Month: August 2022

Talk-Commerce Katie Hoesley

The Simple Formula for Success in Open-SaaS and the BigCommerce Hackathon with Katie Hoesley

Open-Source and Software as a Service have traditionally not been aligned. The traditional SaaS model is closed code on a multitenant host. The Open-Source model is something you have complete control over, and you have to host it yourself.

Open SaaS brings the idea of open source to the SaaS Community. We talk to Katie Hoesley about the Big Commerce Hackathon and how developers can be active in a vibrant community.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce, the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Katie Hoesley. Did I get it right? Katie Hoesley. So Hoesley go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life. 

Katie: Okay. Yeah, I’m Katie. I am the senior developer advocate at BigCommerce.

Katie: And I think the things I’m really passionate about. Completely unrelated. I’m really passionate about education and I’m really passionate about being outside. I live in Colorado and I’m from Minnesota, like you Brent. I’m really passionate about the outdoors and education. 

Brent: Good.

Brent: Today we’re gonna talk about some developer things at BigCommerce and how maybe developers could get more involved. Yep. In some of those activities that BigCommerce is doing. Tell us about what you’re doing in that role and some of the things that we can do together to encourage developers on the BigCommerce platform.

Katie: Yeah. So my position at BigCommerce, I describe it as to people as I swing on a pendulum between our product and engineering teams and then the developers in our developer community who actually use BigCommerce tools and who build on our platform. A big part of what we’re doing right now is just trying to get more people engaged in our community in general.

Katie: And the thing we have actually running as we speak is the first ever developer hackathon at BigCommerce. So it’s a two week long hackathon. We have participants from all over the world and it’s been really fun. It’s the first time we’ve run anything like it. And of course, now that we’re running it, we have 2 million ideas of the things that we wanna do moving forward.

Katie: More hackathons, more community engagement, more open source, contribution competitions stuff like that. We really want anyone that builds on the platform to join either our slack community or follow us on Twitter. Because we have a huge number of people that build on this platform and we have such a small percentage of them in our engaged community.

Katie: And so if I could tell them all one thing it’s that I really think you get a lot out of engaging in the community. You engage with us on the dev team. You engage with the other folks that are building on the same platform. And you can eliminate a lot of multiple people doing the same work, we find out that people are building something that someone built five years ago, but they just don’t know it exists.

Katie: My day to day is really trying to get people into that community and then trying to create initiatives that really bring them a lot of value. And then. We have a perfect direct line into our users to bring feedback back to product and engineering, to tighten up those loops of iterations of products.

Katie: It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, like BigCommerce gets a ton out of us having an engaged community and the community itself. I think also gets a lot out of just being there and being with each other and with 

Brent: us. I think that you had mentioned open source and that’s a little bit unique to the SaaS community.

Brent: Tell us about open SaaS and open source and how BigCommerce views open source and how open source then is is participated in from the broader community. Yeah. 

Katie: Great question. So BigCommerce is moving in a direction. Like I feel like we’re partially there, but the larger initiative in general is moving towards being like an open SaaS platform.

Katie: Which means that we accept contributions from the community. You can go look at the code base of big design, for example, our like modular design library that has all these reusable components that you can use. Anyone can use them. They’re open source. And if you find a flaw or if you wanna improve it, like you can do that.

Katie: We can have all of this contribution from our community so that our community is not reliant on our developers fitting some bug fix or some feature request or whatever into a sprint, rather if you know how to fix it, or if you wanna add something, you can go ahead and do that. And I think anyone who uses a particular software consistently, or anyone that’s been a software developer knows that the community finds things that the developers on the back end don’t see, because they’re building the product.

Katie: They aren’t necessarily using it over and over and over. So the more contributions we get from our community in tandem with what our very skilled developers are building better for everybody. It’s a really cool concept. I don’t know if anyone else is doing or is as focused on it as BigCommerce.

Katie: And if I was a, if I was a developer out in the wild and I had to pick something, I feel like I would wanna pick an open SaaS platform over something that’s completely closed. And if I have any sort of issue or thing. I know I can just go fix real quick. I have to wait for it to fit onto a product roadmap where open SaaS or open source contributions in general are just a way for the community to directly affect the product that they use every day.

Brent: Maybe describe briefly how a developer gets. They find a bug, how do they get that fix into it? And how do they verify it’s been fixed? If it’s a SaaS platform. Yeah, 

Katie: that’s a good question. You would have to find either in the documentation or by contacting someone where that repository is of whatever that open.

Katie: Thing, you’re looking at, say, it’s the big design. You could find the big design repository and you would submit a poll request for whatever change you’re making. And then someone on our end would either accept the poll request or they would reject it. You would find out, probably get like a GitHub notification.

Katie: I’m guessing if that’s how you’re doing it. And if there’s some major thing that you wanna change, they’re not gonna. Users create like humongous features, I don’t think at this point any platform would let users create something huge, but you would just submit a poll request and then you would know whether or not that got closed, like rejected or closed 

Brent: accepted.

Brent: Are there, are you recognizing those people in a way, in any way? 

Katie: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know if we have a system for like recognition of con contributions. I don’t know if we’re at a level where we’re getting enough contributions to think about it.

Katie: But we should, we definitely should. There should be an incentive. There’s an inherent incentive because it’s improving the product that you use, but there should be a greater incentive for people to continue contributing, cuz that’s the goal, right? Like people they start contributing and then they get the bug and they want to contribute more and everybody wins.

Katie: As of right now, I don’t know if there’s like a true incentive outside of the product being improved. 

Brent: Have you looked at other open source communities that are doing the same thing that wouldn’t be SaaS? An on-prem open source software has a lot of these things that we’re talking about already

Brent: ingrained in ’em because people can run the whole system on their local machine and find those things directly. Have you looked to see what other communities are doing to see how BigCommerce can evolve in that as a SaaS company? 

Katie: I don’t know if Magento qualifies for this, but when I first started in devel, I was like talking to everyone I could find online about dev and about their experiences, wherever they are.

Katie: And I kept hearing that Magento’s software is over 50%. Open source contributions. And that creates this awesome ecosystem where people want to contribute. They’re saying their contributions recognized developers love it because they don’t have to sit and fix all these things or add all these these little tweaks that they trust their community to do.

Katie: And I heard over and over these like rave reviews about just that. I think right away, I was sold on uping the open source. Just like upping people’s knowledge or awareness that like, you can do that here. And so our hackathon is our first big thing, but an open source contribution competition, or some way to get people to contribute to our open source content is definitely on the top of the list of things we wanna do next.

Katie: So yes and no, I think I don’t have a lot of direct things to look. There’s not I don’t know that there’s an exact parallel to what we’re doing for me to look at, but I heard over and over from people who had worked both in develop as a developer and in other roles at Magento that that was a huge thing.

Katie: That was a huge reason for their community growing so much and staying so big. And like I said, there’s so many devs using BigCommerce and there’s so few of them proportionally active in our community. Active in slack or active on Twitter or wherever it is our forums. And I’m hoping that more initiatives like that can get people in, people can see this is fun and it’s not that hard.

Katie: And you can solve your own problems, which I think for a lot of developers being able to solve your own problem. Is why you became a developer most of the time. You can do it yourself, you can build it yourself. So yeah, Magento is the big one that I kept hearing over and over.

Katie: Obviously you’re familiar with Magento. And so just hearing that alone, inspired me to really keep that on our developer relations roadmap of a really cool thing. We can get people. To be aware of and to 

Brent: contribute to. Yeah. And I do know a little bit about Magento but I do also think it’s a good if you look back in history, it has a good roadmap of things that have worked and haven’t worked in a community.

Brent: And it’s a good way to collaborate with another community to find things that are working from one community, the other. And I think as a community leader the core of it shouldn’t be commercial. The core of why we’re in a community is to do great things together as a community.

Brent: And I applaud the hackathon. I think that’s very exciting. Is it the first eCommerce hackathon for a SaaS platform? 

Katie: It might be? I’m guessing other companies have done one. I know Shopify did one years ago. I know it’s the first one at BigCommerce. We’ve never done an external hackathon before.

Katie: And when I looked around to try to find examples of other hackathons, so I could figure out how to run one and figure out what I needed to do in order for it to work. I really couldn’t find a whole lot of stuff. So I don’t know if this exact model of us running one, not in tandem with an event.

Katie: It is its own event on its own. I think that setup is fairly unusual. Normally a hackathon would be, the final two days of a week, long conference or something like that. So I didn’t have a lot of examples to look to. I just had my previous experience of being in hackathons. So we could stitch together what we thought we needed to do. I’m not sure if we’re the first oh, SaaS company to do one. I doubt it. I’m sure someone has but yeah, it’s our 

Brent: first one. I think it’s super exciting. It’s the first one of a SaaS company I’ve heard of, but then, okay. I’ve been involved in another community for a long time that’s not SaaS, so I’m not the best expert in that.

Katie: We have, I think like a third of our participants are in Asia.

Katie: A third are in north America and a third are in Europe and 1159 central time is like 8:00 AM someplace, it’s all over the place.

Brent: Great. Is there, so is there plans to do an in person, like maybe in Austin, an in person hackathon it is 

Katie: top of mind. I think running a virtual one has been awesome, but it just makes me that much more excited to run something in person.

Katie: I guess anyone on the internet knows it’s much more difficult to connect with people via discord or even via zoom. So we would love to have some sort of developer-centric event BigCommerce traditionally. I don’t think we have very large developer events. But as we dig a little bit more into like developer relation, as we invest more in our developer relations team and our community team I think it’s become clear that we have a ton of people in Austin.

Katie: We have a ton of people that would travel to Austin if we were doing some big, awesome things. There’s no date but it’s on our like mental roadmap of when can we do this? And we are excited. I really wanna do something 

Brent: soon. Yeah. And I know John Woodall of space 48, and I know Tom Robertshaw who just did big DevX.

Brent: It was a virtual event too. Yeah. Our first event with him was in Austin. Okay. It was called ma Titans. And I think there’s probably a lot of opportunity. And I know Space 48 is fantastic in the collaboration space and especially in the developer space. And Tom is such a great person to lead that.

Brent: It seems that type of event would be a big hit in Austin. And I would be one of those people behind it that would be pushing for it. And it is fun. We have organized a number of the Meet Magento events, and typically after the event, we would do a full day hackathon in conjunction Adobe slash Magento always sent their community leaders there to help put those pull requests in at the end.

Brent: At the end we would have some scorecard items around how many bugs were squashed and how many pull requests were accepted. And it’s always a fun time. And then the developers, if their bug does get into the core. I think with the open source that you can download, you can actually see your name inside of the code base.

Brent: What is that? But it is it’s, I think from a recognition standpoint, it’s always fun to know that, Hey, I’ve contributed back to this software and it’s a good talking point for BigCommerce as well that you can participate and then give back to it. 

Katie: Totally and like doing a hackathon like that too, a really short, like one or two days is a completely different energy than this two week one, this two week one, I think is gonna primarily be people working on or starting to work on apps that they do plan to bring to the marketplace, so I think we’ll have a lot of like MVPs that will get iterated on after. I’m sure Space 48 is gonna come out with some fully done app within two weeks. I don’t even know what those guys could do. Probably a fully completed app, but the energy of a two day one is really fun. Yeah, if we did some sort of open source competition or, whatever it is.

Katie: And also we have so many partners that are doing such interesting things. It’d be so fun to have speakers from somewhere like space 48, someone like you to come up and talk to the other developers in a real, in person forum. I’ve never even met my coworkers or seen our office, so it would also be cool for me.

Katie: But yeah, something in person is like definitely top of mind and being able to in incentivize and encourage open source contributions would be huge. 

Brent: Let’s make sure we do a follow up after the hackathon and see how it goes. And definitely we have a few minutes left here and I have a new project that I’ve started personally it’s called the free joke project.

Brent: Okay. And I’m working on telling a joke during the podcast rather than. just Having a joke prior to my podcast, which I give away a free joke prior. I’m gonna tell you a joke right now.

Brent: And and then you can decide if it’s free or. Should I charge for it? That’s the question. Should it be an open source joke or is this one of those jokes that we want to really tie it down. We don’t want even anybody to modify the payment gateway on this joke. 

Brent: That’s how closed it is. All right. So what do you call it? What do you call a detective who just solves cases accidentally? What do you 

Katie: call detective who just solves cases 

Brent: accidentally Sheer Luck Holmes. 

Katie: I think you got charge for that one. Really? I think that’s gotta go behind the paywall. That’s a good one.

Brent: Behind the paywall joke. You’re the first one who has said that. Thank you so much. Katie, at the end of every podcast, I give the guests the opportunity to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? 

Katie: Okay I think what I’d like to plug is joining our developer slack space or following BigCommerce devs on Twitter.

Katie: That is me. I constantly retweet myself, so you’ll know right away it’s me, but that is I think the top of the funnel to joining our developer network and to really seeing what we offer and being able to engage with people just like yourself and people from my team. We’d love to have more people join the community and really see that it’s a great place to be.

Brent: Yeah. And I will just add that we’ve started a BigCommerce community channel on Twitter. Yes. That we’re trying to get more people. It does have more people than another platform that starts with an M that now starts with an a, but also has a large following. So I would encourage everybody to go to Twitter and join the BigCommerce, Twitter community channel.

Brent: Yeah. And we are trying to post something in there almost every day. Katie, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation and I wish all the luck for your hackathon. And lots of bugs, squashed, and lots of new features seen. 

Katie: Yes, exactly. Thank you so much.

magento-association Marta Molinska

Helping Ukraine with Marta Molinska

We talk with Marta Molinska (@molme) about how she has helped hundreds of Ukrainian refugees as they crossed the border during the war. We talk a little about the Magento Association and how Marta is helping with events and the community. Ukraine can still use your help!

https://www.hospitallers.life/about-us

Marta runs a sky diving business in Poland and is passionate about the Magento Community.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this special episode of the Magento association. Talk Commerce collaboration to bring out more about the Magento association and what we’re doing to help the Magento community today. I have Marta Molinska Marta, please introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis.

Brent: And one of your passions in. 

Marta: That’s a very nice way of introducing myself when it comes to passion because what I do on a daily basis is my passion. So I run a drop zone. So we are jumping out of planes and my personal role on the drop zone is to teach people how to And my side job is actually involved in Magento and Magento association as well.

Marta: I’ve been organizing Meet Magento Poland for 9 years straight and now I’m more involved in Magento association and in helping with communication with some consulting and I guess that I try to be a kind of maybe not community manager because it’s for me, the community is not something that you can manage.

Marta: It’s something that you can join and be part of it. And I guess that I want to be a part of it. 

Brent: Thank you so much. And so today we’re gonna talk a little bit about Ukraine and how people can help Ukraine and maybe how both the Magento community and the Magento association can participate in helping Ukraine.

Brent: So sure. Give us a little bit of background on, on what you’ve been doing so far. 

Marta: It’s it’s already a few months since the war broke. But the first weeks were obviously the most intense a couple of days after this shocking news when when Russia attacked Ukraine we in Poland, we were devastated.

Marta: And as I said, we were just in shock, but after a few days and when the migration crisis took place on the border we saw a horrible, horrible videos and pictures from from the border. We could see that the huge crisis is coming. And I guess that the whole nation was thinking just the same, but I need to step in.

Marta: I need to do something and people just open their houses, they open their their homes and they really welcomed total strangers. Of course, if someone that, needs help you’re open to share some of your personal space, but it I think that it never happened. At this scale, it was hundreds of, and thousands of people who welcomed Ukrainians in their homes.

Marta: But I saw that it’s not enough. And since I don’t have much space in my house but I do have a lot of spaces at the airfield as my drop zone, especially in the winter time when we are not operating. We decided quickly to share every inch of space that we had and we recreated every office and the room that we had to the refugee center.

Marta: And yes, as mentioned before the first week was we’re very busy and we had hundreds of people not at the same time though. We had a rotation. So families were coming in they stayed for a few days or weeks depending on what their next plan was. And then when they left new families were coming in.

Marta: Yeah, a rotation system. And then after each family left one by one we continued to help in their settling in process. Like with finding a job or doing some paperwork with school or providing some basic supplies for the new start you can just imagine people.

Marta: coming to to Poland with all their belongings, not in the suitcase, not in even, a backpack. It were just a plastic bags like from Walmart, and they were occurring at for 2000 kilometers. It’s I don’t know, 3000 miles. Yeah, that, that was something that was obviously the most intense time of my life.

Marta: That’s for sure. And the most rewarding as well. And from this point I also wanted to thank a lot some Magento community members that stepped up really quick and helped me to continue the work because on the very beginning, it was quite easy to gather funds for running the shelter.

Marta: But since it’s not my daily job to run this kind of places I had no competencies to do this. And also not much resources. First of all Karen Baker, she was the first to help me out with covering some basic costs that we had on the beginning. And also Hyva especially Vinai and Willem.

Marta: I was touch with them from the very start and 10% of their income for two months was dedicated to the shelter that I was running. And also a lot of other people coordinated to my PayPal account. It really helped. It was not in vain. It never occurred to me that I had so many friends who wanted to help.

Marta: I really appreciate it. And you can be really proud of yourself. You help? A lot of people, we had 426 people in total at the shelter and yeah, including 270 kids. So thank you very much. 

Brent: Is the shelter still going or there was no need her things.

Brent: Okay. Yes. So things are start. I don’t wanna say normal, but 

Marta: they’re, it is still far from normal. We didn’t have to keep the shelter up and running after end of May. So we had it for three months. But I have to admit that it felt like it was three years really. But yeah, after three months it was no longer needed because.

Marta: The waves of refugees started to fade out and people found their more permanent places to stay. So that was one reason. And second reason is, was that we needed to start our operations. So we needed the spaces for our usual business as well. But on the other hand, we we still have a couple of processes that are

Marta: open and they’re constant. Together with my dad I’m not, I don’t think that he’s ever going to listen to this, but still I’m really proud of him because he’s keeping up an amazing work for the past weeks. He was able to gather funds for four ambulances. And now he just got an amazing support again from Magento community from fi and Tomic KKA.

Marta: Many of you might know them from Devant company. They were really helpful and they were so kind to donate money for two ambulances, which are going to Ukraine in a couple of days 

Brent: I saw some stories about ambulances that were coming into Ukraine and then volunteers that were going to the front line to help evacuate people, especially older.

Brent: I think a lot of elderly people that are stuck in that area are finding it very hard to leave or just even evacuate or at the time, especially, it was very difficult for them to move across that area. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I applaud you. And I thank you so much for all your hard work.

Brent: That is so great. 

Marta: It’s something that we are neighbors. We can’t really, leave our brother nation. When they’re at war, we just need to step up. 

Brent: That’s good. Switching gears into the Magento association. I think, I think that as you’ve helped with the Ukrainian crisis, you’ve also always helped with Magento and Meet Magento, and now Magento association.

Brent: Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you’re doing for the Magento association 

Marta: now? Of course I’m happy. For we started our cooperation on the beginning of the year. It was just, it was short before the war started. So the beginning of the cooperation was a bit hectic.

Marta: I shifted my focus on on the shelter, but now we are obviously back on track and I’m pretty much involved in events. I guess this is my domain and I helped in organizing MA connect this year and also in previous year as well. We have two additions. And one addition in 2020 when the pandemic started and one in 2021 and 20 22 now.

Marta: So yeah, I was pretty much involved in, and I hope that we’ll be back in within next month with some good news about new events. 

Brent: I saw that Adobe is going to have their summit in Las Vegas in March of 2023. So hopefully we can come up with a Magento association event that piggybacks on the Adobe summit and have a little bit more Magento representation at the event.

Brent: I would love. Yeah, as I remember too, there’s a down payment at somewhere in Las Vegas, still. , that they used. That’s true. There was a 2020 event that was planned. I’m sitting on the Magento. Membership committee and I am always looking for ways that we can entice people to join

Brent: the Magento association. I just interviewed Vijay Golani from India on some of his ideas on how we can get people to join. Do you have any thoughts on encouraging people to join the Magento association and the reasons why they 

Marta: would obviously the first reason. To be more present in the community and to, for example, to be able to vote when you have the voting, you can say that you have the real influence on what’s going on within Magento association. But obviously there are also other ways You only want to get involved in in the Magento community you can reach out to Magento association and there are a lot of committees that work on a regular basis.

Marta: So it’s it’s very easy to to join or to suggest some ideas, but you are asking how we could encourage people to join. I am a fan of asking the community directly what they want, because we can think that we know, but maybe we don’t, maybe we just assume that something and if we start with wrong assumptions that we would go wrong direction.

Marta: So if we ask the community what the community really wants, then we can address the needs that really exist. 

Brent: I think you’ve been involved in the Magento community for a long time. You’ve been involved in meet Magento, Poland in the past. What is it that drives you to want to be in a in the community and organize events? You’ve done so much for the community. What is it that lies within you that makes you want to do that?

Marta: I wish I knew I don’t know. It’s I’m a very community person. And the same as in my skydiving community, we have we have a lot of connections and this is something that I really like about the Magento ecosystem. It’s not the only business, like there are a lot of different initiatives, different backgrounds, different companies.

