Situation
When I joined Dolls Kill, they were in the middle of a transition: the influencer program was being brought in-house after previously relying on external agencies. My tean was tasked with making that shift smooth and scalable. I was one of two new hires on the influencer team brought in specifically to help transition the work and make sure we didn’t lose momentum. Our main KPI was simple: hit a set number of influencer boxes sent each month.

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Task
The agency handoff came with a very real target — and a not-so-large team. It was on me and one other teammate to both maintain the outreach volume and help build the operational muscle to support that volume sustainably. Once I found my rhythm, I realized something surprising: even after hitting my monthly box quota, I had nearly 20 extra hours a week. Instead of just using that time to brute-force send more boxes, I saw a bigger opportunity — optimize the system.

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Actions
I started by tackling the low-hanging fruit: I cleaned up our influencer database, deduped contacts, filled in missing info, and reorganized the structure to make searching and updating profiles less painful. I created a simple system to categorize influencers by fit, campaign type, and past performance — making it easier to match them to specific product drops.

Then, I dove headfirst into Airtable formulas. I taught myself how to automate account updates by connecting our order management system and social analytics tool. The system I built automatically checked whether an influencer had tagged us since their last box — and if they hadn’t, flagged them for follow-up or paused them for future sends. If they had tagged us, the system gave them a green light for the next box drop.

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Result
This automation helped us increase the “ROI” of our influencer boxes by over 30% — because we were sending fewer boxes to people who did not tag us – and more to those who consistently delivered. Plus, we could confidently scale up without needing to scale headcount.

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Learning
This was one of my first big lessons in proactive problem-solving and team alignment. While the system worked — and worked well — I didn’t do the best job of keeping everyone looped in as I built it. At times, my manager and teammates weren’t quite sure what I was up to, which made it harder to get support. I learned the hard way that building cool stuff is only half the battle — you’ve also got to bring people along for the ride.

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Growth
Since then, I’ve made it a priority to communicate my ideas earlier and link them directly to team or company goals. Optimization only works when the whole team knows how (and why) it matters — and now, I always try to make that crystal clear from day one.

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