The Transformation Mindset and the Power of WIFM with Kyle Gustafson

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome Back to the B2B Uncut podcast, sponsored by Oro Commerce. I am still your host, Aaron Sheehan, and with me today is a very interesting fellow. He's worked for some very large companies that you have certainly heard of. And I think it's more important than who he's worked for, is what he's done both there and in his own, uh, at his own company. Let him introduce himself, but his name is Kyle Gustafson, which I just learned how to properly pronounce about 45 seconds ago, so hopefully I don't screw up and say it wrong. Kyle, who are you? What do you do?

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for having me on, Aaron. First and foremost, I'm excited to be on and excited to share a little bit more and have a nice, fun discussion about B2B covers, which is, uh, definitely a passion point for me. So I am, um, I've kind of had an eclectic career, but I'm actually a civil engineer that turned into a business and digital, uh, executive. I've worked across major Fortune 500 companies and two startups and kind of everywhere in between in the US and across Asia and Europe, et cetera. So I've had a pretty fun around it so far. And I think we're in a great age and I love what I'm doing. And that's primarily helping folks, uh, accelerate commerce through digital means. So not necessarily purely E commerce, but actually thinking about the tools and ways we interact with technology to drive commerce in a more efficient and effective way. So excited to be on and have a chat today.

Speaker A: Great answer. Yeah. Looking at your LinkedIn, we obviously, we've talked a few times before this recording. You know, you've been at, you were at a, uh, company I think most folks have heard of called Office Depot and Staples, I guess. Is that the same job? Do you consider that, or are there separate stents?

Speaker B: Uh, well, I've done a tour at all the major, major office retailers. So I started a company called Corporate Express, which was pure B2B, which is kind of a fun story because it was in the height of, if you looked at the Internet retailer top 10, three of the top five were Office Depot, Staples and Office Max. And the only reason Corporate Express wasn't in there is because it was pure B2B. This is obviously that's changed significantly since those days, but I worked across all of them. So Corporate Express, Staples, Staples acquired Corporate Express, worked for Office Max, and we merged with Office Depot. So they're, they're different jobs across all of them.

Speaker A: Got it got it. And what were you doing, uh, for, for those brands?

Speaker B: Uh, well, I started leveraging my civil engineering expertise and uh, kind of figured out how to drive the quality of private label office products. And so that kind of launched me from helping the manufacturers who were really good at selling things very cheap, to helping them sell things that were cheap and high quality. And then kind of building brands. And how do you build a brand and how do you market a brand and how do you merchandise a brand online and what tools do you need to do that and how do you build organizations across the globe, et cetera. So I love that.

Speaker A: And that was all brand new at the time, right? There weren't, there wasn't a lot of received wisdom yet, I'm guessing, uh, in those days about what does it take to merchandise online, for instance, because online was relatively new. I would dispose.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say it is pretty early days. I think we kind of. It was really cool. And I still use some of the tools that we built then today to go back and reference. And I learned a lot about merchandising right then. Right. Of how people shop and how do you want to present things and when do you want to present them and why and baskets and lots of key things that everybody should be thinking through.

Speaker A: Well, as Master Yogurt said in the Star wars parody Spaceballs, merchandising, it's the secret of the universe. Um, after, uh, after. So after your, um, office supply stints, you spent time, and I think a few folks listening have probably heard of a company called Amazon maybe.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You did something with them.

Speaker B: Yes, yes. Uh, sir, I actually went to work for Amazon in Europe and I always tell people, if you haven't figured it out, but Amazon is like thousands of small businesses. And so fortunately or unfortunately, I got uh, asked to lead three businesses. It started with one and then it moved to three pretty quickly. Um, one was building, kind of expanding their, what they call hardlines private brands, which is, uh, you would probably mostly know as Amazon Basics, but there are a series of other brands. And so I did that in Europe and then across. At that point there were five primary E commerce sites in Europe for Amazon. And then I had another business where it was called direct import supply chain where our, our business goal was to drive savings, uh, for Amazon by purchasing goods where they were manufactured at the origin where they were manufactured. So think of a USB C disk drive that was manufactured in Asia instead of having that manufacturer imported into Europe and then distributed across all of our distribution centers. My team was in charge of negotiating that deal with them and then building out the supply chain and the technology to bring that in and distribute it much more efficiently, which would in turn save us money.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker B: Yep. And the third, third business I got to start from scratch was a consumables or think of like consumer packaged goods, private brand group. So, you know, from, from zero, basically, you know, where do we start? How do we build brands? What brands do they resonate with? What customers are you targeting? How do we, you know, merchandise, how do we advertise those within the Amazon ecosystem? As my boss always told me, you always start at the bottom of the page. So you got to figure out how to get, you know, get rise up the page without any help. And so that's exactly what we did.

