How we hired our refinishing line manager

Mateo runs our refinishing line, and he's been a key part of the yard since 2019. The story of how we hired him is — like most hiring stories — a study in luck.

The wrong question

The job posting was for a refinishing supervisor. Mateo didn't have a corrugated background. He'd spent the prior eight years running a small upholstery repair shop with his brother in Belvidere. The shop had closed because his brother retired and Mateo didn't want to run it alone.

In the interview, Eli asked him what he knew about gaylord boxes. The honest answer was almost nothing. Mateo said as much. The interview almost ended there.

The right question

Eli's second question, which I credit him with thinking of on the spot, was: "What did you fix most often at the upholstery shop?" Mateo lit up. He spent twenty minutes describing the patterns of failure in different upholstery configurations, the tricks his brother had taught him for diagnosing structural weakness in old furniture, and the small inventions they'd made — including a specific jig for resetting upholstery springs that he'd built himself.

By minute fifteen, Eli was sketching a rough cardboard refinishing bench on a piece of paper, and Mateo was suggesting modifications based on what he'd learned in the upholstery shop. By minute thirty, Eli was offering him the job.

Why it worked

Refinishing isn't about cardboard expertise. It's about understanding how structural things fail and how to bring them back. Mateo had eight years of pattern-matching on structural failure and structural repair. The material he was matching patterns to was different — but the patterns transferred. He understood corrugated grain within a month. He was designing improvements to our refinishing benches within six.

The lesson we keep

Industry experience is occasionally a proxy for skill and occasionally a substitute. The proxy is reliable; the substitute often isn't. We've hired three people since with no corrugated background but with adjacent skills — and the bench has been better off for it every time.

Mateo, for what it's worth, has never gone back to upholstery. But he still has the jig somewhere. He showed it to me once. It's beautifully made.