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Talk-Commerce Taren Gesell

A Better App for Coaching with Taren Gesell

Business owners and entrepreneurs are known for their energy. They focus on their ideas but frequently, that energy is sedentary. Brent interviewed Taren Gesell or better known as Triathlon Taren. Taren went from an Ironman and Youtube sensation to a tech startup with an exciting and disruptive app called MoTTIV. This virtual coaching app helps athletes focus on what they need to focus on while still giving them the flexibility to live their busy lives. Taren is through the beta version and is into his first round of funding. There is a lot to learn and much to unpack in their episode.

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. This is the activity edition, and I have Taren Gesell Taren go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions. 

Taren: Thanks for having me here, Brent. Thing that people would best know me for. If they look me up online would be this YouTube channel that I started about seven years ago called triathlon Taren.

Taren: And I started a YouTube channel while I was an investment advisor as my day job, because I just wanted something on the side that was fulfilling and creative. And I thought that if I really knocked it out of the park, maybe I could get some free energy bars at some point in my life. It ended up growing to being now the second largest triathlon YouTube channel in the world, the largest triathlon podcast in the world, we’ve published four books.

Taren: We have expanded into the main thing that we focus on now where I’m the CEO of a. Called the motive training app that helps regular people get to their endurance races. So whether they want to train for triathlons or running races or cycling events, or do Athlons, we have an app that now is hopefully as good as a one-on-one coach, but as cheap as doing it yourself, which has never existed in this world.

Taren: And we want to make getting to those exciting finish lines that endurance sports really are. A little bit more accessible in the world. 

Brent: That’s great. Thank you. And I will admit that I found you because I’m a triathlete. I’m a a very poor triathlete I’m free, very poor swimmer. I’m an avid runner.

Brent: And I’m an okay. Biker. I think I saw one of your videos. we did our first to half Ironman last year as a family, my daughter, my wife and I. It was one of the best experiences I had absolutely so much fun and I’ve run a lot of marathons. It took me longer, believe it, or not than a marathon.

Brent: But I had so much fun in the race and even the swim part, I had such a great time. That’s how we found each other. One of the things that, that really stuck out was the fact that you’ve pivoted from. This role of being a coach or what you were doing with your YouTube channel into this app that you’ve built.

Brent: Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So 

Taren: I recognized that life on YouTube is a little fleeting. You get about 15 minutes of fame and there comes a point where your channel maybe just starts to feel a little stale. Maybe in my case, I’ve said a lot of the same things for seven years. I’m also getting older and a lot of YouTubers find that.

Taren: Their channel lifespan is finite. So I recognize that was happening about four years ago, just in general in the YouTube space. And I didn’t want to go back to having a real job. I wanted to still stay in this industry and think about what could I do that would be lasting as a career, as a business and what was needed in the world.

Taren: And I saw one of the things that people need the most help with is coaching and advice to get to their finish lines. But what I saw was the two options that are out there for people that want to get advice on how to train for an endurance event is either a $200 a month one-on-one coach or a free template training plan.

Taren: Both options suck for most people because the average person doesn’t want to spend two to $3,000 a year or more on a hobby just for coaching, let alone all the biking equipment and the wetsuit, and it just gets to be too expensive. So most people don’t use one-on-one coaching and then template training plans are not motivating.

Taren: They’re not relevant to the user. They’re not customizable. And what happens if you have two races in a row and you’ve got a marathon and a triathlon and the training overlaps, what do you do with those template training plans? And nobody’s ever looked at solving this problem. So we launched a Kickstarter, but three and a half years ago to see if people were interested in something like this app.

Taren: And I sold the Kickstarter campaign, literally just off of a Google spreadsheet that I mocked up to prototype my way into showing what an app could possibly do. And now three and a half years later, we’re finally scaling up. We’re raising our first significant round of investment. And I think that we can build something that

Taren: is comparable to what Duolingo did for language learning. That’s what we want to do for endurance training. We want to make it something that isn’t a real niche sport. We want to make it something that everyone can access because it’s easier to get solid training and more cost-effective to get solid training, which it hasn’t ever been.

Taren: So that’s what we’re working on right now. That’s the future of the business of my YouTube channel. And I’m really just trying to make sure that I prove my mother wrong and continue to play for a living. And the app was the way that, that I could continue to do that while having a good effect in the endurance community.

Brent: I love that story. I know myself personally, I do have a running coach who helps me and holds me accountable. And I do see though that where you can get stuck in a rut, even with a coach. What are some of the pain points that your app has been able to overcome in bridging the gap between a training peaks, 80/20 plan and a one-on-one coach.

Brent: And I’ll say to, mine’s just a running coach and I know that there’s a lot more involved than a triathlon coach. 

Taren: That is actually a perfect example of one of the biggest problems. Most users of our app. And frankly, most endurance athletes are like you, they want to bounce between marathons or half marathons and triathlons.

Taren: And the fact of the matter is that most one-on-one coaches are single sport coaches they’re run coaches or triathlon coaches or cycling coaches, and they don’t go across all disciplines. So that’s an issue that we have to solve with our. We partnered with some of the best run cycling, triathlon duathlon, swim, run coaches in the world and created algorithms to make the plans that each of those great coaches put together coordinate with each other.

Taren: So that was one problem that we had to solve a second one is that there are a lot of really great one-on-one coaches out there, but there’s also a lot of really terrible one-on-one coaches out there who charge $200 a month and essentially make a template training plan. And the story that a lot of people resonate with is they might go to their one-on-one coach, wake up in the morning and go, Hey, Carl, I feel really bad.

Taren: What should I do today? And Carl, the coach goes this is part of training, continue on. And he’d go I really feel bad. There are going to be low moments in training, continue on, and really what’s happening is the coach doesn’t know what’s going on in your body. And the coach doesn’t want to go through readjusting your plan every single time you have a ache or a nigle or feel a little bit tired, what we can do with technology.

Taren: And now the data that is being collected by things like the Whoop band and the Aura Ring. We can adjust training every single day. If users drink a bottle of wine, we can make their workout the very next morning, easier for them. If they’re trending down and not keeping up with the train and feeling sore, we can detect that and actually get training that is better than a lot of one-on-one coaches and doing the things that really good one-on-one coaches do.

Taren: The ones that will charge three, five, $1,500, but we’re doing it in a way that we can charge 14 to 20 bucks a month. So there were a couple of major problems that we had to solve. And those two are the primary ones that weren’t really being serviced, even by most one-on-one coaches with the current service model.

Brent: I just I’m pretty sure my wife now is signed up for your app because she does drink a bottle of wine with me every night. And that’s probably why she’s getting up in the morning, thinking that she can take it easy and I’m joking. Cause she’s probably going to listen to this. I think from experience, I can say I did go through the coaching training last year with RRCA, the Roadrunners club of America.

Brent: And that was one of the warnings that they give coaches. I know also that coaches either haven’t been through that training can fall into that rut of not listening and especially right now with online and not even actually seeing anybody in person, you end up with somebody that’s in a different city that doesn’t connect with you or never has connected with you.

Brent: From what I’m hearing is that there’s some technology behind that says listening to your body and is there a certain amount of technology that the user has to have to be able to. W like you’d have to have I have a stride pod and I have a power pedals. I’ve all the dumb things that somebody with enough money can buy that doesn’t ever use all that data.

Brent: But what I’m hearing you saying is that some of those things are of value and they add that value and then you can get back and like my Garmin account is a great example. I can go and see what my power was or my FTP was in my bike ride. I have no idea how to use any of that stuff I should because I’m a coach.

Brent: But I don’t know how to use that for myself. So not to get into a bunch of technical details on an e-commerce podcast, but it’s very interesting on how it’s almost like in AI, like in artificial intelligence, helping the users to know, and then the system is learning as it goes for each one.

Taren: That’s a big issue that you’re talking about with the entire industry that we’re collecting heart rate data, we’re collecting power data. We’re collecting HRV data now, resting heart rate data, all of these things and the Garmins, the Whoop, the auras of the world. They all basically just collect the data and then tell you all here’s what it is, but nobody really is interpreting it and saying, here’s what you should be doing. Whoop is a great example. I liked the whoop band, but they say here’s your readiness score. And if your readiness score is in the tank. Great. Okay. What are you doing? Does that mean that you change your workout?

Taren: When does it mean? Like how in the tank does it need to be to change your workout? So that’s what we’re able to do is pair a lot of that data with what you actually should be doing as an endurance athlete on the day. And that’s a big piece that’s been. 

Brent: I want to pivot a little bit of just, the, maybe our listeners our business owners who are sitting in there at their desk.

Brent: Maybe talk about you. If you’re not already really into doing some fitness things. The importance of doing something other than just typing on your computer. Do you ever ever get stuck in not going and doing some exercise? Are you a type of person who has to get out and do something in addition to doing your day to day business work?

Brent: No. 

Taren: I came from a very unfit upbringing and a very, even add a few more varies, unfit early twenties in my life. Lot of drinking, I was quite overweight, about 215 pounds. And I got rid of a little bit of weight in my mid twenties by going into the gym and throwing some weights around and eating chicken breast and bland rice, the things that young kids do when they think that they’re bodybuilders.

Taren: But there were a couple of things about it that were never quite right. And I think are very meaningful to the average person, whether they’re a business owner or really just anyone who wants a little bit more from life, that feeling that you talked about when you stepped up to a start line of a triathlon being different than stepping up to the start of a race, I think

Taren: running races, really fulfilling that feeling of little bit of fear of not knowing if you’re going to be able to accomplish the task ahead of you being a triathlon or a long running race or a marathon swim or something like that. (A), it gives you a lot of structure and motivation to be healthy. And (B) it gives you a lot of fulfillment.

