The Data Behind the Deal: B2B Distribution Through an FP&A Lens with Ryan Cosby

Aaron Sheehan: Foreign. Welcome back to the B2B Uncut podcast. I am your host, Aaron Sheehan. We are still sponsored by Oro Commerce. And I'm joined by, um, longtime personal friend Ryan Cosby. And you may be asking yourselves, why do I want to hear what one of Aaron's personal friends has to say about distribution manufacturing? How could this possibly be relevant to me? So, Ryan, why don't you introduce yourself and explain to everybody why it's relevant to them.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah. Ryan Cosby. I'm in, uh, financial planning and analysis for a distribution company, Beauty Products, here in Springfield. And we're not just limited to Springfield. It's pretty much all over the Midwest and Southeast United, uh, States. A little bit of a recovering banker, used, uh, to be in banking for about 10 years. Did some commercial lending and analytics work there. And just bringing to the table into a new setting. I've only been in FP and A for about, uh, about two years now. But into that setting is just a very wide knowledge of a bunch of different types of industries. And so it's really, I feel like, helped the company, but also I've been able to kind of dig in a little bit more rather than just moving on from deal to deal, move, uh, on. And now it's. We're focusing in on one company, and it's, it's really fun.

Aaron Sheehan: That's good. Well, tell us a little bit of the company you work for. What do they sell? You said beauty supplies.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah. So it's mostly hair care. Uh, we do su. Do some skin care.

Aaron Sheehan: Not a customer. Yeah, it's really clean.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah. No, and you wouldn't be able to anyway. So we're, it's a very, it's very niche. Um, we supply to actually other distributors, and so those distributors are actually smaller. So if you think about if you. Or if somebody would go in to get a haircut.

Aaron Sheehan: Me, If I had hair.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah. So if somebody went in to go get a haircut, they're going in. Their salon usually has a back bar. And what we call a back bar is when they take you back after cutting your hair, they're going to shampoo it, they're going to condition it, they're going to put their product in it. That's also a little bit of a sales pitch for them, because in front of the store, they typically have a retail section and you can purchase from them. Well, we sell to them at, uh, distributor prices, and then they are then selling to their customers. So we're selling to those individuals, to other businesses. Now those businesses can Be as huge salons and I'm talking like chain salons. Right. The types of products we sell are a little bit more on the higher end. So we're not going into a great clips necessarily, but we are selling into ones that maybe have 10 in the state of Texas. And you are doing a bunch of spa services. Right, Right. And they may have 20 chairs or we can sell and we do a lot of our business to one individual chair. So that means a person who has one, they're in a small little strip center, maybe have one chair and their friend and they just want to set out some retail space and get their color in and everything like so it's, we try to be a one stop shop. So we try to sell the combs, the, you know, the shampoo, the color, the conditioner, the care line for the retail. But we're not going to be somebody who you can buy, you know, 80 different brands from. We try to keep it narrow, focused so that our salespeople can be kind of the most knowledgeable they can in those specific areas.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it. Sounds like a very uh, sort of traditional rep led distribution business in a lot of, lot of respects. And again if you're watching this you can see that Ryan clearly consumes his own product.

Ryan Cosby: Yes.

Aaron Sheehan: So one of the things I like talking about with folks in the industry here is the digital orders and E commerce. Now I know that you guys have an E commerce site. You say you sell through multiple channels. It's often said that digital orders are cheaper to serve than obviously there's less sort of like infrastructure and staff and potentially fewer touch points along the way, possibly you know, lower cost of sales. You're an FP and a, you have to prove or disprove that. Walk us through how you model cost to serve on a self uh, serve order versus one that goes through a rep. I don't want to get into the, obviously the financials of your privately held company, but how do you model that? And can you, can you prove or disprove that? Is this a knowable thing?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, I think we can to an extent. We wouldn't be a very good accounting department if we couldn't kind of keep track of those costs. Right. But to an extent we do know that things are so intertwined. Right. When we, we think we have, you know, charts and we have plenty of data that backs this up. But our most valuable customers to us on a transaction basis, on an overall basis are those that shop all our channels. That is brick and mortar. Oh, uh, okay. That is through the rep. So through the rep can be, if they are going directly to them and taking the order down, wr it down and emailing it in later to whoever. And online, those are our most valuable customers. So we see it as intertwined like that. But you're right, our distribution channel through E Com is our most efficient and cheapest channel. And it is because we put a. A lot of money into it. Right. Uh, a lot of research into it. And we have a lot of data going back to who I said we serve. Those people who we serve have to have a cosmetology license.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay.

Ryan Cosby: And so even if you wanted to come off the street, you can't just come in off the street and buy from us. It's not possible.

Aaron Sheehan: When you made the comment earlier about how I couldn't buy from you, it wasn't just a crack about baldness.

