IndustrialSage

Welcome to today’s Executive Series interview on IndustrialSage. Today, I’m joined by the CEO and founder of Minespider, Nathan Williams. Nathan, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me on the show. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

So, you’re coming in from Berlin. Is that correct?

There’s quite a happening startup scene here, and I moved because I heard about it back in 2013. Since then, there’s been a huge growth in the cryptocurrency, blockchain, distributed ledger space. And so, it’s really an interesting place to be for blockchain startups like myself.

So, for those who aren’t familiar with Minespider, who are you and what do you guys do?

Basically, we are a company that believes everyone has the right to know what they are buying. We do what’s known as supply chain traceability. So, if you buy a smartphone or a car, you don’t necessarily know where it comes from, if one is responsible, if one is. Well, companies have the same problem. They buy a battery. They buy materials, raw metals. They don’t know if one was produced responsibly and the other dump toxins into the water base. And so, what we do is we create digital passports that go alongside that raw material of the supply chain as it gets sold, and it gets stamped along the way so that companies can get a better picture of where their materials come from and under what conditions they were produced.

That sounds interesting, but before we get more into that, how’d you get into this space?

Make terrible life choices! (laughs) No, so I’ve started a number of different companies, mostly in the industrial space and mostly because of circumstance. I’ve always been a tech guy. I’ve been a programmer, and I’ve enjoyed that aspect of it, and just people in my network would have certain problems, and it sort of led me into the industrial space. The first startup that I ran ended up tracking fraud in financial documents.

Oh, wow.

And so, I built an online system to scan through thousands of financial documents, looking because there was a client who had embezzled a lot of money. And so, we had to look through, statistically, where the anomalies were, and by doing that, you get a certain cohort of people around you with certain skills. And so, then I was talking to some contacts who had similar challenges of getting good data out of a mess of data, and it was in the regulatory space. So, I started a company that was analyzing chemical regulations and seeing, okay, well, what’s going to be banned? What’s banned? Can we analyze the news with an AI and identify when news is going to be about certain chemicals we use? So, that was interesting.

I ended up selling that company, and then at the beginning of 2017, I was looking at what my next step was going to be, and it was right around that time when the current US administration was inaugurated, and there was a Washington Post article around that time that was interviewing a number of people in electronics and the automotive industry that were concerned that the administration would roll back conflict mineral regulations. And so, they had spent a lot of money and time trying to make sure that they were responsible, and they were concerned about this, that they wouldn’t have the support.

And so, I basically spoke to everyone who would speak to me. I said, “Well, look. There’s this new technology coming up. Blockchain, it’s very interesting, and it solves certain problems of why we couldn’t fix this issue of getting good data on our materials before. And so, I’m looking at what’s been tried in this industry already, what worked, what didn’t work, and what were some of the unintended consequences you ran into,” and I spoke to people for maybe about a year. I think that this is a big learning that I had from my previous startups, and a big mistake a lot of new founders will make is that they don’t spend enough time understanding the problems in-depth. They want to jump right into a good solution. I’ve got a good idea. I want to build it.

Yeah.

And so, I said, “I’m not going to do that this time. I’m going to look at the problems,” and it was at the end of the first year, after I had been speaking to anyone who would speak to me. I went to the OECD. I went to European Commission. I spoke to people who had been working on this for 10 years, and I tried to summarize all of it in what is now my whitepaper. So, we basically took all of the different needs of the different people, wrote a technical solution of how you could address that, and it was about six months after that that I got a team together, and now this is much bigger than just me. We’ve got 10 people working on the project. We’ve got two big projects now, one with Volkswagen, tracking through the battery supply chain, another one tracking tin out of South America for a couple of big companies, and it’s going very well.

Awesome. So, for those who aren’t familiar, what’s a conflict mineral operation?

Okay, so conflict minerals are specifically gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten. They’re four metals that are often used in electronics that are sourced out of, largely out of the Congo, and the issue with them is that there’s been a civil war going on there for quite a long time, and there are armed groups that will fund themselves by moving in, taking over mines, collecting illegal taxes, and it’s led to many, many deaths. And so, what happened was the US government put in a regulation, Section 1502 of the Dodd Frank Act, which required companies to do their own due diligence to say, “Are we funding these activities?” And then, the SEC came in and developed, more in detail, guidelines for what companies should report, and at the same time, the OECD also produced guidelines that were developed as similarly as the SEC roll-in.

So, nowadays, you have increasing regulation. So, in Europe, next January, I want to say, there’ll be a conflict mineral regulation that comes into force in Europe, which will be a little more broad than the others. It won’t be just those four. They’re going to require companies that import into the European Union to do due diligence, and there are other metals that companies, themselves, are concerned about. They want to protect their brand identity. They don’t want this risk of bad things happening in their supply chain. No one wants to be on television next to forced labor or children working in mines.

Right.

And so, they want to have guidelines as to what they can do to prevent that. And so, they’re going to be looking at cobalt. They’re probably going to be looking at, well, gold, tin, tantalum, tungsten, but other materials as well. And so, that’s sort of where it came from, and nowadays, we’re not as focused on just the three-T-G, the gold, tin, tantalum, tungsten. We’re looking more generally at what is responsibility? What is responsible sourcing, and how can I know really that what I’m buying is what I want, is responsibly sourced?

Okay, good to know. So, you mentioned that this is your third startup. What did your career look like before that? Have you always been a big entrepreneur?

I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur, and I think a lot of this is in hindsight, right? I look back in sort of the direction my career has, and I sort of clump different tasks and jobs and projects and things I tried together, but really, as an entrepreneur, I have always desired to be an inventor, even since I was a young boy. I had this idea, this vision, of inventing things and tinkering and building new things, and I happened to be at the right age when the internet started to take off, and I joined a startup early on back in 2000 that failed horribly because it was one of many startups that didn’t go so well, but it gave me the taste for building software, of solving problems, and of being in this environment of trying to make something new and just sort of running on my own and seeing if I could make it.

And so, I lived in Canada for the majority of my life. I went to school in Montreal, and I had started a number of different enterprises there, but they weren’t really as cohesive as they are today. It was only after I went back to school and got my MBA, when I was getting frustrated at starting things and trying to sell some things. I started a hand-made jewelry business at one point with my wife. I had started a software development business on the side, right out of university, but I felt like I was missing this aspect of, how do you actually run a business and make it successful. And so, I went back to school, got my MBA, and there’s a lot actually of people that are sort of down on business studies and the MBA and saying, “Oh, just go out and study,” but honestly, it helped me understand so much, just how this whole system is supposed to operate, and after graduation, I basically said, “Okay, let’s uproot, start in a new place. Go to Germany.” I heard good things about it. Big startup scene there, and it’s just taking off. Let’s go be part of it.

I came here and met as many entrepreneurs as I could and went to every event, shook everybody’s hand, volunteered with the Startups Association back at the time, and organized events for them, just so I could get a sense of how this entrepreneur in the startup space worked, the business angle of it, and, yeah, then one of my contacts, I was talking with them, and started that first startup. I basically was at a point where I said, “I need a life reboot.” So, I just went back, devoted to studying, to figuring out, okay, how is the traditional business world work, and how can I fit within it?

So, has there been anybody who’s really had a big impact on your career in some way? Maybe a mentor or somebody else. Maybe it’s an event.

I remember reading something a while ago. I think it was in a leadership book that I’ve forgotten who it was, and I remember it was that Obi-Wan Kenobi is not for hire. In the same way, I’ve never had a specific one person mentor, but I’ve had many people who’ve helped me with many different problems. I think, in terms of other entrepreneurs that I’ve looked up to but I’ve never met, I really appreciate the approach that Elon Musk has, of course, because he’s very good at communicating a vision and getting people excited about it, and especially in an industrial space or a business-to-business space. I think people forget how important it is to give your customers the ability to sell up to their boss or to make them feel excited to be part of the transformation or something that could be really big, and that’s something I’ve always appreciated about what Musk has been able to do. But yeah, there have been many people that I’ve met along the journey that have been very, very helpful for different aspects, but I’ve never had one specific mentor.

That makes sense. So, what’s something that you really took away from that pause in going through your MBA?

I remember back, thinking, before I started the MBA, that I really didn’t understand money and what it was used for, and at the beginning, I remember just looking at a balance sheet for a grocery store, thinking, “How much do they spend on rent?” $200,000 a month for a big unit, and I was like, “That is more money than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. How is that possible that you could spend that a month?” And it was, partly, it was just a mentality shift that I had, and I remember around that time, explaining this, that I feel like I’m missing something in how I’m viewing the business space, and being directed to something like a book like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” and I remember looking at that and thinking, “That is not what I’m looking for.”

Yeah.

And all apologies to those who found it helpful, but what was very helpful I think was just seeing this different mentality of money is not a treasure I want to hold onto. It is a resource that helps me accomplish what I want to do, and moving into that space, out of this I’m trying to collect money and to use it as my own personal treasure versus I’m trying to use it as a lubricant to accomplish big things and do big projects was one of the first most helpful things, and I remember that was driven home during the MBA when I did an exchange, and part of it is, I remember, we did an exchange to New York, and I remember visiting the NASDAQ and just seeing sort of how there’s a lot of negative things you could say about the Wall Street mentality and the stock exchange and all of that, but there’s a lot of positive as well, and that was my first sort of entry into the world where you see big money can accomplish big things, and this is part of the world we live in. It’s neat to see the positive side of that.

Yeah, so from what you’ve seen, even in undergrad, the idea of handling money really is never explained.

I think that education is meant to prepare us for work, for working for someone else, and not everyone should be an entrepreneur. It’s a much riskier endeavor. It’s a riskier life, and I think that what I ran into was I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I still had sort of a mentality of someone who was working for a salary, and I wasn’t really able to see beyond that of how you could use your money as an asset or as a resource in a way, but I wanted to, and I knew that was needed, and I think that’s sort of normal. I don’t think that there’s that much entrepreneur education out there. A lot of entrepreneurs I’ve met are really not comfortable working for other people.

Yeah, yeah.

I’ve always had a bit of that problem. There’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with it of course that not everyone wants, and there’s a certain amount of needing to be a bit of a generalist and sort of know enough to get yourself in trouble in a bunch of different topics, and not everyone likes that.

Yeah.

So, yeah. You can be creative, and you can have a fair bit of control working for someone else. Not everyone needs to be that entrepreneur.

Exactly. So, today, what’s the thing that gets you excited and out of the bed? Every morning you said, “I just can’t wait to do this.”

