Clarke Galvin

San Diego, CA

Most vendor networks don't fail dramatically. They erode. A technician stops showing up. A partner starts gaming the metric instead of doing the work. A capacity gap opens three months before anyone sees it in a report. By the time it's visible, the window to act without pain has already closed.

I manage the install partner network for Verizon Connect's North American fleet telematics operations: seven partners, approximately 750 field technicians, 50,000 work tickets a year. The financial scope of the role has tripled since I took it. The infrastructure I built to run it became the organizational standard. The work is reading the system before the system tells you something is wrong.

Philosophy You cannot contractually obligate someone to care. Partner management fails when it forgets this. We build frameworks of metrics, service levels, and penalty clauses hoping to engineer excellence from the top down, but rigid structures only measure the shadow of the work. Managed purely by the dial and the dashboard, the people doing the building stop looking at the task and start looking at the metric. Excellence is not a clause. It is what happens when a person is deeply engaged with the work in front of them. The boundary between the architect and the hands that execute is mostly fiction anyway. The machine does not know who signs the checks, and a severed connection at the furthest edge is a failure of the whole. You don't manage a vendor. You tune an ecosystem.

Domain

Vendor and partner ecosystem management
High-volume field service operations
Fleet telematics install operations
Strategic operations and performance architecture
Prevented-loss identification and cost containment
Budget architecture at the eight-figure scale

Selected Work & Prevented Loss

Network Stabilization Under Demand Pressure 2023-2026

A partner network losing technicians quietly is more dangerous than one losing them loudly. The quiet kind doesn't trigger an escalation. It just degrades until the volume arrives and the capacity isn't there.

The signal was early. The intervention was a restructured performance accountability framework, a technician retention mechanism tied to QBR outcomes, and capacity commitments locked ahead of the demand window. The network held. The degradation that would have become a crisis didn't. That outcome has no line in any report because it never happened, which is exactly how prevented loss works.

Over the same period, the managed financial scope of the role grew from $10M to $31.8M projected. The reporting infrastructure built to run it, built solo with no IT support and no system admin rights, was adopted as the organizational standard across North America, APAC, and EMEA.

Credentials

Attended UC Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, Architecture.

Contact

clarke@clarkegalvin.com