The reason I can see what's coming is because I've sat in every seat that built it.

Most people who advise on WMS selection have occupied one or two seats in this market. A vendor. A consultant. Maybe an operator. I've sat in all of them, across 25 years, and that's not a credential — it's the reason I evaluate the way I do.

I've built WMS products. I've sold them. I've implemented them for enterprise clients and designed the solutions other people delivered. I co-founded a WMS-focused consulting firm and scaled it to eight figures. And I've run the systems myself, inside a 3PL, on the floor, after the demo was long over.

Every seat taught me the same lesson from a different angle: what a demo shows you and what an operation actually is are two different things, and the distance between them stays invisible until the contract is signed. That argument is the reason Fullstride exists, and I've written it out in full. What matters here is that no single seat would have shown it to me. I needed all of them.

It also points at a particular kind of operation, and it's the only kind I take. Warehouses that run on rules somebody else sets: client SOPs, supplier agreements, retailer routing guides and the chargebacks behind them, traceability requirements, customer SLAs with real teeth. These operations can't bend themselves to fit whatever software they buy, because the rules were never theirs to simplify. The software has to encode them, or the operation pays for the gap every day it runs.

3PLs are the purest version of that. But it shows up just as often in distributors who have outgrown the warehouse module bundled with their ERP, and in the ones quietly running a 3PL they've never called one: holding supplier-owned inventory as a favor or as consignment, charging inconsistently for storage and fulfillment, tracking the whole arrangement outside the system because the ERP can't represent inventory the company doesn't own. Whether anyone in the building says the words third-party logistics is beside the point. The system requirements are the same either way.

So I built the thing that was missing: an evaluation with no stake in the outcome. That's Fullstride. The System Fit Sprint is the whole of it — a fixed-fee engagement with no vendor relationships, no referral fees, and no implementation revenue. The fixed fee is the only way I get paid, which means the only thing I'm working toward is a recommendation that's right for the operation in front of me.

I work out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and travel for onsite visits anywhere in the United States. The operation has to be seen in person, so the sprint goes where the buildings are.