Marta: Everyone has the same goal. Obviously we are in a business it’s it’s our way to make a living. But still it’s something more than that. Maybe that’s why I still stick with the Magento community because it’s still alive. It’s still there. I know it sounds like a cliche, but still it’s about the people.

Marta: And I like so much being around Magento folks that I can’t really describe this and maybe that’s why I stick to events, because where to meet Magento people just on the events. Yeah. That’s why we missed in person events so 

Brent: much. . Yeah I agree. There’s some sort of magic there. I don’t know.

Brent: I haven’t been in, I’ve been involved in other communities, but it hasn’t been as magical as this and maybe there’s definitely a people aspect to it. I always enjoy, I enjoy going to meet Megento Poland, meet Megento Germany, nether. All those different places and traveling and meeting all those people.

Brent: And it isn’t the event so much, it is the people. And then when you start to get to know those people and enjoy their company and having some time with them, I think that’s the important part. Do you think there’s another community that can match the vibrance of the Magento community? Do you think it’s unique in any way or is there anything that’s this magic Elixer 

Marta: I don’t know if there are any other communities which might be similar to Magento.

Marta: It has an orange vibe, and I guess this is a really unique group of people coming in and coming out also because it’s a living organism. It’s not like a solid rock, I guess That’s exactly why it is unique. It shapes our real from day one to now and to the future.

Brent: Yeah. I think part of the uniqueness too, it was born from the founders of Magento Roy and Yoav and then Bob Schwartz and even Mark Lavell really embraced the community. I saw that, when eBay did their, when they were there, there was a kind of a drop off and. when when Mark Lavell started again, he really embraced it.

Brent: And I think that’s part of it is that the, whatever the brand is that’s around the community. If there is a brand, there has to be buyin from all parties, I think is part of it. And now I think Magento’s finding its place in the world with Mage-OS and the Magento Association.

Brent: I think it’s starting to find its feet again. 

Marta: I really hope that Magento association is is going to play a major role in shaping this Magento reality. And I know that it is not always been perceived as an important player, but now when the changes are being applied, the changes that are

Marta: really going to reshape the Magento association and with the more open attitude to, towards the community. I really think that we are going to make some difference. 

Brent: Yeah. I can say that from the membership side, from the event side, there’s a lot of very exciting things happening and I’m seeing a lot more transparency, especially from the Magento association.

Brent: So we’re seeing more about what’s happening internally and we’re seeing more news from each of the community meetings and it’s an exciting time and I’m very excited for what you’re doing in events and I you’ve joined our membership committee as well. And and had some very good insight for us.

Brent: Thank you. Marta as we finish out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug today. What would you like to plug. 

Marta: I think we can, we started with with Ukraine and to be honest, I would like to end our episode also with a personal request for, to each of you.

Marta: If you can find a way to help Ukraine, everyone wanted to help on the very beginning and was eager. Either send money or supplies or to help in any other way, like offering jobs and so on. But after some weeks this general willingness to help faded a little bit and the war didn’t fight that much.

Marta: Didn’t fight at all, actually. So Ukraine still needs a lot of help. So each of us can really make a difference. I can say from my heart that every single act of kindness or any single act of help is changing someone s life. So I would really like to each of you to find a way to.

Marta: Ukraine in any way you can 

Brent: thank you. Yeah it does. It starts with one person. I before this, I was talking to Dmitri from Swiss labs, Swiss up labs, and he also had a very good recommendation for a paramedic service. We will put any recommendations in our show notes today and make those links available to everyone.

Brent: Marta, what is your next event coming up? What is your next big thing you’re gonna be doing? 

Marta: We’ll, I hope it’s going to be either ma connect. So our online event, or maybe a Magento association in person event, we’re still figuring out the details, but I really hope this is it.

Brent: Yeah, me too. Marta, it’s been so great talking to you. Thank you for the time. Thank you for a wonderful evening. Thank 

Marta: you. Bye bye. Bye.

eTail East 2022 – Recap

The last couple of years of eTail have been a little slow and because of the pandemic, non-existant. I was excited to hear that the sponsorships sold out and even booth space was at a premium at the event.

Talk-Commerce Michiel Schipperus

Real-time B2B Commerce with Michiel Schipperus

B2B commerce is complex, and getting real-time data from your ERP is important. We interview Michiel Schipperus (@Schipperus) with Sana Commerce. We learn how Sana ties directly to your SAP or Microsoft Dynamics ERP. He explains how he is helping companies worldwide achieve e-commerce success. Michiel has been working with B2B eCommerce for the last 20 years and leads a company of over 500 fantastic people worldwide, all with unique talents. You can hear Michiel’s passion for his business and employees.

Big News: This episode was recorded before the Gartner Magic Quadrant report came out. Sana Commerce was named as a Niche Player in the latest report. See here https://www.sana-commerce.com/news/sana-commerce-named-a-niche-player-in-the-2022-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-digital-commerce/

Transcript

Brent: welcome to this episode of talk commerce. Today. I have Michael Schipperus. He is the CEO of Sana commerce. Miguel, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions. 

Michael: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brent, for having me. So my name is Miguel.

Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today, I have Michael Schipperus. He is the CEO of Sana commerce. Mic Miguel, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Brent: Tell us one of your passions in life and what you do on a day-to-day basis. 

Michael: Yeah, Brent thanks for having me. Yeah, one of my passion. I just recently started to pick up adult tennis. You know what I mean is, you know what it is. Yeah. It’s becoming pretty popular. It’s coming from Spain, but it’s something that I really enjoyed doing recently. Although not yet really good at it, but starting to grow as a passion.

Brent: That’s great. And so your day-to-day role, you’re the CEO of Sana commerce. Tell us a little bit about it. 

Michael: Yeah. So we are in the B2B eCommerce space now for 14, almost 15 years. So I would say we’re pretty early on discovering the need for B2B companies to have something different when it comes to eCommerce.

Michael: We started around 2007 and today we’re over 500 people teams around the world and our. Business passion is to help B2B companies go online. And before that I was running an e-commerce agency and we were helping a lot of retailers sell online, but around 2007, we got more in touch with wholesale distribution, manufacturing companies.

Michael: And at that point we were helping them. We try to help them with the same eCommerce solutions that we helped that we use for retailers. But first 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 projects filled. And we didn’t know why, because we were always successful with with commerce. But then we figured out that B2B.

Michael: Companies actually need something else. That’s what we have been doing for over 14 years now. It has been very exciting to see all these B2B companies really grow and really catch up to all these retailers that are already for many years, doing such a fantastic job on the web. 

Brent: I’ve also been in the eCommerce space since 2009, something like that with Magento, mainly, but now with other platforms.

Brent: And definitely B2B clients have taken a long time to adopt the eCommerce model in their business. Maybe tell us some of the differences that you’ve found between the retail direct to consumer and B2. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the reason why that is, I always felt like these B2C companies really got a lot of pressure from their customers.

Michael: They said, if you don’t have a web store or a good, nice looking web store, then I’ll go somewhere else. And I think in B2B that’s a little bit different, right? A lot of these business customers they really depend on their supplier, so it’s not easy for them to switch. And therefore, I think they have been more.

Michael: Patient, I think that is with B2B companies that are not as fast to adopt eCommerce solutions and yeah, talking about the differences. I, there are a lot, it’s very different. And I think a lot of people are overlooking that or under how do you say that? How you say that they’re 

Brent: looking they’re looking for teachers that aren’t on the platform.

Brent: No, 

Michael: I’m just saying that a lot of People don’t understand how complex B2B is. They look at BBC, they look at B2B and say, Hey, it’s pretty similar because it’s in the end of the day, it’s a transaction. And I think that’s oversimplified because for B2B companies, the transaction is a lot more complex than for B2C companies.

Michael: And and I’ll give you an example. If you or me, we go to Amazon, we buy a book it’s very straightforward. We get, probably get the same price. It’s a product that’s probably available in stock. We pay directly with credit card. It’s, it’s done with BWE that’s different, right?

Michael: Probably as a BWE buyer. I have. Prenegotiated prices. I buy big volumes of products. I get tier discounts. I get volume discounts at the end of the year. Maybe I get, refunds or something based on how many products I order, how much I spent. You can have very complex VAT calculations.

Michael: My order might even trigger a production order where it’s made to order I can have my own customized products that I’m buying. So what I’m trying to say is that the B2B transactions are way more complex than B2C. And I think a lot of people didn’t really understand it.

Michael: Even some B2B companies didn’t understand themselves actually how complex B2B buying and B2B selling was especially if you want to do it. Does that make 

Brent: sense? Yeah. I think the platforms too were slow to adopt. I don’t think Shopify has a viable B2B solution still. And some of the other platforms have taken only in a number of years have they started adopting some of those B2B practices?

Brent: So I think you’re right. There is a gap between what is needed in that market and what is provided in the market. Yeah. Where does your platform fit in from a a size level? Is it geared towards enterprise clients or is it geared for the entire spectrum? Yeah, it’s geared 

Michael: for the entire spectrum.

Michael: So we serve really small companies, but also, multi billion dollar companies. Yeah, we we serve both around the world actually quite well. And that’s, I think because of our focus, we have always been focused on the B2B. Business case. And I think that makes all the difference that typically, if you look at all the bigger eCommerce platforms they grew up, serving retailers, B2C business cases.

Michael: And later on, they said, oh, we see the opportunity with B2B. They added B2B features, if you start building your product with a certain use case in mind, it’s not as easy to pivot, I think, especially cause, given the the, my point earlier that B2B and BDC are so different because the transactions are different, but also the relationships are very different.

Michael: I think the relationship that you may have with Amazon is very different. What a B2B buyer will have with their supplier that he might buy from. On a weekly biweekly basis. And they might even know the names of the people that work there in vice versa. And they have built up a relationship over many years, and throughout these years they have made all sorts of agreements.

Michael: And like I said on, tailor made pro products at such. So there’s in B2B so much more complexity and such a different relationship. That it’s I think also looking at eCommerce, it’s hard for a B2C platform to pivot and be very good at B2B as well. 

Brent: Tell us a little bit more about Sana commerce.

Brent: Is it’s a SaaS platform clients are connecting via APIs. Yeah, 

Michael: absolutely. The key difference With Sana commerce compared to almost all other e-commerce platforms in the world is that we, with our APIs, we go directly to the ERP system to the database of the ERP system. So instead of going through an interface where you will.

Michael: Basically synchronize some information from the ERP system to the eCommerce solution, vice versa. We go directly into the ERP system. That’s what we call ERP integration. Although I think a lot of companies that do these interfaces will call it European integration, but And in this way, we have two major benefits.

Michael: One is that we can get all the information from the E R P system and not just the information that goes through the interface. And second is we always know that the information is accurate, becomes because it’s coming straight to from the source. 

Brent: It’s an approach as a if you’re writing your own software and you have the ability to do that from the code level that, that gives you the advantage as a merchant to have that more, I guess we’ll call it a more close integration.

Brent: And you also don’t depend on a third party being up in case somebody went down. I can remember a time where we had a very high volume client and they had an interface that we were gonna go to and they, and I said, our, we’re. Tens and tens of thousands of orders. And they said, no, we’re our system

Brent: won’t go down. And sure enough, their system went down because of the interfa the middleware. And just from a technical standpoint to, to let the listeners know that this not a you’re, what you’re saying is it’s a direct integration. Let’s say one road leads directly to the other where the typical, the new typical setup for a SaaS integration is a hub and spoke where you’re going to a central place.

Brent: And then it’s connecting again to the final destination. So you have a sort of a pass through and you’re now also dependent on that pass through. Yeah. So maybe tell us a little bit more about that and how that helps maybe in speed and reliability. 

Michael: yeah. Yeah. Good point. And to give you an example, if you’re in, you’re using a Sana commerce web store and you’re putting products in your basket. Then in real time, the E R P system is calculating the basket, not the eCommerce solution. So all the business rules, the discount rules, whether or not the product is available. The V a T rules are all being directly calculated in the ERP system.

Michael: And the eCommerce platform is just showing the output of that. so that’s very different. So it’s not. It’s where normally an eCommerce system would do all the calculation process, the order, and then send it to the ERP system where it’s being processed. Once again with us, if you with the Sana web store, if you put, process order directly, it’s being processed in the ERP system.

Michael: So you kinda have no issues afterwards where you’re saying, Hey, this you put in the order, but we. Accepted for some reason or they’re, rounding errors, those kind of things that you typically have when you connect in ERP system to eCommerce solution. And for B2C, that’s not that relevant for B2B that’s super relevant because you’ve got all these, complexity around this order.

Michael: And that’s the nice thing about E R P systems is that they’re very good at handling this complexity when it comes to, pricing or availability of product. So yes, it’s also has to do with what you mentioned, reliability. You want your. Online customer or as a B2B company, you want your online customer to know that they can rely on the information that they see on the web store.

Michael: And with Sana Commerce, there’s no chance that the, that information is not accurate because it’s coming straight from the source. 

Brent: I know there has been traditional struggles from the B2B side when adopting eCommerce besides the age of a lot of B2B owners. yeah. What are some, the other struggles for adoption of B2B?

Brent: In, in the, in trying to get online and sell stuff. 

Michael: I think the biggest struggle is that companies that finally say, okay, we want to invest in, in online that they they do. Directly get the concept of E R P integration. So they can set up an e-commerce solution connected to the ERP system, but not have the reliability that their customers are expecting from them, because then normally their customers would call and they would have somebody on the phone.

Michael: This person is looking at the E R P system and has all the information on. Customer in front of them. So can speak about it and say, Hey, what did you order last week? Last month, last year, two years ago. Oh, you ordered this. Oh, I need to have a spare part for that. And the person on the phone is, has all that direct access has all the information can really support this online customer in whatever he or she wants to buy.

Michael: Now. So if you go online, this customer wants to have all the information available as well in the same way, but if you don’t have that direct integration, you only have a subset of the information. So you might only have the orders that are, that you place through the web store. You will not have all the orders from five years ago that are only near your ERP system.

Michael: If you don’t have that. Close integration as you call it. So what happens? As online customer, you go to the web store, you don’t see that previous order data for instance, or are the information that you would like to have and what do you do? You pick up the phone again and you say, oh, don’t wanna work with web store anymore because it doesn’t have that information.

Michael: It’s not as complete as the person I get on the phone in terms of the information that that I get provided with. And it’s not as accurate or reliable as it should be. And that’s then you see what happens. Then they pick up the phone again, then they will not adopt the web store.

Michael: And then, we speak to the company says, yeah, e-commerce doesn’t work for us. Our customers don’t like it and it’s not true. I think there are very few people these days that prefer to pick up the phone over doing self-service on the internet. However, If you want to do self-service on the internet, you want to know that the, that you can trust the information that is there and that you have all the information that you need.

Michael: Otherwise it will not work. So I think that’s the biggest struggle for companies. If they. , they don’t start with the right setup in place that they will, their customers will not fully embrace it. And they will conclude that eCommerce is not working for them. And we heard that time and time again.

Michael: So I think that’s really a big deal. And I understand because a lot of companies, of course, if you, if I would be also this vision manufacturing company and I want. Buy an eCommerce solution, probably I’ll go online. I’ll Google eCommerce solutions. I’ll see Magento and Shopify and all the big players and say, oh, probably these solutions are great.

Michael: So I need to have one of those. But I think they have to look one, two more steps deeper and see, what’s the nature of my business. What is my core infrastructure that I have in place typically for these companies, it’s the ERP system. And then start thinking from there and say, okay, how do I take that information that I have there and take it to the web.

Brent: Yeah, no, that’s the great points. And I think a lot of I’ll pick on Shopify a little bit, a lot of, and they have such a huge marketing budget that CEOs of companies typically say, oh, they’re selling online. Let’s just set up a Shopify store, not realizing a that there’s gonna be a ton of things that they need.

Brent: And we could go into a feature list that B2B has that, that a typical D2C doesn’t have, and then B that they’re going to run into all kinds of fees and performance issues and all the things that aren’t typical in your. D2C store and you’re direct to consumer store where are more typical in a B2B store?

Brent: I’ll name one of ’em. I know that we talked about reordering or the volume of an order in your typical B2B shopping cart. You could have a thousand line items in it. Where in your typical D2C you’re gonna. 10 at the most or something like that your shopping card has to be robust to handle that maybe speak to some of those constraints that people encounter when trying to adopt a, B or D2C store in a B2B environment.

Michael: Yeah I like the example of reorder, right? Like I said, you might have placed an order a couple weeks or months, or even years ago. And you want to reorder that then, and you want to do that through your online web store. You need to be able to access that previous order through the web store.

Michael: And what I love about the European integration, it’s also that, okay, you placed the order or you want to place it reorder. You can also look it up. Call with a sales rep, ask them to adjust the order. And in real time, you can see on your screen that the order is being chased because changed because it goes directly to the ERP system to check that information and you can on the fly approve the order for instance.

Michael: So you have this because you’re all looking at the same information with this closed ERP integration. You can really collaborate in such a way that is pretty unique, I would say. And there, there are many more examples where if you have that philosophy and that approach of close ERP integration, as you call it earlier that for B2B customers, that it, that are so many more benefits and they will also lead to higher adoption.

Michael: So it’s not just, I think, in the features, it’s really also from my perspective in the fundamental. Set up of your business and your eCommerce environment. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think you’ve, I think that E R P integration too is important. If you think about some, a lot of B2B customers or a lot of B2B merchants might have a million SKUs and most retail eCommerce platforms are not gonna be able to handle that volume or even manage that volume.

Brent: So I guess it sounds like what you’re saying is through that really close knit, E R P integration, it’s much easier to manage all those SKUs when you’re using your platform. Yeah. 

Michael: And of course they’re also, downsides, right? Your information in your ERP. Needs to be clean, right?

Michael: If you make a big mess of your ERP system and then you open it up to your customers, then they can see the mess. That’s not how it should be. So you need to have your ERP system and your data and your ERP system in order. But once you have that, it’s fantastic that you can just make it available to your online customer.

Michael: And it’s all almost like they’re working in your ERP system, but then in a much more user inter friendly user interface. And then also of course only seeing the inform. That is relevant and and accessible to them. 

Brent: Maybe talk a little bit about configurability. I know that some SaaS platforms have the downside of only being configurable to what.

Brent: The other thousands of people are doing on it. How do you manage configurability within your platform? 

Michael: Yeah. Good question. And it’s a hot topic indeed. But what we typically do is we just like we leverage the E R P system for all the. Complexities around pricing and availability of product.

Michael: And a lot of other things, we also leverage the functionality of CPQ tooling, for instance. So we integrate with that tooling to do the complexity of, to handle the complexity of config product configuration if it becomes really complex and then we take the output of that and we say, okay, now you can process that order in your shopping basket, but we just provide the visual interface, whereas all the.

Michael: Complexity is being done by third party tools. 

Brent: And what about language and tax? I know that certainly it’s harder for Europeans sometimes to come to the US and vice versa US go to because the way tax is done here is completely different. In a wholesale market in the US, nobody would ever pay tax in.

Brent: I know in Europe with that, you would typical. Charge on that tax and get a credit. Yeah. Maybe talk to some of those complexities around tax 

Michael: and yeah, for us we love complexity. And why is that? Because typically this complexity for business has already been solved. And then we just leverage what they have used to create to manage that complexity.

Michael: So for instance, with taxes Typically, I think a lot of our customers in the us use Avalara for calculating taxes. And then we just use, the output of that to show it in a web store. Either it’s in the ERP system or it’s, third party integrations like Avalara. So in a sense, Sana Commerce is a pretty straightforward solution because we don’t create a lot of extra complexity.

Michael: Leverage the complexity that customers already have in place. So I love to speak with prospects that have a very complex business maybe because they work with best before dates and all the complexity that comes with that. We don’t care. We, they already have systems in place that manage that complexity.

Michael: And we’ll just take the output of those, processes. And we’ll just show them in the web show, show those in the web store. So we tend to keep it simple because we don’t have to recreate any of that complexity that the customer already has. 

Brent: and just a little bit about complexity and workflows.

Brent: You mentioned a couple times that you’re taking a lot of this from the E R P and ERP may have specific workflows on say, who’s gonna approve something. Are you adopting all those workflows into the eCommerce system as well for if a buyer has to get an approval from another member of their team or even teams working together and then pooling.

Brent: Orders maybe speak to that. Yeah. Good 

Michael: example. That’s indeed functionality that we have within Sana. So within Sana, you can set up these business rules who can order what, and who has, which authorities. So this functionality that we provide, however, if Business has already set that up in their ERP system.

Michael: We can also leverage that we, so we got a bit of both the same with product enrichment. If a customer manages that from the ERP system, or they have a PIM system in place where they manages, their product catalog, then they can use that. That’s fine. If they don’t, we also offer functionality in Sana commerce to manage product enrichment.

Michael: So we can go basically go both. 

Brent: We touched on the idea of the amount of SKU. Is there a sort of upper limit that you would wanna attempt to do, or is it open to SKU count and open to categories and things like that. Yeah, 

Michael: no, there’s not directly a limit.

