Introduction

Most people who run a growth commerce business spend their careers inside marketing: media buying, creative, analytics, retention. I have too. But somewhere along the way, I made a decision most people in this business never make: I bought into two businesses that have almost nothing to do with marketing at all. I became an Amazon DSP (Delivery Service Partner) owner, running a fleet of vans and drivers responsible for last-mile delivery. And more recently, I took ownership of a PostalAnnex franchise, a neighborhood shipping, packing, and mailbox business where every transaction happens face-to-face across a counter.

Neither of those businesses touches a single ad account. Neither of them optimizes a single funnel. And both of them have made me a sharper operator for Springboard Management than any marketing conference, certification, or case study ever could.

This paper is about why. It is built on a simple idea: the businesses we run outside our core lane teach us things our core lane cannot teach us on its own. And the people leading a business like Springboard do the job better when they understand how the businesses they support actually function day to day, not just how their marketing performs. We've never thought of Springboard as a traditional agency. We think of ourselves as an extension of your team, a partner built to help you get where you're trying to go, and that only works if we understand your business as well as you do.

Three Vantage Points, One Operator

Springboard Management exists to help brands grow, through data analytics, market research, strategy consulting, and the systems that connect the two. That is the vantage point most people expect me to have.

The Amazon DSP business gave me a second vantage point: logistics. Route density, driver retention, vehicle maintenance, safety and compliance, and margins measured in cents per stop, not percentage points. It is a business where the plan is only as good as its execution on the specific day it needs to happen, and where a single disruption upstream can cascade into hundreds of individual customer experiences downstream.

PostalAnnex gave me a third: retail and trust. A walk-in counter where a customer hands you a package, often something valuable, sometimes something irreplaceable, and trusts you to get it where it's going, intact, on time, without ever seeing what happens to it once it leaves their hands.

Three businesses. Three completely different functions. One operator trying to hold all three lenses at once. That combination is the entire premise of this paper.

What the DSP Taught Me: Volume Doesn't Care About Your Excuses

On October 20, 2025, a major AWS outage in Amazon's US-EAST-1 region, the same infrastructure a huge share of the internet quietly depends on, took down or degraded services across the country for hours. It didn't just affect Amazon's own systems. It rippled through the delivery networks of every partner plugged into that infrastructure, DSPs included.

Here is what that day actually looked like from inside a DSP: the outage doesn't erase the day's delivery volume. It just delays it. And delayed volume doesn't disappear. It stacks on top of the next day's normal volume, and the next, until someone absorbs the difference. That someone is the DSP.

The response wasn't a memo or a strategy deck. It was: bring in more drivers, right now. Add more vans to the road, right now. Restructure routes on the fly to cover the backlog without blowing up the routes that were already running on time. All of it under real cost pressure, because every extra van and every extra driver-hour is money out of a margin that was already thin, and all of it under real time pressure, because every hour of delay is a customer somewhere refreshing a tracking page, wondering where their package is and starting to lose trust in the brand that shipped it. In most cases, that brand had no idea any of this was happening on their behalf.

That day taught me something I now bring into every conversation about “scale” at Springboard: scale is not a strategy slide, it's a logistics problem with a deadline. When something breaks upstream, the fix downstream is rarely elegant. It's more people, more equipment, more coordination, done fast, under cost pressure, to protect a customer experience that most of the organization will never see happen. Growth strategies that don't account for what it actually takes to deliver on a promise, especially under stress, are incomplete strategies. I don't build growth roadmaps the same way anymore. I build them assuming the systems behind them will occasionally break, and I ask clients much earlier than I used to: what happens on your worst operational day, and who absorbs the cost of it? 

What PostalAnnex Taught Me: Care Is the Product

The DSP taught me about volume and disruption at scale. PostalAnnex taught me something almost opposite: what it feels like to be trusted with one thing at a time.

When a customer walks into a PostalAnnex counter, they are handing over something that isn't yours: a gift for a grandchild, a return that has to arrive by a deadline, a document that can't get lost, a business shipment that represents someone else's livelihood. They are, at that moment, taking a small leap of faith that a total stranger behind a counter will treat their package with the same care they would.

There is no algorithm that fixes a bad experience at that counter. There is no retargeting ad that undoes a package handled carelessly, a rude interaction, or a promise about delivery timing that didn't hold up. The customer doesn't see your systems, your training manual, or your intentions. They see how they were treated, once, in a five-minute interaction. That single interaction decides whether they come back or quietly start going to the shipping counter down the street instead.

