How Storage Solution’s In-House Services Drive Project Success with Brandan Alford
Brandan Alford, Executive Vice President of Operations at Storage Solutions, discusses how our in-house services help provide seamless project experiences from start to finish.
Introduction
My name is Brandan Alford and I’ve been at Storage Solutions for a little over six years. I started as a project manager, working with what was then known as Team Mac. I moved into a Director of Sales Support role, where we manage the project managers and project coordinators. Then, this past year, I moved into my current role as Executive Vice President of Operations.
Can you give an overview of each of the in-house teams you oversee?
So there’s a handful of teams I work with; the first three that get grouped together pretty often are our installation department, our logistics and freight team, and then our warehouse team. A couple of other teams that I work with: our design team, our permit and licensing team, and then our procurement and vendor partnership team.
I think the wheel metaphor is one that is really good for these divisions. So, the sales team and our project managers are that hub, right? They’re the ones that are essential to the execution of a project and how we work with our customers. But these operations departments are the (wheel) spokes. We may not have all six on a given project, but two or three may be a big part of our ability to execute for our customers.
How do these groups interact with other parts of SSI, and how is this important to project success?
There are a lot of times they may not work together directly on a project, but they’re always going to be working directly with our sales and project management team to get exactly what the customer has asked for. That’s the benefit of all these internal departments, right? It’s one less thing that a customer has to outsource, one less voice they have to talk to. So that everything that’s ‘rolling up’ through our project managers is a benefit. That’s one less problem or one less headache that that warehouse manager or 3PL (third-party logistics) engineer has to worry about.
When we talk about managing a project, that’s not just the material; it’s not just the engineering; it’s not just the execution/installation; it’s every piece of a project or as much as we can bite off, right? There’s some things that we may not manage, but as much as we reasonably can, we handle that ‘in-house’ and we find that it makes things as frictionless as we’ve seen.
What measures do we take to ensure that our turnkey services team operates efficiently and productively?
You know, it’s impossible to eliminate all problems. I think what we’ve shown, especially in the last few years, is we take the problems, or the pain points, our customers have brought to us, and we’ve turned them into a strength for Storage Solutions.
Permit and licensing is a great example of something that has been a pain point for folks across the industry in the last few years. We decided to take a proactive approach and dedicate resources to folks who were successful in their previous roles in project management and elsewhere and dedicate them to being the best in the business at managing that piece of it. There’s always something new, but this group knows going into a project what pain points we’re going to see and what potential problems we may encounter.
So, it comes back to that partnership with our project managers and communication. It’s letting our customer know ahead of time what we might be facing and then when that problem happens, we’re going to talk through not only how we’re solving it, but how we’re going to get back on schedule.
How does the combination of these services differentiate SSI and help us serve our customers?
We say it a lot around here, but we truly believe that the customer comes first, and delivering on what we promise is really important. As I’ve moved into an operations role, it’s really been important to see that that’s not just a sales and project management mindset, right? But they’re wired that that’s their sole focus. That’s been really great to watch and get to work with a fantastic group of leaders. You know, we don’t produce anything, we don’t manufacture a product. There isn’t a widget that we’re going to market with. It’s us, it’s our reputation, it’s the deliverables. It’s when you say you’re going to hit a deadline, hitting it. When you say you’re going to find the most creative design solution, you’re going to find it.
So, it’s incredibly important that what our customers, as well as what our vendors say about us in the marketplace, is positive. We want them to be able to say that you can go work with Storage Solutions. It’s going to be easy. Their group is really dedicated to the end product, but they’re also going to be a fair partner. We don’t view anyone as a vendor. We talk about partnerships more than we do vendors, and I think that shows you know where our mindset is: that we’re here to help facilitate a project for our customers but also win for our partners on the back end as well.
If you have any questions about how our in-house services or how they can help you, click here to get learn more.
