entrepreneurship

Talk-Commerce-Laura Boyd

Leading a Culture of Trust with Laura Boyd

We are at a time when organizations are changing, and leadership is changing from a command control environment. Brent and Laura discuss the changing landscape of how leaders lead and how times are changing.

In this episode, we talk about accountability and how important it relates to communication in leadership. The leader has to be accountable to their team. Leaders can learn more about how a culture of trust is one of the most important aspects of today’s work culture.

Business leaders may think that all the recent layoffs are giving them opportunities for more hires, but the truth is that we are still seeing historically low employment. Now enjoy this episode of Talk Commerce with Laura Boyd.

What you will learn from this podcast

It’s about helping people with their resolutions, and it’s about having a culture where we’re helping one another and being accountable to one another.

  • Leadership is changing from a command control environment to a culture of trust.
  • Accountability is just as important as communication.
  • Technology allows for both good and bad connectivity.
  • Leaders need to have the confidence to be vulnerable.
  • Competence, compassion, integrity, and an emotional bank account are important for building trust.
  • Have open conversations and call each other out when needed.
  • External facilitators can help create a culture of accountability. Don’t burn bridges during exit interviews.
  • Use cultural assessments to gauge buy-in.
  • Have a Fresh Start program to help people with their resolutions.

Tweet about it.

Brent and Laura discuss how leadership is changing and how accountability is just as important as communication. #Leadership #Accountability @LeadershipLaura

Laura explains that to build trust, you need to have competence, compassion, integrity, and an emotional bank account. #Trust #Compassion @LeadershipLaura

Laura suggests holding a focus group to find out what is it that we’re doing well and what is it that we’re not. #FocusGroup #Feedback @LeadershipLaura

Laura: We want this open conversation, but you don’t have to be an ass, if I can say that. #Conversation #Culture @LeadershipLaura

Laura: We have a Fresh Start program that you can sign up for at the beginning of every year. #FreshStart @LeadershipLaura

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ruth: We are at a time that organizations are changing and leadership is changing from a command control enviroment. Brent and Laura discuss the changing landscape of how leaders lead and how times are changing. Brent what else did you talk about in this episode?

[00:00:12] Brent (2): Ruth, we talked about how accountibility is just as important as communication in leadership. The leader has to be accountable to their team.

[00:00:20] Ruth: Thanks Brent, I will add that in this episode leaders can learn more about how a culture of trust is one of the most important aspects in todays work culture. Business leaders may think that all the recent layoffs are giving them opprotunities for more hires but the truth is that we are still seeing historic low employeement. Now enjoy this episode of Talk Commerce with Laura Boyd.

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Improve your Google ranking and conversion rates and make your customers happy. Learn more@hyv.io. That’s H Y V a.io. My name is Brent Peterson and I’m your host. Please remember to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts and now talk commerce.

[00:02:52] Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Laura Boyd. She is the CEO and founder of Leadership Delta. Laura, go ahead and give us a better introduction that I just gave and maybe one of your passions in.

[00:03:04] Laura: Excellent. Thank you Brent. I appreciate it. And I do have to say Brent is my brother’s name, so it should be easy for me to remember. So yes. My name is Laura Boyd, and I can give you a quick background. I have been in sales and marketing basically my whole career. Seven years ago, walked out and was trying to figure out what am I gonna be when I grow up?

[00:03:25] Laura: And what I realized is I have a really strong passion for growing organizations through leadership. And I am a strong believer in the fact that leaders make a difference in the organization and the culture. And so I wanted to build an organization for myself that could help other organizations thrive in a human centered culture.

[00:03:47] Laura: that would help them grow from the inside out. So that’s what we’ve been doing. Great. 

[00:03:53] Brent: Perfect. And one of you, you have a passion that you follow or, oh gosh, 

[00:03:57] Laura: When you own your own business, do you have time for passions? I don’t know. The only thing I could think of is I love working out and now I am a new empty nester.

[00:04:07] Laura: And so pickleball has become, Quite a phenomenon in, in with my husband and I. So I guess I’d say that’s my passion. I don’t know that. No, 

[00:04:16] Brent: that’s great. Yeah, pickleball. I I tried it a couple years ago and it was super fun. I haven’t en, I haven’t embraced it specifically, but I do enjoy playing pickleball.

[00:04:24] Brent: Laura, I know that we, in our green room, we had a quick talk about participating in the free joke project. So I’m just gonna tell you a joke and. And this one is it’s, we’re not going to, we’re gonna do this one as a, is this gonna help our work culture or is this going to lead into a worse work culture?

[00:04:41] Brent: And I found a specific joke just for this, so here we go. Excellent. I phoned my work this morning and said, sorry, boss, I can’t come in today. I have a we cough. He said, you have a, we cough. Really. Thanks, boss. See you next week.

[00:05:01] Laura: Oh, Brent. I’m trying to, I’m gonna see this one. It might hinder the culture. I think it might hinder it. I’m just saying 

[00:05:15] Brent: Yeah. Feel like we need we’ve Yeah, I think you’re right. And I, my, my delivery wasn’t the greatest. And and I think we could have used some kind of dramatic music around that one as well.

[00:05:24] Laura: maybe next time. Next time. The dramatic music. 

[00:05:27] Brent: I agree. All right, so let’s I know today we want to talk about a little bit about work culture and some topics around, around that. Why don’t you tell us your story, give us a little intro on your story and why this has become such a passion for you.

[00:05:41] Laura: , thank you this has become a passion for me because I think that we 

[00:05:46] Ruth: are in this transition of organizations leading from a command and control environment. 

[00:05:56] Laura: And I work with a lot of manufacturers, so I think that is how they have raised the generation of leaders that are there currently.

[00:06:04] Laura: It’s been very much a command and control type of scenario. Not negative or positive, but that’s just how it has been. But yet we have raised the next generations coming up in a different a transformational or more of a high performing type of generat. . So you’ve got leaders within organizations that have grown up in this command and control, and then you’ve got the new generation of leaders that are coming in from a high performing transformation type of background and how they’re raised and there’s a clash.

[00:06:39] Laura: And so it’s really interesting because you’ll have some people in this the current leadership who will call me and they’ll say, Hey, Laura, we have a problem with. Do you think you can come fix Bob? And I love that because we all know it’s never just usually, I shouldn’t say not never, but usually it’s not just Bob.

[00:07:03] Laura: It usually is the culture that has exuded and now there’s this clash. And so they don’t know how quite to deal with some of the consequences of bad behavior or desired behavior. . And so they build these cultures and they say, these are our values. These are the great things that we have in our organization.

[00:07:23] Laura: Oh, except for Bob. And so they don’t know how to reframe Bob and redirect him or say, this is not our desired culture anymore, and so you’re no longer the right fit. Now we can use it in a different capacity maybe, but not to lead other people. So that’s what we’re in is this transit. I got my master’s in organizational leadership in the late nineties, so I was like one of the first classes to get the organizational leadership bandwagon. And I love it because I think leadership hasn’t really changed that much to be honest. You could go back to, from my personal idea is you can go back biblically, right?

[00:08:01] Laura: I All the way. And it hasn’t really changed that much if you look at it. And so that was something that I was very passionate about, is how do you connect that human-centered leadership to move this transitional generation from here to here? That was a really long answer, but that is exactly what I love doing.

[00:08:23] Brent: So have two follow up on that. The first one is, do you think that there’s a, there’s gotta be some kind of a transformation in leading, in how we lead leaders, right? And that new leaders are going to be more in tuned with what the millennials, the people that are signing up for the great Reg resignation.

[00:08:40] Brent: The new leaders are gonna be more in tune to that. Do you think there’s a, there’s gonna be. Is there an issue with how the old guard is now bringing in the new leaders and how those new leaders are seeing what should be done and, but they’re not the original aren’t on board with that?

[00:08:57] Brent: Or do you think there’s a disparity in there? 

[00:09:01] Laura: I think this is the 

[00:09:03] Brent: question ahead. Okay. . 

[00:09:03] Laura: So here’s one thing I will say. So just because somebody has, I think you had said the old guard, but I think more of the command and control type of leaders, many of them are shifting so that transformation is happening.

[00:09:19] Laura: But there are still some that aren’t. And I think those are some of the leaders that the culture is trying to figure out, how do we change this? not possible. Or how do we get this person out? And so there are some transformational leaders within the current leader structure. And so I don’t know if that, if I answered that question the right way, is that what you’re asking me, Brent?

[00:09:46] Laura: Or is there a follow 

[00:09:47] Brent: up question on that? Yeah, I think a lot of times we look at how we’re leading and we look at the people where we are leading and that we don’t we discount the person who’s the leader because they’re, maybe they’re not in tune with the, I don’t know, the hierarchy of how the organization should happen, but I think the underlying thing that I heard in your, in what you’ve said earlier, , they’re not matching our culture and neither the culture changed or somebody hired him not to match the culture.

[00:10:16] Brent: I think that’s probably more of a root cause in that. . And how would you say to leaders that have that problem and is it a new problem or is it something recurring? 

[00:10:28] Laura: So I do think that every generation you’re gonna have a transformation or a transition technology. , as we all know, it transitions cultures and it transit transitions organizations.

[00:10:39] Laura: I do think that people forget about the culture when they are hiring, and especially today because we need people. And so sometimes wego ah, they don’t really fit, but close enough. And so then we hire ’em and they don’t fit at all. And then they end up leaving and they’re like, oh, why did they leave?

[00:10:59] Laura: I don’t understand. I do think that it is something that happens on a cyclical basis. I do think that cultures do change and the leaders have to change with it. And some of those leaders are able to do it, and some of ’em. One of the things I do want to bring up is that I’m talking more about the current leaders titled leaders, right?

[00:11:20] Laura: I think everybody can be leader, but the titled leaders, I’m talking more about them and we often say cuz they’ve always done it this way. They don’t want to change all of those kinds of things. The, I think part of the challenge is this next generation of leaders doesn’t give grace.

[00:11:38] Laura: They’re not very open to hearing, this is how we’ve done things. So there’s a little bit of a clash because we’ve raised them to push the envelope. Do this, do that. Be perfect. Focus on one thing, go after it. Whatever you want is yours. And a lot of times they don’t give enough grace, I think, to the current titled leaders.

[00:12:03] Laura: And that is a challenge too. And they have to know that too. 

[00:12:08] Brent: Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. On that. Maybe new leadership isn’t listening enough or it doesn’t have the concerns of the higher, I don’t know how to describe them, but the ones that are running the higher ups are setting the tone and there’s a shift, but maybe we need to have a more of a conciliatory view on how that shift is happening.

[00:12:28] Brent: Right, 

[00:12:29] Laura: absolutely. I agree with that 100%. I do call ’em titled leaders because I think you can be a leader wherever you’re at, doesn’t matter where you’re at in the organization, but these are the titled leaders. And so I, but I agree. Just as much as the titled leaders need to have compassion, the next generation of leaders need to have compassion.

[00:12:50] Laura: How do think help We forget about that. 

[00:12:52] Brent: Sorry. Yeah. How do you, no. How do you help people describe their culture? I think a lot of. The leader can’t even describe their culture. How do you get that into everybody? , so everybody is on the same page in terms of culture. 

[00:13:07] Laura: Yeah. So we actually, it’s interesting because when you have worked at an organization, let’s say 30 years, 20 years, 15 years, and you’re at this titled leader position, you see the culture differently than maybe somebody that comes in at more of a entry level position.

[00:13:23] Laura: And so what we do is we talk. if the more you can talk about culture and the more you can talk about desired behaviors, being part of that culture, the openness to doing it isn’t gonna make it be a taboo subject. If I continue to talk about culture and the, I’m working with an organization, we talk about the culture of accountability and leader.

[00:13:46] Laura: because accountability, I swear that comes up number one right next to communication as a challenge for organizations. And so this one organization I’m working with, we talk about culture of accountability and leadership. What does that mean to you? And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken we’re at about 450 employees from the leadership team all the way through frontline Super.

