Strategy & Governance

$394M direct P&L · $1.1B channel operation · 330+ bps gross margin recovery · 7-person team

The clearest proof of this pillar is what was built and governed at L'Oréal / SalonCentric between 2015 and 2018. SalonCentric was L'Oréal PPD's $1.1B national salon distribution operation. Direct P&L responsibility covered a mixed portfolio of PPD brands and partner / competitive brands including Dyson, GHD, Bio Ionic, Revlon, Coty, and Olaplex.

The commercial model was structurally complex. Promotional funding moved simultaneously across AP debits against manufacturers, AR credits in L'Oréal brand local entities, and downstream debit / credit memo settlement with salon professional customers — across four channel layers (sub-distribution, company-owned stores, street sales, e-commerce) and six distribution centers across the US. Operations spanned Tampa Bay, Hudson Yards (New York), and New Jersey.

What was built

The trade governance and promotions finance function was built from scratch: business case authored, executive sponsorship secured, seven-person team hired and led, function deployed from zero to a governed, auditable operation.

Scope of governance

• Promotional funding and trade event agreements (TEAs)
• Manufacturer distributor agreements
• Trade event mechanics, inventory management tiers, compliance chargeback programs
• EDI requirements and SAP 3-way match compliance
• Anti-diversion controls
• AP / AR settlement flows — simultaneous, bidirectional, multi-entity
• Early payment discount windows
• Gross-to-Net integrity
• Period-end accrual routines, deduction management, claims validation

Result

330+ basis points of gross margin recovery over three years through disciplined claims automation, ERP alignment hardening, promotional finance workflow redesign, and Gross-to-Net governance.

Commercial Systems · Strategy & Governance

Translating Commercial Strategy into System Design

Across multi-market TPM and RGM deployments at Visualfabriq, the strategic work was inseparable from the technical work. Before configuration could begin, commercial strategy had to be understood, interrogated, and translated into concrete system logic: what the business intended to do commercially had to survive the encoding process and emerge accurately on the other side.

This required working directly with commercial, finance, and senior leadership teams to surface assumptions, resolve conflicts between what had been agreed and what was operationally feasible, and establish design principles that would govern the deployment. The decisions made at this stage — how promotions would be funded, how settlement would be triggered, how exceptions would be handled — determined whether the platform would reflect the business or merely resemble it.

• Facilitated pre-design alignment sessions with commercial and finance leadership across Tier 1 CPG clients
• Translated commercial strategy and trade agreements into system design requirements and configuration rules
• Identified conflicts between stated commercial intent and operational or system constraints before they became deployment failures
• Established governance principles for promotional mechanics, funding logic, and exception handling that held across markets and brands
• Worked across Nestlé, Mars, Haleon, and Deoleo across 24 markets in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

Strategy & Governance · Executive Advisory

PE and Investor Advisory — Market Intelligence to Strategic Implications

Engaged by private equity firms and investment advisors to translate ground-level commercial execution realities into factors relevant for investment strategy, platform assessment, and risk measurement. The work involved interrogating the actual operating capability of enterprise software platforms, assessing deployment quality and market fit, and surfacing the gap between vendor claims and client outcomes.

Advisory relationships have included engagements connected to firms including APAX, Cinven, EY, and Bain in contexts involving enterprise CPG software platform evaluation and commercial execution due diligence.

The value in these engagements is the same as in deployment work: the ability to read an operating environment accurately — what the system actually does, what the commercial outcomes actually are, and where the risk actually lives — rather than what the materials say.

• Functional assessment of enterprise RGM, TPM, and commercial execution platforms for investment and acquisition contexts
• Evaluation of deployment quality, client adoption, and the gap between platform capability claims and operational reality
• Translation of technical and operational findings into strategic implications relevant for capital allocation, risk assessment, and value creation thesis
• Market context analysis: competitive positioning, client base health, and structural vulnerabilities in commercial software platforms
• Advisory delivered to PE sponsors, investment teams, and transaction advisors — independent of vendor relationships