Entrepreneurs

Talk-Commerce-Alejandra Santos

Looking Forward in Finance with Alejandra Santos

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between an accountant and a finance person?

An accountant looks backward, and a finance person looks forward.

Alejandro Santos helps us to understand the complexities and the simplicities in accounting, why you should be looking forward more than you should be looking backward, and how vital that finance person is in your organization.

Transcript

[00:02:46] Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alejandra Santos. Alejandra is the c e o and founder of Startup Tandem. Alejandra, go ahead, do an introduction better than I just did. Maybe tell us your day-to-day role in one of your passions in life. 

[00:03:03] Alejandra: Oh, thank you so much Brent, for the introduction and for having me here.

[00:03:06] Alejandra: I am very excited for today’s episode. So my day-to-day means a lot of meetings, talking to clients and steering them into good practices with their financial. And with the finances in their business, and taking long walks along the beach with my dog and , trying, if I have the opportunity to take a meeting to the beach, I will absolutely do that as well.

[00:03:27] Alejandra: And a passion of mine. I just, I have so many, but I’m gonna say since we’re talking about dogs, passion is to rescue all the ducks from the streets and put them in beautiful homes. . 

[00:03:36] Brent: That’s a, that is a great, that’s a great venture to do. All right, so Alejandra, I did warn you that I’m going to do this free joke project.

[00:03:43] Brent: I’m gonna tell you a joke and you could just tell me if you feel as though the joke should be continue to be free, or if you feel like we could charge for the joke at some point. Okay. Here we go. Never date a tennis player. Love means nothing to.

[00:04:01] Alejandra: I think that one’s free. Okay, , 

[00:04:04] Brent: thanks. Thank you so much. All right, so Startup Tandem. Tell us a little bit about how you started Startup Tandem, and why you started it. 

[00:04:13] Alejandra: Yeah, so thank you for that brand. Startup tandem. I’ve been doing accounting and finance for 15 plus years. I actually bred into it after I gra I graduated college, I did the wealth management, and then I went into corporations, big companies, nonprofits, and it was when I moved to California that I went into entrepreneurship as an employee.

[00:04:32] Alejandra: Internal employee is an external consultant working for. One of the competitors, not what it is now, a competitor of mine. And it was there that I realized a big gap that existed between the services that were provided, two entrepreneurs when they were building their businesses to exactly what, the price was for those services.

[00:04:50] Alejandra: And it just didn’t make any sense to me. So that’s why I created Startup Tandem. A startup Tandem is a supportive partner of four entrepreneurs in when they’re in their. To start a business and as a startups and all the growth level, that maturity, some clients are making 80 million in revenue.

[00:05:07] Alejandra: Some other ones are making one $50,000 in gross revenue. It just, it really doesn’t matter where you are in your journey. We are committed to become that partner that can set you up at least with a good infrastructure and take you all the way until you scale or until you’re ready to hire internally. So that’s exactly what we do.

[00:05:23] Alejandra: We set up entrepreneurs with the tools and the resources. to help them in their finance journey and not just, give them whatever service. It’s not a one size fits all. It’s customized to its company’s growth. 

[00:05:35] Brent: When you start with an entrepreneur or a new business, do you see them making common mistakes in, in, in their accounting practices or bookkeeping, things like 

[00:05:44] Alejandra: that?

[00:05:45] Alejandra: A hundred percent. So one of the biggest pitfalls that I see is that they’re not on top of, Just general bookkeeping. And they don’t have really good policies in place. By that means that there’s no AR policy or AP PO policy approval policies in place. There’s a lot of personal expenses go flowing through the company.

[00:06:03] Alejandra: And, They do their taxation, their taxes according to their bank statements rather than a financial statement. And it’s not really until they have the urge to bring an external investor, an external partner, or they’re trying to get into a very big line of credit or some kind of debt financing that actually puts them urgency.

[00:06:22] Alejandra: To, wow, I gotta clean my financials now because we’re gonna look at that. And at that time, at that moment, you’re really 10 years into the business or five years into the business, and you’re looking at a high cost. Just to go there backwards and then forward to clean those financials is a big mess and it takes a lot of money out of your pocket.

[00:06:42] Brent: Do you find that a lot of entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily versed in accounting and maybe they don’t underst. what payables are and what receivables are and even the sense that, hey, I’m suddenly, I’m amount of money, but I have a whole bunch of inventory to you. Help them with some of those 

[00:06:58] Alejandra: pieces.

[00:06:59] Alejandra: Oh, 100%. And yes, what we do, a big portion of what we do with our marketing and resources that we offer is education. Just because that is a thing that we do see in the industry. There is no urgency in. in financials, in financial management, in accounting, and knowing what your numbers are. So a lot of it goes with educational videos, educational resources, why you should do it, why it works, why you should, this is a big component of your business.

[00:07:27] Alejandra: We. Definitely focus on that as an early stage company. Even though you cannot afford, if you cannot afford a full service yourself, we definitely wanna set you up with the tools and infrastructure, the policies to help you get into a good regimen. And, if you wanna do it yourself, you can, do it yourself, but at least you have something to go buy.

[00:07:47] Alejandra: And then when it comes to inventory, that’s a big pitfall that I see, especially for e-commerce companies, startups, and businesses, is. They don’t have just with the basics, they don’t have a really good skew numbing clutcher. Which that means it’s like products. Some products don’t even have a skew, so it’s really hard to even track down what the levels of that skew is or that inventory product is if you don’t even have a good traceability on it.

[00:08:11] Alejandra: So yeah, there is a lot of things that I see pitfalls, but there is a lot of things that also systems and very low budget resources and tools can. Entrepreneurs gear to the right position. 

[00:08:24] Brent: You see a lot of entrepreneurs doing books or doing their bookkeeping as the last thing they wanna worry about, they just get it done.

[00:08:32] Brent: And I, you had mentioned that they just go off bank statements for reconciling they’re not doing cash flow reports and there’s so many more things that are involved in there. How do you educate ’em on some of those? . 

[00:08:42] Alejandra: So yeah, it’s really interesting. I get a lot of clients at the end of the year because they’re getting ready for tax season, and one of the big things that I get is, oh my God, my books are a mess.

[00:08:52] Alejandra: I don’t even have a set of accounts. Can you please help me out? Cuz the tax season is coming. And it’s great. Yes, we can definitely do that. However, When I asked them those questions that you just did, okay, so what is your cash burn? What is the biggest driver of your cash burn? What, those are the things that you have to know in order to make the right strategic decisions in your business.

[00:09:11] Alejandra: You gotta know all those drivers. You gotta know all those KPIs. So when I make those questions to them, it’s it goes like an. in the brain. Oof. Okay. I don’t know those things. Maybe I should know them. Yes, abso a hundred percent. And I try to get because in numbers it’s not for everybody, and especially when you are a business owner and you’re creating this amazing product, you’re very creative. You probably don’t wanna talk numbers. So when you’re very creative, I try to talk, in the level. Whoever is in front of me to educate them, okay, maybe you do need to know what’s causing that burn, because if you know that you can control that, you could probably put that money into this instead.

[00:09:50] Alejandra: Product development or a marketing expense, something that’s gonna drive revenue up, and that’s when they realize, okay, I do need to be more diligent with my financials. 

[00:10:02] Brent: are some, are there some basic from an educational standpoint that you help them with and say just in reporting balance sheet, p and l, cash flow statement, are there some just basics that every entrepreneur should know before they even start?

[00:10:15] Alejandra: Before they even start? Yeah, that’s a good one. . I even have friends that entrepreneurs, and I tell them all the time, get your stuff together before, please don’t give it to me like that. The first thing I say is try treat your business as a business. And your personal is your personal business.

[00:10:28] Alejandra: A business is basic. Don’t run your. Personal expenses through the business is just at the end of the day, you gotta look at the big picture. And if the big picture is, I’m gonna sell my company in five, six years, guess what? They’re gonna be looking at those ebitda. They’re gonna look at operational income and they’re gonna see what’s flowing down there.

[00:10:46] Alejandra: And if you put all their personal expenses flowing, it’s gonna destroy the valuation of your company. So I try, just keep the big picture, even if you don’t understand the technicality of it, just keep the big picture in mind as soon as you have a business. Go with the, goal. I’m gonna sell my business.

[00:11:01] Alejandra: I’m gonna go an I P O, and then work towards that since the beginning, from the beginning. And just that will give you a clear sense of what you should or should not do. And if you have a hesitation, then ask questions to someone that does. No 

[00:11:14] Brent: I think you mentioned how the banking system works and how they wanna look at your books.

[00:11:20] Brent: If you are gonna start, if you’re gonna try to get a loan it would also apply to, if you wanna sell your business or get investors how do you recommend somebody that maybe they’ve been in business for five, six years and suddenly they’re, they want to start making their books, is it a process to weed through the mess that a person may have made and then they, you need to get ’em on the, in the right.

[00:11:43] Alejandra: Yeah. So there is definitely a process, especially if you have been in business for a few years and you have done taxes according to your bank statements rather than what’s sitting on that, on those financials. There is definitely a process, especially because those years are already closed.

[00:11:57] Alejandra: I called them closed because. Taxes have been already filed. So it’s really how can I say? You have to talk to the person that file your taxes to, to see what kind of adjustments you have to put in those financials to match exactly what you did in your taxes. And let’s just say that most of the time, your taxes, the taxes that are done are show less revenue.

[00:12:15] Alejandra: Then what’s in the financials? And it’s just because it’s cash basis and there’s a lot more things that are happening on the financials that are happening in, the bank statements. Let’s just say that it’s, you have to go retroactively. So what we do is basically Reno talk to the tax attorney or tax prison that did those books and say, okay, this is where we are.

[00:12:35] Alejandra: this is a trial balance. Now what can we do to get it there and then go forward cleaning up the whole, financial set and make sure that everything that’s flushed out personal, from business is flushed out and there’s a differentiation on it. Because what happens is the banks will look at least two to three years, depending on the financial institution.

[00:12:55] Alejandra: To see, what, how much your gross revenue is. You’re gonna look at those numbers. So if we can make the financials as accurate as possible, and related to what was posted on the taxes and then moving forward as well, we can show some growth, then that can put in a better place, and that goes with investors as well.

[00:13:14] Alejandra: The same, they’re gonna ask for your, your financials. Most you don’t, you probably don’t wanna even share your tax return if it’s flowing through you with an investor it’s uncomfortable situation. So we would have to go back, clean it up, match it to that, and then go forward and show some kind of forecasting, increase in revenue.

[00:13:33] Brent: Yeah, I think that you brought up a really good point about how the tax how the bank statements won’t reflect your ar They won’t reflect your inventory, they wouldn’t reflect any depreciable assets that you have and how important those are for a business owner to know. And even for when you’re going to get a loan, the banker’s gonna want to know what your assets are outside of what the bank balance.

[00:13:56] Brent: maybe talk about some of those pitfalls that entrepreneurs fall into when they, maybe they’re not as educated around accounting as they should be. 

[00:14:05] Alejandra: Yeah, so that’s actually a good point, Brent. So there’s a lot of asset based financing and it’s very important to know that, especially if you are in e-commerce and you have inventory on the books So there is definitely platforms.