[00:14:13] Laura: and we’ve had that same conversation because we’re trying to create that. It’s not a taboo subject, let’s talk about it. It’s just culture. What is it that we want it to look like? How do we want to treat each other? What are our guiding principles? And so the more we can talk about it, the less taboo it feels and seems.

[00:14:32] Laura: And sorry, Brent, one more thing is there has to be consequences for people that are outside of a desired behavior. , there has to be consequences. Doesn’t mean it’s a termination, but something otherwise it’s not gonna matter. This particular organization, somebody came in and blew a gasket to five of his team members and in an appropriate way, and he actually was terminated and so that’s no longer how they wanted to operate in their culture.

[00:15:05] Laura: Now may it have, it maybe had worked 15 years ago, maybe. But not today. 

[00:15:10] Brent: Let’s just say the leader doesn’t, is talking the talk, but they’re not walking the walk. How do you get some accountability in leadership if they’re saying to be this way, but the leaders are demonstrating something different in a culture?

[00:15:23] Brent: Is that just that, is that just straight up toxic and it’s gonna lead to ruin ? 

[00:15:28] Laura: No, I don’t think it’s gonna lead to. I do think, this is why I think outside consultants or facilitators where there really isn’t any what’s the word I’m looking for? Not fear, but where it gives me the opportunity to say, is that really what you wanted to say?

[00:15:44] Laura: And I will call people on things in an appropriate manner, but I don’t have any skin in the game, so it’s easy enough for me to do. And that’s when we work with the leadership. throughout the process as we’re going from, top down across all of that. But working with that leadership team, cuz it has to start at the top.

[00:16:03] Laura: This is where the decisions get made at the titled leadership, but you have these centers of influence within it. So you’ve gotta figure out who are those people that are influencing either toxic or positive or, so you have to figure out from a social architect standpoint, what that looks like.

[00:16:24] Laura: So yes, I think it’s having those open conversations. I think it’s about the leadership team calling each other on things, and I am seeing that is happening and I think we’ve got a great group of current titled leaders. I think we’ve got a handful that aren’t amazing, but it really takes each person individually.

[00:16:47] Brent: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. We implemented e. Oh sure. About five, six years ago and having an implementer there was key to the success because nobody could push, or nobody could. It’s easy for a leader to not be accountable to something that they don’t want to be accountable to, cuz they’re the top of the food chain.

[00:17:04] Brent: It’s easy for that. If you’re talking about the culture, how do you not, how do you focus on the culture rather. focus on control of the culture. 

[00:17:17] Laura: Tell me more what you mean by that. 

[00:17:20] Brent: So you wanna make sure that you’re watching the culture, but you also don’t want to focus too much on control of the culture because the culture should be something.

[00:17:30] Brent: Built grassroots, right? Ideally your culture would come from the bottom up and the top down. . Is it a problem if leadership is trying to exert too much control over the culture and then in turn pushes a bunch of people out? 

[00:17:44] Laura: And that’s how you’ll know that leadership is trying to control it too much if people are leaving.

[00:17:49] Laura: I do believe though, when you look at high performing organiz. . There are five areas in the middle that they have direct control over, and the leadership team and the senior managers in that group, they actually own the strategy and the culture. It doesn’t mean that nobody has input and collaboration and all of that, but they own the strategy and the culture.

[00:18:11] Laura: That is what they’re responsible for. The rest of the organiz. Focuses on the structure, the systems, and the processes. And what they do is they bring that to the leaders and they allow them to make the choices. So they say, this isn’t working, this is working. Here’s how. It’s that kind of up and down, exactly what you said, but really the ownership for the strategy and the culture belong within the leadership teams. 

[00:18:42] Brent: Just going back to eos and EOS for the people who don’t know is entrepreneur operating system. So it’s a way of running your business or a systematic way. I one of the, it’s a systematic way and it is based on hiring people for their core values. And one thing that we do every quarter is working isn’t working.

[00:18:59] Brent: And I think one thing that maybe we miss out on, and I’ve heard you say this earlier, was how does that not working? tie in with the culture of the company, and then taking that one step further, how does it tie in with the core values? How do you help companies make sure that isn’t working ties in with culture, which should tie in your, to your core values?

[00:19:21] Laura: For one thing, and I know EOS has this too, I, I’m a firm believer that the entire strategy and the values and everything should be on one. , like there’s a focus area. This is how we do things. These are our guiding principles, right? And so I think if everybody has access to that and it’s communicated and there’s alignment and what that looks like, it’s easier to call someone out on something.

[00:19:47] Laura: If there is alignment, it’s been communicated. Then if you don’t really know or, Hey, I heard this is what our strategy is, or our culture is, but if you don’t have that and you’re not actually communicating it and have that alignment, doesn’t matter. So I think a leader’s role is really to set the vision, right?

[00:20:09] Laura: This is where we’re going build the alignment and then the execution. So those are the three pieces. And again, when I say leader, it could be anybody within the organiz. . But when we’re talking about vision, alignment, and execution, those are the three core pieces of top level leaders that need to address that.

[00:20:31] Laura: And again, I think it’s mostly Brent, it’s consequential challenges that people don’t want to deal with because so many people don’t like conflict and so they don’t, they just like what if I just ignore it? It’ll just go. Or they’re gonna retire in a couple years anyway. We’ve all heard this.

[00:20:48] Laura: So it’s that, and I know EOS has the same thing too. Let’s fix it right now. And if this is not the, get it, want a capacity to have it right. If this is not the right person in the right seat, then let’s find a different seat for this person. They’re very valuable, but maybe not today.

[00:21:04] Laura: And where we need them to. Maybe they were 15 years ago in this position, but not to date. We need their expertise to help us build this technical platform or whatever, to write out what the process is or whatever the situation is. 

[00:21:17] Brent: If a leader is struggling with a culture of trust, and you’d mentioned accountability and communication.

[00:21:24] Brent: How is there some simple steps that a leader could, or leadership team could start to assess that trust factor and then start working on building that trust? 

[00:21:38] Laura: ? Yeah, the, that’s a great question and because trust is a foundation of everything, every relationship you. Is the confidence. Trust is really, that’s the definition, right?

[00:21:49] Laura: Trust is my perception. Trust is the confidence you have in your relationship with others. That’s what trust is, the confidence I have in my relationship with you to do X or to do Y, and to break it down even further, when you talk about trust, it really has to start with me. I need to give trust first. As a leader, I have to be trust.

[00:22:16] Laura: And when you talk about trustworthiness, a lot of that comes from vulnerability, right? And I think that’s part of our challenge as leaders is, I know how we grew up. It was you don’t make a mistake and you just work 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week until it gets done. That’s not what we’re dealing with today.

[00:22:39] Laura: And so we have to have that opportunity to be trusting in our virtual environ. , there’s a lot of trust that has to be given. Like I know that this person is working because I trust that person. And so I think, the trust has to be given first and you have to be trustworthy. And I look at trust as in three areas.

[00:23:02] Laura: One is competence, can they do the job? And two is compassion. Do they have compassion for themselves and others? And giving grace And that type of. Competence, compassion, and integrity, right? Do you do what you say you’re gonna do? And then you have this emotional bank account component of it too. The more you can fill someone’s cup or fill up the emotional bank account, the more likely you can make a mistake and it’s gonna roll right off.

[00:23:35] Laura: But if you are in a negative deficit and you make a mistake or you do something, . It’s hard to build that trust back up. And when you talk about emotional bank account, we work on this, it’s just saying, Brent, thank you so much for a job well done. Or Brent, I really appreciate your expertise. Or Brent, I appreciate you giving me a hand when I needed it.

[00:23:55] Laura: Whatever it is, it’s the small things. It doesn’t have to be this grandiose. Here’s your, million dollars Brent for convers. . It could just be small things that add home. 

[00:24:05] Brent: And so that communication part of it you mentioned the company with 400 employees the leadership team can’t possibly talk to every single one of those employees, or they could, I suppose it would take some time.

[00:24:17] Brent: Is there methods in which that, or maybe you start with a one-on-one and then you move into a more of a scaled version of that. Is there ways to. Leadership, communicate some of those things to get feedback from their team? 

[00:24:32] Laura: I do think that it is important for them to have access to the leadership team, people the organization, to have access to ’em. Now, this one-on-one gets a little tricky because it’s just time. Time is of the essence, right? So I think when you do the connectivity, it could just be a town hall. , it could be that opportunity where I’m gonna, there’s three of us this month or this quarter, whatever.

[00:24:54] Laura: We’re gonna do a town hall meeting. Put your, send your questions in. That’s an option. Another one is when we go throughout the organization and build out the leadership development series, we have different leaders come in and do the introduction. So when they’re talking when they’re in front of the hundreds of people that are going through the program.

[00:25:14] Laura: They’re doing the introduction, they’re connecting with everybody at that level. I think that it is a challenge and an opportunity for the leadership team to look at focusing on the business, not in the business. And so when I say that, so many of our leaders tend to be technical experts, and that’s what they enjoy doing.

[00:25:36] Laura: So they like to just stay heads down instead of, that’s not your role anymore. Your role has shift. Where you need to be thinking about the organization as a whole and not just your area. So that’s a shift for some leaders also. But that, I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity. I Technology today has allowed for really nice connectivity and really bad connectivity too, cuz you can take everything out of context and you put your own story, thought or meaning behind something and it could blow up.

[00:26:07] Laura: And that’s oh, that’s not even what I meant. Technology’s good and bad, as always. Kurt Vank talks about that in his books in the fifties. But anyway, don’t get me started on that. 

[00:26:15] Brent: You mentioned a little bit about retention and, how we need to be attentive to the cultural needs.

[00:26:22] Brent: If there’s a high turnover. How do you get the new people involved in culture? 

[00:26:30] Laura: So if there is a high turnover, that’s a data. . So that is something where I think immediately some sort of focus group pulling out different people to have that conversation and finding out what is it, if we’ve got this culture laid out on our wall yet, we’re not living by it, we need to figure out what’s the gap.

[00:26:52] Laura: So what is it that we’re doing well and what is it that we’re not? . Right? So we talk a lot about what do you want us to stop doing? What do you want us to start doing, and what do you want us to continue to do? That’s a thousand years ago people have been talking about that, but it’s that ha that’s, it’s actually having that conversation.

[00:27:10] Laura: You’ll learn so much from the team members. But again, I think you need an outside person to come in and do it, because I think if you’ve got somebody from the inside and you’ve lost all these people, there’s a little bit. Fear paradigm they might be living in. I don’t know if I wanna share that. So is it’s easier to have somebody from the outside come in.

[00:27:30] Laura: Sorry, Brent. 

[00:27:31] Brent: No, it’s okay. Is there an easy way in an extra interview to get a leaving employee to talk about some of those? What’s not working? Okay. 

[00:27:41] Laura: So here’s how I think that most people see exit interviews. Most people, some people will share. a challenge, but don’t burn bridges. How often have we heard that?

[00:27:52] Laura: Don’t burn your bridges. Okay. So if that’s sitting in the back of your head, are you going to be truthful in what you wanna share? I don’t know. And quite honestly, the exit interview is passe we need to get in front of these people before they get to an exit interview, before they terminate and get to an exit interview.

[00:28:11] Laura: We need to get to connect with them ahead of. . 

[00:28:15] Brent: Yeah. That’s, that’s a really good point. Getting it before they quit. Is there something in the great resignation that has changed so much that maybe leaders aren’t understanding that?

[00:28:28] Laura: I think the great designation from everything I’ve read, I know that there are a lot of different opinions on it. I think the great resignation was a time when people. Reevaluated their life and what they wanted to be doing. And so a lot of times it wasn’t necessarily about the culture of the organization, but perhaps more about the role or that they wanted to do something different with their lives.

[00:28:58] Laura: Or they decided, I’m done. I’m retiring, we got enough money. This is how I wanna live. I. , I don’t wanna work anymore. It’s too stressful. Whatever the scenario is, I think people got the opportunity to take a step back and look at their lives and evaluate their lives. So that’s my take on it from everything I’ve read.

