TL;DR: Documented and systematized operations for a fast-scaling startup, cutting onboarding time and enabling 30% sales growth within two months.
Context
Kombucha Brooklyn was a fast-growing kombucha producer based in Brooklyn, NY. As order volumes scaled and the business brought on temporary workers during peak periods, the operational infrastructure hadn’t kept pace. What worked when the team was small was breaking under volume.
The Problem
Onboarding temporary workers was slow and inconsistent — processes for order fulfillment and shipping lived in people’s heads rather than documentation. Orders from different vendors had meaningfully different processing requirements that weren’t written down anywhere. During high-volume periods, mistakes were frequent, costly, and hard to trace. The company was scaling the work faster than it was scaling the system.
My Approach
- Mapped all core operational workflows from end to end — culture preparation, order fulfillment, packing, and shipping — documenting each step and the variations required by vendor and product type
- Built a company-wide internal wiki as a centralized knowledge base, covering every department with enough detail that a new worker could get up to speed without requiring direct supervision
- Developed a streamlined, documented order processing workflow that accounted for vendor-specific requirements and reduced the number of judgment calls required during packing and dispatch
- Worked alongside the shipping team to identify and remove bottlenecks in the packing and dispatch flow
Outcome
Consistency improved measurably across shifts. Onboarding time dropped. The operational foundation allowed the company to fulfill larger order volumes without proportional increases in coordination overhead — sales grew 30% within two months of the system going in.