Your career journey spans majoring in Dance & Philosophy, an MBA from MIT, strategy consulting at BCG, and now heading merchandising at Sysco. Please walk us through the pivotal moments of your career and how they have shaped your personal and professional growth.

Looking back, I think there are four pivotal moments:

The first big one was when I had a serious knee injury that took me out of ballet for several months, right after securing a spot with my “dream” company. While I recovered, I had the chance to support that dance company from the back office: helping with administrative tasks, interacting with donors, hosting events, and working with our PR and marketing agencies. I’ll forever be grateful for that experience, which showed me that I actually loved running a business—so much, in fact, that when my surgeon cleared me to go back to dance, I opted to hang up the dance shoes and start looking for a completely different career.

Fast-forward a few years, I had carved out an interesting spot for myself in working with small beverage brands and businesses in the Bay Area. While my work was interesting, I wanted to do bigger things and realized that my degrees in Dance and Philosophy didn’t exactly give me all the tools I needed. I decided to go to business school and was incredibly fortunate to be accepted to MIT.

MIT was an eye-opening experience for me. I certainly had to work a lot harder than most of my peers, who had heavy exposure to finance, analytics, and accounting from their more “traditional” paths. I also found the recruiting experience to be pivotal for me, because it was the first time that I realized my nontraditional background was an advantage, not a detractor. MIT and the internship recruiting process taught me how to lean into being authentic and how to appreciate that it can be a strategic advantage to solve problems in my own unique ways.

From MIT, I made my way to BCG and had the chance to gain exposure to a bunch of different topics and teams before finding my pyramid and my home in grocery retail. The one experience I always think back to is the year I was the recruiting director for the Miami office. Being an RD is stressful, with a demanding travel schedule and a constant need to be “herding the cats.” But the most important part of being an RD is figuring out how to connect with a diverse set of candidates so that each connection feels meaningful and authentic to them—and then, through those connections, building a class that meets the needs of the business. I draw on my learnings from my RD days often in managing my team at Sysco, in terms of how I approach recruiting as well as team dynamics.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t count leaving BCG to join Sysco as a pivotal moment in my career. I was not looking for a new role, and was quite happy at BCG. However, the chance to lead merchandising at such a large company and to have a front-row seat to massive industry changes happening as a result of COVID was too good of an opportunity to pass up—not to mention that I’m a crazy foodie and would love to spend all day every day thinking about restaurants! I’m thankful I had the guts to take the leap to Sysco despite it not being part of the plan at all, because it was the right role, with the right team, in the right industry, even if it wasn’t quite at the time I wanted it to happen.

As chief merchandising officer at Sysco, how do you leverage the management consulting principles you took with you from BCG to enhance Sysco’s supply chain resilience strategy?

I leverage a lot of the core management consulting principles every day as my team and I focus on supply chain resiliency. A few key principles and how they apply include the following:

• Led by Data. We start with the facts, and let data guide our actions and our efforts. Reporting shows which types of products need the most attention or where we think an issue might be coming from. Data also helps us better manage suppliers and help them be better in their ability to serve us.
• Framework-Driven. It would be easy to boil the ocean across our tens of thousands of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of items. Having a few simple, powerful frameworks for how to navigate our portfolio and how to address different types of supply chain issues helps the team stay efficient and find scalable solutions.
• PMO Mindset. To manage the complexity of our business and to ensure we’re continually improving on supply chain resiliency, we use project management office (PMO) best practices to ensure we are doing the right work. Targets, tracking, templates, and regular meeting cadences keep us organized and effective.
• Hypothesis First. We’ve now had a couple of years to really dig into the supply chain failings of COVID and understand what went wrong and how. That means that, today, when approaching supply chain topics, my team doesn’t need to be spending a lot of time on root cause diagnosis. We operate off of hypotheses now, based on really good pattern recognition, and good data, which gets us working on resolving issues faster.

Please describe a challenging project you’ve led at Sysco, how it differed from your previous experiences at BCG, and how you navigated it.

I joined Sysco in July of 2021 at what was the perfect storm for the foodservice industry: the height of food supply chain disruptions and the beginning of the great “bounce back” of restaurant demand. Fill rates of orders from our suppliers were at all-time lows, so I had to throw my 100-day plan out the window, get on the phone, and find product.

This situation immediately showed me how different Sysco was going to be from my time at BCG. If I had been a BCG partner supporting Sysco in this endeavor, I’d have had a PL+2 draw up a PMO structure: a value-ranked list of suppliers to call, a tracker to record call activity, a tracker to record outcomes at the warehouse, and a crack team working on mitigation strategies like finding alternative suppliers, doing SKU rationalization, etc. We’d stand this up for a few weeks, teach the client how to run it, and then roll off.