[00:29:17] Brent: I think that’s a really good point. I think that some leaders have now taken the opportunity as an excuse for high turn. and they just point to that the industry standard is now whatever it is, 60% turnover, some crazy high number . But I do feel as though there’s a place that we can find common ground.

[00:29:38] Brent: A as we, as you started out with, we can find common ground with the whole team to build a culture that. Do you think that we have to start shifting? I guess we, if everybody’s leaving, there has to be, there has to be a shift in culture. And if your attrition rate is so high that it’s affecting productivity.

[00:29:55] Brent: Cause I think also that pro productivity and retention are the two highest things that can lead to profitability. . So having some focus on that is gonna, one of the most important things a leadership team should examine. How would you say that

[00:30:11] Brent: you get feedback from the team and also you mentioned the in it’s too late in the exit interview, anonymizing some of these things. So the old idea of having. Little thing next to the time clock where people can put in their anonymous feedback. Is that a good idea? 

[00:30:30] Laura: I go back and forth on that because I would hope that people are in a culture where they can have those conversations, and that’s what I would say most people would wanna get to.

[00:30:42] Laura: I think this generation of leaders that’s coming. That is gonna be something that’s important to them, and they’re gonna build cultures out like that. I just think of my own kids who are in college and I just, I think they have such a different mindset that it will get to that point where they’re just speaking truth, right?

[00:31:01] Laura: They’re just speaking, but it’s about the delivery, which goes back to the emotional intelligence. It’s about delivery. So we want this open conversation, but you don’t have to be an ass, if I can say that. The air , you just don’t have to be that way. It’s about being curious. It’s about having connection.

[00:31:21] Laura: So I think that hopefully we’ll move to that point where we’re having more conversations and more open conversations where there isn’t that fear paradigm that necessarily living. 

[00:31:34] Brent: All right, we’re running out of time, but one last question is, I know back, going back to us as a people analyzer, it would be great to have a Culture Analyzer tool.

[00:31:44] Brent: Do you know of anything like that to say, so you could, somebody could objectively this isn’t working. How can we apply each of our core values to that not working and run it through the tool and come back with a number? ? 

[00:31:57] Laura: Yeah. What’d be great? There’s a, an analyzer, an assessment for everything, Brent, you know that to be true.

[00:32:03] Laura: So there’s one that, I think it’s university of Michigan I wanna say is working, there’s an Ohio, anyway, sorry. But they’re working on a cultural assessment. There are a lot of ’em out there. Actually, when I started the business seven years ago, I was thinking of going down this path with an organization that, that’s what they did was cultural assessments.

[00:32:24] Laura: They’ve been out there. I think the challenge that I have with that is that leadership component needs to be there if you don’t have buy-in. Cuz I’m this believer, like you have to have awareness of something like our culture’s not working or what we have on the wall is not what we’re seeing here.

[00:32:43] Laura: So you have to have that awareness and then you have to have the desire to change it. So if the leaders don’t have a desire to change, it doesn’t matter what kind of assessment comes. but you have to have the desire to change it. And then the commitment, what does that look like? So is it bringing people in, having focus groups.

[00:33:01] Laura: It’s not just the pinball machines anymore, it’s really about what’s true about the culture, and that’s the commitment and then practicing and failing. So it’s really pretty easy though. Pretty easy. I say that those four steps, awareness, desire, commitment, and practicing it. 

[00:33:16] Brent: That’s very Laura, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug.

[00:33:22] Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

[00:33:24] Laura: We have at the, at the beginning of every year, but it’s our Fresh Start program and it is just a micro version of you can sign up and it’s yours. It’s videos, it’s holding you on track. That’s something to consider. And you can go to leadership delta.com and it’s right there is the opportunity to sign up for that.

[00:33:48] Brent: Great. And I will put all those in the show notes. Laura, this has been a very fun conversation. Should I say enlightening is a good word. Fun and enlightening. How’s that? I. Very enjoyable to talk to you today. Thank you so much. 

[00:34:00] Laura: Thank you, Brent. Take care.

[00:34:03] Ruth: Listen, Brent works hard on this Podcast, he would really appreciate it if you could rate it where ever you download your podcasts. Don’t forget to go to Content Basis dot eye oh and sign up for the content creator beta program. It is a great opprotunity.

How to Cope with Grief as an Entrepreneur with Sherry Walling

Sherry helps smart people solve complex problems. Sherry Walling is the one you call when you’re in burnout, feeling isolated, need to make a difficult decision, embroiled in a messy situation, out of ideas, and in need of a fresh perspective.

Her superpower is bringing calm to crisis and insight to chaos. Sherry has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and two master’s degrees. Sherry has been an academic, researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author.

An Entrepreneurial Journey in Comic Books and Toilets with Alex Teller

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:04:40] Alex: That’s so 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:06:23] Brent: awesome.

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

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

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

[00:06:40] Brent: It’s not 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:12:27] Alex: that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:17:30] Brent: think Home Depot, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:24:43] Alex: what’d you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:27:19] Alex: Yeah. . 

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

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

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

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

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

[00:28:41] Alex: Yeah. It’s 

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

[00:28:56] Brent: Yeah, it 

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

[00:29:07] Brent: did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:30:11] Alex: Maybe I do. . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Drop-Ship Breakthrough with Ben Knegendorf

Ben Knegendorf is the co-founder of DropShipBreakThru.com, where he teaches people to start an e-commerce business in the next 30 days for $500 or less.

Transcript

[00:02:40] Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Ben Korf. He’s a co-founder of drop Ship breakthrough. But I’m gonna let Ben introduce himself. Tell us what your day-to-day role is, and maybe one of your passions.

[00:02:56] Ben: Yeah. Of the co-founder of drop ship breakthrough.com, where we teach people just like you to start an e-commerce business in the next 30 days, usually for around $500 or less. That that’s a big, bold statement. I hope to back up here. But to our passion, I saw the Minnesota on your wall.

[00:03:08] Ben: I am just over the border and I’m the absolute Minnesota twins junkie. Baseball runs through my blades for sure, runs through my veins. 

[00:03:17] Brent: That’s awesome. I just interviewed somebody who helped with, she was a teacher in the seventies, and she had a bunch of the early twins in her class. And it was, not early twins.

[00:03:29] Brent: The twins kids in their class before baseball got big money and people stuck around. So Tony Oliva still lives in the Twin Cities. Anybody’s baseball fans would know that. Rod crew, we might be back. I don’t know. Anyways Ben I know I warned you before we get started that I’m just gonna tell you a joke and you’re gonna tell me if that joke should be free or if we should charge for it.

[00:03:50] Brent: So here we go. Losing my hair made me sad. So I bought a cheap wig. It was a small price to.

[00:03:59] Ben: I think you should not charge for that one. . Okay. 

[00:04:03] Brent: I agree. That was a stretchy. All right. I’ll agree with you. Okay. So can I throw one back 

at 

[00:04:07] Ben: you then since we’re here? Yeah, go. Let’s do it. Tell me, how do mermaids wash their fins?

[00:04:12] Ben: How tied ? 

[00:04:14] Brent: Let’s see. That’s a good one. I like that. I’ll, I might reuse it. , actually, we’ll publish that one. Good. All right. Nice. Yeah. Free joke project. All right. Alright, so today we’re gonna drop, we’re gonna talk about drop shipping. We in our green room, I mentioned that, we’re a magenta partner and for 13 years now and all of our clients have done drop shipping, but I think you have some ways to get people into the business.

[00:04:36] Brent: So tell us a little bit about your story and why you decided to do that or this. 

[00:04:41] Ben: Yeah, I mean it all started quite a few years back, right? I was working at a Walmart distribution center and the holy grail, there was first shift, like your whole goal was to just get the first shift. It took me seven years to get there in this building, and I got there and I remember walking in and just everyone looked dead inside and I was like, oh my God, I’m 29.

[00:04:57] Ben: I’ve. Quote unquote made it at this job. Maybe I’ll become a coach again, cuz we’re all a team. Give me a w. But there’s, this was it. And I was very disappointed with what I saw. I was disappointed in how everyone looked around me and I knew there had to be a better way. And so that’s when I started looking for.

[00:05:11] Ben: A way to get outta there. And honestly, at the time I was working at a warehouse. My wife was a cna. My dad worked at a warehouse and my mom was a cna and like that, that, that’s all I knew, right? And so I had lived up to the box that was built around me and it took a little effort to look around at other ideas and start experimenting.

[00:05:27] Ben: Some of those were like going to clearance aisles. and flipping that stuff on eBay or Amazon, going to garage sales, things like that. Just trying to understand how to, make money while you sleep if you will or make money on the side. I just, I didn’t know anything other than go work at a warehouse.

[00:05:39] Ben: And my first pure a into this was flipping things or finding the arbitrage between clearance aisles and Amazon or fba or eBay. And then eventually I stumbled on the term drop shipping, which I’m sure many of the listeners have seen. The latest guru talking about drop shipping. I immediately was turned off by the low ticket stuff shipped from China.

[00:05:56] Ben: Stuff that really wasn’t big back then. But I did hear about high ticket drop shipping, which is basically how Wayfair got started. They had hundreds of different stores that they were selling, niche, high ticket, e-commerce, drop shipping stores that they brought together into Wayfair.

[00:06:09] Ben: And when I understood that, I was like, oh, this is, you’re building a real business here. You’re becoming a retailer. You’re selling brands people have heard of from companies within your country. And at that moment I realized, all right, this is what I want to do. This makes too much. . Yeah. 

[00:06:22] Brent: Do you think you had a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit in you to drive you to do that?

[00:06:27] Brent: Or was it just you’re so sick of working at Walmart that you wanted to just get out of there? 

[00:06:32] Ben: Yeah, I think in hindsight I did, but I didn’t have anyone around me to spot that. So if I look back at my childhood I didn’t do, I didn’t pay attention in class, but I knew all the answers. Math was a good one.

[00:06:41] Ben: Like they would, here’s how you do complicated math. I’d have the answer in my head, and then they’d be like, you didn’t do the work this way. And I, I don’t understand why we need to do the work your way. I got the answer for you. And I was told I w wasn’t quote unquote normal. And I got told a lot of things as a kid that I think were just signs of, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m constantly questioning things and I’m unsatiable curious around everything.

[00:06:59] Ben: And I think in school they try to fit you into this little box. So in hindsight I think I saw the signs, but I don’t really think I noticed it until my mid twenties. I was big UFC fan and Joe Rogan, when somebody would get knocked out, he’d be like, oh, he got hit right on the button. So I started on the button fi gear.

[00:07:13] Ben: That was my first business I ever. Don’t ever, don’t sell clothing. People, whoever’s listening to this, don’t start a clothing line. It didn’t go super, super well, but that was, that, that was fun. Even though it sucked, it was fun. And then, realizing it didn’t work was a big l and that kind of, pushed me back down for a little bit.

[00:07:27] Ben: But look, that was my first adventure in entrepreneurship and it was fun. Like being able to solve my own problems choose my own path was fun. Yeah. 

[00:07:35] Brent: And I think, so I just wanna make a distinguish because my wife had a eBay business back. Nineties, early two thousands, and she actually had a warehouse, and I think what you’re talking about is not having an manage a large warehouse full of stuff.

[00:07:48] Brent: She did Wayfair, like every, there’s all those returns, right? There’s such a huge market for that return business. And she would get truckloads of. Stuff from where Wayfair and Fingerhut and put it onto eBay. You’re, it sounds like, just explain a little bit more about your, the model that you’re proposing and how that differs from what I just described.

[00:08:08] Ben: I actually had a buddy who did the exact same thing you just described, but did it for Golf Galaxy. And so he would go get all the trade-ins and then he would pay, pennies on the dollar and then he would flip them as well. So that’s interesting. The model I’m speaking of. So I’m sitting down currently, but I’m sitting at an Apex standing desk and so I was part of a company called Standing destination.com, which is a good example of what we teach.

[00:08:26] Ben: And we would sell these apex desks and we would. I can work through this whole process, but essentially we’d work out an agreement with Apex to become a retailer for their brand. We would go run Google, we would go acquire the customer, sell the product, then go to Apex and say, we need you to drop ship this product to our customer.

