Meet our Head of Operations, Morgan Landsberger
What do you do at Beacon?
As Beacon’s Head of Operations, my team is responsible for defining and managing the end to end experience customers and partners have with Beacon. On a day-to-day basis that means our operations and supply managers are surfacing the most competitive quotes and shipment plans for our customers, finding the best carrier partners to fulfill those plans, and then monitoring and processing to ensure we meet them.
Personally, I spend my time building a team and an organisation that focuses on how to save our customers what they consider most valuable, their time and money. I’m passionate about process design – how can we set up processes and policies to minimise the back and forth with customers, reduce waste and truly execute on their behalf. From there, I partner with our tech teams to drive those efficiency gains by automating the repeatable steps within the process, and making sure our operations managers are focused on problem solving. The nature of shipping is that things go wrong – delayed production line, weather, global epidemics – anything. Because of that, we have a shipment plan A, B, and C.
What did you do before Beacon?
I mentioned I’m a lover of process – this has been ingrained from my years at Uber. I started launching high touch support teams in London and ultimately led the safety and social media customer support programs for EMEA. The incredible challenge there was to create support policies and processes that reflected the nuances of each country, culture and legal regulatory body in which we operated while ensuring we could perform at scale and maintain safety standards across the globe. Even though at a surface level, the topics from Uber to Beacon seem different – the skills and hurdles to overcome are similar. I’m excited to continue leveraging what I’ve learned to fast track and re-imagine Beacon’s approach to scaled customer experience.
Why Beacon?
I loved what I did at Uber because I could see the impact of my work and the teams around me improve everyday life. Beacon and logistics are the same – everything we do, almost every product we buy is impacted by shipping. Higher freight costs or delayed paperwork results in added costs which are ultimately passed on to the consumer. The opportunity to join Beacon and partner with some of the brightest people across data science, engineering and operations to optimise and reduce the chance of these issues happening seemed too good to pass up. But work can’t just be based on the size of the opportunity or the industry – work is where we spend up to (or more than) a third of our lives. That means you have to love your day-to-day, and that’s due to the people and the ethos of the business and founders. Our co-founders prioritise hiring the right people. The first hire at Beacon was our Head of People, someone to ruthlessly prioritise the needs of our teams above all. For me that said it all – a business that doesn’t see it’s people as a cost, but an asset.
