Kevin Baker Consulting

03/05/2026

Most operations leaders I know are drowning in spreadsheets they didn’t build and reports nobody reads. Sound familiar?

Claude Code is changing that equation — and fast.

I’ve used it to build internal tools that would have taken a developer weeks, in hours. Automated reporting. Dashboards that actually reflect how your business runs. Systems that talk to each other instead of creating more manual work.
You don’t need a development team. You don’t need a tech background. You need the right tool and the willingness to try.
If you’re running a multi-site hardware, building supply, or trade distribution business and your operations still rely on manual processes — this is worth your attention.

That’s not a novelty. That’s a competitive edge.

👇 Drop a comment if you want to know how I’m using it with clients right now.

26/04/2026

Business Builder | CEO · COO · GM | Turnaround, Growth & Multi-Site Operations | Sydney

ABOUT
I build businesses. I fix them when they’re broken, grow them when they’re ready, and lead the people who make it happen.
Over a career spanning the United States and Australia, I’ve operated as CEO, COO, CFO, and General Manager across industries most executives never encounter in a single lifetime — commercial food manufacturing, multi-site trade distribution, and the full commercial operations of a Trappist monastery.

That last one stops people. It should.
The Abbey of the Genesee hired me as the first professional non-monk executive in their history. I inherited a bakery, a farm, a timber operation, a retreat centre, and an e-commerce store — all running at approximately 2% margin. I left them at 15%. Not because I imposed a corporate playbook on a contemplative community, but because I took the time to understand what the business actually was, what it was trying to do, and what was standing in the way.

That’s what I do in every organisation I enter.

Most recently I led Operations and Sales at Hardware & General, a 26-site B2B hardware and building supply business. Over seven years I grew revenue from $126M to $145M, led 310 staff across retail, sales, supply chain, and support functions, and guided the organisation through a prolonged housing market downturn without losing ground.

Earlier in my career I was brought in as CFO to a US food manufacturing business and promoted to President to lead a full commercial and operational turnaround — margin recovery, brand revitalisation, distribution expansion, and governance uplift, all within a mission-driven cultural environment that demanded both discipline and sensitivity.

Before that I spent years helping business owners and brokers secure SBA7(a) growth capital from institutional lenders including JP Morgan Chase, KeyBank, and M&T Bank. I wrote the business plans and financial models. I got every deal funded. Not most of them — every one of them. Then owners asked me to stay and help run what we’d just convinced a bank to back.

I also taught postgraduate students at UNSW Business School how to think and operate as consultants and manage with digital technology — which forced me to articulate frameworks I’d spent years applying intuitively.

I write about AI ethics and its implications for business leadership. I started in October 2023, when most people thought it was an eccentric niche. The conversation has since arrived at my doorstep.

I hold formal governance credentials through the Governance Institute of Australia.

If you’re looking for someone who has seen the inside of more different kinds of businesses than most executives encounter in a career — and who has a track record of making them grow — I’d welcome a conversation.

09/04/2026

The RBA just hiked rates for the second month in a row. If you’re an independent hardware or building supply merchant, here’s what the data is actually telling you.

Last year the RBA cut rates three times. Confidence returned. Approvals picked up. Merchants started planning for growth.

In February and March 2026, the RBA reversed course — hiking the cash rate to 4.1 per cent in back-to-back months. Westpac is now forecasting three more hikes this year, with the cash rate potentially hitting 4.85 per cent by August. The RBA’s own forecasts don’t see inflation back within target until late 2026 at the earliest. Rate cuts are not coming back in a hurry.

Here’s what that means in the market that feeds your business.

The approval numbers are misleading.
Australia approved 195,730 new dwellings in 2025 — up 12.8 per cent on 2024. That sounds like recovery. But approvals are permission slips, not buildings. Not all of them convert to commencements. Not all commencements complete. And with two consecutive rate hikes already landed and more flagged, projects sitting in that approval pipeline that haven’t broken ground yet are under real pressure to stall or die quietly. New dwelling construction is already running 25 to 30 per cent below the federal housing target before these hikes take full effect.

The build cycle tells you something important about your own revenue.
Before Covid, a detached house took roughly seven months to build. Today it takes close to thirteen. Build times blew out 40 per cent between 2020 and 2025 because of trade shortages and supply chain disruption — and while they’ve eased slightly, they haven’t normalised. That matters for merchants because every house in the construction pipeline generates orders spread across its entire build cycle. Longer build times mean the same number of houses under construction generates orders more slowly than it did five years ago. The pipeline can look full while the order velocity running through your business is structurally lower than you realise.