I like solving big problems, and especially I think we live in an age where we all feel very powerless, and especially in the past few years, we have things such as global pandemics. We’re trapped in our houses. We hear negative things on the news that we have zero control over, and we feel very anxious. I like the fact that I can wake up every day and solve a big problem that no one really knows how to solve, but I’m working on it, and I might have part of the solution, and the people that we’re working with are helping. And so, we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, and it can have a real impact in the lives of poor people living in rural areas around the world. It can have an impact on regular people who don’t want their waterways poisoned, and it can have an impact on big companies and us in western countries who want to see what we’re actually buying and the footprint of it.

Yeah, so let’s dive into the challenges facing the industry today, and there’s definitely a lot of them. What are some that you think that this virus has brought into the forefront of the space?

One of the biggest challenges, and it doesn’t matter if you want to track your carbon emissions versus the responsibility of your metal versus… It doesn’t matter what you want to track. There’s a problem of too many standards. Everyone’s got their own way of measuring success, and it’s hard to mesh that together. Even if you get everyone participating and submitting their data, how do you mesh it together? And it requires experts, and the problem is that if you get a lot of people that are experts and know a lot of details, you can get lost in these details, and it’s a big enough challenge to convince everyone to work together before you start getting lost in details. And so, from my point of view, the best approach is to just get as much participation as possible. Getting a lot of companies to submit a little data. I’m participating responsibly. I want to. I’m doing a self-assessment. That’s better than no assessment.

So, that’s just a challenge in general to traceability. A challenge that these companies are facing is going to be, number one, knowing is it being sourced in environmentally responsible ways? Because the environment is probably the biggest question mark out there, and that can range from everything from are the waterways not being contaminated? Are we using chemicals that aren’t polluting the people around us or poisoning the workers? And if we are using those chemicals, are they being handled properly? Do we have policies about that? Carbon emissions, of course, is a bigger and bigger topic, especially because it’s one that most people don’t feel they have control over, but we see as an issue. And then, of course, moving into human rights, are there negative groups that are taking advantage of people? Are there forced labor workers that are contributing and getting me, is my lifestyle based on the pain and suffering of a five-year-old child working in toil? No one wants that, and I think that these are going to be huge challenges because no one knows exactly, first of all, where it’s going. We all sort of know that it’s going but not where and in what products and to what degree, and once we find that out, we don’t know how to keep measuring it properly, and once we find that out, we don’t know how to fix them. And it’s a tangled web, and the first step of it is just knowing who is in my supply chain, and what measures are each one of those actors playing? That’s a good start. Now, post-COVID, of course, we have this other problem.

Yes.

The problem of availability of supply. So, we’ve already seen that if the world’s manufacturing is done in one region of the world, and that region has a crisis, then it can disrupt supply chains all around the world, and I think that going forward, most companies are going to want, at very minimum, to make sure that they’re not sourcing from one area. It’s not about China. It’s not about China versus the US. It’s not about geopolitics yet. What it’s about is about a diversity of supply so that if we have a problem in one area that it doesn’t have a ripple effect to the others and so that I’m stable.

I mean, 50 years ago, we had a couple of key materials that we needed. Now, with electronics, we have so many rare earths. The list of critical components that we can’t manufacture, our devices, our key things that we live our lives with, has just grown exponentially. We’ve got a few hundred of them, and many of them are going to be flowing through the same regions. So, we need to know that, and we need to take action to make sure that there are supplies that are diversified, especially in complex industries. Automotive, electronic, anything that has sort of a few hundred to a few thousand suppliers, just in time is a bigger danger there because you miss one critical component out of 60, 70, 80,000, and suddenly you can’t manufacture anymore, and that’s a much bigger risk than say someone working with wood, with paint, and then they’ve got like five things that they were dependent on.

Definitely. So, how do you think Minespider’s helping to solve some of these problems with visibility and traceability?

Basically, more data is more power. That’s what it is, and if you’ve got a knowledge of who’s in your supply chain, if you’ve got a rough knowledge of where your materials are coming from and how much of them there is in different places, then you can take action. So, we don’t have one product. What we have is a whole platform. So, we’ve built, essentially what I like to describe as sort of the internet for responsible supply chain traceability. We have this system to create passports, and then we have an app on top of it, but you can have any number of apps. You can have an app that tracks quantities and regions and how much stockpile each one has. You can go the other way around, and you can say, “We’re going to build an app that throws red flags if there are a certain force measure of supply chain issues, so that we’ve got a heads-up and can take action before it becomes a supply chain disruption,” and that’s sort of the beauty of building a flexible system like that. With what we have today, we’re already tracking and being able to prove authenticity of materials, so where they come from. Do they come from this source, and what data do we have on it to prove it? And though, this is the sort of thing that can help even with regulatory compliance, like we want to keep importing, or we want to make sure that we’re not delayed, that our supplies aren’t delayed at the border.

Yeah, and we’ve talked about blockchain on the show before. Have you seen a lot of misconceptions around it? Because it’s, quite honestly, a super complicated thing.

That would be an apt way of describing it. I remember when I got started in 2017. I was actually introduced to blockchain through a TED Talk, through someone I know, and he said, “You should look at blockchain now that you’re looking at what technology to work with conflict minerals,” and I said, “Blockchain?” Isn’t that–“

“Bitcoin?”

“Isn’t that the magic internet money to buy drugs on the internet or something?” But no. It’s true. There is a lot of misinformation of it, but what it essentially boils down to, it’s the solution to the problem of trust. We could have built a system that would have been much faster, much easier to use, much quicker to develop on a single database 10 years ago. The problem is, you’ve got different companies that do not want to share data. You’ve got companies running in different countries. So, you don’t necessarily have one regulatory body that you want to trust with the data. You don’t necessarily want to trust me with all the data because that is a lot of power if I know how much material everyone has all around the world and can pay for it.

So, designing this type of system required what’s called decentralization. You should own your data. You should have total control of your data, and you should be able to decide who it gets shared with, and I shouldn’t have a backdoor password to it. That’s just what it comes down to. It means that you as an individual have more responsibility, but you also have more control. And so, this is where blockchain really shines. If you don’t have that problem of trust that you want the data to remain unchanged, to be provable, to be mutable, and to be self-sovereign so that, self-sovereign just meaning that you have total control over it, then maybe a regular database is a better solution.

Yeah, I agree, and I think I’ve seen this before, but do you think that a lot more companies are going to be discussing it now more than ever before.

I expect so. I expect so, and I think that in the near-term, companies that were caught off guard by coronavirus and by supply chain disruption are probably, well, first, near-term, they’re going to be basically trying to scramble to get back online, but medium-term, everyone is going to want to know, at very list, their tier twos.

Yeah.

Everyone already knows their tier ones, but you should know who your tier twos are and have a better idea of where your risks are.

Exactly. Well, Nathan, listen. I really appreciate your time. For those who would like to learn more about Minespider, where can they go?

So you can visit our website at www.minespider.com. You can follow us on LinkedIn. LinkedIn/minespider, company in there, and I also post a lot on LinkedIn as well, and we’ve got our own blogs and own communications where we talk about all things blockchain and how it can be applied to this space.

Perfect. Well, thanks again so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Well, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. Thank you so much for joining me on the IndustrialSage Executive Series. We do this every week. Join me next week as I interview another guest and bring you some great content. Listen, if you are listening on any of the podcast stations, we’d love a review. If you are not on our email list, and you want to get this great content sent to you every single week and then some, go to industrialsage.com and sign up for our email newsletters, and there’s a lot of other content you can sign up for if you want. We’ve got other series, and manufacturing news, and you can sign up for all of it or choose which ones you want. So, don’t miss out, go do that today, and I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

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All right, let’s go ahead and just jump into this episode. Bhaskar, thanks so much for joining us. And before we get going, could you just introduce yourself to our audience. Who you are, who you’re with.

Sure.

What you’re doing?

Sure, so my name is Bhaskar Chopra. I am the Industry Manager for Material Handling with Siemens Digital Factory.

Excellent, so today’s topic, we’re going to be talking about presentations. And that’s kind of a big deal. So if you’re in business and you’re B2B sales presentations are kind of really, really important. But there’s been maybe some evolutions, there’s some changes. We’ve all been through those really great presentations and we’ve all been through those really, really boring. You’re questioning my life’s purpose presentations and things like that, right? So maybe in your experience, what are some of those do’s and don’ts that you’ve seen that you’ve worked through that have helped you?

We can talk about that.

Yeah.

So presentations I guess are a very critical part of anybody’s job, whether you’re doing sales, doing business planning, doing financial statements. Anything you’re doing as part of your function for your job. You’re presenting this information to somebody.

Right, yes.

More often than not I imagine you’d want to present it to people of either your client standpoint or your management. And in both cases, their time is very valuable, right?

Yes.

You want to be very cognizant of how much time they have and stressing the importance of whatever you’re trying to say to them in the most efficient manner. You’ve given presentations, I imagine in the past. Who are the types of people that you’ve given presentations to?

So I’ve given presentations to a couple, one or two people. No, different companies are so many different audiences like you mentioned, that internal, external audience. For a lot of times, most of it’s external for us. So you’re maybe presenting in front of one person, having that one-on-one, doing it via Webex or you’re having it in person or you’re presenting in front of a whole tribunal. You know, the whole board room full of people. And so, yes, each of those situations completely varied. It’s been interesting just the feedback you get from people. Some people like the slide deck. some people hate hate the slide deck.

Yes.

Some people, I don’t know.

So we did a trade show back in March and there was a variety of different types of presentations that we were watching, we had to deliver and we had to get accommodated to. The one point that you make a very good statement on, if you’re talking about VFDs and automation and you come to a slide deck and you know it’s going to be an hour long presentation. The speaker’s up there, you know he’s the smartest guy in the room, but it’s the most technical, full of jargon presentation where it’s just words upon word upon words for 28 slides in a 15 minute session, and then he’s like, “I have a video and then I have 58 more slides.” We all know that that’s the worst, right?

Yes.

Not necessarily because of the content, because all that content can always be put in an appendix.

Right.

If I’m the audience and I really want to know that, perfect, I’ll get to know that eventually.

Right.

But when you’re having a dialogue in front of 25 people it really should be a dialogue, right? It shouldn’t be you preaching to them.

Right.

In my opinion it should be just a bit of an exchange. So what I like to do whenever I’m making my presentations, I think this is, for whatever reason, we’ve been trained as people in this industry, to put as much stuff up there on that presentation PowerPoint as we can partly because, for whatever reason, we’re not comfortable with note cards, or we’re not comfortable with the content or we haven’t memorized the content. And that’s probably step one, preparation, right?