[00:08:41] Ben: And then they would charge our credit card and we would keep the arbitrage in between basically high ticket drop shipping. In a nutshell, it’s a marketing, it’s a customer acquisition and customer service business at the end of the day. Okay. Yeah. So 

[00:08:51] Brent: you’re Handl. So you’re working in effect, like a salesperson for that manufacturer and you’re, they’re, you’re arranging the sales and they’re doing the drop 

[00:09:00] Ben: shipping, correct?

[00:09:01] Ben: Yeah. But in the meantime, you’re building a real business. So I’ve referenced Wayfair. I’ll reference another one. That’s hopefully nationwide. I know it’s local to us here. Re e I is a good example. They’re very niche focused on outdoors people. And so that’s what we’re trying to build to.

[00:09:12] Ben: We’re trying to build a focused. Retail store on the internet that is not only just being a salesman for the other brands, but being a destination for anyone who’s interested in that type of product. So if you go to a standing destination, there’s articles on standing desk benefits there’s all sorts of content around the benefits of standing desk and around the brands and reviewing the brands.

[00:09:31] Ben: a destination on the internet for you to look at standing desk products versus just us being out there trying to be salesman for the brand. . 

[00:09:39] Brent: And so you’ve mentioned high ticket. How do you get started or why would you start on high ticket rather than just commodity items or lower ticket items?

[00:09:50] Ben: Yeah, I think this is what turned me on most to this business model was simple math, right? I also have a a brand myself, a pet supplements. And so I understand like the low end market, but if I want to make let’s just use $30,000 in revenue next month, and I’m selling a $30 product, I need to sell a thousand items versus if I’m selling a high ticket product that is $3,000, I need to sell 10.

[00:10:10] Ben: And you can imagine with 10 orders versus a thousand, you’re gonna need much less employees. You’re gonna have less damages in returns, you’re gonna have less overhead in general. The business model seemed to make a lot more sense for me. You could, we’ve, I have, and I have students who have grown a business as a solo operation to a seven figure business without needing the help of VAs or team members.

[00:10:29] Ben: And to me that was intriguing, especially when I was first starting out and wondering I, I didn’t know what I was doing as far as hiring a team or really doing anything. And the idea that I could work by myself and not be overwhelmed with orders or inventory or things like that was very intriguing.

[00:10:44] Brent: how do you differentiate then? Like the pluses versus having your own warehouse? I guess setting aside the fact that you don’t have to own it all. , do you have to, do you have to take back returns or do the re I’m assuming the returns go right back to the place 

they 

[00:10:58] Ben: were shipped from. Yeah, so that can vary, right?

[00:11:01] Ben: That’s gonna depend on the relationship you have with each brand that you are associated with. Everyone has their own rules. Some of ’em. Wildly creative restocking fees, we’ll just call it that. Others are like more generous than others. They’re happy to take it back. Other brands, there’s nothing you can do about it.

[00:11:16] Ben: Like it’s going back to you and you’re gonna eat that cost. And certainly I would say the, that is one part of this business model that’s a little bit out of your control. It’s like having a three pl, right? When you have a three pl, you hope they do good by you. They charge you all sorts of fees.

[00:11:27] Ben: You don’t really know what’s going on with your product. You hope it’s getting packaged well. And the only way you find out it wasn’t packaged well is when the customer complains to you. And It is a, I don’t wanna call it a downside but it’s certainly something that isn’t always fun when you’re dealing with this because it’s out of 

[00:11:40] Brent: your hands.

[00:11:41] Brent: And what about price point to get started? What do you recommend a user has or a person that wants to get started in this sort of thing? What does the pricing . 

[00:11:50] Ben: So again, I think that is one of the most appealing parts of this business model. Let’s imagine you wanted to open a franchise Taco Bell would fit right in, in your area.

[00:11:58] Ben: That’s gonna cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get set up and running on a Taco Bell. Or if you wanna launch your own brand, likely it’s gonna cost you thousands of dollars as well. To do the research, get the samples, place a big money. Order launch Hope people enjoy your product. I prefer cash flow, and that’s why starting this model for less than 500, which I’m happy to outline here.

[00:12:14] Ben: And also everything is cash flow in the beginning makes so much sense to me. So you’re gonna need a domain, right? That’s $12. I’d like to use name chief, you can use whatever you. , you’re gonna need Shopify. I know you’re a Magiano guy, Brent, but I’m gonna say Shopify’s the way to go here for sure. $29 a month for that.

[00:12:29] Ben: You might want a paid theme. You might want to, have something customized. You definitely don’t need one. But if you do, it’s 180 to, I think they’re up to $400 now. We give Superstore from out of the sandbox. We give that to every student of our course because we do believe a paid theme is important.

[00:12:42] Ben: You’re gonna need Google Workspace so that you have Brent at your new e-commerce domain.com. Not Brent Brents Commerce store a Gmail. That’s just not super professional. You’re gonna need an 800 phone number, so I would recommend Grasshopper. That’s $40. You might need a little branding. So fiber’s a pretty easy place to go get a logo done and get some homepage images and branding and things like that for your website.

[00:13:03] Ben: And then the biggest expense you’re going to have is Google Ads. That’s where we’re gonna acquire most of our customers. Google likes to give you a coupon. Spend one 50, get one 50 or spend 500. Get 500. Definitely look for the ladder if you’re gonna start this model. And within that first, Thousand dollars of ad spend on Google.

[00:13:19] Ben: You should have acquired one customer or multiple customers where you can then roll that cash flow back into, get the snowball moving and acquire more customers. outside of that, your biggest expense is time. Like you’re gonna have to put in the sweat equity. You’re gonna have to understand how to build your site, upload products, contact the brands.

[00:13:36] Ben: In the process you’re gonna learn Google ads, a little seo, a little conversion rate optimization, a little copywriting a little how to code a little bit in the back end of shop. But hopefully you’re doing all of this while making sales, while getting paid, rather than, paying a college a hundred thousand dollars to go learn something and hope you get a job.

[00:13:51] Brent: There’s a step before that though. It’s choosing what is the product that you want to sell. And there must be, I think getting the website is a big investment and certainly even Doing the theming part is even, is gonna be more time consuming. How? How do you choose which product 

[00:14:06] Ben: you wanna sell?

[00:14:07] Ben: So this is interesting. I think too often the world of e-commerce is focused on the product. . And the reality is you should be focused on the human behind the screen. So a good thing we always talk about like 2% is the average conversion rate. What about those other 98 people? Those were 98 people raising their hands saying, I’m interested in your product and you didn’t serve them, and you’re just letting ’em leave your website.

[00:14:27] Ben: That’s wild to me. So John and I, John’s my co-founder here we try to get you to focus on the human. Who is the human that you want to market to every day that you want to deal with in customer service? Ideally it’s you, right? If you have a passion ideal. Whatever you’re passionate about has products that are $800 and above, and you are going to be able to sell to that person better than anyone because it’s you.

[00:14:47] Ben: So we like to focus on the who first and then find the products that they buy. And if you get the who wrong, it can be a nightmare. I bought one of my consulting clients businesses, saw the opportunity, enjoyed the marketing, but the who behind it was an older. Less fortunate human being and they were awful to deal, literally awful to deal with.

[00:15:04] Ben: I got more chargebacks in the first three months of that business than I have anywhere else. And I ate my own dog food there of Hey, focus on the who rather than the products and the marketing. Who do I want to serve every day? Whereas I, the biggest company I was part of that we went 1 million to 11 million in two years that was serving the golf industry.

[00:15:18] Ben: I’m a golfer. I knew the pain the customer behind the screen had. I knew. How to speak to them. I knew the language they used, I knew the places they hung out online. I knew exactly how to write a headline that would hook them in because all they cared about was getting one more stroke. That was much, much easier than talking to a different who that I didn’t have any relation with.

[00:15:33] Brent: And I’m just gonna put a plug in here for Big Commerce. They have the exact same plans as Shopify. Nice. I’ll just do that my, cuz we’re a big commerce partner as well. and I, there’s no differentiator. Your checkout if you ever wanted to do, to customize your checkout. Big commerce is open source where Shopify’s lockdown anyways, so that’s beside the point.

[00:15:56] Brent: So I think, you’ve chosen something, you’ve built out a store. Google ads can be a money suck if you don’t do it right in your course. You give some sort of. Help around that. Even if you’re, and $500 goes nowhere, especially like if you’re gonna compete against I would imagine that you’re going to some, sometimes compete against the actual manufacturers that you drop shipping for at times in Google Ads.

[00:16:20] Brent: Yeah. I think 

[00:16:21] Ben: this is where we are different than anyone else who’s. Teaching something similar or really anywhere you go for Google ads. Once Google bought the Chinese Go AI and brought it into their system and started doing smart everything that’s where everything fell apart in Google.

[00:16:35] Ben: My ads back in the day. You’d have to build everything and do everything yourself, and there was a very specific way that you should do this. We still teach that, so rather than doing performance, or smart shopping or whatever you’re on currently we do use like smart list that makes sense. But most of the, like Google do it for you is a very bad idea, especially for high ticket products.

[00:16:52] Ben: And I’ll say that because again, I sell glucosamine for dogs. If somebody’s searching glucosamine for dogs, they actually might buy this, right? That’s generic. But also like they’re willing to probably spend 30 bucks and see if their dog can stop limping. If somebody’s searching infrared sauna, they are so far from buying, it’s not even funny.

[00:17:08] Ben: And so if Google. Buy all that traffic for you and show you tiny price clicks cuz they’re serving you for infrared sauna. No one’s gonna buy from you, right? And you’re just gonna burn all your cash. So there’s a way to set up a manual shopping campaign and choose your priority. And anyone listening to this might understand that you can choose high, medium, or low priority.

[00:17:27] Ben: And if you set everything up as a high and seg segment, the brands by ed groups. Duplicate that and set it up as medium. The only thing that can go to medium priority is when you put a negative keyword in high, so all your junk, everything will go to high, right? And then you can pull out your semi-important keywords and move them to medium, and then you can segment your most valuable keywords and segment them to low.

[00:17:46] Ben: So now all your junk’s flowing into high where you’re bidding 10 cents, 25 cents, something like that, your branded terms likely your middle of the funnel terms, you’re paying a little bit more in medium. And then those exact match bottom of the funnel, people looking for this exact product terms you can pay more for and low and you’re not getting you’re not getting si, your cash isn’t getting siphoned away, which is what, Google’s very good at that, if I’m honest with you.

[00:18:04] Ben: I’m not a huge fan of everything they’re moving to do. I understand they’re trying to hit the bell curve, right? That, 80% of people just want this. But I’m not in that 80%. I’m, I’m at the other end of the bell curve. I wanna be optimized. I wanna be bringing the right traffic to my business, to the right pages.

[00:18:17] Ben: And so I, we definitely teach a method that I don’t think has taught much anymore out in the universe. 

[00:18:22] Brent: And you mentioned high ticket and. So I’m assuming no high ticket items like high ticket clothing or shoes or something like that. 

[00:18:31] Ben: Cowboy boots. Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t recommend apparel. That’s a return nightmare.

[00:18:35] Ben: But I’ve sold everything from 3D printers to tiny house products, to standing desk products to golf products. I’ve literally been all over the place and I’ve coached hundreds of students and whatever the first thoughts come into your mind. If you’re thinking about doing this, don’t do those.

[00:18:47] Ben: Those are the ones everyone thinks of. Spend some time writing in a notebook, gathering some ideas, and once you like point your reticular activation system at looking for things above a thousand bucks, you’ll start seeing them everywhere. And it honestly the list is endless. And there’s just so many things that you can build a business around and the Internet’s made it even more possible to really niche down and still find all of that audience looking for what you.

[00:19:08] Ben: How 

[00:19:08] Brent: about doing FBA fulfilled by Amazon? Is that the same type of model that you’re talking about? 

[00:19:14] Ben: Yeah, with fba. My pet supplements here on fba. I wouldn’t recommend selling someone else’s products. Via fba. I don’t If you have your own FBA brand, I’m sure they’ve been you’ve had people reach out to you that said we wanna ride your listing just in case Amazon cancels you.

[00:19:26] Ben: I’m not a big fan of that, and I don’t think selling high ticket products is a good idea. So again, I sell pet supplements on there every single day. I open my email and it says, refund initiated for this refund, initiated for that. Amazon is in total control. And I can eat that on these 20, 30, $40 products.

[00:19:41] Ben: But if that’s gonna happen on 800 to $10,000 products, the I’m in for a world of hurt because Amazon’s always gonna side with the customer. 

[00:19:49] Brent: Yeah. So you talked about you talked about Amazon and the price points. Is there a highest price point that you would recommend? You’re not gonna do a car, right?

[00:20:00] Ben: I think where you’ll run into issues is actually with Shopify itself, with the payment processor itself they’ll start wondering, who are you making these big sales? I knew some people that were selling 15 to $20,000 things and quickly Shopify payments shut them down. They went around the backside, just went to Stripe, who Shopify’s using and Stripe had no issue.

[00:20:18] Ben: But that’s where you’re gonna run into issues is. That’s a lot of money to be moving around without being questioned, why you’re moving that kind of money around. So I tend to stick in the two to eight range. I think that’s the sweet spot. The lower you get, the more you’re just eating your margins with shipping.

[00:20:31] Ben: So if you’re selling an $800 product where you have 25% margins rough math, that’s 200 bucks. You have to acquire the customer. You have to pay the 3% credit card fees when you take their credit card and you have to pay for shipping. And oh, by the way, you’re a business, you’re trying to make profit on the back end.

[00:20:43] Ben: So really anything below 800 doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if you’re selling a $5,000 product with 25% margins and it costs you $250 to ship, now you have a thousand dollars in arbitrage there that you can go acquire the customer. That seems to make a little more sense the higher you get. Got 

[00:20:58] Brent: it.

[00:20:58] Brent: You had mention. Alley Express no nonsense, no Alley Express nine. Explain that. What does that mean? 

[00:21:05] Ben: So that’s been the hot thing for drop shipping over the last, I don’t know, three to five years. And it is simply go find the hottest trending product. Go find it on Alley Express. Set up your store.

[00:21:16] Ben: It’s a turn and burn website, right? You’re gonna drive traffic and hopes you can convert a ton of people. On your website selling a, honestly, it’s gonna be a terrible product. It’s gonna ship from China, show up 40 days later in a heavily tape box. And you’re gonna have a bunch of disappointed customers who aren’t gonna reach you to tell you they’re disappointed cuz you’ve already turned and burned that website.

[00:21:31] Ben: So if you’re out there for a cash grab, maybe this makes sense, but I don’t know, my ethics and my integrity aren’t going to allow me to sell a terrible product with a terrible experience attached to that person. . 

[00:21:43] Brent: So that would be a, an example of that would be can 95 masks when the, when they got all sucked up in the pandemic and all of a sudden people got ahold of them.

[00:21:50] Brent: They’re gonna sell ’em on a quickly made up website, and then by the time they, they land in your doorstep, you’re they may not, it might be PA post pandemic. 

[00:22:00] Ben: The one I think of is there was I was flicking through TikTok. It’s like a girl on a beach and then he zooms out and it’s supposed to be this like monocle that can zoom, thousands of yards away.

[00:22:11] Ben: I can imagine who they’re trying to target. I’m a dude, so I understand why they were targeting dudes with that. I actually bought that cause I wanted to see the experience, so I bought it again 40 days later, heavily tape box the thing. You can’t see anything out of it. It does not work. And so it, yeah, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.

[00:22:24] Ben: Now, on the other hand, if you’re using this to judge demand, and go sell, I dunno, 50 of something, and see if your audience is into that. And then you’re gonna turn it around and actually make the product better and serve it to your audience as part of your brand. Maybe that makes sense. But the folks who were out there teaching turn and burn websites and just, destroying all customer trust, I, I can’t get behind that.

[00:22:43] Brent: Tell us a little bit about your course. You’ve mentioned that a few times that you’re teaching, you have a course on this te tell us a little bit about. 

[00:22:49] Ben: Yeah, so the beginning part of the course is, and we just did a podcast on this, so I might have the numbers actually. Yeah. So the beginning part is like 68 videos long.

[00:22:55] Ben: And that is simply how to get started, right? This is gonna help you choose your market. This is gonna help you identify the suppliers inside, upload products, build out your website, and actually have an over the shoulder look of John building all of this stuff in real time so that you can follow along.

[00:23:09] Ben: And then the backside of that. Something we’re continuing to grow. It has 150 plus videos currently, and that’s everything John and I have learned over the last eight years of doing this personally. And both John and I have taken stores to eight figures. And so there’s a lot of learnings in there that we wanted to put inside the course.

[00:23:23] Ben: And so that half of the course continues to grow as we continue to learn more as we continue to network with other experts who we can bring in and create some videos for us. And . Yeah. It’s an over the shoulder look like this model isn’t that difficult to understand. To me, it’s pretty simple.

[00:23:35] Ben: The work is hard. You have to do like hard work. That’s business. But the model of, it’s pretty simple. So we give that all away on our podcast, drop ship podcast. And if you want someone to hold your hand and walk you through it, that’s what our course is for. 

[00:23:47] Brent: What is your biggest win in terms of a product in the.

[00:23:51] Ben: The biggest one, I have two months left on a non-disclosure agreement, so I will say it’s in the Gulf industry. But we, yeah I coached two gentlemen. They brought me on as a consultant. I coached ’em to a quarter million in the first three months. We remained friends for the rest of the year as they were in Wisconsin.

[00:24:04] Ben: We would just rib each other on slack basically. And then they asked me to come on board and we went, they did 1 million in revenue in their first year. Two, two years later we did 11 million. And by far that was the biggest business I was part of growth wise and just big. And they bought me out about a week before the world shut down for Covid.

[00:24:18] Ben: And I can only imagine what they went on to do after that with everything shut down. Yeah, it was a good time. 

[00:24:23] Brent: And what was the biggest lose? . 

[00:24:26] Ben: Yeah, that one. Like I said, it was serving an older demographic. It would be like mobility products. The sales came in, but again, the chargebacks came in.

[00:24:33] Ben: There’s just, that’s not an audience of people I want, without bashing that type of audience. They’re just, they’re very difficult to deal with from a customer service front. A lot of handholding, a lot of walking them through the buttons to click on the website, like there’s just. It’s not a group of people I would like to serve personally.

[00:24:51] Ben: Whereas I would say middle-aged men who are trying or who are passionate about something, is the ideal audience. If that’s who you wanna serve and you have products that fit that is the ideal audience. Cuz men just lay in bed and will buy it on the phone. They won’t think twice about it.

[00:25:04] Ben: Whereas, women take a little longer in the buying cycle to make decisions. They also buy differently. They wanna see things on sale. Where men, I don’t think really care. They just, if they want something, they’re gonna buy it. And yeah. More on the, who there it’s the definitely.

[00:25:15] Ben: Middle-aged affluent men that are wonderful to serve. 

[00:25:19] Brent: You’ve mentioned a who quite a few times. Tell us how you as a business owner determine who is the best, who for you. 

[00:25:28] Ben: Trial and error, I think. But I’ll go back to what I said, like if it’s you, that’s gonna be the best. Like whatever you are passionate about, if you can build a business around that.

[00:25:37] Ben: you are going to wake up and wanna work on that business more than I’m gonna wanna work on the business I’m not passionate about, right? So every day work needs to be done. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. That statement is definitely true. And so if you’re passionate about it and you’re consuming content late at night about it, and then you wake up and you get to work on your business that is driving more content into the world or driving more people into the passion you’re just gonna work way harder than me.

[00:25:57] Ben: And so that, that’s what I recommend. Go find whatever you are into and build a business. 

[00:26:01] Brent: If you have a one kind of nugget of advice for somebody that’s wanting to start on this besides taking your course, what would you say to them? 

[00:26:10] Ben: Yeah, and just the kind of, I don’t think you need to take our, if you want to, great.

[00:26:13] Ben: We’d love to have you, but I think we have quite a few students in our Facebook group who have only listened to our podcast and they’ve built a real business that’s making decent money and That’s amazing. My goal is to. Help people change their life through e-commerce. The same way e-commerce changed my life.

[00:26:26] Ben: And so my advice would be just start you’re gonna learn. So I don’t understand why people are afraid to get going. If Brent, if you’ve never golfed in your entire life and you decided you’re gonna, you’re gonna go be a golfer, would you sit like months on end going, oh, what if I suck at this?

[00:26:40] Ben: What if I fail a call? Think no. You just go out there and you’d shank the ball around and it wouldn’t be fun, but you’d have a good time and you’d slowly get better. This is the same way you should treat business. So stop. Think. You are a failure. If it doesn’t work, first off, the business can be a failure, and the entrepreneur itself is not a failure, right?

[00:26:53] Ben: And so go in there, set up a Shopify store, start screwing around, run some ads, maybe make some sales, and then you might understand, oh, I, I kinda like serving this person versus this person. I kinda like selling these products versus these products. I kinda like working on big commerce over Shopify or whatever it is.

[00:27:06] Ben: Like you’re gonna learn a lot by doing. And if, yeah, my only advice would be just start, just get moving and iterate. 

[00:27:13] Brent: Yeah. And I just want to point out that my golf score and my bowling score are identical. You guys can take which one is good or bad. . Yeah. From a learning standpoint, I know that doing it for me there’s all kinds of different ways of learning, but I’m a big, I’m a big advocate of learning and doing at the same time, and I think that, You’ve hit it right on the nail right on the head, where that type of learning helps you to really see how it’s gonna ha what, what’s gonna happen in that, how you’re gonna get it done and how it’s gonna come out in the end.

[00:27:44] Brent: Last question in terms of this was I know that we, in the magenta world, we work a lot on say, firearms. Products that that aren’t like Google ads can’t serve up. Is there any model where that would work? Cbd, those type of products that say Google won’t work with or even sometimes PayPal won’t work with.

[00:28:05] Brent: Do you have any recommendations on those or just you’re clear 

[00:28:08] Ben: of them? Yeah, I think with what specifically I’m teaching, I would tell you to steer clear. On the other hand, the biggest revenue driver in any business is not gonna be your ads. So what we teach ads are definitely gonna get you started.

[00:28:20] Ben: You have to go acquire that customer first off. But if you aren’t like building SEO from day one, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And so whether you’re in CBD or firearms or wherever else which God only knows if Google suppresses that stuff too you have to get out there and create content.

[00:28:34] Ben: Now, I’m a big fan of seo. I think you should do it on your website. In this like retail environment when we’re, when we become a retailer, I take a drop show. You’re a retailer of brands. Creating collections that rank for a brand name is quite easy. You have a cluster built for you. The brand is the collection page, the products are the cluster content around it.

[00:28:49] Ben: And so it’s actually quite easy to do good SEO in an e-commerce store. Above and beyond that, you’re gonna want to also be someone who’s putting out best articles cuz you’re selling all the brands. So if you can put out the best standing desks of 2022, that’s gonna rank really well too. And then. Just loads of supporting content, right?

[00:29:05] Ben: Go to answer the public.com, put in your generic word standing desk and go look at all the questions everyone’s asking. Now. Go answer those on your blog. Go build content around that. Once that ball is rolling, it really turns into something amazing over time. But again, maybe you’re not a writer.

[00:29:20] Ben: Maybe you prefer like me to be behind a microphone or on camera, right? Gary V says, this salon, this is a world of content and so whether you want to. Or speak or be on camera, you’re gonna have to do one of those things to grow your business, in my opinion, or hire someone to do one of those things.

[00:29:33] Ben: And I don’t think it matters what in industry you’re in, that’s gonna be the biggest driver of traffic in your business versus ads. And so you should get started immediately. 

[00:29:41] Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just, I’ll second that, that we at Woto started a content Around magenta at the time, but Adobe Commerce now, five years ago and it, within the first year it took about a year to, for our SEO to start catching up.