Michael: I I don’t know if there will be at some point in it there’s always a limit. But we typically do stick to limit. Of course, if there. More SKUs. We always need to do a bit more work, bit more testing some tweaking and tuning on the caching side. And of course we the company need, need to be able with their ERP system to manage certain volumes.

Michael: Because if we process an order, like I said, it gets directly processed into the, your ERP system typically. It’s also good to stress test the ERP system on the amount of transactions that it can process within a certain time window. Typically, in our experience in B2B, you don’t have these in our experience, at least the type of customers that we have these crazy what is it?

Michael: What is black Friday events you have less of that in B2B. So typically these spikes are a little bit less there compared to B2C. 

Brent: I said earlier that maybe the larger comp the more performance issues would be around SKU count and even SKU count in the cart rather.

Brent: Getting slammed with thousands of orders all at once. Yeah, no 

Michael: yeah. It’s a good point. Yeah, no. And in terms of SKUs I, there, yeah, like I said, there’s always, if there are large SKUs with lots of attributes and complex search, of course you need to do extra work. But we I think we have yet to encounter our limitations there.

Brent: It’s just talking about attributes and limitations. One problem that I’ve seen in the magenta world is the ability to create as many attributes as you want, and to create as many VAR attributes or text based attributes as you want. And in the I think in the SKU management world, There should be some restrictions on that.

Brent: Like the advantage of some SaaS platforms is that you don’t give the users so many choices and because of that, it helps them to manage their store better. Yeah. How do you deal with somebody that wants to set up hundreds of attributes and may decide? I want to have 200 attributes that are all text based.

Brent: Yeah. 

Michael: Yet for every. New customer. We provide what we call handholding services. So we will guide them through the process of setting up their web store. So this consultancy involved. And once we see that are, not making. When they are planning to make decisions that will be unfavorable for the performance of the website, of course we’ll advise and we’ll talk to them and make sure that they will not create too many attributes that will, limit their search performance for instance, or there navigation performance.

Michael: Typically that’s how we do it. So it’s more in person guidance and consultancy around. 

Brent: Some of the buzz words out on the market today are around headless and API first. How are you positioned in that? 

Michael: Yeah, I think just like any other platform we say, okay, we’re headless and that’s true.

Michael: We can function with, without our Sana Head, so to speak that being said, it’s not something that among our client base is, the highest ranking topic on their agenda, so to speak. So I know there’s a lot of talk about it in the industry. Sometimes we discuss it with customers or prospects, but it’s not something that we are fully focused on because it’s, not the main topic for us at the moment.

Brent: And do you find, this is just a general comment that a lot. B2B clients just want to try to keep it somewhat simple. So having more of a monolith deployment of the application is sometimes easier than building it out into multiple microservices on PWA front end or something like that. 

Michael: Yeah I can definitely relate to what you said that, more I, that’s also what we recognize more and more B2B companies want to keep it simple.

Michael: I think in general, more companies, when it comes to software and it solutions say, Hey, we had this experience in the past where we had a lot of complexity, a lot of customizations, and now we want to have it much more simple. And that’s definitely something you can relate to. Like I said, we have the advantage that we don’t have to rebuild the complexity that they already have in the ERP system or potentially in other systems that we can leverage that what they already have.

Michael: And with that, we can keep things much more simple for them and much smaller applications. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. Everybody wants some level of flexibility, of course. But I think in the flexibility that was A lot of people are speaking about with microservices, et cetera.

Michael: I think it’s for some companies, it’s great if they have large it teams that are managing all this complexity, but I see it more and more, at least among our customers and prospect that they say, okay, we prefer to keep it simple. We get so many other applications in a landscape to manage. If we can do something more simple in eCommerce that they’re really happy with that.

Michael: Does that make sense? Do you see that as well? Yeah, and 

Brent: I don’t wanna say it’s simple. It’s just it, maybe it’s it. It’s making the journey easier for both it and thus the customer, because you’re not adding a bunch of subsystems that your main systems is dependent in all these subsystems.

Brent: And I know we did. In a sense, a Valera is a is a microservice, but it’s also a microservice that’s maintained by somebody else. So I think some of those complexities happen when your team has to maintain all. Sub microservices and a lot of the API only solutions for eCommerce nowadays require you to build out microservices to get any additional functionality.

Michael: And that comes with a lot of complex or a lot of flexibility, but it also comes at a price, I think. And you need really large teams, I would say to manage that. 

Brent: Tell us a little bit about your team, about the Senate team.

Brent: You’re where you’re based in Netherlands. Tell us a little bit about the company. 

Michael: Yeah, sure. So we, like I said, we started 14 years ago and we have certainly back then we had this niche approach. We said we’re only going to work for B2B companies because there we saw a real need and we built our product only for companies that either run on Microsoft dynamics, E R P.

Michael: or an SAP ERP system. So with that, we are, very focused and like I said, a niche player, but then we said, okay, If we’re going to take this focus, we need to be a global player, right? Because otherwise our addressable market is too small in, in Netherlands or even in Europe. So our headquarters is here in the Netherlands.

Michael: We have another headquarters in New York. We have another office in Columbia and Meine we have offices in Germany in the UK in Dubai and. So we try to serve this customer that is B2B and running our Microsoft dynamics or SAP around the world. And then we got our development centers in Sri Lanka in Ukraine and also team in Meladinine in Columbia.

Michael: So we’re pretty spread out. We’re like I said, with around. 500 people. We want to be close to our customers and our partners. We work a lot with the E R P vendors because they of course, speak with the customers and prospects also about eCommerce and then bring us in. Yeah, so that’s basically how we’re currently organized.

Brent: And what about your roadmap for other E R P platforms like NetSuite. 

Michael: Currently it’s not on our roadmap. We’re discussing it. We’re thinking about if it’s not directly on our roadmap, that’s because we want to be the very best at what we do. So we constantly challenge ourself.

Michael: Is this the right time to also look at NetSuite? And we say we can be again a little bit better with our product for Microsoft dynamics and SAP. And we got now about 1500 customers. There are we estimate around a hundred thousand customers companies around the world that have SAP or Microsoft dynamics and are in B2B.

Michael: So we still there’s, so much growth potential there that we said, okay, we first want to be better at that before we go into NetSuite 

Brent: and from a it side, what sort of technical knowledge does a a merchant need to have to run your system. 

Michael: Not much, I would say it’s a visual design, so you can create your web store as you want.

Michael: Of course you need to involve some of the it people in the company to, get the APIs up and running. But like I said, we have these handholding services. So we really, we have done this already more than a thousand times, so we can really guide customers in what they have to do.

Michael: And there are small things that they need to do. But in general, it’s not a lot of technical knowledge, I would say. 

Brent: And I SAP has a front end solution. Do you compete a little bit with the SAP’s front end 

Michael: solution? Yeah. In a sense we do it goes a little bit back to what I said earlier that solution, I believe, has been built in a very different setup to serve, I think in the beginning, mostly retail customers.

Michael: So it’s a very different solution, more standalone. Sounds strange. Because, but it has been an acquisition from SAP, so more standalone and it can be connected to the SAP system. Whereas when we build our solution for SAP, We went, a lot more into the ERP system itself into the SAP system itself.

Michael: And that allowed us to build this really deep integration. So yes, we compete, but typically if we speak to a prospect and we show how we work and what our philosophy and our approach is, they see that it’s a very different approach in a very different way to to to basically solve their eCommerce needs.

Brent: Great. Yeah. Michael, thank you for being here today. As we close out the episode I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to promote or plug today? 

Michael: Yeah, I think, I just briefly mentioned that we got a team in Ukraine, so 130 of our 500 plus people are in Ukraine.

Michael: And as we all know, they’re in a pretty tough spot at the moment. Everybody listening, please support any way you can either financially or through, social media, let yourself be heard. I think it means a lot. And I think together, this as a world, basically, I would say we, we need to do anything we can to support people because it’s it’s really tough.

Michael: What’s going on there. Thanks for the opportunity. 

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just comment on that as well. That the the world needs to stand up and talk about this and the more misinformation that comes out of Russia, the more misinformation that’s put out there. And I think the more we all stand up against that is gonna be better.

Brent: And I think thank you for that. 

Michael: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the risk is that it faded away. And I think we need to continuously even if it takes for month, we need to continue to focus on it and make sure that we don’t, that it doesn’t, that we don’t forget about it.

Michael: If 

Brent: yeah. And I think, especially from a technical standpoint it touches so many communities Magento and BigCommerce and Sana yeah, definitely. Thank you for that thank you for again for being here, Michael is the CEO of Sana commerce, a B2B tightly E R P knit b2B commerce platform. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Brent.

Talk-Commerce Lisa Hammett

Dare to say NO with Lisa Hammett

When you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. What are you saying no to? @lisahammett

If you’ve ever experienced burnout, it’s like hitting a wall. You’re done. You’re mentally and physically wiped out. You’ve lost your capacity to see beyond your present situation. Your life has become gray, devoid of color.

Lisa talks about her experience with burnout and how saying yes too much can contribute to this. This is a great conversational interview that covers a variety of topics that causes stress and burnout in the workplace.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisahammett/
https://www.lisahammett.com/book

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have Lisa Hammett.

Brent: Lisa, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing in a day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in. 

Lisa: Thanks, Brent. It’s so nice to be here. I am Lisa Hammett. I am a success and mental fitness coach and I help executives and business owners reduce stress. Hopefully to prevent burnout, but I have helped others get through burnout, by developing mental fitness so they can leave a healthy, happy, productive life.

Lisa: And having been through burnout myself, I am really passionate about helping others get through that because oftentimes when you reach burnout, you feel like you have no hope you’ve hit a wall. I like to equate it to the world kind of goes gray devoid of color and it can really seem like there’s no hope.

Lisa: So I like to give people hope. 

Brent: That’s great. And I know that what sparked my interest was that you had a article on LinkedIn and I think it was about just say no. So tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind that and some of the things you found out of that. 

Lisa: Absolutely. So one form of stress management is setting healthy boundaries and that falls into the self care equation.

Lisa: And oftentimes when we think of self care, we think of what we eat, how we move our bodies, our sleep water, which are all amazing, but setting healthy boundaries is just as important. And especially for managing stress. So just say no was about how you can set those healthy boundaries and you don’t need to apologize for it.

Brent: in just say, no, your article was directed to both entrepreneurs and employees. 

Lisa: Yes, 

Brent: absolutely. And maybe speak to how entrepreneurs sometimes would say yes to everything which causes them to have more stress. 

Lisa: Oh, I can so relate to that, cuz I’ve been an entrepreneur for quite a while and when you’re hungry and you’re starting your business, you don’t wanna say no because you don’t want to develop a reputation of, oh, I can’t do that.

Lisa: Or, if you’re in the business, Sector. You don’t want people to think that you’re not a team player, but what I have found is when you learn to say no the right way and set those healthy boundaries, it actually commands more respect and you don’t need to apologize for it. In fact, apologizing for it sets a negative example.

Lisa: It’s okay to say no, in fact, it is encouraged. 

Brent: Do you think there’s some truth to focusing on a couple of things is better than trying to do everything and by saying no, you’re really just targeting those specific things that you’d like to work on. 

Lisa: Absolutely. Absolutely. So somebody explained to me and I thought this was such a unique way of looking at it is, when you say yes.

Lisa: To something you’re actually saying no to something else. So it then begs the question. What are you saying yes to? Are you saying yes to the wrong things, which ties into what you had just asked? Are we focusing on the wrong thing. So we are not able to really drive our business or move forward in a relationship, make positive change in our life.

Lisa: It really begs the question to assess and say, okay, what am I actually saying no to, and should I be saying yes to it a way to shift it a little bit. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think there’s some things in there that business owners would say yes and no to, and I want to break it into two parts right now.

Brent: There’s the customer portion of it. And then there’s the inner drive to do something new portion of it. And I think Verne Harnish calls it the shiny object where that thing is making you add something more to your list. Let’s talk about the customer first. You mentioned that they would have more respect for you for saying no.

Brent: Talk, just dive into that a little bit. 

Lisa: If you are saying no, from a place of authenticity, you’re not apologizing. And you’re being honest without providing a dissertation, people will respect you because oftentimes other people want to say no as well, but they don’t know how to, or they’re afraid of offending somebody.

Lisa: And when somebody is honest and authentic, it’s very refreshing. For example, when dealing with customers saying something to the effect that. Unfortunately, I cannot do this for you right now, due to X, Y, Z, in my schedule, I want to make sure that I am able to provide you the best service. And by saying yes to this, I won’t be able to do that.

Lisa: Somebody said that to me, I would be thank you. I might be disappointed, but I would be so appreciative because how many times have you been in a situation where somebody told you yes to something and then it surpassed, it went the deadline just kept pushing out and you never got constructive feedback as to what was happening.

Lisa: And it really developed some resentment. 

Brent: I think a real life. Way of looking at it for a business owner would be to look at the restaurants that have a list for you to sit down. They are telling you no. You can’t sit down right now because either we don’t have enough room or we don’t have enough staff to handle all this.

Brent: That no, then sets your expectation for when you’re going to be able to eat. There’s a direct correlation with that. That’s more of a quick thing where, Hey it’s gonna be 45 minutes, but I could see all these open tables. Well, we don’t have enough people to cover all those open tables.

Brent: So if we were to seat you, you would still sit there and wait. Do you think there’s a, a way that business owners can work or let me just back up a second, are there some exercises they can work through to help them to understand when they should say no? And when they shouldn’t. 

Lisa: That’s a good question.

Lisa: I think a lot of times it boils down to what is most important, and I’m gonna go to the shiny object thing that you were talking about earlier. It’s we get distracted by things that we put too much importance on, so it really boils down to prioritization. And what is of the utmost importance and when we are,

Lisa: squirrel squirrel shiny object. That is not helpful. So sometimes, it’s as simple as doing a brain dump and just writing down. Okay. These are all the different things that need to be accomplished and then start prioritizing them in need to be done now, need to be done. And X number of time can be done later.

Lisa: And. It sounds remedial, but it really does work. 

Brent: I think too, the making sure that you, from a customer standpoint, when you do say yes, looking at that entire journey that the customer’s gone through and then going back and doing a little retrospect on how did that actually go and are we serving them in a good way?

Brent: Maybe we could talk a little bit about the monetary side of that. Cause I think a lot of times newer business owners always wanna say yes, and they don’t realize where their profit comes from. And there is a actual monetary value that you could put on saying no. In economics it’s opportunity cost, right?

Brent: So every time you say yes, you’re giving up potential opportunity for a higher revenue. In your coaching, how do you like coach that into somebody that isn’t sometimes very receptive? 

Lisa: Oh, gosh, I personally went through this when I lost my lost launched my business. You almost want to be something for everybody and then just see kind of where it sticks, but that doesn’t work.

Lisa: I mean, it’s really more effective to narrow down specifically who your clientele. Is and be very, very specific because oftentimes we get so focused on, oh, here’s something here. Oh, here’s a little bit here. Well, what happens is that just takes time to prevent you from really going after that ideal client it’s just becomes like busy work.

Lisa: If it’s somebody that isn’t really going to help you develop your offering in a sense that can actually help you move forward. Do they have people that they could refer you to? Is it really the, the area that you want to.

Lisa: become involved in, as opposed to, oh, here’s just something that’s gonna get me some money. Does that make sense? 

Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good way to look at it. Okay do you think it’s harder to pivot from nos to yeses at some point? And I’ll give you the example. The agency that I run was specifically a Magento agency and Magento’s an eCommerce platform.

Brent: The name of the agency is Wagento. And a couple of years ago, we took on another brand, another partner called BigCommerce. And it was very difficult because we were so hyper focused on the one platform to get people to understand that we’re gonna add another one. So that pivot took a little bit of time.

Brent: Some may argue that, Hey, if I’m so hyperfocused, it’s gonna be harder to branched out when we’re ready to branch out what sort of advice or coaching can you give to somebody like me? Who was so hyperfocused for 10 years?

Brent: And then suddenly I’m like, oh geez. You know, I’m gonna have to do something new. How do I start saying yes again to something. 

Lisa: I think having somebody to coach you through the process is really important to have somebody who’s outside of the situation. And I’m not saying actually hire a coach. It could be somebody, a mentor that you really respect.

Lisa: A fellow business owner who has gone through a similar transition, but somebody who can look at it objectively and really provide you with some great feedback because when we are so focused on one thing, it’s really hard sometimes to shift that focus, cuz it’s been so ingrained in us and it served us well, but now we need to take take the lens back and really look at it from a different angle.

Lisa: And I think that’s a good place to start is to find somebody that you respect to help you with that. 

Brent: Yeah, I think that’s a lot of businesses do QBR or quarterly business reviews or quarterly business planning. Mm-hmm and when we’ve had a facility come facilitator, come in and help us do that. I feel as though we’ve been way more productive than if we just did it as a leadership team.

Brent: Cuz I think sometimes as you said, it’s hard to see other perspectives without somebody who doesn’t have a perspective to come in and look at it. And maybe some of those questions they ask help you to spark those new questions to ask about your business. I wanna ask specifically then about if how do you coach a business owner to not be defensive when they say, how about this?

Brent: Why aren’t you doing. In EO, we don’t should on people. You should do this. You want to sort of do some experience sharing. Do you find it delicate sometimes when speaking to business owners about some of these topics to help them through that, 

Lisa: I think they need to focus on, and I know this can’t always a hundred percent of the time be the case, but

Lisa: oftentimes when we get so focused on a goal and something that is not going right. We just dive in and focus all our energy on what is not going well, instead of really focusing on what is going well. now with that said, I’m not saying put on rose colored glasses, and if you have a problem that needs to be addressed, throw it under the table.

Lisa: Absolutely not. But I think when you’re having a conversation with somebody that. They need some coaching and development. It’s really, it’s starting with their strengths and maybe they’re in a situation that isn’t leaning into their strengths and maybe it needs to be shifted into something else.

Lisa: I think that’s really what needs to be understood first is where is everybody best suited? And sometimes it isn’t the right fit and that can be addressed, but. When you’re leading from strengths personally how does that make you feel when somebody is saying, you know what, Brent, you are so talented at this.

Lisa: It’s just, it’s a real natural fit for you. You did such an exceptional job and X, Y, and Z. So if somebody were to say that to you, how would you feel. 

Brent: Obviously it makes me feel a lot better so leading with those type of questions is much better than leading with criticizing questions.

Brent: Right. 

Lisa: Right. 

Brent: We’ve talked about the kind of customer dynamic as a business owner. The other dynamic, a lot of business owners have, would be I’m gonna rescue everything. And then suddenly. If you have a team of 20 people or 50 people or a hundred people, your bandwidth becomes completely lost because you’ve now said yes to your entire team to rescuing them instead of helping to enable your team

Brent: to solve some of the problems. How do you work through that type of situation where you want to encourage the business owner to delegate some of that work? It might even come from a lack of trust in your team to solve those problems. But I, and again, then you need to lead with the strength.

Brent: How do you encourage them? Not to say yes to everyth. 

Lisa: That’s oh, that’s a great question. And I’m gonna lean into Brene Brown, who I just think is phenomenal. And she talks a lot about this type of thing in Dare to Lead, but it’s, it starts with first of all, creating a safe space for people to be vulnerable and authentic and to be able to share when they are struggling and

Lisa: if your culture does not have that type of environment then situations like you just described arise. And the manager for whatever reason, supervisor, business owner may not feel like they have confidence because they’re not having open ended dialogue with their team and they’re not encouraging that.

Lisa: So they’re feeling compelled that they have to do everything themselves. Well, that’s not an effective leader. I mean a leader is taking the spotlight off of themselves and developing and encouraging their team. So again, it starts with having that open, honest culture where you can share ideas without judgment and criticism, which can be challenging.

Lisa: But when you have that starting ground things really start to 

Brent: shift. Do you think there’s the opposite problem of somebody who’s giving credit to somebody else all the time, even though that person didn’t do it, 

Lisa: so like favoritism and 

Brent: nepotism, that type of thing, not favoritism, but I I’ll be honest that a lot of times I like to give credit to somebody else for an idea because it makes everybody look better, but.

Brent: Maybe, I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud right now. Maybe it’s not a great idea to give ever, or talk to them in, I suppose, in advance and say, Hey, this is a great idea. And I feel like you came up with it. I’m gonna give you credit for it. Well, I 

Lisa: think it’s important to give credit where credit is due, you know, and that is really, what’s going to build the authentic, open, honest

Lisa: environment, because if you’re starting, if you’re doing that and giving credit where it’s not fully due, other people are gonna start to pick up on it. They may not initially, but then it will start to cause resentment. So I understand why maybe once in a while you might want to, but it’s not a good practice to be in.

Lisa: And I’m not saying as a business leader to say, oh, I’m so awesome. I did this, blah, blah, blah. In fact, if anything, even if you did do something exceptional that shouldn’t come from you that should be noticed by other people and not, you should not. Toting that yourself, because that’s really demotivating to your staff.

Brent: Yeah. Is there something around the business owner, always being in the savior?

Lisa: Yes. It, that’s not a good thing either. They need to be there to support if something goes wrong, but if you are developing your staff the way they need to be developed then you shouldn’t have to save them if they do something that maybe they shouldn’t have, or they made an error, or it could have been done better.

