Field notes from circular commerce
Operating patterns and lessons from building and running recovery programs at Samsung and SquareTrade. Written for Ops and Strategy leaders who need working systems, not theory.
Recovery Economics
The CFO Filter: How Finance Decides Whether a Recovery Program Lives
When Finance kills a recovery program, it's rarely because it doubts the money: it's because it can't model it. What a CFO needs to see, why most recovery programs miss it, and what it took to get a trade-in program at Samsung inside Finance's model.
Execution Gaps #30
The Build-vs-Buy Question Almost Nobody Asks
Build vs. buy gets argued on capability and cost, and both have spreadsheet answers by Thursday. What actually decides it is where the operating learning ends up. The third option: buy the capability twice and keep the scoreboard.
Execution Gaps #29
My AI Invented a Trade-In Program That Never Existed
An AI research agent handed me a clean, well-sourced brief on a prospect that already ran a trade-in program. The program did not exist. The model had guessed it into being, because companies like that usually have one. Reliability never comes from a better model; it comes from the harness you build around it.
Execution Gaps #28
Don't Sell Circularity. Sell Control.
European operators built genuinely good circularity-first programs and watched them stall in the US. The engineering was rarely the problem. The program asked people to pay for a value they only ever applauded.
Execution Gaps #27
The Most Dangerous Process Is the One You Compiled
The execution gap everyone watches is intent that never executes. Its unwatched twin is execution that outlives its intent: a process frozen into an SOP and run confidently long after the right answer rotted.
Execution Gaps #26
The Recovery Half Your Dashboard Doesn't Show
A team hit every recovery rate target while the CFO said the program was losing money. Both were right. Recovery rate is half the measurement, and asset velocity is the half most dashboards leave out.
Execution Gaps #25
ITAD Has Always Been Bigger. The Mobile Playbook Is Moving In.
Mobile resale is the smaller side of device recovery, and it industrialized faster anyway. Now its operators are crossing into ITAD with the playbook in hand.
Execution Gaps #24
The Trade-In Ownership Mirage
A clerk at a carrier counter told me he owned the trade-in program. So did seven other people, up to the CFO. Every level of the org chart can name an owner, and none of them can move it.
Execution Gaps #23
The Friction That Never Generates an Escalation
An SLA miss gets a meeting within 48 hours. The approval everyone thinks takes a day but actually takes eleven gets nothing, because it never triggers an escalation. That is where the margin goes.
Execution Gaps #9
The Circularity Delta: Turn IT Asset Recovery from Cost Sink to Revenue Generator
Most companies lose 85-90% of hardware spend at end-of-life. The Circularity Delta reveals how much value you're leaving on the table - and how to recover it.
More to come. We publish to Substack first: Execution Gaps, a biweekly on where recovery programs leak margin and how operators close the gap. Pieces land here shortly after.