About

I’m Jeff Tekavcic. I run commercial operations at Top Hat, the EdTech platform used by millions of students across North America. My teams own the bridge between a digital product and the physical, financial, and operational machinery that makes it work at scale. Print and digital fulfillment, revenue systems, support ops, logistics, the whole unglamorous middle layer.

I got to that seat by building businesses, not by consulting about them.

The short version of how I got here

Founder and operator. I built and ran Urban Nature Store (retail + ecommerce in outdoor and nature products) and founded Lunchy Inc., a marketplace startup for school lunches. I’ve held operating roles across retail, wholesale, and manufacturing, and I’ve made platform decisions with my own money on the line and a real team depending on the answer.

Ecosystem side. I spent time at MaRS Discovery District working with Canadian startups and scale-ups, which is where I learned how early-stage companies actually break. It’s almost never the thing the founders think it is.

Scale side. At Top Hat, I lead Commercial Operations across a business with genuinely complex logistics: digital delivery, physical fulfillment, revenue operations, and customer success systems all sitting on top of each other. The problems are different from running a small company. The instincts are not.

Always iterating. I keep learning by building. Right now that means a lot of applied AI: training on modern frameworks, shipping internal tools that save my teams real hours every week, and rewiring workflows I’ve run for years so they happen in minutes instead of days. Most of what’s shaped how I work lately has come from the work itself.

How I think about this work

The interesting problems are never pure strategy or pure tech. They’re where a platform decision collides with a real team, a real P&L, and a real customer. That’s the layer I care about and the layer most advisors skip.

Build, don’t talk. I’d rather prototype a thing in a day than argue about it for a week. If AI can shorten a loop from hours to minutes, I want to see the working version, not the architecture diagram.

Bias toward what you already have. Most companies don’t need another tool. They need the ones they have to do more, integrate better, and get out of each other’s way. I’ll push back on “just buy something new” before I’ll recommend it.

Tools I’ve worked with in depth

Commerce and marketplaces: Shopify, BigCommerce, Sharetribe Revenue and ops systems: Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach Data and analytics: Tableau, Looker AI and automation: OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude Code, custom agents and workflows Finance and ERP: NetSuite, QuickBooks Ops tooling: Airtable, Zapier, n8n AWS: EC2, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, Amplify, Route 53 Google Cloud and Firebase: BigQuery, Vertex AI, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Authentication, Hosting

I’m not claiming fluency in every tool. I’m claiming the judgment to evaluate them quickly and the experience to know when a platform solves a problem versus when it just relocates it.

Let’s talk

If you’re working on a problem at the intersection of digital strategy, operations, and what AI can actually do for a real business, send me a note.