Yes.

You want to make sure that you know what you’re talking about and you know what you’re talking about more than the second and third person in that room, whatever question, you know what you’re talking about. The only way to get around that is with preparation, honestly.

Right.

So I do a lot of presentations on the state of material handling as an industry.

Yeah.

And while I’ve been working in material handling for less than five years, I feel like I’ve gained quite a bit of knowledge about that industry, and I can speak intelligently about the market trends, the general feedback about where this industry’s evolving to, some of the technologies in it. That didn’t happen over night by any means, but I do have a good sense of that industry. I don’t think I would feel comfortable making a presentation on the benefits of TET stands for the electric car industry. Not an expert at that.

Right, yeah.

So I think step one, make sure you’re confident in what you’re presenting on.

Yes.

Sounds underrated, or it sounds like common sense, but that’s why it’s common sense. You should know it.

Right, actually another question on that. So you talk about preparation, right? What are some of those things that you would do to kind of prepare? And you mentioned industry standards and trends and things like that, but do you have a particular process on that?

Yes, first one, know your audience, all right?

Yes, yes.

Because, I’ve done this before too. It’s not like I’m perfect at presentations. I’ve definitely given the wrong type of presentation for the wrong kind of audience. If I’m meeting with a C-suite executive and I’m talking about the nuts and bolts of my product they don’t care very quickly.

No, yeah.

And I’ve made that mistake several times, but you learn about these things. So the first tip is know the audience that you’re presenting to. That’s sometimes tough in trade show environments because your audience could be a little but of everyone. But in seminars that we do inside trade shows, I try to really get a feeling for who these people are, what their titles are and what they’re interested in. I’ll even send a survey out ahead of time, if possible. It may sound like a little bit of overkill on that aspect, but you’re asking for an hour of these peoples’ valuable time. And that hour means a lot more than the cost of a VFD or the cost of a PLC does. That’s an hour of their personal time.

Right.

And so if you throw something out there that says, “Hey, this is my normal thing that I want to talk about, but is there anything special that you would like us to get into?” That preparation and that audience participation, I think is really appreciated.

And I think there’s a really key point in here that obviously, yes, one would say this is very much a very sales-driven activity, however, you still have the exact same framework that you would in marketing activities. The exact same process. And I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up on, in terms of knowing your audience, knowing that persona. You mentioned a really great thing. C-suite versus end user versus who are you talking to and who they are going to care about. C-suite, bottom line, if you’re talking about publicly traded companies, let’s talk about EPS. How is this going to impact these things over here? Not how are we going to do it, the nuts and bolts, like OK, we’re going to do this and then we’re going to do this, then we’re going to connect this over here. No, no, no, no. We want high level, like we implement this solution and this investment and return on this is going to do this, and here’s X and what have you, right?

I think to a certain extent it’s kind of like when we were in middle school, high school, we had a very general format about how to write essays. You say what you’re going to say, you talk about how you’re going to do it, and then you say what you were going to say again. And to a certain extent, that’s kind of how presentations should be too. You open, especially to a C-suite executive, you open with this is what I’m going to deliver you. And then depending on the level of how engaged they want to be, you can get into some of the nuts and bolts, but you always start with this is what I want to deliver you. This is what the purpose of my meeting here is, this is what we’re going to go deliver. And then you’ve grabbed their attention. If they have very specific questions about that then that gives them an opportunity to expand upon that. A lot of times in presentations in this industry we really like to work up to a final point. And that’s fun, because talking about how we’re going to build up to this point makes that crescendo happen at the end. But depending on your audience you may not have time for that. Or they might not have time for that, that’s the key. It’s not about your personal enjoyment of your topic, it’s about what they want, what the people want. And I’ve tried to adopt that as much as I can into all my presentations. That also leads into my second thing that I like to really have. And this also goes along with preparation, but before you put any words, any content, any pictures on a PowerPoint, you need to have some sort of a storyboard. So that goes with a marketing plan or animations or whatever you want to do. There’s got to be a plan in place and that’s very hard because to think about what you’re going to put on this PowerPoint before touching the PowerPoint, it’s not an intuitive process.

Right, yeah.

But I swear this makes the actual creation of the PowerPoint 20 times easier, because now that you have a storyboard created about what you want to talk about and the steps that you want to talk about these things in, and how different PowerPoint slides might be able to build into these other steps, you get a strategy for your slide set. And then when you present it, you’re all the more prepared because you’ve got three layers of understanding for how you want to exhibit this content to people.

Absolutely, it totally makes sense, I love that. Creating that storyboard out and it’s really it’s the purpose. OK, here’s we want to get X result so let’s work backwards. Not OK, let’s add this and that looks cool and done, right?

I’ve done a lot of presentations where I’ve tried to. So my background was in VFD sales. My previous job before this, and I had to go about exhibiting the benefits and features and all the value adds of a general purpose VFD, which to me is very exciting. To a lot of people, even in your audience, they may be like, I don’t know what a VFD is. Or they may be like, it’s just a VFD. At the end of the day though, there’s a lot of sales that need to happen with VFD so it can be a very profitable presentation to make.

For those who don’t know.

Variable frequency drive.

Such as myself.

I apologize, see, point taken, I didn’t know my audience right there. Variable frequency drive, it basically runs the motor in a certain speed, in a certain ramp up, ramp down time and these motors can be involved in pumps, fans, compressors, conveyors.

OK, so like my pool pump that just went out, my capacitor just went pop on me?

There’s actually, yes, I mean, more often. If you lived in Florida there would be a rule that says you have to have a VFD on it. More and more states are starting to incorporate that.

OK, all right, yes.

So I would have to give a presentation on these VFDs and I would try to make it so my presentation isn’t a very static, “Here’s what a VFD is,” presentation. That’s if we’re going in order this might be the third thing, to try to engage your audience.

Yes.

I always like to ask questions. Once I have my preparation and my storyboard created and I know what I’m going to talk about I always try to build a little bit of time in there during my presentation, to engage an audience member. It can be as very simple as asking questions. So, how many of you guys know what a VFD is? One hand shows up, no hand shows up. No hands show up, you just pivot off of that. OK, if you don’t know what a VFD is, here’s an example of a VFD. This is the applications that VFDs are involved in. How many of you guys have these applications? And it’s very simple things like that, in my opinion, that at least get some of that hindrance of audiences wanting to actually listen to you. If you start asking questions, then in reality the people in the audience are going to be like, well, maybe I should pay attention to some of this and really be ready for whatever questions are going to happen.

Exactly.

It’s not malicious, it’s meant to get audience interaction and get people to come back to you.

It just reminds you of when you were in school, and you were like I don’t want to be asked, I better pay attention.

Exactly.

What’s going on here?

Subconsciously that’s probably where it comes from, in reality, because I was always caught off guard. But it really does spur audience involvement and it makes people really care more about your topic.

Yes.

And then often what I would try to do is always incorporate a hands-on demonstration in my presentations, too, But I would never want to do that by myself. My biggest thing that I talked about with VFDs for Siemens was the ease of use of them. You can talk as much as you want to about the ease of use but if you have an audience member come up during your presentation and showcase what you’re trying to present, successfully, that speaks a lot more volumes than what I could.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Right.

Of course the sale guy, oh yes, this is super-easy to do, anybody can do this, it’s amazing and like yeah, right, no.

It doesn’t work with everything, but the more that you can incorporate audience involvement in my opinion, in whatever you’re doing, the more engaged, not just that person will be, but the rest of that group will be as well too.

Yes, no, absolutely, one key thing, several key things you mentioned in there, but one that I latched onto was that you mentioned, obviously you want to engage your audience with, you mentioned doing with a question, right? It’s the very same tactic that you would do on social media.

Yes.

You know, It’s really interesting. If you really want to drive engagement there it’s hey, let’s ask you for participation inside this conversation. And there’s a reason why they call that engagement. Right? Yes, so.

There’s a psychology involved in all presentations. I don’t want to make this sound like it’s a brilliant, new science, but I think there is.

I think it’s brilliant.

You’re talking to people, right? And all people have certain emotions and certain characteristics that they want to convey to people whether they have the best way of conveying this or not, that’s for people to decide. But if you can tap into something that that person is very concerned about, but maybe too shy to talk about it in a crowded environment of 100 people, if you can make that interaction easier for him or her, that’s really the key of getting that audience member engaged in whatever you’re selling.

OK, so let me ask you this question then. You build out that storyboard and you mentioned earlier on in the conversation, OK, sometimes you have just layers and layers of text. I’m saying not you, but people, and then there’s just all kinds of technical information. How do you, what’s best practice in terms of handling that? Or how have you handled that in the past, where you have a very highly technical product and you’ve got to slide deck, or maybe you don’t, I don’t know. Do you have a slide deck and if you do, well you mentioned you had the storyboard. So what do you put on that?

I personally like to limit it to a very Apple, Steve Jobs-like presentation format. I’m not sure if that’s the best practice by any means or if that’s the best way of doing it, but that makes me feel a little bit more comfortable whenever I’m in front of an audience. I read a study just before I came here, just to refresh my mind about that stat but I think I’ve forgotten the exact stat, but something like the first two lines of most presentation slides is what people read, if that. And then if you have more than two lines of slides then people are either 100% focused on reading everything that’s in that slide or have tuned out what you’re saying and kind of half-way participating in that slide content. You’ve lost 100% focus, one way or the other. You want people to listen to you rather than read off of a slide. Appendix slides are there for that.

Right.

So if you do have a technical topic like how a VFD is meant to operate, I always like to have images up there. And images that have as little word content as possible. And I let myself do the speaking, because at the end of the day, they want to hear and understand what you’re selling, what you’re trying to convey or educate to them. That’s where that preparedness goes into play. That’s where having that knowledge of whatever you’re presenting goes into play. You can wind up being a much more effective liaison of that information than words on a slide ever will. Think about it like this too. When you have a multidisciplinary audience where you have people from all sorts of different cultures you’re presenting something in one fashion and one written statement. That written statement may not be the easiest way for people to be able to comprehend whatever is supposed to be written. Whether they come from different cultures or they just aren’t the best at reading comprehension on any kind of level. I mean that in a very succinct way. Reading comprehension is a very highly sought after skill, especially with technical jargon. You can read something all you want to, but if you don’t take it into account and comprehend it, that’s average, most people don’t. So you have to be that liaison in my opinion. Have good representative background images to convey what you’re talking about. I like to keep text to a minimum. There’s definitely different ways and methodologies of having some sort of picture and overlaying some sort of text onto it that’s representative instead of words about that picture. But you can’t have paragraphs on a slide statement, in my opinion.

