Daniel Tuegel

When this build started, there was nothing to scale from: zero hires, no operating plan, no staffing or recruiting plan, no policies or procedures, and no governance around roles and responsibilities. No training program existed either. The team had six weeks to get a first wave of hires in place.

I led the design and launch of near-shore call center operations in Mexico from the ground up: an operating plan, a staffing and recruiting plan, job descriptions and SOPs, and a governance model for roles and responsibilities, all built inside that six-week window. I also brought in local Mexican legal counsel to make sure our policies and procedures aligned with both One Call's standards and Mexican labor law, and had that same partner run a training course for my team.

The four trainers we hired completed five weeks of training built on our own plan, including train-the-trainer methodology and a structured check for understanding before anyone took a live call. Job descriptions and SOPs were in place before the first hire started, and every new hire followed a defined training plan from day one.

Policies and procedures were approved under Mexican labor law, and every new hire moved through the site on a defined training plan. The build is on pace for roughly $3M in annual savings once fully deployed and running.

By the time I transitioned out of the role, hiring was continuing at a pace of roughly 15 to 20 new colleagues every two weeks under the model we built. If that pace held, the site would be well past 200 colleagues by now, though I can't confirm current headcount since I'm no longer with the company. That trajectory is the clearest evidence the infrastructure, not any one person, is what scaled it.

One Call agreed to acquire Data Dimensions for $500M, a deal bringing more than 600 new colleagues, spread across the US, into the organization. The question wasn't whether the deal would close; it was whose systems and roles would survive integration, and whether the talent worth keeping would stay through it.

I led HR due diligence ahead of close, then owned post-close integration end to end: workforce and culture integration, retention planning for key talent, organizational design of the combined entity, and impact analysis across the full 600+ colleague population.

The combined entity now operates as one organization, absorbing the workforce and culture impact of a 600-person acquisition without losing the talent the deal was built to gain. In the first 90 days post-close, the final milestone I owned before transitioning out of the role, the integration held 100% retention of the acquired company's top talent.

Turnover was running above 60% in my first year. A large part of the story was structural: heavy reliance on temporary labor, and a wage floor that made it hard to compete for talent in the first place.

I combined several levers instead of one. Over three years, I proposed a series of base-wage increases, from $12.50 to $13.50 to $15.00 and finally to $16.50, funded in large part by savings elsewhere in the labor model. In parallel, I drove the elimination of more than 300 temporary positions within 12 months, converting that spend into a stable, better-paid core workforce. Alongside that, I led 15+ organizational restructures that removed cost without breaking the org's ability to operate.

Wages and staffing changes fixed the economics. Retention also needed people to feel connected to something bigger, especially with much of the team working remotely. I sponsored a full-scale company intranet that functioned as a real social platform, not just a policy repository. Our CEO posted on it almost daily, and colleagues could see business progress and connect directly with peers across the organization. In a remote environment, that visibility mattered as much as the paycheck.

Turnover fell 40 points over four consecutive years, from more than 60% to 20%, while the organization moved off temporary labor entirely and rebuilt its wage floor from the ground up. None of it was one initiative; it was wages, staffing model, and culture, reinforcing each other.

At a 700-store, multi-banner grocery retailer moving through real cultural transformation, off-the-shelf leadership training wasn't landing. The harder question wasn't which modules to buy; it was which specific behaviors the business actually needed more of, and from which leaders.

I designed the program around one rule: start from the org's real goals and the specific gap in front of a specific group of leaders, then build backward from that gap. The modules, the cadence, and the format are all a means to that end, not the point. A first-time manager and someone managing other managers are solving fundamentally different problems, so the curriculum split into two tracks instead of sharing one, and each track reinforced the same behaviors three ways: on the job, through coaching and peer relationships, and in structured formal sessions.

Later, at One Call, I extended that same philosophy into enterprise-wide onboarding, performance management, and succession planning, scaling it to more than 500 leaders and over 1,000 training hours delivered in a single year.

Average tenure increased by more than two years and engagement scores rose over 10%, leadership development treated as retention strategy, not a training-budget line item. The same diagnose-first approach now shapes every people program I design.

The original 9-box lived in a standard fillable PDF. It worked fine for an individual leader, but broke down the moment senior leadership needed an organization-wide view: no fixed schema, so aggregating dozens of PDFs meant manual reformatting; ratings that were genuinely subjective since most leaders had never used the method before; and heavy HRBP hand-holding just to get consistent input.

With no dedicated talent review software to build on, I designed the fix as a spreadsheet built to behave like one: a fixed schema so results can be aggregated without reformatting, a dropdown scale so performance and potential definitions flex by function without breaking the schema, an auto-generated 9-box matrix so no one plots points by hand, data validation to keep ratings numeric and clean, and an automatic high-potential flag that triggers calibration the moment someone lands top-right on the grid. I set the model and the questions; my team built it in Excel.

The fixed schema only pays off through aggregation. After HRBPs complete their sheets, a script rolls individual submissions into a single organization-wide summary I built for CHRO-level review, converting dozens of individual files into one calibrated view the moment it's needed.

The Excel model is live and iterating. It runs on the same underlying discipline as the performance management platform: build the data infrastructure first, then let the real conversation about talent happen.

The tools existed. The habit didn't. AI tools were technically available across the org, but mostly treated as a novelty. The people team had no visible example of AI solving a real, recurring piece of HR work, and a single broad, generic bot tends to underdeliver compared to something narrow and purpose-built. I wanted the people function to be a visible example of what's possible, not another department waiting to be told to adopt AI.

Instead of one general-purpose assistant, I scoped two narrow bots in Copilot Studio, each built around a single moment in the employee lifecycle rather than trying to cover everything: a Development / IDP Assistant and an HR Policies & FAQ bot.

Both bots are live and in active use, proof that the AI tools were worth adopting, not just available. It's the model I now default to for people-function bot design: narrow scope beats broad ambition.

Performance and hiring data lived in disconnected systems: a legacy applicant tracking process, offline rating forms, no shared talent record. Recruiters and managers were working from partial information, and no one above an individual manager could see workforce data at scale.

As VP of Talent & Organizational Effectiveness, reporting to the CHRO with a $10M+ budget and an 18-person team spanning talent management, OD, talent acquisition, and business partnership, I directed a $1M+ investment in a unified applicant tracking, performance management, and talent assessment platform, replacing three disconnected systems with one system of record.

Time to fill dropped by 10 days and manager utilization improved 70%, giving the organization faster hiring and a clearer read on where talent actually sat across the business. Live in production across all 2,000 colleagues.