Get to know Propeller’s world-class team in our new, ongoing employee spotlight series. Today, we talk to Laura Forth, who serves as director of sales operations. She is based remotely in New York City and works out of our Denver office quarter time.
What do you do at Propeller?
I help make sure the sales team has everything it needs to reach as many customers as possible. Some of the classic Laura duties are making sure the sales team has all the right tools and information about our customers and products. I also build processes for how to get things done and communicate with other teams.
Right now, I’m working on big project to get the Propeller Platform to talk to our customer database. We want to get up-to-date information on our customers’ product usage, so we can talk to them if they’re having trouble, or not processing a lot of data with the platform, or uploading a lot and will need to renew their plan soon.
If you watched The West Wing, I think of myself as a Leo McGarry. A director of sales is often like the president and my role is more like a chief of staff. I keep the train moving day to day, and the president comes in to do the top-line vision, coaching, strategic steering, etc. When it comes to making sure people can get their jobs done day to day, that’s most of the work I do.
What’s your career background?
I’ve only ever worked in early stage companies, mostly in education. I was involved in a personal financial education startup and a mentorship startup for high school and college students.
After leaving my last company, Mentor Collective, I wanted to work in a more technology-focused industry. I was really interested in aerospace when I found Propeller. So drones are what drew me in, but construction and understanding more about all the heavy civil and resource industries is what has kept me here.
Before working at Propeller, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?
I did all of the digital marketing for a company that makes flood-proof doors and pneumatically sealed doorways.
If you’re in a flash-flood plane at a Home Depot, for example, you have to flood-proof the whole store in something like 30 seconds. It’s nearly impossible to do that unless you have these built-in flood doors. I did all of their digital marketing and Google AdWords, so I know a lot about how people search online for flood-proof door technology.
Where are you from? Where have you lived?
I’m from Boston, born and raised. Went to Boston University. Then spent a couple years there afterwards, and now I live in New York City.
What’s your favorite Propeller memory/win?
Our recent Thailand retreat is my best Propeller memory. This is in part because when Team North America started it was just myself, John Frost, and a few others—but they were very, very new like me. There weren’t a lot of people based here. There wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in place yet. We were all in different cities. So in Thailand, seeing the Sydney team was great, but also seeing how big and how successful our current sales and marketing teams in Denver are was fantastic.
If you could be any piece of worksite equipment, what would you be and why?
That’s a great question. I’d want to be a hard hat because you get to see everything on site and you get to keep people safe.
If you could attend any professional sports game, what would it be and why?
I love to see the Pittsburgh Pirates play at PNC park because it is the most beautiful stadium that I’ve ever been to. The bowl of the stadium opens out over the river and you can see the sun go down. It’s really quite beautiful and just a fun time.
Do you have an office nickname? What is it?
It’s Loz. That is my nickname because Australians put “oz” at the end of everything. I have now come to accept it. It took about a year, but now I am signing emails and everything as “Loz.”
If you could do any job at Propeller for just one day, which would you choose?
I’d really like to do customer success for a day. Because for a lot of the work I do, I’m not involved with individual deals all the way through. I’m involved with all our customers and optimizing our sales team’s ability to reach everyone. I have to know a lot about the end customer, but I don’t get to spend a lot of time with them one-on-one, or see the follow through of that work. So getting on site for a day and teaching them how to fly the drone and get them started up would be great for me.
