entrepreneurship Archives

Navigating Mergers and Acquisitions with Kison Patel

April 14, 2023March 31, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was your shirt made?

April 14, 2023November 27, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Are your clothes made where you live? Where does the cloth come from? Shannon Lohr and I dive into some of the sustainability questions that you should ask when starting a clothing business. As the founder and CEO of Factory45, Shannon has worked with Idea-stage entrepreneurs to launch clothing companies that are ethically and sustainably made across the globe.

Shannon got her start in 2010 when she co-founded {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable clothing company for female travelers and minimalists that was featured in The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Yahoo! News.

To date, Shannon has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion space, many of whom have launched some of the most transparent supply chains in the fashion industry. https://factory45.co/ Shannon has worked as a consultant for crowdfunding projects that have surpassed their goal amounts by as much as 300% and has worked closely with startup apparel companies from all over the world to create ethically-made products with a focus on environmentally-friendly materials and transparent supply chains. Shannon is a strong advocate for increasing supply chain transparency through sourcing, localization, and storytelling. She’s been named a thought leader for the future of fashion by Ecouterre and Triple Pundit, and she frequently writes about conscious consumerism and the intersection of fashion and environmentalism.

CoachTech Summit | Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching with Ivonne Rohner

May 30, 2024October 27, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

This week we interview Ivonne Rohner with CoachTech Summit. We talk about all things Augmented Reality and how AR can help entrepreneurs in their growth through Virtual Coaching. Learn how you can blend Virtual Reality and coaching and we talk about the XR BootCamp which is one of the well-known virtual boot camps for Virtual Reality.

Using Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching, Ivonne helps leaders get the most out of the available technology and shape an empathetic virtual atmosphere where people can deliver their best because they feel seen. She works with corporate incubator teams/rocket labs and startups or to create structure and employee engagement in corporations and mid-size companies.

Branding your Business with Maureen Mwangi

April 14, 2023October 27, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

This week we interview Maureen Mwangi, CEO of Starward Consulting who has over 10 years of experience building, growing, and scaling some of America’s biggest brands.

In a world where all the “expert” growth strategies seem catered to the service industry, it can feel impossible to figure out what it takes to turn your product brand into a market leader.

But as a brand growth strategist who’s worked with many of those big brands, Maureen Mwangi knows first-hand that they didn’t get where they are today through trial and error or piecing together fragmented strategies. She uses the data that companies already possess to develop a growth strategy

Jeff Campbell – Courtney Taylor | Ecommerce Banking

April 14, 2023October 5, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

This week we interview Courtney Taylor and Jeff Campbell with Fidelity Bank. Courtney tells us how she is the matchmaker of the banking business. We learn how peer groups will help every entrepreneur succeed in their business. We talk about how important it is that your banker knows your business and you as a business owner are not just a number. We talk about trends in the banking industry that relate to commerce. We dive into a lot of great subjects that business owners should know and do with their bank.

Amazon FBA and starting a business with Neil Twa

November 6, 2024August 29, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

This week we interview Neil Twa. Neil is an executive mentor to business owners responsible for over $100M in Collective FBA Sales. He has helped to launch, grow, and scale 7 and 8 figure, high ROI Brands. He is the CEO of Voltage Holdings which launches, operates, scales, and acquires ecommerce brands with a focus on Amazon FBA. He owns multiple ventures including Voltage Portfolios. His partners include Kevin Harrington, the original shark on the hit TV series Shark Tank and the inventor of the infomercial. He has sold 1000’s of products leading to over $5 Billion in sales. He focuses’ on buying ecommerce brands to take them direct-to-consumer across multiple channels. We discuss how you can get started on a new business selling on Amazon, with little to no experience, and how you can take your existing business to Amazon FBA and automate the delivery of your products. This is a great conversation around why a business needs to embrace all channels and even why a business needs to sell some branded products!

Andrew Devlyn | GetFairPlay.com

April 14, 2023April 13, 2021 Brent W. Peterson

Brent Peterson chats with FairPlay Co-Founder and COO Andrew Devlyn in this third episode of Talk Commerce! Fairplay is a financing and analytics platform for your eCommerce, which uses data processing to invest in your digital marketing campaigns and inventory. For fast-growing ecommerce businesses that generate consistent sales, Fairplay offers smart financing in exchange for a small portion of your revenue until the financed capital is repaid plus a fixed service fee. https://getfairplay.com/

Brent Peterson chats with FairPlay Co-Founder and COO Andrew Devlyn

Brent: Welcome Andrew to Talk Commerce, Andrew Devlyn. You can introduce yourself.

[00:00:07] Andrew: Thank you, Brent, for inviting me to Talk Commerce. I’m very excited to be in this new effort you’re doing. I’m Andrew Devlyn. I’m the CEO of Fairplay. And was a partner of Summa Solutions for many years.

Before that, I was in a family business in Mexico that sold glasses, and I headed their e-digital transformation efforts, not only in e-commerce but also in their stores with omnichannel. We met many years ago. I think about six years now.

It’s been a while. Interesting. Thank you for inviting me.

[00:00:55] Brent: Why don’t we start with your experience with E-commerce and how you got into it in Mexico. I think I got into it about the same time as you got into Magento in Mexico, but why don’t you walk us through how you got introduced to it with Devlyn Optical.

[00:01:14] Andrew: We go to the very beginning, starting with my actual partner now in Fairplay. We met in high school, and he went on to do a whole musician career. And when he was offered to join Groupon, he called me, and I was heading the LASIK surgery centers of the family business.

So he told me, no, we’re selling these coupons in Groupon for LASIK and really starting very well. I said, Man, that’s interesting. So we published some Groupons. We sold a lot, and then we started seeing the potential that we can have selling LASIK.

And literally, it took me to start selling LASIK online, and it did very well. That later took me to the family business to start developing an e-commerce platform for the optical business. And when we could, we started that. That was around 2012, around that date, 2011 probably, when we started evaluating platforms.

We literally fell upon Magento because one of the partners that we had, had already started developing it, and we had already paid him for a portion of the development.

So we were stuck there. We had to work with Magento, but then it was a very nice relationship, basically. That’s how it started. It started really with random situations that began with my friend and then going into LASIK. Honestly, even to this day, I said, man, that was an easier business than selling glasses.

[00:03:34] There was not so much variety of products, but that’s what brought me to e-commerce in my career because for most of my life before that, I was focused on medical services. I’ve been a paramedic and started selling medical equipment and, after that, services. But that was how I, little by little, started moving towards e-commerce.

[00:04:03] So that was, in a nutshell, how it started.

[00:04:07] Brent: That’s really interesting because I know that one of my first Magento gigs was with a brewing supply company. And they started doing Groupon. This would be like 2010. Their business just exploded with Groupon. It was just crazy how many they did these like little brewing kits that they sold. It was a fantastic way to supercharge things. That was back on Magento enterprise1.10 So way, way back, probably 12 years ago, now that we started doing that. So that’s a significant similarity. So then you developed your internal team at Devlyn that kind of built out your Magento stack.

[00:04:55] Andrew: [00:04:55] Yeah. So after that, when we started, when we saw the development of the Magento store, we noticed that there were a lot of issues. First, they told us it was the enterprise version. And, of course, it wasn’t. It was Community. And, we struggled to work with an agency that used to be very strong in Mexico.

[00:05:15] And the relationship didn’t work out. And so I decided, look, if we’re going to do this. We need to learn how this works, and the only way is to do it ourselves. So I started hiring a whole internal team. So we hired the developers, frontend and backend. We got designers and the entire team, and we started developing our platform on Magento.

[00:05:46] We did the transition. Yes, we did with the help of the previous agency moving from the community version that had a lot of basic mistakes in how they did the development of it to the enterprise version to the present version. If I’m not mistaken, I think it was, is there a 1.13, the last one.