My reality was that, well, it was my reality. I was on the phone and, in many instances, in the room with the suppliers. We were having real-time negotiations about which SKU was more important, or how to optimize allocation because they only had enough labor to staff one shift instead of three. I didn’t just feel like I was disappointing a client by not finding a solution to every problem; I was disappointing team members, colleagues, and—worst of all—customers.

The silver lining to the supply chain disruptions happening during the very beginning of my tenure at Sysco was that I was deep in the trenches with our supplier partners right away. I will always remember who stepped up and dug deep for Sysco and for Sysco’s customers, and who worked on a compromise with me to get the right things done. It was the start of some great partnerships and the start of doing some things very differently in merchandising in the foodservice industry.

During your tenure at BCG, you progressed from summer consultant to partner, working in various cities. How did your leadership style evolve at BCG, and how does it continue to influence your approach to leading your team at Sysco?

Progressing upward at BCG was an exercise in getting better at fragmentation. I needed to learn very quickly what to worry about versus what to let go, and what was fixable versus what would not be if I let it break. I could read the energy in a room, and read a client’s or senior partner’s body language. These were all survival tactics so that I could manage case complexity and fragmentation in a semi-sustainable way.

With a 500+ person global team, over $50 billion in spend, and hundreds of thousands of unique items in our product portfolio today, I’m drawing upon all of those survival tactics and more. It’s still incredibly important to be able to quickly assess the criticality of an issue, and the “soft” skills around reading customers’ and suppliers’ nonverbal cues are important when we’re working through issues together.

All of that said, there are two very big differences in how I lead my team at Sysco. The first is with people: I have a very stable team of people who, in many instances, have been at Sysco for decades. There is a level of familiarity and subject matter expertise to draw upon that truly helps in times of crisis and in times of going after new opportunities. The second big difference is time: working in industry in a function like merchandising is not project based. We’re in it for the long term here, so I make decisions about how I spend my time and how I push the team with more of a marathon mindset than I did during my time at BCG.

Reflecting on your time at BCG, please share a memorable project, case team experience, or piece of advice that significantly impacted your professional development. What lessons did you take away from it?

In 2019, I received a phone call about an incredible opportunity to lead a big piece of work for a multinational retailer in China. I was totally unqualified for the project: it was located in a country I had never been to, conducted in a language I did not speak, delivering on topics I had not done before, bringing together multiple parts of BCG including product development and data science, and including over 30 BCGers spread around the globe.

Like any good BCG principal, I said “yes” to this opportunity and promptly went about securing my visa. Was it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? Absolutely. Did I learn any Mandarin? Only the phrases for “promotion” and “cannibalization.” Were there tears shed and perhaps a few moments of regret? Sure.

That project was also the smartest decision I’ve ever made. It showed me the power of BCG: by saying yes to something that might seem impossible, and believing in the support structure of the firm, I had an incredible development opportunity. That project showed me that I can pull off just about anything with the right team around me, which is an incredibly important lesson for anyone to learn. Ultimately, it showed me to always say “yes.”

In your view, what key skills are essential for leaders in supply chain, procurement, and merchandising? What would you share with fellow alumni looking to excel in these fields?

In no particular order, these are a few skills I see as non-negotiable:

• Problem-Solving Skills. Particularly in a post-COVID world, things can and will go wrong in supply chain, procurement, and merchandising. It’s critical to be not only an exceptional problem-identifier (BCG folks are great at that) but also a very skilled problem-solver, being able to have not only one but often two or three feasible solutions to a problem at hand.
• Execution Bias. Analysis gets you attention, but results get you promoted. If you can figure out how to execute well, by being a great cross-functional partner, you’ll go incredibly far as a merchant or supply chain professional.
• P&L Fluency. It’s critical as a merchant or supply chain professional to very quickly learn how the organization makes money, and how you can directly influence specific levers in the P&L in ways others cannot. Come up with a list of ways to drive value, rank them by size and by speed, and start executing.
• Extremely Good Influencing and Relationship Skills. Whether it’s in a negotiation externally with a supplier or internally for constrained resources, you won’t always get what you want. It’s important to invest in the right relationships so you can draw on them when necessary. People work with people they want to work with, and people go out of their way to collaborate with people they want to see do well. Invest in the right relationships and stay in touch with the right people—I promise it is worth it.
• Resiliency. Did I mention things will go wrong, often every day? I joke with my team that merchants never hear good news, only things that need to get fixed. These types of roles require a very resilient person who can have thick skin, who can handle a lot of very direct feedback from the field and from customers. It can be rewarding, however, once you learn how to turn that feedback into a greater outcome the first time around. And as a last resort, it’s helpful to have a really finely developed sense of humor.