[00:14:18] Alejandra: I’m just gonna speak very, a few of them. I don’t endorse any of them by the way. There is a Shopify, there is PayPal capital there is Clear Bank. Those right there will finance against your cashflow revenue stream. But what some asset based institutions do, and you can do the traditional or the non-traditional way, which.

[00:14:37] Alejandra: Do you prefer the non-traditional way for small companies or startups because they’re a little bit riskier? They basically look at your inventory and see what the inventory turnover is and see exactly what the valuation on that in turnover is to finance against it. And what happens there is that if you don’t have.

[00:14:54] Alejandra: If you don’t have a clear, a clean inventory balance, meaning they’re gonna ask for warehouse reports, they’re gonna ask for, what’s sitting on the balance sheet ties into the warehouse and evaluation that’s sitting in the warehouse. Actually the same as in the books. And if you don’t have that really button up, you’re missing on a lot of money.

[00:15:12] Alejandra: And if you do get an untraditional institution, they, you’re probably missing on not right now, cuz there’s inflation. In the future you probably will be missing on lower, in a low cost of capital financing rather than going to a traditional institution. When they give you a term loan, which is gonna be really high with really bad.

[00:15:29] Alejandra: Payment terms. So there is a lot to unpack when it comes to the balance sheet financing. There’s your ar like if you have some really good contracts and clients and they’re valued at, let’s just put a number, 500,000. You can get some really good financing against that if you find a good institution that can give you good factor for that.

[00:15:47] Brent: On your website you list that you do services like bookkeeping and fractional cfo. Maybe explain to our listeners some of the differences, and if we started with the bookkeeper, you have a comptroller, there’s a fractional cfo, there’s a cpa. How there’s a lot of different roles that that a in financials that play.

[00:16:06] Brent: Tell us if you could just explain some of those differences and then maybe tell us what, how you help. Yeah, 

[00:16:13] Alejandra: no, thank you. So yeah, so bookkeeping is your, I’m gonna call like the very low level service. Very basic, can somebody coming in, making sure that your bills are there, your invoices are there, your payments are matching, your invoices very low level.

[00:16:28] Alejandra: I don’t like to really just offer that because I think the company does deserve a little bit more. Than just bookkeeping. I like the accounting, the whole accounting service for anybody honest. It doesn’t matter what your business growth is. And it’s because it not only makes sure that your books ar and AP are really up to par, but it’s also gives a little bit more insight on what your margins are and where you know, your, where your biggest drivers of expenses are.

[00:16:56] Alejandra: If it’s marketing or you. Probations or whichever one it is. So I like that one more. And each level, for us at least, we do have a CPA person and management, that manages the accounts and make sure that everything is up to par. We do have also staff and senior accountants that take care of the very.

[00:17:16] Alejandra: Low, low, the low budget task as well. And then when it comes to fractional, CFO is going forward, right? So one of the things that people need to understand is that accounting is, keeping the financials accurate to what’s going on right now. But cfo, f o means going forward. But in order to have a good forward overlook, you are gonna need accurate financials like the forward.

[00:17:40] Alejandra: journey is based on the actuality right now. A CFO person is somebody that will do those analysis for you, is gonna do an f p, and a analysis is gonna do a weekly cash flow. It’s gonna do some variance analysis, which is like budgets, forecast versus actuals, right? Where are you standing according to your forecast or your budget?

[00:17:59] Alejandra: And if we have to readjust the forecast to meet those numbers this person will help you navigate. What kind of KPIs you’re gonna need to reach, or what kind of KPIs you need in order to meet certain metrics or something like revenue goals. This person can identify, like I said, cash burn.

[00:18:16] Alejandra: Where is that cash burn coming from? If you are a company that’s bringing product from China or bringing, product from another country, what are your shipping costs? Is that like the main driver of your cash burn? What can we. To mitigate that cash burn. And it’s somebody that, when it comes to financial institutions, goes ahead and assess the risk of each loan or line of credit or any, o other kind of tool that you wanna get into.

[00:18:40] Alejandra: This is a person that will analyze and assess that risk that comes with it. And it’s a true apr, right? What exactly are the fees that my company’s gonna face on a yearly basis? Divide business with this company. It’s just, for all, anything that you need. There is, like I said, accounting is actual.

[00:18:55] Alejandra: So you need somebody that can make sure that every number in that book is actually, has a backup. If there’s traceability, there’s an a report. If somebody comes looking for answers, there’s something there. And then you, a fractional CFO is somebody going forward. How do we get to the next level?

[00:19:11] Brent: If somebody’s just starting let’s and they want, they, A year’s worth of books or two years worth of books, they’ve just done it on their own. How long would you expect somebody, like one of your team members to get them up to speed where it’s ready to. Start forecasting revenue, start for forecasting cash flow, things like 

[00:19:30] Alejandra: that.

[00:19:30] Alejandra: So it really depends. Let’s see, one year, two years, and they’ve done it all on their own. We would have to go and look at those books, make sure that, if there are any changes that we need to make. We do them in the current year. Talk to the tax accountant, like I said. And just honestly it takes a month or so to get the, to get us up to speed on like the accounting side.

[00:19:50] Alejandra: And then after that, because we need actual information, we need some really good, reliable information to do the forecasting. And then I would say like a few weeks after that, three weeks, we could probably have a model ready. We do models. Very differently than a lot of companies that I’ve worked for before.

[00:20:06] Alejandra: We don’t have a one size fits all kind of issue because everybody has, different business models and not also a different business growth as well. So there’s a lot of things that small companies don’t need and they probably find overwhelming. So we basically have standardized models already.

[00:20:23] Alejandra: We have a small model and we have a more complex model, and we adjust those models accordingly to the business. The, The business and the business model that we have. So with that being said, it doesn’t take as long to, to create something. But it does what could be that time delay would be the cleaning of the accounting and make sure that everything is reliable.

[00:20:45] Brent: What do you see from a mistake standpoint that entrepreneurs or business owners make when they are hiring somebody like you? and they want to try to cut costs at the same time. Is there places where you see people being cheap and maybe they should just spend the extra money on services to make sure that their books are right?

[00:21:07] Alejandra: Yeah, so I’ve seen different cases, so I’ve seen people. Hire full staff of marketing internal team, and overhead is one of those things that is the biggest driver of cost, especially for a small business. It’s one of the things that I look at. The first things that I look at are, do you have an office?

[00:21:26] Alejandra: How much are you paying for that? And how much people do you have in staff? Because you will be surprised. Fractional goes a long way when it comes to building a business. You just have to find the right partner. That’s what it goes with, everything, right? You just have to talk to people. getting a conversation.

[00:21:42] Alejandra: Go have coffee, vet them out, talk to their clients, talk to their partners, see how they’re reacting. But that would be one of the biggest pitfalls that I see is that these companies are spending a lot of money on employees, internal employees. With that comes and I don’t. Know if a lot of people are listening are in California, but if you are in California’s one of the worst states to have employees.

[00:22:04] Alejandra: It’s like the state is against you as an employer. There’s so many policies that you have to follow. It’s insane. So you could. , you could reduce that level of stress if you just go, find some agency or someone that does those services on the side and can be a good partner to you. The other one that I see is, like I said, if you are in e-commerce and you’re doing inventory is inventory wow.

[00:22:27] Alejandra: There is a, if you’ve. Find the wrong three PL company. Oh my goodness. There’s so much cost that goes with that. It’s just, and it’s a lot of cost to get out of it through PL and to get into another one. So research on the right three PL company is one of the biggest ones that I would suggest to do as well.

[00:22:44] Brent: As a business owner, do you recommend like a payroll service or do you recommend that the entrepreneur or business owner do their own? . 

[00:22:52] Alejandra: Oh, that’s a good one. So definitely a service, a payroll service. I honestly, I like everything. I’m not very techy. I like everything that’s very user friendly, user interface friendly to me.

[00:23:03] Alejandra: And I like the ones that are targeting startups because, they basically provide a lot of support and that companies do need and they’re not very bureaucratic, like older. Payroll software providers are but I’m not, I’m not here to recommend anything. But one of the big, one of the ones that we use is Gusto is very user-friendly.

[00:23:22] Alejandra: It connects with different softwares. And then I also hear that ADPs going and. Connecting, doing a thing with QuickBooks coming up soon. So that’s, that could be a good one as well. I just think that when you’re starting a company, you wanna be very e easy, make your life easy with a lot of techno technology tools, cuz it gets really complicated when you have so many at the same time.

[00:23:42] Brent: Is there a, is there an alternative to QuickBooks 

[00:23:44] Alejandra: as a small business? Oh my God, there is. There is, but is, you’ll be surprised how many people use QuickBooks. I think 90% of the population, I use QuickBooks, so there is, but QuickBooks is just makes it easy for small business owners because it’s very cost efficient, and for example, there’s NetSuite, NetID is a really good platform. , but it’s expensive. And that’s what I am saying, and they do have an in inventory management already capability in it, which makes it a fully RRP system. However, it is very costly, and this is when as a business owner, you have to make those decisions.

[00:24:21] Alejandra: It’s What is the value added for the software that I will be buying is if I’m spending $30,000 a year for the software, what is the value that I’m getting out of it? How many employees do I have that are you gonna be using it? And then from there determine if this is worth the investment or not.

[00:24:37] Alejandra: So that’s where we go with the companies that’s. Probably use QuickBooks online because it’s very cost efficient. You can connect it with other tools, but there’s ma As you grow your business, I, if it makes sense, go for it. If it doesn’t make sense to put those 20, 30 grand in a system, then don’t go for it.

[00:24:55] Alejandra: Just continue, using tools that work for you. 

[00:24:59] Brent: Is there, can you highlight challenges? So you mentioned e-commerce in selling a product. Is there challenges in selling a service as a, as a. . 

[00:25:08] Alejandra: Oh, always. There’s always challenges. . Oh my goodness. There’s so many challenges. Yes. One of the biggest challenges, it is credibility.

[00:25:15] Alejandra: Making sure, obviously when you’re, when I see it from a small business owner point of view, when you is your baby, Especially the finances. This is go to finances. Oh wow, somebody’s gonna handle my finances. You wanna make sure this person is really vetted and wonder what they’re speaking to.

[00:25:31] Alejandra: And I a hundred percent agree with that. Also marketing service is another one. That is, there’s presents a lot of challenges because marketing’s all about results. It’s not about the process. While the finance and the accounting is all about the process. , about the results.

[00:25:43] Alejandra: So you just have to, it is always, there’s always a challenge no matter what you sell. For me, the biggest challenge is people like me, they talk to me, they meet me, they’re like, oh she’s very pleasant. But I look very young. I’m not gonna lie. You’re looking at me right now.

[00:25:56] Alejandra: I look very young and people are like, oh my gosh. She has that much experience. How old was she when she graduated high school? And when they look at my experie, My experience will talk for itself. So if you do feel like there is a way to vet more of your service, providers, you can always ask for references for clients, for partners, for, just to see what they’re doing for other people.

[00:26:18] Alejandra: And, at the end of the day is, find a partner that has flexibility as well. on a contract. If you don’t like them, goodbye, there’s no oh my God, you, I have to pay this. I have to do that. I have no, it has to be somebody that’s easy because at the end of the day, you’re is your business and you wanna make sure you have the right partners in place.