Lisa: They can recognize that and learn from that and they don’t need saving. Does that make sense? 

Brent: Mm-hmm yeah, that’s a good way to put it. As a business owner, if I am overwhelmed with a certain thing, but I don’t know how to ask for help. Is there keys and is there coaching things that you could tell me to say, Hey, you know, and I think too, as business owners, sometimes we don’t feel like we wanna be that vulnerable to say, I can’t do this.

Brent: I’m gonna need help. Is there ways that I could express my myself better to say, you know, I’m a hundred percent on this. I don’t have any more capacity. How can you help me? Or can. 

Lisa: So I think that goes back into, if you’re in a situation where you can go to a mentor to help that. That’s awesome.

Lisa: Now, if you are needing to share this with your staff, you can do it in such a way where it doesn’t come across, that you are floundering because you still want to appear. I don’t wanna say stable. Don’t give a false sense of impression, but you want to be reliable to people, but you know, if you are really asking for authenticity, you in turn need to be authentic as well.

Lisa: And that doesn’t mean saying, oh, I can’t do this, blah, blah, blah. You know, but if finding a way to maybe integrate somebody else into the equation to help manage the load. so to speak Does that make sense? Yeah. And then when it actually comes down to maybe if you’re starting to feel as a business owner, overwhelm yourself, that’s where I illustrate mental fitness and how that can really help by shifting all that negative energy, which is in your left analytical side of the brain, which

Lisa: stems fear and anxiety and stress and overwhelmed that all comes from your left side, quieting it so that you can then transfer your focus to the positive right side of your brain. So you can be a little more clearheaded because oftentimes when we get in that space of being overwhelmed, we’re not clearheaded.

Lisa: It just snowballs and then we start over dramatizing in our mind and assuming that, oh my goodness this could happen. Well our thoughts are not facts. 99% of the time we tend to overdramatize them. So this just kind of grounds us. So especially if you have to have a difficult conversation with

Lisa: a person that you are working with an employer or mentor, whatever. It’s always good to come from that positive right. Side brain. 

Brent: Does that make sense? Yeah. And I’m left handed, so I’m using my right side all the time. As you know, as you were talking about that, I remember myself, let’s just say 10 years ago or five years ago, even that.

Brent: When I felt overwhelmed, I would start lashing out at people by saying, I can’t do this anymore. Or, I think that the emotional side sometimes comes out and that and employees don’t absolutely can’t and don’t understand that. I think one of the things I read was emotional EQ 2.0, which was a great book.

Brent: And going through that book and learning more about my emotions and how those emotions affect your team, helped me through some of that. And I’ve realized as we’re talking now that it’s been five, six years since I’ve experienced that overwhelmingness. That has caused me to start lashing out at people about whatever the issue is.

Brent: So, not that I’m fixed, but I can now relate to the fact that I’m not that I don’t experience that anymore. 

Lisa: right. And that’s a, oh, that’s not a fun position to be in, but you know that we are emotional beings and when all that negative emotion bubbles up, that is one of the responses that happens.

Lisa: And yeah, if that is not managed oh, that can create a toxic mess. 

Brent: So. And just as a facilitator side of things we, as a group hired a facilitator to facilitate that book. And there’s some tests. If you read the book, there’s a test you can take in the beginning and then they would like you to go through a bunch of exercises and take another test.

Brent: So it was a great experience. And I would encourage any anybody business owner or not to read the book and do some of those exercises because I feel as though. I even thought maybe anger was a good tool to use. Cuz you think about coaches and you look at a coach in a locker room and they’re yelling at their players, right. 

Brent: at some point that doesn’t work anymore. And I think that’s not the most effective way of coaching your team yelling and getting angry with them. and that the book itself, that was one of the big things that I got out of. that’s awesome. I wanna switch gears now to the to the employer, employee relationship mm-hmm and the fact that some employees work a lot and they, they tend to not say new, no to their employer.

Brent: And there is a little bit of a conundrum in there. Like I am a results person. So I would expect less. I would love it if everybody worked less than 40 hours. If we were all in Europe, we all work 35 hours when we get August off plus another two weeks. Right. But in America it’s different, right?

Brent: We’re all expected to work 60 hours a week and not take your vacation. So there is a conundrum in there and I think the specific conundrum comes down to you want your people to work no more than 40 hours, but let’s just say somebody’s worked 40 hours on Thursday already. Do you expect them to work on Friday?

Lisa: That’s a really good question. I think it depends on the business and what is happening, you if there’s been a lot of turnover, it’s not ideal. Let’s kind of go backwards a bit. So let’s just say you are starting a new position at a company and you were informed that this is the expectation of the number of hours that you

Lisa: should work in order to get your job done. Well, if you start from day one, when you’re there telling everybody, oh, I’ll work the weekend. Oh, I have no problem working over time. Oh, I’ll take my laptop home with me and do this. You’re putting this expectation on yourself and sharing that with others.

Lisa: So then they will just come to assume. Well, this individual has expressed that this is not a problem, so they will continue to hold you to that expectation. And before you know it, you have no boundaries. You’re 24 7, you’re taking your laptop on vacation. So you’re not really on a full vacation, so 

Lisa: that is one thing that needs to be established upfront, and again, I’m not saying that in particular situations that maybe you are open to stepping up, but. You’re the one who sets that expectation up front. So don’t set the wrong expectation. And then if it gets to a situation where there’s staffing issues and there’s not enough people, and you’re doing the job of three people, If it’s getting to the point where you’re starting to get chronic stress, it’s impacting your work life balance, and you are working as hard as you can, but you need help.

Lisa: Then you have to say something. You can’t just, oh, well, no I can’t say anything. That’s gonna make me appear weak. No, you have to ask for help. I’m not saying you’re always going to get it, but you have to ask for help. And it’s how you ask for help. It’s kind of with the solution in mind, it’s like if you’re presenting a problem to somebody you don’t wanna just appear, like you’re a complainer, you want to provide a solution as well.

Lisa: That solution may note be taken into account, but at least it’s going to show that you’re trying to be proactive and you’re not sitting there complaining. 

Brent: I think that there’s a dynamic there where the employee may not have the skills to be able to delegate yet as a coach

Brent: how would you encourage them to do some of that delegation work.

Lisa: I think it really boils down to sitting down with them and, okay. So where is the fear coming from? Is it a fear that, oh my gosh, I am going to look like I can’t do my job if I delegate it or is it not going to be done right. Because I’m delegating it. So it’s really looking that fear in the face and then working on moving through it because fear ultimately can paralyze all of us

Lisa: at any point in time. And that’s the, one of the largest reasons why people do not achieve goals is fear. It’s either fear of success, fear of failure. And it can manifest in very weird ways like procrastination, or you become a hyper achiever because you won’t delegate and you have to keep doing it all yourself.

Brent: Do you think the other problem in that is, is also. The employee has so much to do that they couldn’t possibly be successful at everything they’ve been. They’ve said yes to doing. 

Lisa: In some cases that might be the case. Certainly the working world is very different today than it was.

Lisa: I know when I started decades ago, it’s very different. And especially now as we still try to get through the whole pandemic issue and the whole flexible workspace and it’s just it’s constantly evolving into different things. So it, that could be. But not always. 

Brent: And just to be clear, you and I have both established that we’re both in our mid twenties, so yes, decades we’ve been working since we were five years 

Lisa: old.

Lisa: yes. We’re amazing humans that way. 

Brent: absolutely. Lisa, we are running out of time here quickly. As we close out the podcast, I give everybody, a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? 

Lisa: Well, thank you for that opportunity. So I have a book, it’s my first book that I am publishing next month.

Lisa: That’ll be mid month and it’s From Burnout to Best Life. And it integrates my story of reaching burnout and how I overcame burnout, but it’s really a guide to your happiest, healthiest life. So after I went through burnout, I started my personal health and wellness journey and I lost 65 pounds. And I have been a health coach for many years.

Lisa: And then during the pandemic, I added the life coaching piece of it as well. So the book encompasses both areas. So it talks about healthy eating, and diet and everything, but also like we discussed fear. How do you deal with fear? Setting healthy boundaries? A lot of the topics that we discussed are in the book.

Lisa: I am starting speaking engagements. I’ve been doing podcasts, but I’m actually doing a Ted talk coming out at the end of August. So really looking at the book as a way to just get speaking engagements and just kind of open doors. So that’s, what’s 

Brent: happening with. Yeah. So let’s definitely do a another interview when your book comes out and we can dive into more of these topics.

Brent: It’s been a, it’s been very interesting and just as we close out too, I am a running coach. And so physical. And I recognize how important that mental aspect is to especially running. But even last night I had a conversation with another coach and I was asking about something and he said, I think you need to work on your mental toughness because a lot of times we think we can’t do something and as I’m running and I’m in a long run, I always say to people, I think running is

Brent: 90% mental and the other 15% is in your head. Then I wait for the reaction some, and it depends how well they’re doing or not, but it is a lot of that. And I think you’ve really illustrated how important a lot of these things are from a mental standpoint to be healthy. And how if we’re putting our employees under so much stress that.

Brent: Really degradates and it just didn’t people are gonna find a new place that is less stressful. The great resignation is telling us that people would like to be stress free rather than stressful. 

Lisa: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I hundred percent agree with you. It’s I tell people all the time it’s, if your head’s not in the game, you’re not gonna be successful.

Lisa: And you have to visualize, you have to believe that what you want to achieve will happen and really have a clear mental picture. And when you do, you can be successful. 

Brent: Lisa Hammett thank you so much for being here today at thank you. I look forward to another conversation when your book comes.

Brent: Thank 

Lisa: you so much. This has been great. I appreciate it.

Talk-Commerce Tom Robertshaw

Building a Big Community with Tom Robertshaw

Brent and Tom (@bobbyshaw) discuss ways to build community and how people can become more involved in the BigCommerce Community. We talk about different channels and how inclusive or exclusive those channels are. We talk about the BigCom DevX event that Space48 recently organized and the upcoming BigCommerce.

Hackathon happening August 15 – August 26, 2022, Starting at 10:00 am CDT

https://bighackathonsummer22.splashthat.com

Transcript

Brent: All right. Welcome to this BigCommerce. Big talk. Hey, that’s a good one. Big talk, BigCommerce, the addition of talk commerce on the BigCommerce community channel today. I have Tom Robertshaw who is a activist for the BigCommerce community. Can I call you an activist? Agitator? Okay. Agitator. Yeah. Yeah. So Tom, introduce yourself.

Brent: Tell us what you do day to day. One of your passions in life. 

Tom: Brilliant, Innovation Director at Space48, and I head up our initiative to build a suite of apps that help the commerce merchants grow their store. Passion day to day two main passions. First, my children about two that three years old and three months old.

Tom: So that’s a lot of time and energy goes into that. And I love it. But my second passion. Probably supporting on Manchester United in the football slash soccer. Although that’s more difficult of late in their recent seasons. 

Brent: Yeah. We have to stay away from controversy or as you would like to say controversy on our podcast.

Brent: Let’s dive right in. Let’s just talk about community. We’ve both been in another community of another platform for a long time. And in our green room talk, we were just going. Some of the reasons and we landed on the word. Why? Like, why are you involved in the BigCommerce 

Tom: community?

Tom: Yeah. That’s a great question. And as you say, we’ve been involved in communities in the past and some, I think when you’re in a community, you think it’s special. And lots of communities are special. I think like for me, personally, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m involved in, I want to give it my all.

Tom: I want to be involved fully. Get the joy out of it, but to make the most impact as well. Like it feels like if you’re gonna be working with a platform to be involved in the community, gives you so many benefits, whether or not that’s learning like from others in the community, rather than just being whoever you’re working with day to day.

Tom: If you can broaden that to some of the best minds in the community, just by being active, whether that be at in person events online events, forums slack groups and things like that. It’s a greater opportunity to learn from others. I also, particularly when moving to BigCommerce over the last couple of years, I’ve loved being involved in answering other people’s questions, because it was the best way for me to learn rather than just what challenges am I taking on day to day?

Tom: Like I’m building this app. Okay. I need to learn this API. And just the problems that I come into. Building that app, if I’m listening to and helping others I’m researching other APIs, finding out about their problems. And for me that for both Magento and commerce has been fantastic ways to learn myself.

Tom: And the old age old adage of teaching is a great way of learning because you really have to put thought into it. It’s not just oh, I know how that works. Once you tell someone else how it has to work, then that the inside out. So those are like a few ways why I really enjoy learning.

Tom: One of our values is we thrive and we learn. And so there’s so much about being involved, helping other people, getting help from other people that resonates with 

Tom: me there. 

Brent: yeah, I like that. So thrive when we learn. That’s a great, that’s a, that’s one of the core values of Space48 and that’s such a great, that’s such a great way to look at it.

Brent: And I think you had mentioned earlier, too, that like maybe 90% of the people that are involved in doing BigCommerce stuff. We’ll just say whatever they’re doing, they could be implementers or they could be a developer. They could be a salesperson project manager. They aren’t involved in the community.

Brent: And there’s not a lot of interest to be involved in the community, which means that we slice up the pie. We have a very small group of people that are involved and out of that pie, there’s people that would be the ones that are. Pushing that involvement or pushing that engagement.

Brent: And then there’s the people that are learning from the broader community itself. How do we get people to be more engaged and I’m just gonna also target maybe the introverts that aren’t, that don’t feel as though they want to be engaged, but sometimes feel left out when they aren’t engaged.

Tom: Yeah, it’s a great question. And a difficult one and I’m sure it’s, sure it’s one that the like developer advocates and community moderators at BIgCommerce are tackling on a week by week basis as well. I feel like inclusivity and making it a, an a, an open plate environment, whichever environment we’re talking about.

Tom: If it’s on the forums or if it’s on the BigCommerce dev slack, which is where I spend probably most of my day to day time engaging with the community. It’s just, I guess the best thing you can do is making it a welcoming environment. So it is answering people’s questions.

Tom: So people see that people aren’t like judged for their point of view or corrected and told that’s not how you do it. And providing and showing that everybody is welcome. And there’s so many different ways to to approach a problem. I think that’s the best that we can do to encourage I do the, there’s a couple of people within the community.

Tom: Andrew Barber in particular, in the BigCommerce Dev Slack like that, we’ll pose like questions each week, then there might be like slightly off topic questions or a bit more bringing any sort of personal lives into it, like music interests or what have you learned this week? What’s your favorite, like local cuisine.

Tom: And I think that’s a great way of building up a relationship with other people. And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, with everything that we’re doing it’s all about the people, relationships will live on. People will move to other industries, whatever other platforms.

Tom: But I feel being, being real in those communities as well is an important part of making people feel like they don’t have to perform or be particularly as you mentioned for introverts they’re more likely to be nervous about what they’re sharing or if they’re going to be corrected.

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just say right this morning, anyways, it is gonna be Branston pickle on. Simply because I’m out of Branson pickle right now. Now I’m on a mission to find some more. So I know I can find an on Amazon, but it’s incredibly expensive. Anyways, 

Tom: Beans on Toast for 

Brent: lunch, say . Yeah, it’s also Marmite, which Tom you very nicely gave me a 500 gram jar of Marmite a number of years ago, but I’m sure that’s still going.

Brent: Yeah I ate the whole thing, so don’t worry. It’s been that long. I think one of the things in the community space and we talk about slack, like that is a closed channel. And if people don’t know about it, they’re never gonna know about it because it’s not public. , it’s public in the sense that anybody can join, but if you don’t know about it, you don’t know about, it’s like that speakeasy.

Brent: That’s a great little place to go to, but until you know about it, then you know about it. So maybe from a community standpoint, there has to be some more outward evangelism that helps people understand where the places to go in the community and help them find the places where they fit best, and I think the slack group is great.

Brent: There’s been some talk about a discord group. And because, I set up a Twitter community and again, that’s a closed group. Anybody can join, but if you don’t know, it’s there, you’re never gonna know it’s there. So how can we. Make it more, how can we get our voices heard better through the broader scope of say social media and then invite people to come to these communities.

Tom: Yeah, I think from my experience and so far in industry, it’s been, Twitter has been the place. I dunno if that’s changing, I know LinkedIn has its own sort of place for people to come to and share and build a network. But depending on which role you’re talking about, like from a developer perspective wouldn’t say necessarily like LinkedIn is the place.

Tom: But Twitter outside of groups, I think we are, all we can do is provide many different options for people for their personal preferences. Like you say is slack isn’t for everyone. I dunno if discord is what, like hip young people are using these days. But I was forced to sign up recently.

Tom: So I think to learn about that now. But yeah, and the Twitter community I think is a great. It’s actually new to me in this, in, in general. Like I’ve joined the eCommerce community group on Twitter as well as a PHP one. But I’m, they’re new to me, so I don’t know. How to make the most of them and what other people’s experiences are other than that, it, yeah.

Tom: Feels like for me personally I enjoy sharing on Twitter, as you say, that’s there’s, it’s public. You still need to be following your network. But that seems like the most practical way. The alternative that I mentioned earlier is the forums. That can be a bit more

Tom: transactional rather than conversational. So I have this problem or, critique my site. And so you, that’s another place if you know about it and if you’re in the becomes community, then I’m sure you do. But that would be another one to 

Brent: mention, yeah. Forums is how I got started in the Magento community.

Brent: And just as you were describing earlier, I asked so many questions that I started thinking I can actually answer questions and the, I. Wanna be a teacher in any way, but I answered questions because I knew by finding the answers, it would help me understand the problem better. And I’ll be honest this is 13, 14 years ago I did a lot of Googling and it’s amazing how just some little investigative Googling would help you find answers for that.

Brent: And then getting into a network of people to help you find those answers. which what followed from joining those forums and forums are more of a public thing? I’ll be I’ll be transparent. I’m not part of the BigCommerce forums yet. have to be part of that. And I don’t do much of a technical role anymore, so maybe that’s shows where that pivot comes from more of a architectural thought leadership role,

Brent: you’re not so much in the forums, but I do feel like it’s an important place for people like myself to at least try to answer some of those questions. So tell us a little bit about the BigCommerce forums and why developers should go there. 

Tom: Yeah, and I had a similar experience. I was a moderator on the Magento forums.

Tom: And now I didn’t initially get involved in the BigCommerce forums. I started out with the slack group and then have grown from there. I think one of the reasons I chose to get involved is like you say, it’s, it feels more open. it feels more open and accessible. So there’s a wider group of people that are in and on the forums as opposed to the slack group.

Tom: But also like slack, particularly in most communities, the messages are lost. So it’s again, it’s very transient of the logistic, the experience of being in a slack community, whereas with forums. while we’ve talked about relationships, there is, a commercial and brand building reputation, building aspect to being involved in the community as well.

Tom: Naturally. It’s a kind of a, it’s a strategic choice. And one of the be benefits of forums is the SEO of them. You answer a question a few times. If that question is popular or it’s linked to, then it’s more likely to show up in search results. And it’s there, forever, or as long as it becomes forums and this shape or forum are around.

Tom: So there’s a lot of it’s nice to know that the time that you’re investing is going to be useful to others in the future, not just the person that’s asking it, whereas slack, its, who asked the question and who maybe saw that question at the time after that it’s gone or forgotten.

Tom: And so I think that’s one of the great advantages over a forum. Even over Twitter for the same reason that if you search for a problem, your solution that you posted a year ago is much more likely to be found. And therefore the value that you’re creating is greater. 

Brent: Yeah. It’s of like an encyclopedia, so you can go back and look up things where I definitely agree on slack is something that does get lost even after a day.

Brent: It depends how busy the channel is. And it’s hard to go back and find it. Maybe speak to a little bit about the developer community now and just let’s touch on big Devex and how you are helping to bring those developers together in a place that we can all talk together. 

Tom: Yeah, sure.

Tom: We created and had our first BigCom DevX, which was a virtual event for developers to come together and listen to a few different talks from people within the community, sharing about their experiences, neat ways about solving problems that they’ve tackled or deep dives into things like stencil and handlebar and how to build

Tom: more advanced themes. And the reason we created that is we internally have a dev X every month where given that we’ve been across offices are now like multi, multiple locations for many years, we wanted a way for the development team to come together and just learn about what other projects have been working on?

Tom: What cool things have you been doing? What challenges have you faced that we other we might all want to avoid in the future. And so we were having a monthly kind of an hour to two hour call Talk set up in advance for some people might be five minutes just to share this one thing they learnt.

Tom: Some might be longer if it’s a deep dive on a particular tool of technology and I got a lot of value from it. I learned and met people in the other offices that wouldn’t have got to know otherwise, and after doing that for so long and particularly post pandemic and getting like really involved in the BigCommerce community, I was going through the the process of

Tom: getting to know other people manually reaching out to them, having a catch up call learning about like their backstory, which I’ve really enjoyed so far and wanted to provide something else. And it felt like an appropriate time to, yeah, let’s run this as an experiment.

Tom: Let’s create what we would normally do for a monthly dev and make it. Announce it three months in advance get people from the community to talk. And we’ve got really good feedback from it. So we had about 75 people attend it. It was a free event, as I say, for a couple of hours. And all the videos are now posted on the BigCom DevX YouTube channel for you to find later.

