Business Strategy & Performance Manager

Overview

You work across sales, operations, carrier sales, pricing, and market intelligence teams at KCH Transportation to develop and execute network strategies. You're analyzing freight lanes, carrier capacity, pricing trends, and sales pipeline to figure out where the company should expand and how to optimize operations. This sits somewhere between rev ops, business operations, and strategic planning - heavy on data analysis and cross-functional coordination.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Mature/Growth stage (316 employees, established business)

Size: 316 employees

Growth: Actively expanding based on VP posting for team growth

Market Position: Mid-sized logistics provider in a fragmented, competitive freight market. Competing against both large 3PLs and specialized carriers.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Data Analysis (30%) | Cross-Functional Meetings (35%) | Strategic Projects (25%) | Reporting (10%)

Key Activities

• Network Analysis: Pull data on freight lanes, capacity utilization, carrier performance, and margins. Identify which routes are profitable, where there's whitespace, where they're losing money. Build models to show impact of adding capacity or entering new lanes.
• Cross-Functional Coordination: Sit in meetings with sales (hearing what customers need), ops (understanding capacity constraints), carrier sales (knowing what trucks are available), and pricing (figuring out margins). Translate between departments who often have competing priorities.
• Strategic Initiative Management: Own projects like "expand Mexico shipping" or "optimize drayage network." Build the business case, get buy-in from stakeholders, track execution, report on results. Most projects take 3-6 months and involve herding cats across teams.
• Performance Reporting: Build dashboards and reports showing how different business units are performing. Track KPIs like load volume, revenue per lane, carrier costs, on-time delivery. Present findings to leadership monthly.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Data Quality Issues: Logistics data is messy. You'll spend time cleaning TMS data, reconciling discrepancies between systems, and dealing with incomplete information. Not all carriers report consistently.
• Competing Priorities: Sales wants to say yes to every customer. Ops has capacity constraints. Carrier sales has limited truck availability. Pricing wants margin. You're constantly trying to find the middle ground and make trade-offs.
• Slow Execution: Logistics operations don't change overnight. A "quick win" project might take 4-6 months because you need carrier contracts, sales training, operational procedures, and system updates. Expect friction and delays.
• Limited Tools: This isn't a tech company. You're probably working with Excel, maybe Tableau, pulling data from their TMS and cobbling together analyses. Don't expect a modern data stack.

What Success Looks Like

• Launch 2-3 major strategic initiatives per year that move the needle (new service line, geographic expansion, network optimization)
• Build a consistent reporting cadence that leadership actually uses to make decisions
• Become the go-to person for "should we do this?" questions across the business

Who You're Working With

Key Partners:

• VP Business Initiatives (your boss - Ian Walters, reports to exec team)
• Sales leaders (need to understand customer demand and pipeline)
• Operations managers (understand capacity and execution constraints)
• Carrier Sales (understand truck availability and carrier relationships)
• Pricing team (understand margin and rate structures)
• Market Intelligence (understand freight market trends)

What They Need From You:

• Clear recommendations backed by data (not just analysis paralysis)
• Project management to drive initiatives to completion
• Translation between technical ops language and business strategy language
• Realistic timelines and expectations (not consultant-style pie in the sky)

Requirements

• 3-5 years in logistics, supply chain, or freight - need to understand the industry mechanics
• Strong Excel/data analysis skills - you'll be building models and wrangling messy data
• Cross-functional project management experience - able to drive initiatives without direct authority
• Logistics TMS or operational systems experience helpful (understanding freight workflows)
• Comfort with ambiguity - this role isn't tightly defined, you'll need to figure out priorities
• Willingness to get operational - this isn't ivory tower strategy, you need to understand how freight actually moves