Jeff Kaiden will tell you, without apology, that he is not an innovator. He doesn’t see himself as a disruptor, doesn’t have a Big Tech R&D budget and has never chased a moonshot. What he has done is build a $200 million fulfillment and logistics company—serving leading beauty, wellness and lifestyle brands from a multi-facility campus in New Jersey and locations nationwide—by doing something more deliberate: watching carefully, moving quickly and knowing exactly which ideas are worth following.
He calls it being a fast follower. And for CEOs who can’t afford to invent the future, it may be the most honest growth strategy available.
“I have never been what I would say like a super duper out-of-the-box innovator,” says Kaiden, founder and CEO of Capacity, the North Brunswick–based firm he launched in 1999 with zero revenue, which boasts roughly 1,000 employees today. “You have to be a fast follower. You have to hear a whiff of something that you know you have to do. And you need to get on that really quickly.”
In a recent interview with Chief Executive, Kaiden had a few more nuggets of wisdom to share with his peers.
1. Redefine the CEO job at each stage
Kaiden launched Capacity in an industry nobody thought was glamorous. “No talent wanted to join a fulfillment company or warehousing company. Nobody even knew what that was,” he recalls. In those early years, he did everything: “I was the chief technology officer, I was the chief operating officer, I was the chief financial officer… I did every job.”
Two things changed over the next 26 years. The industry gained visibility as e-commerce exploded and players like Amazon made fulfillment a household concept. Capacity grew through key revenue milestones—$1 million, $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, $100 million and beyond—each one forcing a reckoning with what the CEO should actually be doing.
“You’re a different CEO at $1 million in revenue versus $10 million and $20 million and $50 million and $100 million,” Kaiden says. “You have to go back to yourself and say, ‘okay, am I still the right person for this job?’”
He kept answering yes—but not by standing still. As the company scaled, his role shifted from doing 10 jobs to building the systems and team that could do those jobs better.
“The best thing was that at a certain size, all of a sudden you can start paying people more and you can get more excellent people to join your organization,” he says. “Then all of a sudden everything just keeps going. It goes faster and better, and you have better people and you can delegate more.”
Somewhere around eight to 10 years ago, he finally felt the balance tip: “I felt like I was really doing a CEO job and not just 10 jobs.”
2. Make people your permanent priority
When asked what won’t change over the next five years, Kaiden doesn’t hesitate. “You have to keep being focused on having great staff and [make sure] they’re not thinking every day why they’re nervous about losing their job,” he says. “Keep them motivated and keep them moving forward.”
In a physical business that bridges “a gap between $400,000 executives and $25-an-hour forklift truck drivers,” retention is strategy. Turnover drains institutional knowledge and operational reliability. “I’m sort of proud that our retention is really high. We have very low voluntary turnover,” he says. “Turnover’s the worst, right? It kills the company.”
To counter it, Kaiden leans into what he calls a “cheerleader” style. He makes a point of sitting down with employees at every level—pulling up a chair, watching them work, asking questions. “You learn a ton that way,” he says. When new tools create efficiency, he uses the gains to keep people—and institutional knowledge—rather than reduce headcount. “We’re going to use productivity enhancements to keep the same people we have today to do more work. Your job may change. But you know everything about this business. I want you here.”
3. Turn the whole company into an antenna
Fast following is not a one-person act. It depends on information—what customers want, how work actually happens, what competitors and adjacent industries are trying.
Kaiden’s approach starts with data. Capacity uses a CRM platform to capture every customer interaction and operational task. “We track everything that our client-facing folks do every day. We know whether they’re routing orders or responding to customer requests for photographs. We know exactly what they’re doing.” That visibility lets the team identify where new tools might have meaningful impact—and quickly rule out where they wouldn’t.
From there, he defines what’s worth following with a simple test: Does it materially improve a real step in the process? “If something can have a major impact on one of those areas to make it faster, better, cheaper… then those are the ones that we want to follow. We don’t do basic research. We’re not like the NIH. We don’t have that luxury.”
He also expects employees at every level to participate in spotting what matters. “If you can empower employees to come in and say that Expedia chatbot is amazing, the one from Verizon sucks—why is that? What is this one doing better than this one? And if they can figure out the answer, then they can drive towards the solution.”
In other words, “you have to keep listening to the customers and try to do what they need you to do,” he says. “You have to watch out for disruption and what other people are doing, like feverishly. You’ve got to have your antenna up for what’s changing.”
4. Follow fast where it actually matters
Where some leaders chase novelty, Kaiden looks for proven changes that line up with processes he already understands deeply. Once they pass that bar, he moves quickly.
He points to several examples that have shaped Capacity’s operations. The company’s customer-facing portal is good, he says, but others are doing better—a clear signal to move fast on upgrades, since self-service visibility directly affects client satisfaction. Watching travel brands shift from painful call centers to effective messaging and chat was a turning point: “For a long time it was bad, really terrible, you couldn’t get anything,” he says, “but then all of a sudden when these larger companies started to be able to give customers access to their information and what they wanted to do, and it was working and it wasn’t annoying—when I saw that was happening, I’m like, okay, there we go. We gotta do that now. It’s feasible.”
In each case, he waits long enough to see the idea work in the wild, then adapts it to Capacity’s context. Understand your processes, he says, watch who is meaningfully improving similar steps, and move decisively once the pattern is clear.
5. Use tools to elevate, not replace, your best people
One of the biggest anxieties in any evolving business is whether new tools are coming for people’s jobs. Kaiden addresses that head-on by framing change as leverage.
He describes a current project where an internal system will read all customer service emails, sort them into “can be answered” and “can’t be answered,” and prepare drafts for account managers to personalize and send. “What we tell them is that this is like a superpower. You can suddenly respond to so many more emails that you can take a new account.” In Capacity’s world, accounts are often aspirational brands and celebrities—beauty founders, global entertainers. That framing matters, because it makes automation something that enriches jobs rather than diminishing them. As Kaiden sees it, less drudgery, more relationship-building.
He takes the same view of his 20-person software development team. “Their job is going to change. They’re not going to be sitting there just writing code all day.” Instead, they’ll architect systems, understand process flows and design logic that other tools help implement. “Their jobs are gonna change from being code writers to code designers. And we’ll add functionality much more quickly.”
The throughline: Don’t deny that roles will change. Explain how and why, and connect that change to skills and knowledge people already have.
He does worry some about big industry-shaping shifts—particularly the moment robotics finally match the human hand. “Right now there is no substitute for the human hand in our physical world,” he says. “You can pick up boxes with a robot, but you can’t pick up [small] things.” Once that changes, his industry transforms, and the broader impact on semi-skilled labor will be profound. He’s also candid about macro forces: Oil price pressures haven’t yet driven up carrier costs for Capacity, but they’re already putting “downward pressure on consumer spending of the discretionary variety” that many of his clients depend on.
Still, he draws a firm line around what he can influence. “That’s a societal issue, not a Capacity issue,” he says of the long-term labor question. “I only have so much control over the world.”
