Flylow director of ops Jeff Shaffroth is a quiet hero, silently making sure all the gear gets here on time and gets where it needs to go.

 

Jeff Shaffroth, Flylow’s director of operations, likes being backstage. Shaffroth—who goes by Shaffro around the office—has been with Flylow since November 2019, right before a global pandemic took out supply chains. With a background in supply chain management, before Flylow, he worked at Colorado’s Never Summer Snowboards, where he oversaw material sourcing from inbounds freight from all over the world. When he’s not working with overseas factories or managing shipping at Flylow, Shaffroth volunteers as a high school mountain bike coach in Denver and does outreach for Friends of Berthoud Pass, a nonprofit avalanche education organization. We spoke to him at Flylow’s Denver office about what happens when things go wrong, when he finds time to snowboard, and why he hates clutter.

We’re the unseen heroes. Nobody messes with operations. Unless something’s not done, I don’t hear from anyone. We’re so far removed behind the scenes.

Customers are happy when packages are delivered on time. They’ve received their goods. They’re happy. That’s rewarding. I have three guys who work for me to make sure that the small shops and the big shops we work with are taken care of. It’s a lot of moving parts to get stuff out on time. I get the disappointment when something doesn’t deliver on time. We’re doing our best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Coach Shaffro doing his post-work thing. 

It’s not a perfect world. Stuff goes wrong. My job is to come up with solutions as best I can, with as little visibility as possible. When I was at Never Summer, my first day on the job, a truck caught on fire. The whole truck was full of snowboard base material. There have been shipments that showed up wet, shipping delays, and other messes. You’ve got to work through it. It’s a lot of problem solving.

Winter 2020 was a difficult time to start a job at a distribution company during a global pandemic. We did our best to keep orders shipping while minimizing risk.

I wouldn’t be in this industry if I didn’t love it. It’s different than everything else. The ski, snowboard, and mountain bike apparel industry is unique. You’re selling a hobby. I enjoy doing what I do because I care about this industry. I could do this job elsewhere. But for me, the box that needs checking is I actually want to enjoy the product.

Shaffro enjoying the fruits of his labor. 

The best time to do what we love is when nobody else is doing it. Own your time, that’s what we say at Flylow. So, if that means going snowboarding on a Tuesday morning before coming into work or leaving early to go for a mountain bike ride, then so be it. I always check back in later—I don’t like clutter in my inbox.

My job is to make sure that products get here on time. I take over once gear exits the factory. My job is to get it here, the quickest and most cost-effective way possible. Then I work with my team to make sure orders get out. It’s a lot of shooting from the hip.

The hardest part is managing factories in different countries and overseeing ops across the world. You lose a lot of time. You’ve got to maintain relationships when you’re 10 plus hours away from your factory. That also makes it exciting.

If you’re not having fun, then it’s just work.