How I work
Executives bring me in when customer data should be earning more than it is: a supplier insights business to design, a loyalty programme that needs to pay its way, analytics investment that has not yet changed how decisions get made.
The work sits on a bridge most organisations split across three functions. I am technical enough to direct data scientists, commercial enough to sit credibly with trading teams and suppliers, and senior enough to take the outcome to a board. Twenty years of translating between those rooms is why engagements move quickly.
Supplier insights and data monetisation
Designing the proposition a retailer takes to its suppliers: the product, the pricing and commercial model, governance, and the operating model and roadmap to run it. The principle underneath is one I learned at dunnhumby and have applied ever since:
“Suppliers pay for decision support that improves how they trade, not for access to data, and the revenue funds a stronger customer offer.”
Interim and fractional leadership
Commercial intelligence, customer analytics or insights leadership by the day or by the phase. Standing up a new function, steadying one through change, or holding a senior seat properly while you hire it.
Capability, operating model and AI
How the function should work: what to build, buy and partner for; how AI moves out of pilots and into the pricing, range, promotion and customer decisions it should be improving; and the operating model that makes it stick.
Underneath those shapes sit the domains I go deep in: loyalty and personalisation, category management, supplier insights and retail media, and AI-enabled commercial decision-making.
Who I work with
I work with retailers, and with FMCG and consumer brands on the other side of the same table: category strategy, and making better commercial use of the retailer data programmes they already pay for. Engagements run under strict confidentiality. I am careful about conflicts, and I will tell you if one exists.
What an engagement feels like
You deal with the person doing the work. I engage directly with executive teams, with no pyramid underneath me; an AI-augmented delivery method does what a partner and a floor of juniors once did, faster and with nothing lost in translation. Scope is agreed plainly, priced by the day or by the phase, with a defined end point.
Current engagement: Supplier Insights Advisor for a major Australian home improvement retailer, designing its supplier insights capability from proposition to operating model.
If this sounds like your problem, email me: andy@avradvisory.com.au