The mix is working against independent merchants.

Most of the approvals growth in 2025 came from multi-units — apartments and higher density — which jumped 31.4 per cent. Apartments take nearly 33 months to complete and are almost entirely procured through commercial channels. They rarely put product through an independent merchant’s door. Detached housing — where independents do their best business — grew just 2.4 per cent in approvals. And detached commencements in the most recent quarter were running well below the peaks of 2021.

Buyer sentiment is already moving.
The Westpac-Melbourne Institute survey of consumer sentiment toward buying a home fell to 82.9 in March 2026 — a new cycle low, well below its long-run average of 120. The deterioration was most pronounced among mortgage holders. Tim Lawless, Research Director at Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) and Australia’s most cited housing market analyst, said it plainly: “We know that construction activity is still going to be pretty hard through 2026. That means we’ll probably end the year with an ongoing supply-demand imbalance.”

What this means for your business.
When commencements slow, it doesn’t hit your till immediately. There’s a lag — often three to six months — between the market turning and the order drop showing up in your numbers. By the time most merchants feel it, the decisions that caused it were made months earlier.

That’s when margin gets managed badly. Purchasing decisions get made on yesterday’s confidence. Staffing levels don’t adjust. Supplier terms don’t get renegotiated. And when the revenue softens, the cost base is still set for the market you expected — not the one you’re in.

I spent eight years as General Manager of one of Australia’s largest independent hardware and building supply operations in Sydney. I’ve navigated this industry through good cycles and bad ones. The merchants who come through downturns intact are not the ones who reacted fastest. They’re the ones who were already running tight when conditions changed — who knew their numbers, managed their margin actively, and had the operational discipline to absorb a market shift without bleeding out.
Right now, the data says the next twelve months will reward exactly that kind of business.

Kevin Baker Consulting works with independent hardware and building supply merchants and suppliers who want to grow sales, protect margin, and leverage technology and data to run a business that doesn’t depend on a favourable market to stay profitable.
If you’re not sure your business is as ready as it needs to be, let’s find out.

📅 Book a no-obligation call. The link is below.

07/04/2026

Baker Crisis Group is a dedicated crisis operator practice for individuals and organisations facing their most serious moments.

This sits alongside Kevin Baker Consulting’s operational advisory work as a separate and distinct practice.

Lived experience. The ability to sit in the uncertainty. To not flinch. To manage it with you — not for you, not at you — with you.

Baker Crisis Group is for the moment when it’s all coming at you fast.

Here is what makes a serious crisis different from a serious problem.
It is not one thing going wrong.
It is one catastrophic event activating multiple domains simultaneously.

Legal. Financial. Reputational. Operational. Family. Human.

All live. All urgent. All requiring expert response. All happening at the same time.

Your lawyer is managing the legal domain. Your accountant is managing the financial domain. Your therapist is managing the human domain. Your PR firm is managing the reputational domain.
Nobody is managing all of them together.

That gap — between what the specialists each own and what nobody coordinates — is where crises become catastrophes.
That is the gap Baker Crisis Group was built to close.

The first 48 hours of a serious crisis determine the outcome. Most people don’t know that until it’s too late.
That is when the mistakes happen. The wrong thing said to the wrong person. The critical detail missed. The communication that cannot be taken back. The decision made in panic that costs everything later.

Baker Crisis Group enters in those first 48 hours. We take the load. We run the war room. We coordinate your entire professional network — lawyers, accountants, therapists, financial advisors, communications specialists — and we bring in the specialists your existing team may not have.

Every expert working in the same direction. Toward the same outcome.

For individuals facing:

— Legal jeopardy and criminal proceedings
— Marital and family breakdown
— Reputational threat and public exposure
— Financial collapse
— Health crisis
— Intimate content exposure and extortion
— False allegations
— Multi-front personal crisis where everything hits at once

For organisations facing:

— Operational and business failure
— Financial crisis and liquidity threat
— Leadership and people breakdown
— Reputational and media crisis
— Regulatory and legal exposure
— Cyber and data breaches
— Food safety and product recall events
— Supply chain and operational collapse
— Employee death and workplace safety events
— Public and government crisis

If you know someone in those first 48 hours right now — share this with them today.

If you are that person — call me.

My experience in crisis operations is how you will sleep at night.

📩 [email protected]

Baker Crisis Group. We don’t advise on crises. We resolve them.

Baker Crisis Group is a mission-driven firm committed to supporting marriage and family health and creating meaningful employment for neurodivergent individuals.

