Nick Shah is one of the CareLineLive Leadership Team and as Director of Operations is involved in almost every aspect of the business and knows many of our clients well. I asked Nick for some day-to-day insights on his role.
What does the Director of Operations do?
I take my major responsibility as making sure – in collaboration with Josh and Dec who are part of the leadership team at CareLineLive – that we deliver to customers what we say we will. And ideally in an efficient and easy way, with processes that are replicable. Quite a large part of my time is about joining up all the different teams at CareLineLive and often being a mediator. Call me the ‘General Secretary’ of CareLineLive.
Describe a typical day
A typical day consists of working with these teams:
- Sales – existing customer contractual reviews and new prospect relations, keeping our CRM working well for all of us, liaising with the sales team
- Marketing – reviewing our messaging to our market, deciding on marketing strategy and campaigns
- Administration – finance reporting, contractual documentation
- Customer Support – sometimes giving a hand to the support team where an issue is a bit tricky for commercial reasons
Previous roles
I’ve spent the majority of my career running my own businesses. My longest and most successful spell was between 1991 and 2009 when I was the MD of a paper (fine printing and office paper) distribution company. And between 2009 and 2019 (when I joined CareLineLive) I had a ‘portfolio career’ when I spent most of my time as an angel investor investing in early stage technology start-ups.
Why did you join CareLineLive?
The honest truth is that I needed a job, having invested my whole fund that I had set aside for my angel investing ‘project’! But, of course, I was selective in what I wanted to do – and I wanted to work within a SaaS business within operations/finance/general management, and this is exactly what CareLineLive presented. The icing on the cherry was that CareLineLive was delivering a service that I believed was doing good in the world.
Best part of the job
The breadth of activities that every day involves, making customers happy and working with an extremely talented and YOUNG team who are always teaching me something new.
Worst part of the job
When a customer decides to stop using CareLineLive, I’m the person who officially says ‘goodbye’. However, there have been a few instances of customers coming back to say ‘hello’!
What do you enjoy most about working at CareLineLive?
Believing that we are making a real difference to our customers.
What is something that people in home care have to deal with that you want to help fix?
Slim profit margins and making their finances more sustainable. CareLineLive is helping by making their business processes more efficient and effective.
Surprising or a fun fact about you
My undergraduate degree was in Maths – one thing in my bucket list is that I will get time to understand/learn enough of the mathematics that is needed to understand and see the beauty of the equations in Quantum Mechanics (QM) – because otherwise QM seems absurd – how can one particle be in infinite positions all at the same time?