[00:06:08] Brent: [00:06:08] At 1.14 was the last one.

[00:06:11] Andrew: [00:06:11] Okay. So I think I did 1.13, and we launched that one, and that was the first time that I launched a whole site from almost scratch, but it was a different time because at that point, just getting the images of the product was such an ordeal.

[00:06:35] None of our suppliers had the images of the product. So we had to go and bring them in from the stores, photograph them, and they send them back. And around, I’m not lying, about 5% would get broken, just going and coming. And so we had a lot of loss of inventory just moving around products.

[00:07:00] And so it was such an ordeal doing that. But we were able to get. I think in my first launch, I think we had about 800 SKUs, varied between all brands. And then when we launched at the start, you think, it’s so easy you just connect the payment processor and this. But in Mexico, even that was so unprepared, and we got very low authorizations.

[00:07:39] If I’m not joking. I think when I started the tunnel authorization with about 10%. 10% of all the authorization attempts went through. So there was nothing. So you made all your effort, you put up a lever, and they didn’t have the ecosystem that generally supports e-commerce. Now, I see all these people trying to launch e-commerce.

[00:08:06] I said, man, how easy they have it. Now the simplicity of different platforms that exist gets vendors to connect and make it possible for e-commerce to thrive. It didn’t exist in that day in age, especially in Latin America. The US had suitable suppliers and authorization and delivery.

[00:08:36] Probably not Amazon level, but it was good enough. And in Latin America, everything was such an ordeal. And especially in that industry, which was super traditional. That is the optical industry.

[00:08:50] Brent: [00:08:50] I can, remember. We started, I think we started in Mexico in 2014, and I remember thinking that, Hey Mexico, maybe they’re five, ten years behind the US, but they’re going to catch up quickly, and they have, and it has been such a growth experience going through…

[00:09:11] just going through the whole process of all the different payment gateways that are available now, the shipping methods, and then how they’re working with some of these platforms like Magento and Shopify now BigCommerce and VTEX. The experience for the customer has accelerated.

[00:09:32] And especially for the vendors who are building out these stores, you’re right. It has gotten so much easier in Mexico. And I feel that we could, you and I could probably make another whole conversation about both partners and experiences for customers in Mexico and then customer expectations.

[00:09:49] I feel like we could have a whole “let’s get some realism in the e-commerce market” and what a merchant should expect. And then, especially from our side, what should an American agency expect when entering the Mexican market for the first time?

[00:10:08] Andrew: [00:10:08] Of course. One of the things that, when I started my venture, and in competing with you or with SUMMA in the market is how much time it takes to get to their vision. It’s not only us developing the technology. There’s a lot of effort they have to do internally to change the way they operate to be able to internalize e-commerce as something that can and will help.

[00:10:43] accelerate their growth as a company, but it’s not only the technology. The general idea was, we just need a good platform. We need Magento. We need whatever Hybris or whatever. And that is only part of the vision. There’s a lot of internal processes they have to change.

[00:11:02] I remember a merchant at Summa was going to use, for example, BBDA bank commerce which is a big bank and operator. It connects to them before they let you connect through OpenPay, which is a FinTech company. They bought this processor. And they are very low authorizations, but they decided to do that because that’s what they use for their stores.

[00:11:31] but it doesn’t work the same. I imagine you have a lot of stories like that. Just the expectation of the merchants that everything should be just resolved by the partner developing the technology. And that’s not the case.

[00:11:51] Brent: Yeah, we launched the first Magento 2 enterprise store in Mexico in 2015, which I think we were a little bit ahead of ourselves because M2 was launched in 2015.

[00:12:05] I think we started the project when Magento 2 came out, and we finished the project in February of 2016, but I know that PayPal was significantly behind the curve on making sure that their product worked in Mexico. There were a lot of challenges in that, and especially being on a 2.0 project instead of a 2.1 or 2.2. I think inherently, with new software, there’s going to be some bugs.

