"Find the work where you shine:" Happy First Anniversary, Lila!
Team Anniversary | Lila Padios | July 1, 2025
July 1, 2025
Dear Alpaca,
Today, a special team letter to celebrate Lila Padios’s FIRST anniversary at Alpaca!
There is maybe no harder time to start your job at Alpaca than July. It’s is our biggest prep month — for a new school year, new customers, Back to School packs that need to arrive by August 1, and last year, unprecedented growth for our company.
Enter, July 1, 2024: Lila Padios. A joyful new operations and customer experience manager, finding big shoes to fill and an even bigger job ahead of her, on a tight timeline.
Lila is no stranger to the crazy world of start-ups. In fact, she grew up in it, heading to conferences like Big Omaha and start-up events all over the city with her dad, and later joining PetFriendly to support their operations early on.
Even with her understanding of the start-up world, starting at Alpaca with a ticking timeclock over her head for an August 1 delivery of packs was not easy. And I think she’ll be okay with me sharing that it didn’t go perfectly smoothly from the beginning. I believed we needed precision and systems and spreadsheets, and Lila believed we needed relationships for better vendor pricing, hourly staff, and shipping terms. It turns out, we were both right.
Over the last year, I’ve watched Lila grow into — and actually build for herself — a role that is uniquely her own. Lila leads the operations floor with joy, humor, humility, and a willingness to take on any project that supports the company. She is infinitely patient (mostly with me), and her systems thinking and organizational skills have grown leaps and bounds.
But where Lila really shines is in building those relationships. Over the last year, Lila has raised the bar for what we’re able to add to the packs, because of those relationships she started quietly building the moment she got here. Because of her work, teachers get more value and more unique items in their packs every month. This fall, our back to school pack will have a retail value of over $80. Are you kidding?! That’s true impact in this business, and Lila has accomplished that by building relationships call after call, email after email, sample after sample.
Even greater than her impact on our operations is Lila’s impact on our team ethos. We’ve always been the hype squad for each other, but Lila takes that to a new level, and delivers absolutely unending support for her team and our company. She is the first with a handwritten note, a compliment, a joyful greeting, and an offer to help.
Last week, Lila welcomed a visiting superintendent to the office with kindness and hospitality. When he arrived back to his office today, he found a handwritten note and Alpaca mug waiting for him on his desk. This thought, this care, this never letting anyone drive themselves to the airport — it’s what makes Lila’s work shine just a little brighter.
What I’ve learned from Lila as a leader is how to find and lean in to the strengths and joys of our team better. I won’t back down on my need for well organized spreadsheets of course, and Lila has risen to the occasion, learning to translate her relationship-thinking into systems-thinking where I need it. And in turn, I’ve learned to lean into relationships more, and look at the long game, not just the immediate need.
A few weeks ago, a handwritten note on my desk read, “Thank you for the opportunity to find the work where I shine.” Lila, thank you for finding and creating the work where you shine — it’s helping Alpaca shine, and we cannot wait to see how you grow next.
KB