No, it’s not going to happen. And we’ve all been there and done that. I can’t tell you how many times you go on there and you should have font size minimums or whatever because people can’t read it. Like hang on, they’re up there, let me get my binoculars.

Never want to go back to say, hey, just scroll in right there.

Right.

That’s tough. The other thing I would say too, this is even a bigger pet peeve to some people in PowerPoint and the people that I deal with tell me that this is best practice, too. Don’t embed pictures. If at all possible, try to recreate that picture on the slide. It conveys a sense of laziness almost, if you’re just taking a screenshot of a picture and putting it on the slide. It’s a subconscious viewing of laziness from your audience member. That’s how see it whenever in the audience too.

Interesting, so you’re saying, all right, walk me through this.

So let’s say you’re trying to come up with the number of airports projects coming up in the next five years in the United States. The FAA may have a nice little screenshot that says here’s the United States, here’s all the different airport projects coming up. Some people may, and I have done this in the past too, no saint. You could take a screenshot of that map and put it on your slide, that’s it, done.

Right.

Or you could take the extra 15 minutes, find a picture of the United States on a place that’s available and then create your own thing.

Gotcha, OK.

It’s a subconscious thing, but I think the audience really appreciates the fact that, hey, this guy actually took time to actually make this. It also looks better nine times out of 10 because you don’t have to worry about pixel distortion and things like that. And it streams a little bit more professionally polished-looking presentation.

Stream is a good word for that, yes, because it absolutely does. Because there is something, and you know it, whether you can pinpoint it or not, but I think the average person will look at that at say, well, this looks cohesive. The graphics and charts and whatever you might have on there.

It all matches a certain pattern, right?

Exactly, versus you can easily tell when somebody cut and paste and threw something on there. There is something that’s subtle like mm, I don’t know, they didn’t spend a lot of time on this or they just you know.

The worst part is the graphs, right? Especially when you’re doing financial statements. I know there’s a lot of extensions out there within PowerPoint, to be able to embed Excel files and there’s tons of third-party extensions to be able to bring in things like that. Use those extensions. If your company has access to those extensions, use those things. Don’t just always screenshot an Excel graph and put it in there.

Yes, that’s true. And I’d say this too. When you put your content on the slide, if you feel that you have to say, well, I know you can’t see this, but.

Exactly.

That’s a couple red flags right there. No, you should probably scale that down.

Exactly.

And make sure you could comprehend it, right?

Yes.

Yes.

No, there’s a ton of individual small little best practices to get into like that and just being mindful that the audience is the one that cares about this, not you completing the PowerPoint, but the audience.

I think a couple key things there too. And again, this all goes back to marketing. It’s messaging, your audience and you mentioned a key thing on there, education. You know, sales has definitely evolved, but it hasn’t completely, it’s not oh, we’re doing things radically different than we were. OK, maybe the way, the method of communication. Yes, that has radically changed. But sales, in caveman days, I’m sure, it’s education, providing value, developing your relationship. That has not changed.

Right.

And that won’t.

Right.

The technology on how it gets delivered, it will, but I think sometimes particularly in the manufacturing industrial space there has been this tendency. And correct me if I’m wrong, it is a perception that we’ve seen, it’s just that messaging and presentations we’re the biggest, we’re the best, we’re the greatest, that’s why you want to work with us. Have you, is that?

That happens a lot, right? And that’s got its place, it definitely does.

Sure.

To the right person probably that does. That company that’s hearing all that though, probably doesn’t care if you’re not the best and most appropriate for them.

Right, yes.

And that’s where all that homework comes in ahead of time. That’s where that preparedness comes in ahead of time to be able to say, I may be the biggest, best company out there in the world, but if I’m not the right company for you, why are we having this meeting?

Sure, and I guess another variation on my question on that, how many of your presentations would you say would be more education-based versus very matter-of-fact?

Oh, they’re all education-based. I don’t know if that’s as a result of the type of job that I have, or just the way that I like to talk to people. My bigger background prior to Siemens, too, I used to be a tutor for a long time. My mom was a teacher. I just liked teaching people. I liked talking to people, as you can tell, I like talking to people.

No .

But if people can gain something out of their time with me then I feel very happy on the inside. My dopamine levels just kick off when I’m teaching people stuff. And so as a result, I think all of my presentations always have some sort of set-up towards an educational type environment. I don’t want to speak about what Siemens is or what any of my company facets are. That’s nice, but that’s also researchable in 2018. You can find out what we do from a large perspective. Now how those things that we do impact you as a person and how you can benefit from those things, that’s education for the customer. That’s education for that individual right there. It’s hard to say 100% of my presentations are education but 90% of them are.

Absolutely, and that’s the big feeling we’re seeing that shift in marketing as well. That’s the really big opportunity there is: people realizing, “Hey, you know what? Maybe these messages aren’t working before like they will. Maybe we need to educate.” The big thing is really providing value.

Right.

That’s what you’re doing.

So we kind of strayed away from the way of doing presentations but this is a nice segue into that again. When you’ve given presentations in the past, what do you do when you first start your presentations? What do you start off with?

That’s a great question. I do a couple different things. Sometimes I think the go-to is, hey, everybody, this is who we are, yada, yada, yada. We’re trying to move away from that a little bit more and just jumping right into it. And I think the big thing is focusing on your audience first versus. Because a lot of times we’ll come in and you hear, oh, we want a capabilities presentation. We want to know what you guys can do. And so there’s a big, big, big tendency to just jump right into it and it’s all about us and this is what we can do and we’re amazing versus coming in and saying, well let’s. To your point you were talking about industry trends. Well, let’s talk about here’s what’s going on in your industry. Here’s what you guys. These are some challenges I bet you guys are facing. And walking through all that. Does that answer your question.

That’s an interesting point because you said I bet you’re facing, right? You’re taking an assumption and not just you, just people.

OK, all right.

Taking an assumption on what they always want to hear. You can sometimes get a very good idea for what that audience really cares about. More often than not though, a lot of people will come into a meeting, or you may have extra people coming to the meeting that have their own individual goals and challenges in mind. What I do like to do is before I start any type of presentation, especially for a smaller crowd, less than 10 people where I’m doing a lunch-and-learn or something. I’ll go around the room. I’ll take a legitimate five minutes and say, I’m Bhaskar, here’s what I do. Who are you? What do you do? Why do you care about Siemens? Why do you care about VFDs? Why do you care about material handling? Tell me your experience and what you care about and I’ll write those things down on a board too. Ideally there should be a whiteboard there, that would be fun. Or you can just write it anywhere, just to keep in mind what their goals out of this meeting are. The next statement is a very hot take, but this is why I think PowerPoint probably isn’t long for the world for the way that sales is evolving.

Sure, sure.

I’ll explain that for a second. With PowerPoint, you have a very linear flow of content, right? You create the storyboard and it’s great for what you’re trying to do, but if four of the people in that room, when you’re asking these questions, have things they want to talk about that are outside the scope of what your storyboard is your medium is now shot. Now you have to come up with another presentation or try to salvage some stuff from elsewhere.

On the spot and you’re like ah, yeah.

And that’s doable, and we do that all the time when we try to salvage these things, but PowerPoint as a medium really doesn’t allow for that non-linearity of conversations. I don’t know if there’s a solution out there that does but it makes you think about if our point is to answer every single one of these peoples’ questions and make sure that they all come out of this room with 100% acceptance that this hour of their life was well worth it, how do we do that in the most effective way? PowerPoint’s mostly what we have right now. I’d love to hear if the audience has other ideas.

Yes.

But still, that first questionnaire portion, making sure that you ask everybody what their goals are, write them on a board so that they can clearly see that you’re doing it.

I like that idea, yes, yes.

And I did this for a customer in Marietta a year ago. We were talking about pump drives and large 500 horsepower drives requiring ethernet IP communication. That’s just an industrial protocol that allows for data transfer between a programmable logic controller and the VFD. And they all had questions. They all had individual different questions. Some had questions about telegram set-up, some had questions about horsepower size, some had questions about IP ratings, and I made sure to write all those down in plain English so that they could see it too. So they knew I really did care about it. Everyone cares about it, but just to make sure that they understand that we are going to get to every single one of these things. I went through my presentation, answered probably half of them and then I said, the remaining people, you guys obviously still have these questions. Would you mind if I took 15 minutes and found a different presentation to kind of address these other topics? They didn’t care, they welcomed it, they wanted it. It bides you some extra time to do other stuff that as long as they know you’re going to answer questions that’s really all it comes down to. Just be there for them.

I really like that, I mean it’s communicating, visually though, that I heard you and we’re going to get to this and I’m not just like ah. I’m not a one-trick pony over here. I’m like, here’s my thing. Which is funny, you mentioned the linear slide deck and this is it and we’re going to stick to the script. I have never run into that ever. Never done that, yeah. Yeah, probably the biggest offender right here. But, no, that absolutely makes sense. Absolutely just really tailoring that message to what you want to hear. I mean, at the end of the day isn’t that kind of like Sales 101 a little bit? But it’s like, hey, what do you guys need? What do you guys want? I mean we’ll get to crafting that solution to the best solution there, but let’s just start with what you guys want or what you guys think you want. And then kind of go from there.

Do you remember The O’Jays?

The O’Jays.

Yes, the Motown band, The O’Jays?

I do not, I’m sorry.

That’s OK, I don’t why I should, I’m not that old, but they had a song called Got To Give the People Want They Want. It’s a very fun tune, it’s a very catchy melody.

Got to give the people what they want.

Got to give the people what they want. Got to give the people what they need. And that just, it rings in my mind every time I’m about to go up there and do a presentation. This is a personal thing that I like too. I like to get psyched up before I give a presentation. I like to get very.

Like Matthew McConaughey, like I’m doing a bunch of push-ups.

I’m not very good at push-ups.

OK, all right.

But I do like to listen to a good song just to get me in the right mind state. And that’s all, always subliminally puts me in the right mind state. I listen to the O’Jays.

Driving to a meeting and you’re like, all right. And you’re just like I’m getting in my jam.

Yes, it’s weird but I guess the purpose of it is really because you’re trying to give the people what they want. You’ve got to give. They were talking about peace in the song.

That’s awesome.