Taren: When you complete that task, it’s like selling a business or achieving a huge milestone in the business. It’s going through a process of seeing what you are capable of doing. And being able to do it and astounding yourself. And in my case, it made me more confident. It allowed me to start this business.

Taren: It allowed me to have the confidence to put myself out there on YouTube and put my thoughts out there in the world. So it’s less to me about, alright. Do you age? Because so many people talk about that, but I think the unsung hero in endurance sports. Is the confidence and fulfillment and structure that you get from that little bit of fear of knowing that you have to step up to the start line of a race and not know if you’re going to be able to finish it.

Taren: And frankly, the things that are going on inside your head at the start of the race, are am I going to come out of this alive? Yes, the answer is for sure, you will but it’s exciting. And we don’t really get that excitement in this day and age anywhere we can get it in endurance sports. 

Brent: Yeah. And maybe not so much excitement from a marathon.

Brent: Although if you’re in a the excitement going into a triathlon because you, even if like I’m from Minnesota, so Northern Minnesota, there’s some races and in the summer, those lakes. Dark sometimes and it’s gets, it gets imposing when you’re going across a white cap to lake and you’d have to go out a mile and come back or something.

Brent: So the structure that you said is what I really want to key in on, because I think most entrepreneurs or business owners have to have some kind of structure or they just wing it. And the ones that wing it are unbelievably lucky to make it. And when they do make it, they have to put some structure into it.

Brent: So I think that by doing some of these things to get fit, and let’s just say, all you want to do as a couch to 5k. That structure you’re putting into place. And that goal you’re setting to get there is going to be (a) fulfilling and then the fulfilling the next piece of that fulfillment is that most likely you’re going to be a little bit more fit at the end of that goal.

Taren: And you’re going to change how you feel about yourself. I use the example that I’ve just recently come across, while we’re doing fundraising as opposed to going the traditional venture capital route. We are going to individuals. And we could talk about another time about why we’re doing that, but I’m looking for individuals who are endurance athletes and could write a decent sized check. And I started thinking, how do I actually go about finding these people? I say, can I just search for them? So in quotes, I have triathlete in quotes and then LinkedIn, and then president in quotes. And sure enough, the amount of people that have triathlete or ultra runner or ultra marathoner in their LinkedIn bio is enormous.

Taren: That doesn’t happen with golf. Maybe with CrossFit, but there are very few things in this world that become a part of who you are and that people want to celebrate and display to the world in the same way that endurance sports gets displayed an advertised. And I think that’s because it is such an impactful thing in people’s lives.

Taren: So yes, again, all of the good health is great, but the confidence, the fulfillment, the structure of having a reason to be healthy it’s all so powerful. And I want more people to be able to experience that sort of power of changing and improving one’s life. 

Brent: I think that fear part is another one that’s always a fear in a good way. The fear of trying something new and the fear of failing and even the acceptance of, Hey I’m going to go out and do this swim, let’s just say, you’re going to sign up for a 5k swim. And if I don’t make it, there’s going to be a boat there to pick me up.

Brent: If the weather gets big and I know there’s a swim, like the Point to LaPoint is one I want to do it’s from Madeleine island to to wherever across Lake Superior, two miles, and last year they had three foot waves. So a lot of people had to dropout, but just the idea of doing it and stepping in and making that extra effort to put yourself out of what your comfort zone is.

Brent: I think makes you a better entrepreneur because in your entrepreneurial life, in order to grow, you can’t be stagnant and always doing the same thing. And I believe there’s such a tie-in from being active in your physical life to being active in your mental life, to being active in your business life.

Brent: They all tie together and I think you’re right. And I’m going to say something that would probably get a lot of people upset. I don’t like CrossFit. I don’t see the big point in CrossFit. You’re standing in a place. And then you might do a hundred yard run. I run past a CrossFit gym and I see them sprint out and they come back and they sprint back and maybe I’ll run five miles down the trail and come back and they’re still sprinting out and whatever.

Brent: But the the idea of that identity and then the idea of of being able to put yourself into somewhere that you’re uncomfortable. And maybe the, one of the differences too, from the gym to an ultra race is that you’re putting yourself into somewhere uncomfortable for a really long time.

Brent: So your half Ironman is more like three hours. Mine is more like six, but that’s, you’re still out on the course a long time. 

Taren: But 

Brent: close, you could be. Who’s the guy that just got the world record. He did his full Ironman in less than seven hours. Yeah. 

Taren: Yeah. Blumenfeld they’re in 7:21 crazy.

Brent: Only the Norwegian can do such things. Exactly so I can see the tie in, I’m a big proponent of keeping people active and my business life has been around having some balance between that. So maybe if you could bring us back to your app, then you’ve transitioned from your YouTube into this app, and now you’re trying to raise capital, that’s where you’re at in your business. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, are you in a beta? where are you on your app now? 

Taren: So we launched three years ago, a little bit over three years ago and it was in beta for about a year and a half. The beta was public, and because I was still doing the YouTube channel and have this nice big audience.

Taren: We were always able to drive a certain amount of users to it, enough users that we could start getting data and collecting user feedback on where we needed to go with the app. And then a year and a half ago, we rebrand. We rebuilt the entire app, a completely new architecture, completely new programming language so that we could scale the app because we had grabbed enough, got enough data from our users to have an actual business thesis of what would scale up, what are users looking for? Things as simple as like you mentioned AI, we started doing a lot of market testing of what do athletes think when they hear that their plans are generated by machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Taren: It’s actually a detriment. So learning things like that is important that isn’t to say that we won’t use AI. It just means that we don’t lead with it and our marketing. So learning all the things like that, about what increases engagement, what is a good price to come in at? What is a way to make people feel that the app is working and that they actually develop confidence so that by the time they get to the race,

Taren: they’re confident that they’re going to be able to get across that finish line. So we’ve been gathering all of that for three years and we bootstrapped all, but us small little friends and family round that we raised at the beginning of last year, but now it’s time to start unrolling some of the features that we think are fairly groundbreaking in the industry, and we don’t want to do those

Taren: slowly, we don’t want to do those in a bootstrap fashion and basically announced to the world what the playbook is. We want to be able to come out, grab market share, because we’ve probably got about a 24 to 36 month window before competitors catch onto what we’re doing. And we want to use that to aggressively launch the feature set that we want to create and capture market share quickly.

Taren: So that’s where we’re at right now. 

Brent: Are you seeing a community as an important part of the experience from the user? And I say it from, I used to use an app called the daily mile. It was something that was super popular 10 years ago. They just really put no money into their app and it just ended up fizzling out.

Brent: But the best part of that is that it created a community. And it was more about how your posts look. And I do remember my wife complaining like, oh, you’re going to go do your post about your run, because it was a social thing. And because you had people actually cared about what you’re doing, it turned into less 

Brent: Facebook, Hey, look at the marathon I did to here’s the marathon I did, or here’s my run and here’s the struggles I had, or here’s the exciting part about what I had. And it was a commonality in that community that you don’t get on Strava. Strava, you can give somebody a kudos or you say, Hey, great run but for whatever reason, there’s a piece that you miss in the social part of it. That’s between coaching and between support and it’s about your own people or your group of people that are supporting you in your activity.

Taren: So it’s interesting that you say that we launched on day one with a social media feed. And my core belief was that training for yourself and solely for yourself, wasn’t as fulfilling as training for yourself but with other people, that human element is something that is so hardwired into us, whether it is seeing success in other people and being motivated by it,

Taren: or achieving success in yourself and getting those kudos or the accolades from achieving something that you never achieved before, is really important. And I look at an app like Zwift, so people don’t know Zwift is a training app where you hook your bike up to a smart trainer. And the smart trainer communicates with the app and you cycle inside this virtual world alongside other people now had Zwift launched and you biked around this virtual world by yourself.

Taren: It would be marginally better than staring at a wall or watching Netflix while you’re on your bike. But not immensely better, but the experience that Zwift launched with was you cycle inside this virtual world. And so is everyone else. So when people pass you, you have an encouragement to go a little bit faster and you can enter a race and there’s people all around you.

Taren: You get ride ons from everyone that is riding around you. There are achievements and badges that you can go and collect. The other people get to see how far along you’ve come. And then all of a sudden it’s immensely better than just training by yourself, staring at a wall. So our competitors and where the industry of online endurance training has gone is really just creating that virtual world where people are training by themselves.

Taren: The problem that they’re all trying to solve is how do we automate training? I can tell you we’ve already solved, automated training. And it isn’t enough to change people’s habits. So our entire scale up thesis is we’ve already automated training. We’ve figured out all of that logic and that programming language to be able to make that happen.

Taren: But how do we actually make it such that all of the users have this community experience? They get some of those good things from CrossFit or from a in-person training club. That sense of community is really what keeps people around and keeps people very motivated to continue to come back. So it is the entire thesis of our business, that community aspect of it, without that we’ve just got empty training that people are doing solo and suffering by themselves.

Brent: How. So just I apologize. I should have used the app before I came to the interview. I apologize for that. How I’m not if you’ve sparked my interest. I’ll give you an example, right? So I’ve been injured and I haven’t been running for about a week. And so I’ve switched to biking.

Brent: And so my coach has a running coach. So now she’s given me some biking workouts that I actually, I find quite fun. But because I’m on and I’m on Rouvi, which is just like Zwift, but you get to play. Can I get the bike in Hawaii all the time now? So w what happens to me is. I see that person, then I’m like, I can bike as hard as that person.

