Partnerships
What the work has actually looked like.
Five programs, described by what changed rather than by what it saved. The pattern in all of them: practice learned at Tier-1 scale, applied where it is not standard yet. The figures stay inside the companies they belong to.
Reshoring
Moving contract manufacturing out of China
A multi-year program to qualify a Thailand site and move production without interrupting supply. Tooling transfer, dual-running through qualification, and a revenue line that depended on none of it slipping.
The lesson that transferred to everything after it: a reshore is a data problem before it is a logistics problem. You cannot move what you cannot see, and most bills of material are less accurate than the people who own them believe.
What changed: continuity of supply held through the transition rather than being restored after it, and the outgoing partner was kept whole on the way out.
Trade & tariff
Mapping Section 301 and IEEPA exposure
A direct-materials portfolio assessed part by part for tariff exposure, then engineered down through classification review and footprint decisions rather than by asking suppliers to absorb it.
This work has only got harder. The regime changed twice in 2026: the Supreme Court struck the IEEPA tariffs in February, the Section 122 bridge expired in July, and a new Section 301 action took effect the same day across sixty economies.
What changed: exposure became a number the business could plan against instead of a surprise that arrived with the invoice.
Cost model
Consignment and conversion redesign
Reworking who buys the raw material, who carries it, and how conversion is priced across fabricated components. The recurring argument in these categories is whether the buyer consigns material or the supplier buys it and amortises it into piece price.
The answer is not universal, which is exactly why it should be a written policy with thresholds rather than a conversation held again every quarter.
What changed: the decision moved from a debate to a rule, and the exceptions became visible to leadership instead of invisible in the price.
Domestic supply base
Tier-1 practice at mid-size scale
The steady week-to-week work has been with domestic fabricators, molders and machine shops, bringing them disciplines their previous customers never asked for. Tooling ownership and asset audits, quality escalations, transitions between suppliers without a line-down, and cost models built from the actual process rather than from a quote.
Should-cost built from the actual process, tooling tracked as an asset, scorecards with consequences. None of it is novel at Tier-1. Almost none of it is standard at this level, which is exactly why it moves the number. And these are the relationships where you find out whether a cost model is honest, because the owner will tell you to your face when it is not.
What changed: cost conversations moved from haggling over a number to arguing about a process, which is a conversation both sides can win.
Operating model
Building a procurement Center of Excellence
Standing up CoE and PMO structure where none existed: method, cadence, decision thresholds, and a reporting spine that let leadership see status without asking three people for a spreadsheet.
This is where Find the Friction came from. Building the method for a whole function forces you to notice how much senior time goes into retrieval, waiting, and re-arguing settled questions.
What changed: leadership stopped chasing status and started seeing only the exceptions, which is the difference between a function that scales and one that hires.
The pattern
Four programs, one shape.
In each of these, the money was not sitting in the negotiation. It was sitting in a process nobody had been asked to describe out loud, and the fix was usually a discipline that already exists one tier up.
That is not a coincidence and it is not a sales line. It is the reason the workshop exists, and the reason I open a cost model before I open a negotiation.
Working on something like one of these?
Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell me which one it resembles and where it is stuck.