When I moved to Birmingham, Alabama in the 2010s for work, I had two roommates, no money, and an empty apartment. All three of us were fresh out of university and broke. We had a place to live and almost nothing to put in it.
So I made a suggestion: I'll just build the furniture.
Throughout the following year, I built the couch, the coffee table, the TV entertainment unit, a bookcase, and the platform my mattress sat on. None of it was fancy. All of it was built with construction-grade lumber from the Lowes down the road (don’t ask me about transporting all that wood in my old Toyota Camry). But it worked, it held up, and it furnished an apartment three broke graduates couldn't have furnished without this thing we call money.
I could do this because of my Dad. He was a steelworker who knew most of the trades. Growing up we did a lot of home improvement projects together. By the time I was a teenager I knew my way around power tools well enough to be dangerous. I probably knew how to use a power drill before I knew how to ride a bike.
What I didn't know then was that the way I approached that empty apartment, see the problem, sequence the work, build the system, was the exact same way I'd later approach operations as a COO. A decade of woodworking has taught me that the woodshop and the business operation are the same discipline wearing different clothes (eye protection and all). Both are about getting the sequence right, using the right tool, managing complexity, and doing the unglamorous work that nobody notices when it's done well.
Here's what the woodshop taught me about running a business and how it made me a more effective operator.
Order of Operations: Sequence Is Everything
In woodworking, you cannot finish before you sand. You cannot sand before you assemble. You cannot assemble before you cut. Do step 4 before step 3 and you ruin the piece, or at best you create rework that costs you hours of time and adds to the wasted lumber pile.
This is why before I start every project, I write out a full checklist in the order things have to happen. Part of it is avoiding mistakes. Part of it is getting the most out of every board. I do this because the sequence of your cuts determines how much usable wood you have left. Get the order right and the project flows smoothly. Get it wrong and you're stopping mid-project to go buy more lumber.
Operations is this same discipline, just at scale. At Fledging, we sold consumer electronics, (mostly internal and external SSD storage for Apple products) across 30+ SKUs and multiple sales platforms. On any given day we had over a hundred products to assemble, test, and ship to customers spread across 100+ countries. That doesn't happen without sequence (at least not if you want it done correctly and at scale). It happens because someone has worked out the order in which things must occur and built the system to hold it.
We had daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly checklists all around the office. Those checklists were born from the same instinct as a woodworking cut list. They existed so the order was never in question, so nothing got done out of sequence, and so we weren't wasting material, time, or momentum on avoidable rework.
Great operators think in sequence and dependencies before they think in tasks. The to-do list is downstream of the order of operations.
The Right Tool for the Job
Using the wrong tool in the shop doesn't just slow you down. It produces a worse result, and sometimes it destroys the work entirely. The right tool can make a hard job simple. The wrong one can turn a simple job into a ruined board.
Anyone who has driven a screw into a board without pre-drilling knows how fast the wrong sequence ruins the work. The screw goes in, the wood splits, and the shortcut you took to save two minutes just cost you the whole piece.
When I started at Fledging, I was Head of Growth, overseeing marketing and sales and ultimately owning revenue growth. One of the most important tools I built was our monthly revenue retrospective. We didn't just pull the financial numbers by sales channel and product line. We paired those numbers with the specific decisions and actions we could take internally to influence them going forward. This turned revenue from a black-box concept the team couldn't act on into something real, something we could move with deliberate choices. The right tool didn't just measure the work. It changed how the team thought about it.
Later as COO, I rebuilt our customer success playbook when the old approach stopped working. The right tool there wasn't a piece of software or a framework I read about. It was a weekend spent personally answering a few hundred customer support tickets, finding the patterns, identifying what good support actually looked like, and then building a decision tree with tailored message and email templates that cut our time to resolution. I only knew which tool to build because I got close enough to the work to feel exactly where it was breaking.
Operators diagnose before they reach for a tool. And the best tools are usually built for the specific job in front of you, not borrowed because they happened to work somewhere else.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
It's the oldest rule in the woodshop, and it exists for one reason: a cut is permanent. You can always measure again. You can never un-cut a board.