[00:12:31] So there were many, extremely many bugs when two came out. Not to get into the weeds too much, but 2.0 to 2.1 was just a vast upheaval, just so much work. We don’t have to go into those sorts of details.

[00:12:52] Andrew: [00:12:52] And it’s fantastic after that, it stabilized a lot.

[00:12:57] It’s a lot more stable after 2.2. It’s a lot more manageable now. They were different because if you remember correctly, I think we spoke about this when we met. You launched yours in February.

[00:13:19] I started developing mine when we moved from that 1.13 to 2.0. Our experience also internally was challenging.

[00:13:31] Brent: Yeah. And on a side note, I know I talked to Aaron Grego quite a bit, and he’s such a great guy. He’s at Spacebar now. I think he still owns Pengo, but I think one thing that’s unique about Mexico, and you can correct me if I’m wrong,

[00:13:48] but the relationships among agencies are a little bit different. From my experience, I think that I’ve had a good relationship with Pengo and with, even with Marco and, Aaron and we continue to talk. Even employees that have left Wagento, we’ve been able to continue to speak, and it’s some. In some ways, I feel like it’s a little bit more open.

[00:14:16] Maybe it’s more of a personal relationship that I’ve made. Still, it’s been an exciting experience to see the differences and how businesses work and Mexico compared to how we work in the US.

[00:14:32] Andrew: I do believe that’s something we need to learn from the US. We need to know how to be more.

[00:14:41] open and friendly to support the ecosystem, not certain players. And, I think that’s something we try to do so many times very sporadically. I remember the first Magento event in Mexico. I forget the name that they placed on those Magento events here in Mexico. And I said we need to do them as a team because it will be a lot easier for us to spread the weight of that effort to grow together.

[00:15:26] But that’s a little bit of a Latin America methodology because, of course, we’re a much smaller market. So competition is a lot more fierce than in the US, which is such a large market. You’re not going to fight for one account as much. At the end of the day, you’re always friendly.

[00:15:50] I believe that I had a pretty good relationship with most players in the market because I always try to speak my ideas openly.

[00:16:00] Brent: That’s good. Why don’t you tell us a bit of what you’re doing now? I’m interested in Fairplay. I’ve read some of it on your website.

[00:16:08] It’s in Spanish. So I am continuing to learn Spanish and trying to get better, but give us the elevator pitch and then give us some insights on how you’re helping businesses.

[00:16:23] Andrew: [00:16:23] So basically, we are a revenue-based financing firm for ecommerce or the digital economy in Latin America.

[00:16:33] Right now, we’re only in Mexico. And what makes us different from other financing and ours is that our customers repay their funding based on a percentage of their sales until they finish paying the principle and our commission because there’s no interest. That makes our model very friendly to an ecosystem that has seasonality that retail in general has, and especially ecommerce that is super intensive on certain days during the year. So when they sell more, they’re able to pay more. When they sell less, they pay less. It can even go down to zero if necessary.

[00:17:18] That’s what I got into after being a merchant and then being a partner. I heard about this model personified by Clear Bank. They’re the largest player there in Toronto. It’s not a US Company. It’s a Canadian company based out of Toronto. They started growing and said, man, this is a great model.

[00:17:42] So we brought it to Latin America, And right now we’re in Mexico, and we’ll be launching in other countries in Latin America by the end of this year. So We are venture-backed by a fund in Mexico and a fund in Virginia, and QED investors in Monta Nexca.

[00:18:04] So that’s what we’re doing. It’s an entirely different pace than I was so used to internally. You’re working with customers for them to achieve their dreams. It’s a little bit different, but I love it. I love being part of that ecosystem that supports e-commerce.

[00:18:28] I think it’s super. If I could give anybody feedback regarding this system is to find a way to support the whole ecosystem. You’re going to have a lot of opportunities. At the end of the day, it’s growing leaps and bounds, it’s going fast, and by supporting it, you’ll indeed find a lot of opportunities to grow.