[00:26:36] Brent: If you had a piece of advice going into this fourth quarter in these high interest rate times to a business owner, what would that be? 

[00:26:44] Alejandra: Start looking to cut costs. Right Now, look at the areas of like I, we just talked a few about overhead costs, right? Unfortunately there is a lot of people being laid off right now because of that reason.

[00:26:55] Alejandra: But. It shouldn’t be that way if you were vetting your costs at an early, earlier time this year, right? Because inflation has been coming for a long time already. So just be proactive look ahead. That would be my first advice. Look ahead, look at your cash burn. Start looking into those weekly cash flow models that I always, you know, monthly cash flow models will tell you so much, but if you look at a weekly standpoint and see exactly what’s driving the number in, you will see there is a lot of areas that you can, lower down those costs.

[00:27:23] Alejandra: The other one is, it was probably better back a few months ago to get into a line of credit, Kind of use that money now, the interest rate are so high, I don’t even recommend it. Just start initiating those conversations with a lot of financial institutions to see what they offer in the near future.

[00:27:42] Alejandra: Because the, the interest rates will come down. It’s, as the government continues to push, they will come down at some point. So the cost of capital will, will become cheaper. Just start initiating those conversations now and be, prepare, be proactive in this time. 

[00:27:56] Brent: Yeah, I’ve always heard that the best time to ask for cash from a bank is when you don’t need it at all.

[00:28:02] Brent: Exactly. , when you absolutely need it, that’s when they don’t want to give it to you. . Yeah. You, you mentioned weekly and monthly cash flow models and that’s how you can help cut expenses. Do you, so you recommend looking at the detail within that cash flow to help you see where that money’s going?

[00:28:15] Alejandra: Yeah. So this is the thing with the monthly one. So the monthly is a very undirect cash flow model. It takes the activity of the balance. Just to see what’s happening. But on a weekly basis, it is very direct. And you can monitor that on a weekly basis. Just to assess where you standing and when is It tells you by week when your cash is running out.

[00:28:34] Alejandra: If you’re running out of cash on January 3rd, that’s when you’re running out of cash with everything else that you’re being forecast, you’re meeting those forecast numbers and it helps you be proactive in your budget If you say, okay, I’m running out of cash on January 3rd. , that’s not a lot of runway.

[00:28:49] Alejandra: We don’t have, external capital coming. Let’s cut down what are the budget areas that we can minimize to bring it to February, at least one more month. That it helps you be really proactive in identifying those areas of opportunity. And then if you need to ask, do a fundraising round, then it gives you at least that lag time.

[00:29:08] Alejandra: Okay, two more months to get really out there and ask for. 

[00:29:13] Brent: Perfect. Alejandra, as we close up the podcast, I give the guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today? 

[00:29:20] Alejandra: It is Black Friday coming up, so make sure that you have your inventory.

[00:29:27] Alejandra: If you’re using something like Shopify or e-commerce, make sure your inventories are set up correctly cuz that way you don’t have a future headaches in the, once everything is done, make sure that you have your follow ups correct, coming out to all those new customers, make sure that you have some retained strategy for the new customers coming in and purchasing your product.

[00:29:46] Alejandra: So I would just say there’s actually a blog from OK Kendo I can share it with you and I just head over. There is a few tips of coming from different experts on how to prepare for Black Friday, cyber Monday for you to make a lot of money and cut a lot of headaches. . 

[00:30:01] Brent: That’s awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that.

[00:30:03] Brent: We don’t often get different types of industries that you’re giving advice for. Thank you so much for that. Alejandro Sandro, Santo, sorry. is the CEO and founder of Startup Tandem. Thank you so much for being here today. 

[00:30:17] Alejandra: Thank you brand. This was so much fun. Mutual Gusto, .

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Talk Commerce. Please rate this episode wherever you download your podcast. We are actively looking for people to participate in the Free Joke Project. Go to talk hyphen commerce.com and sign up for your free spot on the Free Joke Project. If you are a business, I will do a 32nd elevator.

In the spot to help promote your business. That’s talk hyphen commerce.com.

Talk-Commerce-Alex Teller

An Entrepreneurial Journey in Comic Books and Toilets with Alex Teller

Magento’s life as an ecommerce solution has been a roller coaster ride.

Alex Teller is more excited about the future of the platform than ever. Alex talks about the flexibility of Magento and how it powered his business for over a decade. He dives into marketing and social media topics and more.

Transcript

[00:03:00] Brent: Welcome to this magenta edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alex Teller. Alex is the CEO O of home. Perfect. Alex, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in 

[00:03:13] Alex: life. Yep. My name is Alex Teller. I am the CEO O of Home. Perfect. We sell faucets and sinks brand name, luxury products.

[00:03:21] Alex: We’ve been in business for about 10. Business is on Magenta. I’ve been a magenta enthusiast for quite some time. And when I’m not in front of the computer breaking my head, trying to fix stuff, I like to collect old comic books. 

[00:03:36] Brent: Yeah. And I, we both met at Meet Magenta, New York and that was fascinating cuz my first experience in mag.

[00:03:43] Brent: With a client was on a comic book site and I can’t even remember the name now, but it’s been like 12 years. , you don’t remember the name? I know it’s not terrible. Yeah, that’s terrible. Anyways. did. I will look for it after the show and if I can find it, I’ll even put a link on the episode notes.

[00:03:58] Brent: So before we get into this what we’re gonna talk about, I do have an important project called the Free Joke Project. It’s hashtag free joke project. And I was, I’m gonna tell a joke to Alex. All I would like is just a reaction. The idea is, should these jokes be open source or are they like paywall?

[00:04:17] Brent: Okay, so they’re very short. Here we go. 

[00:04:20] Brent: Dude. I know. Geez. Yeah. Maybe we should open source. 

[00:04:23] Alex: This should be open source and patched and fixed for a decade. Before it’s stable, 

[00:04:27] Brent: we’re gonna have to do two.

[00:04:28] Brent: Now I’m gonna re, I’m gonna start, I’m gonna do my second joke. Ready. A ghost walks into a bar. The bartender says, sorry, we don’t serve spirits.

[00:04:40] Alex: That’s so 

[00:04:40] Brent: stupid. Yes. Very stupid

[00:04:45] Brent: All right. All right,

[00:04:50] Brent: I appreciate that. You gotta pay for a joke. That good? Yes. All right. So redo on the first one. The adjective from metal is metallic, but not so for iron, which is ironic.

[00:05:02] Brent: Yeah, I don’t know about that one. Yeah. Good thing I screwed it up to start with, but I feel 

[00:05:05] Alex: bad cuz it’s cuz the, I don’t know about that is like saying, oh, that should be open source. But I love 

[00:05:10] Brent: open source. Yeah. All right, good. I apologize. I could get a 

[00:05:13] Alex: tattoo. I would get the canoe public license across my back.

[00:05:17] Brent: There you go. Perfect. Yeah. Open source license 3.0. So yeah. Yeah. Alex, tell us a little bit about your journey. Commerce and how you started home. Perfect. 

[00:05:29] Alex: Yeah. I was always buying and selling on eBay. I would say eBay is my favorite to this day, still my favorite website ever. Because I do enjoy a, I do always have a collectible sort of nature to me.

[00:05:40] Alex: So I was buying, selling on eBay, and back then it might have been, I think I was like selling package software or DVDs. It, it was a while ago. It I’ve been buying and selling on eBay for so long that I was getting checks in the mail and I wasn’t even old enough to get a bank account. My parents needed to go in and sign me up so I could go deposit the checks and then PayPal came out and it was a game changer for me as I, I started to, just get the money straight to.

[00:06:07] Alex: So I was buying and selling on eBay, and then I knew I wanted to get into more e-commerce. And my father’s an architect and he put me in touch with some people that had access to some faucets and some sinks, and we hit the ground running and we’ve been in business ever since. . That’s 

[00:06:23] Brent: awesome.

[00:06:23] Brent: And so you got, you went from eBay to e-commerce? I know my wife had a business on eBay for a long time and a different type of business. So what, tell, just tell a little bit about what were you selling on eBay and how 

[00:06:34] Alex: to I’m still on eBay. My eBay username is comic pu. , ah, so 

[00:06:39] Brent: I understand what you’re selling.

[00:06:40] Brent: It’s not 

[00:06:40] Alex: Home Furniture. 89.8% positive feedback. One guy gave me negative 

[00:06:45] Brent: feedback. Oh, that’s frustrating. I’ll 

[00:06:47] Alex: say that I, it was for a heat sink that I forgot to include. It was a heat sink and fan that I forgot to include the backplate for, and it got shipped internationally. So the dude within I don’t know why this guy bought it from me, but I ripped it out of an old computer.

[00:06:59] Alex: I upgraded and I got 15 bucks. And the 15 bucks was not worth that one negative feedback to this 

[00:07:05] Brent: day. Yeah, no kidding. My, my experience, so I all, I had a, I used to have a retail computer store. I sold it. I ended up with a ton of inventory that everybody said was bad. I sold it all in eBay. It was amazing.

[00:07:17] Brent: And nothing came back. So anyways let’s keep moving. So e you sold it all on. I sold 

[00:07:23] Alex: everything. This is, you guys made more money on it for some of it. Yeah. This is a, you never 

[00:07:26] Brent: sold it for in the store. It was crazy. Yeah. This was in the nineties, but yeah, some of the 

[00:07:30] Alex: stuff, if you held onto it, it’s probably worth 10 times the amount, if it was like boxed computer games that are, like boxed Sierra games or something.

[00:07:36] Brent: I wish I, I also had a retail store called CD Rom City, so I’m dating myself now. 

[00:07:42] Alex: I update yourself. It’s all good, man. I was there, I was clipping the coupon for Comp U USA on Saturdays going on my gosh, Sundays getting the mail-in. I love that I paid 90 bucks for EDOs, 16 gigs of Ram, and I loved it,

[00:07:55] Brent: So we won’t go into let’s keep moving forward instead. thought it was the best deal. I was so excited. So tell us a little bit about your current Your current store and what you’re doing and is it a hundred percent commerce, e-commerce, I should 

[00:08:07] Alex: say? Yep. It’s a hundred percent e-commerce.

[00:08:10] Alex: Home Perfect is b2c. We have a large database. We have about 250,000 s skews and we have so many different product attributes cuz we have so many different product types. If it’s something like a toilet has a one piece toilet and a two piece toilet, and they might have required accessories that are different.

[00:08:29] Alex: One might chip LTL freight, one might chip X ground. There’s so many different elongated toilets, round toilets. There’s so many different product attributes and attribute sets that cuz of just the breadth of product mix. I felt like I almost had no choice to, to be on Magento. I think Magento has been a good fit for me because of that.

[00:08:49] Brent: Yep. When you were evaluating platforms, did you look at other ones to try to do your store on? 

[00:08:55] Alex: Yeah, so back in 2012, we were on something called the Venda platform. It was software as a service before it was cool, right? Back when it just sucked when it didn’t work. Now Venda was okay, but it got acquired by NetSuite, I think.

