All work

Growth Engineer

Outbound at Gushwork was starting from scratch when I joined. I built the email, calling and data setup that 15 SDRs and 2 AEs worked from every day, and I was also the person they came to when something broke mid-day or a new hire needed onboarding.

Gushwork proof

What wasn't working

The reps were fine. The setup behind them was basic - it worked for a small team, but it had no way of handling the volume the business was heading toward.

What I built

Email, calling and the data underneath both, and then the n8n and Slack layer that let the whole floor actually use it.

  • Calling data, built end to end in Clay: list building, dedupe, waterfall enrichment, validation. I know it well enough that I could rebuild most of it outside Clay.
  • Cold email from zero. I set up the domains and mailboxes to handle 10,000 sends a day, wrote the copy, looked after deliverability and domain reputation, built the lead lists and the dashboards to track it all. When the market called for it we scaled up, to about 300k sends a month at peak.
  • LinkedIn outreach to the same ICPs, run alongside email and calls rather than as its own separate thing.
  • The cold calling system. JustCall and SalesDialer were hooked into Clay and HubSpot, so the next account's details were already on screen before the current call ended.
  • All of our n8n. I fixed bugs, extended workflows and built new ones as requests came in, with JavaScript and JSON doing the glue. Anything important posted to Slack: demos the moment they were booked, and enrichment dropped straight into the channel the SDRs were already working in.
  • Python for scraping and the small one-off automations that kept coming up, plus the rest of the toolkit: FullEnrich, LeadMagic, Apollo, Zapmail, Namecheap and a few scraping extensions.
  • I also helped on the other side of growth, with the company newsletter and influencer outreach.
  • Outside the tooling, I onboarded new SDRs, answered their technical questions and handled the call and sales ops that kept everyone dialing. If something was stuck, they messaged me instead of raising a ticket.

How it worked

Every record went through the same steps: source, dedupe, enrich, score, tier. Then it went into either an email sequence or a call block. Call outcomes were logged in HubSpot the moment the call ended, because anything logged later usually gets logged wrong.

When an SDR booked a demo, the prospect got an email right away showing what the product would do for them, sent from our in-house tools. It moved the show-up rate, since people are more likely to turn up when you've already given them something useful. It's also why we changed our main metric from demos booked to show-ups. A demo nobody attends doesn't count for much.

I owned all of the n8n orchestration and usually fixed or extended things the same day someone asked. Everything reported into Slack, and Python took care of scraping and the small, temporary automations that weren't worth a full workflow.

Tracking the numbers

I tracked everything: all fifteen SDRs, every call, list and campaign. At a team this size, the usual setup is a CRM dashboard counting demos booked, plus a few activity numbers nobody has properly defined. I sat in on the CEO's meetings with the data analytics team and brought that way of thinking down to the dialer. Every test started with a hypothesis and ended with a decision: keep going, or kill it.

  • Each channel had its own success metrics, since calling and cold email don't win on the same numbers. We picked them before a test started, not after.
  • Every stage had one agreed definition - dials, connects, conversations, meetings booked, shows, held - so two people quoting the same number meant the same thing.
  • Week over week numbers for each rep and each list, so we could see who was improving, which lists were bringing in pipeline, and which scripts held up on real calls.
  • I was responsible for two numbers, show-up rate and demos booked, and both went up. Reminders and better pre-call context lifted shows. Better lists and talk tracks lifted bookings.
  • One dashboard across the CRM, the dialer and the campaigns, so management and the reps looked at the same numbers instead of arguing over separate spreadsheets.

Results

The main thing I built was the cold calling setup: the data layer 15 SDRs and 2 AEs dialed from, connected to JustCall, SalesDialer, Clay and HubSpot. The team booked 100+ demos in a quarter on it.

Email went from zero to 300k sends a month, and the tracking showed us where to push, so show-up rate and demos booked kept climbing as the volume grew. All fifteen SDRs ended up working from one system instead of fifteen spreadsheets, and a few product features I suggested from the floor got shipped.