People Who Plan | Inside the Minds of Modern Operators

Ep. 13 | Sean Agatep, Co-Founder @ Vincero Collective

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 operating10:00 — Engraving at scale and the discipline of doing less13:00 — Rebuilding the org chart by going senior offshore15:00 — Why hybrid only works with 30+ people in one city20:00 — High agency, AI, and outputs over presence22:00 — Three co-founders, lifelong friends, and built-in checks and balances25:00 — "Just fucking use it": Vincero's stance on AI adoption27:00 — Connecting tools to AI and adjusting prompts in real time

Ep. 12 | Andy Hicks, Chief Transformation Officer @ Driven Distribution Group

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's 1,800 SKUs), tariffs that flipped from a constant to a variable and forced sourcing pivots from China to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and the rise of AI-enabled platforms like Parts Tech and Nextpart that are reshaping how distributors price and stock. Andy also gets into Chinese New Year planning (the real shutdown is four weeks down plus a 50/75/100 ramp), his people-process-systems approach with IT pulled in early, and why scenario planning only works when finance is in the room before the PO button gets hit. Topics Covered:- The one-hour delivery expectation in automotive parts distribution- SKU proliferation: from 2 Ford starter motors to 1,800- Tariffs as a variable, not a constant — and the 40% "Made in Vietnam" rule- AI platforms reshaping cross-distributor pricing and stocking decisions- Chinese New Year: the real four-week shutdown plus 50/75/100 ramp- People-process-systems, with IT brought in early- Scenario planning that survives contact with the 13-week cash flow

Ep. 11 | Cody Berenson, SVP of Operations & Services @ Siddhi Capital

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 Capital, a growth equity firm with a twist: a full operating team of ten embedded alongside the investment side. It's a model that exists because Cody saw something that shocked him when he entered the investment world — how many people write checks without understanding the operational backbone of the businesses they're funding. Siddhi's team plugs into portfolio companies and beyond, rolling up their sleeves on everything from building manufacturing lines for products that have never been made at commercial scale to setting up S&OP processes for brands doing $200–300 million in revenue that still don't have the right planning infrastructure in place. The conversation covers what changes operationally at each stage of a brand's lifecycle — and what goes wrong when teams don't recognize the shift. Pre-revenue is its own animal: no data, high aspirations, and a foundation that has to be built on assumptions. The $1–10 million range is, in Cody's view, actually harder — everything is changing, retailers are calling, innovation is flying, and you're building systems while the plane is taking off. Past $20 million, the mistakes stop being small. A hundred thousand dollars. A million dollars. The margin for error compresses and the need for real planning rigor becomes non-negotiable. Cody's sharpest point lands on capital. S&OP isn't just sales and operations planning — it's working capital planning. In today's funding environment, where brands actually have to be profitable or on their way to it before they get their next check, getting inventory right can extend your runway by six months to a year. Getting it wrong means burning cash you can't replace. The episode also goes deep on how product characteristics shape operations in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. A sparkling water brand has dozens of co-manufacturers to choose from at every scale. A brand making something specialized might have two — or might need to build its own line. That constraint changes everything about how you plan, and getting founders and boards to understand the landscape they're operating within is half the job. Also in this episode: the cottage cheese revolution and why Good Culture couldn't make enough product even if they wanted to, how AI is flipping the 80/20 rule for operators who used to spend most of their time just organizing data, and Quality Italian's chicken parm pizza — which sounds gross and is absolutely overkill, but apparently phenomenal. Topics Covered: - From managing a Boulder burrito restaurant to SVP at a growth equity firm: Cody's path through operations - How Siddhi Capital embeds a full operating team alongside its investment portfolio — and why that model exists - Brand lifecycle stages: what changes operationally from pre-revenue to $10M to $200M+ - Why the $1–10M stage is actually harder than pre-revenue for operators - S&OP as working capital planning: why getting inventory right can change your fundraising plan entirely - The cottage cheese problem: what happens when demand explodes and manufacturing capacity doesn't exist - How product characteristics and co-manufacturer availability fundamentally shape your planning constraints - AI for operators: moving from 80% data wrangling to faster, cheaper decision-making - Why writing a good AI prompt is actually an operational discipline — you still need to know the answers to the test - The case for formalizing processes before automating them

Ep. 10 | Corey Sisson, VP Sales Strategy & Planning @ SmartSweets

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 why.He is now the VP of Sales Strategy and Planning at Smart Sweets, where he oversees the planning function that bridges field sales and supply chain, and has recently taken on the company's US club channel — including a Costco rollout that was literally happening as they recorded. Four years in, he describes the ride as equal parts adrenaline and gray hairs.The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to plan for an emerging CPG brand. At General Mills, you have 19 cuts of data, a merchandising team fixing your shelves, and layers of process built up over 150 years. At Smart Sweets, you have fewer data points, no dedicated merchandiser, and a pace of change that makes every retail call a potential re-forecast. Corey is remarkably honest about the gap: the math of demand planning looks simple from the supply side — units per store, per week, times store count — until a retailer calls two days later and contracts your shelf space, pulls a display, or shifts your facings. That's not a forecasting failure. That's just the reality of how the CPG world works.His take on healthy tension between sales and supply is one of the sharpest in the series: you can't build a brand if you don't have product on shelf, and you can't have product on shelf without a supply plan that can move fast enough to capture opportunities when they show up. Miss that window and you've handed revenue back to a behemoth competitor — one who absolutely has a merchandising team.Also in this episode: what Corey had to unlearn after 16 years at a highly matrixed organization, why making a call and owning it is a skill you have to actively develop, and what Smart Sweets has coming down the innovation pipeline in 2026.

Ep. 9 | Kenzie Parton, VP Global Planning @ Kendo Brands, Inc.

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 behind Fenty Beauty, Marc Jacobs Beauty, and others. But getting there required a leap: in the summer of 2020, mid-pandemic, she took a cold call that led her to leave one of the most iconic brands in the world to build a planning organization from scratch. The team she inherited had been through reorg after reorg. Turnover was high. The planning tool wasn't built for planning. And the expectation of what the planning function was even supposed to do needed to be reset from the ground up.What she built over the next three years — a new leadership team, a new mindset, and a new Anaplan implementation that automated months of manual re-forecasting work — is the kind of story that doesn't get told enough about what it actually takes to run a high-performing planning org.Kenzie is also an Atomic Advisor and recently completed a Berkeley certificate in AI Business Strategy. Her take on AI in planning is grounded and refreshingly honest: the technology is maturing fast, but forecast accuracy at 70% is still considered excellent, and the real unlock isn't better algorithms — it's connected data, financial consequence modeling, and planners who can translate numbers into business decisions.Her advice for early-career planners is just as sharp: curiosity is the skill that compounds. Understand the whole business, not just your slice of it. Break through silos before they become walls. And never lose sight of the fact that planners are making some of the biggest capital allocation decisions in the company — even when the work feels like it's happening at the SKU level.