We’re talking about selling drives. It’s two different things.

Hey, you know, you’re selling something.

Whatever works for you, right?

I love it, that’s like your walkout music, right?

Exactly .

I’m doing this, this is cool, that’s awesome. Well, Bhaskar, this has been a really great episode. Again, we all give presentations and it’s nothing super-earth shattering, but we forget, right? We forget these things and I think the biggest thing, the biggest take away for me anyway is what you said, and I’m reflecting on how we could do a better job. As the very beginning, preparation, you mentioned. Preparation, it’s really spending that time to really something that’s meaningful, that is on-point, on-message for your target to give them what they want.

That’s right.

Simple, but you know.

Just got to remember it.

We need to do that. So now I’m going to steal that walk-out music. Awesome. So Bhaskar, thanks so much for your time.

Absolutely.

If everybody would love to ask you more questions or reach out, what’s the best way of contacting you?

I don’t know, I’m not on social media really at all.

OK, he’s non-contactable.

I have an email address, we could put it on the bottom of the screen if we want to.

OK.

It’s my first name dot last name @siemens.com.

First name dot last name @siemens.com.

Yes, I got away from social media recently.

It’s all good. It’s OK, it’s all right, no shame. So anyways, all right, again, thanks so much,

Thank you.

It was awesome. All right, so this was yet another really great episode talking about presentations. It’s something that I think everyone, we all take for granted. It’s one of those things that everybody does a presentation whether you’re in the marketing department, you’re in the sales department. Whether you’re talking to a customer or whether you’re talking to your upper management and presenting things internally. And so it’s really, really, really easy to forget the basics and just go to all right, here, slide deck, whatever, we’re going to crank this out and maybe even sometimes using it as a crutch. So some really great tips in here. For me, selfishly I’m taking away this preparation thing. I’m going to make sure I’m really going to hone in on this and figure out really who is that audience and really present that great information that they’re looking for. I’m going to give the people what they want, that’s it. Again, thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you liked it please make sure to share, comment. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. If you have any questions for any future episodes or content please write in to us, industrialsage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them and thanks so much for watching this episode. We’ll see you next time.

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Welcome today’s Executive Series interview on IndustrialSage. I’m joined by John Krummell, who is the president of Advance Storage Solutions. John, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Thank you.

For those who are unfamiliar with us, tell me a little bit about your company, Advanced Storage Solutions.

Yeah, we’re a material handling system supplier, so our main business is we build pallet racks and push rack systems for warehouses selling into the grocery industry. And then we have a new business that’s growing very very rapidly right now in automation, we’re building fully automated storage and retrieval systems for warehouses, focused really around a unique product we built called the Rack Rover that we’re rolling that out right now.

Excellent, so now tell me a little about your story. How did you get your business started? Is it a family business? What’s the background?

Well, I started my career working in Anderson Consulting; I was in computer and systems consulting work, and I was moving from them going to graduate school, and my dad called and said, “You want to come and help me out for the summer while I have this big project? We sold one business, and we’re growing a new business.” And so I went to work with my dad for three months 30 years ago. So when I came into the business, he had sold a prior business; we were starting up into the rack push rack business, and I think we had about five or six employees in a 1500 square foot office up in Carson, California. And now we’ve grown it to about 300 employees and two factories, and the new automation business is growing as well. So it really was just, I had never planned to work with a family business, but we got in and I enjoyed it. I had never planned to work in the pallet rack business, but once we got into it, we learned it’s a fun business, a lot to learn, it’s always changing, and it’s been a great opportunity to grow and to build a nice organization.

So how long did your dad have the business before you jumped in?

Well, he started the business in 1958, so my dad was really sort of an entrepreneurial guy, and he had at least five or six different businesses. I mean, at one point he made furniture, he had a moving business, he had an electronic workbench business, he was doing all these different things. And I joined in 1989, and at that point, when I came in, I’m not that creative, and so we really just focused in. And we started out in the push rack business. At that point, it was a growing segment in the rack industry. And so we had some unique designs, and then we went and we got some patents on the deeper systems, and started to grow that business. And initially we started out not in manufacturing, we tried just being an engineering business with a contract of manufacturing.

And then in the mid, let’s see, I have to go back to the time, but the mid-90’s we realized we really have to go back into manufacturing. And so ’cause the business was growing and the subcontractors couldn’t keep up with demand. So we went and we opened up our first factory in Rockmart, Georgia. At that time we were in Carson, California and we had a factory in Georgia. And really it was just a logistics decision that most of the material handling markets on the east coast, and so we wanted to put the manufacturing closer to the markets. And in Georgia, we found a facility that met our needs for the time, and so we opened up out there, and I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. And then we ran that facility for about six, seven years, and outgrew it very quickly, and then in 2004, we moved into our current plant in Cedartown and went from a 20 to 100,000 square foot facility, and really went from being just a push rack only supplier to being a full rack system supplier. In about three years, we almost trebled the size of the business. It was a huge risk and it was pretty pretty hairy at that time. But by the time we came out of it, we had really established ourselves at a very very nice place in the structural rack market.

I’m a pragmatic optimist that, it’s like well, if other people can do it, we can do it. And so we kind of looked at the rack business and said, well criminy, we’re making push rack and doing pretty well at it. And the rack market is a much larger market so we can get into it, and of course we didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be and how competitive, but it took us a couple of years, and then we got ourselves well established. And at this point, we’re definitely one of the larger players in the industry. So same thing in Salt Lake; it was really time to go national. We’re working with all the major Wal-Marts of the world, and they want one source, and so we really felt we needed to be able to service the whole country. So that’s really what our throw is to open up the Salt Lake facility.

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have some early memories from your childhood? Maybe of your dad working and doing this, does any of these stand out?

Well you know what, my dad was a workaholic, and so we didn’t see a lot of dad growing up. But we were always in the plans, so I worked summers in the factories, and realized I didn’t want to be a factory worker at that time. And I was always doing something around the business, so I don’t think I really ever said I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I’m more of a let’s build something, and then let’s build out, versus, oh my gosh, I’ve got this idea, let’s go out and do something. And I’m kind of a problem solver, and so as we grew up, it was more, boy, we want to keep growing the business, that’s interesting, I don’t have a lot of desire just to stay steady. What do you have to do to grow a business? And then that’s when you start taking kind of the entrepreneurial risks. But for me, it’s much more calculated than, oh my gosh, I’ve got this idea, we’ve got to just do that. And I’m definitely the person in the organization who’s going, yeah, we can do that, yeah, we’ll figure it out. No, we can’t do it. No it’s okay, we’ll take some risks, and they find we do the first hype of this project whatever it is, the first customer, and then it doesn’t go so great the first time, but then we get better at it, and then pretty soon it becomes part of the routine, so I’m definitely the one who’s always trying to push the organization out of the comfort zone, and go onto the new whatever sort of new thing. I don’t like a lot of routines, so I get kind of bored in the day-to-day. So I’m always kind of trying to be out six months, a year in front of the business, and say, what can we do that’s a little different that’s cool, it’s fun, it’s interesting?

Yeah, I’m the same way. So you know, besides your dad, or maybe him, that may be the answer, but is there anyone that, throughout your career, has had a really big impact? Or maybe it’s a moment that has really really impacted your career, what is that?

I’ve been very very fortunate that I’ve had a lot of really good advisors and help throughout my career. So we’ve always had an advisory board in place. And at different points, different members on the advisory board have helped me at kind of different, ’cause there are a lot of step functions in growing a business, and in each step function, I kind of tried to reach out finding different people, so I’ve been very active in the Young Presidents Organization, and that’s been a phenomenal resource for me, and say the Lean journey, all the resources I’ve gotten of taking us on the Lean journey have almost come out of YPO. And my dad is just the guy who, he was a fabulous engineer, and the guy in the first going into business, I mean, he knew how to run a business, and I really learned the basics of running a business from my dad. Five, six years ago, we had one of our board members, a fellow named Dan Wilson had been president at the Interlake, and he had retired, and I called him up and said, “Hey Dad, want to be on our board?” He’s like, yeah. Dan was a great mentor, and I think he kind of helped at this transition where we’re at right now where we’re going from being a mid-size to a larger size business. And for me, having transitioned on the building management team and bringing in a much stronger set of leaders and not having everything run through me the way it used to. So I think along the way there’ve been different people that have kind of helped push, and I’m always sort of trying to reach out and get new coaching, and how do we go and sort of move to the next level of the organization?

Yeah, so you mentioned that you took a really big risk on opening the second plant.

The first plant was a big risk. Really in the Cedartown plant we really bet the business ’cause we had gone from, in three years, we tripled the size of the business, and we were running out of cash, the plant managers couldn’t handle the volume, we didn’t really know how to make wrath, we weren’t as smart as we thought we were, and it was really really harrowing. I mean, it was hard. At that time, too, my dad– talk about having some, he was in his early 70’s and put his entire network at risk for that, too. At that point in my career, I wouldn’t have let my son make that decision I don’t think. So it was a tough tough time going through that. And truthfully, I left the business for three years after that. Just kind of my dad and I kind of got at lager heads and so I went off and worked in another business for a few years, and fortunately we had good, strong, professional management for the business and the business ran very well in my absence.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound fun at all. It sounds actually really stressful and very challenging. So what would you say that would be one of the big milestones of your career? Or what are these moments of success that really stands out for you?

Well, I’ll tell you one. A very good customer of ours, H-E-B Grocery, we’ve worked with them, they’re a large Texas grocery firm we’ve worked with for almost 30 years. And we just completed a 15 million pound project for them. And this project went in, it took I think 450 truckloads of material, installing over seven months, two crews, and we were late by three days. To me, that is just the cumulation of 30 years of work that we can be running that major project shipping out of two factories, and it was routine. And also the rest of our business is running along regularly, too. We’re still shipping to hundreds of other customers at the same time. And then it just finished up a few months ago, we finished so early because they had put contingency in assuming the building would be open late.

