How we work
Let’s talk before you commit.
New supplier. New SKU. New market. New shipment. Or something you’ve done the same way for years.
That can be a diagnostic, a project, or a fractional seat.
Your broker keeps filing your entries and your forwarder keeps booking your freight. I work upstream — on the product, sourcing, specifications, cost assumptions and operating decisions that shape what gets handed to them. I'm not a licensed customs broker or a trade attorney.
Typical decisions I get brought into
Diagnostic
Find what actually deserves attention.
- Expansion review — a new country, category or supplier, go or no-go with numbers.
- Classification check — the codes on your recent entries, corrected and owned in house.
- Supplier re-qualification — who makes what, and whether they still should.
Project
Work one defined problem through execution.
- Sourcing & ops audit — the four decisions across the catalog, end to end.
- Market introductions — a vetted factory or buyer, handed over so the contact is yours.
- Written product specification — what you agreed to buy, in writing your factory can be held to.
Fractional
Keep Hannah in the room as decisions keep arriving.
- Interim coverage — full-time stretch while you hire, transition or restructure.
- Ongoing supplier / shipment / cost / launch decision support.
- Written reasoning and institutional memory remain in the business.
What I bring
Access.
Real relationships with manufacturers in Korea, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia and Mexico, and with importers and distributors across six Latin American markets. Built over twenty years, entirely through referral. Finding a factory was never the hard part — getting one to care about a small account is.
The decisions that keep arriving.
Every new SKU needs a code. Every new supplier needs vetting. Every new market has its own rules. Every volume change moves the freight and MOQ math. That operational queue never empties, which is the only honest reason to keep someone on.
Getting product to market.
A new category or a new country, taken through the practical economics and the execution: who can make it, whether you can meet their minimums, what it lands at all-in at each volume tier, where your capital is exposed if the first order is wrong.
If the decisions keep coming, I stay.
Fractional Head of Sourcing & Import Operations. A retained seat, typically 10 hours a week.
The ongoing supplier, SKU, shipment and cost decisions come through the seat instead of getting made in a hurry. Everything I advise, you keep in writing, so the reasoning stays documented in the business and the institutional memory remains after the decision is made.
You stop finding out about problems on the invoice.
What I bring applies to project work too — fractional is simply the ongoing relationship. If nothing’s changing, you need one project, and I’ll be the first to tell you.
How founders arrive → what the founder gets
How founders arrive
What the founder gets
The code your duty rate rides on was set years ago, and nobody has re-decided it since
Your codes chosen in house, with the reasoning in writing — ready for the day someone asks
Containers booked last-minute at whatever the day's rate is, with a third of the box empty
A shipping calendar your team runs instead of reacting to
Factory prices agreed over email, with no written product specification behind them
A written specification your factory signs and can be held to
A supplier inherited years ago that nobody has ever re-qualified
A supplier file with real qualification behind it — who makes what, and why
No answer to “which products survive a ten-point duty increase?”
A product-by-product duty picture, so the next tariff layer is arithmetic, not panic
A short back-and-forth, then straight to my calendar.