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.
Each seat taught me the same lesson from a different angle. As a vendor, I watched founders ask exactly the questions we were trained to answer well — and miss the ones that would have revealed the gaps. As an implementer, I inherited selections made against operational pictures that were never accurate to begin with. As an operator, I lived inside the consequences.
The pattern never changed. A demo is the happy path. It's there to impress and to keep a sale moving, which means it routes around anything that might slow one down. What a demo can't show you is your own operation: the tribal knowledge, the missing data, the conflicting context, the personality-driven processes that are the real shape of how work actually gets done. All of that surfaces at implementation, once the contract is signed. And it surfaces at the same moment the system's own gaps do, which is exactly when changing course costs the most.
That's the gap I've spent my career inside: how a system looks when a vendor controls the room versus how it meets the messy reality of an operation once the work is real. It's also the gap a founder running a solo evaluation has no way to see, because every seat that could show it to them belongs to someone with a stake in which system wins.
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.
The seats, in order
Building the product
Systems start as code before anyone runs them on a floor. Software engineering and technical product roles at GE Transportation, a PE-backed startup, and ERS — the seat that shows you what a WMS actually is underneath the demo.
Implementing and architecting
At RedPrairie (now Blue Yonder), led complex execution-software engagements for enterprise clients and ran a 15+ person team — where most of the hands-on systems depth comes from. Co-founded MacGregor Partners, a Blue Yonder / JDA implementation partner, scaled it to eight figures in five years as a repeat INC 5000 honoree before selling the stake at the end of 2018. (The firm was later acquired by Accenture.) This is the seat that taught me how selections fail — because I kept inheriting them.
Running it inside a 3PL
As Director of Supply Chain Systems at Metro Supply Chain Group, owned the systems running across North America and Europe and cut implementation timelines by 65% in the first year. The operator's seat — living inside the consequences of a system that does or doesn't fit.
Advising before the commitment
Building the Advisory Services practice at Open Sky Group, then advising Auctane on WMS build-vs-buy, then Fullstride — independent WMS selection for founder-led 3PLs, with no implementation and no vendor relationships. The part that comes first, done by someone with no stake in which system wins.
I talk through this in public, a lot
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If you're working through a WMS decision and want an independent read you can trust, reserve a System Fit Sprint — or message me on LinkedIn and I'll tell you straight whether it's even worth your time.