Ryan Cosby: It was not. It was.

Aaron Sheehan: No, it was a supply chain.

Ryan Cosby: It was the crack about Bulbus and literally. Right, but you would have to have a cosmetology license and you'd have to have an account number. And so the beauty of that is we have a lot of data on those individuals, buying habits by individual, because they're not able to come in off the street and just buy anonymously. They have to tell us their account number.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: And they're used to that. Right. So it's not, it's not a burden for them. If they were going to a different beauty supply, they have to do the exact same thing. So that gives us a lot of data into that. So where our E Comm really plugs in is we can, you know, make that their E Comm space really tailored to them and what we, you know, what we want to show them. Also our reps are very tuned in and able to know exactly what they're looking for. And so this data of how that person shops makes it very easy. So while you say, yes, E Com is the cheapest, I don't think that if we just had an E Com presence, we would have as much data on those individuals as we could. Because it's the rep talking to that individual pushing those brands. It is them. What are they browsing on E Comm and what are they maybe leaning towards? So, yeah, again, cheaper, but without the rep or without the store, we're just not really, when we're not in tune as we'd like to be if we didn't have every single one of those channels.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it. That makes complete sense. And something you said is really interesting because you sort of Implied that the reps can see what their customers are doing online. Mhm. Is that, is that, do I understand that correctly?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Sheehan: So.

Ryan Cosby: And it's not down to like, you know, we have down to the clicks, right. Where we can say this is what they're clicking on. We're not giving that, that's too much information for the rep. If the rep had maybe 10 customers it would be perfect. Right. And they'd really. But they're not. They have hundreds of hundreds of customers. But we are getting down to able to tell them what lost sales were. So if they have put something in their cart and they're lost sales, we can let them know, hey, this is what we lost on those sales. Whether it was unfulfilled or they just wound up not right. You know, we want to show those representatives what the interest is. We want to help them give them all the tools to make the sell. And in that same sense I think a little bit of it could be lost is if the rep is scared of E Comm because it could take away some of their sales. Right. We're not allowing that. We are also commissioning those reps on those E comm sales.

Aaron Sheehan: That's their custom critical point. I feel like this has been said on this podcast I don't know how many times over the last couple of years. But please, if you're listening to this, please comp your reps on E comm orders if you want E Commerce to succeed. And it sounds like you want E Commerce to succeed because it's an enormous wealth of data for your reps and then use. As long as they're not threatened by it or scared of it.

Ryan Cosby: Absolutely, absolutely. And I can't tell you how important that is. And they're still, even though they're getting commission on that, they're still buying. You're not going to get day one somebody saying, well, you know, for instance, we think the best use of it and has been is uh, far of our app is the rep to sit there with them and allow them to order then rather than the repping it on their app. Right. They used to be a back end app. Now it's front end for the customer and order through it. It's so much easier to sit there with the customer the first couple of times and do that and then let the customer start ordering. Right. That's a good entryway into the E Comm space for that customer because they're used to seeing the rep using the app and they feel it's safe. And so that's helped a lot.

Aaron Sheehan: That's fantastic. And it's. What's amazing is that we didn't really rehearse any of this ahead of time and you're really hitting a lot of the greatest hits of how we go to market and sort of position aura. Um, so thanks for that and I appreciate it. This is going to be clipped up by. My social media and content team is going to be so thrilled with everything that you're saying. Uh, let's talk about something boring. Pricing. Oh yeah. So I know that typically, and actually I don't think we've talked about this before, but pricing comes up a lot as a sort of a complexity piece. I was at a B2B trade show a few months ago on a panel and somebody in the audience, we were taking questions from the audience, from the audience said, you know, like, what's the one thing that, you know, distributors can do to sort of like right now, how to sort of improve their lives. And it was, you know, a bunch of practitioners. We were, we were up there and I said smooth out your pricing. And everyone was. And then we just talked about pricing for like 20 minutes as a group with the audience. Um, it really resonated with everybody. But there's so many typically, especially when you have a rep, heavy business what you get. Often there's a lot of very custom pricing sheets that are for a, uh, specific account that the rep needed approval on to win the account. And then once it's won it tends to just stay there forever. And so over time you get typically lots of very bespoke little agreements for specific one off customers. And then when you try to manage that or do any kind of modeling or any kind of like what is our margin? And it becomes very complicated because you don't have a lot of streamlined inputs. First off, do you guys have that kind of complex pricing at all or is it, have you fixed that in your two years, uh, your two years at Salon Service? Have you fixed that? And does that complexity cost you anything in terms of like either margin leakage or like operational overhead for you?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, you're describing exactly how we operate. Right. And it's still to this day. Um, and just because we have reps and exactly like you said, they're still going out and making those deals asking for that permission and then small little agreements per individual. Right now those agreements are kind of, I would say they're not piecemeal, but they're pretty customizable per agreement. Right. So it can be hard and tracking that down at the end of a month, whenever your margin is off. And okay, so being a distributor and I'm sure a lot of your people will know our margin is pretty steady.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: So if it's a little bit off, uh, we're freaking out.

