Physical products
Manufacturing realities, capacity decisions, and quality-control demands that get harder to manage as volume grows.
Founder-side operator for product businesses
Your business outgrew improvisation.
I install the operating structure your business needs and build the custom tools to support it — inside the engagement.
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Best fit: founder-led physical products, e-commerce, Amazon-heavy, and inventory-complex businesses — typically $2M–$20M revenue.
Free 30-minute call · No prep needed · If there's a fit, we scope a Diagnostic. If not, we don't.
Two operating realitiesFig. 01
Everything routes through one person
Ops
Marketing
Finance
Inventory
Sales
Founder
Operating System
Cadence
Reporting
Ownership
Visibility
Decisions
Escalations
Approvals
“At some point, the thing holding the company back stops being the product and starts being how it's run.”
Who Foundryside helps
Who Foundryside helps
Real product businesses with real operating complexity.
I work with founder-led product companies where the growth is real, the complexity is real, and the business still depends too much on founder memory and founder follow-through.
E-commerce and Amazon
Multiple channels, platform-specific risk, and the operating strain that comes with speed and scale.
Inventory complexity
Purchasing, lead times, logistics, and working capital decisions that need one operating picture.
Founder overload
Too many decisions, approvals, escalations, and follow-throughs still route through one person.
What is usually breaking
What is usually breaking
Growth has compounded. So has complexity.
The founder is the bottleneck.
The team can move fast in places, but the system can only move at the founder's pace.
The numbers exist, but they do not drive.
Reporting may be present, but it is late, inconsistent, disconnected from execution, or not useful enough to improve decisions.
Accountability is soft.
Good people, unclear ownership. Work moves, but no one is clearly on the hook for the outcome.
Ops and decisions are disconnected.
Inventory, purchasing, channel, and execution decisions happen without enough operating visibility tying them together.
What this looks like in practice
What this looks like in practice
Operating fixes you can measure.
2× productivity in twelve months
A per-station logging system feeds a live shop-floor scoreboard, with sign-in lights and production scores driving weekly bonus calculations. The mechanism wasn't motivation — performance finally became legible enough to reward high performers and retain them. After a year of natural turnover, the whole team was high-performing. I can build a similar custom system in a week.
Reporting that drives decisions
System-of-record plumbing: connecting inventory, AP, marketplaces, fulfillment, accounting, and the reporting layer on top — Katana, Ramp, A2X for Amazon settlement reconciliation, ShipStation or Amazon MCF through Shopify, QuickBooks or Sage Intacct depending on scale, Metabase or Hex for reporting that actually drives. Whatever the stack, most “our reporting is bad” problems are “our data isn't connected” problems.
What Foundryside does
What Foundryside does
Operating structure, practical tools, and clear accountability.
Most engagements move through the same three stages, from diagnosis to reset to continued support.
01
Stage 1
Operational Diagnostic
A first read of how the business actually runs, not how the org chart says it does: where bottlenecks really are, where reporting fails to drive decisions, and what the highest-leverage fixes look like.
02
Stage 2
12-Week Operational Reset
A focused engagement to tighten decision rhythm, build the reporting and visibility the business actually needs, harden accountability, and reduce how much still depends on the founder.
Where the fix needs custom software — internal tools, integration plumbing, real-time visibility — I build it as part of the work, not as a separate project handed to a developer.
03
Stage 3
Ongoing Fractional Support
Continued founder-side operating help for businesses that benefit from senior operating judgment, follow-through, and practical build capability after the reset.
AI changes what one operator can deliver
How Foundryside works with AI
The differentiator isn't that I bring AI into your business. It's that AI compresses the cost of building the tools your business actually needs — to the point where one operator can ship them.
So when I see an operating gap, “we'd need to build something for that” stops being the reason it doesn't get fixed. Internal apps, real-time visibility, and integration plumbing ship inside the operating work, not as a separate software project.
01 / System First
Fix the operating system before automating it
A weak process with automation layered on top is still a weak process. I focus first on operating structure, ownership, reporting, and decision flow. Once those are clear, it becomes much easier to identify where AI will help and where it will just add noise.
Why Foundryside
Most operators don't build. Most builders don't operate.
I'm not a generic consultant, and I'm not selling abstract strategy.
I work founder-side, as an operator: I diagnose the operating constraint, install the cadence and ownership model, build the visibility layer when it's needed, and stay accountable to whether the business runs better.
The combination is the differentiator: senior judgment, founder-side accountability, hands-on delivery, bounded scope.
Craig Stoller
Founder, Foundryside
Questions founders ask
Questions founders ask
Before you book the call.
How much of my time will this take?
Less than you're spending now on the problems it fixes. A Reset runs on a weekly working session with you, usually one team touchpoint, and structured async follow-through between them. The point is fewer, more focused meetings — not a new layer of them.
What does it cost?
Pricing is scoped in a written proposal after the intro call, based on the complexity of the engagement — never by the hour, and never open-ended. The intro call itself is free, always. The Diagnostic is a paid, fixed-scope engagement; if all you ever buy is clarity, that's a complete outcome.
What do I actually get from a Diagnostic?
A focused read of how the business actually runs — roughly three to four weeks, paced by your team's availability for interviews: where the bottlenecks really are, where reporting fails to drive decisions, where accountability is soft. You get a written readout plus a live walkthrough, with the highest-leverage fixes ranked. It stands alone; some engagements stop there.
We mostly need something built. Is that a fit?
Yes — when the build is part of an operating fix. I build custom tools constantly: reporting plumbing, internal apps, real-time visibility. What I'm not is a dev shop — if there's no operating layer to the work at all, I'm the wrong hire, and I'll tell you that on the call.
What if we're smaller than $2M — or bigger than $20M?
The band describes the center of the work, not a gate. The real tests are simpler: the business is founder-led, the complexity is real, and too much still routes through you. If that's you at $1.5M or $30M, bring it to the call. Pre-revenue is the one honest no.
Will this disrupt my team — or replace anyone?
The work is designed to lower the noise, not add to it: fewer, more focused meetings, clearer ownership. And the tools I build are about making the operation legible — capturing what lives in people's heads and spreadsheets into systems the whole team can run — not about cutting the people who run it.
Do you work remotely or onsite?
Remote-first, with onsite time where it earns its cost — production floors in particular are hard to diagnose over Zoom.
What happens after the 12 weeks?
A clean exit is a fine outcome: the structure, reporting, and tools are yours and keep running. Companies that want continued senior operating judgment can move to fractional support — but the Reset is designed so you don't need me afterward.
Anything not covered here — bring it to the call. Thirty minutes, free, no prep, and you'll leave with a sharper read on the operation either way.
How it starts
If the business feels harder to run than it should, it usually is, and it is usually fixable. A short conversation is the place to start.
Free 30-minute call · No prep needed · If there's a fit, we scope a Diagnostic. If not, we don't.