[00:09:11] Alex: And at the time we we knew we needed to move to Magenta, so we did. And Magenta one worked very well for us for many years. When it came time to migrating to two, I did debate on whether or not I should move to another option. I had a layout, right? I was like, maybe I’ll go to Shopify, or maybe WooCommerce were the two that I was bouncing around on.

[00:09:33] Alex: But I felt the number of SKUs and the attributes would’ve been an issue on Shopify for me and commerce. I just, as much as I like geeking out I was familiar enough with Magenta that, I have a business to run, at the end of the. I’m the ceo, right? Not cto, right? So as much as I love technology, I need to sell faucets on the internet and toilets, right?

[00:09:51] Alex: How can I just keep the business running while, upgrading the software? I took the plunge to two. It was a little bit rocky at first. I would say the performance for large databases wasn’t there until maybe for me personally, I saw the improvements at two 40 or maybe two 40.

[00:10:08] Alex: But now it is very stable for me. I’m very happy being on it and I’m really finally getting to enjoy all the new technology and new benefits I have of being on it. And I’m having fun with it. So I’m glad now that I made that switch 

[00:10:20] Brent: and I think you’re in a particular market space that has a lot of, like you had mentioned attributes and those are just parts of a product that can ide be identified.

[00:10:30] Brent: And in Magento’s case, they worked also to make configurables and child products. So if you think about on Amazon that left. When you’re navigating, that’s your attributes. Just for our listeners who aren’t under don’t understand the concept the, your particular market is very attuned to having very complicated products that can balloon your skew count.

[00:10:55] Brent: Maybe talk about the challenges of having so many SKUs and. How you’ve worked as a merchant to make customers be able to find the right product when they need to. Yeah. 

[00:11:06] Alex: In short Brent, it sucks. Let’s take for example, the lighting industry. The lighting industry will create, new products and they’ll already have a skew count of 2000 codes, and then they’ll just discontinue on a whim the next year.

[00:11:17] Alex: They might not have even produced some of these things. They just keep throwing stuff out there and put it on. And sometimes the information is so bare from the vendor, but at the same time, we have the information when we when we go on their website. So at the end of the day, I think our customers know what they want.

[00:11:36] Alex: We’re not really looking for the customer who is oh I wanna redo my bathroom or kitchen, but I don’t know what I want. We’re very much looking for people that come into us, the Brandon part. . And when they do, we wanna at least be able to have that brand at part number, that image and offer, ideally a compelling price for them.

[00:11:51] Alex: And we really want them to come to us, not just for one item, but for a whole list. Because we have salespeople that will walk them through a quote and make sure it’s compelling enough. Or we have a members only price club that uses the magenta cart rules to, if they log in a lot of the prices might be heavily discounted and make it compelling for them to use us.

[00:12:08] Alex: So that’s where. We want you to go to a maybe showroom first or maybe discover the product that you want somewhere else, but then come to us for the best deal. Yeah. You mentioned 

[00:12:18] Brent: price rules. Do you have ways to get your average cart value up in, in terms of when they’re navigating through your site, you wanna recommend other products, things like 

[00:12:27] Alex: that?

[00:12:28] Alex: I would say that’s 1000000% credit is given where credit is due to our recommendations, our AI-driven recomme. We analyzed years of sales history and we started with maybe maybe a more dumb AI, if you would call it, right? Just saying, which products were most often purchased with these products.

[00:12:44] Alex: But now that we’ve gotten more information and every sale makes trains that and gets that smarter, we’re now able to maybe use the category data to boost and optimize which related products we show. . It really helps, it, sometimes a customer might come in and say, oh, I, I didn’t know I needed this in-wall tank carrier for this toilet.

[00:13:02] Alex: I don’t know if we personally want that customer, but at least we show it or we show the seat that goes with the toilet or we show maybe a sink and faucet that other customer had purchased. So it’s definitely very detail oriented for us. It needs to be exact and. And we’re not selling a pair of sneakers.

[00:13:19] Alex: Somebody’s not just swapping out their faucet cuz they like a black one one day and a gold one tomorrow. They’re making that investment for a while. 

[00:13:27] Brent: Yeah. And I think recommendations is something that really scales especially as you grow your traffic and as more people, as you start collecting that information for what other customers are doing, that’s where it really comes into play.

[00:13:40] Brent: Do you mind telling us which recommendation engineer you’re using for, you mentioned ai, so are you using a outbound Outbranded one. 

[00:13:49] Alex: Oh, yeah. I’m. I really value the close relationship I have with my host and provider cloud machines.io. I think they specialize in large databases and and large catalogs.

[00:13:59] Alex: And I think in particular they developed the they developed a software called computer ai, which is like product information management and also AI recommendations. I think I was like an alpha partner and now they’re going to market pretty soon.

[00:14:14] Alex: And adding some new clients. So I’m really excited about what they’ve done with me and for them to be able to offer that to other customers. 

[00:14:22] Brent: What would, if you, if somebody were to come to you and say, I’m so afraid of machine learning how would you get, how would you encourage another merchant to embrace the idea of machine learning?

[00:14:33] Alex: I can really say it comes down to cost for us merchants, some solutions are just too costly and I personally can’t sign a contract. I, I. Spend crazy amounts on budget. I have to allocate a certain amount towards ads and I have to stay profitable. I’m not a company that’s looking for I, I looked into you, Brent you said something about how, like you had loss of leaders at your software store, but we’re looking to make money on every order.

[00:15:01] Alex: And, I’m not saying we’re gouging our customers. We’re we’re delivering a competitive price, but we can’t give away these items. We need to we need to make. And if we start spending a lot on very expensive features, we could just kill our whole budget. If somebody is scared about the concept of ai, me personally, if I were to, as somebody who’s probably more computer geek than most business path sorts of people, I would just show them the price and tell them that they have nothing to lose if it’s priced well enough and if it if there’s really no.

[00:15:32] Brent: Yeah, I think I’ve talked to a number of different, say, fraud providers and they use AI to help help with the transactions to make sure, hey, is this a fraudulent transaction, non fraudulent? And always give the example of a client that we had in Mexico who had a call center that would call every single merchant to make sure that it’s the right merchant, right?

[00:15:52] Brent: And at some point that just doesn’t scale anymore. , like you want to fulfill that item. And I think anything that has to do where machine learning can help you as a merchant scale your business, that’s where it works. And Adobe has a sensei, which it’s, it sounds is very similar to what you had in, in your competitor.

[00:16:13] Brent: Do ai. There are so many computer AI or competing to win computers already. . Yes. Computer . Sorry about that computer. Yeah, there’s just so many different places where you can get wins and I think people need to embrace it more. And the other thing is that it has to learn, like it needs to be there.

[00:16:29] Brent: It has to start collecting data, and it has to learn from it, but it 

[00:16:32] Alex: needs, but cost is so prohibitive. Just to use your example of fraud, there’s so many and I see the I see the potential and I see why there’s fraud, fraud companies out there. But me personally, just to, shed some light on what I use for fraud.

[00:16:44] Alex: I have max mine filters, right? And I pay them a very nominal fee per transaction to, allocate thresholds that I’ll then review. And I’ll am I self-insured? Yes. But if I, went with a company that insures me on those frauds too, the cost would just be completely not make sense.

[00:17:01] Alex: So that’s the solution that I did and I put a lot of faith in MaxMind to, to machine learning and catch the frauds for me. But I’ve been very fortunate and very observant and and I like the software and I think that it does work for me, so I was able to keep costs down by doing that.

[00:17:16] Brent: As a medium sized merchant how do you find competing against the big stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that? Do you find that because you’re so targeted in what you’re doing, that you’re getting, you’re offering a much better value for what the clients are getting, getting?

[00:17:30] Brent: think Home Depot, 

[00:17:30] Alex: Maybe is better for a lot of things. If you came to me and you were like, Hey, I want a new toilet, Alex, and I’m in California. And I’m like, okay, Brent, what toilet do you want? And you’re like, oh, I saw this one at Home Depot. It’s 150 bucks. I would say, go to Home Depot, definitely go to Home Depot and while you’re there, pick off Faucet because that toilet for me to ship to you.

[00:17:50] Alex: If I wasn’t, shipping directly from a west coast fulfillment center, which I can do with Magenta with msi, it’s so expensive to ship something like. I almost don’t even want the sale. It might get damaged and it’s not really a luxury toilet. If you take, for example, the total nere, which is really cool, and it has a integrated heated Bday seat, and I tell everyone, you’re aple.

[00:18:09] Alex: If you don’t have a bday, you gotta have one. That $150 boy doesn’t have that. And it doesn’t have an autoclose lid promised air de odor. It doesn’t have a concealed connection, so you don’t even see the wires. But that total nearest toilet costs 3000 bucks, so it’s different customers and for us, we’re trying to give them the best possible product at a good price.

[00:18:31] Brent: So the niche part of it or the specific market segment that you’re serving serves you well because you’re working on being a targeted, you’re targeting certain types of clients and what you’re doing, and that’s been successful as that’s a good representation. 

[00:18:46] Alex: Yeah. I, all the time and even my father will be like I gotta, I need a new light fixture for a rental place in Brooklyn, and I’ll be like, , let’s go to Home Depot,

[00:18:55] Alex: Let’s go do it, man, this is 150 bucks. They do a great job with lighting, so everyone and or let’s go on Amazon and let’s, let’s find something that, whatever it is, there’s just different customers, like different things, and there’s enough of a market that what we offer is really more granted, luxury.

[00:19:13] Brent: What do you think is the most exciting thing right now in the e-commerce space? What’s getting you 

[00:19:18] Alex: excited about it? I would say personally the amount of ai in terms of recommendations and ways to retarget customers. But I think the costs have finally gotten to the point where it makes sense for someone like me a couple years ago, even something like email marketing platforms.

[00:19:34] Alex: They were so expensive for what you got. And then, value added services of recommendations. It just put me, it’s gonna rock in a hard place cause I value software and I truly understand why it costs that. But I personally, if I just started, buying the best I wouldn’t be able to stay in business how I do it.

[00:19:53] Alex: So I think we’re at like an exciting stage. . Certain things have gotten more complex to pull off, but certain things are also more possible to pull off for less money. So I’m excited to delve deep into that and make it work for me.

[00:20:04] Brent: So you’d mentioned you mentioned email marketing. I’m in a business group and our topic, one of the topics that came up on Tuesday was, people think that social media is gonna be your savior as a merchant. How do you determine how much I should do on Google ads, on, on social media, on, on just an email or a blog post or whatever?

[00:20:24] Brent: How do you break out 

[00:20:25] Alex: different that like a good buddy of mine has silver age comics.com, a site that we helped make on. It’s still on Magenta one, but it works for. And he does a lot of sales on Instagram. We’re selling vintage comics on Instagram and we’ll go live and we’ll have a couple drinks and sell.

[00:20:39] Alex: We sold like a $25,000 low grade copy of the first appearance of the flash on Instagram, which is crazy, and we’ll sell a ton of a hundred dollars books and $50 books, but you get a $25,000 sale on Instagram is nuts. And for him something like social is more important for. , A lot of our customers aren’t really on it that much.

