Operations Leader · Systems Builder
I fix the systems that fail people. Most of my career has been spent in operations leadership—support, retention, technical ops, customer success—and the throughline is always the same: when something breaks, it's usually the system, not the person. I'd rather rebuild onboarding from scratch than write up another agent for something the training never covered.
I also run production infrastructure at home, write automation when something needs automating, and can sit in a room with engineers without needing a translator. The resume covers the specifics. This site is how I think.
Impact
Rebuilt onboarding around how the job worked instead of how training had always been done. Connected the curriculum to real job requirements and added feedback loops so new hires weren't set up to fail.
Read the case study →Eliminated the escalation path entirely in my departments. No more “let me get my supervisor”—agents got the tools, authority, and information to handle issues themselves. If they needed SME help after investigating, they could reach out. But the default was trust and empowerment, not routing.
Read the case study →Helped small businesses and individuals replace expensive per-seat SaaS with self-hosted alternatives—VPN licenses, cloud storage, backup services, password managers. Typical client: 5–15 seats averaging $30–$80/seat/month replaced with one-time infrastructure at a fraction of ongoing cost.
Replaced the weekly reporting cycle with dashboards that gave agents direct visibility into their own attendance, adherence, and KPIs. If it saved a back-and-forth with a supervisor, we built it in.
Experience
Director of Customer Lifecycle Operations
Full customer lifecycle ownership for a regional broadband provider—grew from billing team lead to director over ten years, building a 10-person leadership team.
Billing Team Lead → Billing Supervisor → CS Manager → Director
Regional Manager
Frontline to regional management across 12 retail locations—cut 90-day attrition from 99% to 49% and co-founded a company-wide sales training program.
Sales Rep → Asst. Manager → Store Manager → Area Manager → Regional Manager
Project-based
Self-hosted infrastructure consulting—helping small businesses and families replace expensive SaaS with owned infrastructure.
Word of mouth → Repeat clients → Referrals
How I work
When a team or individual wants to do better work—take ownership, have input, make an impact—can they? If not, that's where I start.
A well-built team runs on its own systems, not on any one person's involvement. My role is to make that possible, then get out of the way.
New reports and dashboards can feel like progress. Whether they change what happens next is a different conversation.
Every process, policy, and system I build gets measured against the same question. If the answer is no, it goes back to the drawing board.
Technical Profile
I'm not a systems engineer by title. But I run real infrastructure in production, I can read a stack trace, and I hold my own in technical conversations without wasting anyone's time. Everything below was learned by doing.
58-container homelab. Monitoring stack, networking, VPN mesh, encrypted backups, secrets management.
Notification bridges, maintenance orchestration, backup pipelines, business reporting.
KPI dashboards, reporting pipelines, and documentation systems that people actually use.
The systems that hold up when the org doubles in size or sends everyone home.
Two years of daily collaboration workflows. Knows where these tools help and where they don't.
Used in live operations for over a decade across multiple organizations.
Operations leader with a homelab habit and a genuine love for building systems that work. When I'm not managing teams, I'm probably managing containers, working through my Steam backlog, or exploring the world through food.
Used in live operations for over a decade across multiple organizations and acquisitions.
Nearly two years of daily collaboration workflows and memory/context management—building systems where the tool retains useful context rather than starting from zero every session. Good intuition for where these tools genuinely help and where they confidently make things up.
58-container homelab on Docker Compose. Prometheus/Grafana/Loki monitoring stack with custom dashboards, PromQL queries, and alert tuning. Networking, DNS, VPN mesh, encrypted backups, and secrets management.
Python for real work: notification bridges, automation scripts. Bash for maintenance orchestration and backup pipelines. SQL for translating business questions into queries and building reports.
KPI dashboards, reporting pipelines, and documentation systems that people actually use. If it's not written down and findable, it doesn't exist.
Building the systems that hold up when the org doubles in size, merges with another company, or sends everyone home. The boring stuff that keeps everything running.
$ man brandon-barlow
No manual entry for brandon-barlow
$ which brandon-barlow
/usr/local/bin/brandon-barlow
$ brandon-barlow --version
v9.0 — bwbarlow.com/proof →
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