Case Studies

What we found.
What we recovered.

An independent assessment means the wins look like operating wins, not deck wins. Here's what we've found across health & wellness CPG, beverage, hospitality, lifestyle, and cannabis brands.

Supply Chain Health & Wellness CPG

Functional supplements brand cuts packaging cost 18% factory-direct

Three packaging components routed through one agency for six years. Markup never benchmarked. Two of three sourced from factories we'd already worked with at list price. Agency added 22% on a printed carton you can buy direct.

$640K Annual packaging cost reduction via factory-direct sourcing, MOQ negotiation, and freight consolidation
Method Mapped every packaging SKU to its actual factory of record. Built RFP across three direct factories per component. Renegotiated MOQ on the bottle. Consolidated freight onto a single forwarder. Quality at parity, lead time inside the operating window.
HR Hospitality

5-state restaurant group recovers $310K in workers' comp surcharge

Servers, back-of-house, and management classified under three NAICS codes — two wrong. WC mod rate inflated for two policy years from a miscoded claim. CPA signed off on premiums through three renewals.

$310K Refunded comp surcharge plus prospective premium reduction over 24 months
Method NAICS code review across all role categories. Mod rate analysis. Broker RFP. Negotiated retroactive surcharge refund with prior carrier. Bound new policy with hospitality-aware underwriter at correct classification.
IT Beverage

Craft beverage brand consolidates ERP, e-commerce, and 3PL into one stack

NetSuite, Shopify, two 3PL portals, a custom dashboard, and a retired BigCommerce tenant still billing $1,200/month. Inventory reconciliation lived in one analyst's spreadsheets. Every state expansion added platforms; none ever removed any.

$220K Annual stack savings plus eliminated 14 hrs/week of manual reconciliation
Method Full SaaS inventory across all entities. Renegotiated NetSuite tier. Migrated 3PL onto a single integrated portal. Killed retired tenant. Built native ERP ↔ e-com ↔ 3PL data flow. Documented succession on remaining stack.
HR + IT + SC Lifestyle / DTC

Premium apparel brand rebuilds the operating seam end-to-end

PEO, HRIS, ERP, WMS, packaging vendor — never integrated. Pickers misclassified, comp loaded wrong, POs flowing outside the ERP. Each pillar fixed alone would have left half the leakage. The seam was the engagement.

$1.2M Annual recovery across HR (classification + PEO migration), IT (ERP/WMS integration), SC (packaging consolidation)
Method Cross-pillar discovery: walked HR roster, IT integration map, and packaging PO history side by side. Reclassified warehouse roles. Migrated PEO. Rebuilt WMS-to-ERP data flow. Consolidated packaging onto two factory-direct vendors. Documented end-to-end so the wins held.
HR Health & Wellness CPG

Supplements brand migrates from generalist PEO to category-fluent provider

PEO never benchmarked since founding. Admin fee buried inside medical premium. Workers' comp loaded outside the master and never re-bid. Two FTEs spent ~5 hrs/week reconciling between PEO, payroll, and ATS exports.

$280K Annual reduction across PEO admin, comp premium normalization, renegotiated medical plan
Method PEO RFP across CPG-fluent providers. Benefits benchmarking against operators of similar size and footprint. Workers' comp re-bind with category-aware underwriter. Migration plan executed across 60 days with zero coverage gap.
Supply Chain Beverage

RTD beverage brand consolidates 6 promo vendors into 2

Six promo vendors across events, sampling kits, branded glassware, gifting, and on-premise activations. None benchmarked. Three were sourcing from the same factory at three different prices.

$310K Annual savings via vendor consolidation, group buying, and direct factory sourcing on top three SKUs
Method Mapped every promo SKU to its underlying factory. Built RFP across direct sourcing alternatives. Consolidated onto two specialist agencies for high-touch and one direct relationship for high-volume basics. Locked pricing on twelve-month forward.
IT Hospitality

Restaurant group unifies POS, scheduling, and inventory across 12 units

Toast at 9 units, legacy Aloha at 3, scheduling on a separate platform, inventory in spreadsheets. Same SKU priced differently at three locations — nobody had visibility.

$165K Annual savings on platform consolidation plus margin uplift from menu-level visibility
Method Migrated all units to single POS. Integrated scheduling and inventory natively. Built menu-level cost reporting. Standardized SKU pricing across locations. Trained GMs on the new operating cadence.
HR + IT Health & Wellness CPG

Skincare CPG closes the badge ↔ HRIS ↔ payroll seam

Badge admin in HR (Rippling). Access control in IT (Brivo). Time clocks on a third platform. Same employee could be on payroll, off the badge list, still in the building. Nobody could reconcile against WC at audit.

$185K Annual recovery across consolidated time-and-attendance, corrected wage classification, eliminated badge-admin labor
Method Mapped every system that touched a single employee — HR, badge, time, payroll, comp roster. Consolidated time-and-attendance onto HRIS-native module. Reclassified warehouse roles under correct NAICS. Built audit-ready reconciliation between HR, badge access, and comp.
Supply Chain Lifestyle / DTC

Premium apparel brand cuts retail-fixture spend 42%

Custom fixtures sourced through the agency that designed them. Ten years of refresh cycles, never re-quoted. Same fixtures available factory-direct from a Vietnamese builder we'd already worked with at half the price.

$420K Annual savings on fixture refresh program plus ongoing POP / trade-show consolidation
Method Audited the entire fixture catalog. RFP'd against three factory-direct alternatives. Kept the original design agency for creative, severed the production relationship. Consolidated POP and trade-show production onto the same factory. Built freight consolidation program across deployments.
Supply Chain Hospitality

Restaurant group rebuilds uniform program across 14 locations

Uniform program inherited from a single broker for nine years. Pricing never benchmarked. Quality drifting. Inventory carried by the broker, marked up on every replenishment. Embroidery charged twice on every reorder.

$185K Annual recovery via factory-direct sourcing plus inventory program redesign
Method Audited every uniform SKU. RFP'd against direct decorator alternatives. Built inventory program with predictable replenishment economics. Consolidated decoration onto a single shop. Mid-tier quality up; cost down 32% on the line.
HR + IT Cannabis · MSO · 4 states

4-state cannabis MSO rebuilds the documentation behind a defensible 280E posture

CPA wanted a stronger COGS allocation. CFO didn't have the HR classifications or ERP cost-center hygiene to defend it. The fix wasn't a tax model — it was the HR and IT documentation underneath.

$1.1M Federal tax position recovered (filed by CPA) once HR classifications and IT cost-center coding aligned to defensible §471-11 methodology
Method Reclassified roles across all four state entities so HR records matched the work people actually did. Reorganized ERP cost centers in coordination with the CPA. Built audit-ready linkage between payroll, badge access, METRC state agents, and cost-center coding. CPA filed the recovered position.
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$ ? Recovered margin, built around your operating reality
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* Representative composites built from typical engagement outcomes. Specific results vary by company size, footprint, and contract terms. Real client names and figures are protected by mutual NDAs — we'll walk through specific reference engagements during your assessment.

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