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Unlocking Ops Superpowers using Airtable

25th March 2022

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Welcome to Ops Hacks Speaker Series

“A community of and by early stage operators”

  • Early stage: Pre-seed to Series C-ish
  • Operations: Biz Ops, CoS, Special Projects, GM
  • Slack community + Events
  • Support the ops ecosystem
  • Focus on member contribution and co-building

Join at www.opshacks.co

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Introduction - Abhi

A generalist & early stage operator who loves problem solving, embracing the wild roller coaster ride i.e. a startup

S&O Manager,�AGM @Clutch

Moved to Canada

Founded a 3D printing company

2014

2018

2021

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Introduction to Clutch

Early stage —> Growth stage

Canada’s largest online used car retailer

Amazon of car buying: Click.Buy.Drive.

5 Locations. 3500+ cars. 300+ employees

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Introduction to Clutch

Source Vehicle

Inspection & Reconditioning

List Vehicle

Sale Pending Vehicle

Processing

Delivery

Incredible Clutch Experience

=

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Ops @ Clutch

Movement of physical products with regulatory requirements

Multiple touchpoints to deliver an incredible Clutch Experience

Distributed teams

Sales in TO, Field Ops in local markets

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Building a LEGO plane while flying it

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Capabilities of Airtable

Streamline

Collaborate

Source of truth

No code tool

Scalability

Streamline ops process - defining process & scope of work for each team

Collaboration & Asynchronous communication between teams

Single* source of truth for your org

Anyone can build without eng. help → decentralized problem solving

2 Locations → 5 locations, 10x inventory growth, 5x Ops headcount

Data

Capture & analyze early stage ops data

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Limitations of Airtable

Learning curve

Initial ramp up to learn your way around Airtable

$ adds up

Cost could be prohibitive @ scale �i.e. 200+ seats ~$3000/month

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Airtable = Spreadsheet ++

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Airtable = Spreadsheet ++ Secret Sauces

Relational Databases

Views

Field Types

1-to-1,1-to-many,many-to-many relationships

Same data but different views for different use cases (Composability)

28 field types (Multi Select, Attachments etc.) allow for customized applications

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How Ops uses Airtable @ Clutch

  • Inspection & Reconditioning
  • Fulfillment (Delivery Ops)

  • Sales Management

  • Processing payment requests

Process Overview

Live Demo

Airtable’s Role

Process Overview

Trailer of the OG �(which has evolved over �months of work)

How does Airtable help?

Operational flow of the process

Local Ops

Sales Ops

Finance Ops

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Local Ops Inspection & Reconditioning

Purchase Vehicle

Fit for Retail?

Inspection & Reconditioning

List Vehicle

Move to Wholesale

No

Yes

Airtable enables…

Streamlining process: Organizing queues for Ops Team

Collaboration: Easy hand offs between teams

Tracking metrics & KPIs for Inspect & Recondition teams

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Sales Ops Deposit → Delivery (h/t Shan)

Sale pending

Approvals

Documentation

Schedule delivery

Airtable enables…

Collaboration: Communication between Sales & Fulfillment Teams

Deal Management: Organizing customer docs for each transaction

Tracking metrics & KPIs for Sales Managers

Extra work required?

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Local Ops Fulfillment Ops (Vehicle Delivery Ops)

Sale pending

Extra work required?

Pre-Delivery Inspection

Delivery

Airtable enables…

Streamlining process & capacity planning: Organizing schedule for Delivery Team

Collaboration: Communication between teams / markets

Tracking metrics & KPIs for Fulfillment teams

Type of deal?

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Finance Ops Accounts Payable (h/t Ben)

No

Finance payment required (trade ins, returns, CX)

Manager approval

Organize payments

Disburse funds

No

Airtable enables…

Tracking Payments: Communication between Finance & other teams

Documentation: Organizing docs for each payment

Collect supporting docs

Missing docs?

Yes

Yes

Good luck 🤞

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Level 2

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Dashboards Leveraging your ops data

  • Use your airtable data to create powerful Dashboards
  • Interfaces —> Drag & Drop Dashboard elements (Charts, Graphs , Numbers)

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Dashboards Leveraging your ops data

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Automations Let AT do the heavy lifting

  • Automation is a core feature of AT
  • 2 parts to Automations
    1. Triggers
    2. Actions

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APIs & App Go Realtime

Airtable APIs will allow you to import your website/app data into airtable

  • Populate data: Sale Info, SKUs info (send anything and everything)
  • Update data: Sale Pending —> Completed (can do!)

Your Website/ App / Service

Airtable Data

Real time info

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APIs & App Pairing AT with other tools

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APIs & App Pairing AT with other tools

Use Cases

  • Bill of Sale Generation (Formstack Documents & Hellosign)
    • Building our own invoicing system, complete with templates & delivery options
  • Editing Records (Mini Extensions, develops features AT ignores)
    • Creating and Editing Records in
  • Datafetcher
    • Populating airtable database using APIs (eg:- Google sheets to AT)
  • Write your script - Mapping script to interact with G Maps
    • Calculate the delivery travel times to a customer and back

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Best way to learn Airtable TRY IT!

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Build a world class consumer brand

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Questions?

Reach me at abhijith-shetty

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Appendix

  • Getting Started
  • Use cases

Please make a copy of the base (button on the top right) into your own workspace and can edit the base

  • Airtable used in live demos for each use case