A talent distribution problem, not a talent shortage

There are exceptional operators scattered across the CPG ecosystem — people who have built supply chains, run trade programs, scaled retail networks, and managed P&Ls through downturns. What the industry has lacked isn't that talent. It's a structure that lets those operators work where they're needed most: inside early- and mid-stage brands, at the moment the decisions actually matter, rather than locked inside one company's org chart or spread thin across a generalist agency retainer.

Socratic CPG exists to close that gap. We're a fractional C-suite and operations firm — Operations and Growth practices, run by operators who sit inside the business rather than advise it from the outside.

Founder-led, on purpose

Socratic CPG was founded by John Henry Behrens III, who leads the firm's engagements and its build-out. The firm is in active, deliberate transition from a solo practice to a real firm — onboarding its first Ops Associate, building the delegation systems and playbooks that let work run on documented process instead of one person's memory, and developing Agora CPG, the platform underneath it all.

We're building this in public rather than pretending the firm arrived fully formed. A firm sells on trust in a system that happens to include a person; that system has to actually exist before we claim it does.

How we work

A few things we hold to regardless of engagement:

Confidentiality by design. Patterns from client work inform how we operate — never identifying details. What we learn on one engagement never crosses to another without explicit permission.

A named human on everything. Agora CPG helps us draft faster. It never ships a deliverable to a client without a named operator who reviewed it and stands behind it.

Specific over generic. We'd rather tell you what's actually wrong, what we'd do differently, and what we got wrong ourselves than hand over advice that could've come from any business book.

We operate inside brands. We sit in the rooms where the hard calls get made. That's the vantage point everything we publish comes from.

If that's the kind of operator you're looking for, we'd welcome a conversation — or read our first Midyear Letter for a longer view of how we see the industry right now.