Tom: And we certainly hope to run it again, not sure on the frequency. Right now may, perhaps the next one will be in the new year. 

Brent: There’ll be one in Manchester hopeful. That’s a big in conference developer conference. I think you, you had mentioned a little bit about answering questions helps your, I don’t know if you were used the word reputation, but it does help you create more awareness about yourself in the broader community.

Brent: I think it’s important to note that both of us don’t work for BigCommerce, but we work for places that are BigCommerce partners. But I don’t think your motivation ever should be self-promotion or trying to be commercial and answering a question, cuz you’d like to sell somebody, something I, as a developer a long time ago, always saw through that

Brent: when somebody was saying, you should use this extension because blah, blah, blah. And it that self-promotion in terms of trying to be commercial and selling something is different than I think the motivation to be in a community to help others, there’s two competing factors there.

Brent: Maybe with the few minutes we have left here, we could talk a little bit about why we want to get people to join and some of the big things that they get out of the community, other than just commercial benefits. 

Tom: Yeah, I think it, it comes back to some of the things I mentioned earlier.

Tom: Like I, I really wanna meet other people in the community. I enjoy kind getting to know people like, like myself getting to know you Brent and me visiting Minneapolis. What was it a decade ago now? So it’s amazing what can come out of getting involved and meeting other people, not least, the things you mentioned in terms of how it can be better for you

Tom: personally from a, the knowledge that you can apply at work or the projects that you might win because of it, those things are there, but they’re not the reasons that you go into it. Like you say. For me, it’s definitely been about the people. I think if I, my personally, if I can, if.

Tom: Be brutally honest. If I hadn’t got involved in the first conference that I’d been to, then I wouldn’t have gone on a tour of America and met my future wife. So there’s a good reason to do it. 

Brent: yeah. Your kids have everything to do with the Magento community. We’ll give the Magento community full credit for both of your kids now.

Brent: I’m gonna edit that out. Definitely. it’s a joke, everybody. So you know, the other thing that, that has come up in our past community started with an M ended with an O had gento in it was inclusive versus exclusive. A lot of people saw Magento, some of the community members as being exclusive

Brent: and they felt it was hard to be involved with those other people. How do we stay away from that? How do we stay away from this sort of notion of being a clic or being some kind of in crowd? And if you remember, there was a hashtag called real Magento that was going around and people then started associating that with the in crowd.

Brent: And it wasn’t, it was I think it was meant to be a label of, Hey, this is where the Magentol community. not that there should be a fake Magento, but it also, we have to have a differentiator from the hashtag Magento, or BigCommerce, because that’s gonna be a commercial hashtag. How do we make it inclusive, but also say here’s how you find the content for this community.

Tom: certainly, and I’m probably the last person that should advise on how to be inclusive, but from going through that experience, and I recognize why those kind of hashtags were created, when there’s lots of Twitter, spam and things like that. And I think in some ways it regarded as a time back to your previous point about like being authentic and connecting those that are just there to be authentic.

Tom: So I think that’s some of it In terms of how to continue being inclusive. I think it’s about always being open to new members. I think it can be difficult, particularly if you’re an introvert. Like you’ve got people that, it can be like a little difficult when the new person walks up to the group, whether that be in, in real life or new person enters the slack chat, like I can appreciate like why we don’t really talk about it.

Tom: That is a strange experience that we, we have to deal with on a day to day basis in our modern lives. And I think it’s about recognizing that they probably just have a wealth of experience too. And even if they don’t, they can provide as just as much like value to the community.

Tom: And they’re just as important. I think I have certainly been lazy in the past of not necessarily considering myself in a clic, but trending towards like the same people that I already knew, because it was. And once you have found a group of people or people that you recognize, they are gonna be the people that you are drawn towards, you engage with because you know them, it’s safe, yeah. It’s gonna lead to a good time. And so it takes effort, doesn’t it, to be inclusive. And I think sometimes it’s hard to make that effort. And so I think we can all forgive each other for the times. And we, when we don’t but to continue to try to make that effort to stay as inclusive 

Brent: as possible.

Brent: Yeah. And I think there is a challenge as well. You have to put effort to maintain relationships with the people that, there’s a certain amount of energy that has to go into putting the effort into maintaining a friendship like between you and I, if we both don’t put any effort in soon the relationship falls apart because there’s no effort put in either.

Brent: So the times that we did get to see each other in an event or something, we, you definitely wanna make time to spend time with your other community members and as it grows, and as there’s more people you wanna spend time as many as possible. So there I do see there’s a dichotomy in there between wanting to make sure everybody feels inclusive, but also wanting to maintain relationships within the community.

Brent: And I think. Like the relationship building and relationship maintaining. Like now we’re getting into more psychology and community, but the word is community, we’re trying to build community. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna be solved. I do feel as though the idea of diversity in our community can be solved.

Brent: Like we can invite more women, more people of color, and you and I are both not good examples of either of those. And how can we bring those people in? I feel like both of us could be open about making sure that we’re talking about the fact that we need more people of color and people that aren’t men and, that’s just a simple fact, right?

Brent: That, that has to be talked about. And it can’t be swept under the rug from a community standpoint and from an inclusion standpoint. 

Tom: Yeah. And I think more, even more effort in that case, because, naturally, psychologically we are going to be drawn towards people that are like ourselves.

Tom: And if it takes effort to continue to Welcome by new people. It’s gonna take even more effort. If you don’t anything about the background or than what they’ve been through. 

Brent: Yeah. I think that the perfect place for community building would be a community run together, which I’m a big proponent of changing your life through movement.

Brent: The Big Com Run. Huh? Are you getting it? feeling it now. I want to end, let’s end at a positive note. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you in the BigCommerce world. And is there any, anything exciting that you’re working on right now?

Brent: And then I’ll make sure we put all these links and things like that in the show notes. . 

Tom: Yeah, sure. Our most recent app just launched which we are about to more formally announce, which is a mega menu builder which I would be remiss not to mention on this particular episode we’ve worked.

Tom: with BigCommerce for a couple of years now, and we’re a bit frustrated what you can do out the box. And we know how important, like the store navigation is to draw people in help their product discovery and just simple lists of categories that it’s not gonna cut it.

Tom: And over the years we’ve created solutions with. Page builder, but again, that’s on a project by project basis. And so we’ve now built an app that allows you to manage your menu completely independently of your cater hierarchy, add images, choose your different sort of designs for the flyout menu.

Tom: And so it’s great for people just to install, configure and get working, but also for agencies to use as just to perhaps an admin interface and provide their own front end from menu. So that I’m really excited about.

Brent: Excellent. Yeah, and I’m all, I’m always excited about the concept of open SaaS, which BigCommerce likes to tout and the fact that BigCommerce, even though it’s a SaaS platform they offer a lot of ex extendability to their existing code and allow you to to work within that similar to open source.

Brent: You. Necessarily download it and run it, which would be actually cool if you could do little local instances of it, but I will, I’ll mention that to Brent Bellm. The next time I talk to him that we need local instances of BigCommerce run with warden. Anyways, I digress. 

Tom: I’ll also quickly mention I’m excited for the BigCommerce hackathon.

Tom: That starts very soon as well. A two week event that BigCommerce are putting on to people to create whatever they would like, or whether that’s apps or scripts or demo stores, things that just create something with the APIs, following that open SaaS approach. And I’m excited to see that’s the first time that they’ve done anything like it.

Tom: First time I’ve been involved in that kind of thing with the BigCommerce platform. Looking forward to getting involved there. Yeah. And 

Brent: hackathons are super fun and there’s roles for non-developers and hackathons either. They need creative thinkers. There’s always there’s roles for everybody in a hackathon.

Brent: And I would encourage even non-developers to join hackathons at least to see what’s happening and learn a little bit about that experience hackathons, I feel are most valued in person, but what we’ve learned in the pandemic and in the last couple years is that they are successful online and they build a lot of great relationships.

Brent: And I, I know that from the Magentol side they did some 24 hour hackathons that happened, starting in one time zone and just continually went for 24 hours straight around the world. And that was all done online collaborative. It’s a proven concept that works so great.

Brent: Definitely. Tom, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate all the work you do putting in on the BigCommerce community. Thanks. I enjoyed it. When I finish off a podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? 

Tom: I will plug our apps. So if you search Space48 on the BigCommerce app store you’ll find a nice long list of apps that we’ve been able to put out now.

Tom: And we’re continuing to add to so check it out. All right. 

Brent: Thank you, Tom Robertshaw. He is with Space48 in the UK. Have a great day.

Talk-Commerce Jeff J Hunter

The 90/10 rule with Jeff J Hunter

I can do it faster myself. It will take too long to teach someone to do it. I don’t trust that the person will do a good enough job. You must learn to elevate and delegate if you have said any of these statements. @jhunter101 Jeff J Hunter helps us to understand the importance of getting S#!t off your plate.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have jeff J. Hunter. Jeff, why don’t you go ahead and do a much better introduction than I just did? Tell us what you do in your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.

Jeff: I’m a huge IT nerd. I’ve always been in IT my entire life started a computer store that I used to work at for free back at my high school days. And then I ended up becoming a it guy for a networking company in a health and wellness center. And then I became an it guy for a school. And then I became the it coordinator for the whole school district.

Jeff: And then I became an it project manager for each fortune 500 Phillips electronics. And I literally build virtual teams. That’s what I’ve done pretty much my whole life and turns out it’s a pretty important thing to do. These days, I was just telling you before the show that back in 2019, I used to have to convince business owners why they should hire remotely.

Jeff: And after COVID happened I got tapped by pretty much everyone to be their kind of remote team expert. I have a column at entrepreneur.com. I talk about virtual teams and personal brand. I’m officially faculty at digitalmarketer.com on how to build remote agencies. And I’ve definitely helped build out teams for, everything from real estate to e-com to

Jeff: every type of business you could think of. I have 170 team members, mostly in the Philippines. We’re a Filipino virtual assistant company called VA staffer which is now up to about 2.7 million in revenue. And that’s me in a 

Brent: nutshell. All right. Thanks for that. So I know that we did talk a little bit about

Brent: pre pandemic. And there was a lot of resistance from employers to build out remote teams. I’ve been in the Magento space for almost 15 years now. And I think there was a necessity in our space that you had to build remote teams because of the lack of talent.

Brent: So maybe go into some of the reasons other than lack of talent in your local area, where you need to build a remote team.

Jeff: I think that’s very valid. I think that, when you hire remotely, you obviously can tap into resources that are not local. For example, I live in a very small 50,000, maybe 80,000 person town in central California, like it’s near Tracy, California.

Jeff: It’s a very small area. The closest, I am an hour and a half away from the bay area, in all reality, like my talent sources are limited. And I think most people actually are now. I also think that there’s another advantage here that we’re not talking about, which is the American work ethos.

Jeff: Where that’s progressed. I think that over time American has become more entrepreneurial. America’s always been very entrepreneurial, but I feel like right now there’s a huge movement in America for like side hustles and things like that. And and especially in a field that we’re not talking about that much, which is personal assistance and executive assistance, which is something that

Jeff: it used to be an incredible career, right? Like in the sixties, seventies you’d have assistants. Everyone had an assistant and nowadays it’s very challenging to find people for those types of support roles. And another reason why I really like the Philippines is because they have a very strong work ethic.

Jeff: They have a very like service, heart mentality. Also in the Philippines, it’s like a really amazing role that people look up to, to become an executive assistant to a founder CEO here in America. It’s like an awesome thing compared to in America, when you hire someone to be a personal assistant or an executive assistant, they say, cool, what’s next?

Brent: Do you think the Philippines are two virtual assistants like India is to technology talent? 

Jeff: I think so.

Jeff: Although I have learned a couple things along the way. Here’s probably a valued nugget for your listeners. One is I don’t hire virtual assistants. virtual assistant, no matter where you are in the world are typically like entrepreneurs, they’re usually. Managing multiple clients, they’re servicing multiple clients.

Jeff: They have multiple retainers. And for me, I want dedicated people that are committed to me. We’re a permanent staffing solution. So like we build teams, we have people that have worked for the same client that have been on my, that have been in my client lists since 2014, we still have clients that have the same VA.

Jeff: So it’s I guess in all reality, what I do is I actually go out to like technical support call centers, like Uber, Microsoft, Shopify, Canva, right? Like I go to these types of technology companies and I find people that are like, Two years, three years of tenure, they usually work in six days a week.

Jeff: They’re usually getting mandatory overtime. Non-paid mandatory overtime, by the way, they usually have to commute. And then I just simply give them the pitch, which is, Hey, how would you like to learn how to become an executive assistant or a virtual assistant to these awesome companies here based in America.

Jeff: And you’re gonna make two to three times more than you’re getting paid right now. And you can work from home. In your pajamas. That’s how we get them to stick around. Cuz I, I think that, I think the real issue Brett is that retention rate. I think that’s the one thing that you really have to think about remotely is the retention rate.

Brent: Yeah, I know that we’ve hired quite a few people in Mexico and it has been a challenge in the developer world anyways to keep people from moving from job to job. In certain markets, there is a strong a strong, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the word I want to use, but, Trying to get somebody else’s talent, nabbing, your talent or whatever you wanna say.

Brent: So I know that recruitment, yeah. Recruitment is a much better word to use. So yeah, I, so maybe some secrets around how do you keep that talent staying there? 

Jeff: Yeah. First off one, one thing’s for sure. You cannot treat people like. A clock in clock out employee. As a matter of fact, if you’re hiring people overseas, you’re not gonna have them be employees.

Jeff: Anyway, they’re gonna be a contractor. They’re gonna be what’s called a W8BEN W8BEN is a form. You have them fill out that they’re not a us resident. or citizen. And thus, they are not held liable or you’re not held liable to us tax law. So another benefit they actually make it very difficult to hire Americans.

Jeff: These days they’re getting so more expensive. just hire, especially the low wage people. If you’re hiring. A tech stack developer, a hundred K or whatever but if you’re trying to find just like low level, I here in California, where the minimum wage where I’m at is about $15 an hour.

Jeff: I. It really hurts the economy in all reality, because, and the sad part is these laws are meant to help people that are the most vulnerable young people in, maybe minority communities, they’re meant to be like, Hey, look, you’re gonna start out great with a great job, but here’s the problem is business owners have to evaluate what kind of return am I gonna get for a $15?

Jeff: They’re not gonna take their chances on some Joe Schmo. They’re not gonna take some chances. They’re gonna find someone who maybe has some experience or whatever else is they’re gonna pay 15 bucks an hour. So the people that need it the most are not able to get jobs. But anyway, the point that I’m getting at is, as far as retention goes, I try to keep things results based, not clock in clock out.

Jeff: So when it comes to results based you say, okay, what does it for? So in the E eCom space, for example, let’s say I built out teams to do e-com fulfillment. We have a bunch of stores. I have a guy who’s got a huge Trump store. Who’s just killing it. And it’s all drop ship. It’s all drop ship, Amazon fulfillment.

Jeff: They get hundreds of orders a day. They have a VA who basically goes in there, gets into their Amazon account, sets up the drop ship orders. Boom easy. Here’s another thing it’s very hard to find Americans that would be satisfied every day, going into an Amazon account and shipping drop ship orders.

Jeff: It’s like very a low level task. So I think that, setting the right expectations and having it results based, how many orders they should be able to fulfill per day rather than, Hey here’s the amount of hours you should work and that’s gonna go a lot.

Brent: isn’t that Amazon model, the exact model that Amazon uses in their warehouses to show productivity. And I know that there’s been a lot of talk about how busy and how that, that you have to be in motion all the time at an Amazon warehouse. 

Jeff: Yeah, they have stories. They have stories about people who like pee and water bottles because they don’t have enough time to run to the bathroom and pack or something.

Jeff: obviously I do not condone that. I’m just saying that obviously they have results based stuff and it’s the same thing with their prime shipping model. Like they have their, like you can see every package, what like the, they know exactly what drivers are doing because they can see it.

Jeff: They got GPS, they got the little blub-blup, they got a picture everything’s results based. And I feel like right now we’re moving into results based, or even a show me economy. 

Brent: Yeah. Do you think there’s a little bit of a trade off between just hourly and then results based. Some people are motivated to work a little too hard even.

Jeff: Yeah. I’ve actually had to have a real talk over the past year with my leadership team. I have nine people that run this company, VA staffer and actually technically have five people. And then four of those people have an assistant. Including my assistant. So I guess that’s 10 people, but what I’ve learned is that there is a little bit of a trade off.

Jeff: And I also learned that I don’t like to have caps on my people. I want them to be able to earn as much as they can whether that’s, if they, what if they need to put in extra time or whatever. I also reward my team. For example, Jacqueline, my assistant, she does a kick ass job. Hey, you did fantastic today.

Jeff: It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve done for the day. We’ve done the to-do list. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s little leadership nuggets like that, that make people like, wow, this guy is really cool to work for. If you’re the kind of guy who has your assistant work an hour, two hours overtime every day and never actually say, Hey, thank you so much for your what doing take the rest of the day off, whatever, like you’re setting yourself up for 

Brent: failure.

Brent: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And having some of those expectations up front and what to expect at the end are so important, especially as a manager. So I would imagine then when you’re helping a company build a remote team, do you have a roadmap you’d walk ’em through to be successful in that.

Jeff: Yeah. So we usually start, and this is it’s funny, cuz it’s backwards. Most people think oh I, when they hire somebody, they have this whole laundry list of things they want them to do. I call that what I call the miracle trap. Like you wanna find this miracle virtual assistant, that’s gonna do everything for you.

Jeff: What that does is it burns them out and you’re also gonna find out they don’t like doing a lot of this stuff. So what I like to do is I figure out like, what is it that this person really likes to do. Like for example, because we specialize in executive assistance. We have what we have something called an experiential hiring process. But experiential hiring process means that we actually have tests of things that they would be asked to do for their real job. For example, one of them is taking meeting minutes.

Jeff: I have my assistant on all my calls. She’s matter of fact, she’s probably feeling weird right now that she’s not on this call because it’s a podcast interview, so she’s not needed. But on every other call throughout my day, I know that my assistant is trained on doing, taking medium. So the experiential hiring process, I have a 15 minute call where we give them a template of here’s the meeting minute templates. I don’t give them a lot of instructions cuz see, I don’t actually hire skill based. This is something that’s gonna blow people’s minds.

Jeff: I don’t care what’s on your resume to me. That’s what you’ve shown you can do. And by the way, I’ve also learned that B and C players. They’re good at copy and pasting A player resumes. I wanna see what you can do. And more importantly, I wanna see what you can learn. So I want adaptability on the forefront.

Jeff: How fast are you able to learn something new? I give them a blank document on Google docs. It has attendees objective of the call. What we talked about. Action items. Very simple. That’s what every call we have, and there’s a call it’s on zoom, it’s recorded and we send them the link. We tell them to listen to the call and fill in the form and we see what they’re able to take away.

Jeff: And that’s a really great way to see what someone’s comprehension is. Comprehension’s key. We hire people based on three things, their adaptability, their work ethic. And if they actually give a damn. 

Brent: Is there a certain type of person that fits that well, or is it pretty much anybody that you can find.

Jeff: I like people that already work for American tech support companies, because half the battle is finding people that work on your time zone. If you’re recruiting from the Philippines, you wanna find people that are gonna work in your time zone as an American, which is half the battle, cuz they’ll fall asleep. So what I wanna do is I find people that already work during American hours at call centers, Uber, like I said earlier, Shopify Canva, and people that have already been trained by Americans because I know American obviously have really strong work ethic and standards, especially in training.

Jeff: And if I hire somebody from Google, Shopify. I know that they’re coming really well prepared already, and that they have good standards of their companies. So I might be one of those culprits recruiters that keeps stealing amazing people. But at the end of the day I have no problems with it cuz I know how much they get paid and I know how much more I pay them.

Jeff: And I’m proud to say that the majority of my team at VA staffer gets paid more than anyone ever has in their entire family generationally. 

Brent: I know that’s it’s a great way to keep retention as well is to pay them a, an extremely fair wage. Yeah. So maybe going back to just the reasons why why an entrepreneur or a business owner shouldn’t focus a hundred percent on clock in clock out.

Jeff: Yeah, I think especially remotely, you’re not able to be there and babysit ’em, you can’t sit there in a, you’re not looking at ’em through the cubicle glass. So you have to have metrics that you can measure to see if they’re actually performing that’s the bottom line.

Jeff: So for example, let’s go back to that Amazon fulfillment, cuz I’m sure everyone listening to this show knows a little bit about, e-com knows a little bit about fulfillment. If you know that someone’s gonna be able to do 10 to 15 order fulfillments in an hour. That’s obviously just a whack number, let’s say 10.

Jeff: So you know that they should be able to fulfill about 80 orders a day. So like order fulfillment, and if they get a hundred fantastic. So as long as you keep like metrics, that people are doing what they’re expected and you also wanna keep people motivated to learn and grow and develop.

