Work

Five verticals, and the businesses built across them

Client names sit under confidentiality. The numbers are real regardless, and every engagement is tagged with the verticals it actually touched.

MedMen 20 people → 2018 CSE listing, $1.6B Cultivation · Extraction · Manufacturing Distribution · Retail

Where the full chain was built

I ran operations from the earliest days, standing up every operational department from scratch and owning the retail footprint I opened alongside five production facilities covering cultivation, extraction, manufacturing, and distribution — all of it standing up at once, under compliance rules that punish improvisation. My scope narrowed to production and brands only as the company continued to scale after the 2018 listing.

Running every vertical during hypergrowth is a specific education. You learn that each one optimizes for something different and that nobody tells the others: cultivation optimizes for yield, extraction for throughput, manufacturing for run efficiency, distribution for on-time delivery, retail for sell-through. Left alone, those five objectives quietly fight each other, and the fight shows up as margin.

What it produced: The failure catalogue I now diagnose from — and the reason I look upstream first.

A multi-dispensary operator Midwest · Vertically integrated Manufacturing · Distribution · Retail

A gate system for new products, and the scorecard to run it

Products were launching across a multi-store footprint without a consistent decision framework. Good ideas and weak ones moved through the same path at the same speed, and by the time a weak SKU was obviously weak it had already consumed capital, shelf space, and buyer attention.

I built a Gate 0–7 new product development framework: named owners at each gate, evidence required to advance, and kill criteria agreed in advance so that stopping a product became a normal outcome rather than an admission of failure. On top of it went the reporting layer — new product scorecard, portfolio performance, store-by-store KPIs, executive roll-up — so leadership could see the pipeline live rather than reconstruct it after the quarter closed.

Result: Documented go/no-go on every SKU, portfolio and store performance in one view, and a framework the team runs independently.

A regional retail chain Confidential Distribution · Retail

$7M to $30M in revenue, and a $56M exit, in eighteen months

Growth of that shape breaks companies more often than it makes them. Demand is never the constraint — the constraint is whether inventory, staffing, store process, and reporting can be rebuilt fast enough to stay ahead of volume.

I rebuilt the operating model: store-level process standardization, inventory and vendor management, weekly KPI reporting leadership could act on, and a hiring and training structure that let new units open without each one running differently.

Result: $56M exit inside eighteen months — infrastructure built deliberately for that outcome rather than infrastructure that barely survived the growth.

A national footwear brand Artist-led launch Manufacturing · Distribution · DTC

An artist-led launch against an immovable date

When a brand is tied to an artist, the launch date isn't a planning assumption. It's a tour stop or an album, and it will not move. Everything operational has to be finished before demand arrives, and that demand is spiky in a way forecasts handle badly.

I ran the operational buildout: vendor coordination, fulfillment infrastructure, DTC workflow design, and the inventory allocation logic that decides what happens when a single post outsells the plan. Different category, same discipline — build upstream for what happens downstream.

Result: Shipped on the date the brand needed, with fulfillment built to absorb the spike rather than buckle under it.

A consumer brand collaboration Global automotive partner Manufacturing · Distribution

Making a global partnership operationally real

A partnership with a global marque is announced in a press release and executed in a hundred unglamorous details: who approves what, on which timeline, against whose quality standards, through which supply chain. The gap between announcement and shippable product is where most brand partnerships quietly die.

I built the operational structure underneath it — approval paths, production coordination, and the internal cadence required to hold a small brand to a large partner's standards without stalling.

Result: A partnership that moved from agreement to execution with defined ownership at every handoff.

A residential solar company Before cannabis · Acquired by NRG Field operations · Supply chain

100 employees to the eighth-largest installer in the country

Residential solar in its growth years had the same shape cannabis would take later: a regulated, permit-dependent, field-heavy business scaling faster than its infrastructure, where every market had its own rules and the operational playbook had to be rebuilt at each border.

I helped grow the company from roughly a hundred employees into the eighth-largest residential installer in the United States, ending in an acquisition by NRG. It's where I learned that multi-market operations are a documentation problem before they're a people problem.

Result: Top-ten national scale and a successful acquisition — the first of the operating models I built toward an exit.

Find out where it actually started.

Most operators know something is wrong. Fewer can name which vertical it originated in, which pillar failed to catch it, or what it's costing them per month. Start there.

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