Four ways to start.
Most clients begin with the diagnostic and continue into a build. Each engagement stands alone, and each one leaves you with something that keeps working after the invoice clears.
Planning diagnostic
A hard look at last season against what it could have been. I take your sales, inventory and receipt history and quantify the three gaps that compound into a bad year.
- Revenue gap — potential gross sales against actual
- Unit gap — the same comparison in units, free of price and discount effects
- Stock miss — weeks in stock against weeks you had potential to sell
- Overbuy exposure: high weeks-on-hand paired with high discount
- Dead-on-arrival styles, late arrivals, and assortment concentration risk
You get a written findings document, the underlying analysis in a workbook you keep, and a specific recommendation on what to fix first.
For: anyone who suspects the plan is wrong but can't prove where.
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.
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.
A few things worth saying up front.
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.
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.