Speaker A: That makes sense. Although I imagine working inside of Amazon, hopefully give you access to some tools to climb up the page.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, it wasn't starting from 00 but you know, there was, there was a lot of friction, let's put it that way.

Speaker A: Just call your good friend Jeff, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, he gets a few gods.

Speaker A: Yeah. Pretty, pretty straightforward. So in looking at your experience, that's a relatively straightforward story. I think in terms of sourcing merchandising, you're dealing with a lot of the actual physical products and the supply chains and the merchandising of those products. After this point, this is probably about seven, eight years ago, I think I start seeing the word transformation start popping into your job descriptions. So I'm very interested in this topic because for us, uh, uh, on this podcast, a lot of our listeners are practitioners in manufacturing and distribution who are in the middle of or planning to do some kind of digital transformation. Walk us through sort of your evolution a little bit, how you went from what you were doing for Amazon, building these three small businesses, sort of like entrepreneuring inside of Amazon, to joining the consulting world and then the sort of directly the e commerce world and what digital transformation looked like and meant for you in that journey.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I'm, I'm happy to do that. I'm actually going to go back. I'm not going to jump right off at the end of Amazon. I'm going to go back at the Office Depot days. So Office Depot, uh, merged with Office Max and my role was to basically reconstruct the private brand group, which is essentially a brand within a brand. And the reason I'm telling you that is because Office Depot had 10x the number of POS that we did at OfficeMax for roughly the same number of products. And so that was probably one of the number one solves was obviously I had to do more with less from a resource perspective. And there was only one way to do that and that was to find or leverage the tools that we built at Office Max to accelerate handling 10x the number of POS, et cetera. So it was like, okay, how do you force, jump into that, force that and start to prioritize building out the tools that are going to enable the team to really grow? Which is obviously maybe that was some of the, some of the sizzle that they liked at Amazon, I don't know. So at Amazon it was as I said, building out those import systems, et cetera. So there's a whole different way of thinking about that, right? It's not about purely this year's results, it's about how are you building something that's going to scale and grow. I mean I think I heard the scale 6 million times, the word turn scale at 6 million times at Amazon to the point that we were analyzing one problem and my boss said, you're not thinking of like 20 years from now. I'm like, okay, that's a fair, fair point. Right. So to your question about transformation, you know, that was kind of embedded and obviously that's the approach that you take at Amazon. You're thinking about longer term, how do you build things that start to scale and you can either learn from them and grow with them, or you can learn from them and push them to the side and continue to focus on the things that you're growing with. And so that really transformed when I came back to the US and started to work for ah, a lot of consumer brands and um, distributors on how are you thinking about solving problems in a longer term mindset? But actually 20 years results in the short term.

Speaker A: Yeah, 20 year timeline, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, 20 years I think is.

Speaker A: Boards love 20 year timelines.

Speaker B: I think they probably do and I think it sounds great. You also have to, it's always the balance, right, of 20 years versus I gotta deliver this year and somewhere in between. So which kind of realized for me brought up, hey, really my mindset is about that kind of continual learning, you know, cultivating that curiosity, using data to drive how you're starting to continue to make decisions and adapt things, which is really transformation. Um, and I think we're kind of, I don't know if it's the golden age of transformation, but I think we're hitting one with you know, the word AI, you know, either gives you the twitches or gets you Excited or confuses you or all three of them.

Speaker A: Ah, all of this a little from columns A, B and C, I think,

Speaker B: uh, in this business. So, um, you know, I've just said, hey, there are so many opportunities, and especially in the consulting world, I mean, your job is to come in kind of like a doctor assessment, understand very quickly, and then lay out a plan on how to transform. And it's actually super fun if you actually get to help execute on that transformation. And so that's kind of what I've been doing, even in my entrepreneurial role. When I took on that at, uh, McLean and built out their kind of E commerce and digital commerce practice there,

Speaker A: that makes a ton of sense. And so it's interesting because digital transformation, I think, is specifically something that comes up for us a lot. And for you, it sounds like. Also, um, and sometimes I feel like that gets chartered pretty explicitly as a technological initiative. And sometimes that's something. The previous episode that we had with Ali Copeland from AEI talked about that and it was very much, you know, there was merger activity that was driving it, but a lot of that was the technological underpinnings of how many. We have too many ERPs. We have ERPs that are aging out. We have systems that need to be digitally transformed. So sometimes you have a sort of a very explicit, like, hard stop something, end of life thing, or for whatever reason. We have to, we have to scale. Um, sometimes there's a, um, organizational and cultural change that's driving the transformation, like a merger or an acquisition or an unwinding of one, or an ownership change in general, or going from private to public or back again. Like, there's, there's a lot of different things that can drive it. I'm curious when, when you talk about, um, you know, your, your boss at Amazon saying, you know, you got to think 20 years. To me, what I, what I hear, Kyle, is a, a culture that expects continual transformation, expects that tomorrow will not look like today and that it will be better. What have you seen what motivates the desire to transform within a large organization? Because it's, it's often pretty painful. You've got the technology side that's its own sort of like change management. You've got the culture and the people side of it and the org chart side of it. That's even more painful, in my opinion. Where do you, where do you like to start that? And does it matter which comes first? The sort of technological, sort of. Like you can see, you can see the cliff coming. And so you need to change or die? Or is it an organizational thing and you then make the technology fit the new culture, a new organization? Where do you, where do you see it starting in these conversations?