[00:20:58] Alex: They’ll be like, they don’t even really know how to use a computer that well sometimes, or they don’t care, like they just, they know what they want and they want a good price and they know they’re gonna get a tracking number in an email and, so while for this particular business, certain things aren’t embraced in terms of allocating marketing budgets, I would say yeah, there’s more budgeted on Google, right?

[00:21:18] Alex: Or. , but but on other businesses it could be everything.

[00:21:25] Brent: Yeah. Yeah you took the answer out of my mouth. It is specific to businesses and I think as you’re even getting into B2B more, the social aspect of it isn’t as important as. Some of the other channels you have to help market your business. I think that one thing I know Gary Vi always says is, if it’s there, try it.

[00:21:44] Brent: Don’t and test it. Don’t, please don’t. I, 

[00:21:46] Alex: what do you do for testing some? I was talking to ca at the meet magenta after party right before I talked to you, and he was like, Hey man you know who you remind me of, dude? Like you remind me of. And I was like, bro, like I, I please, I’m not, like I’m my own person.

[00:22:01] Alex: And he’s nah, but you probably go to the flea markets and stuff. I’m like yeah. I go to the flea markets and you probably buy a bunch of things. I’m like yeah, I do that. But I just I don’t know. I’m not really the, I very much get a thrill from a from an actual sale, but I’m not gonna like say something more broad.

[00:22:15] Alex: I’m very specific and maybe that just comes. Having more of a technical background as well, 

[00:22:19] Brent: yeah, no I, so what I was gonna say is that testing things and trying things out are always important and I guess going back to social media, how much do you test on those social platforms to see if it’s gonna. Cr if it’s going to bring you some business from those, are they gonna convert to a sale if you did 

[00:22:38] Alex: videos on?

[00:22:39] Alex: Yeah. Probably not for the $4,000 toilet, but maybe for the $300 washlet seat. The thing is you never want to get too comfortable just doing one thing, and you always want to try everything. But sometimes that fear of missing out You get grounded when it’s a grounding feeling when before you know it, you have no more money left than your bank account.

[00:22:57] Alex: So it’s it’s a humbling feeling to be like I have no money to do this. Or and I’m not saying we don’t have the money to do it, I’m just saying, you always need to think from the perspective of maintaining, a profit line. 

[00:23:09] Brent: Yeah. So fear of missing out is a great, it’s a great example.

[00:23:13] Brent: And then also the capacity and the bandwidth to do all those different things you’d like to try. That’s 

[00:23:16] Alex: amazing too, Brent. It’s amazing to not get off the, just to say social media is incredible. The fact that we could go on Instagram at midnight from my friend’s com shop in Queens and get, 200 people in a stream, a hundred people in a stream and have people just buy is such an amazing sort.

[00:23:33] Alex: Feeling like it’s so empowering to be like we just made our own home shopping network, like feeling it with our own, we’re, we’re probably a little bit, we’re cracking jokes and we’re being a little bit Wayne’s worldy, but it’s but the customer likes it too, and that creates like a personal relationship, like I ran into a guy after we did that show, and he was like, yo, man, like you’re the guy.

[00:23:50] Alex: Drinking, like your cup was like it looked like you were drinking a cup of pee, bro. And I’m like, what are you talking about, dude? It was like I think it was like Gatorade , but it’s but the guy was watching, like you had a captive audience and he remembered and he came up to you and it’s and that didn’t cost anything, it was free and it was sincere and it was memorable.

[00:24:06] Alex: So it, depending on what you’re doing, it could be the most important thing. 

[00:24:12] Brent: Do you think as we’re going into the future for content and conversational content the content that’s wrapped around each piece of your products like is if you have a skew that’s one of that $3,000 five toilet writing, $5,000 toilet, sorry.

[00:24:27] Brent: Are, is that content around that? Say you’re writing blog posts or social or whatever, or, yeah, maybe more blog posts that, that’s pointing to that content. Educating people on why that, what’s about that and the features and breaking that content into larger content. It’s totally important. Is that more important now, 

[00:24:43] Alex: what’d you say?

[00:24:44] Alex: It’s totally important. Is that more? Yeah. Yeah. It’s also not our own brand, right? If I had my own private label Washlet, I would be doing even more, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I have thousands of codes and I get information from vendors and then I can use like a software like computer to get more information from vendors.

[00:25:05] Alex: But I can’t, like I, there’s only so many hours in a day and I can keep going and I can keep adding. And maybe some good reviews help, but I’m a B2C and I’m selling something that people can get in a lot of different places. I think what’s compelling about me is they’re getting a great deal.

[00:25:19] Brent: You mentioned you mentioned having you mentioned b2c. You and you mentioned having the email earlier. And we always hear email is dying or email is dead. Your email list, are they still bringing in good Yes. Returns and do you see email going into the future? 

[00:25:36] Alex: Yes, they’re bringing traffic.

[00:25:38] Alex: I think, you get so many emails every day that they all board together to be like nothing. But you do see traffic and you see like an interesting, sometimes I’ll look at Google Analytics and I’ll be like, man, I sent this email like three months ago. This guy just bought this and it if the more you do, the more you get.

[00:25:54] Alex: Are our emails a little bit spammy? We’re throwing a lot of coupon codes, and are they targeted to an extent? Somebody renovates their house once every few years, ideally you’re trying to get some contractors maybe, or some architects or designers and give them, some sort of incentive to to work with you directly in bulk.

[00:26:09] Alex: But I don’t think it’s going away. . Do you think it’s going away, 

[00:26:12] Brent: Brent? No. I think email’s gonna remain strong. I saw a tweet the other day that we need a spam folder for texting though. And I would say that texting can get super annoying. And I’ve signed up for a couple of different brands for, they say, we’ll text you every once in a while to send you a coupon and then all of a sudden I’m getting a text twice a week.

[00:26:30] Alex: Yeah, I get a text from a gun range. Me and my wife she’s from Texas. We go to near her house’s, like a, there’s an archery range on the second floor and a gun range on the first floor. And we just did archery there like once, and they send me texts. They’re like come to Valentine’s Day at Saddle River Range.

[00:26:46] Alex: Like extra ammo is half price. And I’m like, I like it, but it’s, it’s lost on me. I’m in Brooklyn. Yeah. I’m not going to Saddle River Ranch for 

[00:26:53] Brent: Valentine’s Day. . Maybe that’d be something that you should try this year. 

[00:26:58] Alex: I would definitely do it if I was there. Just shout out to Saddle River Rage guys.

[00:27:02] Alex: The texting’s working guys 

[00:27:03] Brent: keep texting me. Yeah, I read it. I guess the point on the points I’m trying to make is that there is a tipping point email. We don’t want texting to turn, like people say, my texting inbox is something that I, everybody reads the text at some point. 

[00:27:16] Alex: Yeah. Unless it’s five or eight prints from high school.

[00:27:19] Alex: Yeah. . 

[00:27:19] Brent: There you go. The text group that goes around and around. Yeah. I hear ya. Yeah. If you had some kind of nugget to tell a merchant that in it that they should be doing, maybe what they could still do for Black Friday, but then what’s, what they should be doing as they’re planning into quarter one of next year, what would that be?

[00:27:38] Alex: Yeah, so I never do any code upgrades. Right around now I just because, especially with Magento, I’m just like, oh God, I might not realize something else went wrong, for another month. And then it’s a trickle down effect. And then I’m breaking my head on, who knows where, Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving dinner, right?

[00:27:54] Alex: Like just fixing something, which has happened. But like I, I think. , for Black Friday, you just want to get organized and say, what are you doing? What am I gonna do? What are my sales gonna be? Am I offering coupon codes? Make sure the, for us Google promotions are really important.

[00:28:07] Alex: Google ads are really important. Submitting, leaking the coupons and just making sure you know you’re ready because there’s so many things to switch. Weeding up to Black Friday only to then switch it all. , right? Like you’re like, man, I have coupon codes and I’m lowering prices and then I’m activating this and it’s only for this day and then this day and then like once Black Friday’s over, oh my god, cyber Monday.

[00:28:28] Alex: And then, everyone should know Cyber Monday is gonna be extended to Cyber Tuesday, but come that Wednesday, you’re stuck reverting a lot of stuff back. And if you don’t, all your marketing efforts might get mixed up and might cause a trickle down effect of a headache. Just be organized.

[00:28:41] Alex: Yeah. It’s 

[00:28:42] Brent: a plan. Organized, make sure I like that. I I think a lot of people don’t think about the fact that maybe they didn’t turn off their coupon codes after a certain time. And certainly magenta, it’s easy to just make the coupon codes stop working on the day after Cyber Monday or whatever, whenever you want to stop it.

[00:28:56] Brent: Yeah, it 

[00:28:57] Alex: is. But if you don’t do it right it’s like somebody’s adding that extra 5% on something where you only had or it’s just like, oh no and then it’s like, what do you do, as the years go on, it becomes more difficult to like, reach out to the customer and explain to them what you 

[00:29:07] Brent: did.

[00:29:07] Brent: Right. Alex, as I close out, as we finish out the podcast, to give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. It could be your business or any, anything, your school or something a anything you’d like to plug. What would you like to plug today? 

[00:29:22] Alex: Sure. If you happened to acquired any comic books that’s say 10 cent or 12 cents on the cover price.

[00:29:28] Alex: Maybe some 15. None of that new stuff. Don’t, hit me up and be like, oh, I got these, nineties books. I don’t want ’em one or two of them, but not all of them hit me up. You could even email Alex home perfect.com, Instagram Web seven nyc. I’m born and raised in Manhattan or on eBay at comment palooza.

[00:29:46] Alex: I’m always buying, I’m paying cash for your collectibles. And in particular 1960s Marvel books. I can give you a good deal and I’d love to buy bulk and I buy collections. I buy inheritances. I’ll go anywhere and I’ll come to you. And let’s just, let’s buy these books. I like to keep some of them for myself.

[00:30:02] Alex: I am a collector too, but I do also sell. 

[00:30:05] Brent: Awesome. It sounds like you should also have a online comic. . 

[00:30:11] Alex: Maybe I do. . 

[00:30:13] Brent: That’s awesome. . Alex, thanks so much for being here today. It’s been an enjoyable conversation and I wish you all the best on your your B F C M as they like to say nowadays. 

[00:30:22] Alex: Yeah, but it’s B F C M ct.

[00:30:25] Alex: What is the ct? Black Friday? Cyber Monday. Cyber Tuesday. Extended. 

[00:30:30] Brent: Extended. There you go. And then we’ll call it Christmas in July soon. Yeah. 

[00:30:36] Alex: God. I don’t, I think it’ll just be year round. Honestly, with us it’s always year round. If you join our perfect Members only Price Club and you sign into your account, all the prices are cut in half.

[00:30:44] Alex: So every day is Black Friday at home. Perfect. We’re just trying to get you the best possible deal on your full renovation. 

[00:30:50] Brent: Awesome. I will put all these links into the show notes and I appreciate you being here today. Thank you, Alex. 

[00:30:56] Alex: Thank you, Brent.

How to Motivate Your Team and Nurture Success After a Setback

Leadership: How to Motivate Your Team and Nurture Success After a Setback

Leadership is a challenging yet rewarding role. The leader is responsible for providing guidance, direction, and motivation for the team and fostering an environment of collaboration and success.