Running that business up close reset my definition of “customer experience.” In this line of work, we talk about customer experience in dashboards: NPS scores, churn curves, review sentiment. PostalAnnex stripped all of that away and showed me the raw material underneath those metrics: a single human being deciding, in real time, whether they were treated like their package mattered. Every dashboard metric a brand cares about is ultimately built from thousands of moments exactly like that one. If you've never stood on the other side of that counter, it's easy to treat customer experience as a KPI instead of what it actually is: a series of decisions made by real people, at real moments, that either build trust or spend it.

It's part of why we built our eConsumer Pulse™ Reports at Springboard, ongoing research into how consumers actually experience the brands they buy from, not just how those brands measure themselves internally. Our June 2026 Spotlight on Beauty & Personal Care shoppers found a CSAT Index of 80.9 and an NPS of +38, both ahead of the industry average, driven less by brand messaging than by small execution details like faster checkout, easier navigation, and reliable delivery windows. It's the same lesson from behind that PostalAnnex counter, just proven out at scale: trust is won or lost in the moment, one interaction at a time, and the brands that understand that are the ones who show up ahead in the numbers later. 

The Pattern: Functional Fluency

Neither of these lessons came from marketing. Both of them changed how I do marketing.

I think of this as functional fluency: the ability to genuinely understand the mechanics of a function outside your own, well enough that it changes how you make decisions on your own. Not surface-level familiarity. Not “I read about supply chains once.” Actual, hands-on exposure to the constraints, trade-offs, and pressures that function operates under.

This kind of exposure is rare in marketing, and there's nothing wrong with the traditional path. Most careers in this business are built by going deeper into one function, media, creative, analytics, rather than wider across several. That depth matters, and we value it at Springboard too. But it's also why we built Springboard the way we did. We are led by people who didn't just study growth, we did the jobs first. We've scaled businesses, managed payroll and fleets, stood behind a counter, and executed the strategies we now help our partners build. That operating experience sits alongside our strategic expertise, not in place of it, and it's part of what makes Springboard different: we've done the work we're now advising on.

Functional fluency is what makes that possible. It's the difference between advising a brand on customer experience because you've studied customer experience, and advising a brand on customer experience because you have personally been the person a customer's trust was placed in. It's the difference between building a growth plan that assumes operations will simply keep up, and building one that has already asked what happens when they don't.

Why This Matters for Growth Commerce Specifically

Growth commerce sits at the intersection of marketing and operations. A brand's growth curve isn't just a function of media efficiency. It's also a function of whether the product shows up on time, whether the return process is painless, and whether the person on the other end of a customer service ticket makes the customer feel heard. Marketing can create demand. It cannot manufacture a good operational experience after the fact, and it definitely cannot undo a bad one.

A partner that only understands the marketing layer of a business will keep optimizing the part of the funnel it can see. A partner that understands fulfillment pressure, staffing constraints, and the reality of a customer-facing interaction gives fundamentally better guidance, because it's built around the whole business, not just the media account. That's the kind of partner we set out to be at Springboard, and it's why we're built by operators, not just marketers.

That's the case I'd make for Springboard, and for growth commerce as a discipline: the best strategy work comes from people who understand how a business runs end to end, not just one function of it, because they've run one themselves. 

Practical Takeaways for Other Operators

A few things I'd suggest to any operator, marketer, or growth leader who wants to build this same kind of fluency, even without buying a second business to do it:

Spend real time with the operational side of your own clients' businesses, a warehouse, a call center, a store floor, before you build their next strategy. Ask frontline staff what actually goes wrong on a bad day, not just what the org chart says should happen. Look at a P&L outside your own function occasionally, even if no one asked you to, so you understand what a margin actually has to absorb. And when something breaks for a client, resist the instinct to only ask what it means for the campaign. Ask what it means for the person who now has to fix it on the ground, because that person's constraints are about to become your strategy's constraints too.

Closing

I didn't buy a DSP or a PostalAnnex to become a better partner to our clients. I bought them because they were good businesses. But they made me a better partner to every brand we work with anyway, in ways I wouldn't have predicted and couldn't have gotten any other way.

That's the case for functional fluency, and it's the philosophy underneath how we run Springboard Management. We're not a traditional agency, and we don't want to be thought of as one. We're an extension of your team, led by people who've done the jobs, scaled the businesses, and executed the strategies ourselves. We don't just study the businesses we work with. We understand them, because in more ways than one, we've run them ourselves.