Speaker B: Uh, uh, that's. That's an awesome question. I think it's kind of an Amazon style. You gotta go work backwards. So that would. You probably heard that a million times. But working backwards is like, what's the vision? And there's always, you know, we can have disparate motivations, right. I want to be the dominant player in my marketplace, or I want to serve a broader marketplace, or I want to just keep up because I really like what I'm doing, but I just got to keep up. I mean, I don't know that anybody would say that directly, but I think starting there and then starting to work that back into, okay, what pieces of, uh, technology can enable that, what processes, what people actually can drive that and get you to that path. So that's kind of how I start. Because if you don't have an island North Star, then you start chasing things, right? And especially in the technology world and digital world, you chase something and the technology has shifted and you're looking over here and the train is over here, and it's just passed you by.

Speaker A: Oh, boy. There's so many. There's so many things I want to say about Shiny Object Syndrome. I think in the C suite or at the board level, tempted to bring it back to AI M. I'm going to reserve the right, depending that. To come back to it later. Uh, I am curious then, from your experience, what starts the Boulder rolling when they decide to hire you? Because my right, Kyle, today you operate a consultancy. Yeah. BJ and Partners. Do I have that right?

Speaker B: Yep, that's right.

Speaker A: Okay. Correct. And you're doing a lot of consulting for, I imagine, consumer brands, distributors, companies that are looking to transform digitally. When they pick up the bat phone and they're like, oh, my God, we've got to call Kyle. What are the first words out of their mouth to. To you most of the time? What starts that conversation going? Because you just told me how you would like to approach it, which I think is, uh, I think extremely wise way to do it. But I'm betting that's not necessarily what they're saying to you on the phone. Or is it what they say to you on that first phone call?

Speaker B: Typically, we're. We're all in business for a reason. Right? To grow things and to make money. And so they start there and say, hey, I've got a problem. Like, hey, I want to be, I want to reposition my company and I want to do that by adding capabilities to onboard a lot more selection. And so I need the software to build a marketplace out.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Or to find more suppliers and that's kind of where they, they go. Or, hey, I need to really enable. I'm um, working on some projects where I need to enable my on the feet or on the street sales folks to be more efficient and to grow what we're offering to our customers. What do I need to do technologically to do that? Right. Where do I start? How do I get there? So those are kind of the starting points. And then as you said, my approach is, okay, let's go back and figure out that vision and then we can start to understand where you're at, where you need to go and start to connect the dots.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. Um, so, yeah, there's an immediate pain point and an immediate goal. Once you start pulling on that thread, then probably lots, uh, of other adjacent problems start to reveal themselves or challenges start to reveal themselves. You'd mentioned that you've worked with, we've name dropped lots of big companies, but you've also worked, you said startups and smaller companies. Would you answer that question any differently if you think about your experience in smaller teams or does it play out pretty much the same way no matter the size or scale of the client?

Speaker B: Um, I think, you know, it's obviously you got to adapt it to the client, especially in startups have the ability or the, I guess the uh, opportunity that they can move a little bit faster and you're not changing big things. But on the same token, they don't have the capital typically or the cash to make big changes and take that risk. So you have to look at those two, risk and reward in the way you're building roadmaps or approaches, uh, differently. Um, but I think still kind of aligning on what's that objective and principle or set of principles. Like this is what success looks like. And that can adapt, by the way. So that's not like a static thing. It's like, okay, you know, I want to be the ultimate, uh, distributor of screws. Right. Okay. That's different than the ultimate distributor of hardware because there's a whole different selection. Right. So it's narrowing those things and. But I think that is a, uh, pretty, pretty important part is to just lock that down and then that can align and actually makes the projects go much more efficiently. If you align on those principles from the beginning because then you're continually dovetailing all the work into those. So.

Speaker A: Yep, yep, we agree. Having been part of very large organizations and startups myself, I would completely agree with that, that assessment.

Speaker B: Uh, and by the way, that's part of the, that's one of the most difficult parts of project because as you said, it's like I got a problem. I mean, in cases that are like, hey, I want to, I want to grow my E Commerce. Okay, that's awesome. In fact, I, when I got hired at McLean, I literally asked the CEO what does E commerce mean to you? And his response was, I don't know, you need to help me define it.