Brent: And then I, my easy days, I find myself biking way harder than I should. So if I get I’ve told I bike between a hundred and 150 Watts or whatever, I’m at 200 or 250 or some stupid number that, and I’m no that, I know these are very small numbers for you, but That I’m overdoing myself. And then, I don’t get a lot of feedback after that.

Brent: So would the, would like your app would give you an opportunity to say, Hey, ease back or 

Taren: yeah, our app will give people not any sort of strict guidance where people will be. Say penalized for not following the app to the letter. I think that people need enjoyment. They need to be able to have some free play time, essentially where they can go.

Taren: And if a workout says 60 minutes, but they’re feeling great and want to go for 90 cool where we will start giving people guidance is when they start going off the training plan too many times, be it in the intensity or in the duration or in what they’re actually doing in the workout. We will have indications of you might be less likely to reach your goal. So we will give that guidance of being able to do that. And it will not necessarily motivate people to only follow the plan, which I don’t really believe is reasonable. It’ll give people motivation and guidance to maybe not just fall too far outside the rails.

Taren: And have a bad race day. As long as they’re keeping a hard ride, hard, an easy ride, relatively easy most of the time, strength days are still strength. Days. Rest days are still rest days. People are going to still reach their goals. And we want to give that latitude while we’re giving the a hundred percent guidance, but give them the ability to

Taren: make smart choices make adult choices. If you want to go and turn a 60 minute easy ride into a 60 minute easy ride with 15 minutes, really hard at the end, we’ll tell you if that is becoming detrimental. 

Brent: Yeah. So at the macro level, rather than trying to micromanage the individual workouts, it sounds like what you’re saying, which is, I think that’s a great approach to how you’re doing that.

Brent: And as we tied this back to business, Often entrepreneurs tend to get stuck in the details of a thing and they can’t see the bigger picture. So as we bring this full circle, tying it back into a business standpoint, or even in your app standpoint, if you were to focus on some small bits of code and you’re missing that picture of community or something like that, you’re missing the big picture.

Brent: You’re going to miss out on what your goal is going to be. 

Taren: Yeah, exactly. Whether it is training or what we’re building say with our analytics dashboard. I like what you’re talking about, that we’re looking at large, big indicators of the health of an individual or the health of your business, as opposed to fussing about all of the very, very small minute details.

Taren: I think the small minute details are things that you do need to work on. We’re obsessing right now about the time that it takes people to get through our signup flow. But the reason that we started looking at that was because we started looking at larger numbers, is our churn too large for our.

Taren: For the amount of people that we’re bringing in. And if the answer is yes. Okay. Where are the leaky buckets? Yeah, as opposed to getting stuck in the weeds of every single detail, just focusing on the big picture numbers, which then led us and me in fitness and in business to starting to narrow down what weeds we look at after looking at the big picture.

Brent: Not to keep harping on it, but that idea of having those metrics in place and measuring it and remeasuring it and testing it. It’s exactly the same across both business and exercising and training for an event. If you don’t measure something you’ve done, you’re not going to know if you’ve achieved that goal.

Brent: That’s obvious in a running race, but in business sometimes. And I’ll take marketing as an example. A lot of times people just think marketing is marketing and I going to put some social media posts up and I’m going to do a post on LinkedIn and that’s my marketing and whatever happens there.

Brent: I’ll spend $5,000 on Google ads and we’ll see what happens. I don’t know. And then they don’t look and see how well they performed. So I think to tile this back even the idea of looking back at your your workouts to see how well you performed, it’s always good to to have a measurement or a commonality in that measurement.

Brent: The motivation is like the Google analytics. Could I say of of the running triathlete world and that those analytics are telling you certain things about your fitness and your training. That’s bold step. 

Taren: Maybe I thought about it that way, but as you were saying, that one thing that came to mind was a big thing that we believe in with our method of endurance training is taking care of the entire body, looking at

Taren: every system, as important as all of other, the other systems that isn’t the case with most sports that people do, whether it’s CrossFit and focusing basically entirely on strength and explosive power or yoga focusing exclusively on nothing but being flexible or running and cycling, focusing on being aerobically fit, most sports tend to leave out the rest of every other system.

Taren: What we like to do is look at the digestive system, the musculoskeletal system with strength, training, the heart and the lungs, the cardiovascular system with the aerobic training. And how do we get a training app and a training philosophy to address all of those together because they all do need to work together.

Taren: If you don’t have a healthy heart and lungs, but you’re super strong. Hey, you might be able to run really fast to the end of the block, but you’re not going to be able to run any further than that. Vice versa for people who are really aerobically fit, but not very strong. I look at marketing as exactly the same thing that it’s not enough just to buy some Google ads.

Taren: You have to buy Google ads and then retarget people on Facebook. You have to not just have Google ads, but then you also have to have content. So content marketing, when people come to your website, if they don’t sign up. If people end up maybe signing up for the app, then you have to start thinking about how good is the onboarding flow that the entire system of marketing and of business has to be looked at as a whole, in the same way

Taren: that the body has to be looked at as an entire system. And if you’re just focusing on one thing, I don’t think you’re really going to get great results in fitness or business. It’s got to be looked at as this entire cohesive system. 

Brent: That’s great. Yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Brent: So we have a couple minutes left. At the end of the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug, but anything you’d like to plug today and go ahead and plug whatever you like. 

Taren: The app would be the biggest thing. And I’m not saying that endurance sports is the key to everyone’s happiness, but if people feel a bit of a sense of unfulfillment and want to challenge themselves physically, I can’t think of a better place to do it,

Taren: but in endurance sports, because it is so fulfilling. It’s so rewarding. When you have a well-designed endurance sports training plan it does address your heart health, your lung health, your strength health, your mental health, your emotional health your digestive health. All of those things should be addressed in a really well designed training plan.

Taren: And when you cross that finish line, you’re going to be really happy that you challenged yourself. So I think we have one of the best offerings of any endurance sports app in the world right now. And it’s only getting better. This is the year that we’ve been building up towards over the last three years.

Taren: So I’m really excited for everyone that’s on the app. And if people sign up over the next couple of months, they’re going to see a lot of things that start getting rolled out with all of our features over this year. 

Brent: Yeah. And I would just add on that. Now as races start opening up and the world starts getting back to normal, this is a great time to train for a race, to sign up for a race, to do a race and apps like yours, help people to track and build those habits that then turn into

Brent: something that is part of your lifestyle. And I think there’s always a joke about, how do you know if somebody is a marathon runner? They’ll tell you. How many marathons, how do you know how many they’ll tell you? So you just, like you said, in the LinkedIn example, it’s part of their persona.

Brent: I’ll have to look at my LinkedIn. I don’t know if I say I definitely my Twitter. I tell you how many marathons I’ve run. I’ve run five majors. I only have one left, which is Tokyo 2023. They’ll tell you what those are. This is a great way to get into those habits and build healthy habits.

Brent: My dad is 83. He ran until he was 75. She still tracks his miles walking. He’s his goal is 700 miles a year walking this still. It. It is well documented that being active is better than being sedative and as much as much fun at it as is sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, drinking beer, and eating Cheetos it is equally as fun and free in some people’s minds, either, biking for 56 miles or 112 miles, and then running a marathon.

Brent: And by the way, before, I’m starting that I’m going to swim for a two miles. Yeah. A little warmup. So you know that there’s an equal amount of like in both of those, for the type of people. Some of those behaviors are learned behaviors and you don’t have to do a marathon. You can do 5ks. And there’s an incredibly amount of fulfillment in doing a sprint triathlon.

Brent: And my whole family is into sprint triathlons and it’s now turned into a family thing that we do together. I’m just going to go back to having that place to track those habits is so important because you know how well you’ve done.

Taren: Then having a community of other people who are also going towards similar goals, the community is very important that without a community around you, to support you, things are going to be really hard without a community around you to celebrate your wins. Things are also going to be really hard, the community aspect of things, sharing in other people’s successes and other people sharing in yours, it makes it so much more fulfilling that’s when you start getting the people that have triathlete in their LinkedIn bio, because it becomes part of their identity.

Taren: And it’s not to say they can’t ever have beers or pizza or Cheetos or whatever it is, but you can offset that a little bit by doing something for 60 minutes in the morning, challenge yourself and feel really good for the rest of the day and really proud of what you did every single day and string a few days like that together

Taren: and you’re going to be able to step up to a start line that you never expected you to be able to do. 

Brent: Terran Gesell. I thank you so much for being here today. I will put the links to your app in the show notes so people can go there and sign up. And I look forward to someday participating in a race with you, maybe the half Ironman in Kona.

Brent: Yeah, what’s ed life is 

Taren: getting back to normal. We gotta start thinking about that again. This is awesome. 

Brent: Absolutely. 

Taren: Thank you Brent. 

Brent: You’re welcome.

Talk-Commerce Andrew Barkan

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Talk-Commerce Alvaro Verdoy

A Better SaaS PIM with Álvaro Verdoy

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Listen to the episode with Chirs Johnson

Talk-Commerce Chris Johnson
Talk-Commerce Chris Johnson
Talk Commerce Rob Holthause

Pros at Subscriptions with Rob Holthause

Brent speaks with Rob Holthause from Subscribe Pro. Rob focuses on helping businesses improve their efficiency and grow their revenue while building a loyal customer base. Rob is a native of Maryland and is proud to call Baltimore home. When not educating customers about subscription marketing and Subscribe Pro’s products, Rob can be found hiking and playing with his Chocolate Lab mix, Atlas. He teaches music lessons on the weekends and plays bass with the popular Baltimore-based reggae group, Can’t Hang.

