Who we are
Two people. No firm behind the curtain.
When you call, one of us answers. When we buy, we move in. There's no committee, no fund office, no associate who "handles Michigan." This page is everything a careful owner — or their CPA — would want to know about us.
παράδοση — the act of handing down
James's grandparents came from Greece and built a wholesale food business in Detroit. Thu Ra came from Burma and built everything twice. The name Paradosi is the promise both stories taught us: what someone builds with their life deserves to be handed down, not broken up.
James Penz
Co-founder · CEO
- BA Economics, Michigan State
- AI certification, MIT
- AWS-certified practitioner
- Senior Manager at leading global consultancies, 10+ years
James spent over a decade inside leading global consultancies rebuilding how some of the largest manufacturers and insurers in the country actually run — automation, AI, supply chains, the unglamorous machinery of getting work done. As a Senior Manager he sat between owners of problems and the teams that fixed them, which is the seat he still prefers. He plays guitar in a Greek band on weekends, and Paradosi carries his grandparents' story in its name.
Selected project record
Personal consulting history, anonymized — client names stay confidential. These are not Paradosi transactions.
- $4B manufacturerRebuilt sourcing & materials management through COVID
- Partnered with the Chief Supply Officer to rebuild materials management during the worst supply disruption in decades — safety-stock platform, shortage and exception handling, a supply-risk assessment tool. Identified over $90M in gross-margin improvement and cut working capital.
- $180B insurerBuilt an automation capability from scratch
- A health-services business drowning in manual work on legacy systems. Designed and deployed the full automation pipeline — finding opportunities, validating them, building solutions. The piloted process ran in a quarter of the time.
- $50B aerospaceCharted the generative-AI roadmap
- Guided the C-suite from concern to plan: a cost-estimation framework and twenty prioritized, company-specific AI use cases shaped in working sessions with the people who'd run them.
- $60B private equity fundWrote the finance playbook for a portfolio
- Worked with a network of eight CFOs to design the comprehensive playbook the fund's portfolio companies use to run their finance function — process, organization, and technology.
Thu Ra
Co-founder · COO
- MBA with Highest Honors, Yale
- MS Supply Chain, Case Western — 4.0 GPA
- BA Economics & Psychology, Cornell College — Phi Beta Kappa
- Two ventures founded and sold
Thu Ra came to America from Burma at seventeen, alone, for the oldest reason there is — the American dream. He built his from the ground up: starting on the floor of a mid-sized manufacturer and rising to Director of Supply Chain and Logistics, architecting the systems that carried the company from $80 million to $160 million in revenue. Consulting at a top-tier firm sharpened the toolkit; founding and selling two businesses of his own proved it. He and James met working together — and never stopped. Thu Ra is married; his wife is a board-certified neurosurgeon, which he credits for keeping the family standard for precision uncomfortably high.
Selected project record
Personal consulting history, anonymized — client names stay confidential. These are not Paradosi transactions.
- $6B food manufacturerRan the integration of a European acquisition
- Built the Integration Management Office for a multinational food manufacturer's acquisition — cross-functional leadership, roadmap, and processes — including a plan for over $100M in annual procurement savings.
- $7B apparel manufacturerRebuilt a global supply chain, end to end
- Four consecutive engagements across a single year: supply-chain strategy, the US network, distribution and S&OP, then global supply strategy — including the restructuring of more than twenty major US distribution centers and the long-range global distribution plan.
- $40B pharma manufacturerCut complexity, grew margin
- Simplified an over-the-counter product portfolio — roughly 40% fewer SKUs and more than 200 basis points of gross-margin improvement.
- $2B building-products manufacturerFound $20M a year on the shop floor
- Labor planning, production batching, de-bottlenecking, and loss reduction across manufacturing facilities — approximately $20M in annual savings, found by walking the floor, not by reading reports.
Why we work
We've done this together before.
On a manufacturing engagement, we worked as a pair the way we do now — on the floor, past the org chart, finding $20 million a year in savings by fixing how the work actually flowed. The client's CEO kept us on afterward as his "special ops team," running weekly diagnostics and designing what came next.
"It is rare to see this combination of technical competency and demonstrated knowledge of a client's business."
Senior Partner, a leading global consultancy