We've run a business like yours.

In 2017 EatStreet, a Madison-based food delivery company doing under $10M a year, acquired our delivery startup, Zoomer, and put us in charge of launching and growing its delivery business. Different industry, same math produce wholesalers live with: thin margins, a perishable asset (a driver hour you don't sell is as dead as a pallet you don't move), and dozens of operating calls a day where the wrong ones quietly eat the year.

We went deep instead of wide: about 25 Midwest markets, our own drivers, the delivery P&L in our hands. Rob ran delivery, then the whole operating side as COO: sales, operations, and data. Dave ran the driver organization. Max built the routing and scheduling systems that kept the cost of every delivery survivable. By 2021 the business was doing $50 million a year, five times what we walked into. The growth came from going all-in on markets we could win, and running them on numbers instead of instinct.

After EatStreet we hired ourselves out: data work for whoever needed it, mostly tech companies. Then A. Marinelli & Sons, a fourth-generation building-materials wholesaler, brought us in. Sixty years of catalog, and half the products weren't earning their place; nobody had ever had a reason to ask. The businesses that needed us most weren't tech companies. They were multi-generational family businesses with decades of relationships and hard-won credibility, running on an ERP, a veteran's memory, and legal pads.

Pinto Brothers came to us the way most good things do in this industry: through people. Mutual friends introduced Dave and Alex Penza, and the conversation turned into a look at the data: product that ages by the hour, margin decided before lunch. What we found became the first Money Map: $1.8 million a year. John Vena Inc. came next, a Philadelphia produce name more than 100 years old.

Produce loses money quietly. A speculative load ages out in the cold room and gets dumped. A top account cuts orders in half and six weeks pass before anyone notices. The product rots, and nobody gets accused. None of it shows up as a line item. It just comes out of the year.