Subscribe Pro is a subscription commerce solution that enables brands to offer auto-ship, subscribe-and-save, monthly box, and recurring billing programs on the Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud e-commerce platforms. They provide a thorough interface for customer service personnel to manage auto-ship or auto-replenishment programs and allow customers to modify subscriptions easily.

Kalarav Vasavada

What India wants from the Magento Association with Kalarav Vasavada 

Brent and Kalarav talk about all things Magento and how the community has been embracing the changes that are happening with Adobe, Magento, and the Magento Association.

Kalarav is a Certified Scrum Master, Adobe Certified Expert – Business Practitioner, and Adobe Certified Professional Developer with more than a decade of experience in the eCommerce world. He is a Delivery Manager with BrainVire, working with clients all over the world. He loves to explore and discuss the technical architecture of platforms and the growth of other commerce platforms.

Talk Commerce Mariano Gomide de Faria

Commerce is a conversation with Mariano Gomide de Faria (Live from ShopTalk)

I was able to sit down with Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder and co-CEO of VTEX, at ShopTalk 2022 in Las Vegas and we had a great conversation about commerce. The United States needs to catch up with the rest of the world with conversational commerce. Mariano tells us how big players are going to be skipping distribution and going straight to the consumer. The world is global by definition.

Talk Commerce Brent Bellm Part 2

Big Brands using Multi-storefront on BigCommerce with Brent Bellm

Part 2: Multi Store Disruption with Brent Bellm, CEO at BigCommerce

Transcript

Brent Peterson: Just going back to multi-storefront, if we put all these pieces together, you have a solution now that will work across borders, across currencies, across languages maybe help us understand how big you’ve already helped us understand how big of a hurdle it was, but some of the solutions now that people can go to market with and the speed in which they could do it. 

Brent Bellm: Yeah. So one example I love to use. I think it might’ve been the first or second multi-store customer to go live with us in beta.

Brent Bellm: This was months ago. This was last year. It’s a company called The Bullet Group that has Motorola rugged phones. So these are phones that are dust-proof, waterproof, drop-proof, rugged phones, and another brand called cat phones, like Caterpillar phones that they sell all across Europe.

Brent Bellm: They launched. I think they’re up to I don’t know, 20 plus stores for each of those two brands that are selling different currencies, different languages, all around the world. And they did this in a headless way. Meaning they’ve got, I think a WordPress front-end is the design. And then the backend is BigCommerce multi-store and it’s a multi geo scenario.

Brent Bellm: Ted Baker is doing the same thing. Ted Baker just launched this great apparel brand. They have something like a dozen different stores, different languages, different currencies. Again, that’s the multi-geo use case. But you could also instead do a multi-segment use case. Like maybe your initial store sells to consumers, but then you wanted a B2 B store to sell to your wholesalers and your retailers.

Brent Bellm: You can do that with multi-store. You could also come up with different brands. Sub-brands promotional launches, a store that you spin-up and then spin-down. And the power of this is that when you spin one of these stores up, you can use the same integrations that were on your main store, all the investment you put into building that initial big store, integrating into your ERP or accounting system, your email marketing, whatever your payment solution is.

Brent Bellm: You don’t have to replicate all that work. You can leverage it. That’s really the power and the speed of multi-store, but I think it’s illustrative that those first couple of examples I gave you they have a dozen or more stores and they did it out of the gate. 

Brent Peterson: And I think the difference right now in the landscape of SaaS at least is the other, your competitors are all having to have a storefront and a different backend. And then they have to figure out how to manage all those multiple backends. 

Brent Bellm: That is correct. 

Brent Peterson: You’re letting the client effectively manage one place, one place to do everything and then distribute out those SKUs and even multiple currencies with different checkouts in different countries.

Brent Bellm: My understanding is that with Shopify, you can clone a store and it’s pretty easy to clone a store. You push a button. You’ve got another store. That’s like your initial store, same theme, same integration, same currency of that. You can’t do multi-store, which is one account. And then start changing all of that changing the theme and the currencies and the that have like same integration, same backend one account, one store, lots of storefronts.

Brent Bellm: You have multiple stores and we’ve always been able to do that too. This is much more powerful. This is. Very appropriate for many of the world’s mid-market and large enterprise businesses who do have multiple brands, segments, and, or geographies, but so many small businesses want to do the same thing.

Brent Bellm: And that’s one of the neatest things that we’ll be doing next. The announcement today is live launched for our enterprise stores, but we’ll be bringing this to our small business stores, our $30 a month for $80 per month. With our $300 a month plan, you’ll be able to click a button at a store, and boom, there you go. Storefront, I should say. 

Brent Peterson: So you did mention that these new things coming up for the smaller merchants. What else is coming up with multi-storefront? What are the things we have to look forward to? 

Brent Bellm: So in addition to bringing it to a small business and click of a button store addition, another major area of investment for us is in international capabilities within our native Stencil framework.

Brent Bellm: So having multi-language we already have multi-currency, but especially multilanguage and some other geographic capabilities built into individual stores. multi-storefront will benefit from this. If you’re using. Our native design framework and theming engine called stencil. If you don’t want those limitations today, then you can go headless with us and do your front end and WordPress or ContentStack or ContentFull or pick any other front-end framework.

Brent Bellm: We’re a leader in headless but we’re bringing some of that native in as well. And then a final release, which should happen next month. It’s March should happen next month in April is multi location inventory. So this is also going to be helpful because for businesses who have multiple warehouses and, or the addition of retail point of sale, we’ll have the full inventory API capabilities for you to use logic within BigCommerce to track.

Brent Bellm: Where is the inventory for each SKU, and then present that either to the customer. If the customer wants to make a choice, buy online pickup in store or within your shipping optimization to say customers located here closest warehouse is there shipped from that warehouse. So a multi-location inventory APIs are coming out soon and that’s quite complimentary to multi-storefront. 

Brent Peterson: The multi-location inventory is going to help in the omnichannel world. If somebody is trying to connect some of their outbound POS systems into BigCommerce, that’ll allow the, that inventory to be available to the storefront.

Brent Bellm: Yes. And today you can manage that logic outside of BigCommerce, but bringing it in is nice and scalable.

Brent Bellm: It’s the sort of thing that would let us, for example, we’re integrated in and partnered with point of sale platforms like Teamwork Commerce, and Square and Clover. Another differentiator from Shopify who has its own proprietary. One size fits all point of sale. We partner with the market leaders and EPASS now in Europe ISEL these partners can then integrate the knowledge of inventory counts that they have in individual stores into the API.

Brent Bellm: And then the merchant who may have remote ship warehouses that are outside the point of sale can integrate those as well. And so that complexity can all be orchestrated within BigCommerce relieving you from having to have an outside order management system or ERP that’s handling all of that. 

Brent Peterson: A lot of your enterprise clients are going to have an ERP there’s this enhances that allowing actually to connect multiple ERP is each store or each you can grab the inventory from each of those ERP systems with the with multiple inventory locations. So you’d have to have that. So that’s right. I think that, that gives another advantage to that. We did mention a little bit about headless and I’m always interested in headless.

Brent Peterson: Where do you think headless is going in the next five to ten years? Do you think the the idea of having a monolith where we have an easy added front end that’s part of the system. Or do you think a lot of stores are going this headless route? 

Brent Bellm: I think headless will only grow. For example, when people talk about the metaverse, if you start creating storefronts in the metaverse that won’t be based on pre-packaged themes coming out of BigCommerce or Shopify, you’ll be designing that outside of our framework and then integrating a BigCommerce in as a backend, more broadly.

Brent Bellm: There is a very rich set of frameworks and content management systems and digital experience platforms that companies can use for their front ends. I gave the Ted Baker example, they’re using BloomReach, which is a really nice design and experience platform. I gave the example of The Bullet Group using WordPress more than 25% of the world’s.

Brent Bellm: E-commerce. Our WordPress stores, right? And WordPress is by definition going to be headless because WordPress is a content management system without its own e-commerce backend. You need to use BigCommerce or WooCommerce or another headless backend in order to commerce enable a WordPress site. But you think about the the popularity of all these additional frameworks, NextJS and content management systems like ContentFull and ContentStack, the high end, Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal and Acquia ones.

Brent Bellm: We don’t work with like SiteCore. There are a lot of these and what they do is they free up the designers to do things that are more innovative, less constricted than, the templating engine coming out of the e-commerce platform. We’ve got great themes, and you can do a lot with your design and Stencil.

Brent Bellm: The vast majority of our stores are in fact designing within BigCommerce because those teams are great, but increasingly brands want to be unconstrained and they want to really innovate in their user experience. And this is the advantage you get with headless. This advantage is that you then now have to integrate your front end and your backend BigCommerce is the platform that makes that easy.

Brent Bellm: Our biggest competitor is commercetools, a German company that’s like at the extreme end of difficulty. Because it’s just this giant, API switching network and you need a point solution to everything that integrates you need your payments, integrated your email marketing, integrated your your catalog management, integrated your backend ERP integrated.

Brent Bellm: It is a nightmare. Whereas BigCommerce has all this functionality built in and you get to pick and choose which functionality in which of the thousand plus apps that are already integrated. You want to leverage. And so there’s so much less work to do headless and many of the front ends are so well integrated that we’ll soon be putting them into our channel manager.