Speaker A: Okay, well that's a nice, very candid

Speaker B: and open and a great way to look at it, but it's actually true. Right? Does that mean a, uh, website or a web shop or does that mean, uh, that all your commerce is enabled digitally and you can meet customers wherever they want to shop and however they want to shop with the same delivery terms and pricing and you know, offering.

Speaker A: So, so, so I mean, so now you're, you're speaking pretty explicitly my, my language. And in my day job here, um, uh, doing strategy in Oro is what is E commerce? And you do get different answers to that questions. And I like to ask, you know, is punch out or E procurement. E Commerce is edi. E Commerce is cpq. E Commerce, um, is an order that gets called into a call center and typed into a system and then routed to an OMS and then a help desk ticket. Like where does that. Like E just means electronic. Right? And so where, which touch point blesses it formally as E Commerce is, or is it just web orders or portal orders? And if so, how do the various systems that you're buying reinforce the other channels? How do you think of that whole spider web of all the different ways that, or even Amazon orders, right. Marketplace orders, um, are those E Commerce? You know, this is a, and this is a loaded question inside of a lot of organizations because people are comped entitled based on where, what label we slap on that particular order depending on how it came in. That's a. As a consultant, I can imagine that can be sort of an interesting situation to walk into if you're, if you're being hired to sort of like fix an E commerce problem. But how far does your mandate go like in that conversation?

Speaker B: Well, that's always the question, right? And I think more and more you know that you always have to ask the question, especially if you're doing a uh, consultant project or you know, a contractual project of like, who's the sponsor and where is that coming from? Right. How is it being driven? Because of different contexts, I think more and more. Not the. The term E commerce, I don't think is going to go away, but with commerce is going to include, you know, it was E commerce and then it was omnichannel, and, you know, those things still exist out there.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: You got to think in the whole, they're all going to be connected very quickly here, and they. And they should be. And obviously then that comes to the top of like, hey, if I have a business and I'm charged to grow X, Y and Z, I've got to pull all those pieces and parts. It is difficult to kind of outline, you know, their different accountabilities by channels, but I think actually spending time on, trying to figure out how they connect together and how each one contributes to the other with some specific metrics and measurements is very critical. And it actually drives common success, which is, I think we all want, you know, we want to be a unified team versus a. And yeah, uh, infighting team.

Speaker A: Right. No, 100%. And you look, the, uh, if you're publicly traded, the stock price sort of answers the question, what is good for the entire company? Well, you can go see it. Everybody can see it reflected in their option value and RSUs and so on. I do like to ask. So I would class you as a digital transformation leader. I think that's fair. From everything that you've shared, you've done it multiple times in lots of different contexts and environments, that there's a question I like to ask people who have gone through this, which is, how do you know when to stop? And I get it. If you're, if you're being. If you're a consultant and you just sort of like, answer that a little bit, which is, what is your mandate? Who is the executive sponsor and charter for this constitute of engagement? And you stop when they tell you to stop and you're. They stop paying your invoice. If you're a digital transformation officer from sort of within the house, if is digital transformation ever done, does it ever stop? Can you ever sort of put a bow on it and say, okay, we have transformed. We have the legacy, you know, legacy proof company of the future, we're done. I can go, you know, sit under my own fig tree. Uh, or is it never actually done?

Speaker B: Well, I think the answer is if you're never going to buy another cell phone, it will stop in most cases. No, I don't think it stops. I think it's actually that's where I kind of go back to the philosophical pieces of it and I call and there's actually a great book, it's actually called the Digital Mindset of Thinking in a digital Mindset of continuing to be curious around what's around the next corner and how can I learn about that and not be an expert necessarily, but learn enough to then connect that to whatever my business is so I can go and then, you know, continuing to use technology to get faster and faster or serve that. And so I think it's a never ending thing. I know in a lot of cases because, you know, this is partly what I love about the distribution industry is I'm really good at moving X, buying stuff from this supplier and moving it to this customer. And then I just had, you know, it evolved from faxes to, you know, now I need to call people to order or et cetera, you know. And so typically haven't been on kind of leading edge of that, that you know, transaction, you know, digitization. And so there's some, some gaps too. Obviously how you shop on your phone from Amazon is completely different than you would shop uh, in a B2B space, you know, on a distributor. So there's, there's kind of a leaf, there's a transformational leap. But if you can do that and instill this mindset of continual improvement and you know, assessing things and continuing to learn and shut some things down and focus on the things that you're really good at even in the technology space, I, I think that's actually what really serves organizations to, to grow and continue to be even more and more relevant as we get into the future. Because I don't think the technology is going to slow down. Right. And we're in the middle of the, of another revolution.

