MEET TYLER

I ran the distribution floor at a brewery on the weekends. Monday the forecast looked clean. By Friday I was loading trucks that went out short.

We could hit the monthly volume almost dead on and still send a route out missing half its cases. Right in total, wrong in the mix that mattered on Friday. I’ve been chasing that gap ever since.

My whole career has been inside operations and finance. MillerCoors. ABB and Zurn. Food and beverage at Gehl. Cannabis at Cresco Labs. Business unit CFO for electrification at Briggs & Stratton. Different products, different constraints, the same room every time. The forecast said one thing, the P&L said another, and the production floor was quietly running a third plan nobody had signed off on.

Consultants came through. They handed over a deck and left. The deck was usually right. The building didn’t change.

On one engagement, $10M of working capital came off the shelf and went back into the business. No new system and no new model. The safety stock settings hadn’t been touched since the middle of the prior year, so they were still sized for a scare that had ended months earlier. We re-cut them to the volatility the business actually had.

A business executing consistently knows how it makes decisions, knows what its options are, and knows the risk sitting on each one. It’s choosing. A business that isn’t executing is reacting to something that already happened. I’d rather hand you three choices with the risk attached than hand you a fire.

I started VAST Insight Partners for the part where the building changes. SIOP, the forecast underneath it, and the FP&A that makes both hold up.