ALCO has always been family-led, and I am glad to share a meaningful next step in that story: my wife, Carly Leveille, has joined ALCO as Client Operations Coordinator.
This announcement matters to me personally, but Carly's role is not ceremonial and it is not a vague family-business title. She is joining to do specific work at a point where our client experience and our internal operations meet. As the company grows, good intentions are not enough to keep every request visible, every handoff clear, and every follow-up timely. That takes ownership and a consistent operating rhythm. Carly is here to help build and maintain it.
The experience she brings
Carly comes to ALCO with a background in customer service. That work teaches lessons that apply directly to managed technology services: listen before deciding what someone needs, communicate in language the person actually uses, keep your word, and do not let silence become the customer's problem.
A client reaching out about technology is not always able to provide a perfect technical description. They may only know that something changed, a task is blocked, or a system no longer behaves the way it did yesterday. A good first conversation does not make them prove the problem. It gathers the right details, establishes the impact, explains what will happen next, and makes sure the request reaches someone equipped to act.
Customer service also creates respect for the small moments that shape a relationship. An acknowledgement sent when a request arrives. A realistic expectation instead of an easy promise. A follow-up when work crosses from one person to another. A clear explanation that closes the loop. None of these is a substitute for good engineering, but good engineering is harder to experience when communication around it is inconsistent.
Carly understands that distinction. Her contribution is not to make technical work sound nicer. It is to help make the whole service easier to navigate and more dependable from the client's side.
A business-owner mindset
Carly has also wanted to help build a business of her own. That entrepreneurial perspective is important to the role. An employee can reasonably focus on completing the task in front of them. An owner has to ask the next questions as well: Did this solve the client's problem? Did our process make it easier or harder? Will the same gap appear again? Is the way we are working sustainable for the team and clear to the customer?
That does not mean treating every interaction as a sales opportunity. It means understanding that trust, quality, cost, and follow-through are connected. A missed handoff consumes time twice. An unclear update creates another request for an update. A promise made without checking capacity puts both the client and the delivery team in a bad position. Good operations remove that friction before it becomes normal.
Carly brings the perspective of someone who cares about the business as a whole and is willing to work on the ordinary details that determine whether it earns confidence. That is the mindset we need as ALCO moves from relying on individual memory toward processes that remain reliable as the volume and variety of work increase.
Where her role sits
As Client Operations Coordinator, Carly works at the front of the client journey and across the coordination behind it. She is the first point of contact for many requests, supporting intake, scheduling, routing, and follow-up from our Caldwell office.
Intake means making sure a request begins with useful context. Who is affected? What changed? Is work stopped, degraded, or simply needed by a future date? Is there a safe way to continue? Has the request already been discussed with someone? Capturing those basics helps the technical team begin with the problem instead of spending the first exchange reconstructing it.
Routing means getting work to the right owner and making that ownership visible. Not every request belongs in the same queue. A support incident, planned infrastructure change, billing question, access request, website update, and project decision each require different handling. Carly helps keep those distinctions clear while giving the client one understandable path into the company.
Scheduling means coordinating the commitments around the work: availability, maintenance windows, client contacts, internal resources, dependencies, and follow-ups. It is not simply putting a meeting on a calendar. It is checking that the people and information required for the next step will actually be there.
Follow-up means watching for the places where work can quietly stall. A ticket may be waiting for approval, an engineer may need a vendor response, or a client may have missed a question in a busy inbox. Carly's role includes making the next action clear and bringing attention back to requests that have gone quiet.
The responsibility boundaries matter
Clear roles protect the client as much as they protect the team. Carly coordinates technical work; she is not presented as the engineer responsible for diagnosing an incident or approving a technical change. She can gather context, communicate priority and impact, connect the right people, and keep the path visible. Technical decisions remain with the people qualified and assigned to make them.
She also cannot responsibly promise an exact resolution time before the team understands the cause. What she can do is confirm that a request was received, explain who owns the next step, communicate the available expectation, and make sure changes to that expectation are not left unspoken. During an urgent issue, honest cadence is more useful than confident guesses.
Commercial and policy decisions keep their own owners as well. Carly can help route questions, organize approvals, and document what has been decided. She does not replace the account, delivery, security, or executive responsibility appropriate to the decision. When something needs escalation, part of her job is making that escalation happen rather than allowing a coordination role to become a bottleneck.
These boundaries are not a limitation on client service. They are how we keep communication accurate. A strong coordinator does not claim every answer. She makes sure the question reaches the person accountable for it and that the answer returns.
What clients can expect
Clients should notice Carly's work in practical ways. When you contact ALCO, you can expect your request to be acknowledged and recorded. You can expect questions that help establish impact without requiring you to translate the problem into technical jargon. You can expect to know what the next step is, who needs to act, and when another update is reasonable.
When a request moves between people, you should not have to start the story again. When timing changes, we should tell you before you have to chase us. When work is complete, the loop should close in language that makes the outcome clear. When a decision is needed from you, the question should be specific enough to answer.
That is the standard. It will not mean every issue is simple or every request can happen immediately. Technology has dependencies, investigations reveal new facts, and genuinely urgent work can reorder a day. A reliable client experience does not pretend those constraints do not exist. It makes them visible early and manages them respectfully.
Clients can also expect Carly to ask how the process felt, not only whether the ticket closed. A technically correct result can still reveal avoidable friction in intake, scheduling, access, or communication. Capturing that feedback gives us a chance to improve the system rather than relying on people to work around it next time.
What this changes inside ALCO
A dedicated client-operations role gives our engineers and specialists more room to focus on the work only they can do, while preserving a clear line of communication around it. The objective is not to place another layer between clients and technical staff. It is to make direct access more useful by ensuring the right conversation happens at the right time with the context already assembled.
It also gives us a clearer view of patterns across individual requests. Repeated questions may point to documentation that needs improvement. Recurring scheduling friction may show that a standard change needs a better procedure. A series of similar incidents may belong in an engineering project rather than continuing as separate tickets. Operations can turn those observations into follow-through.
Carly will help us strengthen the routines behind that work: consistent intake, visible ownership, dependable handoffs, status follow-up, and a clean close. Those routines are not meant to make the company feel scripted. They are meant to give the team enough structure that care does not depend on who happens to remember a detail.
Building a family-led company carefully
Working with family deserves honesty. A family relationship does not remove the need for role clarity, accountability, or professional standards. In some ways it makes them more important. Carly has a defined area of responsibility, and her work should be evaluated by the same question we apply elsewhere: does it make the service better for clients and more reliable for the team?
For us, family-led means long-term stewardship and personal accountability. It does not mean asking clients to buy into our family story or treating a relationship as a qualification. Carly is joining because her customer-service experience, business-owner mindset, and attention to follow-through fit real work the company needs. The personal part gives this moment meaning to us; the professional part is what should matter to clients.
I am proud to build ALCO with Carly. I also know that the value of this step will be demonstrated in ordinary interactions over time: the request that reaches the right person quickly, the update that arrives before it is requested, the overlooked detail that gets caught, and the process that improves because someone took responsibility for it.
Please join me in welcoming Carly to ALCO. I am excited for our clients and team to work with her, and for the steadier, more thoughtful company we can continue building together.