Hiring Isn't Always Growth: What a Wall of Job Posts Might Really Be Telling You Scroll through LinkedIn and you'll see it: a company posting role after role, week after week. Most people assume it's growing, and job seekers read it as momentum. Sometimes that's right. Often it is... Nov 5, 2026
The Compound Interest of a Broken Culture Companies that leave morale and culture problems unfixed don't pay once. They pay in installments: first in errors and rework, then in turnover among their best people, then with customers, and finall... Oct 6, 2026
The Vendors Just Changed the Price Tag The operator's read on AI • Week of August 24, 2026 Two AI labs raced toward the stock market this month. They could not look more different. Anthropic posted its first profitable quarter: $11.5 billi... Aug 26, 2026
Josh Hoffner The Vendors Just Changed the Price Tag The operator's read on AI • Week of August 18, 2026 This week the machine got bigger and louder. Cisco booked $9.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders. CoreWeave doubled revenue again and lost $626 mi... Aug 18, 2026
Demand a Denominator: The AI Spend Nobody Can Measure 4 million AI agents were registered on Microsoft's platform in two months. Nobody can tell you what they did. "Registered" is a row in a database. Microsoft did not report what those agents finished, ... Aug 13, 2026
Why I Started The Cedar Stack For twenty years I ran operations. I helped scale one company from $5 million to $150 million in revenue, put in the ERP, untangled the supply chain, and managed through the messes that never make the... Aug 13, 2026
The Hidden Costs of Your First Target Contract Every CPG founder dreams of seeing their products on Target’s shelves—but most don’t realize that a single compliance violation can wipe out an entire quarter’s profit in penalties. The true cost of e... Aug 13, 2026
The Real Cost of Rapid Growth: Why 70% of CPG Brands Break Their Operations When Casper hit $100 million in sales, they celebrated—until they discovered their operational costs were consuming 87% of revenue and their repeat customer rate was below 16%, forcing them into a dea... Aug 13, 2026
The Great Consolidation: Why 2025 is the Year of Operational Mergers The $67 Billion Wake-Up Call When Michael Dell stood before 140,000 employees in September 2016 to close the largest technology acquisition in history, he knew something most observers missed: the $67... Aug 13, 2026
The $2.3 Million Mistake That Took 14 Minutes to Create and 8 Months to Discover A director at a major consumer goods company approved a production line change during a quick hallway conversation. No documentation. No ownership assignment. No follow-up protocol. That 14-minute con... Aug 13, 2026
Supply Chain Resilience in 2025: What CPG Brands Learned from Recent Disruptions The brands that survived the last five years didn’t just weather the storm—they used it to build unbreakable supply chains while their competitors crumbled. The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally transfo... Aug 13, 2026
Beyond the Spreadsheet: Why Human Biases Are the Unseen Force in Your Operations May had been rising through the ranks for fifteen years. Now a VP of Operations at a growing $150M CPG company, she brought with her a strong belief in the power of data. She had spearheaded the adopt... Aug 13, 2026