Aaron Sheehan: It's been a weird year for that.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. But being able to not track it down to a certain skew and saying, oh, what's going on? It's overall, you know, it's over these, you know, 500 different SKUs. I've got to find out what's going on. That is the hard part. And that is exactly what typically happens. Whenever we say, okay, who purchased a lot this month? Who has a discount? And you could say, yes, they have a discount check mark. Got it. But what is the discount? It's not on all brands. It's not on all skus of all those brands. So we have to hunt that down. We have a great system we use click for our, uh, BI tool. And it does a really good job of drilling down. So I can tell you kind of a bunch of discounts, right, that happen in the month, and then I can drill down into those, which is awesome. I really love that. The problem is, is that you could drill down really deep. And maybe I have a, you know, $180,000 Delta and I found $6,000 of it.

Aaron Sheehan: Right. And it's full.

Ryan Cosby: Exactly. So then, then you can make inferences on the entire portfolio and say, oh, it's probably a bunch of these. Right. That are doing that, but we don't really know. Um, so it takes a lot more. That is one place where I think we could do a lot better. But it's because a discount is a discount, whether you're getting it because it's baked into your contract or you're getting it because you made a large order on a coupon tier base.

Aaron Sheehan: It's it.

Ryan Cosby: And yeah, they have certain. They. You have to say, okay, I have to buy so much of this product. Then it kicks in like it is. It's really hard to track down. That is. That is a. When we have months that are a little bit, you know, up and down on our margin, that's usually a big culprit is a, uh, discount account. And it was because we had a very large customer order, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. And that really affected it. But it's hidden inside of there because it just looks like normal sales. Right.

Aaron Sheehan: Top line. Top line looks amazing. And then you dig into the actual post and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. That's. That's interesting. Do you. How does that work in an E commerce setting then? When. If I'm a customer with a, with a bespoke pricing agreement with you that I signed up, how does that get. Is that represented in my online price or is that the case where I just call my rep? Because like the rep knows what the real price.

Ryan Cosby: Right, Right. Yeah. No, it is on. Luckily we are able to do that for their online. It's. It's very. I feel like we're nimble enough to be able to code that into our ERP and then it push upwards towards the, towards the E Comm site so that we're lucky to do that. But still at the same time, there are some nuances because when somebody orders, as I mentioned earlier, they have a back bar which I'm using on my clients and I have somebody, I have something that I'm using in retail, I'm going to sell to my clients. Some of that's taxed and some of that's not.

Aaron Sheehan: Oh.

Ryan Cosby: And so it makes for very complicated ways of giving discounts. Right. So our system has to specifically. And just because I buy something doesn't mean that I have a leader. Right. Leaders usually for the back bar, but I can sell a leader to a client. If somebody really wanted a leader of shampoo. Right. It's, uh, there to buy.

Aaron Sheehan: They got a lot of hair, long hair.

Ryan Cosby: So.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: So what's to say that all leaders are this certain?

Aaron Sheehan: Maybe our VP of product at Oro, uh, possibly he has amazing hair. He. Maybe he's buying leaders of the years

Ryan Cosby: of product and maybe, you know, I don't know if you're eating it or whatever. Right. It's, it's, it's possible it smells good, but that is part of it is that it is, it's complex. It's a little muddy. So I can't. Not everything is just every time somebody purchase X product, it is used X way. And so if I'm going back and thinking, okay, how can I say that they should deserve the discount on this? It's up to the customer to say I'm buying it for this specific way. So we can muddy some of those details. So you're not always 100% relying on, on exactly what it was marked as purchased for the reason started.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay. Uh, the sales tax situation sounds somewhat complicated as well. Do you guys have a provider that does that or.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, so we use Vertex. Uh, yeah, Vertex. Very popular, you know. Yeah.

Aaron Sheehan: Our partners.

Ryan Cosby: Yes.

Aaron Sheehan: Several customers using that.

Ryan Cosby: Yes. Yes, Vertex. And you know that takes. We used to have a full time person doing that back in the day and I don't, I think it would take two people now constantly updating our ERP with those rates and then reconciling at the end of the month and then what goes to the. There's just no way, there's no way we could possibly get better than what.

Aaron Sheehan: This is why software exists.

Ryan Cosby: Right.

