Ryan Cosby, FP&A Manager at Salon Service Group, joins Aaron Sheehan for a ground-level look at B2B beauty distribution. Ryan shares how SSG manages cost-to-serve across multiple channels, wrestles with pricing complexity and margin leakage, and navigates the messy realities of month-end close. He also breaks down what vendors need to bring to the table to earn a yes from finance.

Episode Highlights:

00:35 – Introduction: Meet Ryan Cosby & Salon Service Group

01:50 – How SSG's Distribution Model Works: Salons, Licenses & the Back Bar

03:25 – Cost-to-Serve: Is the Digital Channel Cheaper?

06:00 – Giving Reps Visibility Into eCommerce Behavior

07:34 – Commissioning Reps on eComm Sales and Why It Matters

08:50 – Pricing Complexity: Custom Agreements and Margin Leakage

12:40 – Sales Tax Complexity and Why SSG Uses Vertex

15:00 – The Tech Stack: System 2000, Qlik, and Excel

18:58 – Month-End Close: Reconciling Two Different Data Structures

22:07 – AI in FP&A: What SSG Is Piloting With Qlik

26:00 – What a Vendor Business Case Needs to Survive an FP&A Review

30:35 – Advice for Digital Champions Making the Case Up the Chain

34:45 – Payments Across Channels: Cards on File, Chargebacks & Debit Card Risk

39:16 – Ryan’s media recommendations

Resources Mentioned:

• Qlik — BI and analytics tool used by SSG
• Vertex — Sales tax automation platform
• Imbibe Magazine — Ryan's go-to for drinks culture, recommending it as a great example of a media brand quietly and successfully reinventing itself.

What happens when you drop an LLM on top of five ERPs and a decade of M&A? Aaron Sheehan and analyst Heather Hershey map the practical path: B2B use cases that work, risks that don’t, and why chunk-by-chunk modernization beats “robot, take the wheel.”

01:06 – Welcome back and introducing Heather Hershey

03:35 – Defining AI, LLMs, and RAG

09:30 – Why probabilistic AI makes ops teams nervous

11:58 – Is LLM an overkill compared to ‘boring’ machine learning and rule-based systems?

15:19 – The real blocker: fragmented data across ERPs and other systems

19:40 – The strangler pattern: modernize in chunks instead of ripping everything out

21:13 – Why commerce platforms become the orchestration layer for AI/NLP

24:37 – If you had $100K for AI: where to spend it

27:27 – Prisoner’s dilemma: agentic shopping and the disintermediation trap

34:53 – Agentic commerce predictions for B2B

40:30 – Are people replacing Google with LLMs?

This week, we met Kyle Gustafson, civil engineer by training, digital commerce expert by career. From scaling office supply giants to building businesses at Amazon, Kyle reflects on what digital transformation really takes and why WIFM – “What’s in it for me?” – is the key to adoption and growth.

00:00 – Introduction: Meet Kyle Gustafson & His Career Path

02:00 – Lessons from Office Depot, Staples, and OfficeMax

04:00 – Building Private Brands and Supply Chains at Amazon

06:35 – Transformation Mindset: Thinking 20 Years Ahead

11:35 – Why Companies Call for Help: Common Consulting Triggers

17:40 – Defining eCommerce: Where’s the line?

21:33 – Why Digital Transformation Never Really Ends

28:40 – Tech Adoption and the Power of WIFM

34:10 – The Alexa Microwave Story: When Customer Value Isn’t There

39:23 – Leadership Lessons from Mentor Ron Lala

45:10 – Book Recommendations & Closing Thoughts

Resources Mentioned

• Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
• Malcolm Gladwell – The Revenge of the Tipping Point
• Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley – The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI