Brandon Raso

Frictionless World was an outdoor power equipment company with more than 30 suppliers across East Asia and India, along with domestic manufacturing for its core product line. They hired me as a Supply Chain Analyst.

The company was growing quickly, with revenue roughly doubling year over year, but the supply chain had not grown with it. There was no dedicated function, much of the work was manual, and key responsibilities still sat with the CFO.

Within about six months, I had taken ownership of the supply chain and started building the systems and processes around it. I automated much of the recurring work and eventually managed roughly $15M in annual purchasing across the supplier base on my own.

Once the day to day operation was under control, I could focus more of my time on cost, supplier performance, and longer term improvements. Over two years, I negotiated average material cost reductions of roughly 10% across the supplier base.

By the end, one individual contributor was running the supply chain behind a company approaching $40M in revenue. It was also where I learned that I do my best work with a lot of autonomy and a hard problem to own.

Denver Water is the City of Denver’s municipal water utility. I joined the procurement team as a contracts administrator, supporting the day-to-day contract workload and procurement processes.

While I was there, I saw an opportunity to make the department’s data more useful. I taught myself Cognos Analytics and built the team’s first reporting suite, giving managers a much easier way to understand contract and procurement activity without relying on manually assembled analysis.

The work was well received and helped me figure out where my strengths were. I really enjoyed digging into the data, understanding how the operation worked, and finding better ways to support it. That experience ultimately pushed my career toward analytics and business systems.

Bestop is an automotive accessories manufacturer best known for Jeep soft tops. By the time I joined, a series of acquisitions had expanded the business into a five company portfolio of vertically integrated brands.

I inherited a planning process built largely around manual spreadsheets and reactive decision making. I learned the underlying ERP database, automated the data feeds, and built tools that made planning signals easier to interpret, prioritize, and act on.

That work led me to build a Power BI suite from the ground up, which became a resource used across the organization. Those analytics tools contributed to a nearly 50% reduction in inventory over roughly 12 months. During the same period, I negotiated more than $1M in annual supplier savings and helped transition manufacturing from East Asia to Mexico.

I eventually became the Procure to Pay business and technical process owner for a five subsidiary migration from a 30 year old IBM LX environment to NetSuite. I owned the process from requirements and data migration through workflow design, testing, training, launch, and stabilization.

The migration was part of a broader systems consolidation that ultimately eliminated roughly $5M in annual IT spend through tool unification.

I co-founded Stash as an online mountain bike retailer and ended up running most of the business behind the storefront. That included purchasing, pricing, merchandising, ecommerce, customer acquisition, analytics, accounting, fulfillment, and customer operations.

With a very small team, we grew the business to roughly $2M in annual revenue while managing a catalog of more than 45,000 SKUs. I built and automated much of the operational infrastructure behind it, allowing us to handle that scale without building a large team. Along the way, we grew a customer base of more than 10,000 people, averaged roughly 12x ROAS on paid acquisition, and reached peak months above $250K in revenue.

As we operated the business and measured performance across the catalog, it became clear that post COVID discounting expectations had fundamentally changed the economics of the industry. Component margins had been compressed to the point that the traditional independent bike dealer model was increasingly difficult to make work. We responded by shifting away from commodity parts and toward boutique custom bikes, where we could offer something meaningfully different.

To make that model work online, I built the visual configurator and backend systems needed to configure, price, source, purchase, and fulfill highly customized bikes. The system helped drive roughly 10x year over year growth in custom bike sales and eventually became the foundation for FlipChip.