Aaron Sheehan: Well, speaking of software, so you mentioned that you have an erp. Yeah. Obviously finance is often very heavily sort of like dealing with erp. But you mentioned click earlier as a sort of your BI tool. And I also know from knowing you and also from knowing your wife for even longer that you are uh, spreadsheet people. You are Excel people.

Ryan Cosby: Yes.

Aaron Sheehan: It is like a family, it is like a love language in your house.

Ryan Cosby: Absolutely.

Aaron Sheehan: So commerce obviously happens in the ERP at some level. Like every order is going to flow into that absolutely doesn't happen inside of the spreadsheet. It doesn't happen inside of qlik. How do you go about the data handoff between all of these different systems and how sort of like clean is that? I know you're often sort of staying late at the end of the month. Uh, yeah. To deal with this. But like walk me through, walk the audience through a little bit. The fact that the system of record for where the business is happening is not the system that you're using to do all of your reporting for fpa.

Ryan Cosby: Right, right. And, and I will say is that our ERP is pretty, it's very tailored to what we're doing. It is an older ERP, um, but it is very niche. It says called System 2000. Um, it's very niche and we've got it very set out with exactly what we want.

Aaron Sheehan: I uh, can never change. This is a frequent conversation. Yeah.

Ryan Cosby: But at the same time it does what we want it to do. It's getting the data out because it's an old system reporting this wasn't a big deal. Right now it's getting that data out and that's what our BI tool is helping us do. And so we're uploading from our system 2000 ERP into a data warehouse and then it is spitting it out tables into qlik, which then makes it easy for us to view. Right. Makes it easy for a dashboard builder to then build a dashboard or whatever they want. So that handoff is pretty clean. It is down to, if you were to ask anybody else in the organization that doesn't deal with it on the back end, they're going to say, I wish it was more constant, Quicker, quicker data. Right. Everybody's always going to say, no matter what erp, they want it, they push the button, send. They want to be able to see the receipt. Right. They, um, want to see the invoice. That's just not how it works. So we update every so often throughout the day. But that data is pretty clean. Right? Right. So, I mean, to the point where the. In the morning, where I'm getting statements that are reconciled between the data warehouse and our BI tool, and looking at those to make sure they're exact on the dollar. And so. And that's how I check to make sure, hey, we're good.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: And everybody else is doing their checks as well. The accounting portion of that we're still getting out directly out of the erp, which is spreadsheets. And so that part is hard. Whenever your chart of accounts is operating in Excel, and then your BI tool can spit out in Excel, but essentially your sub ledger, what I'm using to reconcile those at the end of the month is nice and beautifully written and easy to dissect, and it's maybe not completely jiving with it. Right. Because I'm very vague over here in my chart of accounts, and then I'm very detailed over here. And you can easily take one little subset out and it's going to filter out a bunch of data. Right. And so you really have to know your ERP and know what it's telling you, and then know what your BI tool is telling you. And so that's very important. And so I think that's where my job, a lot of it lies, is knowing this account over here really means these eight subsets of types of income over here.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it. Yeah. And I'm sure you have customers where there's like six nested DBAs and they show up in different ways. Oh, absolutely. Because of acquisition or a hundred percent renaming and things like that.

Ryan Cosby: 100%. You try to group those as best as you can, but like you said, through acquisition or just age, you, uh, know, uh, Covid was a hard time. We. We've existed since the 80s. Right. Code was a hard time. And so there's a lot of salons that shut down and came back up out of COVID and. And now they're a totally different name, but they want to know what their purchases were back, you know, wherever they want to feel like you know them. So it's really hard to say that. Oh, yeah, no, we've got you back into the 90s. It's just not. Not true.

Aaron Sheehan: No. That. That. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. But like, yeah, talk about an industry that got, uh. Yeah, probably got hit pretty hard there. So I guess walk us through a little bit what the end of the month looks like for you and any kind of advice you'd have for anybody else. That's. That's sort of like trying to figure out how to go through the same process where I've got transactional data in one side, I've got a chart of accounts over here. How do I make them match up? And then presumably there are some level of compliance and reporting that you have to do for both tax reasons and regulatory reasons. So, like, first off, is that a youth sport or is that a team sport? That is.

Ryan Cosby: It is a I sport. But I will say that it has gotten so much better. Our BI tool is only about, uh, as long as I've been there, just a little bit before. So everybody's kind of learning it as we go, right? I just had the luxury of being born in it, you know? And so I think it is my job. I see it as. My job is to get people comfortable with it, because I don't need to be the only one. We need to create a wizard's tower where I'm the only one who knows exactly what's going on. We want everybody to get in on the fun.

Aaron Sheehan: He says the fun of it. Yes.

Ryan Cosby: So I think that's. That's a big thing, is to constantly, whenever I'm here, sometimes I'm just in meetings to sit there and say, oh, I heard a keyword. I just want everybody to know that this means this. Right? And that is some of a portion of my job is to kind of sit there and remind people that what they're really talking about over here, if you really want to talk about it, is this, when you say that word, right? And that is something that requires our team to be a little bit curious.

