Booked In: What a Gold Chair in a Sprinter Van Taught Me About My Role
by Carlos Vergel5 minute read
Episode 1 of Booked In - Carlos Vergel, Channel Sales, Miami
I've had three different roles at Booksy in sixteen months. Field sales, then MSS, now partnerships - mostly Salon Suites, soon beauty schools and distributors too. Nobody handed me a five-year plan to get here. I just kept raising my hand for the next gap, and Booksy kept letting me fill it.
That's the part of this job people ask about most. But it's not the part that's stayed with me.
The part that's stayed with me happened in the back of a Mercedes Sprinter van, parked outside a gym in Miami Gardens, sitting in a gold barber's chair that isn't even the craziest thing in the space.
How I got here
I joined Booksy 18 months ago in Field Sales. Straightforward job, on paper: I had a local territory, and I'd go out and help the providers in it get set up on Booksy - Steven was one of them. You learn a business fast that way, one provider at a time, sitting at their counter walking through their calendar with them.
About six months in, I moved onto our multi staffer salons (MSS) team, which is where we focus on larger accounts - a different sales motion, a different kind of conversation, and I had to learn most of it on the job. Then about three months ago, I pivoted again, this time into partnerships. Right now that means Salon Suites, working directly with suite owners rather than individual providers. By the back half of this year we'll be expanding into beauty schools and distributors too.
So that's three different jobs in a little over a year. Nobody sat me down with a five-year plan. There isn't really a corporate ladder here in the traditional sense, no fixed track from A to B to C. What there is, is exposure. You see a gap, you put your hand up for it, and if you can do the job, you're in it. I didn't take the conventional route into any of these roles. Looking back, that's turned out to be the better route. I've been exposed to more sides of this business in sixteen months than a traditional career path would've shown me in five years.
None of that would mean much if it didn't add up to something. For me, it adds up in moments like the one in Steven's van.
Meet Steven
Steven Rivera (everyone calls him Canes Barber) taught himself to cut hair at twelve because his family couldn't afford a real barbershop. He practiced on his own head with cheap clippers. By his early twenties he was running an unofficial shop out of a Miami dorm room, cutting hair from 4pm to 2am for whichever Hurricanes player showed up next. Word got around a locker room the way word does. Twenty years later, he's the official barber for the Miami Dolphins, with his own station inside their training facility, and a client list that includes some of the biggest names in the NFL.
That's a hell of a story on its own. It's not really mine to tell in full - go find his Instagram page, watch the episode, he tells it better than I can secondhand. What I'm here to talk about is the hour I spent with him, and what it did to how I think about my job.
Here's the part that made the whole day different for me: I'd onboarded Steven onto Booksy myself, just a few weeks before we filmed. So walking into that van wasn't me meeting a stranger for a docu-series. It was me sitting down with someone whose calendar I'd helped set up, asking him how it was actually going. That's a different conversation to have. There's nowhere to hide in it, for either of us.
The van
Steven's business doesn't run out of a storefront anymore. It runs out of that Sprinter van. Inside: the gold chair, a wall of signed jerseys and player cards, a flat-screen, ambient lighting. It looks less like a barbershop and more like a green room. And that's the point. Steven built a business where the product isn't just the haircut. It's not having to leave.
He'll drive to a training facility, a hotel room, someone's house. No commute, no waiting room, no dead time between clients. For guys whose schedules are dictated by someone else, training camp, game day, travel, that van buys back hours they didn't know they could get back.
What I realised after spending time with Stephen is that Booksy is what makes that model run without him having to think about it. The booking, the scheduling, the client history, the exclusivity - the admin that used to eat into the hours he could be cutting hair, or the hours he could be home. He didn't build a business around Booksy. He built the business he wanted, and Booksy is what lets him actually run it instead of babysitting it.
Why that landed for me
Here's the thing about working in partnerships: most days, impact is a number on a dashboard. Activation rate, retention, a chart that goes up and to the right if you did your job well. I'm good at that part of the work. But sitting across from someone I'd onboarded myself, hearing him talk about what it means to hand someone back an hour of their day - that's not a number anymore. That's a barber or stylist who's not answering DMs at midnight, or who got to pick their kid up from school because the booking sorted itself. And I got to watch that happen because of work I'd actually done, not work someone told me about secondhand.
I've seen this before, on a smaller scale, with providers in my own territory: people a year into their business, barely keeping the lights on, who came alive once things clicked. Steven's version is just bigger, more visible, more exclusive. But it's the same shift. Struggling to booming. Stagnant to - his word, not mine - infinite possibilities.
That's the thing nobody tells you about this job when you're deciding whether to take it. You don't just watch a business grow. You watch someone get their time back. And once you've seen that up close, it's hard to look at a dashboard the same way again.
The version of growth nobody puts in a job description
I didn't get here on a conventional path, and I wouldn't trade that. Jumping from field sales to MSS to partnerships in a little over a year meant learning fast, more than once, without a map. That's genuinely the growth story. But the reason I still want to be here isn't the next title. It's afternoons like the one in that van - proof, every so often, that the work is landing exactly where it's supposed to.
Booked In is a docu-series following Booksy employees as they sit down with the providers whose businesses they've helped build. Episode 1: Carlos and Canes Barber, Miami.