[00:29:55] Brent: And it is a very competitive space. And, but that does work. And I know in WordPress they called Cornerstone content and HubSpot, they call it pillar content. But I think what you’re saying is that you have your product, then you start writing about that product and pointing all that content to that product.

[00:30:13] Brent: and I can test that. Yes. That, that SEO works. And we, one of our longtime clients was a gun seller down in South Carolina. The, if you are in that space, you’re all, nobody else can be using Google Ads. And so you are in, if you can do better at writing those articles, , you are gonna win it writing that.

[00:30:32] Brent: So that’s great advice. I 

[00:30:34] Ben: just pulled up a really good example of it if you don’t mind me sharing, so yeah, go for it. One business I was part of that, we worked on this the first year. The site got 7% of its traffic, 7,000 users via SEL for $0 revenue. In year number two, 27% of the users, 76,000 people came for $854,000 in revenue.

[00:30:55] Ben: Year three. As we continue to compound here, 43% of the users now came from seo, which was almost a quarter million people that resulted in 2.27 million in revenue. And so it just continues to grow and grow as you put the time in and do things right. Don’t do things crappy. Don’t go buy bad links, put out really good content and play the long game here and I promise you it’ll pay dividends.

[00:31:17] Brent: Yeah, and I think you, I think earlier you also mentioned just testing it, making sure that your con what whatever you have on that page, your product display. Maybe doing some eBay AB testing on that. And even in Google you could do AB testing on those things. There’s so many things that you as a user, that as you dig in and especially if it turns into your for full-time job, like you said if you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards.

[00:31:41] Brent: That’s a good good advice there. Ben, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug? 

[00:31:49] Ben: Yeah, I think if you’re listening to this, you’re a podcast junkie, as am I. So just go check out our podcast. Like I I think you’ll enjoy the banter between myself and my Australian partner, John.

[00:31:57] Ben: I like to make fun of the words. He says he likes to make fun of the big orange guy in this country. And maybe you’ll enjoy that, but we literally give away the entire business model. You started episode one. It’s what is drop shipping? What is high ticket drop shipping, high ticket versus low ticket?

[00:32:07] Ben: If you start at episode one, you’re gonna learn this entire business model from us. And then if you decide. Work with us further. Obviously the information’s in there, but I would just say start with the podcast. It’s called Drop Shit Podcast and you can find it on any of your favorite players.

[00:32:19] Brent: Great. Now, we’ll put all those links in the show notes today. Ben, thanks for being here. It’s been a great conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me. 

The Human Connection in Commerce with Maier Bianchi

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

Some takeaways from this episode

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maier: like crazy amount.

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

Maier: That, that defines me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maier: Yes, 180 

Brent: client percent client.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maier: things

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

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

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

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

Maier: definitely should have included us in that guide.

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

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

Maier: her today or yesterday. We had 

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

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

Brent: Yeah, absolutely. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brent: What would you like to plug? 

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

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

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

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

Maier: in.

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

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

Brent: Onto the show notes 

Maier: about the layoffs. 

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

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

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

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

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

HD am I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brent: year. 

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

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Mason is Zapier made for commerce. It connects data designs and channels to run your product launches, sales documents, discounts, inventory updates, custom reviews in-app, help, funnels, and more, all on autopilot.

Bridging the Digital Retail Gap with Leigh Sevin

Remember when shopping, marketing, and brand building were all going digital? Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah noticed how little the retail industry had changed its approach to sales. @endearhq

While the rise of online shopping pushed many brands into the next frontier of marketing and customer service, retail salespeople were still confined to the in-store experience. Associates’ limited access to resources and inability to earn credit for online sales highlighted a massive gap in the retail sales model.

We interview Leigh Sevin, the co-founder of Endear. She gives us insight into this ever-changing market and how Endear works to bridge the retail gap.

Endear is the first and only clienteling app certified for Shopify Plus merchants. Its CRM and messaging platform is made especially for retail sales teams and tracks how messages convert into sales in-store and online. Endear empowers retail teams to engage customers over remote channels like email and text. At the same time, the app measures how outreach is performing, including data points like average order value, location of last purchase, and time to convert.

https://endearhq.com

What is a CRM?

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Leigh seven. She is the co-founder of Endear and Leigh, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life. 

Leigh: Sure. So as you said, I’m the co-founder of Endear. Endear is a CRM designed specifically for consumer brands.

Leigh: So we help brands consolidate all of their data and then empower their sales people to use that data to develop really high quality. Relationships with their customers, primarily over email, texts, and of course face to face. 

Leigh: In the free time, I do have, I also enjoy exercise and baking. 

Brent: Oh, wow. Baking. Good. Are you watching the new series of the great British bakeoff? 

Leigh: I didn’t even know it launched. Has it got, is it alive? Is it, Can I launch? 

Brent: Yeah, I think there’s, there is two episodes out.

Leigh: This is very big news as I go into fall, so thank you for this. 

Brent: Yes, it’ll, it, it’ll be very addictive. Good. And I apologize for cutting you off there. No, not at all. Good. Alright let’s talk about CRMs and if you wanted to just do a brief overview for people who may not know what a CRM is. 

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely.

Leigh: CRM is customer relationship management. So really what that means is, when I’m speaking to maybe someone a little bit older or not as familiar with technology, I really describe it as a really high powered grex. So that’s one way to think about it. It’s about taking everything you know about a customer and putting it into one consolidated place.

Leigh: What Endear does in terms of taking it a step beyond that is Basically we try to give you the insight that data is revealing in the aggregate. For example, specific to consumer brands, those things might be what does a customer’s lifetime spend? What’s their average order value? How often are they shopping with you?

Leigh: And these are the things that one of our users would probably try to do on their own, just from the raw data that they might have. And we just wanna take that work off their plate and give it to them in real time.

Brent: Users who are familiar with a CRM would ask then, as a retailer, why would I need a CRM?

Leigh: So CRMs are incredibly popular for the B2B world, right? There is no technical or technology sales person that would spend a day not logging into a CRM. And I think what’s changed about retail, especially for the sales people, is that they used to be able to readily depend on organic foot traffic and therefore not need to do a lot of outbound sales.

Leigh: What came their way was enough to reach their goals and really succeed as a salesperson in a store, atmosphere. But I think what’s changed, especially with eCommerce and obviously with the pandemic and just generally with how much is available to consumers these days, you do need to stand out.

Leigh: You do need to take matters into your own hands, and that’s really what CRMs are there help a salesperson do. It’s about understanding who can I be reaching out to proactively in order to generate a sale, generate a relationship, understand what their needs are, share updates with them, and that all comes from being able to combine the actual data that we’ve consolidated for you with scalable outreach and tracking.

Leigh: So understanding. If I do reach out to this person, how are they responding to that outreach? Are they opening my message? Are they clicking on the products I’m recommending? And I think the insights aspect of endear is what really keeps people motivated to know that, Hey, my, my text message actually converted into a sale.

Leigh: Maybe that customer didn’t come into the store to do that, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is my efforts led to revenue for the company. 

Brent: From a differentiation standpoint do you think Endear makes itself from other platforms that are strictly e-commerce? 

Leigh: I would say, when we think about CRM, Omnichannel versus e-com, most of the time CRM is genuinely lacking on the e-commerce side as well.

Leigh: But for the most part, e-com brands tend to compensate by relying on individual departments stand in for CRM. So for marketing teams, a lot of the time that’s their email marketing platform or their SMS marketing platform for support teams. That might be their live chat, right? It’s everyone that’s ever asked them a question over live chat.

Leigh: Maybe there’s a customer profile, maybe there’s not. And to be honest, for us, CRM is just so much of a low hanging fruit in the sales world, and also the department that is right now least saturated with technology, they have really nothing but the terminal. So we wanted to go where the pain was most heavily felt, and that to us was sales.

Leigh: But I would say CRM in general tends to be more oriented towards B2B salespeople, and that’s really where Endear differentiates itself. We are more about the integrations that a consumer brand would need, the KPIs that a consumer brand would need, and the amount of data storage that a consumer brand would need over what a B2B brand or company would need. 

Brent: When I, as a user come into a retail store and endear is being used there, is there a way that the user would target me or help understand more about me? 

Leigh: It’s a, That’s a checkout. Yeah, I get that question. Did you say after checkout?

Brent: No. During checkout or 

Leigh: before or whatever. So I get, if you already know the person time and the funniest part is that question assumes something that you’ve already decided to walk into a store. And actually for retail stores, the hardest part is getting you to do that. Stores for better or worse, actually have an incredibly high conversion rate.

Leigh: The convert, about 30% of the people that walk. The return rate is also dramatically lower than it is on econ, right? Econ faces at this point, probably near 40% return rate, whereas stores probably having the single digits. So you know the, What we have to think about is where is the challenge? Is the challenge, knowing who a customer is once they walk in.

Leigh: Not really. The store does great. So to us, the real pain point is how do I get you to walk in the first place? And that’s why Endear is so much more about what to do with your downtime, what to do to generate foot traffic or generate converting traffic on your website. And that to us comes from really understanding who your customer is, cultivating that relationship, and then extending that relationship beyond face to remote channels like email and text.

Brent: Do you leverage social media and allow the users to leverage some of that social media as well to promote that drive to get people into the. 

Leigh: I would say that’s something that we’ve considered and have on our roadmap for later down the line. I think there are incredible conversations going on over Instagram right now, where we see Endear coming in most often for social media is we have this really cool feature called stories.

Leigh: And they’re basically, depending on your platform, they’re completely shop. So it basically allows for salespeople to create a custom or completely, special story just for one customer or a group of customers, and send it only to them. And that’s something that they can share via a simple URL that endear then tracks for you.

Leigh: So we do allow some flexibility over how you’re using some of the assets you’re creating within endear across platforms. But really what we’re after is that really high touch, one to one conversations. 

Brent: And you’re looking for customers to repeat at the store and increase that traffic from their existing base, right?

Leigh: Yes. We are only using a, the data that a brand already owns, but we’re making them do more with it. So the, KPIs that we focus on helping a brand improve is how do I extend lifetime value? How do I increase aov, how do I increase loyalty? What most of these brands are dealing with right now is incredibly high customer cost of acquisition.

Leigh: And so the only way to compensate beyond just simply trying to reduce that, which I would say you can do by opening a store in the first place, is by then increasing the lifetime value. And that’s really what Endear is 

Brent: all about. Do you see, so you mentioned lifetime value. Do you think that the stores that leverage an online.

Brent: can mix and matched both to get people online and then offline to purchase things as well. Do you see that as part of the puzzle and gaining traffic for the retailer? 

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a very famous stat sort of floating in the ether that opening a store basically increases your eCommerce traffic by about 37.

Leigh: What a lot of people miss is that they’re talking about traffic. So that’s an easy number to gauge. I think what our customers want to know is what about actual conversions? And that is really where your sales people are such a great resource for not just, working, as I said, face to face, but then motivating customers when they go to buy online, to feel more confident about their purchase, to buy more frequently, and also probably decrease the return rate.

Leigh: They really do know what size they are. They know maybe they’ve actually tried it in store and then only got really convinced to buy it after the fact. But those purchases tend to be a lot stickier than the ones of a customer just shopping on their own. And we’ve actually seen that in our own data that customers who shop with the help of a salesperson, even online actually in one case study, had a 50% higher AOV than the customers who were going at it alone.

Brent: Have you seen a difference pre pandemic to post pandemic on challenges that retailers are facing and getting people into the store? Obviously during pandemic it was impossible to get ’em into the store, but you see a switch in how behavior is now, whereas we’re going into full opening . 

Leigh: I think, this sort of ebbs and flows because I think what also happened was Every retailer that was a little resistant to change.

Leigh: Maybe they started brick and mortar, really had to open eCommerce and had to embrace that as a channel during the pandemic. So if anything, eCommerce has gotten way more competitive because anyone who was resistant before now needed to figure it out. And obviously their first move is to do all the most obvious channels.

Leigh: That used to be the reason why e-commerce was so great, you could acquire customers for, not much money compared to the cost of opening a store. And I think those two levers have now completely switched. It’s become actually dramatically more affordable to open a store these days because landlords had to learn 10 year leases are not gonna work, no one’s gonna sign a 10 year lease.