Speaker A: So it's not Kaizen. Right. The continuous improvement philosophy I think is pretty apt because the tools keep changing but the goals are often pretty similar, I would say, which is their business goals. There's technology is the tool, but the business goals of uh, make more money, be more profitable, have better market share, improve the share price, dominate a particular market, whatever it is. Usually they cluster around a handful of common business goals and then everybody has to figure out what tool do I have laying around that will actually help me achieve that. So yeah, I think that's pretty wise. And I think if you think about the successful companies that we all sort of know in this industry, they've never actually stopped evolving and improving. There is no point at which it's done and dusted. And for me, as somebody that's been on the digital side of this for a long time, I've been hired many times. We'll just build a website. Ah, that's it. Uh, that's our digital transformation is we're hiring you, uh, guy at an agency maybe, or your team that you manage or whatever to build us, uh, an E commerce website. And then we will. And then goodbye, we're done. We've transformed the site. The asset itself becomes the end all, be all, it is it. And then two years later you find out that they turned it off because no one was using it. And there was just a complete lack of, uh, it never. That spark never jumps the gap from where having the site to having it adopted by buyers or adopted by an internal sales team or usable by a marketing team. There was no attributable value to the thing because that was a mirage. The website was not the thing. It was actually the value it was supposed to unlock. But it was an IT project. And so it says, well, website's live DNS is cut over, we're done, we don't have to do anything else. And I'm curious, have you run into that situation before yourself where you got brought in to do that digital?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's the part of like. And I've had this conversation many, many of times and I've worked with, obviously I serve as a consultant. I've worked with the biggest and the big consultants. You know, I've worked with small consultancies, you know that it gives a little bit of a tarnish, uh, on consultancies because you think, hey, just. I want a. I've seen this. I just use this example. I want a CRM. Okay, well, what do you want the CRM to do? Oh, I just, uh, you know, I need a CRM. What do you want it to do for you? Right. Do you want to be continual communication with your customers? Right. Do you understand? Do you want to bucket them? You know, you have to ask those questions. But understanding that, and then they say, okay, well once we, as you said once, not the DNS in this case, but the CRM live, right? It's the processes that go with the CRM that are just as important and that legacy, as you said, has to carry forward. And this is kind of goes back to my kind of M.O. of like continual improvement. You know, we're, this is another Amazon term, but I think it's a great one of like, everybody's focused on the output Metrics, Right. And output metric being sales, you know, gross margin, you know, profit, etc. But the input metrics are, you know, how often are people using this thing that I've invested in? Right. Are we getting more productivity out of it? Just like you would in a manufacturing line. Right. They monitor that. But now that actually should be translated to the tools that we're installing. Um, because in most cases you're going to continue to invest in those tools one way or another. Right? I mean you coming from Oro, you would say that too, right? You're going to add more pieces and parts to make it more usable for your customers. So on the business side we need to be thinking about that too.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting you mentioned CRM. I was in an internal meeting this morning and of course we have a CRM as part of our product. We don't sell it separately. It's not kind of the uh, front facing piece. But it's really fascinating how often people who are talking to us about the sort of the e commerce capabilities of the platform are like, oh, wait, you do CRM too? How often? Even very large, I'll say distributors mostly don't have any kind of sort of CRM or sales automation or revenue automation tools or attribution tools in the business. It's spreadsheets, emails and whatever's in the ERP is basically what the businesses run off of. And thinking about how people buy from me as a distributor, how they're going to contact me, whether that's log, going to a website and requesting a quote or filling the contact reform or adding to uh, a shopping list or completing it or clicking on something and then calling me or faxing me. You said we've outgrown faxes. Not everybody's outgrown faxes, Kyle. I still see them in the wild in B2B, uh, and healthcare, oddly. And I think it's interesting how CRMs are such a great example of what you're talking about because my experience is sales teams hate them. They don't. Yeah, they don't use like value. You really have to build processes and teams and culture around using the tool or else it's just uh, the digital equivalent equivalent of a paperweight at that point. It's sitting there because my board told me I need to know it and now I've got one and it hasn't done anything because I didn't think past that point. You've mentioned sort of actually in previous conversations you've used an acronym that I love, uh, wifm um, it's one of my favorites. It's a great behavioral, behavioral psychology term I think. But when you, what can you sort of tell our audience, you know, what, what does it stand for? Because there's anybody who's never heard of it. Um, and what does it, what does that mean to you and how does that sort of dictate your approach to when you're trying to build the teams and the organizations around the actual value proposition of the digital transformation? What does WIFM have to do with that? How do you connect?

Speaker B: Yeah, so WIFM is what's in it for me. And I mean I actually, I always said if I could go back to school, I think I'd get a psychology degree. And especially in the world of E commerce and digital commerce, it's so intriguing what things drive behaviors or what behaviors and you can interpret from there and then serve people better.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, that's the ultimate job, at least I'm trying to get to is like how to use technology to serve people better, make them more efficient, enjoy their job, do things better. So you know, that, that, that with them. I think as you start to get in, you know, bigger and bigger organizations, it's always everybody has their own kind of objective. And so if they change this, if they install this CRM, the salesperson's first question, well, why should I use that? What's in it for me in using the CRM? Well, uh, you can answer it like, hey, well you just have to use it because we need to have this information.

Speaker A: I told you to.

Speaker B: Not really very motivating if you said, hey, well, you're going to be able to walk into a call at this customer and know their last five purchases, what they should be purchasing, how much they should be purchasing of it, and you're going to be able to show that to them in about 10 seconds and they can hit this button and they're going to, that purchase order is going to be on its way and you can also talk to them about their family and their kids and in your five minute call that you're with them. That's a transformation.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And by the way, you're doing better in all three aspects. Right, right, right.

Speaker A: No, that's exactly, that's exactly right. You've got to show the, show the value. Um, I want to switch gears a little bit here. And you've had such a rich experience in a lot of different contexts and companies. I'm curious, can you, if I said tell me a story about something that illustrates the kind of work that you do or the kinds of situations you found yourself in sort of regularly through the course of your career. Obviously, I don't want to violate any non disclosures or anything like that, but it's a good story from your experience that kind of like sums some of this up a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, it's, it's super interesting. And I, I guess I'll. I'm going to probably put three or four stories into one here for you. But. Okay, so when I. So the reason that I got into commerce, as it was, was I was a civil engineer and I had this. Found myself with this choice of like, I can be a very technical expert in civil engineering. Like I can calculate all these designs and use the, you know, latest math and integrals and algorithms and things to do that. Or I could go down kind of more of the business route, which is like connecting dots, right? So in that case, I was designing bridges. But obviously a bridge connects to a roadway, connects to a drainage system, connects to retaining walls, connects to soil. So I could be, I could do that. And so I said, hey, actually, I like that part of it. So I started down mba. My point was then I got actually a call from a friend that was a Corporate Express and that's how I went there. But the leader, his boss at Corporate Express said like, why should I hire a civil engineer for this job? And my point was, I said to him very clearly, obviously they give you some background on how to solve civil engineering problems, but really they're teaching you a problem solving methodology that was the first of many career. All of a sudden, okay, well, here's the problem. I have a toner cartridge and I'm selling millions and millions of these things, but they're not lasting as long as we're claiming they are. Go solve that problem. I knew nothing about toner cartridges, but I knew how to solve problems and I had a methodology to solve problems. And so I've continually gotten into those situations. And that's actually why one thing I really love about consulting too is it's like assess a situation, you get to learn a lot about something and then connect with people who are those technical experts, right, of photoconductors in this case, and the connection between photoconductors and, you know, toner and how those two fuse together on a piece of paper I obviously knew nothing about. But I could tell you probably more than you want to know right now. And it's um. Because if you're asking like questions and you start to connect those dots and so I'VE gotten into lots and lots of situations like that of, you know, more specifically lately around. Hey, um, in for instance at McLean, there's a tool called Bestsellers, which it seems pretty simple but you know, when you have a corporate buyer that has, they're buying for 250 convenience stores and um, what kind of the amount of insights and analytics that they have to do on a store level seems pretty overwhelming.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But what if you can give them a tool that allows them to understand from a market perspective what's being purchased in their region that they're not purchasing in those stores? Right. It sounds um, sounds easy in concept, but actually bringing that to life is a whole new thing. Right. So understanding what that, that that buyer wants what they need, that kind of goes to the WIFM use that and then connecting that with the information you have and then building tools to connect it is, you know, those are lots of things that uh, I run into.

Speaker A: No, that, that, that those are great stories and I think that really illustrates. I love the. My degree is in geosciences personally. So ah, very similar kind of um, approach I think is just I have no right to be here doing this job like normal by any sort of like normal rubric. My degree certainly didn't prepare me for it. You told a really interesting story that it is, I think the reverse, I consider is a reverse WIFM story. And it was a story about an Alexa powered microwave and I think it was, I just found it amusing. Um, why can't I buy one, Kyle? Uh, why, why, why can't I go get an Alexa powered microwave? And who, who wants one?

Speaker B: Uh, it's a super interesting story and unfortunately I wasn't there for all of it. But there was a point when I worked at Amazon and it was actually the height of uh, um, right when Alexa was taking off. Right. And the echo was taking like I had the first echo, one of the first echoes when I was there and proliferating everywhere. Which is exactly the strategy by the way.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: They still sell a lot.

Speaker A: Don't get me wrong, I've got like three. Yeah. I said sometimes they just show up at my house. Sometimes I think I'm like, why do I have another dock? Yeah.

