Visitor asked
Tell me about Avery's biggest pre-break operations win
The work I'm proudest of from before my break is the four-warehouse vendor migration at Marrowfield Logistics. Our incumbent transportation vendor gave us three weeks' notice that they wouldn't renew, and we had crews in four cities that depended on a clean handoff for last-mile delivery. The easy version of that project is to extend the incumbent contract on bad terms and buy a quarter to plan. I didn't think we should — the relationship was already breaking and a quarter would have taught us nothing.
I sequenced the migration with the highest-volume warehouse first, on purpose, so the new vendor proved itself on the hard mode of our network rather than on a quiet pilot site. I ran a daily 15-minute standup with the ops leads in each region — same time, same format every day, decisions written down in a shared brief by the end of the meeting. And I renegotiated payment terms so the new vendor absorbed rollout risk in exchange for a longer initial commit; that one piece was where the deal got real.
We migrated all four warehouses on schedule with zero missed delivery windows. The metric I cared about more, though, was that the playbook I wrote during the project ran two more vendor changes after I left without me in the room. That's the kind of impact I'm trying to build now — work that compounds after I move on.
The lesson I keep coming back to: when you're under deadline, the discipline isn't to move faster, it's to make the disagreements visible earlier. The migration only worked because the three hardest decisions were already on the table by day three.
This is a sample. Avery Chen is fictional and the answers above are pre-written.