06/04/2026

The first 48 hours of a serious crisis will determine the outcome.

Most people don’t know that until it’s too late.

In those first 48 hours the load is impossible. Everything is coming at you simultaneously. The phone won’t stop. People want answers you don’t have. Decisions need to be made under pressure you’ve never felt before.
That’s when the mistakes happen.
The wrong thing said to the wrong person. The critical detail missed. The communication that can’t be taken back. The decision made in panic that costs everything later.

Not because you aren’t capable.
Because no one person can run the war room, direct every specialist, execute across every domain — legal, financial, operational, reputational, human — and think clearly at the same time.

That is what Baker Crisis Group was built for.

My dedicated crisis operator practice operates alongside my advisory and consulting work at Kevin Baker Consulting.

We go in during those first 48 hours. We take the load. We run the war room. We coordinate your entire professional network — lawyers, accountants, therapists, financial advisors, communications specialists — so every expert is working in the same direction toward the same outcome.

Nothing critical is missed. Nothing damaging is said. Every front is covered.
You don’t lose ground you didn’t need to lose.

For individuals facing:

— Legal jeopardy and criminal proceedings
— Marital and family breakdown
— Reputational threat
— Financial collapse
— Health crisis
— Multi-front personal crisis where everything hits at once

For organisations facing:

— Operational and business failure
— Financial crisis and liquidity threat
— Leadership and people breakdown
— Reputational and media crisis
— Regulatory and legal exposure
— Cyber and data incidents and breaches
— Food safety and product recall events
— Supply chain and operational collapse

If you know someone in those first 48 hours right now — this is the most important thing you can share with them today.

If you are that person — call me.

My experience in crisis operations is how you will sleep at night.

📩 [email protected]

Baker Crisis Group. We don’t advise on crises. We resolve them.

Baker Crisis Group is a mission-driven firm. Our long-term commitment extends beyond crisis resolution — to supporting marriage and family health, and to building meaningful employment for neurodivergent individuals. We believe the same discipline that resolves a crisis can build something that outlasts it.

06/04/2026

In June 2025 I published a detailed analysis of the Israel-Iran conflict and what it meant for global supply chains.
I took it down.

Not because it was wrong.
Because it was right. And analysis that accurate belongs to clients — not to a free content feed.

Here is what we said in June. And here is what has actually happened.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

The Strait of Hormuz faces heightened risk of closure or restriction. Rerouting could add 10 to 14 days to transit times and spike freight costs by three to four times.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Traffic has fallen from 150 vessels per day to 10 to 20 ships per day. Trump has set a deadline for Iran to reopen it. Iran has refused. The operational plan for a massive escalation is ready to execute.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

Any disruption to Iran’s oil output or export infrastructure could push Brent crude to $100 to $130 per barrel.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Brent crude has exceeded $100 per barrel. US crude is trading at $112 to $114 per barrel and rising. The International Energy Agency has released 400 million barrels from strategic reserves — one of the largest emergency deployments in history.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

War risk premiums for shipping have already jumped tenfold. FMCG sectors face 15 to 25% cost increases if the conflict escalates.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Gulf state refineries have been struck. UAE air defenses have intercepted 438 ballistic missiles, 19 cruise missiles, and 2,012 drones since the war began. Every maritime insurance category has repriced. Global freight costs are in sustained disruption.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

The Red Sea — already disrupted by Houthi activity — faces further risk if the conflict widens.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The Houthis resumed launching ballistic missiles and drones at Israel in support of Iran. They have explicitly stated they have the military capability to restrict Red Sea traffic if the war escalates further. Two of the world’s most critical shipping lanes are simultaneously compromised.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

The shutdown of Israel’s Leviathan and Karish gas fields has cut gas flows to Egypt and Jordan, halted Egyptian fertiliser production, and threatens European LNG supply chains.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Egypt’s fertiliser production was halted immediately following the gas field shutdowns. European LNG supply chains are under sustained pressure. The cascade from a single operational decision — shutting two gas fields — has run exactly as projected across multiple downstream industries and geographies.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

Iran’s cyber threat capability poses additional risk to Western business infrastructure operating in or dependent on the Middle East region.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Iranian strikes have targeted US military facilities across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE simultaneously. The cyber and kinetic threat environment for Western businesses operating in the region has deteriorated significantly.

JUNE 2025 — WE SAID

The businesses that will navigate this well are the ones who mapped their supply chain dependencies and built contingency frameworks before the disruption hit. Most businesses have neither.