Speaker B: So, so it was then, and then it turned into, hey, well I can build that. I can put the Alexa, uh, infrastructure inside of things and you know, engage with people more there. Right. So there's obviously a bigger strategy of how do I get engagement and data points across the whole home. And so there was a, actually a Mandate from one high up leader at Amazon.

Speaker A: Yeah. Do we, do we have the same haircut as this guy?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker B: Hey, I want to, I want to say it was a $50 Alexa microwave. And the reason being because that's the most interactive with appliance in the kitchen. Right. You go to the fridge, but you don't really interact. You just open the door, grab something out the microwave. You actually punch stuff in, you interact with. Great idea. But the $50 was to make it so easy to, uh, you know, implement. But I think as things work through there, I mean, my team who was working on this, you know, we do these should cost analysis. Right. So how much should this cost? It was at least double that. I mean, I think the Alexa infrastructure itself was probably 12 or 15 bucks. And that was super cheap. M. So. So think of. That's half. And you don't even have a, you know, metal shell yet. Right. Of what you're trying to get to. Um, but I think it was, it was. Anyway, it never, I think it actually got built, but it never took off. And I think there's many reasons why. But it was a super challenging learning experience too, for, for me and my team. Like, okay, you're. You have some really tight constraints here. Right. Because you want to make it usable again to my kind of digital mindset. And then how do you get it installed? Right. You know, how many people have freestanding microwaves versus Right. The old microwaves. And you know, there's lots of business problems you have to think through just to get that one device in there. And so hence m. Why there's probably not a lot of Alexa microwaves out there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild. Uh, it's interesting because to sort of like put a bow on this, um, and it's going to bring it full circle. We started sort of talking about merchandising, you know, briefly at the beginning. Merchandising, um, it's about to some degree the wisdom of the buyer. And I think if I understand, it's clear you just explained very clearly why JB has a, has a. Had a desire to have an Alexa powered microwave. Uh, it made sense for the Alexa business model. Did it necessarily make sense for consumers? Take the technological challenges and cogs sort of challenges outside of it. Those are solvable. I believe that anybody. I believe that, you know, you guys had the capital to sort of like, if you really decided that you wanted to have Alexa powered microwaves, we'd have had Alexa powered microwaves in the house. But you know, just because it's interacted with where people raising their hand and saying, I want to talk to my market, tired of pushing buttons, um, there's a wifm, um, there's a buyer with them. And I think we all sort of have to remember that. I think you ignore that at your peril. I think in our, in our line of work is that ultimately the customer is always right because we want their money. Um, yeah. So I'm curious a, ah, final sort of serious question in here. Um, and that does imply the existence of a non serious question. And I will, you will find out what that is in a moment. Who is someone that you view as a mentor or leader who helped you out in the past at any of the stops along the way? Was it, was it, you know, pretty far back and sort of the uh, was it somebody in civil engineering background or was it one of the stops who's somebody that you turned to who gave you advice or gave you a hand up or gave you something to remember that you've continually applied throughout all of these jobs and roles?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's easy. I'm trying to think of some of the quotes, but it was a guy, his name's Ron Lala. And so he was actually my boss's boss when I went from engineering to consumer, uh, products at Corporate Express. And you know, I was an aggressive kid that was in an mba. And we were having a hard time scheduling the interview to go and I said, hey, I'll come meet him on a Saturday. So I interviewed with this guy on a Saturday. He had a pink polo shirt on, you know, and it was all relaxed but, you know, and he always, he came across as very uh, you know, chilled out relaxed. But he was one of the most intense guys I ever worked for. Um, but also, you know, so that was fun and challenging but very principle driven. Like he was the guy that we would sit down and say, bring me, I don't want to see a presentation, I want to see your spreadsheet on how you got to this number. Okay? And then he would go and inevitably pick the number and he'd say, tell me how, tell me what this number is and why. That means that at first you'd like, whoa, you know, you just freeze. And I had a lot of people that were freeze. But once I understood him, I understood actually what he was just trying to make sure you had the right methodology to get that. And then he and you could both trust that you're getting the Right. Outputs. Right. And so you would go through that a lot. And so anyway, I worked for him there and, you know, all these. It was always a lot of principal led leadership versus, like micromanaging, which I think kind of transformed how I think about things. And, you know, we all have. Especially now, we all have more than we can do. Right? So let's leverage the collective intellect and, you know, intelligence and technology to make progress. And so, but you can do that by making sure that you have that commonality of vision and that a process that's understandable and you can tweak the process, right. That you know what the process is and you can tweak it. So Ron was always that. Always very challenging. You, um, know, we had lots of, Lots of good discussions and, you know, he's probably one of the first people I call today if I got a question or he's just a good voice of reason and he can jump back into his business mind really, really clearly and quickly. Right? That's good business. Uh, business case discussions over the phone in about 15 minutes of like, oh, well, let's just do the math on that. And you're down to like, that makes sense or that doesn't make sense.

