What it changed for other businesses
Five real projects. For each one: what was stuck, what I put in place, and what it changed day to day.
A management system that kept running after the consultant left
Digital services agency, about 50 people in Canada, the Philippines, and France.
No stock, no warehouse. Projects, deadlines, and people spread over three time zones that almost never overlap in real time. When a question is waiting for an answer, it waits a full day.
I set up Asana as the project management tool for the whole agency: who does what, by when, and where each project stands, visible to everyone without having to ask.
What matters most here: the system outlived my time there. The head of operations took over, and she kept building on it afterwards. When you sell independence, that’s the only proof worth anything: the tool didn’t die when the consultant left.
The system outlived my time there.
Too much attention spread over 50 products
A business selling on its own website and on Amazon, buying its stock from a distributor.
The company was pushing about 50 products on Amazon: ad campaigns, content, listing management. The effort was spread almost evenly. Nobody knew which ones actually made money.
I ran the profitability numbers product by product, every cost included: commission, shipping, advertising, returns. Two things came out of it.
The first: only five or six products were actually performing. The rest ate up time and ad budget and gave nothing back.
The second, less expected: selling by the unit wasn’t profitable, selling by the case was. The same product became a different business depending on how it was sold.
The result: focus on the products that carried the business, steady campaigns on those, and drop the rest.
Today, five or six products get all the attention.
A catalogue of 6,000 listings, and nobody knew what the stock looked like
Online store, inventory split between two homes, then moved to a third-party logistics provider.
About 6,000 listings, with SKUs missing or duplicated. No way to know what was in stock, where it was, or even what it looked like. An item you can’t find is an item you can’t sell.
I built a separate database, connected to the online store. It tracks inventory in real time, the exact location of every item, and a photo of each one.
The photo isn’t a detail. It’s what lets someone who has never seen the product recognize it on a shelf.
Every item now has a unique SKU, an exact location, and a photo.
Moving 2,000 products
Online store, warehouse move.
About 2,000 products to move. Each one had to be counted and given a location, and some needed extra work: repacking, removing an outer wrap, a new label.
That’s where the trap was. Those jobs couldn’t be done as the move went along, or everything would have stopped.
I split the two. Products go on the shelf and can be sold again right away. Alongside that, a project management system groups the tasks by type: every product that needs repacking, where it is, and how many. Five or six types of tasks, each covering a different number of products, tracked as a group rather than item by item.
Products could be sold again the moment they arrived, and operations never stopped.
No more full inventory counts every two weeks
Third-party logistics provider (3PL).
The warehouse was redoing a full inventory count every one to two weeks. That’s team time, and above all it’s a sign that they didn’t trust their own numbers.
I set up an inventory management system that keeps the count up to date all the time. The same system handles order picking: whatever goes out is deducted the moment it goes out, by the person who takes it.
The warehouse doesn’t recount anymore: the count stays current on its own.
Yours could be next
Each of these projects started with a meeting where someone told me what was keeping them from moving forward.
A 30-minute meeting, free and with no strings attached. No sales pitch, just a straight talk between business owners.