Kevin O'Connell

Background

I started in marketing at a national healthcare accreditation organization in Cary, North Carolina, owning strategy and execution for the pharmacy, durable medical equipment and sleep programs and launching the industry's first compounding pharmacy accreditation program at a moment when compounding safety was national news. It taught me that authority is built by being specific and useful when people are looking for an answer, which is still how I think about marketing.

In 2016 I joined Nutramax Laboratories in Lancaster, South Carolina, the company behind Cosequin, as its first International Product Manager. The company had a dominant US position and almost no presence abroad. Over the next ten years and five roles I built that business: the first multilingual, Health Canada compliant packaging; an exclusive Canadian agent and Cosequin in Costco Canada; a 90+ SKU international portfolio; 15 exclusive distribution partners across 22 markets in Europe and Asia-Pacific; EU contract manufacturing, laboratory and logistics partnerships; Amazon launches in five countries; and the 12-month transition from direct distribution to a licensing model, completed without losing a market. The portfolio grew at 20%+ a year to $10M in five years and $20M+ in wholesale at handoff.

Along the way I became Commercial Chief of Staff, where I set up the Sales and Operations Planning process and the monthly cadence that aligned marketing, sales, supply chain and finance, and recruited six commercial leaders. Then, as Senior Manager of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, I designed and installed the new product stage gate now used across 30+ projects, negotiated exclusive technology and supply agreements with global partners, and led confidential first-to-market innovations upstream.

In 2025 I left to found Prepwell Nutrition and build the Prepwell app: a meal planner that turns macro targets into a week of meals and a grocery order. I designed and coded the whole thing, planning engine to payments to grocery integrations, and took it through Google Play review and into App Store review. In the same stretch I built and marketed refinedwithcaroline.com for a Rock Hill spa and took on the new website for Carolina Academy Child Development Center.

Prepwell Consulting is that work, organized: growth and operations consulting for small businesses in York County and the Charlotte area, and a separate advisory practice for supplement brands. You get the person who did it, on every engagement, with a written scope and weekly updates.

Why the name

Build what matters. Success is built in the prep work, and the approach is strategic first: understand the business, its customers and its numbers before deciding what to build, which is why every engagement starts with discovery and a written scope rather than a build. Then the details get the attention most vendors treat as optional, because the search term a page is written around, the tracking event behind a phone number, and the clause in a supply agreement are where results are actually decided. A plan nobody executes is worth nothing, so the same person who writes the scope does the work, and an idea reaches a finished result without a handoff in the middle. The Prepwell app came from that discipline applied to a week of meals; the consulting practice applies it to a business.

How I work

• Written scope before any work. One page: what, by when, for how much. Fixed price for defined projects, phases with deliverables for larger ones.
• Weekly written updates. What was done, what is next, what I need from you. No status meetings that could have been an email.
• Numbers over adjectives. Time baselines before automation, conversion tracking before ad spend, acceptance criteria before build.
• Honest about fit. If the right answer is Shopify, a different consultant or doing nothing, I will say so on the first call.
• Handoff by design. Documentation and training so your team runs what was built. You should not need me forever.

Credentials and development

• International MBA, University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of Valencia, Spain
• BS Business Administration, International Business, University of North Carolina Wilmington
• Chief of Staff Leadership Retreat, McChrystal Group
• LMI Leadership Development Program, Leadership Management International