Jeff: And I think that’s something that we all have to think about. Remember this the first day that you hire someone is gonna be the least valuable they’re ever going to be. They’re going to grow. They’re gonna become faster. They’re gonna learn more, unlike a computer or a car or whatever else that depreciates, they’re going to appreciate value.

Brent: And how do you give them space to continue to learn? So let’s just say that you bring on new technology. Do you make sure that they have enough time outside of their say 80 orders a day? They’re gonna be able to learn this new part of this piece. 

Jeff: Yeah. So this is a very simple hack. Usually it’s us that figure stuff out.

Jeff: We’re the crazy entrepreneurs in our business. And we’re gonna do the work anyway. I just pop on a zoom call and I say, Hey, come on the zoom, call the suit together. So the only difference is I’m doing the work anyway. The only difference is I’m turning my microphone on and I’m explaining it and I’ll record it if I need to.

Jeff: So they have a little tutorial and then here’s the key that most people forget. Come back on the zoom call. Have them do it and you watch you just flip roles and that way, you know that they’ve got it. And then if they don’t get it, you don’t, they don’t mess something up because you’re watching it. You can say whoa, hold on a second.

Jeff: don’t forget to click that, fulfillment tab, the, don’t forget to turn off the white, to click the white label tab. We don’t want that to know it’s 

Brent: coming from Amazon. I know that earlier too, you had mentioned a 90 10 rule. Maybe dive into that and explain that.

Jeff: Yeah. The nine, 10 rule is something I found out about myself in 2016 when I was actually working at my corporate job. And this was like my side hustle, VA staffer. It was just fun. But when I was working at Phillips I started realizing that as a project manager, 40% to 50% of my time, wasn’t actually managing projects.

Jeff: It was. Doing documentation that sucked. I hate documentation. So I actually ended up hiring somebody to do documentation for me and they were awesome. And I found them somewhere in Pakistan or something like that. This was before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know about the Philippines.

Jeff: When I hired somebody in Pakistan who actually had a project management certification and I couldn’t believe it actually, cuz I was a project manager and I didn’t have that certification. So to find someone overseas for $5 an hour that had that certification, which requires you to do 4,000 hours of project management documented, I was like, this is unbelievable.

Jeff: I started thinking like, what other things could I outsource? What other things could I. and the documentation came back amazing. I ended up becoming in the first 12 months of working there. I became one of the top five project managers nationwide out of 95 project managers in the company.

Jeff: And that was when I started realizing that, my most effective use of time isn’t doing documentation. So then I started thinking, what are other. That I’m spending my time on that. Aren’t my zone of genius that aren’t really, like basically I felt like I was kicking the rocks instead of pushing the Boulder.

Jeff: So I just started finding ways to maximize what my most valuable use of time is, which I’ve learned over the years now is marketing. And sales. That’s my best use of time coming on. These shows coming on these podcasts, talking about stuff, obviously people are gonna be like, wow, Jeff, you really did a great job on the show.

Jeff: I wanna learn more about getting a virtual assistant. Like this is the best use of my time. This is my only job, my entire company hiring, firing, managing recruiting, training, performance evaluations, video editing, graphic design, web design. I don’t do any of that. I have a whole team of 170 people that do all that for me.

Jeff: And my only job is to show up and talk about them. that’s it. So the 90 90/10 rule is about delegating that 90% of stuff in your life. That is, it is important, but not important that you do it. So you can focus on the 10% that really drives the business. 

Jeff: forward 

Brent: I know that I think it’s Verne, Harnish in Traction has a concept called letting go of the vine.

Brent: For any entrepreneur that is such a good value statement to make that you need to find ways to let go of some of those things and just trust the process that you’ve built. I know you also mentioned just an operating procedure that would help build out that process for a business owner.

Brent: Maybe dive into that really quick. 

Jeff: Yeah. What I do is that anytime I want to teach something new to my team members is I will literally do a zoom call and I’ll record it and then I’ll have them go back and document the process, take screenshots, things like that. And then I’ll review the SOP together with them.

Jeff: We’ll pop back on a zoom call. They lead the call. They go through the SOP and then we reviewed it to make sure if it has any mistakes. And I’ll tell you, it’s funny, cuz you learn a lot about the SOP process. I call them freedom recipes by the way. And the reason why is because it’s like for me I’m a horrible cook.

Jeff: I hamburgers mistakes I can do. All right. I got a pellet grill. I can set the temperature. It’s easy. I set it and forget it. But when it comes to like baking cake or whatever, I’m trash. But, my mom’s got this cookbook. All right. And it tells me exactly what to do. It tells me I need flour. I need eggs.

Jeff: I need sugar. I need cinnamon. I need some nutmeg. I don’t know. I’m making some eggnog, maybe but the point is that I’m putting it in the oven. I got this bowl. It says to set it in the oven, 17 minutes for 350 degrees. And guess what? Doesn’t matter how bad you are, if your ingredients are right and you follow the instructions step by step, it will come out

Jeff: at least 99% of the time, the. You might drop an eggshell or something in there. But for the most part, if you’re doing the, if you’re following the recipe, you’re gonna get the same result. And that’s the key, by the way. That’s the key with delegation is getting reliability and repeatable excellence.

Jeff: Cuz I think that’s where people fall short is they’re not able to have a reliable system in place. And reliable people in place to finally remove yourself from doing something because you don’t trust the people and you don’t have a good process. The people, the process, I’m starting to sound like Marcus Laona right.

Jeff: You gotta have the people, the process and the product . But that’s the key. 

Brent: Yeah. I bet the hardest part is educating the business owner on why they need to delegate these tasks out and even helping them find those tasks to delegate out. Cuz some people think everything I’m doing is so important that I’m just gonna keep doing it.

Jeff: There’s three lies. Okay. I’m gonna call ’em flat out lies that I hear every business owner. Okay. These are the objections. Whenever people come to me like, oh, I really need a VA one. They tell me that it’s faster and easier if I do it myself. Yeah, it probably is. But let me ask you something, you got somebody who’s doing it 80% and it frees up a hundred percent of your time.

Jeff: Let’s say you get two people and they both do it 80%. now you’ve got 160% results. And by the way, did I mention having someone in the Philippines even for us at VA staffer, it’s $1,500 a month for a full time person, what is your time where that’s nine bucks an hour, not even nine bucks an hour that’s insane to think that you are your own secretary for something that somebody could do

Jeff: as effectively if some by the way, I have people on my team that are way better than me. So we’re talking about above a hundred percent because I’m not good at it, period. So I think that, that’s lie. Number one, number two is that no, one’s gonna care about it. As much as me, man, my assistant Jacqueline cares about my to-do list

Jeff: way more than me. there’s she sent me a message yesterday and said, boss, we’re over halfway done with with July. And you still have these things from the to-do lists from last month, we probably should get this done. And I’m just like putting it off ah, like I’ll get around to it.

Jeff: So that’s line number two, line number three is that you suck it delegating and it would take more time for you to teach them how to do it than to do it yourself. Ooh. See that’s the key. And that’s why I say there’s no excuse with zoom calls, cuz you’re already doing the work. Same with emails, like emails and stuff like, oh, I can’t have, that was actually really hard for me..

Jeff: Okay. The delegating emails was actually really hard for me because like I’m a control freak. So I actually, every day for about a week, we just went into my emails and I told her, Hey, here’s what I would do with this. Here’s how I’d respond to this. This is trash, this is spam, whatever. And if they’re not sure about it, message me.

Jeff: If they’re not sure about it message me. And I think that building that trust and having someone who grows with you in the business is one of the most important things you can do. As a matter of fact, the first two hires I tell every business owner should be an executive assistant and a copywriter

Brent: I can say from experience I’m in an entrepreneurial group and one of my forum members has an assistant and she is doing I where’s 10 of us in our group and I swear that this assistant’s doing most of the work for our group. 

Jeff: Truth be told Brent my assistant is the one who set up this call for us.

Jeff: Yeah, she’s on my LinkedIn. She’s sending you the pitch. She said, Hey, this is what I talk about on the show. Like that’s, by the way, that’s a process that I built. I said, Hey, let’s engage with these people. I tell them, Hey, go into people, be genuine and listen to their latest podcast. I actually have my assistant listen to a portion of your show.

Jeff: So she gave you some feedback on the show like, Hey, whatever, you’re. Previous guest was great show. She likes it. She added you a connection request saying that she liked the show. And then after you come back, Hey, thanks for connecting. We should talk about this on the show. And you’re like, yeah, you know what,

Jeff: that sounds genuine. And I think my audience would get something out of it. That’s all stuff that you can build out. If you have someone who’s reliable that you can trust. And I think that’s the real problem today. It’s really hard for people to find. I don’t know if you know this Brent, but right now in the tech space I think you, you already said something about this with the developer, but right now in the tech space, the tenure of a team member is only 1.8 years on average.

Jeff: So imagine dumping all of your time, all of your resources, all your training brain dumping for a year and a half, and then find out at 18 months that person is gone. 

Brent: That’s super expensive to keep hiring. And I know that we’re in Minneapolis where the employment rate is less than 2% right now.

Brent: So talent is very hard to get. So you’re exactly right. And I think, maybe just as we’ve got a few minutes here, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind, not that higher fire mentality, but that trying to keep somebody on consistently is so important. 

Jeff: Yeah, I think that it goes back to what I said earlier.

Jeff: It’s about building that trust. It’s let me give it an analogy here. We are entrepreneurs we’re we wear a lot of hats. Now I’m wearing my VA staffer hat. I’ve got all these other hats here. I have my Savage marketer hat right here. That’s my podcast, which I should have you on my show by the way.

Jeff: And what do we do as entrepreneurs? We put everything on our plate. We have a lot of stuff on our plate. And when you hire somebody, especially an assistant, what happens is you’re gonna say, okay, cool. I wanna focus. Remember that nine, 10 rule. I wanna focus on these important things, these 10%. So what you do is you’re starting to delegate.

Jeff: You’re starting to take your stuff off the 90% plate, and you’re starting to pass it over to your assistant. You’re passing it over to your assistant. You’re passing. Next thing you. Especially around that 50 50 mark. We’re like, oh my gosh. My day is so much better right now. Like they’re doing 50% of the work.

Jeff: I’m doing 50% of the work. What do entrepreneurs do? 

Brent: They work all the time. Yeah. They start 

Jeff: filling their plate back up. So now you got 50% over here and you got 50% over here, but then guess what happens? We’re like, oh, now I have more time to spend with my family. Oh, now I have more time to go to these networking events and masterminds.

Jeff: Oh, now I have time to launch this course. I’ve been putting off. Oh, now I have time to start doing more content marketing and stuff, right? Oh, Hey, I’m gonna start a podcast. So now you’re back to a hundred percent, but it’s all a hundred percent things that you wanna do. And this person’s over here doing 50% now, guess what happens when you don’t have that reliability?

Jeff: And that person goes away. Now you’ve gone from a hundred percent and 50. And now you’re taking all that work back. So now you’re doing 150% and you have to go through hiring again to find someone to train, to do the other 50%. And so you can go back to a hundred percent. That’s the freaking story that I hear every time.

Jeff: And I can tell you this, our client retention rate is 97.2%. There’s not a single time in my entire career of eight years of VA staffer has a client ever come to me and said, you know what, Jeff, I don’t think this VA’s gonna work out because I really miss doing my own emails. And I really miss taking my own meeting minutes and I really miss doing my own order fulfillment, like never

Brent: Actually my name isn’t really Brent. And I’m just Brent’s assistant. So you liar , 

Jeff: I’m a liar. Yes. 

Brent: I do find it interesting now that I know. Because you did said you listened to the episode with Taran Giselle and that you are gonna do an Ironman now. So that’s fantastic. Want my help in doing that?

Brent: So I appreciate that your assistant added all those extra details in oh, that’s horrible. You’re training for your first Ironman. Which I think was Coeur d’alene that they said you were doing so very exciting. 

Jeff: I’ve been to coeur d’alene it’s a beautiful place. yeah. Good. But yeah. But 

Jeff: that’s a great place because see, people don’t know the context of this funny conversation we’re having right now, but I’ve never ran in my entire life, except for maybe when I was in high school. And it was like required physical education class. Okay. And by the way, I grew up in a really poor area called Mooresville, North Carolina, which it’s better now.

Jeff: But back then, NASCAR cap, the world, my school was so poor that they Bused us over to Duke university to do our mandatory physical education, cuz we didn’t have a track but now here I am turning 40 this year and I’ve ran more than I ever have in my entire life. As a matter of fact, I’m looking at my total distance here, which I think you’re gonna be very proud of by the way.

Jeff: Right now, for those of you who are listening in I’ll rate off the numbers. But I have ran in the past 20 days, 54.7 kilometers. I’ve ran 76 times and I’ve ran a total of 9.93 almost 10 hours. And I’ve lost 10 pounds by the way. 

Brent: That’s great. Wow, fantastic. Good. So that, that you’re getting ready for that Ironman.

Brent: And that’s so exciting. So as we close out the show, I always give everybody a chance to give a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. Yeah, Jeff, what would you like to plug 

Jeff: today? I’d love to connect with you guys on LinkedIn. Jeff J. Hunter on LinkedIn. If you are, thinking about, if you hear this and say, you know what, I probably need an assistant.

Jeff: You can check out VA staffer.com, schedule a strategy call on there. It’s completely free. And by the way, my team’s job is to disqualify you. We’re very picky. We only actually take on about five to 10 clients a month because that’s, it’s hard to hire at the rate as finding really good people is very hard.

Jeff: We’re probably just as picky in hiring people as we are finding clients. I’ve definitely learned that there’s many times in life where I should have never taken somebody’s money. So I always tell people to make sure it’s a really good fit. And if we can really support them because that 97.2% retention rate, I’d like it to be a hundred percent, I know things happen, but usually what happens is when people come with us come and hire with us.

Jeff: We don’t do any marketing and sales outside of doing like this and the shows and stuff. Most of our growth over the past year and a half has actually just been from working really hard on just keeping client relationships. And usually they add on they’ll hire a second VA or things like that. Anyway, that’s my shameless plug for VA staffer.com.

Brent: Perfect. Jeff I look forward to seeing you at the next Ironman event that we’re both attending and I wish you all the best in your running world. I know we didn’t I always end up getting running. Into my podcast. So I’m glad that that we got that in. And I will put all these in the show notes.

Brent: Again Jeff, it’s been great having you on the show. Why don’t you tell, as we close out, just tell ’em how they can get ahold of you. 

Jeff: Jeff J hunter.com has my socials and stuff on there. If you guys wanna learn more about VA staffer or VA staffer.com. Thank you so much for having me, Brent.

magento association sushma vyas

Meet Magento Singapore with Sushma Vyas

We interview Sushma Vaya (@sushmavyas) with Ranosys from Singapore. #mm22sg Sushma has been organizing Meet Magento Singapore since its inception. We learn about Singapore’s vibrant and friendly city-state and the great event the team organizes. Listen to the entire episode and give me your feedback on the MA Pledge commercial I created at the end!

Meet Magento Singapore happens live on August 25th, 2022. Don’t miss it. https://meetmagento.sg

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this special 

Brent: Magento Association edition of 

Brent: Talk Commerce

Brent: today. I have Sushma Vyas. She is in Singapore and she is with Meet Magento Singapore. We are going to talk about the event and how fun it was and how fun it’s going to be into the future. Sushma, go ahead,

Brent: introduce yourself. Tell us what you do on a day to day basis and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Sushma: Thank you, Brent. Very happy, feeling really related to be part of this. My name is Sushma as you already shared with everyone in summary. If I would say one liner, my day to day job is to make sure people associated with us are happy.

Sushma: I act as the COO chief operating officer with Ranosys, I’m the organizer also for Meet Magento Singapore. I take care of end to end operations for the company, making sure all the departments meet their KPIs, people attached with us. I really mean it. Whether they are partners, our customers of all important people, team members, employees are happy.

Sushma: That’s the goal. And that’s what I do being in Singapore for past 18 plus years now. And yeah, I think that summarizes that’s. 

Brent: So your real role as a chief happiness. I wish . I went to Meet Magento Singapore in 2019, and it’s such a great city, such a great community. And the event was so well put on, tell us a little bit about the history of Meet Magento Singapore, why you guys started it and a little bit about the event.

Sushma: Thanks. One of my favorite points to talk about we’ve been associated with Magento per se from I’d say it’s childhood days, because we used to do those little Magento meetups when we were very young as a company, Magento also was running community editions and all, and we did see. Real good potential traction people attached around 2016,17,18.

Sushma: We did attend a lot of Magento events globally and that got us excited that let’s have one Meet Magento Singapore itself. And the thought was really well taken by Adobe commerce aka/Magento. And we got this to own and organize Meet Magento Singapore. It was really, it has been an exciting journey.

Sushma: It was when the very first event, what I’d say was the most exciting for us was that Singapore hosts and is easy for people. It attracts people, businesses, retail, commerce, especially a lot more. Easier. Sorry. If I sound biased than a lot of other countries, it has that reputation and comfort as well.

Sushma: The venue has been amazing, I’d say. And we’ve enjoyed. And of course we all know since past three years, the journey we have seen how pretty and commerce has transformed. Likewise has the event itself opening it up for online presence mix of both. So in all, I’d say it’s been insightful.

Sushma: This is something that we ourselves learn from people around the globe when they come here and everyone builds that bond, that community. So exciting journey. 

Brent: If you were to say to someone to attend the event what would be the some of the big draws to attend meet Magento Singapore. 

Sushma: I’ll talk about Singapore, right. First is really the place, because as much as it is a little red dot, a small place, it brings, it offers everything. It attracts businesses. It adopts technology really fast and well. The place itself is an attraction

Sushma: we, I would say people to come and visit and see how this is so well organized, disciplined, yet open for innovation. And it implements that. Of course, because of all these things, there are huge brands companies who have their foundation here who have their offices here. So they can see and communicate, I mean, that community bonding and they can see how these big brands are facing the challenges, implementing it via technologies, solving it.

Sushma: For Meet Magento Singapore, I’ll say, come for our after parties as well. I know after parties are fun everywhere, but I, I really Bo that some of the best after parties we’ve had the venue is great Marina Basin and it’s real fun here. Meeting people from close to a hundred plus countries and connecting, talking.

Sushma: it’s a different mode that you see them in after parties and different insights that you get during the event and talks. 

Brent: I think that we forgot about the importance of meeting people in person and everybody thought, oh, now that everybody’s doing zoom meetings and online that the live event is dead.

Brent: But I think what we’ve found is that, people desire to see people in person. And not only do you get to go to a great event, but you get to see a great city and then you get to see different cultures and all kinds of things that are wrapped around traveling to a different type of place. And I agree that Singapore is very easy to get to for us in the US.

Brent: It’s a long way. It’s halfway around the world, but yes, you know, it’s very easy. It’s very accessible. And I can say that even the customs. Everybody was so nice and it’s so easy to get through the cultures. There’s multiple cultures. We in 2019, we brought eight people from our office in Ahmedabad to Singapore.

Brent: And what did we do as soon as we landed, everybody wanted to find their Gujurati restaurant to eat at. So we all found the section of town that had a Gujurati restaurant and we ate there. So it, there, there is food for everybody. Something for everybody to offer. What would you say to a sponsor who would like to sponsor Meet Magento 

Sushma: for sponsor?

Sushma: See, I think there’s a wonderful mix of audience because there’s a very good balance in terms of merchants, in terms of technology, partners, partners, and end users customers. So with this balance, they get to have their message reach the right people. It’s not lopsided.

Sushma: So there is one real advantageand we take of it. Otherwise, even the ecosystem is such that it attracts all these different pool of people. So that’s one of the biggest advantages for sponsors plus I shared, there’s this very easy ethos reputation of delivery that its Singapore has gained.

Sushma: Its its rapport in terms of making sure businesses are smoother run. The government would say, we’ll take care of the hassle for you. We’ll make sure things are things are not full of bumps for you, and you make sure that the business is flourishing. So that kind of something is a healthy sign for someone to sponsor in an ecosystem like this.

Sushma: So usually this is also something that we hear from our sponsors and, Yes, digital marketing and all there’s a good outreach. There’s a good reach that they get from. So, yeah, that’s what we would tell them, 

Brent: From the event organizer side. So I know renos has been organizing, Meet Magentol Singapore.

Brent: If other organizers would like to organize an event in a different region, a different city, do you have some advice for them that to get started and some reasons why they would want to get started organizing a meat Magento in a different city?. 

Sushma: Why they should or why they good for sure.

Sushma: Organizers do gain a lot of publicity for sure. And learning on top of that, because something that we, even our own customers, our partners, something that we see them when they are there on the stage speaking or discussing, it’s a very different learning and insight that we get, which otherwise in day to day

Sushma: communication or interactions we don’t get each other on that level of thinking or discussion. This is something we must do because meeting and meeting them in a different mindset is together new learning. And we build a bond, a community which is memorable to us, plus helping the overall ecosystem.

Sushma: if there are any tips or anything, that we follow, or we would prefer people to follow is maintain that local touch, what that place is known for, because people would come from far away from different places to also know more about that place as it there’s nothing beautiful or ugly.