Brent Bellm: You can just go in and click a button and say I want a new storefront. And for this storefront, you can choose differently with each one for this storefront. And I want to use WordPress or the storefront. I want to use ContentFull and Vercel for hosting. You can, that will all be configurable straight out of the BigCommerce control panel.

Brent Peterson: Do you see BigCommerce now as being the leader in that sector and people 

Brent Bellm: chasing you? It’s not just that. I see us as a leader. So does IDC when. And this is two years ago, but they had their enterprise report on headless platforms and they showed us as a leader. If I remember right, we might’ve been the only platform in the leader quadrant, which is a true platform rather than a microservices platform.

Brent Bellm: Like the other one commercetools. Is there maybe Elastic Path. These are all purpose built for headless commerce platform and they’re very expensive and hard to pull together. Whereas, BigCommerce was a full featured platform that starting six years ago said we want to serve the use case of companies who don’t use our templating engine.

Brent Bellm: The first two companies to go live with BigCommerce where giants Harvard business publishing, which is still headless with us today. General Electric. Those were custom front ends. And over time we’ve really built out our APIs, our connectors, our GraphQL capabilities. And so there’s no doubt that we’re fully invested in headless and.

Brent Bellm: It’s every bit our goal to continue to be the best platform in the world to do for most businesses to do headless commerce. 

Brent Peterson: So just a little bit about performance. You mentioned GraphQL and for the non-technical people GraphQL is a newer, let’s just call it one step above restful APIs where it’s much more performant.

Brent Peterson: The coverage on GraphQL is very large on BigCommerce and most things are available via of GraphQL, which gives you a better performance on your store, out of the box. 

Brent Bellm: That’s right, but there’s still some gaps. There are some, there are still some components of our product that don’t have GraphQL APIs.

Brent Bellm: We don’t have the full admin API infrastructure for just quickly provisioning a full store using GraphQL APIs. That’s all being worked on, it’s coming. 

Brent Peterson: Yeah. And then, going back to the admin and separating admin out, a lot of times the complexity that brings and you could still build it out with restful APIs, that’s right. So I guess as we close out today what are you most bullish about for BigCommerce in the next year, 

Brent Bellm: in the next year? Gosh, it’s so hard to limit. To one thing, you’re asking this question after the launch of multi-storefront. So I would have probably named that if you would ask me that question two days ago, but we’re on the other side of that announcement.

Brent Bellm: One of the things I’m most bullish about is international expansion. We were international from day one. The company was originally founded in Sydney, Australia, and only relocated its headquarters to the U S. Two years in when most of the customers were there. So they, they moved to the customers now are headquartered in Austin, Texas, but we’ve shown that we’re really good at hiring great talent and because of our open and partner centric approach, going into new geographies and immediately being able to successfully serve the local.

Brent Bellm: Customer and partner ecosystem. We did that spectacularly well, starting in the UK in 2018. I think it was that business. Absolutely booming. Since we expanded into Italy, France and the Netherlands last year and beginning of this year, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Now each of those is off to a nice start.

Brent Bellm: So one of my aspirations is to get to a point where we’re competing and serving businesses in every country just about in the world of all sizes. I have a real passion for that. I was an international relations major in college and, ran PayPal Europe for four years. So this is an area where I really get jazzed.

Brent Bellm: We’re also a giant believer if I’m going to limit myself to two things. The other thing I’m most excited about is omni-channel selling. We bought a company last year called feedonomics, which is the leading feed management solution. In the world feed management is how an ecommerce company gets its catalog of products for sale from out of its e-comm platform or PIM or ERP and into the leading advertising channels, social networks and marketplaces that it wants to generate demand from and sales.

Brent Bellm: feedonomics is good, so good because they have, they serve something like 28% of the top thousand US online retailers. They not only connect you into Google shopping and Facebook, Instagram, and WISH, and Walmart and eBay and Amazon and Mercado Libre and all these other great channels, but they transform and optimize the data in each one.

Brent Bellm: So that your catalog looks exactly the way it needs to look to perform best on Google and then separately for Facebook and separately for eBay and each of these has different schema for text length, description, length, picture, pixelation, and feedonomics enables you to optimize for every one.

Brent Bellm: And what it does is it makes it really easy for a business to advertise and generate demand and sell in so many more places where your possible consumers might be spending their time and that drives growth. So between multi-store, which is creating more of your own storefronts to sell to customers and omni-channel, which is getting your catalog distributed to all the other places where consumers may browse the internet or shop, omni-channel plus multi-storefront, I think really is a one-two punch to help businesses succeed better on BigCommerce than they would elsewhere.

Brent Peterson: Yeah. And just as we close out here, I just wanted to make a comment on the challenges of going into new markets and how the open SaaS concept really helps to hurdle or get over those hurdles. It’s possible for somebody in Bolivia or Uruguay to build a BigCommerce store and then to have a custom

Brent Peterson: checkout made with a custom payment system. That’s a Bolivian bank and whomever is going to ship in Bolivia. Yeah. This is possible with BigCommerce where the majority of SaaS platforms, it is impossible. 

Brent Bellm: That is correct. Although we also want to compliment that with having pre integration into, one or more of the leading payment solutions in Bolivia.

Brent Bellm: So the merchant doesn’t have to go through that trouble if they don’t, if they don’t want to. Yeah. 

Brent Bellm: I was just making an illustration 

Brent Bellm: on that’s right. We have that openness and flexibility as part of open SaaS. 

Brent Peterson: That’s great. Brent, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to promote today.

Brent Peterson: You’ve spent a lot of time promoting multi-storefront. Is there anything else that you’d like to promote that’s even non BigCommerce? 

Brent Bellm: Yeah, the only other thing I think I would promote that’s related to BigCommerce that I haven’t touched on yet is our B2B capabilities. B2B e-commerce is roughly as big as B2C and we’re full featured. We serve B2B really well. We have a B2B edition with a whole bunch of core B2B functionality that comes out of the box.

Brent Bellm: And so if you’re a B2B seller entirely or partially, we’re a great platform for that. 

Brent Peterson: Yeah, full transparency. We are a BigCommerce partner and we’re using the B2B edition and it’s fantastic. It works very well. Brent, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been such an enjoyable conversation and I wish all the best for multi-storefront.

Brent Peterson: It is a game-changer in the SaaS business. And I say that from a background of another platform that is multi-storefront. And I’m so excited to have this new feature inside of BigCommerce. 

Brent Bellm: Thanks for having me, Brent and congrats to your parents who named you very well. 

Talk Commerce Brent Bellm Part 1

The Launch of Multi-Storefront on BigCommerce with Brent Bellm

Part 1 Interview Summary:

Brent Peterson introduces Brent Bellm, the CEO of BigCommerce. 

Brent Bellm: BigCommerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where brands and retailers use the software to create successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. They power brands of all sizes from startups who get going for $30 a month up to some of the world’s largest companies. BigCommerce recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men’s apparel and lifestyle brand.

Brent Bellm says multi-store is one of the biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history. We discuss how BigCommerce lets any account or customer launch additional stores from a single account. allowing scalability to companies to expand how and where they sell. The platform was originally designed for one account, one store and to expand to build multiple stores, every component had to become multi-store aware.

Brent Bellm says when Magento went from Magento 1 to Magento 2, it was a rewrite. Brent Bellm notes that with multitenant software, everybody’s running on a single platform. They’re immensely proud of making their platform a complete platform for even the world’s largest enterprises.

Brent Bellm notes that if you go start a store for $30 a month, you’re running on the exact same platform that Proctor & Gamble is. BigCommerce versus on-premise software can be 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer. Brent Bellm notes that they joined Escalate, one of the first saas e-commerce platforms, in the nineties.

Brent Bellm says in 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and infrastructure for their stores. Brent Bellm mentions that in 2015, it’s fundamentally broken if on-premise software. Brent Bellm talks about how in 2010, they saw Magento take off, but it burdened companies with having to license, maintain, and secure their software. Brent Bellm says it’s high time that a saas platform was the solution for complex businesses.

Brent Bellm notes that they’re going to create what they call open saas, and they’re going to take a saas platform and open up every component. Brent Bellm says they’re going to try to make saas as open and comparable to open source as possible. Brent Bellm mentions that it’s been seven years bringing enterprise-level openness and functionality to a saas platform.

Brent Bellm notes that if you’re a small business, you can use their proprietary solution or if you want to use someone else, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Brent Bellm says they were doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. Brent Bellm talks about how there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. Brent Bellm says there’s a differentiation between a Braintree between CyberSource and authorize.net.

Brent Bellm says they go to each of these phenomenal payments players and talk about, let’s get you the single best integration into BigCommerce. Brent Bellm says they don’t surcharge customers if they don’t use their own proprietary product. Brent Bellm talks about how you will see that you save a lot of money at every tier using their players because their payments players compete against each other.

Brent Bellm says that third-party checkouts are disallowed because they have to control the checkout. Brent Bellm notes that they believe in their concept of open commerce and that they make the best built-in checkout they can. Brent Bellm mentions that you can modify the source code and use a third-party checkout. Brent Bellm says they support checkouts that are different from other countries.


Transcript

Brent Peterson: Welcome to this BigCommerce episode of Talk Commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of BigCommerce. Brent, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Brent Bellm: So I’m CEO of BigCommerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.

Brent Bellm: BigCommerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software that brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We’re big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in South America.

Brent Bellm: We power brands of all sizes from brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world’s very largest companies, for example, Proctor and Gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world on BigCommerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.

Brent Bellm: We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men’s apparel and lifestyle brand. And we’re one of the biggest software as a service platforms in the world. We IPO’d two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ.