Talk-Commerce-Emily Miethner

Traveling with Cats with Emily Miethner

Have you seen pets on planes? Are you creating connections between your customers? Today we interview Emily Miethner, who is the founder of Travel with Cats.

Emily has built a brand around traveling with cats and a community around cat travel. Emily talks about the ladder of engagement. It doesn’t stop at the sale. She cares about her customers and constantly improves her products to meet her customer’s needs. She started a Travel Cat Summit focused on cat topics, including how to grow your cat’s Instagram account.

Why Empathy in Leadership Matters

Why Empathy in Leadership Matters – 6 Reasons

To be a good leader, it’s crucial to have empathy for your team members and the work that they do. Yet, many leaders lack this skill, and organizations suffer because of it.

Talk Commerce MAIER BIANCHI

The Human Connection in Commerce with Maier Bianchi

Welcome to 2023 and the start of a new Talk Commerce year. What’s new? You will see new and updated show notes, I have a new library of music from AppSumo and I plan on exploring OPEN A I this year. Lots of great things to come in 2023. Today we interview Maier Bianchi, whose primary goal is to help businesses join the modern digital economy. The world is constantly evolving around us like an ever-flowing river of time. To adapt and survive in this increasingly difficult landscape requires us as people to work together, with the mission of succeeding mutually, not exclusively. Maier enlightens us with his business wisdom and tenacity to overcome complex problems and circumstances.

Some takeaways from this episode

  • Maier has been involved with technology and computers since childhood
  • He began working in the IT side of a Halloween store in 2002
  • He began teaching himself coding in 2009
  • He got recruited to work for a luxury kitchen bath lighting retailer in 2010
  • He has since gone on to form his own company and become involved in the Magento community, forming relationships and networking with other members to stay informed and provide better client services.
  • Maier entered the e-commerce world without any formal development background.
  • He took a job in 2015 that exposed him to advanced technology and software development culture.
  • His company was renamed Bemair, meaning “one who enlightens”.
  • He is currently focusing on Magento, Adobe Commerce, Shopify, and headless platforms.
  • He sees e-commerce continuing to form the fabric of our shopping society, but with the human connection remaining an integral part.
  • He is a partner for Shopware and is looking to make headways into the Americas.
  • He is urging people to support 4hcm.org, an organization dedicated to helping those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
  • He believes luck and hard work are essential for success in e-commerce.
  • He sees the venture capital ecosystem drying up and encourages businesses to focus on brand voices and engaging with customers.
  • He encourages people to think of others during the holidays.

RIFF Happens – Read more of what Maier has to say on Linkedin

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this fantastic episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Maier Bianchi, and I have for the first time, I’ve known Maier for about 10 years now. I’ve said his name correctly. Maier, why don’t you go ahead, do an introduction, tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Brent: You are the founder of Bemeir, and again, I’ve been saying be Meyer wrong this whole time as well. And have you attended. . I think I just, I would always just say, I don’t know. Bier, bier. I would just say it wrong, but I say everybody’s name wrong but why don’t you go ahead.

Brent: You’re gonna do a better job than me, and I like the way that you spelled it out. I was super confused when I saw Bianchi or Bianchi because I would’ve said that correctly and I, nevermind. You just go ahead. 

Maier: Yeah. My name’s Maier Bianchi. Thanks for the intro. I’m from Brooklyn, New York, currently by way of New Jersey, and I’m founder of Bemeir.

Maier: We’re an e-commerce solutions agency outta Brooklyn and web development and web applications and other things just like technology and helping people. That’s what we’re about. 

Brent: Cool. And your passion in life is just having kids. Yeah. Crazy because you have 17 kids now, right? Or something 

Maier: like crazy amount.

Maier: Crazy. Yeah, procreation is my passion. No, I have five. I’m definitely probably gonna keep it five, but you never know the fact still. Yeah. One more. Yeah. But yeah, so that, that yeah, that, that is part of my origin story. It’s probably why I’m motivated cuz it started having kids like age 22. That’s, yeah.

Maier: That, that defines me. 

Brent: I am going to you have a, you have so nicely agreed to participate in the free joke project, and now I should have, I realize I should have had a joke about having tons of kids, but I don’t, I have a, I think it’s a good joke, but you’re all you have to do is tell me if you feel like this joke should remain free.

Brent: Or if we could charge for it. And today’s joke is a quick joke, but I may stumble through it. So if we have to do editing and people see jumps in the videos because I’ve said it wrong and Maier and myself have done this, take four times, . All right. You ready?

Brent: Yeah. , a man walks into a bar with a small salamander on his shoulder. The bartender says, what an interesting pet, what’s his name? Tiny. The man Repli. The bartender says, that’s an odd name. Why did you call him tiny? The man replies because he’s my newt.

Maier: That’s a good one. I’m not laughing, but I’m laughing internally. I’m definitely gonna go tell my friend that one. But I, you could charge for it as part of a scholastic book athon. Joke book, it could be part of a compendium, maybe not a standalone joke.

Brent: That’s fair. I think to be fair, a lot of my jokes are thinking jokes and like you think about it and then maybe a week later you’re like, okay, that I get it now. It wasn’t even funny, but now I get it. So that might be like something where maybe next week somebody and maybe what I should do is have, as part of the free joke project, I could have the following week, I do joke explained.

Brent: A newt is just as a small lizard. Okay, good. 

Maier: The joke revealed, no, I wanna tell that one to my dad. I don’t think I can get the intro. But I like the actual payoff. 

Brent: Yeah. And I’ll, I will admit too that I did not practice that. Like I found I was like I was getting ready for our at, just to get everybody in the green room.

Brent: Our green room conversation consisted of me waiting for you to come back from the bathroom. That’s true. I had some time and I’m like, oh wait, we gotta do the joke. So I looked one up really quick. And by the way, there is a dad joke API that you can access. And one of my, when I have some downtime, I do like to do a little bit of coding, right?

Brent: So my downtime consists of me doing bash scripts. If you go on, I do have a bunch of old Magento bash scripts on Amazon, on on GitHub, but I’m very interested in how can I make, how can I get to this api? So I haven’t gotten that far. All I’ve got, it’s still in my head and I’d love to just, Hey, how can I want to just send off a request and come back with a dad joke of the day.

Brent: I think filter ’em because some of them aren’t are. I’d get in trouble from Susan for saying ’em, but anyways. . Let’s would you like to talk about e-commerce today? Or what what would you like to talk about? 

Maier: Yeah I’m open to anything that’s my problem’s. Not always prepared, but so no.

Maier: Yeah,  you can lead the witness. You could go ahead and talk about anything, bring up any topic. 

Brent: Sure. I wanna start off with if, when you get outside, like you said you came via New Jersey today or something, or did, were you moved, did you move from New Jersey to Brooklyn? 

Maier: No, I moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey a couple years ago.

Maier: Oh, so you’re not in Brooklyn anymore? My company’s based in Brooklyn. I still have Brooklyn in my blood. I can’t, you can’t, you can take the kid outta Brooklyn, but you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the kid, but, got it. I. Currently reside in New Jersey and intend to keep it that way for a while.

Brent: Is that because whenever you drove outside of New Jersey and you came back, I mean outside of Brooklyn came back, you couldn’t get any sleep until you actually got there? 

Maier: No. , no. I would just say it’s because Brooklyn is not the most affordable place to live versus the quality of life ratio and space for your family.

Maier: So New Jersey held those answers a couple years ago, back when prices were lower and yeah, things worked out in that regard. 

Brent: I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately and I binge watch, I’ve been binge watching The Sopranos on HBO O Max on my iPad, so that’s a good, again, now just learning everything there is to know about New Jersey and about the people, the wonderful people of New Jersey.

Maier: keep wondering, yeah, that’s like a little north of here, but it’s real. There’s real places. But I did watch it sometime in the last year. Yeah, last year. Yeah. You’re gonna 

Brent: Have to revisit it. And there is some, I think there, there was some tours, some Sopranos tours in the past just to watch that.

Brent: . Let’s talk a little bit about what motivated you to get into e-commerce and again, you’re relatively young, so you started in this Magento community when you were super young, like 12, right? 

Maier: Yeah, . What motivated me to get into e-commerce is I always was into technology since I was a little kid.

Maier: Loved anything with computers and video games and Nintendo and just anything computers, since I was really. And then got my first computer when I was like, whatever. Let’s just say se pick a number seven, apple, two McIntosh. Lc, think like 16 megabytes of Ram 40 megabyte hard drive. My dad was into like Adobe Illustrator.

Maier: I play in like civilization, HyperCard, so you know, always was like into multimedia and art and like computers. And then flash forward to high school. Majored in media and communications, which was once again interactive stuff like photography, video making websites. And like my aunt got me like an HTML book when I was a teenager.

Maier: Never opened it. Had opportunities to learn like visual basic programming for robotics. Never followed through. So there was something about the book way, which didn’t appeal to me. And then flash forward, my parents had a Halloween. I was working at Halloween store in the back office, so doing more office and data entry stuff.

Maier: And then somewhere along the way I got into the IT side where they had started an e-commerce store, let’s just say in 2002. They were early adopters. I wasn’t so much involved in that. But then let’s just say more around oh 6, 0 7, got more involved in that. Cause I was working in the IT of the store.

Maier: And and eventually working in it like, POS infrastructure and MA making sure the registers were ringing during the busy times and like that type of high demand environment and customer satisfaction environment. Probably formulated how I think or think from the business owner perspective.

Maier: And then around 2009 I was working. And was managing the website or dealing with the website. And I started like teaching myself to code like html, css started doing some side projects like WordPress or static HTML stuff and I really wasn’t going anywhere there. And then in 2010 got recruited to work for like a luxury kitchen bath lighting retailer.

Maier: Shout out to Alex Teller, give credit where credit is due. And he got me into that company and they were on a SaaS platform called Venda. Back in 2010, SAS was not where you wanted to be cuz usually it was very closed source. Just adding a pixel to your checkout could cost thousand, cost thousands of dollars.

Maier: So they wanted to move to a more DIY model cause they were successful, but wanted to be able to iterate faster. So what was really great about that experience was I got with AdWords, front end development, you name it, all the aspects of the business. And then in the end of that year, they decided to look at a platform called Magen.

Maier: They were big, so they were going for Magento enterprise. This was the 1.9 version of enterprise, which was equivalent to 1.4 or one point, like right after the major architecture shift, thank God. But this was back then, so I was lucky enough to be put in charge of that project. , helping implement it, bring it to life, working with all the extension providers, working with a Magento at the time.

Maier: I was about to say Adobe, I’ve been training myself, but Adobe was not a concern back then for the Magento community except for making graphics and and so that’s really how I got into this, was working there and getting my feet. We Magento, went to the first Imagine met people like Karen Baker. Met people like yourself somewhere in there, asked, hitting you on Skype for help.

Maier: I don’t know how it hap how, and. and people, all kinds of, like back then. That’s what, how this started. And then flash forward to four years, said, Hey, I really e-commerce, I like making websites. And decided to go on my own and formed my company freelancing. And then for four years, or not in four years, like three years, two years, then I got burnt out on that.

Maier: I was like, Hey, I never wanna work for anyone ever again. No more jobs. Let’s go agency mode. And that was my. So that’s my superhero or super villain origin story in how we got here. 