Aaron Sheehan: Right?

Ryan Cosby: You have to. You can't just say, oh, I know what this means. You have to kind of be like, I think I know what this means. Is that. Right. And ask the right person. Right? And it's not always me. It's sometimes our business analysts, sometimes it's our IT director. Right? Um, and so I think that is a very important part of my job is to listen to those keywords and help people understand that. But it's also part of their job. And we have a great team on all sides, not just accounting. It's our purchasing. It's a lot of different people in there who are curious enough to want to find out how their job relates to our BI tool and how they can. Because then once we're all on the BI tool, we're all speaking the same language, right? And they can then take that language and go and know what it means over here if we all can speak this main language here. So that is something that we are actively doing at, uh, Salon Service Group and something that we would love to do better. But at the end of the month, it is my job to get those people to say, hey, this is what happened to margin. We know we're five points off. It is discounts. They know what that means. Accounting knows what that means over here. But I need to then go to our sales team and say, why did we give a discount? This is a large order. Are they going to purchase next quarter or are they going to purchase next month? Right. And so that is. That's part of it too. It's talking between those two. And we are getting a lot better where accounting can just go to here and say, oh, this is what that means.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay. Okay. So the end of the month, I mentioned your. You're exporting a lot of data out of the ERP into the data warehouse it's going into qlik. You're matching that up. You're chasing discrepancies. You're sort of forensically trying to reconstruct. Why did our margin go down? You know, maybe for the brand of this product line or in this customer account. So you talked a little sort of sidebar a little bit around Vertex, sort of like handling a lot of your. The tax calculation sort of into that for you. One of the conversations that we're having a lot now at Oro is where AI fits into the sort of reporting and reconciliation piece period. And the fact that you do have all that institutional knowledge that is sort of doing. You're doing pattern matching, right? As a team, you're pattern matching information and trying to sort of like uncover the truth. Are there AI pilots going on in the organization specifically around any of these sort of like FP and a work workflows that would look to either make the reporting easier or the matching up basically of two different forms of structured data. How do I make them match up AIs? LLMs in general are pretty decent at that. Is that something that you guys are looking into or is that it hasn't hit the point where the value is there for you to.

Ryan Cosby: I think the value Is actually, we just came out of a meeting on this just recently, um, with Qlik. And so I think the value is that there is so much data in this tool. I mean, we drill down to the invoice level sku. I mean, it is, it's everything about a customer, about a transaction, that it's really hard for somebody to grasp the data that they can get from it. By. And, um, by they, I mean a sales team member or a management team member who is kind of up here needs to stay up here at 10,000ft.

Aaron Sheehan: They have click access.

Ryan Cosby: They do. Everybody in the company has click access. I mean, down to everybody.

Aaron Sheehan: That's amazing.

Ryan Cosby: It is. It is great. It's great. And not everybody can build a financial statement from it. Right, sure. But we, I mean, you can. If you're in purchasing, you absolutely can see what, um, Sally Salon bought yesterday and bought back in 23.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: It's that detailed level because. And this is where I think AI can really help, since everybody has that level. There is no problem with somebody coming to me or coming to our business analyst or IT director to say, ooh, can I get a dashboard that looks like this? You know, in the next couple months, asking and saying, hey, is there any correlation between sales of this brand and these 20 customers to AI and says, oh, yeah, there absolutely is. And then that. Cueing us to build a dashboard or AI building that dashboard at some point.

Aaron Sheehan: Well, that's what you want because once you in the, you're in the custom dashboard business, you're always a custom dashboard business. That's what I feel. And also people's willingness, uh, to continue using a custom dashboard five minutes after they have answered the one question that they have is very low. And you end up, uh, with a lot of abandoned dashboards.

Ryan Cosby: A hundred percent. Yeah. Are you sure you don't work where I'm, I've been there.

Aaron Sheehan: My mat.

Ryan Cosby: Um, so that's exactly it. And that's where we think AI will help. So it's kind of doing. What I'm doing is sitting in those meetings, but it's more people inquiring, inquiring, this, this AI that knows the data points that we have and say, I think I can get this from our data. And it's saying, yeah, there's a correlation. No, there's not. Or let's look at it and say, maybe it's not here, it's somewhere else. Right in this data. So that is where we see the value coming up. And pretty soon. And I think that's the Last point of the buy in where somebody's not nervous to come to somebody who has this click knowledge, this wizards tower that I was talking about and approach that and just be able to of on the side say is this in here?

