People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

What if the next wave of electrification isn't four wheels in California — but two wheels in São Paulo? In this episode of People Who Plan, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter reconnect with their former Tesla colleague Billy Blaustein, Co-Founder & COO of Vammo — now Latin America's largest electric-motorcycle and battery-swapping platform. From the Model 3 trenches to building on the gr...

Jesse Hartman took an unconventional road into data science — music theory, a stint running coffee shops in Austin, and a long-running coffee podcast before a boot camp landed him in supply chain. In this episode, Jeremy Pomp and Michael Rossiter dig into how that winding path shaped the way he thinks about operations, and what it actually means to be a "data scientist" in the age of AI....

Ep. 13 | Sean Agatep, Co-Founder @ Vincero CollectiveChapters 00:00 — Welcome and origin story: Gonzaga, China, and five years in Guangzhou02:00 — Launching Vincero on Kickstarter with Italian marble watches04:00 — Twelve years in: building a brand around sentimentality06:00 — The gifting business: 40% of sales in Q4 and the cost of missing08:00 — The 2022 down year and the shift to disciplined op...

Andy Hicks is Chief Transformation Officer at Driven Distribution Group, and he has spent his career inside an industry where the customer expectation is one hour from order to part in hand — up there with blood logistics for pure speed pressure. The conversation moves through the three forces reshaping automotive parts distribution: SKU proliferation (Ford used to make two starter motors; now it&...

Cody Berenson started his career closing up a burrito restaurant at 2 AM for drunk college kids in Boulder. He fell in love with operations — the sheer amount of time, money, and energy it takes to get a product onto a shelf — and never looked back. That path took him from managing supply chains for nationally distributed brands to his current role as SVP of Operations & Services at Siddhi Cap...

Corey Sisson spent 16 years at General Mills — one of the largest CPG companies on the planet, home to billion-dollar brands and decades of institutional process. Then he left for Smart Sweets, a scrappy Canadian better-for-you candy startup, to build its sales planning function from scratch. The two worlds could not be more different, and Corey has thought harder than most about exactly how and w...

Kenzie Parton graduated from CU Boulder with a degree in applied math and civil engineering. Then she decided she didn't want to be an engineer. What followed was 13 years at Levi Strauss — and a masterclass in how to build a planning career that cuts across finance, operations, and global supply chain. Kenzie is now the VP of Global Planning at Kendo Brands, the LVMH-owned beauty company behi...

Archie Durfee didn't plan to be a planner. He went to school for sport management, moved to Chicago with his girlfriend, couldn't find a job, and ended up temping at Radio Flyer answering calls about replacement wagon parts. Then a director asked if anyone wanted to stay after hours and pick orders in the warehouse. Archie raised his hand — and that decision set the course of his career. H...

What do fine arts, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tesla, and global disaster relief have in common? Lyndsay Skeegan's career. Lyndsay is the Chief Operating Officer of ShelterBox USA, a global humanitarian organization that provides emergency shelter to families who have lost their homes to disasters and conflict. ShelterBox has supported over 3 million people across 25 years of operations — and Lyndsay o...

Aaron Hoag has been geared to say yes his entire career — and it started before he ever worked for a brand. He spent eight years at a freight forwarding startup watching scrappy founders steal business from companies ten times their size, and he learned early that "we can't do that" is almost never the right first answer. In this episode, Aaron walks through a career that moved from...

Most planning teams run their S&OP once a month. They spend weeks preparing, pack everyone into a room, and walk out with a plan that's already starting to go stale. Michael Rossiter thinks there's a fundamentally better way — and in this episode, he and Jeremy break down exactly what that looks like. It starts with a distinction that sounds simple but changes everything: target, forec...

Chris Gerardy's career in supply chain started with a conversation he wasn't supposed to be having. He was 24 years old, no degree, managing a Famous Footwear store in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics — when the corporate allocation team came through, noticed he understood his store's inventory better than most planners they'd met, and offered him a job. He moved to Wisconsin two m...

Gina Jones McPherson didn't plan on being a planner. She started as a purchasing intern at a steel company, bounced through inside sales, and eventually found herself building S&OP processes from the ground up — first at a 10,000-person manufacturer, and then as the very first planner ever hired at Starface World. In this episode, Gina walks Michael through what it actually looks like to w...

Most planning teams are drowning in process debt and don't know it. They're rebuilding the same model every week, pulling data from eight different systems, sitting in S&OP meetings that produce consensus but not clarity — and there's never time to fix it because there's always a deadline to hit first. Nicole Monterroso has spent her career walking into exactly that situation a...

Chad Brinton built operations at some of the fastest-growing DTC brands in the country — Made In Cookware and True Classic — and lived to tell the stories. The ones where a planning mistake almost bankrupted the business, only for a global pandemic to turn it into a windfall. The ones where the marketing team would go viral on a product you had zero inventory for. The ones where you bet the farm o...