Brent: That’s awesome. And Alex has been on the show and and did, how did you stay away from comic books? . 

Maier: So I’m not as good with him as the comics, but I’ve always had some comics, but I would say other.

Maier: Have been my hobby, like making babies or video games, , so yeah. That’s awesome. That’s an expensive hobby too. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s a great story. Just so our listeners give some context The Magento community has been around for about 13, 14 years. The very first imagine happened back in, was it 2011 at the Yes, at the lax at Los Angeles L Ax.

Brent: And and then that’s solidified our the actual community of people. And it is really a community driver to make this happen. So it’s a, I think a unique time in space that we’ve had this and we were, we just saw each other at at Meet Magento, New York. It continues going, and not only do we get professionally, get ourselves Make ourselves better professionally, but we also get making great relationships.

Brent: And I had the pleasure of meeting you quite a long time ago and and just doing so many things across our space. 

Maier: Yeah. And no, and I would just second that by saying there’s relationships I’ve made back then that still carry forward to this day. I was fortunate enough to meet like the founder of Uner.

Maier: Or people that like, like people who worked for Magento and Sapora and then introduced them to other people and they became formative members of their company. And it’s just been like this great, like a family reunion every time you get together with people from the community. Like when I saw you in Boston at a not Magento event at El East, and then just happened to sit down next to you at the table, it’s oh, there’s a friendly face.

Maier: So it’s just really comforting because as things change, it’s been a great constant factor out. And like that I think a lot of people don’t know about or they don’t have in their space. Yeah. 

Brent: I think that’s for me, and I started to attend non-agent events in 2019 with the, for starting with the Adobe Summit.

Brent: It was a Magento event, but yeah, I mean it was 99% Adobe and 1% Adobe commerce. Did you find it a little bit different that maybe you don’t know so many people? Shop Talk or eTail event where , it was mm-hmm. ,, it was a way to, you, you kinda had to reintroduce yourself to the crowd.

Brent: And then the other thing that I find at those events is there’s people that absolutely don’t know about it. And believe it or not, they don’t care about Magento. 

Maier: No, exactly. And so I would say I was there for multiple purposes mainly business development and meeting people. Like I went with my colleague.

Maier: who’s on strategic partnerships and business development. And so it’s different when you’re with a friend and you’re with someone, you have a different, like move and stride to you versus when you’re alone. I’m like pretty outgoing but also more timid when I’m like by myself. I feel like more in my own head, but when you have a certain wingman factor you are able to just get into different conversations or work the room as a team.

Maier: And then also that was a conference focus on e-commerce and I had a great time at eTail East. Back when it was in Philly some years ago. And so I had fond memories of that conference, like from 2014 or whatever that was. And and so it was like, just going there to be about it.

Maier: Meet with Shopify, meet with big commerce, meet with Adobe representatives, meet with partners like Air Call and Webs and so on. So it’s once again, it shows kind of the growth because there were so many familiar faces yet meeting new people at these events. And I would just. It’s cool to see the spirit in general of commerce catch up, cuz it wasn’t always like this, right?

Maier: It was a very different type of crowd. It was definitely a different type of vibe and I think it just has to do with the soup of the day flavor and how this became the big industry and more, more different folks who weren’t in industry flocked to it. So now it’s like one of the it places to be.

Maier: So it’s attracted more diversity in certain ways or more investment, which has led to more involve. . And so I would just say what’s the dark side of it right now is that we’re hearing about so many layoffs and so many people who are like at these companies who are, there’s a lot of things changing hands.

Maier: And so once again, it’s, there’s ups and downs and it’s a whole ecosystem. And so for me, the community is really like a, there’s just so many different facets to it. 

Brent: Do you find that being part of the community makes you a better agency owner? And maybe just from a, maybe from an educational and networking standpoint that 

Maier: Yes, 180 

Brent: client percent client.

Brent: Yeah. A client’s gonna ask you a question and my ear is oh yeah, I’m gonna go ask Philip Jackson that, or something like that. 

Maier: Yeah, no. I’m gonna put a plug. Like for example, in Magento World, there’s this thing called Mage talk that ca you know, not the podcast.

Maier: Sorry. Not Mage talk. Mage chat. Forget about Mage Talk mage. Is, it’s like this slack paid Slack membership where there’s a lot of really smart people all in one place, sharing ideas helping each other out. So it’s like not just these, there’s there’s a lot of free communities, like the Magento, open source Slack with thousands of people in it where you could post a question to get an answer, but imagine a more curated place where you can go learn things and people are happy to share their playbook or say, Hey I really rely upon this integration or this extension, or Here’s how we do it.

Maier: And yes, I would. Two things. Like I’ve struggled a lot in the last two years as an entrepreneur focusing too much on what other people are doing and from a social media and watching, you and getting all that in your head and oh man, I’m not doing good. And hey, the truth hurts. But then at the same time, there’s such a benefit to being connected to people because you learn so much and so yes, a hundred percent as an agency.

Maier: And I’m always on the hunt for information for my clients. That’s why we have so many partnerships. That’s why we do the networking, is because these relationships really help provide a a great way to just get support for people or answer questions. And I would say that’s definitely a big part of my the way I operate a secret sauce as.

Brent: and I will also put a plug in for Mage Chat. Kalen often asks me and I realize now that Kalen asked me in advance for ideas that he’s already gonna do, and he’s already proved successful. Soundboarding . Yeah. And I said I don’t know. I don’t know if I would do that. And then, within a day he’s Boom.

Brent: He I’m get all these text messages. I already got 50 people. I guess it really did work. . I wish I can move fast. He’s good at pointing out the fact that I often give him poor advice. So that’s how, yeah. He also 

Maier: probably didn’t have that answer the day before. Cause that’s how fast Caitlyn moves.

Maier: Yeah, he’s saying one thing this week and then the next week he’s doing something different. And that’s part of his genius is the way he iterates and can just say, Hey, because like I compare that to the way I sometimes do things is where I’ll procrastinate on something or I’ll think about how I’m gonna say something or do something for so long, not put anything on paper, but then when the time comes, that visual or how I envisioned it, Goes to plan.

Maier: So there’s some thought to it, but no, he’s on another level with that. , I can’t disagree there. You can tell him one thing and he’s probably already figured it out. 

Brent: Yeah, he’s a he’s probably a really good chess player. I don’t think I want to play him in chess cuz I’m a terrible chess player.

Maier: Yeah, I used to play chess when I was a kid, but those days are 

Brent: long over. Tell us a little bit about some of your journey as an entrepreneur. You, you worked for Alex Teller. Then you went off and started your own, you did contracting and that’s where I started as well.

Brent: In the Magento space. Yes. I did contract and then I did a agency. Yeah, what was some of the frustrations around the contracting part? 

Maier: Contracting wasn’t so bad. It was the trying to do both, like contracting and having clients or whatever. Contracting for multiple, cuz remember like my whole, I guess I’ll put it to you like this, right?

Maier: So I left and I didn’t have any formal background in development. I had some certifications, I kept leveling up, but I had no computer science background, no PHP background, no JavaScript background. So I don’t think I was the best equipped to get recruited for development. , but I was really specialized with the product.

Maier: I really have a good work ethic. Good focus on e-commerce. And so that’s useful, but that’s not a job, right? That’s not necessarily a ba that’s not necessarily an architect. That’s not necessarily this. So where I fit in well was in certain situations. So for example when I left the, that company working for Alex and then went to, it’s called Home Perfect.

Maier: I went to. , I just was like working with some other people on the side, setting up sites, trying to get involved in certain businesses. But then I got hooked into a company called Weedmaps. And Weedmaps is now a billion dollar, publicly traded company at the time. They were more of a startup going to Enterprise.

Maier: They’re based in Irvine California. And I had the pleasure to work for a brilliant cto. His name was Bill Antreosi and he was leading this project that involved Magento. It was like a marketplace. And it was some really forward looking architecture and headless and elastic search and all this stuff back in like 2015.

Maier: So I really had my eyes open to some advanced technology and also real like software development culture and that sort of stuff. So that was really, I would say one of the most formative experiences I had was I went from a DIY uploaded via FTP culture to. GIT and doing things the right way.

Maier: Culture and learning about, like the software developer handbook. And I worked with some pretty hardcore people who were really sticklers about certain things and that didn’t necessarily mesh well with my style. And so at that time, I grew as a backend developer. I actually learned object oriented programming eventually got my Magento developer certification, which to me, I never could have imagined when I started out.

Maier: The. back end one. So I was like, man, you’re doing something right. But at the time, Magento two was coming, this was like 2015. Everyone was like, okay, the writing’s on the wall. It’s gonna get a lot more hardcore from here. If you could program Magento one, it doesn’t mean you’re good at Magento two.

Maier: So I started to get squirrely. There was some, cultural issues in the company in terms. How the Magento team was functioning. And I was a little bit frustrated and so I was like, Hey, I wanna move over to the business side. I feel hey, if I know the guy that created Magento and I know these people and I work well with all the top software people and I can help speak these languages, hey, let me be a part of this side of things.

Maier: And then that was okay. And eventually, like there was this other company that was trying to recruit me to be a job and I was, I had just had my fourth kid at the time, or like once. I converted to be an employee for healthcare reasons and allowed me to get married and all this good stuff.

Maier: And we had our fourth kid. And so it was more just like I went as the situation developed and I was less focused on building like an agency. I didn’t think like that. I might have had different situations like, hey, I had the job but also had a couple other clients or, projects on the side.

Maier: But then really what happened was I was recruited by this company. . And you know how once you’re a Magento developer, you’re getting hit up by recruiters like, oh, we need a senior Magento developer. And you could be like, Hey, I just know this. And they’re like, no, we want you to solve all our problems.

Maier: And you’re the guy. And they think automatically you’re like a PHP lord. And that wasn’t me. And so I took this job that had been recruiting me for a while. I took a pay cut, I bought a car, was commuting 80 miles a day. That was already the red flags. Took a job where I was working from home and quit because I felt like I was gonna get, cut eventually.

Maier: Anyway, got hired and fired in 60 days. I was working at this company called Nobel Biocare. It’s part of the Danaher Group. Publicly traded. They’re a multi-billion dollar corporation, no lie. Logged into the Magento dashboard and had a billion in transactions, and I was like, you’ve made it when you went and you’ve worked on small Magento’s, then you see one that was a billion and you’re like, okay, this is big.

Maier: But the point is, I wasn’t a good fit for the role they hired me for. It didn’t work out. But I went from having an income to having no income overnight and I was shattered as a person. I was very upset. You can imagine when you’re a sole provider for a household, what that does to a person in your mindset.

Maier: I didn’t take it very. . And so 2017 was definitely a rebuilding year and I’m not gonna act like there wasn’t some kind of help or I like, I wrote an article about this actually recently on LinkedIn called Riff Happens just in solidarity with people who have been laid off. I wasn’t laid off, but I just meant my experiences of, like it definitely has caused me to grow as a person or different aspects of this.

Maier: And just to wrap that up, I guess that is how I went from that employee mindset and the security of that to, Hey, I don’t want to work for any anymore. The social contract is broken. Nobody actually has your back. We’re all a commodity out here. Every man for himself, not so severe. But that’s what changed my mindset.