APRIL 2026 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

The businesses that acted on the June analysis spent the following eight months mapping exposure, diversifying suppliers, building inventory buffers on critical inputs, and reviewing insurance and contract positions. They are managing this.

The businesses that read it as a news story rather than an operational briefing are now making reactive decisions under pressure. Reactive decisions under pressure are expensive. They become case studies.

THE ONE QUESTION YOUR BOARD NEEDS TO ANSWER TODAY

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for 90 days — what does that cost your business per month in increased input costs, freight premiums, and supply disruption?

If you cannot answer that with a specific number — you do not yet understand your exposure.

That is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis.
And a diagnosis is where every useful response begins.

WHAT WE DO WITH THAT DIAGNOSIS

We help businesses understand their total multi-domain crisis exposure — not just supply chain risk in isolation, but the complete picture of what a single catastrophic geopolitical event activates simultaneously across your business.
The Iran war did not just close a shipping lane.

It spiked oil prices. Disrupted gas supply across three continents. Triggered insurance repricing across every maritime route. Activated cyber threats against Western business infrastructure. Created regulatory complexity across six Gulf jurisdictions. And tested the resilience of every global supply chain at the same time.

That is not a supply chain crisis. That is a multi-domain crisis requiring a multi-domain response.

How we deliver that response is not public. That methodology is what our clients retain us for.

What is public is this.

We saw this coming in June 2025.
We documented it.

We took it down because the analysis belongs to the clients who pay for it.
If you want to understand what the next 90 days means for your business specifically — that conversation starts below.

My experience in crisis operations is how you will sleep at night.

📩 [email protected]
Baker Crisis Group and Kevin Baker Consulting.

We don’t advise on crises. We resolve them.

by Kevin Baker 15 June 2025

05/04/2026

Out of death comes life.

That is not a metaphor. It is the most operationally true statement I know.

I have watched organisations that appeared finished find a way back. I have watched people who had lost everything

— reputation, family, freedom, livelihood — rebuild from a foundation nobody could see yet.

The resurrection is not the absence of death. It is what becomes possible after you have gone all the way through it.

This Easter I am more convinced of that than I have ever been.

To everyone carrying something heavy today — a business that is struggling, a relationship that is broken, a situation that feels irreversible —
It is not over.

The tomb was sealed. The stone was rolled. And then something happened that nobody expected.

That is still happening.

Happy Easter.
Kevin

09/03/2026

What do I actually help businesses with?

Most companies don’t struggle because they lack ideas.

They struggle because things get messy as they grow.

Decisions slow down.
Leaders pull in different directions.
Processes that once worked start breaking down.

That’s where I help.

I work with leadership teams to:

• get clear on priorities
• make decisions faster
• fix operational problems that slow the business down
• make sure plans actually turn into results

In simple terms:

I help businesses run at peak performance and get things done.

06/03/2026

Most consultants start at the top.
They fly in, run a strategy workshop, hand over a deck, and leave.

Six months later, nothing has changed.
That’s because the problem was never the strategy.

In my experience, struggling organisations already know what they need to do. What they can’t do is execute

— because something is in the way.
Something nobody is saying out loud.

My work starts at the bottom. I go into the operations first — not the boardroom.

I watch how the work actually gets done. And somewhere in there, the real constraint reveals itself.

It’s usually a person whose behaviour is protected.

Or a story the organisation tells itself that isn’t true.

Once you name it, everything else becomes possible.

That’s the Baker Ex*****on Model. Five layers. Ground up. Built around one thing most advisory work avoids entirely —
The Truth.

If your organisation is stuck and you already know the strategy isn’t the problem, I’d like to talk.

📩 [email protected]

06/03/2026

Before launching Kevin Baker Consulting full time, I taught MBA executives at AGSM, UNSW Business School (2023–2025).

That experience reinforced something I had already seen in operational leadership.

Many organisations do not struggle because of strategy.

They struggle because strategy never becomes ex*****on.

In both the MBA classroom and executive leadership roles, the same issues appear repeatedly:

Unclear decision rights.
Misaligned leadership teams.
Operational systems that do not support the strategy.

My advisory work now focuses on helping leadership teams diagnose and resolve those constraints so strategy can translate into real operational results.

08/01/2026

Marketing on social media

1. Recognition ( “That’s me” )
2. Clarity ( “Oh, now I get it” )
3. Direction ( “Here’s what to do next” )
4. Format ( reel, story, text )

If #1 isn’t there, no format will save it.

What companies get this right? Share examples.