Synuma, LLC

Restaurant chains, retail brands, and franchise systems open new locations as their primary growth engine. The work spans site selection, lease negotiation, permitting, construction, hiring, and opening. It involves dozens of people across legal, real estate, construction, and operations. Most companies were managing it in spreadsheets and email chains, losing weeks per project to coordination gaps.

We founded Synuma in 2017 to fix that. A B2B SaaS platform that tracked the full lifecycle of brick-and-mortar location development, with role-based workflows for each function and executive dashboards rolling everything up.

I designed and implemented the entire Agile product development process. One-week sprints, release planning every six weeks, continuous deployment, customer feedback loops baked into every release. The whole company ran on the cadence, not just engineering.

I served as CEO and Fractional Chief Product Owner, with cross-functional leadership across product, marketing, and sales. We competed against entrenched solutions and won by being faster to iterate on customer feedback than anyone else in the space.

We bootstrapped the company. Every dollar of growth funded the next quarter. By the time we entered acquisition conversations, we had passed $1M in annual recurring revenue with zero outstanding debt. A cleanliness that made the diligence process short and the deal terms strong.

SiteZeus, a leader in location intelligence and site selection analytics, was the right home for Synuma. Their data and our workflow were a natural fit. They had the analytics that told operators where to build, and we had the system of record for how they built.

I led the post-acquisition integration as Fractional Chief Agile Officer at SiteZeus through 2023, embedding the Synuma Agile playbook into their broader product organization and rebuilding one of their core teams in the process (see the SiteZeus case study).

One-week sprints sound aggressive until you've run them. They force everything to be small. Decisions get made faster because you can't wait a quarter for clarity. Customer feedback arrives while the feature is still fresh in everyone's heads. Bad ideas die quickly. I'll keep using them as my default cadence for any product I'm close to.

Bootstrapping was the other key choice. We could've raised. Not raising meant we made every product decision against revenue instead of against narrative, and it meant the exit math worked for the founders, not just the cap table.