When the COVID crisis opened, they were able to go on and accelerate the opening of the facility by three months, and in like a week, they were able to ship two or three hundred truckloads of material a day out of this facility. So just our ability to be such a key part, and I was figuring, the facility, it’s 150,000 pallet positions, I mean it’s massive. And just the ability of us to handle that very much in the routine, without me having to really be personally involved in it, I just thought was fabulous. So that kind of, to me, that’s sort of the pinnacle almost at this point in the rack business of 30 years of work, and to see that the team is handling it, and that we’ve got a super loyal customer, we’ve got a team that just knows what to do, and it’s routine, and that to me is great. Even through the crisis, I mean, we’re kind of running business as usual. So for the customers that are still able to keep their projects going, we’re still shipping and installing, and producing for them. And it’s very much, we’re a relationship-focused business, so we’re typically not the low bid. We’re typically, we’ve done the work on the front end, we’ve worked with the customer, we’re very price competitive, but we get the work because they’re saying, “We really want to work with Advance for X, X, and X reason.” And that’s the part, to me, that I enjoy and that just seeing that we’re building just a good, reliable, trustworthy type of business.

Yeah, that’s huge. So you mentioned that the coronavirus really isn’t impacting your company as much, but how are you seeing it impacting your customers?

I think from us, we’re shipping into warehouses, so we have some projects where we’re in operating warehouses, and for example, we’re taking a row of rack out and putting another row of rack in. Those customers are saying, “Don’t stop,” because all their plans are geared around this dance that we’re doing with them, and if we interrupt the plans, it’ll throw the warehouse into chaos. And so those customers are literally, please don’t stop, we have to keep running. I think for the projects where they’re in process, they very much want to finish them up because again, they just don’t want the interruption. Warehouses are scheduled to come online at a certain point, but they don’t want to change those schedules. We are seeing some projects get pushed out now. So we aren’t seeing cancellations, but they’re saying, well, you know, let’s start it in the fall rather than right now. We’re seeing some of that, and we are seeing some decisions pushed out, where they’re saying, nah, we still need to do the project, but let’s wait a couple of weeks until we kind of know how things are coming out, and CFOs are starting to exert their control saying, no, we need to preserve cash. So we are starting to see some decisions deferred, and it’s hard to say eight weeks out what the world’s going to look like. We have a very strong back log, so fortunately I think we’re in pretty good shape, and I think our core industry is going to be, if anything, we’ll see growth because people are eating in more. But I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty out there. So we’re just going to have to keep, we’ll know a lot more I think in eight weeks when they start to ease the restrictions. And then I think companies kind of see this is what the post COVID world looks like.

So yeah, what do you think will become as a result of the virus? What have you guys learned from this whole situation so far?

I think that in the offices, it’s going to be interesting to see how we’ve been working remote, and are we going to go to more of a blended office remote set up? That’s going to be kind of interesting to see as we go forward what people want to do. We’ve traditionally had a lot of remote employees, but we were just about to do an expansion on our office in California, now I’m thinking, boy, maybe if we just have more people kind of work from home part time, do we really need to do that. So I think there’s going to be a change on that. And the social distancing, I think that’s going to go on for a while. And so my guess is that we’ll see people wearing masks in the factories for quite a while and job sites, we’re going to see the masks everywhere for quite a while as people kind of get comfortable with it. But long-term, it will get past it, and there have been a lot of things where the end of the world has been predicted, and it typically doesn’t end. So I think we’ll see some short-term impacts, and I think that you look at the use of Zoom and like I just tested this afternoon with my sales manager, yeah, I can just click on the little button and get a video call with them on Teams. Boy, that’s cool. Things like that where there’s capabilities that I think a lot of the younger companies are using, and an older company like us isn’t as facile with, and we’re trying to sort of understand some of these technologies, and how we can better use them.

Yeah, those are some great observations. So what are some of the really big industry challenges that you’ve seen that have been around maybe before COVID or maybe not?

People. It’s just, the people challenge is going to continue to be one. We’re a domestic manufacturing business, and we need people that are skilled welders, and machine operators, and things like that, and it’s challenging to get people who want to do that kind of work. And then it’s challenging, I mean, in our automation business, we need programmers and controls engineers, and design engineers and project managers. And then for us, we’re going into these sites, we’re putting these automated facilities in all over the country. we’ve got one going into Canada, and getting engineers who have the ability to go and be at that job site and commission a system is a challenge with the labor pool the way it is. And now with the COVID, just physically getting there, we were just having a big discussion about whether to fly a project manager who lives in Atlanta to Washington to a job site to start out a project, and is that safe or not?

So I think the people are going to really continue to be the big challenges that we have. In the field installation for the rack systems for us, getting enough guys who can go to a job site and stay on the ramp And as they start to sort of limit the immigrant population and those sorts of things, it’s tougher to get the folks who are willing and able to do that kind of physical work that still needs to be done. So I think the biggest challenges here for us are going to be, again, as our businesses are growing, is getting the right skillset of people into the businesses that we need. I do think, right now, the warehousing market is still hot, but in 2009 the industry collapsed and our business went down 40, 50% in a year. And if that happens in our market, then that’s a huge challenge too because then we’re getting into how do you get the business side to survive in that kind of a downturn? A lot of people are really facing that in other industries, not so much in our niche, but in other industries are absolutely facing it right now.

And I looked at booking a flight on Delta the other day, and I think that there were three seats reserved on the plane. So yeah, I think that there’s going to be, you know, there’s going to be some pretty seismic changes, and the certain businesses are going to, I mean, they just dropped off the face of the earth. Our restaurants supply customers, their business is off 50, 60%. So the guys who are selling directly doing food service are getting crushed right now. And then you think about it, say with the restaurant segment, who’s going to want to go to a restaurant in three months? Folks won’t even leave the house right now, even if there’s really not any appreciable risk, and so I think there’s going to be a tail on this one on a lot of industries.

Yeah, the future’s definitely going to be very interesting. So as far as my last question goes, how are you guys really standing out and just staying ahead of the game, ahead of the curve from your peers?

Well I think in our business, two different businesses. So in the core rack business, the designs are relatively standardized at this point, and so really the competitive advantage is operational excellence, and it’s just running the business in a more lean, organized, systematic manner. It’s the investment in the software systems, and the investment in the design systems, the investment in the factories. And then how do we tie everything together so that we just do the operational side of the business with less effort and better results? So it’s almost the Toyota model of business where it’s just, they’re an operationally excellent business, their products historically haven’t tried to compete because of product differentiation, it’s just quality, and service, and supply. And that’s really kind of where I think we’re focused on the core business, but the growth part of course is the automation side, and we’ve been investing for seven years now in developing the Rover product, and really what we’re looking to do is that if we do see a slow down in the core business that we think we can fill that in with the automation business growing because the world is automating. I mean, virtually all the major companies are saying that they have an automation initiative of some sort or another. And then we made the decision to develop the technology in house. And so we’re not just buying something and reselling it; we developed the Rover, we developed all the software, we built the capabilities in the team so that really it’s an advanced product that we’re selling, and that really I think we’re just starting to see the fruition of the investment on that come to. And that’s actually growing up as a whole subsidiary.

Yeah, automation was a huge push that we saw in MODEX this year. Have you seen other companies making that same push as well?

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think it’s just that’s the huge push right now is E-commerce because they just can’t physically pick the products in the warehouses to get that thing to you in a day the way Amazon is doing. And the number of robots that Amazon’s put, I don’t even remember the count, but it’s staggering of what they’ve done with the Kiva business. And then all the goods to man, I mean, the grocery guys, they’re all looking at some sort of a goods to man type automation to put out in the field so that when you drive up, your grocery bag can be filled with the stuff you want. It’s common; there’s just…

Oh, yeah.

I think I’m really glad we’ve got the product at the point where it’s really ready to go and start catching that wave.

John, well listen, this has really been awesome, and I really appreciate the time that you spent with me here today on IndustrialSage. For those who’d love to learn more about you, what’s the best way of checking you guys out?

Well, I think go to our website advancedstorage.com and that you can learn all about our rack systems, you can learn about our automation, if you need to get in touch with us, there’s plenty of ways to get in touch with us through the website. Or send me an email, and I’ll be glad to talk to anybody who wants to reach out to me directly. It’s John Krummell, thank you.

Excellent, well, John, thank you again so much. This was really awesome. All right, well, there you have it; another IndustrialSage Executive Series with John Krummell who is the president of Advanced Storage Solutions. Hey, thank you so much for listening or watching. If you are listening on any of the podcast stations, we’d love your review. If you are not on our email list, highly highly highly recommend that you go to industrialsage.com, get on the list because you’re missing out on a lot of great content that we’re sending out every single week, like manufacturing news, obviously this executive series, and a lot of other things coming down the pipe. So that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

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All right, thanks for joining on this episode! We got Guy Courtin, did I say that right?

You did!

Ahhh!

You did, you get an A+ for effort today, yes, that’s a good one.

I am actually, I don’t tell too many people this. So Gonzales, right? I’m half Mexican and I’m also half French-Canadian.

So you’re, half of that is a good half, right?

The Canadian part, but the French part.

Exactly. There we go.

So a quarter good.

I half pronounced it well.

So there we go.

Yes, you did perfect.

All right, so, but Guy, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Guy is from Infor and he’s VP of Industry and Solutions?

Correct.

Did I get that right? So, tell me a little bit about who you are to the audience, those who might be familiar with you and Infor.

Yeah, absolutely, and thanks again for having me, Danny, this is really great. For me, personally, I’ve been in the supply chain space for almost 20 years. I used to say 10 – 15 years, then I started doing the math. It’s like, no, it’s been a lot longer than that, so, I’ve been around the block a bit. And yes, covering the Industry and Solutions side, so really helping Infor with our strategy, our go-to market strategy, talking to customers and clients, so it’s a really exciting role for me. Gets me the opportunity to come speak to folks like you, but also to speak to a lot of our customers. Infor as a whole is one of the largest software companies out there right now. We’re headquartered in New York, so if anybody’s in New York City and wants to come by, we have a fabulous office, we have a great view of the Freedom Tower on one side and the Empire State Building on the other.

Oh, that’s awesome.

It’s amazing, but Infor as a whole, we’re really focused right now on helping out customers in a number of different industries in their digital transformation, in getting themselves ready for the challenges that we are all seeing and facing today in the acceleration of business. We have a number of verticals from retail, manufacturing, to hospitality, to government, and we’re really excited. We see a lot of opportunity out there. We truly have embraced this cloud notion and I think we’ve seen a lot of our customers coming over. But we also really look to be a trusted partner for our customers and be there with them as they go through this journey, right? I think we’ve realized it’s no longer a market where you go out and you say, “Well I need a solution X, I’ll buy it, put it in, and then I walk away.” It’s really being there with them to understand that this is not a simple path and everybody has a different path to get from point A to point B to point C and we want to be there with you to help you get there and to continue to grow with you.

That’s awesome, man, and the key word I like, we talked about this a little bit before, maybe a little overused, but “partner”, there, right?