Aaron Sheehan: Is this. Well yeah, it's a faster way. It's a, it's, it's faster, faster servant basically into the data. So are, are and you said this was a meeting with Qlik. Is this a sort of a feature that Qlik sort of like unlocks uh, for people? Are you, are you guys looking at your own sort of like having a corporate like Gemini or Claude or account?

Ryan Cosby: It's yeah it's not there yet because we do so much in Qlik. Like we'll be using Qlik's agentic AI essentially for, for that, that process. So it's, it's through them it's just

Aaron Sheehan: turning on a feature basically.

Ryan Cosby: It's pretty much turning on a feature. Yep, yep yep. So right now it's all right. It's all about licenses. So it's keeping the licenses low and then kind of building it out and letting.

Aaron Sheehan: Yes. Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean yeah. Margins are low in distribution. They can't just go uh, turn on every feature for.

Ryan Cosby: Oh I would love to, I would love to make m my job.

Aaron Sheehan: You're great. So I know, yeah I was thinking about that. And so obviously you know we're a vendor right Serving companies like you. Uh, we have a lot of customers that, that sort of have exactly the same business model that you do. And what does a credible business case from a vendor need to include for it to survive? Kind of an FP and a review. Because I think a little bit about Qlik. Obviously you said it was there before you got there but it's. The adoption has been apparently fantastic and easy. You talked a little bit about Vertex. You've talked obviously you have E Commerce. There are vendors like in your business. They are there to solve problems for you. And either you and FP and a. Or somebody else sales or marketing or technology or something like that that. What does a business case need you? You are often one of the uh, I would imagine finance is one of the sign offs or reviewers of a lot of purchases and even those that have nothing to do with you. So how do you look at it when somebody is in the business is saying hey we want to buy X under service thing. What's the business case need to have for you to sign offline?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, I think there's, I think there's three things I Think it's about price. You know, pricing obviously is everybody solution and then partnership and price and solution can have a push, pull, right? If you are very niche in a field and you are the one with the solution, you kind of command that price. If I have this exact problem and you're the one to solve it, I'm not pushing back much on price because the worth of it to me is in the solution. Because I have somebody, we're again we're a, you um, know a mid level business. Somebody is doing that by hand. And by hand I'm talking about, you know, they're taking time out of their day. They are also all the errors that come with that, all the struggles that come with that when they go on vacation, it's not getting done right. Uh, because it is more complex. And so I think those two have a, have a push and pull and listening to where your customer is at is really important because if I know what the solution is and I'm talking to the customer and I know I can do it right now it may be more on price where I'm looking at, but if, if I don't know, I just know I have this problem and I've heard or looked that you can solve it. You kind of have a little bit on that price, right? And I'm not maybe looking anybody else, you kind of have a little bit more advantage on that price. And I think that solution, I think that when somebody comes to you with that, that's where that partnership can come in. And I think that's really important because if I come to you with a problem, I think the biggest value that I have seen companies or vendors be able to help with is hey, look, we solved this for you today, we changed this for you today. But people that have had this problem in the past come to realize that actually this was the underlying problem that they need to solve. Right? And either we have a solution for that or we know somebody who can help. I uh, can't tell you how that partnership that really you come to rely on that vendor as kind of a, in that field and become a spokesperson for that, you know, they are solution to my problem and they could be the solution to future problems that not arise out of this, but that I didn't know that down the stream this is actually was causing it.

Aaron Sheehan: Right?

Ryan Cosby: And so I think if you know where your customer is coming at your price or solution and then providing the extra step of hey, I can help you do more that can overcome price, that can overcome some of that you know, so to some degree.

Aaron Sheehan: To some degree, yeah.

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, true.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay. So do you, um, do you feel like you get a lot of those business cases or do you like, what. What's the. What's the success rate?

Ryan Cosby: Yeah, yeah, no, I think so. I think. Think we're always listening. You know, as my job, it's not. I'm not final sign off. It's our C. Or our cfo, it's CEO, it's the cto, whoever it is that is coming up and saying, yeah, this solves exactly what I want. But after that call, after you get off of the demo call, you're like, oh, my gosh, I, uh, had this problem, or somebody had this problem yesterday. We could use that to do. And that is such a selling point that somebody internally is selling. You know, somebody internally is selling to them. And that has happened a lot. Right. Where we are using a product and then we come off a demo call and we're like, oh, my gosh, I just realized that's five more problems and that's somebody else's. Like, they've been struggling with this. And all those errors we've been having is because of this right here. So I think it is also very important that. And it's really hard to do, but as a vendor, trying to get the most people on the call underneath those people as possible is super helpful because you're talking to somebody at the 10,000 Foot View, they only want to know this single solution. But then you've got everybody else underneath them who is working diligently every month to get stuff done that can absolutely say, oh, there's other use cases for this. And that sells a manager so much more than you saying, oh, it's. We can, we can also do that.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, no, that, that makes complete sense. So I guess I'm, you know, I like to. In these podcast episodes, let the guest offer some advice to people who are listening. So knowing that the process that you just described, um, and everything that we've talked about, if there's somebody listening to this podcast right now who is in an E commerce or digital role, um, in the business, and you are needing to make a case to your leadership to invest in a thing, maybe you want to buy oro, that's fantastic. But maybe you want to buy a bi. Soft piece of BI software or some kind of automation or an AI tool that, that you think will save you time or improve customer satisfaction or improve margin, whatever it is. What is your advice for that person who wants to be the champion but needs to make that case up. The business, especially in a kind of a margin constrained capital constrained business where, you know, distribution is usually, especially in the mid market, is not awash with venture capital. Typically, uh, they can just slosh around on things. So what would your advice be for that struggling director of E commerce, director of digital at a company like yours who wants to raise their hand, wants to ask for money, but doesn't know how to do it?