Brent Peterson: So we’re at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday. Multi-storefront. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about a multi-storefront for BigCommerce and what that looks like? 

Brent Bellm: Yes, multi-storefront is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.

Brent Bellm: What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands, additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalogs, checkout experiences, integrations.

Brent Bellm: The value of it though, is it’s a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.

Brent Bellm: You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You’re basically duplicating all your effort. To build multiple-store, every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it’s referencing, checkout, which store it’s referencing tax.

Brent Bellm: Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. We did it all while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.

Brent Bellm: And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without anything breaking on the stores that they had historically. That’s really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-storefront capabilities.

Brent Bellm: They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It’s a total migration. You throw away your Magental one. And now you start over on Magento two.

Brent Bellm: You can’t do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody’s running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can’t tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.

Brent Bellm: And that is what we have done. So we’re immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world’s largest enterprises. And it’s a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this. 

Brent Peterson: I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering versus the on-prem.

Brent Peterson: You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from BigCommerce for the client when they’re on just the SaaS platform, 

Brent Bellm: When you’re on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in one price.

Brent Bellm: You don’t have to pay separately for hosting. You don’t have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don’t have to worry about security and bug fixing. It’s all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on BigCommerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you’re running on the exact same platform that Proctor and Gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they’re running on the exact same platform.

Brent Bellm: We’re maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance, speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of BigCommerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.

Brent Bellm: And the complexity of their site. So it’s a dramatic saving. I’ve always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you’re a retailer or a brand, you’re usually not a technology company and don’t have world-class software engineers and IT professionals. I believe in this for 22 years.

Brent Bellm: In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I’m going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called Escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.

Brent Bellm: I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might’ve been a few others around the world. They didn’t even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.

Brent Bellm: And Escalate came along and said, we’ll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don’t have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it’s time. That company didn’t end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.

Brent Bellm: But today I came back into BigCommerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it’s fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.

Brent Bellm: I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can’t do that well.

Brent Bellm: They certainly don’t like the versioning and the upgrading. And I said it is high time that a SaaS platform was really the solution for the world’s complex businesses. We’d already grown to number two in the world for serving small business. Shopify was number one, they had a five-year headstart on us.

Brent Bellm: And in 2015, I said we’re not going to catch them. We can’t overcome their five-year headstart. They’ve already IPO. We have not yet. So we’re going to do something they’re not doing and nobody else is doing something that’s new to the world. We’re going to create what we call open SaaS. We’re going to take a SaaS platform and open up every component and turn it into little microservices, catalog and checkout tax service, everything with our own API layer and SDK, so that the world’s complex businesses.

Brent Bellm: Can customize can modify can extend when they don’t like our native functionality use partner functionality. We’re going to try to make SaaS as open and comparable to open source and on-premise as possible. And so that is our mission. It’s been that for seven years bringing enterprise level openness and enterprise level functionality to a SaaS platform.

Brent Bellm: So that the world’s businesses can really optimize for whatever complexity or uniqueness they have, that’s our vision for what BigCommerce is doing differently than any other company. It’s religion for me. I think it’s what a big portion of the world’s companies need when they embark on the best path of e-commerce.

Brent Peterson: I liked the concept open SaaS, maybe talk about some differentiators, especially around the checkout and the payment section, BigCommerce does offer a lot of savings as well in that area. And maybe against some of the competitors, what are they doing in checkout and what can’t you do?

Brent Peterson: Yeah. On some of the other platforms, 

Brent Bellm: When I came into BigCommerce Shopify was already offering Shopify payments and more or less shoving it down the throats of their merchants. If you’re a small business, you can either use Shopify payments, their proprietary solution. Or if you want to use someone else, you better hope they’re integrated because that’s up to Shopify.

Brent Bellm: And if you do, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Now I come from a payments background too. I was doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. I was eight years at PayPal. I helped create express checkout and build their whole merchant services business I ran PayPal Europe. For four years, I ran global product at PayPal.

Brent Bellm: I know payments. And one of the things I know best is that there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. The needs of a business in Mexico , I was there last week, are completely different when it comes to payments and the needs of one in the United States or Canada and a solution built by Shopify a white labeled solution for north America.

Brent Bellm: Sorry. United States and Canada is not going to work in Mexico. Let alone pick any other country around the world. It’s not going to work in B2B, but even for Plain Jane credit card processing, there’s real differentiation between a Stripe between a Braintree between CyberSource and Authorize.net.

Brent Bellm: Chase GoTo Europe, Adyen, Checkout.com. All of these companies do something different and special. It’s not one size fits all. And so rather than in the pursuit of trying to take as much money from our customers as we can, which, what happened if we had a proprietary payment solution, our strategy is the opposite.

Brent Bellm: We go to each of these phenomenal payments players, and we say, let’s partner, let’s get you the single best integration into BigCommerce that you have with any platform in the world. So that if ever a business goes to you and says, Hey, we like your payments. Which platform can we best take advantage of it on, we want that to be BigCommerce.

Brent Bellm: I believe that statement is true for PayPal and Braintree for Stripe, for Chase, for Adyen, you go on down the list. We give customers choice and we don’t surcharge them if they don’t use our own proprietary product, because we don’t have a proprietary product. We believe the specialists in payments are far better.

Brent Bellm: And especially with their diversity of solutions then we would be, and that Shopify is by the way, if you want to know how you benefit from this, it’s very straightforward. Just go to pricing on Shopify and compare that to pricing on BigCommerce. And you will see that you save a lot of money at all at the exact same size of merchant at every tier, you’re saving a substantial amount of money using our payments players because our payments players compete against each other.

Brent Bellm: Whereas Shopify says use us, or, and we’ll charge you more at every level. And if you don’t like it, we’ll surcharge you 2% to use somebody else. Now let’s go to checkout. So if Shopify is making let’s call it 2.9% off a small business. When they process the payments if they don’t use Shopify, they want to charge them the 2% surcharge.

Brent Bellm: That means they have to control the checkout to know how much GMV, how much in sales of businesses getting so they can charge them that 2%. That is a core piece of the rationale around why at Shopify third-party checkouts are disallowed. You have to use Shopify checkout. They used to have third-party checkouts built by Bold, built by Bolt, different companies, D versus T fast.

Brent Bellm: Or merchant specific ones and they said, no, we don’t allow those any longer because we need to know every single piece of data, every single sale. Cause we’re going to charge you 2% if you’re not processing the payments through us. Okay. That’s how they make money. And they’re really good at making money.

Brent Bellm: We, on the other hand, believe in our concept of open, which is that we do our best to make the best built-in checkout that we can. But if you need to modify that checkout, you can do that. You can download the actual source code. I don’t think this is possible. Any other SaaS platform you can download the source code that powers every single pixel in the BigCommerce checkout, modify it, re upload it.

Brent Bellm: Now you’ve got a custom checkout running on BigCommerce that you’ve modified that this still maintains PCI compliance. That’s pretty cool. You can also use a third-party checkout. We support proudly Bold and Bolt. And Fast and anybody else who creates a custom checkout, we support checkouts that are different other countries around the world.

Brent Bellm: You can have your own proprietary checkout. You can have a checkout modified for B2B and all the various B2B payment methods. We support that type of openness because businesses are complex businesses need to optimize for their geography and their customer and their use cases. And what we specialize in is instead of a one size fits all playbook, open SaaS, flexibility, the power to let a complex business optimize for its complexity. And win that way.

Talk Commerce Tim Williams

Coaching and the Entrepreneurs’ Journey with Tim Williams

Youth don’t stop playing sports because they lose a game, they stop because they have a bad experience while playing. We interview Tim Williams about his journey as an entrepreneur, his company, and his approach to youth sport.

Tim is the Founder and CEO at T.WILL Sports, a dynamic sports company that delivers a variety of youth, recreational, and competitive sports services. He focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports.

Tim is also a motivational Speaker at T.WILL Sports with a goal to help parents and coaches to inspire greatness within youth.

T.WILL Sports focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports. 

Talk-Commerce Kison Patel

Navigating Mergers and Acquisitions with Kison Patel

With so much technological disruption, it is important to stay relevant and I can think of no better way than merging, acquiring, or being acquired. However, these transactions fail because critical deal processes such as diligence and integration, are being poorly conducted without proven success techniques.

We interview Kison Patel, CEO, and Founder of M&A Science. As a former M&A advisor, he has seen these challenges first hand and set out to develop tools and techniques that address industry failings and enable M&A practitioners to drive growth and maximize value.

Transcript

All right. Welcome to this episode of talk commerce. Today we have Keyson Patel Keyson is the CEO and founder of M and a science. Keyson tells us a little bit about what you do from a day-to-day standpoint and maybe one of your passions in life. Hey, thanks, Brent pleasure. To have this conversation with.

W as CEO of MNA science, we run a business. That’s pretty much all things. I’m an a, we provide education, training, resources, frameworks, and also software products to help manage them in a process and make it smooth as you can. It tends to be complicated when you have hundreds, if not thousands of people that are going through one of the largest magnitudes of change management that can possibly happen in the business.

And trying to do that without having them get pissed off and quit their job.

Yeah. And I, in our green room, we did, we talked a little bit about, some of the, some of what I’ve gone through with selling a company and then integrating and still being on board with the leadership. So maybe we could talk about a little bit about what does it mean to merge and what does it mean to acquire, and is it really a difference anymore?

I don’t think there’s such thing. I think there was a thing and there’s some type of a financial vehicle around it. But today now, because I then have the day one management team takes control of the other management team. So it’s essentially is an acquisition one way, how you look at it or another, I feel like the merger part is more of the PR placement, trying to make it cute and friendly to the public.