Yeah, it’s overused, but I think, I feel as if it’s overused because we’re all trying to get there.

Exactly.

And what’s great about it in a way is, to sound cliche, it’s not a destination, it’s a journey, right? But it truly is, right? There’s no point where you say, all right, I’m a partner, I’m out!

Yeah, right.

Right? It’s, once you get to that level, then there’s even more work to do to keep that level. But we’re up for the task and I think we’re really embracing it and I think, for the most part, I think we’ve been successful and I think we truly do take that from Charles Phillips on down, sort of that mentality of we’re here to be a partner, and by the way, we have a wide array of really great, top-notch solutions and people that go behind it. So I think that’s the part that, for me particularly, is very exciting.

That’s awesome, that’s great, so, I kind of want to talk about– Well, to give the audience a little bit of context, we met at MODEX 2018, here in Atlanta. We were going around to all the different interviews so you could actually see the man on the street interview that we did.

It was great!

It’s on the website, I’m glad you liked it! It was very good, and one of the things that, and we touched on it a little bit before we started recording on this, is that you go around MODEX, or any trade show really for that example, or the marketplace in general, and there is just so much noise, there’s so many different, so many of similar or maybe even same solutions out there. At Infor, what are you guys doing to be able to really stand apart and from a marketing and from a sales standpoint, to really differentiate?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If you look at the market, people maybe 10, 15 years ago said, “Oh my goodness, it’s going to consolidate, and there’s going to be two and three massive players,” and there’s some argument. You can say there’s the SMP’s, the Oracles, the Microsofts, the Infors of the world, but then you look and there’s a number of startups that come up with medium sized companies, and the reality is, and my bosses might shoot me for saying this, but, we’re all doing something right. Every company that’s out there, whether it’s in MODEX or NRF or any of these events, someone is cutting them a check every month or every two months, whatever it may be, for some kind of product or service. So we’re all doing something that someone else is willing to give us hard earned money for.

So for us at Infor, I think how we, again, approach it, is first, I think we try to approach it with a lot of humility, which is, we don’t have all the answers. We look to work with our customers, our prospects, to get to where we think they need to be, and work with them hand-in-hand to figure that out. We have a number of solutions, but so do other players. We do believe that, in a way, our mentality of being the cloud first has helped us, right, because it really aligns with what companies need today to continue to grow and to evolve in this market. I think we also look at, well, we have a number of really world class solutions, that because we’re in the cloud, because we’ve developed them, we can also start putting things together to really, truly give you the opportunity to fit your road map onto what we have to offer. And I think, finally, the biggest one is the people. Right? And I know know that’s also a cliche–

Never heard of that before.

Never heard of that before, right? Yeah, it’s all about the people. But we really look at it and I’m very proud of being part of that team. You look at some of the people we have and that we’ve had for many years, and some people we keep bringing in: they also have the passion, right? And they not only have the passion to help customers, but they have a lot of industrial passion, right, so, like myself, coming from a supply chain, having really embraced that space and taking that knowledge. We have people from the retail side, from hospitality, from consumer products, from manufacturing, right? Who’ve really taken on ownership of that space and allow us to then be more intimate, if you will, with our customers, so I think it’s a combination of all that. And again, there’s no magic bullet, here.

Right.

There’s no secret sauce where we can say, “Well, we’ve done this and we’re better than anybody else!” It’s a lot of blocking and tackling, it’s a lot of taking chances, it’s a lot of, again, cliche, not being afraid to fail, right?

Yeah.

But learning from those failures and moving forward and I think it’s, um, we’ve won a lot, we’ve lost some, absolutely, you know we’re not going to win every one but I think we’ve learned from those setbacks and we’ve built on them and I think the future’s very bright. We’re deemed one of the unicorns out there and one of the big ones in New York and I think that’s a testament to what Charles and the leadership team and all the way down through folks like myself and others, who I think have really put a lot of time and effort and passion into this.

That’s great, and that’s super exciting. One of the things, let me talk to you about, that you guys are focusing on and helping companies to really in that digital transformation, which is just huge right now. One of those areas in particular that we’re seeing a lot is really on that e-comm space. Tell me a little bit about, what are you guys seeing in that, is this something that we’re making up or is this coming down the road, specifically when we’re looking at B2B, manufacturers to industrial companies that are, you know thinking, hey, maybe there’s a different way of being able to go to market and now, because of a thing called, like, the internets.

The interwebs.

Yeah, the interwebs and the, yeah, right.

Yeah, so give you a little bit more of my background too, I started out in this business in the late 90’s, right? When I went to Forest Research and as many of us remember, that was the first big boom, or the first, I’m sorry, dot com boom, right? That was the, and, and I learned a lot from that. I remember seeing companies come in and talk to us and they were getting money off of Sand Hill Road just because they put a dot com after anything.

Right, yeah.

And that was irrational exuberance, absolutely. But I think one thing it taught me too was this notion of, it was the first sign, because of digital, of the barriers being lowered to the difference between B2B and B2C. And we were talking about this off-camera, but it’s absolutely true. I look, mostly I talk to B2C companies, but I talk to a lot of, to some B2B, and in my past, I’ve talked to a lot of B2B companies, and you realize very quickly that at the end of the day, again to be cliched, it’s about the people.

Right.

The people that are in those companies, those people have a certain expectation of behavior when they’re in their personal lives. Those expectations don’t stop at the door Monday when they go to the office. So the analogy I gave is, I was a big Blackberry user. Why was I a Blackberry user? Because that was what the company mandated. It was a good machine, but that’s what the company mandated, right? The company said you will use a Blackberry and we’re going to control it, IT will control it, we’ll be able to monitor it and all this.

And all of a sudden, what happened, right? 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. “Oh my goodness, the iPhone came out!” All the IT departments are like, “Whoa, nope, nope, nope, nope!” All of a sudden, this whole notion of bring-your-own-device-to-work started creeping in. Why? Because people are saying wait a minute, I have this really cool device I use for my personal life. When I go to the office on Monday, I don’t want to switch over to this, sort of kludgy, IT-centric, 1970’s type mentality of it’s all controlled, so all of a sudden, I was like, “No, no, I want to use my personal device.” Now, how many companies, other than certain ones in law or in financials or government, say, “Yeah, bring your own device,” right?

Yeah.

So the reason I bring it up is that our mentality doesn’t stop on Monday, right? So if I’m used to interacting, if I’m in procurement and I’m buying pencils and paper and desks and all this… But on Sunday when my kid asks for the GI Joe, the Kung-Fu grip, I’m going on my phone. I’m going to an app whether it’s Amazon or Ali Baba or Jet.com or whatever. I’m looking for it, I have customer reviews, I see price transparency, I see options, I see like products, I see ancillary products I might want to buy with it. I see shipping options, right? I have a lower barrier of transaction, right? I can do one-click shopping, things of that nature, I go through a Paypal, things like that. If I go to the office on Monday and now I’m asked to buy paper towels and all this and now I have to go through the old green screen. Do I accept that? Of course not. So we’re starting to see this- well we’re not starting, it’s happened already, where we as consumers, when we go to the office, our expectations don’t stop and stay at home.

Yeah. Absolutely, I love that illustration, with the iPhone and going in, yeah, that experience you’re having at home is carrying over in the business and it’s going to continue to do so. So, yeah, very interesting and exciting time where we’ve had guests in the past who are now, they’re selling 60 thousand dollar, 10 thousand dollar steel tanks.

Exactly, online, and–

And it’s interesting, it’s like, it’s working. Now it’s not going to work in every single case and I think there’s a little fear sometimes that people think, “Well we’re going to completely erase sales people and whole industry and all distributors are going away–“

Yep.

No, I mean, some cases, sure, right?

Well, sales people and people like myself, and all this, there’s always disruption, right?

Sure.

Our jobs are not permanent anymore. Employment stays constant or keeps growing. Jobs keep shifting, right? But you’re absolutely right, I think there’s also the flip side where to advertise to some people who are so enamored with mobile commerce, voice commerce, getting away from a sales person knocking on your door. That, in their mind, “Well, my customer will just come in, customize their product…” This is B2B example I’m giving you, I won’t name the name, but, “…customize the product on a mobile app, hit purchase, and whether it’s a ten thousand dollar product, 50 thousand, 100 thousand, a million dollars, it doesn’t matter, ’cause I can do it on my phone.” I think what they’re missing, however, is that technology is not a replacement.

Right.

It is complimentary. Because as I said earlier when we were talking about Infor, it does come down to the people, right?

Yeah.

It comes down to, because if all this was just purely transactional, then yeah, I would just say, “Yeah I want this coffee mug.” Boom. But if it’s, “No, I want, I need coffee and I want to understand the coffee and I want someone to come in and tell me, ‘You want a medium roast versus a dark roast?’ And what other services can I provide to you?’ “

Right.

And you need more creamer or maybe you’re looking for a tea, what these things, that doesn’t happen just purely through an app, and I think that’s what people are missing out on. Now I’ll give you another example here, I’m here in Atlanta this weekend and I went to Kroger, and a lot of disruption obviously in the grocery space with folks like Amazon and others and even Instacart who are really coming in and changing the way we think of grocery, so people are saying, “Well, why don’t I just order all my groceries online?” And it’s like, well yeah, you could, but what was interesting at Kroger is I walked in and first, they have the bars now, the Kro Bars. You can’t have that experience online, but what was more interesting for me as I was walking around and I saw they had a freezer for Mochi ice cream. I love Mochi ice cream, but I would never think of buying it on an Instacart or online. But I’m going through the grocery store and that piqued my interest. I’m like, “Oh!” I didn’t buy any, but I was like, “Wow, this is really cool, and it wasn’t there two weeks ago, it’s there now, I’m sure it’ll be gone maybe in three weeks,” right?

Sure, yeah.

It’s a promotional item, it comes in and out. But it’s to show that, yes, the technology with Kroger might help me with their click list, might help me do my online shopping, but they are able to hopefully still guide people to the store because there’s still that notion of experience. So the technology doesn’t take away from the importance of the people, the experience, and all that. I think that’s what we have to– especially with the rise of ecommerce– we have to remember that it’s, that it should be, the smart one should realize it’s complimentary. Why is Amazon putting pop up stores? Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods? Why is Amazon putting book stores when Borders and all those, all the books were gone, they’re not putting book stores out there.

Which, wasn’t Amazon originally an online book store?

