Start small. Go further when you’re ready.
You don’t need a planning team, clean data or a clear brief to start — that is what the first step is for. Start with a short assessment, move into the diagnostic, and take on more only when the business is ready for it. Everything happens inside your own environment — your database, your Microsoft tenant, your security.
Planning diagnostic
The first real read on your business, and the tools to keep reading it. You don’t need planning experience or tidy data to start — sorting out the data is part of the work. I do the digging; you bring what you know about the business.
It sets up the views a planning team leans on every week, and answers:
- Can we trust the numbers? What data you have, what’s missing, and a clean product hierarchy so every report adds up the same way
- What’s actually selling? A best-sellers view, and whether you’re in stock on the things that drive the business
- Are we carrying the right amount? Stock to sales by category — where inventory is heavy, and where it’s thin
- Where is the business heading? Trends, forecast, on-order and inventory position, side by side
Together that is the foundation for an open-to-buy built around your categories. We finish by looking at where you are against where you should be, and laying out a practical route to the goals. The dashboards and the organised data are yours, on your own system — and we go through all of it together.
It usually follows the initial assessment: the reports the assessment points to are the ones we build first.
For: anyone who suspects the plan is wrong but can't prove where — including teams without a dedicated planner.
Unit & assortment planning build
A bottom-up unit plan wired to your own history. Choice-level potential sell-through seeds the buy; growth, order cycle and safety stock are dials your planner controls, globally or row by row.
- Comp period logic that handles the 53-week retail calendar drift correctly
- Analog-driven seeding for new styles, with manual override that always wins
- Size curves computed on potential units, stored centrally and reusable
- SKU explosion — build, inseam, color and size — with placeholder style codes
- Reconciliation to your top-down budget, with the variance shown, not hidden
- Placeholder purchase orders written back into your inventory pipeline
For: teams planning in disconnected spreadsheets who need one number.
Open-to-buy & financial planning
The monthly plan and the buy engine that answers the only question that matters in-season: given where inventory actually is, what can I still spend?
- Monthly sales, receipts, markdown and inventory plan by category
- Weeks of cover and excess-cover analysis, aged on FIFO receipt age
- Roll-forward that carries actuals into the plan without breaking the tie-out
- Category structure that reconciles to the total — including the catch-alls
- Receipt flow analysis: where funding is front-loaded against the sales curve
For: merchants managing inventory dollars against a moving forecast.
These are the numbers the monthly cycle produces. Watch it run end to end — closing the month on actuals, re-forecasting off them, saving the plan back to the database, and turning the open-to-buy into receipts.
Planning systems & BI
The layer underneath everything above. If your data can't be trusted, no planning process built on it will be either.
- SQL Server data model: facts at SKU × week, retail calendar, product hierarchy
- Stored-procedure pipeline with a documented, repeatable run order
- Power BI semantic model and reporting reading the same numbers the planner sees
- Excel front ends bound live to the database — no copy-paste, no stale links
- Documentation and handover so your team runs it without me
For: brands whose ERP reports the past accurately and predicts nothing.
Scripted build
Driven in plain English, filtered through a written rule set so the build edits the workbook rather than rebuilding it from scratch. Every step runs as a script you keep and can run yourself.
- new_plan.vbs
- agent_refresh.vbs
- agent_append_po.vbs
Rebuildable on demand. The template is code, not a file someone saved.
Excel planning workbook
Refresh pulls real sales, inventory and on-order. Planners forecast in the cells they already know. Save writes the plan back.
SQL database
Every plan version, forecast and placeholder PO stored with who saved it and when.
- sales$
- inv_wk$
- otb_snapshot_line
- inbound$
Validated on write. Versioned, not overwritten.
A few things worth saying up front.
It runs on your infrastructure
There is no SMP product, platform or hosted service. The work happens on your SQL Server instance, in your Microsoft tenant, under your access controls, your backups and your retention rules. Your data stays where it already is, governed by the policies you already have — I work inside them rather than around them.
An extension of your team
This isn’t install-and-leave consulting. I work alongside your planners — on the calls, in the workbook, through the first few closes — for as long as that’s useful. When you’re ready to run it yourselves, everything is built so that you can.
Your tools, not mine
I build in SQL Server, Excel and Power BI because that is what your team already has and already knows. Nothing I deliver requires a license you don't own or a platform you have to keep renting from me.
You own everything
Source, stored procedures, workbooks and documentation are yours at the end of the engagement. There is no black box and no dependency designed to keep me on retainer.
Override beats automation
Every seeded number can be typed over, and the typed number wins. A planning system that argues with an experienced merchant is a planning system that gets abandoned.
Small enough to be direct
You work with me. There is no team of analysts learning your business on your budget, and no account manager between you and the person doing the work.
What it costs, before you ask.
No packages and no minimum retainer. You are buying hours from one person, and the scope is built to fit the budget you actually have.
The initial assessment
16–24 hours. A health check on your business using the same margin and turn model you can try on the calculator page — run with your real numbers, for your main divisions or categories.
We look at where inventory, margin, discounting and turn stand today, what it would realistically take to improve them, and which trade-offs are worth making. We walk through it together, and you leave knowing where to focus first.
It stands alone. If that’s all you need, that is a good outcome and there is nothing further to buy. If you want to go further, it becomes the starting brief for the diagnostic.
$150 – $225 per hour
Where an engagement sits in that range depends on the work — process and diagnostic at the lower end, database and systems build at the upper.
After the assessment we build a timeline and an hours plan against your budget, so you are approving a number you chose rather than a number you were handed. We build only what the business needs now, and add to it when you’re ready. Hours are tracked and reported; unused hours are not billed.
Not sure which one you need?
That's normal, and it's what the first call is for. Describe the problem and I'll tell you where I'd start.