[00:19:00] Brent: So, just to explain, this is for merchants that want to help fund the development of a store or fund some products in their store. Is that what this does?

[00:19:10] Andrew: Yeah, we primarily focused on working capital. So we are financing inventory, marketing, and logistics needs. We are thinking of starting to invest also the development of their platform if it’s short-term development. Not if it’s something that’s going to be launched in a year and a half, but it’s something that is a time frame of six or eight months or four months. We are thinking of doing that. We haven’t done it yet, but we will be piloting some trade credits probably in the near future.

[00:19:49] Brent: So theoretically, somebody could start up a BigCommerce store, and they could get some help from you in terms of marketing their business in Mexico, maybe getting some inventory and working through that process.

[00:20:08] Andrew: Exactly. They do need some history. We need to know that they are moving a product that is getting traction. We can’t start off on day zero with them. We’re not a venture capital fund, but we are in the early stages. Generally, we’ll start contemplating financing when they are eight months from the start. Then we’ll be willing to do some financing. So we generally connect to, for example, their BigCommerce account or to their Magento store or to Shopify, to their Google analytics and their Facebook ads and the Google ads and pulling their information and then make them an offer. And the good thing is because we do a lot of evaluation of their knowledge, we’re able to give them those data points. We analyze. We present them their CLV, the customer lifetime value, their TAC analysis, their marketing correlation analysis of their marketing efforts, and what campaigns correlate more for their growth. We don’t get into attribution. We also normalize growth trends. And we’re going to do benchmarking too, and some inventory analysis. So we give those analyses with the objective for them to get better insights into how their business is running. And this is done for free to any merchant acquiring financing or not from us. They can use it for free.

[00:22:08] Brent: Okay. That’s great. And just to give you a heads up here. The sun came out overhead, and it started to freeze my computer. So I had to move. I didn’t expect that to happen. I’m trying my new outdoor home studio. It’ll be a good segment for what to do and what not to do when setting up an outdoor studio. Don’t set it up where the sun’s going to be in an hour.

[00:22:42] Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

[00:22:46] Brent: Okay. I’m interested in how you’re helping merchants perform.

So it sounded like you’re helping them after their store launches or not after, but like during the process and allowing them to see how they can be more successful in doing that. And of course, that’s good for you, and it’s good for them.

[00:23:16] Andrew: Yeah, but the initial hypothesis was that a lot of the venture backing funding are using their money, their resources in marketing, in buying in, and things that are not midterm based that’s generally what you should use your money for. What we find, what we’re trying to finance, is that part of their business that grows, that grows in demand. You need more money. The more you grow, it doesn’t stay static. So for them not to be worried about that amount of growth in the capital that they need. Now, if they don’t use that, we can give them insights into how they’re doing. So, for example, we analyzed their marketing things like cost per click CPM, ROI could bridge your weights by platform, things like that. We also see what their average revenue per user is and catch all of these different e-commerce indicators. And most of them will have [the data]. Some of them will have them very up-to-date, some will once you do them, but we think if we can help you with an immediacy without you having to exert effort to have them, then probably you’ll be able to review them and be more knowledgeable. You’ll see the trend and how the trend is moving along. Probably sometimes you’ll find good moments and say, Hey, we’re doing really well, and sometimes you say we have to watch out, we’ll go to dangerous territory. So that’s where we’re going. We were never gonna replace a specialized marketing vendor or that platform. No, we can’t do that, but we will be able to give you a broad sense of how your business is doing. If you would be evaluated by a VC or by a bank or by a financial institution to let you know you’re doing good or doing bad, but one that knows about e-commerce that I want to make that difference, not just a financial institution that doesn’t know anything about companies just cares about cash flow because we are going to do, for example, unit economics and cash analysis too. But we’ll have those lines later this year. Yeah. And I would say that’s even more important to the merchant, even than a marketing company. A marketing company is going to be necessary, but I think what you’re doing is helping them to see. How they’re, how they can maximize their ROI out of the investment and, giving them an opportunity to analyze some of the marketing efforts they’re doing in terms of how do they return.

