As the eldest of 12 kids, Justin Stacy was literally born to lead.
“By the time there were three or four of us, I started getting involved with trying to help out,” Justin said. “I just always had a sense of what my siblings were doing because I was responsible for them.”
The title of “big brother” has always been important to Justin. It’s even made an impact on the title he holds today, as a Vice President in Operations and Manufacturing at AlixPartners.
Whether he was holding the baby, helping cook dinner, or wrangling a sibling while out in public—Justin learned from an early age how to take charge of a situation. It’s an ability that prepared him for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“Whether you want it or not, you're put into leadership positions and you have to be in charge,” Justin explained. “It’s very scary to have that responsibility, but if you're afraid of it, you may not ever seek it out. Being forced in those positions helped me learn to manage people and gave me a valuable skill set.”
That skill set served Justin well as Platoon Leader of a cavalry unit based in North Carolina. He was a paratrooper, which means he jumped out of planes on a regular basis.
It was dangerous work. Two years into his service, Justin broke both of his ankles during parachuting training, causing him to ultimately leave the Army.
“It was traumatic injury and pretty painful,” Justin recounts. “I already had a lot of mental toughness from the military that I developed, but then it was time to really put it to the test.”
With time, Justin grew to see the incident as a “blessing in disguise” because it gave him the opportunity to start the next chapter of his life—a career in Operations Management.
A lot of Justin’s day-to-day job in the Army was planning-centric. He’d organize training events, manage timelines and people. As an Operation Manager for a distribution center, Justin was able to do all of those things and more.
“Working with soldiers translates very well to interacting with blue collar employees on a warehouse floor or in a manufacturing plant,” Justin said. “I kind of get a blend of interacting with people from the top, to the bottom of organizations.”
But like in the military, you can only prepare for so much. Just a few months into Justin’s new role, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
Purchasing from Justin’s company subsided because factories and other distribution centers had slowed or stopped production altogether. Demand dropped, quickly and unexpectedly.
“For my company and many others, the drop in demand was fairly short, and the rebound was high,” Justin said. “As demand accelerated and purchasing ramped back up, we had to adapt to squeeze additional capacity out of a distribution operation that was fairly mature and try to predict whether the post-Covid rebound was transitory or here to stay.”
To build on that experience, Justin pursued an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in the hopes of switching to consulting; an industry he describes as an “experience accelerator” due to the pace of the work and short-term nature of the projects.
Because of Justin’s ops background, he had a “boots on the ground” approach to problem-solving that fit AlixPartners’ hands-on engagement style and dedication to providing practical and tangible results for clients.
With his experience and new degree, Justin thought he was prepared for anything. Then came the tariffs.
For most of the year, Justin’s work has centered around transportation benchmarking to help clients find rates that best fit their bottom line.
Since the rates change so quickly, Justin and his team are focused on getting their clients options.
“That has been key for managing supply chain disruption over the last few years. Spot rates for all modes of transportation saw large swings during and after Covid, and in response to the evolving tariff situation,” Justin explained. “A business that is heavily reliant on any mode of transportation, especially a retailer that imports the majority of their products, benefits from regularly renegotiating their shipping contracts.”
While the uncertainty can be difficult at times, Justin’s dedicated to his work and his clients. Being able to improve company culture, simplify processes or structures and create a better workplace for others, makes his job worthwhile.
“I definitely aspire to continue to have roles where I’m managing people or large projects," Justin said. “I do like to take responsibility and see how my actions impact others in a positive way. I like to know that I made a valuable contribution.”