Leigh: And we saw that a little bit with the popup craze. And I think that has found its middle ground of saying, what does a two year lease look like? Is that better for me? How can I make it more appealing for tenants to come into my physical space? So those costs have dramatically dropped while the cost of doing business online has actually skyrocketed because everyone’s using the same tools, everyone’s using the same, acquisition strategies.

Leigh: So it’s really hard to stand out right now online. 

Brent: Do you see Paid and organic traffic coming to a store, be it online or in person. Do you see any way that somebody could jump start coming into the store rather than if you just didn’t wanna do paid ads? Is there an advantage somebody has to do organic?

Leigh: I think endear is that organic opportunity. We always joke that a marketing team at a omnichannel brand has so much work on their plate, and they are primarily worried about traffic to the site, conversion on the site, and it’s just not, if you have 12 stores right? That means that they can’t be focused on making sure every single store is optimized or maximizing their opportunity with traffic.

Leigh: So really what you get is you have this huge database of customers and the people who are. Focus on making sure those customers know about the store is the store team themselves. So giving them the power within Deere to actually do their own local marketing, their own local outreach. They are going to be the most motivated to get those customers in the door.

Leigh: And I think that’s really, that’s free. You have to pay for a sales force, whether you like it or not, if you’re gonna open a store. So you might as well maximize their resources to get that ROI on that physical retail. 

Brent: Yesterday my podcast was about segmentation and and the person that I had on had mentioned Klaviyo. I know that there, there’s a lot of overlaps from CRM to automated marketing. How do you work with other partners to ensure that you’re maximizing? If somebody has attentive or something, how do you work in Totally making sure that. both are being used effectively.

Leigh: That gets to the whole purpose of CRM. We did an analysis at one point, and I think about 75% of our customers use Klaviyo, and I think another like 40% also use Attentive. And so what that tells us is, A) there’s this thing that we call called the Commerce Stack, and just to even be a proper eCommerce brand, you need about seven different apps cuz you need your email marketing and or SMS marketing.

Leigh: You need your loyalty, you need your support, you need your onsite popups and engagement. And then you also actually need the os, the backbone of the whole thing, which is typically Shopify. So With all these different platforms running, they’re all really good at what they do individually.

Leigh: The question. How do you bring them together from a data perspective? And that’s really what a CRM is out to solve. It’s how do you understand, okay, who is my marketing team touching with Klaviyo and who is my sales team reaching out to via Endear?

Leigh: And Endear works to actually consolidate those two things so that you understand, who’s responding more to one channel or another. And across all these channels, what kind of picture can I get of this customer? What kind of marketing does she respond to? What kind of email does she respond to or text?

Leigh: Does she respond to? Has she used her loyalty points? How do we get her to use those loyalty points? So all of it is about actually using these apps in tandem. And then of course, I think right now people are very concerned with, their overall spend on technology. And so the next question has to be,

Leigh: how can I consolidate how many of these apps actually have overlapping functionality? And I think that’s gonna be the really big challenge that comes next For these e eCom brands or for these omnichannel brands, how do I really make sure that I’m being most efficient with the tech stack that I’ve created?

Brent: Do you see a future in SMS verses email or both? Or? I see SMS happening a lot more, but I also see a lot of now, spam and SMS. Do you see SMS moving forward in what where it’s at? Or do you see it plateauing soon and people are gonna ignore messages in the future? 

Leigh: It’s gonna take, it’s not there yet, but it’s gonna take the same toll as email, which is, would I ever not answer an email from a friend just because of how much email marketing I get?

Leigh: No. It doesn’t stop me from finding the ones that are important and of. All of our personal email clients or our phones will help us do some of that filtering automatically. So I think what really it comes down to is what is a brand’s email marketing or SMS marketing strategy. And I think the challenge there is that is also why empowering a sales force of some sort can be truly needle moving.

Leigh: They will break through the numbness that comes with marketing at some point. If I truly know somebody and they’re texting me, I want to respond because they likely, the content of that message is personalized. It’s specific to me, It’s content that I care about.

Leigh: And so it’s just about, everyone will say it, but it really is about personalization. And I think what’s cool about focusing on sales rather than marketing. , it lets you not worry so much about scale. The whole point is it doesn’t have to be all that scalable because you have a huge labor force, you have a huge sales force, so let them just do it properly one to one, and it will convert really high.

Leigh: And if you have 20 to 50 people doing that, you’re gonna see incredible results. And as I said, those people work for you anyway, so why not let them cut through the noise? 

Brent: Do you think that the big brands out there that are running retail stores, The challenge is getting people into the stores again, or what do you see as the biggest challenge facing retail today?

Leigh: I think from a growth perspective, it is probably that, you still need to figure out how to drive traffic to your stores if you’ve made that investment. I think the other challenge is still for a lot of brands, especially the big ones, omnichannel, How do I understand? How my online and offline channels are working together.

Leigh: How do I make them work better together? How do I help them be resources and allies talk to each other? Because a lot of the time when we at least launched Endear, there was incredible sort of antagonism between what was happening e-commerce and what was happening in store, and they were considered almost rivals.

Leigh: And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make. It’s more about how can these two channels support each other. I think there are really great examples. , brands that have done that really well. With online, with in-store pickup for online purchases, making sure you can return, something you bought online in a store because A, that drives traffic and b, that’s just logical.

Leigh: Not doing that is gonna really annoy your customers. And so for me it’s looking at the strategies that actually unify those things. One of my favorite sites actually does this very cool thing where you can actually search their website by what’s available local to you. So you can basically browse the store from their e-commerce site and then just go buy it or go reserve it, which, talk about same day delivery.

Leigh: You don’t even need that. You can just walk over and go get it. 

Brent: Looking at somebody like Best Buy, certainly they’ve now embraced that. It took ’em a a little bit of time to get there. But you can obviously that features a great way to make sure that people see everything, but then go to the right place to get it.

Brent: The future of. I think it was interesting that Amazon is still opening physical stores today, so it’s like online to physical. Do you still see that happening? Do you think there’s gonna be some strictly e eCommerce brands that are going to do little popup stores to see to see how it works?

Leigh: I think there are different, physical presence formats that are right for different kinds of products. And I think what we’ve really seen over the past couple of years is innovation around what does it mean to have a physical presence, right? It used to be a question of do I do wholesale or do I do retail, like dedicated retail?

Leigh: And even that’s a relatively new concept. So what I love is looking at all these different models for how brands can test what it means to. available in a store, whether it’s their own store or, these new sort of neighborhood goods is a great example, right? It’s not necessarily a wholesale deal, it’s more like I’m leasing or renting shelf space rather than an entire, store.

Leigh: And so all these different models allow different kinds of companies to really test what makes the most sense for them. And I think, the same time that Amazon is opening. Warby Parker is still opening tons of stores and actually doubling down on their retail footprint. So I think if anything, it’s a sign that, physical can work for all different kinds of companies and it’s more about understanding and really testing what makes sense for you, and how do you collaborate with other brands so that you are maybe doing a joint effort and you’re not, taking on the entire cost of leads for yourself if you happen to be at a one type of product or one product business that’s not really gonna make sense to just populate an entire store with one product? 

Brent: Yeah. I think if anything, the pandemic reminded us that we do like to go outside every once in a while and visit a store and touch a product and shop around and visit, just get out of the house.

Brent: Do you do you think that a lot of retailers now are moving towards Having something like Endear to help them leverage more of their in store versus versus web traffic to promote specific items. You talked about the one item thing, but is there more of an in, in if you have Overstock or under stock, is there a way, is there more of a push to get a lot of that stuff?

Brent: I know there’s a lot of Target has a ton of extra inventory. So they’re pushing, this inventory online, offline. Is there more of that now coming through on retail? 

Leigh: Yes, and I think inventory, especially if your omni channel is one of the hardest nets to crack, and it can get very cumbersome and it’s very detail oriented, very logistics heavy.

Leigh: And that to me is another reason why stores really do benefit when they have something like Endear because they have those products literally right in front of them. And with Endear, they can know exactly who. By the store and who would be interested in this product. So being able to again, be your own best advocate and move product that may even be sold out online.

Leigh: Being able to tell an entire neighborhood, Hey, that thing that’s sold out online is actually available in store in your size, come by and hopefully be the first to get editor. I can reserve it for you, is an incredibly, a huge value prop to your community, but also a really easy optimization considering all the challenges that brands face with inventory so it’s basically taking advantage again of your human capital to solve a very big logistical challenge. And I think, best sellers are always gonna move, and that’s great, but especially if you have those lingering products, being able to target them also without even broadcasting necessarily a huge promotion via a marketing email, Potentially sending it to only a handful of VIP customers or a handful of customers who have bought something similar in the past and just extending a promotion to them.

Leigh: Also helps, this long history of the vicious cycle of, if I discount then everyone’s gonna wait for the discount that if I don’t discount, it’s never gonna move. So avoiding that major sale and just giving a handful of people maybe part again, like you have a loyalty program for a reason.

Leigh: You know, Show your gratitude to those people and give them first access, or give them last access to some of these lingering products is a very easy way to really make the most of the inventory you do have. 

Brent: I wanna change gears a little bit and talk about entrepreneurship. What motivated you in your young years to start a new CRM?

Brent: It’s a very competitive space. Tell us your journey on Endear and starting that. 

Leigh: Yeah. My co-founder, Jenesh and I really got into this space pretty circuitously, it was not a very linear path towards success, but what we landed on was quickly learning that within the physical space in retail technology was lacking.

Leigh: There was a huge doth in just any sort of innovation whatsoever. And of course what we saw was this boom in econ technology and it made sense, right? It’s already cloud based. It’s already driven by fast movers. People who were excited about the future in retail to a lot of people sounded like this very laggard, slow industry that would never adopt anything new.

Leigh: And I think that was one of the biggest misconceptions because if there’s huge success in econ, obviously retail stores are eventually gonna have to. And so what we saw was this huge white space, especially among the newer, more modern brands who were leaning on physical retail as a new growth channel.

Leigh: And they were so data oriented already, and there were no solutions in the market that sort of looked at what the store was doing as a CRM. I think it. Maybe our exposure as solving this problem for our customers, but also ourselves needing a CRM and having a sales team that we realized they were really one and the same.

Leigh: They were all facing the same problems. And I think it’s our orientation towards data specifically that really sets us apart in the market because we’re just giving our users much more information and ammo to work with. Compared to just letting them, maybe you just have a messaging platform. That messaging platform is only as good as the content that the users are sharing on it.

Leigh: And so I just think that relying only on something that lets you do SMS is never gonna get you the scale or the quality of conversion. That’s something like Endear would. That was the biggest lesson, was getting to talk to users and understanding how much of their business was already driven by cultivating these relationships.

Leigh: Understanding that this behavior already existed. It’s just that no one had really, hypercharged it, No one had really given it the proper attention from a tech perspective that it deserved. 

Brent: When you started what was your biggest challenge at getting up off the ground?

Leigh: I would say our biggest challenge was really accepting. Being willing to focus on who it was that needed our product most. I think for a while, and I think it’s normal to go through this, we would take any customer that would have us and we would, do whatever they asked of us. But slowly we realized that, there needed to be a very concrete market that we were going after and we needed to use the customer experiences we already had to pinpoint.

Leigh: Exactly who that customer should be. And I think in almost every conversation with a new founder, every conversation, every interview I give, I talk so much about product market fit because I think it is the hardest part of starting a company is finding the product that satisfies a market doesn’t, worry about how big or how small it is, maybe later.

Leigh: But just building something that an entire audience loves is incredibly gratifying and motivating. And being willing to settle on one audience was something that is really hard for founders. 

Brent: Do you think that it’s hard to say no to some customers sometime or even say to that customer, you’re really not a good fit and maybe you’re not gonna be successful with us, so why don’t you use X platform?

Brent: We have problem 

Leigh: now. We. Can’t help ourselves from time to time. It’s very tempting when someone wants to use your product and you have to be honest about what it can do for their business or what you’re willing to do to meet them halfway. And I think there’s a saying basically that most startups die of congestion, not starvation.