Sushma: It’s the combination that makes that place really different and unique. So I’d say maintain that, make sure people also know more about the place, know the local touch, local flavor. So that event automatically becomes very special and unique. There are many things, but this is what I feel we must consider.

Brent: I like what you said about having a different mindset to learn. And I think that oftentimes as we are pushing our whole team to do work that we forget that our team has to also learn about what’s new. If we continue to work on what’s old, then all we’re gonna do is create old things, creating new things requires new knowledge.

Brent: And I agree that you get put into a different mindset and you’re not in front of a bunch of screens. You may be in front of your laptop while you’re watching the speaker speak, but you’re not in front of 10 screens with a dog barking and somebody asking you it’s time for dinner. It puts you in a place where you are in a learning mode.

Brent: Maybe speak to that learning mode a little bit.

Sushma: If I take myself as an example, I don’t come from a technical background. But when I’m there, I listen to those even technical talks or innovations, it makes me more excited to know more Magento as a platform. I would’ve never known otherwise. Except for that. Okay. Customers need this.

Sushma: We fulfill this, the depth of it. I would’ve never known or never have been inquisitive to know that. Okay. Alright. There is this feature. So because when during panel discussions or somebody shares, you can do this, just talking about that specific feature, which to me appears like magic. And then I feel, oh, okay.

Sushma: Then what else does it do? What else does it do? Where else can it be implemented? And it gives ideas. Okay. Not necessarily here. It can be used somewhere else. So I’m a student there. Actually, when I participate or I hear the talks, the speakers talking about it. Likewise, someone whose technical may find interesting business cases, which he, or she, would’ve not thought of while working on that piece of code or that piece of integration. 

Brent: I know that there has always been a developer track or a technical track, and there has been a business track. And that just means that there’s something for both audiences. There’s something for merchants to learn about what are the new things that I can do on Magento or Adobe commerce.

Brent: And I know, especially for the developers, they can learn about the newest technology things that may put a merchant to sleep. Having that ability to see those different pieces of the puzzle and spark some interest. And I’m just gonna say that those new things create innovation because a merchant may say, oh, I saw this at this event.

Brent: I’d like to do it on my site, but I’d like to do it in this way. The pushing the boundaries. I sit on the membership committee and Meet Magento Association is trying to get more members as part of the Magento Association. What would you say to people who not are not sure or don’t know why they should join.

Brent: Do you have any good advice for them? 

Sushma: I’d say definitely join because. I’ll make it a little more philosophical if you hope you don’t mind, because at the end of the day, all of us want to contribute. All of us want to give back. In that effort, what we gain is enormous. When we join our intention was really not, oh, we give back, we do this.

Sushma: You know, okay, it’s a community we want to learn. I’m very attached to this by the way association, because we’ve gained a lot, whatever we’ve gained, I’d say from our years still now it’s because of that and because of the community it creates. So the fulfillment part is huge. In addition to what we gain in terms of repeat learning resources to knowing problems before you face it and solutions, how these get resolved.

Sushma: All this is. I always are like, I’d say golden assets of having being part of a community in which Magento association gives you so readily easily. I would not ask anyone to think twice about it because this is one of the strongest, one of the biggest, and I wish all the best because that shouldn’t die.

Brent: And even at the lowest level, it’s $1 a month, so $12 a year. And I think that allows anybody, the facility to join and they’re coming. We are coming out with some other models where companies can sponsor their employees to join as well. So there’s gonna be continued innovations from the Magento Association to help membership grow.

Brent: Sushma as we close out our podcast every week, I give the guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything promotion about anything you’d like to promote. What would you like to promote today? 

Sushma: Hadn’t really thought about it so much what I’d like to promote, but, since I’m part of Ranosys, I’m part of this whole company that’s one, one thing that I can promote is that explore, recommend, refer, explore services.

Sushma: I think that’s about it. I wasn’t really that prepared about it. What, in my mind. So that’s what I can think is the first thing that’s. That’s 

Brent: Thank you, Sushma. So thanks for staying up so late for me. I really appreciate it. Oh, 

Sushma: it’s a 

Brent: pleasure. Pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the, yeah, go ahead.

Sushma: I was saying you have some really interesting questions there. 

Brent: Good. Yeah. And I, I wish you all the best in your event coming up. I wish I could be 

Sushma: there this year thank you. Thank you so much. 

Brent: I will miss you 2023. Yeah, hopefully, 

Sushma: definitely. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thanks Brent. Have a lovely day. Bye-bye.

Talk-Commerce Kate-Bradley

Looking for the patterns in your marketing with Kate Bradley

In this week’s episode, we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to employee happiness. (@LatelyAIKately) Kate talks about the pressure on a start-up CEO and how it is compounded by trying to run a successful business and raise money at the same time. Kate reveals one really cool new feature on Lately.ai. (You must listen to the end to hear the big reveal!)

What you will learn from this episode and about Kate

• Passion for floating in a pool and listening to 80s music

• CEO of Lately, an AI that repurposes long-form content

• Focus on making fans, not sales

• Educated on Black American perspectives •

White Elephant in the Room: lack of diversity in podcast

• Advice to never assume what any side wants

• Value of lifting others up

• Making a fan creates a machine

• Marketing is about getting a fresh perspective

• Overuse of words leads to dull communication

• Creative use of language to engage people and make them react

I absolutely think that people who are focused on clock punching rather than performance and outcomes are missing out. Clock punchers are focused on the wrong thing and don’t understand the bigger picture. They don’t see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how it contributes to the success of the company. Performance and outcomes are much more important than just showing up and doing the minimum. If an entrepreneur is focused on performance and outcomes, they will be able to make better decisions and find more success.

Kate Bradley

Kate is the Founder & CEO of Lately. The A.I. that learns which words will get you the most engagement and re-purposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words.

Kate is a former rock ‘n’ roll DJ and served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately’s artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this wonderful episode of lately on Talk Commerce. I have Kaitlyn from lately today. Kate. Please introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role in one of your passions in life. 

Kate: I formally was a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. So I have a soft spot in my heart for podcasting, of course. I love the theater of the mind so much. I love radio. I love that you Brent have this I don’t even know if you know that you have it, you have this beautiful power to create what I call a two-way street, even though it’s one way.

Kate: I You wield the microphone here, but people listen and trust you and they lean in because you have this ability to create that magical kind of feeling as though they’re part of the conversation. And so that’s what attracts me to radio and podcasting specifically. And I don’t miss it.

Kate: Cuz can I swear in your show? I don’t know. Yeah. Go for it. I had a shit time. there, there’s great things about radio. I met my husband there and his record was our favorite record of the year. And of course, total job hazard. Cause I dated musicians do not recommend, found the one good one, who’ve cut his hair and wears chinos and now he’s. Sales bless his heart, but radio is a boy’s club, of course. And me too, and all that stuff didn’t even exist. And the rewards you got for participating in sexual harassment were large. It was applauded. And so we all did it, and I, not only, and I was a recipient of course, because, I don’t have a phase for radio.

Kate: Yay. And there’s no women either. So of course, like every day my boss would ask. Bradley or your hands queen, meaning could I hold this Dick while he peed? just, it was just the locker room bullshit. So that. Bizarre because what started happening? I don’t know why I’m going down this thread with you, but Hey ladies, listen up the the sexual harassment turned into a hostile work environment because of course I was great at what I did and I arranged.

Kate: The first ever marketing newsletter for any of the channels, it was ours. And it got all of this. This is before MailChimp. Okay. So I was like in outlook having to send multiple copies because you could only send it to 250 people at a time. Remember that there was like no formatting. And I got us. Just a huge amount of press.

Kate: Just because I’m a bulldog, and I was like I think we should do this. And I’m gonna ask all these people to republish it and forward it, et cetera. And they did. And and then I got shit on for my success. So that was confusing because you’re like, I’m killing it. Why aren’t people excited about this?

Kate: It’s because they’re threatened. And I dunno if that’s why I have my own company and I don’t have to deal with. Ego, except for my own. now , the mountain. What were the other two questions you asked? 

Brent: What is your day to day role and one of your passions in life?

Kate: Oh we might have covered the passion but I think at the moment, my biggest passion is floating. I love the weightlessness of floating in a pool and we have a kitty pool and in text one, thank God for those people democratizing this thing, and we’ve had one for a while. It’s 12 feet by four feet, maybe three.

Kate: And there’s just enough room for two people to float. We built a solar heater out of black hose and a black piece of wood and a there’s a pump. And it does when there’s not a heat wave. It’s usually 88 degrees, which is what I like Brent, and me and my noodles are out there just floating away every day.

Kate: I’m allowed three songs, so I bring the Bose out there and I listen to three songs on the radio. Actually, I can still tolerate live radio and by tolerate, I really mean that cause it’s. Fucking terrible. Really terrible, but there’s this one station here that they mostly play 80 songs with and I’m a child at the eighties.

Kate: So I’m like, Hooters, Eddie grant, Steve Miller. Yes. And sometimes I’m lucky and I get three great songs. Sometimes they throw in some, another seventies, crap like BGS, or I don’t really like Harry Nelson, stuff like that. And I’m just like, I’m just waiting for the next good one. But that’s my passion at the moment.

Kate: And then. Who am I? What am I doing? I’m the CEO of lately lately uses artificial intelligence to repurpose long form content like text and video and audio into bite size social posts that it knows very specifically, which parts will get you the highest engagement. . 

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. And I am a, I’m a user of lately for longly.

Brent: It’s been a great tool for us. I do want to just dip back into podcast guests, because it’s not always a two street. And when people come on as a guest that are, that have an agenda that are trying to. They are not a good guest. And I sometimes just look at the clock and think, oh my God, can this 30 minutes be over?

Brent: And now the 110 guests that I’ve had are thinking, are you one of them? Kate, you are not because this is the second time you’ve been on and I really appreciate you coming on. But it is sometimes difficult and it’s, my, my job is made much easier. when the guest holds the conversation, but it’s not a sales pitch.

Brent: And I, there’s nothing more than I hate in a sales pitch from a guest. But anyways, this is my pitch for lately because it is, it’s such a great product. And I’m falling in love with AI. I just signed up with open AI. I would I want want to get into the Dolly thing and there’s so many fun things happening in.

Brent: That I’m very interested in. But I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the entrepreneur journeys you’ve been going through and also, in our green room, I do wanna just bring up the white elephant in the room, which is me. And we did talk a little bit about, and you brought it up too.

Brent: The fact that there isn’t I don’t have a lot of diversity in my podcast and I would like to work on that. I’m part of the entrepreneurial community here in Minneapolis and Kate. I was just educating Kate, when we, before as well, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of the country.

Brent: And I know people on the coast don’t realize that there’s a part. World that between New York and California, but we don’t have to go into that. So I’m on I do sit on the diversity and inclusion committee. and I always ask myself, why should I be on this? And actually if I had some good guess, and they’ve given me some good answers on why me as a white male should be on this.

Brent: And part of it is just awareness and talking about it, because if everybody doesn’t talk about it, then it becomes something that’s back room. And I think it’s always better if we do talk about it. So not to belabor the point, but I know that there’s challenges in that. There wasn’t even a question 

Kate: in there.

Kate: I have a comment though, if you don’t mind. My friend, please, Jen. God, what’s her last name? Vander something, sorry, Jen. Vander. Awesome. I’m just gonna call her that. So she, we were on a panel once and she. express this in a way that was the first time I got it, which is this, when you are the underdog, you can only be lifted up by those who are on top.

Kate: And the mistake many people make is not including the people who are on top in the conversation and we rely on them to lift us up. So in your case, it has to be white men in the conversation because they hold the power in the world. They. For the most part. And not excluding them is just a stopper right away.

Kate: So I get that on the, just a flip side and we should go into politics cuz that’s dangerous. But I did, I was a marketing consultant for a company called the perception Institute for about a year and their mission in the world or a nonprofit is to change the way that black men are portrayed in the media, black men.

Kate: And. . And so I learned a lot about people, about black Americans specifically and how they feel about white people of intervening in their business. And it was mostly not nice, which was interesting, and the overall reaction was like, stay out of it with your woke perceptions. Because what you think is right is not what we believe at.

Kate: And I’m generalizing. So forgive me there, but just a perspective, like it’s the S U right? You have to never assume what the other, what any side wants. Everybody has to be at the table for the magic to happen for the two-way street to happen. Let’s get back to that. And the second comment I had related to that was.

Kate: You touched on what makes for a good guest, so I believe it or not, I was a terrible interviewer on radio for a long time. I would get very nervous and I was young. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience, doing that. I was, it was the me show. I was great at the me show , I didn’t know how to make people shine or ask the right questions, cuz I was so nervous about pushing all the buttons and getting things right at the same time. Cuz you’re in my day you were managing like the whole show, just like you are with your podcast. So there’s a lot to do behind this in the green room, as you’re saying.

Kate: So to tie in what makes a good guess is when you are able to lift others up. Number one a and that’s I think that goes both ways, but as an entrepreneur. what we say is make a fan. Don’t make a sale right now. The value there might sound corny, but I believe in the long tail, this is the radio that I grew up in is all about the long tail.

Kate: The album cuts, not the hits, right? Get people to buy the records, make fans who are loyal to the death. And I saw the power of those people because when you make a fan, they work for you for free and they can’t help the. And so you get multiple banks for your buck because you make the sale and you make a machine, 

Brent: right?

Brent: Yeah. No. And I really apologize for what I’m gonna say now. because I do feel like now I want to change the name of my podcast to ceiling. Because I would love to get ceiling fans but keep going. I know. I’m sorry, Brent. that was so bad. Hold your nose, 

Kate: everybody. 

Brent: Yeah. So I, my wife and I had this conversation about ceiling, the Mar Marcia Beski talked has a song about a hundred tampon.

Brent: And in, there was there, there was the first lady in space. They gave, she was gonna be in space for a week. So they gave her a hundred tampons and and she has a she’s on Ted. She has a Ted talk anyways. So they, she talked about the fact that she has this song. And then all of a sudden, all these men started berating her about, you shouldn’t make fun of these engineers at NASA.

Brent: Like who knows, like you, you need a hundred tampons right. For a week. And it was, we had a very good convers, my wife and I had a very nice conversation about it. And I, for me, I thought it through and I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t, I don’t know any better, but her point was, there was a lot of men that came out and were.

Brent: Hit Eric making her feel bad that she’d come up with this song or not making her, I don’t know the right words, but sounds funny. They were ham whatever social media, what social media does, that’s what they were doing. 

Kate: I have a segue 

Brent: for this.

Brent: Okay. Yes, we need a segue. Yes, go. 

Kate: So one of my favorite lines is Catherine Hahn in. the, we are the Millers when she calls it a Tanin and she’s from the Midwest. She is in this movie anyways, and so around my house, it’s called a Tanin and we laugh every time cuz it’s so funny to us, but that’s that ability by the way to take so.

Kate: and spin it in a new way, which is really what our jobs are about. This is marketing. How do you get fresh perspective? Whether it’s a hundred tampons in space or throwing a hot dog down a hallway, as she says, right? There’s I love that. I love. we, I just did a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I was inspired by somebody on Twitter.

Kate: And I said, words that make you like wanna bar. And I said, I’ll start. And the word was trousers. And so everybody piled on with not only just words that they don’t like the way they sound moist, got a lot of votes. For example, salacious got some. But then also biz lab was all over the place. So people were like partners and utilize at the end of the day, like all that kind of 

Brent: stuff.

Brent: I’ll reach out to you later. Yeah. 

Kate: Yeah. So I was just thinking about the, how we. how we can overuse words to death. So they don’t mean anything like awesome, which I am guilty of as well. All of America overuses. Awesome. But the whole point of communicating well is to don’t only communicate well, but to communicate with meaning.

Kate: and to hear some biz bla drive engagement, to make people lean in is to take something very familiar and just turn it just enough so that somebody is you catch the ear and you make them react. It’s the reaction that we all want. And I love thinking about that. I love so my husband is great at this he’ll he has all these isms one.

Kate: The hammer lane and the granny lane. That’s what he calls the fast lane and the slow lane on the highway. Or dirt nap. That’s like obviously dying 

Brent: dirt nap. Okay. 

Kate: Or booger sugar is cocaine , which we were just watching that Tom cruise movie American made, which is a great movie, by the way.

Kate: Even if you don’t like Tom cruise, it’s a 

Brent: great movie. I agree. I’ve seen it. Very good. Okay. Alright, so let’s move into little, let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneur entrepreneurship. My daughter just got a job with a CRM company called endear and they’re based outta New York, a very young entrepreneur lady who started it with a partner and te.

Brent: Did you have any struggles as an entrepreneur? 

Kate: oh, so many. I think the one that’s ever present for me is it’s, I don’t know if it’s confidence I, I don’t have an imposter syndrome per se, but I take things personally, that, that whole. Bullshit about it being work and business and not personal it’s it is bullshit, to me it is of course it’s personal, it affects people’s lives, right?

Kate: I That’s, it has to be right. And I’ve had to make decisions. I’ve had to let people go. I know how all that, how hard that stuff is. But I,

Kate: the pressure that I put on myself is pretty sprint. I perceive that there’s pressure being put on me by others as well. That may or may not be true, but there’s certainly that there’s that perception whether it’s my customers, like I wanna succeed for you. Whether it’s other women entrepreneurs, my investors, my fam, my family my team, obviously Lauren and Brian and Kristen, Jason and everybody, Kristen and Katie, Greg, I think that’s all.

Kate: Did I forget anyone, Emma Alex , and I, the problem is I don’t know what failure looks like. So let me just put this in the ground for everybody. We’re bringing it down. Brian, my CTO is very good at being positive and PR and practical. He’s an engineer. So he, he, he shoots pretty straight and I’m always.

Kate: wallowing in the negative. And he’s dude, like you have to really understand this, the odds of what lately is. So the chances of startups succeeding at all is already ne it’s negative. The fact that lately still exists. The fact that we have revenue, that we have hundreds of customers, we’ve had thousands before, we’re figuring out how to do it all here.

Kate: He’s like lately should have died a million. So you really need to acknowledge this, but it’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. It’s that the road to getting to the next level, like the levels, the goal post move a lot, which is very frustrating to me. Like I’m trying to figure out Brent constantly not how to win the game, how to beat the machine.

Kate: Okay. That’s all I think about how do I beat the fucking machine? Beat it into the ground. That’s what I. That’s all I see. And it’s not enough for me just to have a nice little business here. That’s not the game I’m playing, right? That’s not this game. And when you do everything that’s prescribed and you do it like to the fucking awesomeness of awesome platinum level superstar, galactic awesomeness, which is what we do.

Kate: And you still can’t hit the milestones. That’s defeating debilitating to me personally. I take it personally, cuz then I think, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fucking do this? And I hang my head in shame, honestly. The buck stops with me. It has to be me. It’s not I can, there’s all, there’s the great resignation.

Kate: There’s, COVID, there’s the market. There’s all these things to blame, of course. But I don’t think of any of them. It’s always hard. There’s always some shit out there. So it’s me. I’m the one where that can control. What’s happening or figure it out. And, I think just generally that’s the biggest hurdle is my, is myself in a way.

Kate: I don’t have an off button, cuz I want this. It’s not that I want this so bad, but I know it’s I know it’s not even possible. I know it’s probable. I.

Kate: And so I also, that means, I know all the pieces are in front of me here already. I know that they are, this is a matter of assembling the pieces. I have the right. Is which is a blessing and a curse. It’s right here. But the fact that I can’t figure it out makes me feel like an idiot , and none of that’s true.

Kate: I rely on you. I rely on our customers. We’re always asking for feedback. I’m terrible at taking criticism, but my team is great at it, which is why I had them, and we’re always looking for ways sorry for rambling but entrepreneurs, here’s a great tip. Someone told me, and you get a lot of tips that are garbage, cuz everybody wants to give you some advice.

Kate: But a friend of mine said, look for the patterns. So if you can look for the patterns in everything, whether it’s the way the funnel works or how much MRI you’re making or what customers click first, right? All these little patterns are macro and micro patterns. You can double down or then fix them.

Kate: and my, I joke all the time. My, my great skill is seeing the glass half empty. That’s what I do. I look for problems, patterns of problems, so can you imagine being my husband? He’s a nice guy. 

Brent: yeah I am. I am the glass half full and my wife is the glass half empty. So we actually balance each other out.

Brent: We’re either full or empty at the same time empty we’re empty. So I definitely can empathize with your struggle. And I do of want to talk about as a leader that empathy part that you have to have for your employees do you see a difference in differe? Styles of leadership that work or don’t work, or I don’t know.

Brent: I I see sometimes that some entrepreneurs want to like they assume that your employee feels some way and if you feel differently, it doesn’t matter to what it’s not it, the feelings of your employees don’t matter. And I feel like that I’m I believe they matter, but that some of that empathy isn’t there in a lot of entrepreneurs.

Kate: I had a shitty job, so I know what it feels like to have that kind of panic attack and go to work and dread every day. And I don’t want to any make anyone feel that way. I am very lucky because all of those people on my team are very kind and they’re very loyal and they’re also very smart. I forget sometimes.