[00:26:34] Andrew: How can we give you business metrics that help you understand how your e-commerce business is doing? Not only specifically in marketing. Also, how’s it doing in the long term acquisition of customers, because if the trend is going up consistently, that’s going to become very difficult to sustain in the midterm.

[00:27:00] How can we analyze different business-related metrics to help you understand if you’re on the right path or what decisions you can make to help you be more profitable?

[00:27:16] Brent: What is the typical business you work with, the typical size business?

[00:27:23] Andrew: Now it’s a pretty diverse set. The majority are pretty early-stage organizations between six and eight months since launch; those are the youngest on average to, let’s say, a year and a half in operation, on average, between the one-half to the two-year mark of operation. They’ll be selling monthly for about $40, $50K. Some are going to be smaller. We do have a minor start as somebody that’s selling $7K. If they’re selling $7K a month, then we’re willing to evaluate financing. And so that would be the starting cohort. And then the average will be between $40K-$50K in sales a month. The other aspect that’s important is that they’re growing. They have to have a positive trending growth right now in e-commerce. If you’re not growing when the whole market is growing at such a fast pace, that’s not very tolerant of being able to get financing if you’re not growing.

[00:29:01] Brent: And do you look for some minimum amount of time that they’ve been in business, or do you take on entirely new startups?

[00:29:08]Andrew: No, it has to be at least eight months of total operation for us to start being willing to give them a loan. Most of the time, most of ours will be around the 18-month mark of the process for giving them loans.

[00:29:30] Brent: And I think you and I are both entrepreneurs. So you know, that’s very risky. Eight months is very risky. So that’s great that you’re doing that for vendors. Are you getting a lot of exciting new startups that have great ideas in the ecommerce space? And I guess I should back up. Is it only ecommerce businesses that you’re doing it for? Is it retail as well?

[00:29:54] Andrew: Only e-commerce and marketplace vendors now. We do have some SaaS solutions and B2B tech that we’ve given loans as pilots. But we are seeing a lot of growth in marketplace vendors. It’s crazy how many people are going into selling on Amazon and selling on MercadoLibre. It’s such a diverse ecosystem that is growing because so many large retailers are launching their marketplaces without giving a lot of effort to bring in third-party sellers. So we’re working with them. And we’re also working with e-commerce in any type of industry B2B or B2C. Mostly, of course, it’s B2C that’s by far the largest market. And to answer your question. Yeah. Exciting models that people are coming out with. With a lot of offerings in this moment of COVID selling from oxygen concentrators to people that are bringing really good brands. So that’s one of the things that is giving me a lot of good feelings about where Latin America is going now. There are a lot of people developing their brands direct to consumer brands that they’re manufacturing and bringing to them. And, generally, that’s where I see the most growth in the people that create a brand that has a certain charm to it, a particular specific target market, and they’re bringing them to launch, and they’re getting traction. One guy that just started, for example, selling peanut butter, he created a brand, and he diversified into different kinds of butter, different types and is gaining traction. So it’s been fascinating. If I could recommend anybody, if you want to start e-commerce now, don’t start reselling somebody else’s brand. Develop your own brand. Think about it. It doesn’t have to be something super complex. Just give it your image. Your style of communication targeted the market and went to it. And because the feedback is so fast, you’ll be able to move quickly after that. If you’re, listening,

[00:32:46] Brent: Do you work like Shark Tank where you have a panel and people come in, and you do some interviews, and then, you help them in their journey.

[00:33:00] Andrew: Honestly, no. We do have a tremendous consulting-type selling process now that we understand their dream of what they’re doing. But at the end of the day, we are very data-driven, and if the breadth is there, we’re going to find it. But what we have noticed is in those first two years of operation, a lot of them need a lot of feedback on topics that probably are not their strong suit. Some are good in branding but not good in inventory management or marketing, or something else. And we can’t do it for them. That is the line. We can’t do it for you because it would be like your bank giving you a credit card and then spending the money for you. It would be a conflict of interest, but we are bringing in experts on certain topics. We’re bringing in marketing. We’re going to have one marketing expert, one inventory expert, and one branding expert, and these services will be available for our customers but not the free version users.