Maier: And then I basically also, my company was called MageNYC, right? So that was, this is how forward thinking I was. I was like, Magento, New York City. I want to be the guy. Guess what? eBay had a problem. That was a trademark violation. Cause I tried to make a logo, which had the diamond in it, thanks to the glory of Ben Marks was able to work that out.

Maier: And I was gonna get a licensing agreement, but the licensing agreement was terrible. So I said, you know what, I’m gonna change the name. This was late 2016, right as that other stuff was happening with the job and like that whole transitionary period. And so that’s how the name Bemair was. Bemair, because Eric Heman from MageMojo at the time was like, oh, hey, why don’t you just name it after self?

Maier: Why don’t you do this. And I was like, okay. Like my name means giving light, or one who enlightens. It’s a hebrew name, my first name. And so I was like, cool, let the company be one who enlightens. Hey, we like helping business owners. Let’s enlighten people. Let’s empower people. So that went from a Magento focused ideology to a global ideology.

Maier: And that was like a blessing in disguise. The industry changes and being so narrow focused doesn’t always benefit you. And so it was a really just big time of transition. So that’s how I went to being agency focused. I know that was a long-winded tale, but that’s how it happened. 

Brent: No, I think the stories of how we get there are much more interesting as than when you get there.

Brent: The, it’s the journey that, that is the interesting part of it. So you talked a little bit about being super focused on Magento. What does it look like today? You’re branching out, right? 

Maier: Yeah. And I just want to add one parable to what you said. 

Maier: A person is as big as the problems they have.

Maier: And so if you look at your life and you feel like you’ve grown. You don’t think you’ve grown well look at what your concerns were five years ago and look at what your concerns are now and you’ll be shocked to see how much that’s changed. And so that’s how I’ve known, I’ve grown even since then.

Maier: And the problems. So anyway, back to your question is right now we’re focused on Magento, still also wrote an article. Why? I’m still focused on Magento, cuz I believe in it and businesses are still using it and need. We became an Adobe commerce partner this year, so that’s a big milestone because no one’s gonna have an event in Brooklyn in our hometown.

Maier: And we’re the most legit Magento agency from Brooklyn, and you can’t invite us. So I had to step up and become a bronze partner so I could get invited to the Adobe Reconnections, so that was great. We’re also a Shopify partner. We work with plus brands and nonplus brands on Shopify. We’ve been working with Shopify, I’ve been working with it since 2014.

Maier: I wish. Had the foresight to make that my bread and butter could probably be rich by now and acting like I invented e-commerce. Like a lot of these people, like everything you touched turns gold because you had it on easy mode. But but no, so we really got focused on Shopify, let’s just say more 2019 is when we’ve picked up some advanced Shopify knowledge and just been really accelerating.

Maier: And now I consider us up one of the best. I look up to big companies like Half Felix and we make websites and some of the bigger. More boutique or deluxe Shopify agencies, and I don’t consider us like that, but that plus we’re a big commerce partner. I found it hard to grow in big commerce.

Maier: Shout out to the people that do like yourself with that sign in the background, your big commerce elite status, because that’s a really cool industry as well. And . We’re focused on these kind of platforms and I have interest in your Salesforce commerce Clouds. Shopware is one that I’m trying to grow with and having the foresight.

Maier: Again, shout outs to Shopware. We’re a Shopware partner at the moment trying to help them make Headways into the Americas. And also shout out to Ben Marks since everyone jumped on the board when you were on. But I was trying before that, but he really was the catalyst for everyone. And then . And so really like my focus is to utilize our skillset in ways that make sense.

Maier: Cuz now I’m currently trying to focus. And headless is another thing where we do, but unless you’re exclusively doing that or you have your own headless framework that you work on and constantly are using on projects, it’s hard to, it’s like any muscle, it’s hard to develop your muscles if you’re not stretching ’em every day.

Maier: And so I would say the areas I specifically want to grow are Magento, adobe commerce, Shopify, and headless. That’s. Would be my sweet spot right now, but always interested in evolution and going further.

Brent: That’s awesome. Like we’re recording this right before Black Friday. Oh, yes. This is gonna, it’s gonna be a couple of weeks before this gets out.

Brent: It’ll be past Cyber Monday and all those fun 

Maier: things

Maier: in the aftermath. See you all in the, a aftermath. 

Brent: This will be an aftermath. In fact, I have I have a whole bevy of episodes that are being released over the Black Friday weekend. Nice. Now you’re listening to this. Now go back to November 24th and listen to listen to the people that I have on and Megan Bliss from Signified.

Maier: I got you. Just read my mind. That was the one. Yeah. Keep going. 

Brent: She’s on Friday, she’s on our Black Friday cuz they have a holiday guide and we’ve talked about it. I’m like, there’s no way I’m gonna get this done be so we could have this before, but hey, I could do it on Black Friday. So they 

Maier: definitely should have included us in that guide.

Maier: I’m shocked we weren’t included, but it’s okay. I have a big chip on my shoulder in case you don’t know that 

Brent: tomorrow I have Gina Ter from site and that’s another fantastic vision. Oh, we had to call with 

Maier: her today or yesterday. We had 

Brent: to call her. All right, Paul. There you go. It’s a small world

Maier: Yeah. We’re all playing in the same sand. 

Brent: Yeah, absolutely. 

Maier: And by the way, shout out to Megan, greatest partner upline ever. She’s like in the partner pyramid scheme. She’s at the top of all partners. 

Brent: Yeah. There was only other one, other partner manager that I could remember that was, I thought was better than Megan, but she went and left WATO and went to another agency anyways, anymore . Yeah. She’s still a very good partner manager but just not in our exact space. So what do you think what, how do you see now let’s look at, let’s look at the end of quarter four in the beginning, quarter one for e-commerce. Do you think it’s still we still driving towards a good next year in 2023?

Maier: I’m looking for my crystal ball. Hold on. I gotta find it. Let me see what it says. I think there’s one thing you can bend on. E-commerce is going to continue, right? That’s a safe pick is that people are going to use ecommerce people are gonna need e-commerce. It’s still going to form the fabric of our shopping society.

Maier: I think brick and mortar is here to stay too. I think the pandemic tried to put a dent on that. You can bleep out that word in case it just messes up the algorithm. But I think things that happened in the last two years tried to put a dent on brick and mortar, but people really want the human connection.

Maier: And so I think if we bridge the human connection with e-commerce, and that’s in the form of. And strengthening brands and brand voices and how you talk to your customer and how you engage with your customer really shows that e-commerce can be the vehicle or the vessel for, this neoclassical shopping, right?

Maier: It’s not a binary thing. It, that’s what I always enjoyed about when I worked back in the Halloween store was, Hey, I was the guy who was answering the phone. If you call, if you had placed an order, Hey, I saw your order in the digital space, but then we called you if there was an issue or you needed to do a store, in-store pickup, we were prepared for you.

Maier: So it wasn’t like it was this amorphic, faceless animal. There’s real people, there’s real stories. There’s real people impacted by e-commerce. And so I think if we keep the human connection in mind, it’s not going anywhere. I just think the problem is the commoditize. The ads, the ad driven feed the beast venture, capital fed ecosystem might be drying up and that’s okay.

Maier: It wasn’t really healthy to begin with, but I think if we separate the two, and we don’t just look at it as a chart or a line graph, but we look at actual, hey, a guy from X County, Louisiana started X business and it was either a lifelong family business or it’s a new business.

Maier: Someone who’s really small time getting into it themselves on Shopify and starting their own drop shipping business. Whatever it is it’s how people connect to those businesses and the actual utility of what you’re selling that is gonna determine your fate, in my opinion, and also luck and also hard work.

Maier: But yeah. . Yeah, that’s, was that an evasive answer? 

Brent: No, that’s a fantastic answer. And yeah, I know. It was a long it was a very open-ended question. My ear, we’re running out of time. We targeted 20 minutes and now we’re pushing up against 35, but darn. As we close out Yeah.

Brent: There’s so much more to talk about. We, I wanna ask you about your your camera, but anyways we’ll have we’ll do a follow up episode, maybe a special. Technology episode. 

Maier: Yeah. We’ll do a po Let’s do a 2023 technology episode. I’m down. There you go. 

Brent: As we close out the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug and you can plug anything you’d like today.

Brent: What would you like to plug? 

Maier: Okay. I’m going to plug 4hcm.org. It’s the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association. One in every 250 Americans has hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy . It’s a real heart disease. It’s genetic. You may have it, not even know it. If you get an echocardiogram, you can get your heart measured, and if your septal wall is more than 12 centimeters, you probably have it, or you’re on the verge of having it, you should get it checked.

Maier: Everyone should support this charity, the 4hcm.org, any kind of donation. I think that would be a big help to saving a lot of lives in this country and helping people get treatment for their conditions. So because it’s Thanksgiving, And we need to think about other people than ourselves. That’s my shameless plug of the day because this whole episode was a shameless plug anyway, where I talked about myself and my business a lot.

Maier: But we need to focus on 4hcm.org and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. heart condition. That’s what I want to shamelessly plug today. That’s awesome. 

Brent: Thank you so much. I very much enjoy when people do a shameless plug not about their business. So I really appreciate that. And I agree there’s so many, there’s so many causes 4hcm.org I’ll make sure I get all these links 

Maier: in.

Maier: Yeah. Lemme make sure I notes. Imagine I gave you the wrong spelling. Let me just, yeah, no, it is 4hcm.org. I’m bugging. 

Brent: Yeah, we’ll, and I’ll make sure these get into the show notes as well as thank you. Anything else that you want, any of your articles that you’ve rec recently written and your past articles, we’ll make sure we get those onto Yeah.

Brent: Onto the show notes 

Maier: about the layoffs. 

Brent: Yeah. And We will we will regroup in 2023 and have another conversation of what we’ll do with the technology conversation. Or maybe we’ll do it in person. I would love that. We’ve got a bunch of events coming up for next year. Will you 

Maier: break down this virtual wall separating us right now?

Maier: Absolutely. Find a way to link up in the physical space and can you give me a closing joke? Give me an outro joke. All 

Brent: So I was thinking about this. The, and this is coming outta. Okay. 

Brent: The first time Yoda saw himself on 4K tv, what did he say?

HD am I.

Maier: Oh my God. Is that do, if you not, there is no try.

Brent: Yeah. I guess I could have phrased it better. Hd. Am I? Yeah, that would’ve, you kinda have to go right through it, you gotta think about it for a little bit. You 

Maier: got a known That’s a good one though. It is a delivery though, isn’t it? It’s how you, I think you gotta make it something more about the connections.

Maier: There is, something or something hd I, you got, I don’t know. Anyway, thanks for the, thanks for bringing that up, . 

Brent: All right, we’ll do one more, right? Alright. You last, 

Brent: every morning after I get out of the house, a bike comes outta nowhere and ru and runs over. . It’s a vicious cycle.

Maier: Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. The vicious cycle. I like that one. You’re welcome. Cheers, man. All right. 

Brent: Happy Thanksgiving. Have a great Thanksgiving and I look forward to I look forward to seeing you in person next 

Brent: year. 

Maier: Same. See you at some events and be well. Take care.

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