In this episode, I am interviewing Andy Humphrey about his business, and how he came to decide whether to automate, delegate, or eliminate. 

Andy is the owner and founder of SprinklerSupplyStore.com, as well as a sales consultant for Baseline Systems, Inc. 

Give us some background about yourself and what your business is (01:50)

• Andy says he would describe his business as a passion mashup. His professional background started in the wholesale lawn and landscape industry. 
• He was trained to be a landscape architect and got involved in sales, design, and estimating for a landscape contractor in the Mid Atlantic. 
• He spent time in distribution, where he worked directly for manufacturers in regional sales management positions.
• During the course of his career, he has tried to master two things; one being the irrigation and wholesale lawn and landscape industry, and the second is eCommerce. Combining these two business models, he created SprinklerSupplyStore.com. 
• Essentially, what he is doing is building a B2C with B2B integration into the wholesale distribution model. 

In terms of data automation, we ask three questions; where is the data now? Where does it need to go? And what happens to it in between? (09:08)

• Andy says they use Shopify to take orders, but they used Volusion in the beginning. 
• Once an order is received, it goes to a branch that is willing to ship it. They tapped into resources that generally don’t ship directly to the consumer, so they required services from their resources that weren’t necessarily typical for them. 
• He had to create an email containing details of the parts, as well as the shipping address. The receiver at the branch then entered the details into their ERP system, printed it, entered it as an order, and only then could he print the pick ticket in order to get the items and put it in the box before shipping it out. 
• This resulted in a lot of manual work and processes. 

You said you were using Volusion, what did the automation process entail? (11:50)

• Andy says a number of third party pieces of software were used for the automation process. The first part is inventory; they need to be able to indicate the availability of a product online, and if it is indicated as available, it has to be available.
• With that in mind, he would receive a CSV file with a list of parts and quantities, and they would get that on an interval, and have it imported into the Volusion store. They would then automate and send orders again. 
• Roughly 10 years ago, they would send the wholesaler the orders with two digital files; one was the header of the orders, and one was the line items. They noticed a flaw with part number discrepancies. If a number was changed and they didn’t pick it up immediately, the order would be thrown out. Today, they use skew ID, so no matter how many times they change a part number, the skew ID won’t change. 
• Once they’ve sent the order, the wholesaler would use their shipping software to ship it out in their DPR system. However, numerous failures occurred during every syncing process because of how many times the data had to be exchanged.
• Finally, they deployed ShipStation. By using the shipping software, orders didn’t have to be synced backward because the software was connected to their eCommerce store. Once shipped, all the needed information would sync back to their system. 

Did you try to delegate this process, or did you go straight to automation? (17:28)

• Andy says he did try to delegate; at the time, they were only two people doing this by hand. Delegation and automation can have the same outcome. 
• By this, he means that whether he has a computer doing all the work, or another person doing all the work, the point is that he won’t be doing it himself. 
• Having this free time means you can go sit on a beach, but more importantly, it means you can do something valuable with your time.
• If it costs him $25 to perform a task, but he can outsource that task for $25, it means that he can do something else worth $50 an hour, thus increasing performance and value.

 How do you go about deciding when it’s time to eliminate within the company? (25:58)

• Andy says he thinks the one thing that cannot be replaced or replicated is phone communication. Clients need to be able to call the company, which builds a good customer relationship. 
• The negative side of allowing customer call-ins was that their phones were ringing non-stop. Determined not to eliminate phone calls completely, they shortened the hours in which customers can phone, thus eliminating unnecessary hours. 
• Freeing up hours means there is more time for projects and customer care emails. 
• He says that’s a good piece of advice he can give business owners; don’t eliminate call-ins completely, but set boundaries. You will still have the advantage of building relationships via phone calls, but you won’t waste unnecessary time. 

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn

 

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