But Publix wise, they know what M and a is. And I think everybody at this point has this. That it’s a change of control. Yeah. And I think if you think from an accountability standpoint there has to be somebody who is accountable and suddenly you can’t have two parties that are accountable.

You have to have at one at ultimately there has to be one at the end. So when you’re bringing on somebody or you’re talking to somebody about a mergers and acquisition or an acquisition, do you come down through a bullet point list of here. Here’s the things you should be worrying about and here’s there, here’s the things you should be upfront about.

And maybe you could walk there from a high level standpoint, walk us through that process. You can look at it from either side, the buy side or the sell side is probably one of the big dividers of this whole conversation. Then from there you can get a much better sense of what you need to focus on to make things.

I think a lot of the big things, when you think about the buy side is preparation to take a company presented for sale and actually transact on it because it starts off really simple. You need some basic high-level information, but as you go through the process, it intensifies and becomes more complex.

There’s more information that gets reviewed. That’s going to be requested back and forth, more clarification. More people involved, spending time doing their diligence, trying to understand the business what’s represented and make sure it’s accurate. The more you can prepare for that upfront, the best position you’ll be.

That’s one of the most critical things that sometimes gets overlooked and then the rest of the process will be even more taxing as it already will be. I think that’s, if you can work with them like an advisor to do some of that prep work is ideal. I think being creative about it, a lot of people just run into the local investment bank.

You could actually find folks in the industry that’s done that. Maybe there’s like a CFO person that has been involved with a couple M and A’s and the industry. And if you’re going to identify that person, bringing them in as a contract so something sort to help prepare the business, but find that advisor that could really do it.

I think the other part is when you look at how you want to sell a business, right? Do you want to play the long game or do you want to play the short game? Do you have this urgency timeframe? And if you had a really tight team timeframe, say less than six. You probably want to engage investment bank and run more of an auction process so they can go out and run through their network of folks.

They know, and folks they don’t know and reach out to the whole universe of buyers via private equity, family offices, high net worth individuals and institutions corporates, and then be able to go through the funnel and to get this interest down to some options for you to consider. That’s a good way to do it, and it’s tends to lead to the highest price, but sometimes it doesn’t lead to the best buyer or suitor to take that company to the next greater place of growth that person or buyer could potentially be warned off from that whole auction process.

If you win an auction process, you’re not really sure. A lot of the smart savvy buyers, aren’t going to participate in a highly competitive auction process. So if you go back to, if you didn’t have, they’re going to see, and you’re going to play the long-term exit six or six months or greater, then that’s when you want to get to know the buyer’s universe and take your time.

You as CEO of the company and start understanding where corporates are. They have a corporate development function that’s in charge of their MNA activity. Who’s in charge of that. They have a head of corporate development. That’s your job is to be out in the market and knowing the potential acquisition targets and companies like yours.

So you should be on that person’s radar at least have the introduction meeting. So you know, of each other and there’s nothing wrong. I think it’s good to have that conversation. Some of those organisms, same organizations are likely to be really good partners for you. So think about your space, who are those likely acquirers of your business?

Make those introductions build those relationships. It’s just better terms when you have a good relationship with that company that you’re likely to get acquired by. You can know each other, know the cultures of the different organization really spend the time and the consideration on all these things that could go right.

Go wrong. When you’re in this auction process, your timeline’s compressed, especially in this market right now. It’s so crazy. They’re not even getting an exclusive. You have to just be competitive all the way until close that throws all this consideration and smart thinking out the window and you’re buying rationally that’s where I, there’s a lot of value in terms, if you want to put if you want to make sure the transition goes well, that you’re making sure the business goes to the right.

A culture that will fit well together for there to be growth for all the people that took that ride with you to create the value and get the business to where it is today. So I think one, one question I guess I’d have for you would be, I know there’s a difference between the larger deals and the smaller deals.

I’m assuming. The more information that you have not information. The more processes that you have developed in advance is going to help both buyer and seller and from a buyer standpoint how from a buyer standpoint it’s easy to see the processes from the seller standpoint. It’s not as always, it’s not always as easy to learn about the buyers processes until after the fact.

So the question is how much should you insist on as a seller, seeing some of those buyers process. You should. I think the way things are evolving, the buyers are getting more savvy to it and we’ll throw the term around reverse diligence. How do you get the company you’re acquiring to better understand your organization and what the different business look clot looks like, where they would fit in had that understanding.

So they’ll be better prepared for that transition when. That’s that’s essentially the reason you want to do it is because you’re going to work better together on the, all the post-close activities, all the integration work. And if that goes well, people are happier and they’re going to stick around and they’re going to achieve goals and create values for the business.

I think it’s part of a bigger piece of creating this process. That’s connected together. With a vision with the vision, what the end state’s gonna look like when we’re going to buy your organization and what are we planning to do? How do we see it coming together? What’s our go to market going to look like?

In fact, we should be able to sit down and outline a go to market together to get as good sense of. This is where, what it’s going to, what’s the, what the customer experience is going to look like are we are combining the sales teams together. Are they going to be selling? We’re both, I’m going to be selling one giant portfolio of products.

Are we going to let you guys run independent? And when we just sell yours this whole separate product line, what’s that go to market, gonna look like what’s that strategy. And if we can outline that, I think the other critical component is the values of each organization to understand that. Leader to leader and be able to identify that with the company culture, to understand the real people, the leadership, how they operate and manage the respective teams, because there’s things that we can acknowledge are nice commonalities and then some unique differences.

But then there could be some stark differences that we could identify some potential conflicts. If you operate on a pure top-down strategy. And we’re very much about. Managed company, that’s going to create some frictions. We can just integrate our organizations together. You, we need to think of this throughly, how it’s going to actually work, because if we don’t figure that out, then maybe this deal isn’t going to make sense to do.

I would say that. And then the other piece around that is thinking. This vision right. Of what you’re trying to achieve in the end state and building into pillars of value drivers and being able to align teams around those value drivers, is think of them as, okay. Ours they’re defined and all the tasks that need to be executed can roll up to these OKR because the big problem that you lose sight of all the potential values when people.

Lose that end state goal of what they’re trying to achieve. And they don’t know where they fit in and what they’re doing. So the better you can align that by using these OKR hours and prioritizing and creating teams around those OKR, specifically to deliver on them. That’s where that critical part of being able to execute the integration activities, because you’re not buying a company and an operating it, and it’s going to make money for.

You need to buy it with a model that lays out potential synergies. You can capture through cost, energies, cutting costs, where you can economies of scale and whatnot. And then the increasing revenue, are we going to start cross selling the products? What are we going to do to generate the additional revenue?

Is that going to bridge our technology roadmap so we can get to market faster than. So I think having those OKR is what helps keeps those teams, that big picture alignment there, because when you lose that big picture alignment, you lose, everybody loses their focus, it’s in the wrong direction.

But I think those are the big pillars to think on the expand off of having that target company understand you are the new buyer should. So I think in this, on the sellers regard, That is something that you want to know. It’s part of it. And I think the seller, a lot of times have that disadvantage because there’s not a frequent, reoccurring thing, that theme that they do most time, it’s a one-time life event.

So how do you develop that comment that’s where you get, depending on some of the advisors, but the challenge with advisors is you basically pay them to a close, so they don’t have a lot of post-close considerations. They’re not sitting there analyzing that end state and the go to market and helping to calculate the probability that going on, the cultural fit, these sort of things, all the postmark marriage activity that you’re going to have to commit to for the rest of your life.

They’re not, they’re helping you to analyze that and look at it. They think of everything for you up until that day, they get their shoes. Yeah. I That’s you bring up a really good point. So in your role as a, as an, as a advisor, would you stay on with that? So if you’re helping the buyer to navigate this.

Would you stay on with the buyer until some end point? And I think back on we, we both talked a little bit about entrepreneur’s organization or, and there’s also a thing called EOS entrepreneurs operating system, where there’s an implementer that comes in and they help implement some process for you or an entire process.

That role is usually hung onto for two years after that’s been implemented. Hey, do you do that? Or, and B, is that something that, that you see buyers that will need that post-transaction now that you brought a really good point out? This is where our business has been evolving. When we started with software with a basic software diligence management tool, and we got to understand the problem of diligence on management really well.

And the nice Nashville adjacency was integration manager. So we developed a competency around integration management, catered, iterated, a lot of the software functionality. And then we did the front end pipeline piece. Then we had this full, comprehensive lifecycle management solution. So we’ll work with corporations and digitizing that lifecycle manager.

A lot of times they’re just using Excel across the board and stuff’s pretty scattered out there using maybe a data room, like an old school data room. It’s funny. Cause it was back I think, but 15 years, 20 years ago, they would come to your office and scan all your documents and put them on servers. And that was the virtual day.

Do your own business for you? They charge a lot. They used to charge like a dollar 25, something like that per page. You got thousands of pages that need to get scanned in front of the web. They made quite a bit. What’s interesting is today they still use that same per page billing. But there was nothing being scanned or nobody going to the office or nothing.

Are we doing the office in general right now? But they still charge. They’re still charging and maybe not as much it’s in the cents per page, but I think it’s interesting because it’s still playing that model of here’s a company, a lot of data. And then next thing they’re spending a million dollars a year plus for this high security data.

That’s how inefficient this was. It’s that. And then your process flow is all done in Excel. We built around that. I think it was probably six years ago, a friend of mine and marketing was like, Hey man, you should do a podcast. We started getting into that with a mission of enabling MNA practitioners to be able to share their lessons learned.

