Twenty years building planning systems that hold up under pressure, across portfolios exceeding $500M, through acquisitions, system overhauls, and pandemic-era volatility. I build the infrastructure that lets organizations forecast with confidence and execute with precision.
New product launches are where planning either earns its keep or gets exposed. There is no history to lean on, materials have to be committed before demand is confirmed, and the window to get it right is short. New Belgium got it right consistently. From 2016 through 2024, a New Belgium brand held the #1 new product ranking across all U.S. beer eight out of nine years.
In 2024, New Belgium held three of the top five spots at once: #1 Voodoo Ranger Tropic Force IPA, #2 Voodoo Ranger Hard Charged Tea, and #5 Bell's Big Hearted. That kind of result does not happen by accident. It requires forecast discipline, supply readiness, and distributor coordination working together from the start of the planning cycle through the day the product hits the shelf.
The AOP had just been finalized when COVID-19 hit. New Belgium was one of the first breweries to shut down and send people home. The forecast was rebuilt within days: draft volume zeroed out, package volume maximized, larger formats prioritized. Brewing and packaging ran at capacity. Millions of cans were sourced globally, some arriving months later. Competitors went out of stock. New Belgium did not.
Distributors noticed. So did chain and convenience buyers, who rewarded consistent in-stock performance with more shelf space and better positioning. Points of Distribution grew from roughly 300,000 to over 650,000 by 2023. Four straight years of double-digit shipment growth followed.
When Mike joined New Belgium, there was one facility in Fort Collins. Over the next decade the network grew to include a greenfield brewery in Asheville (2016), the Bell's Brewing acquisition (2022), a production facility purchased from another brewery to add capacity for non-beer products (2023), and co-manufacturers making tea and seltzers. Each addition brought new item structures and data sources that needed to work inside a single planning system.
A two-year cross-departmental project, led by a dedicated project manager, produced the dataset and back-end infrastructure that made unified planning possible. Mike was a pivotal contributor to that team and used the foundation it built to author the Power BI dashboards the company relied on for supply chain planning. He also owned his portion of Master Data Management, ensuring his segment of item data was correctly structured and maintained, which was critical to keeping the dashboards accurate as the network grew.
Acquiring Bell's Brewing meant merging two separate planning systems: different SKU structures, distributor networks, and forecast logic. Shipments had slipped to -8% before the integration work took hold. The fix required rebuilding forecast inputs from scratch, aligning S&OP cadences across both brands, and establishing distributor relationships fast enough to stabilize demand signals. The recovery landed at +8%, a 16-point swing.
Purchasing had been managing materials planning through a mix of Excel worksheets with no direct connection to demand forecast outputs. A cross-functional team took on the problem, and Mike was a core contributor from design through delivery. He authored the Power BI dashboards that replaced the spreadsheet patchwork, connecting forecast output to raw materials planning, inventory aging, and supply coverage by SKU. He then maintained and updated the dashboards as the business and product mix changed. The Purchasing team adopted the system as their primary planning tool across the network.
Over ten years, the S&OP process at New Belgium grew with the business: from a single facility to a multi-site network with co-packers, from regional to 500+ distributors and 600,000+ points of distribution, from a focused lineup to a portfolio where nearly half of volume came from products launched after 2019. Each stage required updating the planning cadence, data inputs, and cross-functional alignment to match the new complexity.
The AOP process touched every department and historically took months to complete. Rather than accepting that as fixed, the process was treated as something that could be improved each cycle. Better tools, cleaner data flows, simpler templates, tighter cross-functional coordination. The improvements were incremental but they stuck. By 2025 the cycle ran two full months faster than it had before.
A representation of the multi-panel Power BI dashboard architecture built at New Belgium, connecting demand signals, inventory health, and forecast accuracy into a single planning view. All data shown is synthetic and for illustrative purposes only.
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"Mike really is a unicorn. Getting his interest and passion aligned with your team's goals is among the most powerful things you could do for your business."
If you can imagine someone who can achieve mastery over anything he puts his mind to in the time it takes most people just to make a choice, you'd be imagining Mike. Over more than 25 years I've seen Mike transform the business and personal landscape around him through focus and determination, multiple times.
Most people treat their current skill set as a ceiling; a fixed inventory of what they can and can't do. Mike treats it as a starting point. He sees any skill as learnable and any gap as closeable, and he closes them fast. For Mike, the things one must know and be able to do to solve a particular problem, however hard, are just the things he will master and make tools to ensure success.
I've worked with Mike at three companies and owe a substantial part of my own success to the things we have accomplished together, and I stand in awe at the things he has done on his own. Mike really is a unicorn. Getting his interest and passion aligned with your team's goals is among the most powerful things you could do for your business.
Tamarron's annual survey asks hundreds of beer distributors to score their supplier partners across supply chain operations. New Belgium ranked at or near the top in the categories most closely tied to planning work in 2024, and took first place overall again in 2025, making it back-to-back wins. The 2024 category detail is shown below.
Scored by distributor respondents · Tamarron Consulting · 2024 detail shown
7-Eleven is the largest beer-selling volume chain in the country. Each year at their national convention, attended by 14,000 franchisees, corporate staff, and suppliers, they recognize one supplier across the total alcohol category. In 2022, New Belgium took top honors. The award cited two factors: year-over-year dollar growth and overall customer support, which included consistent in-stock performance, category management, and reliable supply chain execution. The Chief Sales Officer's note to the company was direct: none of it is possible without operations and logistics planning.
"Operations & logistics for planning, production, and shipping purposes... none of it is possible without all of your hard work."
Michael Corrigan, Chief Sales Officer
New Belgium Brewing · February 2023
My focus is finding the right full-time planning leadership role. I work best where there is a real problem, a team willing to do the work, and leadership that values planning as a strategic function. Whether it is building or rebuilding an S&OP process, standing up a forecasting function, navigating a system transition, or bringing discipline to a planning cycle that has lost its footing, I am ready to step in and do the work.
I would also consider fractional and consulting engagements where I can drive meaningful impact for the right organization.
"I thrive where systems are still being built and the answers have yet to be written."