The Secret World of Operations: How Curate, Vesta, and Burial Beer Run Their Teams in Asheville

Running a growing company comes down to a few repeatable habits: how you spend your week, how you hire, and how tightly you hold to your own rules. That was the throughline at The Secret World of Operations, the March 2024 AVLmeetup at The Mule at Devil's Foot Beverage, where 134 people heard from Susan Aplin, CEO of Curate, Carolina Cole, COO of Vesta Property Management, and Jay Richardson, COO of Burial Beer Co.

Key Takeaways

Carolina Cole runs Vesta Property Management with a team of three: herself, one direct report on resident relations and maintenance coordination, and one on finances (rent payments and owner reimbursements), plus Rodrigo as "the visionary." They were also hiring a full-time in-house maintenance tech.
Jay Richardson said Burial Beer Co. has been a living wage certified employer, and the wage standard it certifies against (through Just Economics) has risen 10% year over year for the past two to three years, something Burial has had to keep pace with. The morning of the panel, Burial held its first all-staff meeting on cost-of-living adjustments for 2024.
Susan Aplin said Curate's big 2024 investment is a "high-performing team initiative" built on 11 elements of a high-performing team, with every salaried employee taking a baseline survey this year ahead of quarterly resurveys and an action plan.
Carolina Cole screens Vesta job applicants by hiding an instruction inside the posting, such as asking candidates to state their favorite color in bold red text, calling it "the first filter" for people who actually read and follow instructions.
Asked where they can always find room to add value, Jay Richardson described creating an environment where people "feel safe at work physically and psychologically" and can go home each day with a sense of accomplishment. Carolina Cole named process, saying Vesta is "always updating" its documents and tools to get results with minimum effort.

What a Week Actually Looks Like

Susan Aplin's Tuesdays are back to back one-on-ones with her direct reports: "intentional leadership is a big part of how I approach my role, and that means being present." Carolina Cole starts her mornings with her one direct report reviewing the top three priorities for the day, and Tuesdays specifically are set aside for reviewing Vesta's vacancies and leasing pipeline. Jay Richardson opens by clearing his inboxes and calendar, which Zac Ruiz's follow-up pegged at three inboxes, freeing up time for unplanned conversations "mainly on the brewery floor, sometimes in the warehouse, sometimes in the tap room."

How Each Team Hires and Fires

Jay Richardson called hiring "a get to know you process" where the candidate and the hiring manager together determine fit with the company's values, citing the book Essentialism and its advice to give yourself enough time to start the search over if you can't say you would love working with someone. Carolina Cole said Vesta looks for believers, not "hiders" who just want to collect a paycheck, and runs candidates through a phone interview scorecard before an in-person meeting. Susan Aplin said Curate treats hiring and firing as some of the most important decisions the company makes, wants people who can "drop in and execute day one" without needing to learn the job from scratch, and applies the same deliberate, team-based process to firing unless someone has done something unethical.

What the Asheville Market Looked Like That Month

Zac Ruiz followed a guest update on proposed Buncombe County short-term rental restrictions with the Ruiz Report, marking his 48th straight month of covering Buncombe County data. For the first time in that stretch, both the average and median home sale price were down year over year. Days on market for active listings had fallen sharply, from 93 days the previous month to 68 days, even as 41% of active listings carried a price reduction averaging $45,000. Homes that went under contract closed the gap even faster: the median time to go under contract dropped from 64 days to 32 days month over month, which Ruiz read as sellers and their agents adjusting to where the market actually is.

Questions

At what point do you decide it's time to invest in leadership, and what do you actually invest in? Susan Aplin said the first leadership position she identified a need for at Curate was a head of marketing who understood the company's multiple business units, followed by a three-year strategic planning process and this year's high-performing team initiative. Carolina Cole said time is Vesta's biggest investment, the hours spent thinking strategically with her business partner Rodrigo, plus joining a mastermind group for property management companies. Jay Richardson said Burial's trigger was noticing that people promoted for being good at a task were rarely trained to lead the people now doing that task, so the owners built out healthy leadership development for the whole company.
What role do standard operating procedures play, and how do you balance that against empowering frontline employees to make decisions? Susan Aplin said, "I would marry SOPs if I could," since Curate runs six businesses and depends on distributed leadership working from consistent procedures rather than bureaucracy. Carolina Cole said Vesta is very rigid about following its SOPs because the decisions affect people's lives, like choosing which resident gets a unit, and consistency is what lets her feel good about the call. Jay Richardson said it's the same at Burial, especially in an environment where people can get hurt, but the company also relies on coworkers proposing changes so the procedures stay accurate as the business changes.
Do you host social events that help you notice talent across departments for internal promotions? Carolina Cole raised the question herself, noting she's worked places where departments stayed siloed and talent went unseen. Susan Aplin said Curate runs four or five all-company events a year, from a holiday party to last year's kickball outing, plus open celebrations like the one held at La Bodega when an employee named Theo was promoted. Jay Richardson said Burial shuts down company-wide one day a year to gather everyone, runs team-building throughout the year, and keeps an internal social platform where anyone can post and talk to anyone, including the CEO.

The episode closes with Zac Ruiz pointing listeners to REMC.co for live MLS data and analytics dashboards. AVLmeetup's next meetup was Local Growth Stories on April 2, 2024.