Ryan Cosby: I think the best way to look at saying, okay, we need to. When you want to get into these businesses, these subset of businesses, it is doing research and finding out the problems that those businesses have. And it's not. It's uh, not outside of it. It's just. Just providing use cases.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: I think that is so hard. It's so hard. It's great for management to say, yeah, I understand it solves this problem. Or you're trying to get me to solve this problem. I might not have that problem right now that you're trying to. Or I might have a solution for that. But whenever you can get into that meeting and say, hey, we know your business, maybe not your business specifically, but I know about your business, I think that creates that partnership where I'm going to come to you first when I have additional. If I buy your product, I'm going to come to you first for that. For that additional problem.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: If it's in your area, even if you don't provide that service, I'm going to come to you first.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it. So you're saying if I'm that director of digital and there's somebody or a vendor already in my portfolio that could potentially solve that problem, start there first and see if you can.

Ryan Cosby: 100,000%. That is what, uh, because I am trying to find the easiest route.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: I want somebody who's flipping that switch on and says, oh yeah, we, we provide that suite of products already. Boop. It's on yours. Good to go. Here's an extra couple thousand a month, right?

Aaron Sheehan: Yep.

Ryan Cosby: That is important. But we've also found, and I feel like it is so great to be able to go to those vendors, be like, you know what? We don't have that. That might be something that we. But here's XYZ that we think we play well with and can then add on to that. That is so. It's so comforting because as somebody who doesn't want to change their erp, doesn't want to change their bi tool or doesn't want to change their payment solution. Right? And if you're Coming at it from each one of those, we want to know you play well with those. Right. We don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. And so having that in your toolkit of companies that do a myriad, uh, of different things that play well with you or you have a partnership with makes us so much more comfortable. That's where I'm stopping first. That's where, you know, if you can't do it, I'm starting with that person first. And, and if you can provide those types of, of handoffs or referrals or solutions, I'm not going, I'm not Googling anything. I'm calling you, I'm emailing you. And we do that a lot. And so, and I think that, who knows if I feel it's helped us, uh, you know, it creates an atmosphere where I feel, and rit feels comfortable with implementing solutions rather than holding off a bit.

Aaron Sheehan: Right.

Ryan Cosby: Being like, well, we got to do more research because we need to talk to 20 people. It makes the decision easier. They play well here. We know that this person is vouching for them. Awesome. Or hey, they already have this suite of product. It's just a flip of a switch. We can implement it. Next close. Let's do it. Right. Yeah. Whereas even if it had been a separate company, it's the same price. There's more hesitancy. There's more hesitancy. Yeah.

Aaron Sheehan: No, that makes, that makes complete sense. Last sort of serious question then, before, before we, I asked the non serious question I want you to ask of all guests, um, at the end, but I want to talk a little bit briefly about payments. So something that you said early on, you've got a lot of channels and your most, you said that your most successful customers are the customers who touch the business on multiple channels. They've got a rep relationship, they're ordering online, they've got stores or places where they're buying from. You probably have other channels as well that we haven't covered. From a payment standpoint, how does that typically work in an organization like yours? Where typically what we see is that the payment side of that at the transaction level is usually very specific to a single channel and not multi channel. Uh, so what does that, what one, does that describe ssg? And two, what does that look like then on the reconciliation side or the having to deal with credit memos or chargebacks or returns or wire transfers, are people mailing paper checks? Like, how do you sort of like figure out why your bank account looks the way it does at the End of the month. Given that the, the successful customer is sort of like putting money in through various methods. That's.

Ryan Cosby: That's a great point. And so I'll go back a little bit to. We know each customer when they walk in. You're not coming in anonymously and buying off the street. You have to give us an account number, and some of that can be identification. So we can use a card on file for purchases at the store, and then you can use that same card on file online. You can use it through the rep. And that affords us some great flexibility where it feels like there's not a lot of friction Right. Between the order process. It works great. But you mentioned kind of a hot topic word which was chargebacks. Right. Card not present is not something that credit cards like to hear. Right. You're not going to win a lot of cases.