Speaker A: It's a really good advice. I've worked with some similar leaders in the past myself where, you know, the ability to sort of zoom into the details and move past the story, don't get caught up in the deck or the words and actually go into what are the. What are the building blocks, this theory that you're presenting in this course of action that you're. That you're advocating for. Show me the numbers or whatever, you know, whatever the foundational, like, cases based on, um, I think probably the business world would be in a better place with more leaders like that. And certainly we have not sort of talked very much about AI, but I am beginning to see more and more, uh, it's pretty obvious when you spot it, when you encounter sort of like a business plan or prospect, uh, or strategy that was heavily sort of. I can't go to ChatGPT. They show me the numbers that, that led you, led you to sort of like, make this, recommend this course of action. It's something that I think it's going to be very interesting in the business strategy world to see how dependent the MBAs of the future are on outsourcing. Uh, the problem solving and the chain of causality down to an algorithm told me things, and I just took it and I multiplied everything by times 10 and look at my PowerPoint that's always been a danger. I feel like we're making that easier. Maybe just cranky old man, like banging on my keyboard a little bit. But, uh, I can definitely see the danger of that and the need for leaders like him to hold people accountable to, uh, that and Kyle, maybe that's us. Maybe we are those leaders now, uh, in our own roles, which is, for me anyway, kind of a terrifying thought. But here we are.

Speaker B: I think it's terrifying, but it's, you know, even, uh, you know, and I keep doing some advertising for the, the folks from Seattle here, but I always explain it to somebody that there's always a balance of data analytics and all the things that we can build there and, and gut. Right. I mean the, the story I always use is that the first distribution center that I went in, and I think it was in Germany, extremely automated. Like, you know, from the time that you as a customer order, you know, the clock starts on when that's going to get shipped out. Right. And there's all these could be 600 steps and those steps get checked off. Right. But at the end of the day, there's somebody watching or in this distribution center, somebody watching that said, hey, step 55 got missed. I got to get out of my chair and go physically triage this problem right now. So there's always going to be that balance. So if they know it, we know it. Right. And I think that's going to be really what propels us to success in the future, is being able to use your gut and to leverage those things interconnectedly.

Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Yes. Get the head and the heart wired together for full tilt. Freedom and justice. Um, so last question. This is not a serious question necessarily, but it's something I ask every single one of my guests, which is named one book or movie or television show or magazine or podcast, some piece of entertainment that you have consumed yourself, um, in the recent past that you would recommend to other people. It does not need to be serious. It does not need to be business related. It can some, uh, people like to give two answers. A serious one and a non serious one. Whatever you want. But this is your opportunity to move product. This is your opportunity to make recommendations into the great, the great algorithm. So what do you like and what do you recommend?

Speaker B: Oh, I, I mean, one book and m. I'm sure there's. There's tons and tons. I mean, I guess I'll give you two. And they're kind of both serious. One is I just sent a kid to college and like, as the dad who's like the, I don't know, self help is not really the word, but I'm into that kind of stuff. I gave him, you know, Victor Frankel's Man Search for Reading.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But I'm like, okay, you should read this book. Like, it's really easy to read. Like this is one thing that you could at that time of life. If I would have read a book like that, I think that would have been changing. And then I'm always a big fan of Malcolm Guidewell. Like he just wrote the Revenge of the Tipping Point, which is a huge. Is actually a very good illustration of vulnerability and candor. Right. Of like I wrote the Tipping Point and then I came back and I revisited it, which kind of ties together this whole mo of continuous learning and how we're continually evolving. And that means you always got to almost question yourself or check yourself. So super cool.

Speaker A: Good. Feel good. Uh, especially Man Search for Meaning Feel, uh, good Head of the Year. Uh, very relevant these days. It is very relevant. It'll always be relevant. I think it's an excellent book, certainly. Well, look, um, Kyle, I really appreciate you taking the time, um, out of your, uh, workday to ah, come and be on this podcast and share your experiences with uh, the audience. Where can people find you if they want to, uh, learn more, if they want to give you money to solve problems for them?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, um, BJM Partners has a website that's an easy thing to look up, I think probably even more relevant. I'm happy to connect directly with people via LinkedIn just on my like. And I don't know if you can post that in there, but yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker A: Anything you want in the show notes, just send over and we'll, we'll put them in.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll just, we'll just put it directly there. That's an easy way to connect and then really appreciate you having me on and having the discussions and uh, you know, keep up, uh, the continual learning.

Speaker A: Always. Thank you so much, Kyle. Have a great, uh, rest of your day and thank you again all.

Speaker B: Uh, right, thanks a lot, Aaron.

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