And the idea was because that was the problem we saw. We kept working with these companies and they all had a different way of thinking and looking at them. But there’s industry itself is lacking standardization, best practices. The real science as very started this theme of MNA science to the podcast was eMoney science.

As we kept learning, we started documenting all these things that we’ve learned, and we took transcripts of these podcasts. And I think it’s the date we have over 350 published blogs. You build a community around it. We have these practitioners that show up to our events. They started an online school.

They’ll get, take horses, get badges certifications. And it’s all of this pursuit of getting good, optimizing M and a getting really good at it. Looking at our industry as this practice. And that, yeah, there’s a swarm of bankers out there, and most of them are out in their self-serve serving regards, but to be an actual practitioner and sharpening your skills in all these areas that really are what generate value in a deal.

And they’re not models. They’re not always math formulas. It’s a critical part of. But when we look at the actual doing the diligence through executing integration, that’s real people, skills, that’s real leadership skills. It’s more about managing change than anything else. So I want to put Magento out there as a Guinea pig on, on success.

And failure specifically, Magento was purchased by eBay in 2011. They had a different vision and I’m of course I’m speculating because I wasn’t part of. Their team at the time. But I was a partner with them and I’ve, I found firsthand on how they dealt, how E-bay dealt with with the users and how eBay dealt with employees and then how they dealt with partners.

So that’s my perspective on it. And I know that after two years eBay came back, did a reset and said, Hey. We actually care about our users. We care about our community and we care about our partners. Do you see that happening a lot in this space where, Hey they’ve taken a little bit of time realize that they need to make some changes and then they go ahead and make those changes.

Please don’t have a choice nowadays because things are moving pretty quick. And if they see what’s working, like when Adobe ran that Magento product, they had a much better ecosystem to support a product like. Where they can foster growth and they immediately saw the value, which is why they pay the high amount for them, for it forum.

E-bay. It’s interesting that you say that too, because just recently there was an open letter that was written by the Magento community to say to adult. You have to change something or you will lose the majority of your community open source customers. And the message, the problem was there was some transparency and messaging.

It turns out, we don’t know everything yet, but it turns out that Adobe was on the same page, but they didn’t have that messaging in place for that open source side of the community in terms of Magento or Adobe. The M the open source probably is 95% of the install base. And the CA in the commercial version is 5%.

And again, I don’t know if these numbers are accurate, but it’s a big proportion that are on open source. So there’s a lot of open source users that are skewing the sort of usability or communication channels that Adobe has that. So it Adobe then has now come back and said, Hey, we do care about you.

We are going to support you and, helping to convince the community in general or the users in general that we are behind this vision of open source software, as well as the commercial version of it. And here’s how we’re going to do it. It just took them a while to get there. Crux of managing change.

The gap year was the communication that the intentions were good and there were there. But as part of doing this acquisition, the comp plan didn’t cover that part. That there’s this suspect sus or subset of people that they didn’t get the right messaging to, to have them clarification about what was happening, why and how it was.

And in your process, do you go and help them identify those gaps or there’s a whole comm department from that corporate development, the leaders should be helping to shape that and they should continuously iterate on it throughout the project. We don’t work with companies directly on it. There’s a whole bunch of consultants that specialize in that alone, but in our academy, we’ll cover offerings.

Teach people, the basics around stuff like that. I guess some of my points here, or at least my, what I’m trying to illustrate too, is that it’s it it, no matter what size the deal is and no matter how mature the company is, it seems like there’s always going to be issues that come out of it.

And I think to your point, the sooner they can manage that. The more successful, they will be in that acquisition and then transition into whatever’s next for that particular business. That’s the hardest part. If you can get good at that’s your whole competency of M and a, if you create change for the greater good that you had this vision of how you’re going to make value from purchasing the company, they’re able to execute and deliver it.

That’s it. That’s the whole M and A’s all about that. That part is the part that makes it the most challenging is to be able to do that. If you can understand that part, it’ll allow you to make that part of your success by managing that change, knowing how to align people around priorities and have them achieve and change, achieve goals, but then not have to the big, typical problems like attrition, Cain shows back.

You’ll get frustrated. They leave. All the headhunters around are after them, after deals announced. So there’s, especially in this market, they managing that change. It’s it allows you to really bring things together in a nice way that happens quickly communicates well. So people are in the know, they don’t feel all this fear and certainty if they have a job or not, or, and it just, I think a lot of it, you just gotta be real clear and transparent because people can take the bad news.

They just can’t take notes. As you can keep communicating it saying, Hey, we are going to let some people go. That’s the whole point of this deal. Like we’re going to save some. And then we’re going to use other resources to make the company overall much better, provide better value to our customers, but we’re going to create a lot of other new jobs and these other areas, the good far outweighs the bad obviously there’s opportunities for those people that you know, are going to get affected and if they can transition to it.

But that’s the thing. If you can get really good at managing change, that’s your whole competency around invest a good M and a. Acquire businesses and have them continue to grow and be healthy. It’s really hard to do so many people screw it up. So many corporations we see just seeing them sometimes just murder some of these companies, especially these little startups start integrating them, caused them to turn in.

So it was follow every little large corporation process. That’s not what they signed up for. Yeah. And again, we’re having a little bit of a technical problems with Riverside, but okay. So I just been riffing. No, you’re doing great. And I hear you the whole time. I just I’ve tried to do that’s good.

Absolutely. All right, so just, let’s just wrap it up here with attrition. I know that I heard you say attrition and I wanted to talk about like when Adobe purchased Magento, they, everybody stayed on. I think part of it was, they just moved people into different roles. So part of that change management has to be, and I heard you say communication quite a bit.

It sounds like communication and transparency as much transparency as you can get with each of the employees is a key factor in that. Yeah. The way it’s difficult. Cause you can’t sit down with people one-on-one like, ideally. And the change is going to be hard regardless. Everybody’s gonna have challenges with it.

Plus just the projects, your scope of work. It’s just a lot of change. And if you don’t feel you’re up to speed and what’s going on, I that’s, the, what we’ve seen is the hardest part to really manage it. When we look at a lot of the clients that we work with, it’s not like the technology or stuff like that.

It’s really, they bought a company that need people to do stuff and have everybody really motivated and do it. That’s really hard. Yeah. So setting those expectations and helping everybody’s aligned with the new vision of the leadership is the key to success from the anti attrition.

They call it anti attrition is as you’re trying to bring people and keep people on. Yeah. Cause that’s the thing it’s like the gravity is the attrition. You really just naturally going to, especially like the, seen this. It’s hard to keep them when we’ve seen it happen a lot where it just does the innovation.

You have to keep people that leave. And then it’s over. We see one of the big IOT companies. All right. Let’s just back on Google for a bit, like their nest acquisition that turned off to be a big disappointment. They came out with. Great products to start the business, built it up, got acquired at a great valuation.

I remember it was two or 3 billion, but they didn’t keep cranking out products. A lot of their leadership team left and it happens a lot, assessed as I one example like that’s why it just happens a lot. It’s a big, hard thing to do. And having all that organization upfront. I think in the very beginning, you, you said having all the planning in place, especially from the buyer’s standpoint is important, but the seller having they’re having some kind of a transition plan is just as important.

It should be something that’s joint that’s working together. And then I think at the end of the day, people tend to forget about the customer for maybe both of you, both sides of the table, working together with. Things aligned around the customer’s perspective might be the way to really do it.

Yeah. I’m with you there align around the customer. Look, how are we going to do this? We’re just going to, if we create value, it’s all through customer experience. We can just bill out. Are we going to actually make customer experience better and compelling, and really think that through from the time you start working together and at that, in that journey, understand each other’s cultures, the value.

And then you’ll get a good sense. Hey, this would be good partnership that’s happening or leading in like a partnership of us working together to achieve this. And then it could be a really good net positive things. When two organizations come together for the greater good, a lot of value gets created.

We see it happen a lot by companies. If things go rive pretty quick and that’s it, a lot of value gets dot gong. I wrote down the company doesn’t grow to the next big thing that everybody wanted them to. It’s just things fall apart. And yeah, and I’m assuming, Adobe still has a vision that that they’re sharing again with everybody and they are going on to the new, great things and I’m crossing my fingers, that it will continue to be a success.

Are they doing? They’re doing pretty good. We’ve got a great confidency. I know one of our MNA science alums just joined their M and a team. What to see? I depends on their con department, how friendly they are loading people and it gets some airtime on a podcast, but we will find out soon enough. Keyson we have used a lot of time up here and unfortunately we use it up in, in technical difficulties.

So we might have to do this again in the future. We should do this again in the future. I’m going to rephrase that. So as we kind of wrap things up here I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to. Go ahead and plug something today. A very, we can talk a lot about mergers and acquisitions.

If anybody’s interested in learning more about mergers and acquisitions, it’s hons of content on M a science.com. Yeah, anybody interested? We have a diversity scholarship program to promote diversity in industry to give a couple of years on the academy program. So it was a great opportunity. Expose people that have not familiar with M and A’s or career path to understand, learn about it.

It’s an interesting world that we often associate with just the bankers and we’re working in the boiler room operations, but there’s so many other roles that involve some of the things that are more important. What we’ve been talking about. And how do you align people around these goals to make things happen and manage this large magnitude of change?

That’s it? Yeah, that’s such a great point too, because people are what makes your company run and making sure those people are happy people, happy employees make happy customers. Thanks again for bearing with me today on our, on the podcast and some technical problems, but I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful.

My pleasure. You too, Brett. Thank you. Thank you.