They’ll be able to get some guidance on look into this, look into that. You can focus on this. We see this missing and, at least they can point them in the direction as a coach, let’s say. No, you should be looking to go that way. Because these are the basics, you need to cover. I imagine you agree with me, Brent, that a lot of the problems at that early stage are basics, are not complicated issues, but it’s just basic steps that because it’s such a broad thing to do e-commerce, that the basic steps need to be covered to be able to be successful.

[00:35:12] Brent: I think some of the things that maybe you learn later in entrepreneurial life and it certainly, for me, it took me about 15, 20 years to figure some of these things out would be just the steps that are outlined in what we’ve learned in Entrepreneurs Organization, or EOS, or one of those other systems that help you run your business. Do you introduce customers into EOS Mexico, or anything like that, or even Accelerator, the Accelerator program inside the Entrepreneurs Organization, to help them get some guidance from other entrepreneurs?

[00:35:47] Andrew: No, but that is a great idea, Brent, and I will be taking that and talking to EO Mexico City, and you’re around Latin America too. If they have Accelerator programs to see if somebody wants to be able to go into one of these programs for us to at least point them in, or you can look into this or that or this other program to be able to talk to them. What we will be doing, and we haven’t started yet, is having round tables, like power lunches. Like you remember the EO PowerLunch to be able to speak with other people that are knowledgeable to connect our customers to each other. At the end of the day, especially after COVID, there’s been a lot less networking inside of the industry, and we want to facilitate that integration. And now that digital integration has become more acceptable, and people are more open to it. I think we want to do exciting events to connect with each other. So people that know a lot about a subject can share with each other.

[00:37:09] Brent: Yeah, as soon as we can start safely traveling again, I’ll be the first person down there to be at your English-speaking table and to talk to other entrepreneurs. I get a kick out of that. We have a local venture capital, a small venture capital company called Traction Capital. They are not doing what you’re doing, and it’s a very small scale. It’s more of an angel investors type thing. And they are specifically looking at The Entrepreneurs Accelerator program. To find vendors and to help vendors through that process. So I do think that there’s a lot of value that both sides could get out of it to help entrepreneurs. And I think one of the principles in EOS is that everybody has a number or there’s a number that’s assigned to things, and you start tracking those things. And the number-driven part of it is where many entrepreneurs miss out because if you don’t follow it, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, it could be anything.

[00:38:17] Andrew: And to keep it there on your mind, and don’t get lost between all the issues you have because entrepreneurship has such an amount of work that falls on a few people in the organization things get lost. So being able to keep track of what is essential to the business is vital. And that’s what I told my partner. We are in the finance industry, but our customers are not, and they don’t want to talk about finance every day of the year. They want to be able to have a financing partner that can help from time to time, and they want to do it with that partner. They want to stop thinking about it and run their business, and we forget that. And I think sometimes I would forget that also when I was in Summa, I know you think about the technologies. Also important for the business because it helps the operation so much, but it’s not the only thing. There’s the brand, and there’s the marketing, and there are all these other aspects that need to be taken care of too.

[00:39:38] Brent: We have about 10 minutes left. Let’s wrap things up around platforms. I would imagine that you are going to see a lot of different types of platforms, and I’m very interested in seeing which ones you see that are successful in Mexico. And then, at what point do people choose different types of platforms?