But the real skill isn't measuring twice on everything. It's knowing which decisions are cuts and which are measurements. Some decisions are hard to reverse, and those deserve real care before you commit. Others are cheap to redo, and those reward speed (especially at a startup or fast-moving company). Treat them the same and you'll either move too slowly on the reversible calls or too recklessly on the permanent ones.
At Fledging, hiring was the irreversible cut.
I ran a very thorough hiring process, and for a long time it produced consistent, high-quality hires. Then I moved from Birmingham to Chicago, and the process broke. We made one bad hire, and the honest truth is that the lesson here isn't that I always measured twice. It's what I did when the cut went wrong. I stopped everything and ran a complete hiring audit, both the process and the people involved, so we could understand what had slipped and recalibrate. A bad hire is expensive precisely because it's hard to reverse, and the right response to an irreversible mistake is to fix the system that produced it before you make another cut.
Contrast that with a reversible decision. In 2019, SSD prices were falling, so we ran just-in-time purchasing on our raw materials. Buying late was the right call because the decision was cheap to adjust. If prices moved, we moved with them. The downside of waiting was small, so we optimized for it rather than agonizing over it.
The operator's job is to spend deliberation where it actually counts. Treat the irreversible decisions like cuts. Treat the reversible ones like measurements you can always take again.
Managing Complexity: Dependencies and the Ever-Growing To-Do List
A complex piece of furniture is a web of dependencies. The glue-up has to happen before the steps that depend on it. The finish has to cure before you can move on. A single move made out of order cascades into rework that can cost you the whole piece. The checklist exists to hold that complexity so my head doesn't have to.
Supply chain at Fledging was the same web, just larger and constantly moving. We were always evolving and diversifying our sourcing to make sure we got favorable prices on raw materials and could secure the volumes we needed. It was a system with many interlocking parts, and every part depended on the others.
We knew we were managing it well, not just surviving it, when we landed a partnership with the same SSD manufacturer that supplies Intel. That kind of relationship doesn't come together by accident. It comes together when the underlying complexity is handled with enough discipline that a serious manufacturer trusts you to be a serious partner.
Complexity never gets simpler. It gets managed. Systems, checklists, and clear dependencies are how you keep an expanding operation from collapsing under its own weight. You don't conquer complexity. You build the structures that let you manage it.
Operations Is 80% Sanding
Here's the joke every woodworker knows to be true: woodworking is 80% sanding.
The cutting and the joinery are the fun parts, the parts you'd put on a highlight reel. The sanding is endless, repetitive, and completely invisible in the final product. Nobody looks at a finished table and says "great sanding." But skip it, or rush it, and the whole piece feels wrong the moment someone runs a hand across it. The unglamorous work is what makes everything else feel right.
Operations is 80% sanding too.
It's the playbooks, the checklists, the retrospectives, the process maintenance that nobody celebrates and nobody sees. And here's the hard truth about being a great operator: when you do the job well, it's often thankless. Not because people are ungrateful, but because nothing is going wrong. The trains are on time. The fires aren't burning. The absence of chaos is the entire achievement, and it's invisible by design.
The payoff isn't the credit. The payoff is what good operations does for everyone else. When the systems run smoothly, people stop spending their days putting out fires and start doing their most important work with clear, aligned direction. The sanding is what lets the rest of the team do their best work.
If you need the recognition, operations will frustrate you. The most valuable work is often the least visible. Make peace with that, and you'll build systems instead of chasing applause.
What the Woodshop Taught Me
The broke kid building a couch for his roommates in Birmingham didn't know he was practicing for a career in operations. He just saw an empty room and a set of tools he knew how to use.
Over a decade later, the instincts are the same. Get the sequence right. Use the right tool, and build it yourself if you have to. Measure twice on the cuts that can't be undone. Manage the dependencies before they manage you. And embrace the sanding, because that's where most of the real work lives. Those are the instincts that made me a more effective COO, and I learned every one of them with a board in my hands before I applied them to a business.
The thing about woodworking, like leadership and business, is that the more you build, the more you realize how much there still is to learn. I'm a forever learner in the shop and in my work, and I've come to believe those are the same muscle.
So here's my question for you: What hobby, craft, or passion of yours has quietly shaped how you work? What have you learned with your hands, or on a trail, or with an instrument that shows up in how you lead?
The best lessons tend to come from the places we least expect. Sometimes a hobby and our work have far more in common than we think.