About Grant Garris
Executive coach and fractional operations leader. Orlando, Florida. Twenty-seven years building and scaling the service side of software companies.
I have spent my career running support, implementation, customer success, and technical services organizations for SaaS and HR technology companies, most recently at a global scale across the United States, England, and South Africa.
The Short Version
I now do two things. I coach managers, individually and in groups inside companies, because developing managers was always the part of the job I would have done for free. And I take on a small number of fractional operations engagements with SaaS companies whose delivery functions have outgrown their structure.
Both come from the same place. I have run these functions at every level, starting at the bottom of one.
From the Phone Queue to the Executive Suite
I did not start in leadership. I started on the front line of customer service, in consumer brands most people would recognize, taking the calls and working the queue. That matters more than it sounds like it should. When you have worked the queue yourself, you design around what the work actually feels like to perform, and that instinct has shaped every operational decision I have made since.
Front-line customer service
Taking the calls and working the queue, in consumer brands most people would recognize. This is where the instinct to design operations around how work actually gets performed came from.
Cox Enterprises
Director of PeopleSoft Support, Training and Communications. This is where the through line of my career started: enterprise HR technology, the humans expected to use it, and the distance between how a system is supposed to work and how it actually gets used on a Tuesday afternoon.
A.D.A.M.
Vice President of Implementation and Client Services for the benefits technology division. In roughly a year the team cut implementation timelines by twenty percent, brought SLA compliance up to ninety percent, and restructured account management in a way that lifted revenue forty-five percent and client retention fifty percent.
Paylocity
Vice President of Operations, responsible for the client services division across two locations and more than two hundred people covering account management, training, and support for payroll, HR, and time and attendance. I built that organization rather than inherited it, including the metrics and dashboard reporting that gave leadership its first real visibility into service delivery, and the internal training curriculum that gave the staff somewhere to go next.
UKG
Eight years building technical services for the partner ecosystem. The number I am proudest of from that stretch is not a revenue figure. Team tenure went from thirty percent to eighty percent over three years. People stopped leaving. Everything else on the scorecard followed from that, including contractor service scores that landed at eighty-four percent against a goal fourteen points lower.
NMI
Senior Director of Global Support, running services across United States locations, Bristol in England, and South Africa.
Across those roles I have carried revenue responsibility up to three hundred million dollars, owned P&L, budgeting, forecasting, and receivables, and been the person in the room when the executive team decided what the service organization was going to become.
What Twenty-Seven Years Taught Me
Two things, and neither one is on a resume.
Operations and management are the same problem
When a service organization runs well, it is almost always because the managers running it know precisely what they own and have the confidence to decide at their own level. Structure, tooling, and process all matter enormously, and every one of them performs to the level of the people operating it. The most durable improvements I have led started with strengthening the management layer and worked outward from there.
Management is a learnable skill
Companies promote their strongest individual contributors, which is the right instinct, and the abilities that made someone excellent at the work are simply different from the ones that make them effective leading it. Give a capable person that second skill set and they become the most valuable asset the company has. I have watched it happen enough times to build a practice around it.
That is why the coaching and the fractional work are one business rather than two. When I am brought into a company to strengthen a service organization, the highest-leverage move available is frequently developing the managers who are already there.
What I Believe About Strong Organizations
The best teams I have run, and the best ones I have worked alongside, had the same handful of things in common.
Everyone understood what the business was trying to accomplish that quarter, and could connect their own work to it. Good ideas were judged on merit rather than on the title attached to them. Managers treated their own leaders as partners, arriving with context and a recommendation rather than waiting to be told. And people knew where they stood, because feedback happened in the moment rather than being saved up for a review.
None of that is complicated. All of it is built on purpose. That is the work I do now.
What Colleagues and Clients Say
Feedback from executives, peers, and teams across a twenty-seven year career.
He is a true leader with an infectious compassion for people and service. Grant takes a hands-on approach to managing his staff and leading by example. He implemented numerous processes to double our service team in size and build a second location in another state.
Grant is the sort of leader who attracts talent and then inspires results. He will take suggestions and solutions from all corners, regardless of titles or legacy processes. No good idea is ever ignored. Fiercely devoted to his team and to his customers.
Grant was one of the most visionary and talented people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. He has an innate ability to recognize opportunities in challenges and inspire those around him to think outside of the box. He is a champion for his employees.
Background
Education
B.A. in Psychology, University of Central Florida
Certifications
Executive Coaching Certification
Project Management Professional
Six Sigma Green Belt
Global Customer Service Certification
Affiliations
SHRM, American Payroll Association, ASTD, Toastmasters International, and Langevin.
Systems experience
PeopleSoft, Ceridian, ADP, and the HRIS and HCM stack generally, across payroll, benefits, recruiting, time and attendance, and the ticketing and CRM platforms that sit underneath service delivery.
Speaking
Keynote and training delivery throughout my career, including university and corporate audiences, and the design and facilitation of multi-week classroom programs on complex technical subject matter.
Where I work
Orlando, Florida. All coaching and fractional engagements are delivered remotely, and my operational experience covers the United States, England, and South Africa.
Working Together
If your managers need development, that is coaching. If your service organization needs someone senior in the seat part-time, that is a fractional engagement. If you are not sure which, the fit assessment sorts it out in three minutes.
Take the Fit Assessment Leadership development Fractional leadership