Luke Skarzynski
Verified Expert in Management Consulting
Management Consulting Expert
Stamford, CT, United States
Toptal member since October 17, 2022
A founder of Just In Case Estates, a legal tech startup, Luke has over ten years as a finance veteran. He began his career at L Catterton, the world's largest consumer-focused private equity firm, and served on a senior leadership team at one of its portfolio companies, growing revenue by over four times and leading the finance, operations, merchandise planning, and customer experience teams. Luke wants to connect with other passionate entrepreneurs and solve exciting new business challenges.
Career Highlights
Case Studies
Select Transaction Experience
Illustrative Financial Model
Simple Price Variance Analysis
How to Budget and Plan for Your VC Fundraise
D2C SaaS Customer Acquisition Models
Software Expertise
- NetSuite
Other Expertise
- Finance
- Financial Modeling
- Growth Equity
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)
- Operations
- Shopify
- Startups
Work Experience
Co-founder and CEO
Just In Case Estates
- Developed and bootstrapped the company from concept to launch.
- Pitched and earned admission into a leading CT startup accelerator successfully.
- Designed technology system architecture, with validation from top Fractional CTO.
- Recruited, hired, and trained an overseas team of front and back-end developers.
Vice President of Strategy and Operations
Rhone
- Built detailed models, led due diligence efforts, and negotiated terms to support the Company's Series B and Series C equity raises and the closing on an ABL (asset-based loan) facility.
- Grew revenue by more than four times, serving as the company's go-to "firefighter," tackling front and back-office opportunities across the organization.
- Led over 40 team members as head of finance, customer experience, operations, and merchandise planning.
- Created new ROAS (return on ad spend) based models to better guide performance marketing investments in near real time based on robust customer lifecycle analysis.
- Grew customer experience from five to over 20 team members and substantially revamped all major touchpoints, reducing inbound tickets per order by almost three times and achieving a 93% customer satisfaction score and over 70 net promoter score.
- Strengthened partnership with 3PL to increase throughput by over four times while maintaining more than 97% of orders shipped on the same or the next day.
- Negotiated an improved fulfillment rate card by more than 30% and small parcel rates by over 40%.
- Streamlined a merchandise assortment and built a suite of new reporting and forecasting planning models to enhance the ability to make data-based buy decisions.
- Represented the company as quasi-general counsel reviewing, negotiating, and approving more than $10,000 value business contracts.
Director of Special Projects
Rhone
- Oversaw a transition to in-house accounting in the first two weeks, managed the finance team's daily operations, regularly closed books in under 10 days, led annual audits and appraisals, and created financial packages for investors and the board.
- Navigated a tight liquidity position over five months by pulling a combination of operational and working capital levers and culminating in a successful equity raise.
- Developed and managed the new budget and long-term financial models.
- Created automated KPI and operating dashboards for the operations, merchandise planning, and sales teams in Excel and PowerBI.
Investor
L Catterton
- Closed more than two dozen buy and sell-side transactions, focusing primarily on the middle and lower-middle market and including an approximate $1 billion take-private.
- Built hundreds of financial models, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and pitch decks for companies of diverse backgrounds, often from scratch.
- Conducted extensive industry and company-specific research across five consumer verticals: restaurants and retail, food and beverage, branded consumer products, consumer health and wellness, and consumer marketing and services.
- Collaborated with portfolio company management teams on numerous strategy-setting and execution initiatives across sales, marketing, new product development, real estate, financial planning and analysis, and other functions.
- Stepped in as interim CFO for a $20+ million restaurant concept during a liquidity crisis. Acted quickly to flex working capital and worked closely with the CEO to improve operations.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Economics
Middlebury College - Middlebury, Vermont, United States
Bachelor's Degree in Economics
Universidad Carlos III - Madrid, Spain
Skills
Finance
Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Financial Modeling, Budgeting, M&A (Buy-side), Fundraising, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Revenue & Expense Projections, Data Analysis, Three-statement Modeling, Due Diligence, Cash Flow Forecasting, Growth Equity, Cash Flow, Cash Management, Forecasting, M&A Modeling, Accounting, Corporate Finance, Market Research, Startup Funding, Valuation, CFO, Seed Fundraising, Private Equity, Equity Raises, Cross-border M&A, Venture Funding, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Output Software
Microsoft Excel
Industry Expertise
Consumer Products, Venture Capital, Health & Wellness, Entertainment & Leisure
Geographic Expertise
United States
Data & Analysis Software
NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Visual Basic, SQL
Other
Microsoft Office, Finance, Planning, Business Modeling, Budget Modeling, Analysis, Financial Analysis, Excel Expert, Pitch Decks, Waterfall Modeling, Pitch Deck Consultant, M&A Due Diligence (Financial), SaaS, B2C, Software as a Service (SaaS), Dashboards, Management Reports, Slack, Shopify, Operations, Customer Experience, Startups, Product Management, eCommerce, Cash Flow Analysis, Strategy, M&A Strategy, Fundraising Strategy, Excel VBA, Market Segmentation, Market Research Analyst, Business Models, Business Plan Consulting, Financing, Inventory Management, Financial Risk Management, Fractional CFO, SME/SMB Financing, Debt Financing, Wellness, COO, Business Setup, Competition Research, Data Visualization, Excel Macros, Macros, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Google Analytics, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Klaviyo, Portfolio Reporting, Microsoft Power BI, Pricing Models, Economics, Early-stage Venture Capital, Manufacturing, Fundraising Consultant, Customer Acquisition
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