Kate: That they can’t read my mind. I try to apologize for that. Luckily they have a high tolerance for my bitch. That’s ano very lucky thing, because I can be an asshole. I can be, of course, and I’m so grateful. I have to surround myself with people who have that tolerance because I.

Kate: Always apologize for it. There’s too much to go on, but I have to also obviously reward and acknowledge. And so I need also the kinds of people who either don’t need that all the time can get it from each other. My re I feel my perception is the reward is to provide a workplace that is fun, which it really is.

Kate: It’s we have like unlimited vacation, no one ever takes a vacation. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. You can, you don’t have to ask to go to the doctor or anything. You just, nobody cares. Get the work done. We don’t really care what you’re doing during the day. If there’s. And everyone is very autonomous.

Kate: There’s, some things I’m a micromanager about. I know this, but my aim is to not be that way and to, to a fault, honestly, like sometimes I’m trying to figure out why these people, these two people, maybe aren’t getting along or hearing each other. And then I realize , I don’t bring them together enough.

Kate: cuz we’re all just out doing our own thing. We’re running and running. And one thing sometimes I forget that. Because we’re, know, we are dispersed and we always have been dispersed and I like that because I feel it’s so much more productive. I hate being in office when people are coming in and talking to me all the time.

Kate: I hate that. I can’t get anything done, and. , I will forget how smart they are. I’m like, shit, Chris has really good ideas. I need to ask him these questions more often and then utilize them, or Lauren is, I think she’s 15 years younger than me. I forget, but she’s younger than me.

Kate: And I forget that she is because she’s so 

Brent: she’s 10

Brent: And I talked to Lauren. Lauren is fantastic by the way. Isn’t she great. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. She’s didn’t mean interrupt to you. 

Kate: No, I’m sorry for she’s so smart. And my, for all of them, my expectation is I, these people are on a scale of one to 10. They’re twelves. They’re all twelves. And so when they’re only tens, I get on their asses about.

Kate: Shame on me. Because I believe in them I respect them and I’m so impressed with them. And Lauren is certainly one of those people, and but she can tolerate my shit, which I, that this is also what I appreciate. So the way I try to reward, money is not the thing that motivates my team because.

Kate: We often can’t pay each other or the salary isn’t very high, but I try to create a workplace where there’s like a ton of flexibility and a ton of autonomy, because these are the things that I need personally. And I know there’s people out there like me, and I think to providing a safe place, like I call it where people can be themselves.

Kate: Like we don’t, we don’t really have a lot of rules, the golden rule, our biggest rule. And. a lot. We have two meetings a week, one for sales and one for the whole team, cuz we’re small enough. We can do these things still. And at those meetings we have what’s called the rolling agenda. And so the rolling agenda is a Google doc that goes on and on for years and everyone’s name is on it and you’re supposed to write what you’re doing, what you’ve done and what you’re doing there.

Kate: And everyone reads it an hour before the meeting and at the top of the meeting is the actual agenda discussion items. And the discussion items are the things that we all actually need to talk about together. Cuz I don’t need to have a report of what you’re doing and plus I can see it all in slack. Our slack channel is I don’t I poo threads because I want everybody, I want it to bleed over for everybody.

Kate: It saves me the time from repeating myself from silo to silo and it makes everybody sympathetic or empathetic. And so the rolling agenda what’s so funny is there’s almost never dis any discussion items cuz we’ve already had the discussion. So it’s a hang we get on the phone and we find out that.

Kate: Chris’s son, Zach just performed at a comedy club and killed it with amazing jokes. A couple of Dick jokes, in front of his grandparents, but I guess they were killer. Awesome. Katie’s daughter, Ruby just scored some major role in a play. I think it was beauty. The beast she’s the lead, which is pretty great.

Kate: Kristen’s getting ready to go to Paris with her two children. For the, and her husband. So the first family vacation and maybe the last one, cuz everybody’s going to college, this is what we talk about, I love that about them, Brent, how lucky am I? 

Brent: Yeah. That’s building a team like that is, is like the dream of any entrepreneur.

Brent: It I think you’ve talked to a lot about, about that team building and how you’ve been successful in it. What would you. If you were gonna say something to an entrepreneur who was hung up with instead of that mentality that you have for performance I don’t care what you do all day, just so you deliver what we’re expecting.

Brent: The opposite of that is I, all I care about is that you come in and punch the clock. right there. There’s a dichotomy there and there’s a big swing, right? If you’re just assembling something and you’re punching the clock, you know what you get because you’re assembling something.

Brent: But the same thing is you could come in and assemble something very poorly. Or, if you’re not checking, there’s gotta be a balance between performance. I’m a firm believer in performance and the outcome of that. Do you think people that look at clock punching, miss the outcome part? 

Kate: Sure. I’ve been that I worked in retail in the mall.

Kate: I know what it’s like. it sucks. And I hated it. Sorry, dad. I worked for my dad for a while. I love my dad. I think, so like begets, like when you are around other people who are working at a superior level and you’re not, it’s obvious and you feel bad and you want to catch up. So that’s one thing, right?

Kate: And I’ve surrounded myself. I’m very lucky to have these people who are, these are amazing people. Please never leave me please. And I’m always concerned when, like one of them, if someone’s gonna get married, Girlfriend moves in or something like that. I’m like, is my productivity gonna go down?

Kate: It’s so mean, that’s my first thought. Then my second thought is I want joy for this person. Hello. What’s wrong with you, Bradley. But I think that I think we were saying earlier, like the work life balance is bullshit. Like work is life and life is work. And if you’re not having a great time during what you’re doing, you’re not feeling fulfilled and joyful.

Kate: and like you’re doing something to improve the world or yourself, then you really need a different job. I It’s so important. I think, for entrepreneurs, the objective, I always think, and I think about this, especially when I’m like arguing with my husband is what is money? What is the outcome that I want here?

Kate: What’s the outcome. So let’s back into it is the outcome to make someone feel wrong because they fucked up is that the. that you want, you wanna make them feel bad. So then they don’t sell shit for you all day long. Cause they feel bad and they’re done. I’ve done that before. I’ve done that. I like making PE people feel wrong.

Kate: Like I do. I like calling them out on their shit. I’m trying to go to therapy to improve this, but it’s there, it’s the thing. And I, but I’ve learned not to do that because what is the point now? Now sometimes you have to correct someone on what they’ve done in order for them to improve.

Kate: I’m not great at this, but I, that is my aim, Poor Lauren. She, I like people to write copy for me. So we’re always, we work together on sales. And so she is in charge of the follow up with the sale, right? So we have a call. We have to email them, she’ll draft an email and Google I’ll take 95% of it apart and rewrite it and then be like, okay, here you go.

Kate: Now her feeling can be defeat defeated, like thanks for wasting my time. I explained to her, I was like, you don’t know how much time you saved me just by starting this. And my point of taking a part isn’t to shit on you. My, my point is to give myself something to play, where I can move around.

Kate: And I said, this was a, like earlier last year or something. And I was like, I will do. I promise to do a better job of telling you why I’m rearranging these things and what, why I’m putting these things in here. If you wanna learn how to do it better, but at the same time, I have to remember.

Kate: Lauren came from she. So she has a she’s smarter than all of us. She has a master’s degree in psychology analytics. And she came from working at the cancer ward in a hospital, God. And took the first job at lately as head of customer service, which she killed it at. And then she ran our sales team and now she.

Kate: Chief operations officer. So she has some very deep legacy knowledge of the company, but she didn’t come from sales. That’s not her background. None of us actually have come from sales me the most. I have the most experience in sales and we have a 98% sales conversion. Brent, Kristen come from sales.

Kate: Chris comes from radio like me,

Kate: the reason, of course the product is awesome, but we. Fucked up that demo 50,000 ways sideways to Minneapolis. Okay. I’ve seen it. Me too. And the demo does sell itself, but it’s the people, it’s the people that sell it. And it’s because Lauren, her ability to read the room and by the room, any room in a room, an empty room on a camera, in a zoom call or a room full of 85 people at SAP.

Kate: Like she has those nuances. And that, and Chris has the same thing as well. These guys this is about being nice, right? It’s about being thoughtful. It’s about listening. It’s about they know both of them are, I’m talking about them cause they’re my chief salespeople specifically, but like they can stand on stage any kind of stage, whether it’s just a call or actually on a stage and lead a room, they have that capability to do.

Kate: But at the same time they know when to listen. I don’t have that capability. I just like to be on stage and hear the sound of my own voice. Sorry.

Brent: So what would you say to To an entrepreneur then that is that they’re building this team and they’re, they seem to be getting a lot of turnover. Is there a magic formula in that team building model or is there yeah. Something to create community or is there anything that somebody could start.

Kate: I think the first thing is just to really think about how you wanna be treated. That’s just the most important thing. And that’s very hard cuz like you’re trying to get shit done, so you have to be very reflective constantly and to not just how you wanna be treated, but when you’re at your best, when you’re in the zone, right?

Kate: What are people around you doing to facilitate that for you? And then try to replicate that? I think that’s the first thing I. the second thing is to know this is so important. You have to ask people about their fucking lives, right? There are so many times where I just wanna get the meeting on and get stuff done, but I don’t, I make sure, Hey Brian, how was your trip?

Kate: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Hey Jason, I saw that me is on Instagram and she’s like doing this whole abs routine. She looks amazing. What is that about? So he’ll tell me. You have to start that way. People want to talk about themselves. Obviously look at me. I’m someone who talks over people, Brent and I have no patience for people who are offended by that.

Kate: Honestly I believe in passion and I believe in the power to express your passion and that an interruptive culture should be celebrated because people are so excited to share their ideas.

Kate: and I don’t believe in democracy. Lately is not a democracy. I’m the leader. Although you have to make people feel as though they bring listened to right now, you can only do that with people you wanna listen to. So if you’re hiring people, you don’t wanna listen to, then you are an idiot, you’re, you have to really think about who you’re.

Kate: And we’ve made mistakes. Lauren will know, and she rolls her eyes and she tells me every time and I still make this mistake. I constantly think we need an experienced salesperson to come in here. And so I hire these fucking dudes. They’re always dudes. And. some dudes. I love they’re some of them are dudes.

Kate: I love some of them are dudes. I don’t love, and it never works out because they’re probably bold 

Brent: white dudes. They’re the worst 

Kate: is that where, how was, yeah. Or so one mistake we made by the way, which I didn’t know, this was, you cannot hire a salesperson to be both a manager and a salesperson.

Brent: Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. You can’t hire anybody to be either to do dual jobs. They’re gonna do two jobs poorly. 

Kate: Yes. And that is a mistake that I made. I didn’t. I do that. So I don’t understand why someone else can’t do that, to be honest with you. And Lauren does that. There are Brian does that.

Kate: I have superior people in the world who can do that. So it’s of like why, but it’s not everybody’s nature, so I think that’s the first thing a very easy tell for us is this is if your company, if the PE, if your employees aren’t saying. you’re doing something wrong. 

Brent: Yeah. If they’re saying you Kate, that then also you, and I’m, they don’t because I’ve talked to your employees.

Brent: If they are though, just always referring back to you, that’s also could be a problem. 

Kate: I do that by the way on purpose. So I rarely, I don’t like it when people call me the boss, I correct them and say, don’t say that I don’t like. I say we all the time, my team I rarely say my employees, I rarely do.

Kate: I need them and I don’t like the word need, this an needy team is needy, but I cannot live without them. And so they know that

Kate: I send them gifts often, like little surprises, even the. Some T all guys like pocket knives, you can give them endless pocket knives. Am I right there? 

Brent: send ’em a box of tampons. A hundred figure out what to do with these . I do, I want to just go back cuz I you talked about re you’re editing Lauren’s copy when she started it.

Brent: And I think that and it sounds like you explained to her. Why you’re doing it, I’m trying. Cause I think a lot of times a lot of times leaders will jump on they’ll just take it and they’ll do it, but they don’t give any feedback on why that happened. And that just leads to narratives in people’s heads.

Brent: And I think 

Kate: I made that mistake actually, because I assumed that she would understand and know right. And I assume that she would take the time to read it and think about it. But of course, Lauren is busy and she’s just trying to check shit off her list and get, cuz she’s the queen of productivity.

Kate: She knows that. I respect that. And so either one of us weren’t both of us, didn’t want to take the time to do what you just said, which is a very important thing to do cuz who can learn if you don’t do that. And. , know, like I said, why can’t someone read my mind? What the fuck when it’s so obvious to me, but I’m sure at the same time, she’s thinking why can’t Kate read my mind. 

Brent: So yeah, I, I have definitely got, I’ve gotten into the habit of explaining I’m always now trying to play chess with Anticipating the way somebody’s thinking. And I realize that people that are happy are more motivated and that they’re gonna be more productive when they’re motivated and that when they’re happy and productive, they’re gonna get a lot of work done.

Brent: So if I’m gonna be critical of somebody, I would like to explain all those reasons why that’s gonna. and I maybe now do it to, is the word in nauseam or something like that where you do it too much. Yes. Ad nauseum, whatever in nauseum I’m nauseous. Just that, that verbal feedback, because I think we do I also suffer from that same thing.

Brent: Of course, everybody should know what I’m thinking and yes, everybody can do this. Everybody can be a great salesperson. They can also be a developer. I fall onto that trap because I used to be a developer and I would. Of course, you can do that in AWS. I can do it in 20 minutes. Let’s watch me do it.

Brent: And everybody’s oh God, this is the worst time of my life. You can see everybody’s eyes are glazing over and pretty soon, like they’re, anyways, so to read the room, right? Yeah. Read the, yeah. And then it makes it worse on zoom, all everybody’s camera goes off and then you get done with your demo.

Brent: And then, so what did everybody think? And nobody’s there, it’s silence. Everybody’s gone to the bathroom. Oh, I’m sorry. And then one person leaves the mic on and the flush sound comes out and your zoom call was ruined or saved yeah. Or saved exactly. 

Kate: yeah, I think I oftentimes I wish people would ask me why I do.

Kate: and they don’t. And so that, that is frustrating to me because I want the initiative to, to be there and that’s, my problem is that’s why I’m the entrepreneur and these other people are not right. That’s a different skill, so I have to constantly readjust my perspective to reality and think about.

Kate: What’s gonna, what’s gonna get the job done. Like you said, like, how do we get people to be happy and motivated and successful all at the same time? I think that

Kate: it’s important to ask people. Do you like working here? Sometimes you, I brace myself for the answer. You still like working here? Are you leaving? I just wanna know. I think that. knowing what your weaknesses are really important. Like I said I’m not a great cheerleader, but Katie Jordan is, she’s amazing.

Kate: She does it for me. And Chris is great at that. Everybody is there everybody piles on, but you need a cheerleader on the team if it’s not you that bubbly. When, when Lauren’s on vacation, slack is quiet. And you feel that energy gone like that. It’s so important. She she doesn’t even real.

Kate: I don’t know. She realizes that she probably does that. How. Much that energy. Slack is our workplace, right? That’s our work environment. And so it’s the, you can see the thermometer of how things going now. When I like last week, an investor who had hard, committed first to a smaller amount, and then to three times an amount hard commit pulled out for no reason.

Kate: I just was like, mother, fuck. I said every swear word of the thing like that could be. And no, I don’t do it in the general channel. I just did it with Lauren, Jason and Brian because I don’t wanna upset everyone else, but I need them to know cuz they’re my they’re. We are running the business together.

Kate: We’re running the numbers, we’re looking at all these things, but Brian and Jason are co-founders like, they do need to know what happened with this investor. And I need the ability in a place to express. Frustration. I also need them to have sympathy for me because like, when I have to ask them to not have a paycheck, they need to know exactly why, and I’m not doing it on purpose and it’s not cuz I’m selfish or I’m money grubber, there’s a real reason and it’s very painful for me.

Kate: So that sympathy, empathy thing here I think is so important. Like I’m just a person, Brent, I’m trying to do this thing. and they are these people’s lives are in my hands a little bit. Cuz a paycheck is a paycheck. I 

Brent: Yeah I want to just jump on that happiness thing. I had a post on LinkedIn recently that I just put out there.

Brent: I meet with every person on my team every quarter. one on one, just for 15 minutes to get to know them. And we have team members in India and Mexico . I do that and I’ve always had this. I’ve always had a question that I’ve asked and I think I’m asking, are you happy in your job or something like that?

Brent: And I been thinking about it and like I was thinking like does anybody ever ask, are you happy? And period, because yeah. Are you happy period? Because there is. And maybe happy in your job or happy, whatever it’s different. And knowing if you’re happy, if you’re not happy.

Brent: Again, people probably aren’t gonna tell me in that short time, hopefully, maybe over time. In fact I recently did have an interview that I did where he said that I’m very intimidating and it’s hard. Like you had said, you want people to tell you the things that like if they don’t understand something and I think people don’t tell people things because leaders can be intimidating.

Brent: I can get very impatient and then become very I can be an asshole. And and especially when something going the way it should go and. I’m gonna assume you can relate with this. This is something that’s so obvious. Why aren’t we all doing this? Whatever that thing is oh my God, this is obvious. We should know this. You always get French fries at McDonald’s what thing? Yeah. Which I don’t, it’s the thing I don’t, I’m just making the insane, but it’s come on, everybody knows that in. As you’re driving on the freeway and you stop and you get a burger, you get fries, right? You get a Coke and a fries. Everybody does that. What the heck is going on with our team?

Brent: You guys are only getting chicken sandwiches. This is ridiculous. Everybody knows it.

Brent: It’s true. So I don’t know, is there, I think it’s a hard that’s, it’s gotta be one of the hardest things as a leader to give that space to somebody to allow to to open up and tell you, cuz it is a little bit of vulnerability from that person. And and maybe that’s I’m dealing.

Brent: Three different cultures. It used to be four. We used to have an office in Bolivia. But we have three cultures now. So I think culture’s a little different, right? 

Kate: Yeah. I think, one thing is I always, and I’ve said this before, like I expect them to go to to complain about me, to each other.

Kate: I expect that happens to all managers and bosses. That’s part of the role that you’re accepting. And so good. Do it complain to each other, get it out of your system, certainly. The same way how many times you be, are you like fucking Brent? I say that of course, about myself, about, oh, whoever it is that’s just your, and it’s not you mean like you, you have to know that, like to and express a frustration.

Kate: because someone isn’t perfect in this second moment. It’s meaningless it’s just this thing, evaporating the world. And when you have people around me sometimes I’ll complain to Lauren about other people and the company and just cause I need that outlet with somebody and the validation that I’m not alone in this thought, and I’m sure they all, I know they all do this to each other, which is fine.

Kate: And I think they’re, that’s part of the culture that you wanna encourage, right? People are gonna vent it’s. This is human nature. And I think of it as if lately if everything about lately was. Just smooth sailing. Boy, we have no fun whatsoever. This is part of the adventure.

Kate: Are we gonna make it, are we not? So it, that ups and downs, it keeps it interesting. Like I, I think that’s why they come to work every day is cuz they’re wondering what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. 

Brent: That’s it’s often said that without stress, without contention, without arguments, that you don’t move anything forward.

Brent: If everyone is always on the same page you could be going in the right direction, but you may not. And having a dissenter, there is always a, it was always, it’s always a having a dissenter there to ask those questions is important. And I think that essential. Yeah, it’s essential, right? We, as a leader we need to make that space.

Brent: I know that we’ve sent people we’ve sent Indian developers to Germany in onsite to work. And one of their, one of their things that they’ve said was that they were surprised that other team members on the German team would. Hard pushback to the boss in the room. And for them, that was an eye opening thing.

Brent: Cause their culture more is more around. And I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole bunch of Indian developers not telling you. No, it’s not like that here. But their culture is more about doing what you’re told. And you don’t often. It’s not a strong cultural trait to question the boss and to say this I’m a white guy anyways.

Brent: I don’t know, concern that because that’s my perception of the culture. I’m gonna I’m making a disclaimer. I’m gonna put a little asterisks in my transcript. Don’t get back to me on this, but I digress. 

Kate: Yeah, I gotta go do shit, Brent.

Kate: I’ll say this one thing, we just released a new feature where the AI is rearranging what it finds to pull out into wholly new content. Okay. it, we just launched it like the other day. We haven’t told anybody. We haven’t even told our customers like so you’ll just start to see it suddenly the surprise you’ll be like, who wrote this?

Kate: Oh my God. The AI. and it’s pretty good. All 

Brent: right, I’m gonna go try it. 

Kate: Yeah. Keep an eye out. Yeah. 

Brent: Kate, I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug at the end of the podcast. So what would you like?

Kate: Oh Jesus, I’m gonna plug forgiveness today. Forgiveness. 

Brent: all right. Thank you. 

Kate: Yeah, I think we all 

Brent: need a little mark. Kate Laly Kate . 

Kate: This is why just so you know, I’m on the air. I stopped saying my name because I mispronounced my own name once in an interview with the guys from we. And so I never said it again.

Brent: Yeah. Did you wean yourself off that? 

Kate: About a thing on me. Oh my God. I love you. 

Brent: Yes, you’re so funny. Kate Bradley co founder of lately, CEO of lately. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Kate: Thank you, Brent. 

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