Leigh: And I think that’s a really good way to think about it, especially at where we are in the seed stage. You have to be able to focus and you have to know why you’re focused. And I think it’s always good to put opportunities on your own radar for investigation and research. But we’re always remembering, your bread and butter customer and why they love you so much because they are the ones that will keep feeding you.

Brent: I’m gonna make a small CRM joke, so I apologize, but when you were looking at how you were gonna design Endear, did you look at SalesForce CRM and think , this 1980s interface is the last thing I’m ever gonna want to do, and we’re gonna make all this great data presentable for people who can actually use it.

Brent: and if anybody’s used Salesforce CRM, they know exactly what I’m talking about. 

Leigh: I have to be completely honest, I’ve never seen the Salesforce CRM. I don’t know what it looks like. All right. But you’re very lucky. I’ve heard that, I’ve heard that from so many people. There’s like a I literally think there’s a quote on our website that is basically we have plenty of users who have tried Salesforce and to even think about putting.

Leigh: A retail worker who’s constantly on her feet on Salesforce to use as if she were at a computer all day is absolutely insane. And so we’re very honest about, the way that we’ve built the product, specifically for someone who works in a retail environment, someone who is able to, they have to be able to look up from their phone no matter what they were doing, and work with a customer and then look back at their phone and know exactly where they are in their workflow and pick it up instantly.

Leigh: It’s not no secret that turnover is also incredibly high in retail. And so what we think about in terms of how we build the product is okay, and there needs to be something that the second you hire a salesperson, they can pick it up in 30 minutes. They do not have six months to train on something like Salesforce because they’ll probably be gone in six months.

Leigh: So how do we build something that, A, they can get up and running in 30 minutes and B actually might get them to stay longer because they love the tech. They love that they can track their own progress. They love they get credit for sales online. So how do we make it a reason for someone to actually stick with your brand because of how great, the motivation is through Endear.

Brent: Do you find it harder to. design, something that’s easy for a millennial to use as compared to somebody who’s retired but now has gone back to work and is suddenly in retail. Do you think there’s a challenge in both in that sort of learning phase? 

Leigh: So one of our first customers, they actually were a beta customer and they were still with us today, like three years later, they got a version of Endear that we would never want anyone to have to be on.

Leigh: The entire sales course were in like the boomer generation, and I trained every single one of them. Maybe sometimes it took an hour and a half. But what I knew was their willingness to work with me and to get trained and then their ability to use the platform was probably the biggest validation that we were doing something worthwhile because every single one of them got on and said, I absolutely hate technology.

Leigh: I don’t know why we have to use this, and yet somehow three years later here, they are still using it and getting even better at it, and they are incredibly productive. So to be honest, millennials are great at tech and it’s great that they use Endear and they, I think they love it. I think what’s more encouraging is that we have users across all generations and they all seem incredible value.

Leigh: And getting up to speed and actually, finding it pretty easy to use at the end of the day. 

Brent: And I can say that I’m old enough to remember when I was working as a waiter that you had to look through a big book to see if this credit card was stolen or not. So it has come a long ways.

Brent: Another good parallel would. Somebody who’s a runner and they log all their miles in a physical book and then they move to a spreadsheet, and now they’ve moved to logging all their miles in Garmin or Strava or something like that. Strava. So that same sort of pathway for the CRM could be seen through how we’re making our lives easier.

Brent: And you don’t have to at checkout or at at the pos or even as somebody walks in there is an opportunity or getting people to walk in, I should say. There’s an opportunity to somewhat know the customer and then to leverage that knowledge to help them understand that there’s something.

Leigh: Totally. I tell every founder, if you ever hear of an industry still relying on Google Sheets, that is the billion dollar idea to go after. It’s always a sign that there’s a problem to be solved. And I know a lot of companies that, they are the Google Sheets alternative. They are, as you’re saying, the Strava to just logging it in a Google sheet or same for us, our users went from little black books to, if they were relatively sophisticated, A, a pretty, color coded Google file and then they found us.

Brent: The the typical customer that you would see or the typical user for Endear, would there be a certain size that would be a right fit? 10 stores, 20 stores? 

Leigh: We, when we started, a lot of our customers were smaller. I think more of a mindset. Certainly from a, traditional icp.

Leigh: What are your qualifiers? What do you look for? We look for brands that have, north of three stores. That’s something that we do take into consideration mostly because it shows a level of bullishness on physical retail and eagerness to. We look at their tech stack. Do they use platforms that we already integrate with that we, so that we can deliver that really 360 degree view of the customer?

Leigh: But I think what we’re really excited about that we’re seeing now is, if you did start with Endear when you were relatively small, there is no interest in moving to Salesforce because it’s just, it doesn’t matter how big you are, that product is still not designed for the retail store enviroment.

Leigh: And so we’ve seen customers that, started in the single digits that are now, double and nearing triple digits store fleets. And they are not giving us any signs that they’re interested in leaving because we’re growing with them and we are watching their needs change and become more sophisticated at the same time that the product becomes more sophisticated.

Leigh: We obviously hope that trend sticks around, but that’s what we’ve seen so far. 

Brent: I’m doing a terrible job of staying on track here, but if we jump back to entrepreneurship have you found it harder scaling your tech stack or your people stack? 

Leigh: That’s a really good question for my co-founder Jinesh and our CTO JP, but I will answer it as best as I can.

Leigh: I would say people stack on some level proves to be more slippery in the sense that I think you know what you’re getting with tech and if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly and you are even aware of the quote unquote like tech debt that you might be taking on at any given moment.

Leigh: And it’s also probably pretty clear to you how to fix it. I think the team growth side is you have all these things that you want to, that you wanna do or that you wanna think about, and finding that balance between hard skills and culture and also, equity and making sure that you’re finding that diversity in the applicant pool that you’re looking at.

Leigh: And then you have to think about we are a distributed team. Do we always wanna be distributed? I think so. What are the drawbacks and what are the advantages of that? And what if there are drawbacks, how do we compensate for those? So I think there are just a lot more unknowns when you’re dealing with humans in general, which is why, tech products are really fun to build.

Leigh: because you can rely on them, but then you realize like there’s a user at the other end of that and you have to think about, how are they going to receive this product? What are they gonna want to see from it? So I’ve just basically bundled your questions still back into endear and the problems that we have on that front.

Leigh: But I would, I hope I answered it at some level. 

Brent: When Leigh wakes up in the morning, what drives her to get up and do something better? Stronger. Bolder as the Endear co-founder. 

Leigh: Anecdotally and broadly, I would say it’s the customers that we work with.

Leigh: So I absolutely adore this space. I love the customers that I work with. I geek out when I see a brand that I recently shopped at or know or just follow on Instagram, and I see them wanting to use in Endear. And I feel the same way when one of those customers just has an amazing experience or one of their sales people has an amazing experience.

Leigh: And knowing that, as I said, it goes back to product market fit, you get incredible motivation knowing that, hey, even if something is broken, even if you know an employee wants to leave, all of that stuff is totally solvable if your customers love your product and it’s totally worth solving if your customers love your product.

Leigh: I wouldn’t feel the same way if customers didn’t. It’s like, why are you even bothering? Like you have a bigger existential problem if your customers are not huge fans of what you do every day. 

Brent: Do you ever buy something from a store that’s using Endear and you wanna say, That’s my product you’re using?

Brent: Yes, all the time. The person that’s selling it , by the way, that’s my product. Yeah. 

Leigh: I’ve done it. I’ve done it a few times. I also have a very. Supportive husband who won’t walk into a store that doesn’t use Endear without trying to pitch them on endear, which I also appreciate, but I have also stopped doing.

Leigh: It’s very cool to walk around a lot of neighborhoods in New York and see the brands that we work with. I’ve walked in and it’s just a weird interaction. You’re like, Oh, that’s cool, thanks. But it’s not quite anything, I think it would be pretty weird.

Leigh: A HubSpot person came up to me and was like, I work no, actually I’d appreciate it. I’d be like, That’s cool. We use HubSpot. So I try to keep my cool when that happened. But I would say the other thing that gets me up in the morning is when I have friends who say, I just got a text from a store using you and I, I saw you in the url, or I could tell it was you guys.

Leigh: And I think that is also incredibly inspiring that, we are. Penetrating all these different circles of people that are receiving her product and most of the time not even knowing it.

Brent: I started in the Magento world, which is like Shopify, but it. It’s better. And it’s, No, I’m just, I’m not gonna talk about that. But I can also relate to that. Nobody actually cared at all that I was using Magento to sell stuff or developing on Magento. Anyways, we’ll move on. We have a few minutes left.

Brent: And I promised a free joke. I was gonna do it in the beginning, but then I forgot. And now we’re, because I’m a d today, I don’t know why. So I’m gonna tell you a joke. And this is a joke that could be free or we could pay for, . All I want you to do is just react and tell me what you think.

Brent: Here we go. 

Brent: Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns the other and says, Dam!, 

Leigh: Okay, 

Brent: I’m, make it, I’m, That’s clearly a free joke. I’m gonna say a free 

Leigh: joke. I was actually ready for it to be. A different punchline from a different joke, and I was like, Maybe this is a different version. So you actually caught, 

Brent: Tell me yours.

Brent: Tell me yours. You know 

Leigh: The one where it’s like there are two muffins baking in an oven, and one muffin says, Damn, it’s hot in here. And the other one says, Oh my god, A talking muffin. So I thought that was gonna be the joke, but with two fish , 

Brent: Yeah. How do fish talk underwater? That’s my question. It’s Aquaman, right? They must use some kind of radar thing.

Leigh: Yes. And there’s that very famous David Foster Wallace speech or short story about what is water? And it’s basically like people’s awareness. If you haven’t, that’s also what’s on my mind now, which is, it’s a much more existential philosophical question.

Leigh: So now I’m just in 10 different places like you, so there you go. 

Brent: All right. I gotta do one more since I clearly bombed the first joke. 

Brent: What is the opposite of a croissant? A happy uncle.

Brent: Okay. Cross an, Yeah. Anyway. I get it. I will stop torching you on the jokes, . I 

Leigh: appreciate them.

Leigh: I get it. I’m with you. 

Brent: If you were to say to a retailer the thing that they should be paying attention to as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What would be that something they should be really looking at now, going to quarter four and even into quarter one?

Leigh: That’s a great question. I would say, what are you gonna do differently from last year? And ask yourself, what did I do last year? and what have I done every year that, am I seeing any difference in results? And I think the question becomes, if everyone else is just gonna do the same thing anyway, what is the harm in taking a year to try something that I’ve never done before?

Leigh: And at the end of the day, I’m not a retailer. I only have so many creative ideas that I’ve seen from the brands that use us, but I think. A like getting ahead of the most obvious things. Like you’re gonna send a promotional email the week before and then three days before and then the day of your sale.

Leigh: What doesn’t look like that? Just anything. But that is my advice at this point, because you can always do that. But is there something more creative you can do either on top of that or instead of that, because you know everyone’s gonna do that and we do have that. Have test.

Leigh: We do have an entire webinar from a bunch of other brands speaking about this that I would highly recommend. This doesn’t count as my shameless plug. I wanna clarify that. I would recommend people go listen to if they’re looking for inspiration. 

Brent: All right. And we’ll put that in the show notes. So we’ll make sure you get that on the show notes of the podcast.

Brent: So Leigh, as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? 

Leigh: I would like to plug Endear as an app, is that allowed? Can I just plug the company? Absolutely. Okay, great. Yes, one of the great things about Endear sales process is we offer everyone, both we can get a demo on the app and then we also include a free training as part of your trial.

Leigh: So I would encourage everyone to a go check out the website and Endearhq.com and book a demo because there are no strings attached. And you’ll even get a free training if you sign up for a 14 day free trial. So that is my shameless plug. 

Brent: Perfect. Leigh Sevin co-founder of Endear. Thank you so much for being here today.

Brent: Thanks so much. Had a 

great 

Leigh: time.

What is a CRM and Why do You Need One?
Talk Commerce

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