[00:40:05]Andrew: I’ll give you that now herein, FairPlay, I think what we’ve seen by a large amount is generally Shopify. Most people are starting with Shopify. I mean because I can understand why it’s so easy to start. I do see a lot of people also using WooCommerce, and honestly, I’m not wildly convinced with the people that use WooCommerce. I don’t know if it’s the best, most sound decision. But I do see that a lot of the mid-market enterprises are really fighting it off between platforms like Magento and VTEX. I think VTEX has a lot of growth in the Latin American market. They are trying really hard to push in. And after this last round of financing, they got from SoftBank. I see them growing their teams and their support teams and the noise they’re making in the Latin American market. I used to be very partial to solutions like Magento, and I still have my heart fully with them, but I do believe that these are solutions are getting very competitive with how they’ve been able to support merchants and their needs,

[00:41:55] Brent: Yeah. I would be interested in seeing why people would choose Shopify over VTEX. And I would imagine it’s probably a cost thing, like licensing. I think Shopify is reasonably cheap.

[00:42:09] Andrew: Yeah. And at least Shopify, because it’s very self-service people generally don’t interact with anybody at Shopify to start the business. They do it in their home. It’s pretty easy to create. I think BigCommerce, for example, versus Shopify. My understanding is that they are also very self-service. If I’m not mistaken, they just don’t have that much branding in Mexico compared to Shopify. That is very top of mind in the customer’s mind. For VTEX, people don’t associate it with. I’m going to start my business with VTEX because it’s not as well known to be so self-service.

So I think, to answer the question, I think it’s just that self-service stage of Shopify that people really feel it’s so easy to start off with.

[00:43:06] Brent: Yeah. So just full disclosure. We are now a VTEX partner and just closed our first VTEX deal in Mexico, and we’re a BigCommerce partner. So part of this is learning why people are choosing which platform. And I agree that Shopify does have much better branding in Mexico than BigCommerce. I think that the platforms are very similar and work very similarly. And we don’t have time to get into the specific differences between the two, but it will be interesting to watch and see what platform shines in Mexico. It is a different market than the US, and there are so many various aspects of the market. As a Mexican merchant, what do you expect out of your platform, and why is it that you chose this one or the other one? I think that’ll be interesting to see what happens.

And I wouldn’t even say over the next five years. It’s all going to happen very rapidly now. And I think the growth is going to happen exponentially.

[00:44:19] Andrew: Yeah. I imagine you remember when Magento 2 came out. It was such a leap from where it was. And of course, with all the difficulties it brought, it was such a leap from there and then 2015 and 2016 a jump.

It’s 2021, and things have changed dramatically. It’s hard to see how Hybris and SalesForce, and Adobe Magento will be able to reconquer these tiny businesses, especially Magento, that they used to be the owners of. The owners of the “I’m starting my e-commerce from scratch” they would start it with Magento. Or am I mistaken with this historical thought? Now it’s so difficult for them to come into that small market, and if they give breathing room for them to grow and these self-services are able to continue servicing them, then what market is going to be left for them? Because replatforming is a nightmare.

[00:45:45] Brent: Yeah. I think we’re just about out of time. I thank you for meeting with me and doing this. It’s been an exciting conversation. I believe that we could probably have some more topics that we could talk about. Specifically, that would be good. I always like to give a shameless plug at the end. So why don’t you give a shameless plug for FairPlay and how people can get in contact with you. And I will also add that we will, specifically, put the subtitles for this episode in Spanish, as well as English.

[00:46:23] Andrew: Thank you, Brent. It’s been a pleasure really to be with you in this podcast. I am very honored to know you and see you grow through all the years we’ve known each other. If anybody is looking for financing for their e-commerce or a marketplace vendor or SaaS or B2B tech and you want to finance for working capital, and you’re growing, you can come to our website and getfairplay.com. Hopefully, we can be your financing partners, so you can focus on your business and not worry about having the resources to do it. That is my shameless plug.

[00:47:15] Brent: Great. Thank you, Andrew. It’s been a lot of fun.

[00:47:19] Andrew: Thank you. Enjoy the paradise over there.

[00:47:23] Brent: I’ll do my best to enjoy myself in Hawaii now that I’m out of the sun.

[00:47:27] Andrew: Okay. Take care. Thanks.