Postmates Waves Goodbye to Community Managers

With any business, there are a fair share of ups and downs. As such, there will likely always be a need to adjust staff and operations from time to time.

This is a lesson on-demand delivery service Postmates just recently learned. After the company’s sales passed the $1 billion mark, it made the tough decision to make cuts for profitability purposes. To do this, the company, which currently runs 44 locations, chose to make its operations leaner with the elimination of its community manager. In order to help with this transition, Postmates has been gradually moving upper-level operations to a central support location.

Postmates’ SVP of Operations Russell Cook shared a statement with Forbes to help explain the company’s decision to move forward on this front. He said, “Postmates has grown to approximately 500 employees nationwide. To facilitate this growth, over the past year we’ve consolidated our support functions (customer service, merchant support and fleet operations) in Nashville, Tenn., where we now have nearly 245 employees. We are thankful to our community managers for all their hard work, and we’re confident that such engaging and adaptable individuals will be successful in their future endeavors.”

Only time will tell whether or not reducing staff will help with the company’s profitability as Postmates’ CEO, Bastian Lehmann, shared that the company won’t be profitable until Q4 2017 or Q1 2018. Lehmann went on to discuss the various pieces of the business that he and his team will continue to work on to better enhance operations in 2017.

He said, “There are so many things that are still not optimized. I could give you a laundry list of items — from payment processing, customer service costs, credits and refunds because of things that go wrong, courier payouts that you can reduce while you increase performance. Every minute counts. If you just look at these buckets and the improvements, you do not have to touch anything on the marketing side.”