Deal-Won / About
One person builds it. That person is Tom.
Deal-Won is Tom Loebenstein. Seven years selling to operators who do not speak software, and now building the automations that run their back offices. No account manager, no handoff to a delivery team, no junior doing the actual work.
The decade that matters
Tom spent seven years selling into exactly the kind of company Deal-Won now builds for. Not adjacent to it. Into it.
Joyride, 2017 to 2020
Office and workplace beverage. The buyers were workplace managers, office managers and HR managers, and he closed and ran the largest national account in the business.
Therma, later Glacier Grid, 2020 to 2024
Energy management and IoT for buildings full of refrigeration. He joined as the founding sales hire, became Senior AE, then Director of Sales running a team of ten. He owned the revenue ramp from zero to $7M, took the company from zero to more than 200 K-12 school district customers, and grew the deployed sensor base from 1,000 to 10,000.
The buyers were restaurant operators, including McDonald’s franchisees and the largest natural food distributor in North America, and K-12 district administrators. Risk-averse, procurement-heavy, and completely uninterested in technology for its own sake. If you run a distributor, you already know this person. You may be this person.
What he is not
Worth being direct about, because the category is full of people who are vague on this point.
- Not an ML engineer or a researcher. Tom does not train models. He builds with Claude Code: agents, integrations, sites and automations that run in production. That is a real craft and it is the one this work needs.
- Not a deep-tech founder. If your problem is a novel model architecture, there are fifty better people for that and none of them are on this page.
- Not an agency. There is no bench to staff you with. That is the constraint and the whole offer at once.
Most recently he was the founding seller at two AI companies, which is where he learned to build this way. He left to do it full time.
Why one person is the point
An agency sells you a pitch from a principal and delivers with someone three years into their career who has never stood in a warehouse. At a distributor doing $12M, that gap is fatal, because the whole job is understanding how your shop actually works, including the parts that are technically wrong and have been fine for twenty years.
Tom takes the first call, watches how the work gets done, writes the plan, builds it, and answers the phone when something breaks. The trade-off is honest: one person has a ceiling on how many distributors he can serve at once. If that means you wait a few weeks, he will tell you that on the first call rather than sell you a slot he cannot fill.
Your back office is not one job
Order entry is one problem. Invoice matching is a different one. Price lists and the storefront are a third. Handled separately, nobody owns the seams between them, and the seams are where your week actually goes. The order that came in by text has to become an invoice that matches a PO nobody photographed. The price that changed on Tuesday has to reach the storefront, the quoting sheet and the rep in the truck. One person holding all three is not a luxury. It is the only way those seams get owned by anybody.
You own what gets built
Everything runs in your accounts, on your systems, documented, with no dependency on a Deal-Won platform you would lose access to. You are not renting the automation from us. If we part ways, it keeps running.