JD Davenport

I build the systems a company runs on, and then I audit them to find out whether they are telling the truth.

What the job actually is

Today I am Director of Sales at a residential contracting company in West Michigan. On paper that is a sales job. In practice it has meant compensation structures, job costing, lead distribution, territory design, hiring standards, and the audits that keep all of it honest.

I took the seat after the sales organization lost five of its ten producing consultants, the five who carried 54.3 percent of the prior year’s revenue. What happened next is the reason everything on this site exists.

Volume went up sharply and profit did not follow. More jobs, smaller tickets, and margin falling while everybody was busy. Nothing in that was visible in a monthly total. It only showed up when the numbers were expanded to job level and put on a matched window, which is exactly the work The Job Cost Standard is. Every kit here came out of a problem that was costing that company money and could not be seen from a summary line.

The compensation plan went from analysis to signed adoption in eight days, behind a 20 percent job margin floor, and no historical job was repriced to fund it. That last part is not a detail. It is the difference between a change people accept and a change people resent, and it is written into The Commission Standard as a rule rather than left as a preference.

The rest of the year was written down rather than remembered: a 19 question, 95 point behavioral interview scorecard applied to more than forty candidates, a 144 page field guide that became the training and evaluation standard, a 512 row job cost workbook carrying two commission regimes at once, eleven custom CRM reports, five dashboards, and sixteen consecutive weekly executive summaries.

Before that

Four and a half years at a publicly traded specialty retailer, finishing as Director of Supply Chain Development. I implemented Manhattan point of sale and warehouse management across 67 retail locations and two distribution centers, through configuration, quality assurance, user acceptance testing and end to end testing. I took over the warehouse management configuration mid project, during end to end testing, and carried it to production. The company went from twenty-seven stores to sixty-seven while that was happening.

From 1997 to 2020, retail and telecom. Store and area management, up to three locations at once. Freight, inventory and labor through a post-merger integration. Payroll, vendor purchase orders, loss prevention, hiring and training. My first point of sale rollout was in the wireless years, from the counter side, testing and launching a replacement system while the old one was still ringing up customers.

Twenty-nine years in, the work has not really changed. A system either matches how people actually do the job, or people route around it and the numbers quietly stop meaning what they say. Everything on this site came out of learning that the slow way.

What people who worked with me say

Both of these are public recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, quoted in the writers’ own words. Each block below is a verbatim excerpt. Nothing inside a quotation has been added, cut or altered, including the punctuation.

“From day one, JD distinguished himself as a natural leader—decisive, adaptable, and deeply committed to solving complex problems. His leadership style and project management approach seamlessly adapted to any initiative, leaving a lasting and far-reaching impact on the entire organization.”

“In an emerging industry where innovation was often the only path forward, JD played a pivotal role in navigating the challenges of greenfield expansion and acquisition integration. He drove essential supply chain improvements, championed the implementation of a hub-and-spoke distribution model, and developed a nationwide team of supply chain professionals.”

“This was most clearly demonstrated during a major enterprise technology initiative to migrate all business functions to Manhattan Active Omni (MAO) and Oracle NetSuite. As a Product Manager, JD guided the project through every phase of the software development life cycle with precision and clarity. He communicated across departments to ensure business requirements and constraints were effectively addressed. He was critical to the design and configuration and worked closely with technical consultants to manage user acceptance testing, training, and implementation of MAO.”

“He consistently invested in the growth of those around him, offering insightful and actionable guidance that elevated the capabilities and confidence of his team.”

Jeff Furr Jr.
Business Analyst and Technology Professional
Worked with JD on the same team · 30 May 2025

“I am pleased to recommend JD, who excelled in his role when I ‘permanently borrowed’ him from Field Operations. I’ve been in the Supply Chain Operations and Technology space for 3 decades and it was very impressive to see how quickly JD was able to grasp complex concepts related to automated execution systems both within and outside the DC, despite not having decades of distribution center operations and supply chain technology experience at that time.”

“JD was instrumental in helping the executive and implementation teams in streamlining processes, designing systemic functions and architecting solutions to increase overall efficiency and accuracy in our various distribution facilities (Including a Greenfield site in which he took on the leadership role for the building), and leveraged his deep Retail operations background to push forward solutions that made both Store Ops and Distribution stronger.”

Chris Dahm
Supply Chain and Omnichannel Operations and Technology leader
Managed JD directly · 12 September 2024

The one idea underneath all of it

Which means when something keeps happening, the first proposal is never more oversight, more training, more reminders or an accountability conversation. It is a structural change that removes the route to the failure. If somebody has to remember something for the fix to work, the fix is not finished.

I write about this

Structure Over Symptom is where the thinking goes before it becomes a standard. Two small apps and the psychology underneath them. Why there is no leaderboard in a commission tracker. Why a routing rule has to be checkable rather than merely correct.

Why any of this exists

Everything on this site started as something I needed and could not buy. The commission plan nobody could compute. The jobs that lost money after they were sold. The year where volume grew, margin fell and nobody could say which jobs did it. I wrote the standard, built the spreadsheet, made the tool, and then audited my own work and found it wrong often enough to write a chapter about it.

The kits are that work, genericized so it fits any business that sells jobs. The two books are the method underneath them: The Audit, on finding out what the business is actually doing, and The Field Guide, on the hour that decides the job.

Both books are on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. JD Davenport's Amazon author page lists every edition.

I post as @HouseDavenport on X. Company Framework posts as @CompanyFramewrk.

Get in touch

The fastest route is the consulting page, which says what the work looks like and what it costs.