The founder's story

I spent most of the last decade making large operations work better — first as a supply chain and operations consultant, then as Head of Supply Chain Sourcing at Wayfair, where I was responsible for something on the order of $150 million in annual spend. The work was rarely about cutting. It was about getting demand, process, and sourcing to agree with one another, which is a less dramatic problem and a much more common one.

But the jobs that taught me the most were the smallest. Early on I worked inside manufacturing facilities with fewer than ten people on the floor. In a shop that size, a decision you make on Monday is visible on Wednesday. You see who it helped and who it inconvenienced, and you hear about it directly, because the person it inconvenienced is standing ten feet away. In a large company that same decision disappears into a quarterly review and you never really learn whether it worked.

That difference is the reason I am doing this. Small businesses are where operating discipline actually compounds — where intentional, unglamorous improvements to how work gets done turn into a durable advantage rather than a slide in a deck. Most of the companies I want to buy are already good at the hard part: they have customers who come back, people who know what they are doing, and an owner who built something that has lasted. What they usually have not had is someone whose whole job is to make the operation run a little better every year, for a very long time.

So I am buying one business. Not a platform, not a portfolio — one. I intend to move to it, learn it from the floor, and run it for the next thirty years. The people who work there will keep their jobs. The name can stay on the door. The transition happens on the seller's timeline, not mine.

I should say the obvious thing plainly, because you will find it out anyway: this will be the first business I own. I am completing an MBA at the Tuck School of Business, and I hold a BA in Mathematics from Connecticut College. What I bring is not a track record of acquisitions. It is nearly ten years of being accountable for operations that had to work on Monday morning, and a genuine willingness to spend the first year listening rather than reorganizing. If you would rather sell to someone who has done this five times before, that is a completely reasonable preference, and I would rather you act on it early than late.

What I can promise is that you will always be dealing with me. There is no committee behind this, no analyst who will call you back, and no investor whose timeline overrides yours. If we get to a price and terms, that is the price and those are the terms.