idea that people are perfect is absurd, and we want to encourage people to play big and fail big.

Garrett Schwartz

Thank you, Stephen and Crafty, for sharing the teamwork story of goodr. To learn more about the flock, check out the Culture goodr podcast or find Stephen, Crafty, and the goodr team on Instagram.