Episode 20. We made it to 20, so we're celebrating with a game: Would You Rather, The Supply Chain Edition.

No guest this week — just Keith and Dan putting operational dilemmas to each other and seeing where they land. A CEO who understands ops but won't stop interfering, or one who leaves you alone but knows nothing?

A warehouse manager who hits every number but destroys morale, or one everyone loves who never quite gets there?

Ten small problems a day, or one enormous crisis a year?

Along the way: a very real story about a crisis that put someone off an entire country, a warehouse where nobody used locations and somehow knew exactly where everything was, and a debate over negotiating a contract by smoke signal versus running a supply chain through a WhatsApp group with 400 unread messages.

It ends, fittingly, with the only Would You Rather that really matters this time of year: run Santa's entire worldwide Christmas Eve delivery, or manage a warehouse that exists to ship a single paperclip, forever.

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Supply chain and ops have a reputation problem: seen as the "support function," rarely in the room until something's already gone wrong. This week Keith and Dan are joined by Kevin Boyd, a leadership development consultant who's spent years inside organisations watching exactly why that happens — and what it takes to change it.

Across the episode: the moment a shipping manager who'd "been doing this since before you were born" became an unlikely ally, why chasing the hero's welcome for fixing a crisis quietly stops anyone from fixing the cause, and why a comfort zone doesn't have to feel comfortable to keep people stuck in it.

This one's about courage — not the loud kind. The kind that shows up in a trade meeting with a better answer than "that's not my fault."

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He once helped launch a laptop line — for a fashion brand that had never sold anything electrical — without warning his own warehouse it was coming. It didn't go smoothly, and it changed how he's worked ever since.

This week on Under the Pallet Wrap, Keith and Dan are joined by Jalil Rahman, Chief Commercial Officer, for a look at the oldest tension in business: commercial teams chasing the deal, operations teams trying to actually deliver on it. Across two decades in commercial leadership and licensing, Jalil's seen both sides of that gap up close — and makes the case that the best commercial deals aren't won, they're built together.

Along the way: why old-school "whoever says the first number loses" negotiating is dying out, the true cost of last-minute promotions on the warehouse floor, and a simple exercise — swapping seats with the other department for a day — that changed how one team saw each other for good.

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If your best person didn't show up tomorrow, what would actually break?

In this episode of Under The Pallet Wrap, Keith and Dan tackle succession planning — and the single points of failure hiding inside almost every operation, not just at the top, but in the planner, the supervisor, and the person who's quietly been holding a broken process together for years.

In this episode: – Why the biggest succession risk is rarely a director or a C-suite exit – Dan's experience of a sudden departure nearly taking part of a business down with it – Keith's own experience of becoming an unintentional bottleneck — and the points system he built to fix it – Why being "irreplaceable" is a trap, not a compliment – What good succession planning actually looks like on the ground.

New episodes of Under The Pallet Wrap every Thursday. Subscribe, and tell us your own single-point-of-failure story.

Most founders start a business because it's fun.

At some point, for almost everyone, it stops being fun and starts being a slog — and it's often hard to say exactly when that happened, or why.

Keith and Dan talk through the real warning signs: the founder who can't step away for a single day, decisions that only ever get made by one person, a process that worked perfectly a year ago and now quietly doesn't.

They dig into the difference between symptoms and root causes — why chasing "why is this costing so much" often misses the actual problem sitting underneath it — and the honest test for knowing whether it's time to bring someone in, versus just working harder at the wrong thing.

Your system says you've got the stock. The shelf disagrees. In this episode of Under the Pallet Wrap, Keith and Dan are joined by Phil Wilson from RGIS — 15 years in inventory and supply chain consulting, on top of 20 years before that in senior loss prevention and stock management at Sainsbury's — to unpack inventory drift: what it actually costs, where it really starts, and who should own fixing it.

Highlights include the Wimbledon strawberry order that accidentally wiped out an entire distribution centre's stock for one shop, the articulated lorry of beer sent to a single store by mistake, and a genuinely spicy debate on whether suppliers are really to blame for inventory errors (spoiler: usually not).

Whether you're running a warehouse, managing e-commerce fulfilment, or just trying to work out why your stock count never quite adds up, this one covers the real causes of drift — from picking errors to receiving processes to where AI is actually starting to help.

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Free returns became the default so long ago that most businesses stopped asking whether it should be. In this episode, Helen Baynes joins Keith and Dan to challenge that assumption.

Helen's been on the inside of this problem — from the early days of Net-a-Porter, where free returns helped convince people to buy clothes online at all, to building a supplement brand where a traditional returns policy made no sense at all. Her fix there wasn't "free returns" — it was a 30-day money-back guarantee built around what customers actually needed reassurance about.

The conversation digs into why most businesses still measure "valuable customers" by spend alone — missing frequency, longevity, and the small cohort quietly ordering a dozen items and returning all of them, every time. And why incentivisation almost always focuses on getting the sale, never on what happens after it.

Should returns always be free? Helen, Keith and Dan all land on the same answer: no. It depends on your product, your customer, and whether you're brave enough to actually ask them.

You know you should be doing something with AI. You just don't know what.

This week Keith and Dan sit down with Vince — building with AI since before ChatGPT existed — for the honest version most people skip: what AI can genuinely do for your operations, where it falls apart no matter how good the pitch deck looks, and the one thing Vince checks before any business spends a penny on automation.

Along the way: the moment one of Vince's AI agents formally filed a complaint about another AI agent for "getting a little bit chippy about scope creep." An AI, snitching on another AI. Nobody saw that coming.

Sharp, funny, and worth the listen before you commit budget to something you'd have to explain in therapy.

Two supply chain leaders, one honest disagreement: is silo thinking really about structure - departments, hierarchy, org charts - or is it always, underneath, a leadership failure?

Keith and Dan trace it through a £60 million warehouse project nearly undone by two teams who never thought to talk to each other, a managerless company that made Keith question everything he believed about hierarchy, and a chaotic 250-email saga that got fixed by cutting it down to seven real steps.

Along the way: HBR and McKinsey data on just how much of the average business's performance gap comes down to nothing more than people simply not talking to each other. Not a lecture on collaboration - a real argument about where the responsibility actually sits.

Two experienced supply chain operators sit down to ask a real question: what's actually changed in warehouse and logistics leadership — and what hasn't?

Keith and Dan trace decision-making from handwritten dispatch notes and gut-feel routing to dashboards, data, and AI, and land on an uncomfortable truth: the data didn't replace judgement, it just changed what judgement looks like.

This isn't a nostalgia trip — it's a conversation about which instincts still matter, which skills quietly disappeared, and why the best operators still know when to override the model. If you work in supply chain, ops, or logistics, this one's for you.