When Bryan Jensen walked into his interview at St. Onge Company 27 years ago, he didn’t think he was about to start the second half of his career. “Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I liked consultants,” he says with a laugh. “The ones I worked with at Toys ‘R’ Us were all fresh out of business school and had never actually run a warehouse.”
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But what was supposed to be a short detour turned into nearly three decades at one of the most respected independent consultancies in the business. “I didn’t plan it,” he says. “It just turned out to be a place where the work mattered and the people did too.”
He’s seen the industry evolve from clipboards and conveyor belts to AI-driven distribution systems. Through it all, he’s stayed grounded in one simple belief: it’s always about the people.
Switching gears and finding balance
Jensen grew up in Lodi, New Jersey, in a “relatively blue-collar” household. His father worked two jobs, one in a warehouse and another as a PATH train engineer, while his mother worked full-time, too.
“I don’t think I realized how hard my dad worked until I got older,” he says. “He’d leave for one job at 7 a.m., come home for lunch, then head to his second shift and get home at 10:30 at night.”
At first, Jensen thought he’d follow a technical path. He enrolled at Stevens Institute of Technology to study engineering, but quickly realized it wasn’t for him. “After a year, I hated it,” he says. “Then I took a creative writing class, wrote a 97-page short story, and thought, ‘Wait a second, this is what I like.’”
His parents weren’t thrilled when he told them he wanted to switch to English. “My father had worked so hard to give us stability, and now I’m telling him I want a humanities degree,” he says. “So the deal was I could do it, but I’d have to pay for it myself.”
That’s how Jensen landed a job at Toys “R” Us at age 19, working full-time while attending William Paterson University, where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.
“It was supposed to be a job to get me through college,” he says. “It ended up paying for college and lasting another 10 years.”
From Toys “R” Us to St. Onge
At Toys “R” Us, Jensen rose quickly, moving from freight auditor to Director of Distribution Automation. In the 1990s, he helped design and implement seven automated warehouses, which was no small feat in the pre-Internet era.
“Back then, the cutting-edge tech was a high-speed shoe sorter,” he says. “Some of that tech is still around, but the industry’s moved toward more advanced, flexible systems.”
After more than a decade at Toys “R” Us, Jensen sensed the company’s momentum slowing. “The stock wasn’t what it used to be, and some of the energy had shifted,” he says. “It just felt like the right time to look for a new challenge.”
In 1998, he joined St. Onge Company, a small but respected independent engineering consultancy based in York, Pennsylvania. He was drawn not by flashy projects, but by the people. “You meet some folks and just trust them,” he says. “That was the case here. It wasn’t about the building, it was about the culture.”
At the time, St. Onge had 35 employees. Today, it has about 170. Jensen’s proud that the growth has been steady, not chaotic. “It’s never been wild swings up or down,” he says. “Just consistent, manageable growth where you can actually make an impact.”
Lessons learned along the way
“One of my favorite phrases is, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’”
After nearly three decades in consulting, Jensen says the biggest lesson he’s learned is that curiosity beats certainty every time.
“One of my favorite phrases is, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know,’” he says. “People who are curious and want to keep learning do really well here. If you walk into a project thinking you know everything, you’re probably not going to learn anything new.”
He looks for that quality when hiring, too. “I view interviews as a two-way street,” he says. “I’m interviewing them, but they should be interviewing me. They need to know what makes this place different.”
That curiosity also drives how St. Onge approaches its work. Instead of pushing a one-size-fits-all solution, the firm uses what Jensen calls an “alternative-driven” approach, comparing manual, mechanized, and automated options before recommending the best choice. “We’re not selling a product,” he says. “We are the product.”
He’s also quick to admit that not every recommendation goes as planned. Early in his consulting career, St. Onge advised a client to buy a certain lift truck model that turned out to be deeply unpopular with operators. “It was technically the right truck,” he says, “but they hated it. So we helped the client resell them and made up the difference. That’s how you build trust.”
On automation, tariffs, and uncertainty
“You still hear people say, ‘We have to automate because of the labor shortage.’ That’s a lie. You can get people, you just don’t want to pay for them.”
Ask Jensen what’s driving the biggest changes in supply chain today, and his answer is direct: automation and uncertainty, often in the same sentence.
He’s skeptical of what he calls the “peer pressure to automate.” “You still hear people say, ‘We have to automate because of the labor shortage,’” he says. “That’s a lie. You can get people, you just don’t want to pay for them.”
Instead, he encourages companies to look closely at the return on investment. “If you can save $10 million on labor and your automation costs $20 million, that’s a great two-year payback,” he says. “But if you can only save $100,000 and it costs $1 million, maybe you should stay flexible and keep using people.”
On trade policy, he’s equally blunt. “It’s not just the tariffs, it’s the uncertainty,” he says. “How do you do a fiscal analysis if you don’t know your pricing from one day to the next? That instability has created a massive hesitation bubble.”
Leading beyond St. Onge
Jensen’s influence extends beyond his day job. He also serves as Chair of the MHI Board of Governors, guiding the trade association’s direction and strategy.
“MHI is always looking for people from the industry who can make it better,” he says. “It’s a reciprocal relationship. They help elevate the industry, but they need people from the industry to tell them what’s needed.”
In his role, he helps review budgets, audit reports, and new initiatives aimed at strengthening MHI’s footprint across the supply chain sector. “It’s about representing the people doing the work,” he says. “We want to make sure the organization reflects the industry it serves.”
Finding balance in a demanding career
For Jensen, the toughest part of his career hasn’t been solving technical problems; it’s been managing time. At one point, he was traveling close to 180 nights a year, often missing family events.
“I used to say that if you got home before your kids went to sleep, you were home that day,” he says. “If you didn’t, you weren’t.”
Now that his two sons are grown, he credits his wife of 35 years for keeping everything steady. “I couldn’t have done any of this without her,” he says.
These days, Jensen travels less and spends more time mentoring younger consultants. When he’s home, he loyally follows the New York Jets and Rangers, even if they test his patience. “It’s not always a rewarding lifestyle choice,” he jokes.