Aaron Sheehan: You do pay more. Pay more for a reason. Yes.

Ryan Cosby: And you don't win a lot of chargebacks because. Because people aren't signing necessarily. Like, you want to provide a frictionless checkout system. Right. Because at the end of the day, these people are running a business. But there are some things, if they want to try a new product, you want to get that into their hands as quick as they. As you can. You don't want to provide this extra step of, okay, well, thank you for that call. I'll come to you and I'll, uh, get something to sign. No, you just want it out. You want it out of the warehouse into their hands. And so having that frictionless as possible is great, but it does come with that back end of there being problems when somebody says, oh, I didn't say I wanted that. And you really don't have too much to stand on because you have maybe a text or a phone call or, you know, a word of mouth. Like, it's, it's hard. But we feel that what we make up for in that frictionless part is worth it. Right. Right now that could change, but right now, um, it's worth it. And so at the end of the month, people are typically using one form of payment. Right. They're either on net terms and we're charging a card or taking an ach. Uh, or they are. We're taking cash at the drawer or typically car card. Right. And so that is important. And I feel like the next part of that level deeper. Let's get out of accounting for a second and dealing with that customer and even going beyond just frictionless checkout, is that we also have to be very cognizant of how these people are using those accounts. Not everybody's using a credit card in our field, right. We have a lot of debit card users. And so when you're placing the hold on somebody's account for the entire order and you're only able to fulfill 80% of that until that goes through, you're holding somebody's money. And so we had to be very cognizant of that when somebody comes in with that struggle. And a double charge of $700 may not seem like a big deal to a large company, to a, uh, one or two chair salon, it's a big deal.

Aaron Sheehan: Right?

Ryan Cosby: Whenever you've had to charge or charge more, accidentally had an unauthorized, you know, it'll fall off, don't worry about it. But we're tying up somebody's.

Aaron Sheehan: We're tying up fine capital for a couple of days, right?

Ryan Cosby: So it's really important that we have the insight to be able to use how to use our payment system, how it works, to be able to those down and kind of give that customer and that sales rep ultimately the fuzzy, warm feeling of, it's okay, we'll take care of it. This will, this will help. So, yeah, that is, that is, it's really important to us. And I'd hate to say that we are 100% awesome at it. There's always room for improvement. But I feel like we're pretty good at a pretty good level with it right now, where we are.

Aaron Sheehan: Well, the fact that you've got centralized, you know, payments basically between the various channels is huge. That's often not the case. And that can cause problems depending on how someone is interacting. To chase down what channel did that or come from, how do I sort of like handle it after. Great conversation. Ryan, I really appreciate this. I'm going to ask you the question I ask all the guests and longtime listeners know what's coming. What is one piece of media that you've consumed in the last 30, 60 days that you really like and would generally recommend to other people? It can be a book, it can be a magazine, it can be a podcast, it can be a, uh, YouTube series. It can be absolutely. It can be a movie, it could be a TV show. What's something that you like that you think other people should like?

Ryan Cosby: I know the market here. I know the people that are listening. So I'm going to say my favorite one right now is a magazine called Imbibe, and it is about cocktails. But they have, in the most recent years, slowly, and it's to great effect. Um, have been putting in other things, such as tea and coffee. And it's not just. They're like. They're not saying it outward like, hey, we're adding this. It's just. Just slowly kind of been pushing it out to where the magazine is almost in thirds at this point. They're getting a podcast on. It's been a really cool transformation to see that. And it's. I've realized that, um, my media consumption habits are a little bit different than what I thought they were. I'm like, this is just a magazine. I'm going to look at it because it's a magazine. It's on my, you know, my bar, my coffee table. I'm going to read it. It's changed how I kind of consume their media. And so I would really. It's kind of. It's not in its infancy. They're kind of growing it out right now. I feel like you can go back, but it's really interesting if you'd kind of look at that magazine. Uh, just kind of the company in general. Imbibe, um, is what it's called.

Aaron Sheehan: It's just.

Ryan Cosby: It's been really interesting.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay, well, I hope they give you, like, an affiliate code.

Ryan Cosby: I hope so, too.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah. Never heard of it. So if I sign up, I'll be sure to use promo code. Ryan, for 15% off your first year. Ryan, I really appreciate you being here and kind of sharing these insights with our audience. Um, thank you so much. Thank you, listeners. I hope that this, uh, looks and sounds, uh, as good as it does to us here in the small studio. Really appreciate it. Thank you again, Ryan, and have a wonderful rest of your day.

Ryan Cosby: Thanks.