#153 Supply Chain Leadership: Brent Hagan on Building Lob's Direct Mail Network

Brent Hagan is Chief Supply Chain Officer at Lob, where he built the tech-enabled direct mail network that turned supply chain leadership into a competitive advantage. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Brent explains how he stood up a third-party manufacturing, fulfillment, and logistics network that mails hundreds of millions of personalized pieces a year at 99% on-time reliability with no fixed manufacturing cost. Brent traces his path from the factory floor to the C-suite and gets specific on the plant-manager story where he rebuilt an entire role into two hours a day. He argues supply chain leadership isn't about the plan on paper. It's respecting the constraints of the people doing the work, and he breaks down how that mindset shaped the way he makes acquisitions actually stick. He also unpacks why he joined a SaaS company to build logistics from the inside, the "ignorant" question that became Lob Logistics, and how he now uses ChatGPT as a context-rich thinking partner for operations decisions. Along the way he revisits the hardest problems he faced at Deliverr and Amazon scale, and what direct mail networks can learn from them. About Brent Hagan:   / brent-hagan-530284173   https://www.lob.com/ About Federico Ramallo Founder of Density Labs, the AI Engineering Partner for the mid-market, helping US companies ship AI to production, backed by a decade of shipping software with distributed engineering teams. Author of The Invisible Distance, the operating system for engineering leaders running teams across borders. Host of The PreVetted Podcast: 150+ conversations with VPs of Engineering, CTOs, and operators on what actually works. 💼   / framallo   🌐 https://densitylabs.io ✅ https://prevetted.ai 🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod 🔗   / prevetted-podcast   TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Introduction 0:51 Inside Lob's third-party direct mail network 5:19 From the factory floor to the C-suite 11:04 Rebuilding a role in two hours a day 20:33 Making acquisitions actually work 28:43 Building logistics inside a SaaS company 32:26 The ignorant question that became Lob Logistics 38:23 Using AI as an operations thinking partner 43:24 The hardest problems at Deliverr and Amazon scale #SupplyChain #Logistics #Operations