Owen walked me through the floor, introduced me to the team, showed me the operations system and where he thought it needed development. He had been direct about the gaps in his own setup, which I found immediately useful: a manager who can name what isn’t working is a manager you can actually work with.
The team of five was what I’d expected from the way Owen described them and what I’d seen in the panel interview. Two senior coordinators who were experienced and efficient. One coordinator who had been there the longest and had developed workarounds that made her fast but created inconsistency when other team members needed to follow her process. Two who were new enough that their primary need was structure.
I started with the documentation. Not because it was flashy or because it would produce the quickest visible win, but because documentation is the foundation and I had spent enough of my career building on a foundation that someone else controlled to know that I wanted to start this one right.
The exception log I built for Pinnacle was different from the one at Morgan Freight. Different clients, different carriers, different lanes, different account-specific requirements. I built it from scratch, from what I observed and what the team told me and what the account records showed. Nothing from Morgan Freight’s systems. Nothing from Alder’s account files.
What I brought was the method: the structure of how you document an exception, what categories matter, why the “why” is as important as the “what,” how you create a log that is usable by someone who wasn’t there when the decision was made. The method is mine. The content is Pinnacle’s.