And Amazon originally was the online and CD book store but it’s to show that they recognize that at some point they have to get that personal experience. Why are companies like Bonobos or Warby Parker putting physical stores to sell their products when they were, as they say, a digitally vertical native company, right? Because they realize they need that personal relationship. Now it doesn’t mean you’re going to open 200,000 stores, but it means that there’s complimentary, there’s, it’s not one or the other.

Right. No, it’s such a great example there, obviously particularly with Amazon, there, and yeah, Fresh Market, all the… So, for companies that are going through this digital transformation, maybe question and they’re saying, “Oh we need to figure this out, we need to start moving,” and this e-comm question comes up, are there particular, what would you tell them in terms of what to be thinking about– As far as, should we be making this transition or what are some big considerations we need to look at before making that move?

First and foremost, I’d say if you’re still thinking about it, you’re a little bit behind.

Okay, all right.

You’re already behind. I think unfortunately the world of ecommerce, mobile commerce, voice commerce, now, is here to stay. Now, I would say the flip side too is let’s not get too overboard as I just mentioned, depending on certain studies, whether you look at the U.S. Government numbers or like, Forest Research, ecommerce for all of just retail is still barely in the double digits, all right? It’s between 7% and 12%. That’s still over 80% that is being done in a brick and mortar store.

Right, yeah.

Or a physical entity, so that’s a big, and this is trillions of dollars we’re talking about, but I would say first and foremost, like I said, if you haven’t already embarked in or had a strategy, you’re a little bit behind. I think you need to understand that this notion of ecommerce, I think we’re even beyond that. There’s a great article in the Harvard Business Review from two years ago which I quote all the time, unfortunately I didn’t write it, but it’s a great piece. It talks about the notion of ambient commerce, right? Where we as consumers can shop whenever we want, right? We all carry a mobile phone around with us, some have smart watches or other things. Think about how easy it is now with that to shop. We see something, “Oh, I like it, I’m going to maybe take a picture of it.” Maybe the app will figure out what that is or scan a barcode or something, so companies, whether it’s B2B or B2C need to understand that’s where their customers are. Now how do they get there to meet those needs, without sacrificing other parts of their business? I think if it’s the B2B side, to your point, maybe it’s not selling $10,000 tanks online, maybe it’s selling understanding of how to… which tank is better. Do I need the 10,000 gallon capacity tank or the 15,000?

Right.

What’s my business? Like, am I in petrochemical, what have you?

Right, right.

Maybe it’s integrating some of that, maybe it’s integrating some of, again, helpful process, whether it’s through chat or your mobile phone, or things like that to help you understand the processes of getting from point A to point B. It also has to be a mentality of how to reduce the friction to get to that transaction, right?

Yeah.

Is it through easier payment through my mobile phone? Is it through whatever means there is? And that’s up to each company to figure out what the balance is, you know. We’re seeing, or I’ve seen some things where, in some countries where mobile commerce or credit cards aren’t even there yet– Is there a way-? like Overstock.com I believe is doing this to use things like Blockchain to allow transactions to happen online where they can secure the financials and things like that, so that’s thinking, “Hey, this is beyond just ecommerce. How do I ensure or allow potential customers to shop with me in whatever means they want?” right?

And I think that’s what this notion of ambient commerce is, it’s no longer just am I in the store, or on my phone, or my laptop, my tablet, my kiosk, my smart watch, my google glass, like whoever still has it. It’s beyond that. But it’s really, “Hey, if Danny wants to buy something this way, I need to make sure I can let you buy it that way, or at least get a path to that conversion.” So I think all these companies need to think about that. What is the path I need to make to allow my consumer to get to the conversion? Because it’s going to be different for everybody, right? Some, it’s one click away and, “I want that toilet paper to come every two weeks,” right? Some others it’s “No, no, no, I need to understand the processes, I need to see how things work. I need to talk to customer service.” It really runs the gamut but at the end it’s all, “How do I reduce friction to the path of conversion?”

Such a great question and start asking with are we where our customers are looking? And if we’re not, how do we get there?

And the scary part for B2B or B2C is guess what? Your customer is always shifting, right?

Yeah!

And that’s why I tell people when I speak is, at the end of the day, the people that have screwed this up, is us. Us as consumers.

Yeah.

Right? We’ve screwed up for ourselves as professionals.

“Shiny squirrel, oh hey!”

Yeah, exactly, we’re like, “Oh, hey! I can now talk to Alexa and it will buy something. Awesome. Do it.” What’s next? I don’t know. We’ll look at things like your car. Your car’s become more connected. When is your car going to be able to start, You can just talk to your car and it’ll order stuff ahead, right? And then it’ll reroute you to the best place, right? Things like that. We’re also seeing v-commerce, right? Talking to your Alexa or your smartphone and ordering things. We’re seeing social buying, right? You go on Instagram or Facebook and all this, but if you think about it, that’s all you really, someone made this analogy, it’s in the first inning, I would say it’s batting practice, we’re not even in the game yet, right? We’re just starting to scratch the surface of, hey, I can, because to me, when something pops up on Instagram that says buy it like how different is that from a pop-up ad or a banner ad? It’s not.

Right. Yeah.

What’s the next step? Is the next step like, it’s not as evident, but there’s a picture of something and a picture of Danny’s, a picture of you at the beach and I see someone in the background with a cool pair of swim trunks. Is there a way I can say hey, I like those, and all of a sudden it goes right into a transactional mode, right? I don’t know. But I think it’s, we as consumers again are constantly like you said, squirrel!

Yeah, yeah.

Right? And because we have so many choices, and because in a way we’re bombarded by them, sometimes it’s hard for brands, whether it’s B2C, B2B, to anticipate where that conversion point’s going to be.

Right, yeah.

That’s the hard part, that’s the fun part.

You’re absolutely right, 100%. Listen, Guy, this has been absolutely fantastic. We’ve covered a lot of topics. We could probably go for another four hours.

We could, we could, I think there’d be a lot of editing to be done after that.

Yeah! Well this is fantastic, so if anybody would like to reach you and ask a questions, what’s the best way of getting–

Uh, the best way is, obviously, search for me on any of the social sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. My twitter handle is @gcourtin. I’m on there a whole lot.

Okay.

So by all means, reach out to me, but otherwise, just go to the Infor site as well and you can probably somehow find me in there. It’s in there. But yeah, always happy to talk to people. This is obviously a topic which I think is really interesting and, like I said, I think we’re only starting to scratch the surface and I think it’s, I think people need to start and people need to start thinking about it, and if they haven’t already, they’re already, they’re still behind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t catch up.

Right.

One last thing from me is the scary part, or the beauty of what we’re at today with digital is just because you’re ahead doesn’t mean you’re going to stay there and just because you’re behind doesn’t mean you can’t leapfrog someone. That’s the beauty of it and that’s the scary part of it and I think that’s why people need to really constantly be thinking and evolving with this.

Those are great parting words, that’s awesome. Thanks so much!

Hey, appreciate it!

All right! Okay, all right, well that was another fantastic episode. Thanks so much to our guest Guy who came on and just dropped some major truth bombs on us. It was absolutely awesome. A lot of key things there. A lot of key takeaways for me. I think really at the end there, solidified a lot is that hey, look, if, maybe you are late to the game, and you know what, that’s cool, that’s fine. Just recognize that you are and you can totally leapfrog somebody. If you’re at the top of your game right now, recognize, realize that you could be the one who’s leapfrogged. You need to constantly innovate and keep thinking forward. This whole digital transformation, the whole ecommerce piece, and really at the end of the day still remembering that we are selling to other people, even though it may be B2B, you are selling to another person.

So, absolutely some awesome takeaways. If you have any questions for Guy you know how you can reach out to him. It looks like Twitter is his thing, so as always, thanks for watching or listening, if you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review! If you are watching on our website, please sign up so you can get this sent to you every single week. We’d loved it if you could share it on social media, we love the love! And as always, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Hey thank you for joining me this week, on IndustrialSage on our expert series. Today I’ve got a guest: Steve Banyan, he is the CEO of Banyan Hills Technologies. Steve, thank you so much for joining me today on the IndustrialSage Executive Series.

Thank you for having me.

Alright Steve is– for those who aren’t familiar with him– tell us a little about what you guys do.

Yeah, no problem. So Banyan Hills Technologies is a company that is focused on the Internet of Things and we have two parts to our business, we built a proprietary Internet of Things software platform that we call Canopy. We built that and taking it to market and then we have a professional services division of our business that is responsible for doing all things related to Canopy implementation, support, maintenance, and the platform is really designed to help our customers or our partners connect to device systems that they have deployed inside of their facilities or on premise and then provide them a central management platform that can monitor and control those devices.

So how did you initially get into that career field?

Growing, up my father created the company, he had a software company early on was called Applied Computer Systems. My whole life I grew up being surrounded by everything that he was doing with that company, and then my mom actually was a Chief Information Officer as well, and so there was no shot at me doing anything other than technology. I was immersed in it from day zero, and I think my the entrepreneurial spirit happened really early just watching my dad in particular, reach out build something that he was proud of and invest himself in that business, and watch the type of lifestyle he was able to have with that and the control that he was able to have around his passion, which was technology.

As I went through my my education, I got to a point where, I went to college, I studied– clearly technology was in the background, but I also studied business. But when I graduated college, the thing that I didn’t have that my dad apparently did was, I just didn’t have any of the entrepreneurial tool sets and so I needed to go out into the professional world, land a couple of jobs that could teach me, give me the weapons that I needed to be entrepreneurial. I don’t think there was ever a doubt if you would ask any of my friends growing up or my family, they would tell you that from a very early age, when I was asked what I wanted to do, it was to create a company and to create a technology-focused company. But then graduating as I said from college, at least, I had the insight that my education at school did not give me all of the equipment that I needed to go start a company.

So we then started management consulting, which taught me a tremendous amount expose me to all kinds of different industries. It exposed me to what it means to have a really strong work ethic, and I did that for about 10 years and then went in out of management consulting and joined– still all technology-focused, but then I went into the corporate world, joined a company here in Atlanta called Harland Clarke. I helped in merging technology systems for them, then joined the NCR and worked for NCR for a number of years. I eventually made it to a Chief Technology Officer position within NCR and by that time, I had not only the skills that would allow me to go support something entrepreneurial but I also had the idea.

I think I’ve learned a lot through particularly with my experience at NCR about what it means to have large networks of complex systems and devices that have to be managed and managing uptime and availability, and then realizing that there was this bit of a hole in the market for a solution like what Canopy is, and then you sort of add all of those things up together and I was at a position where it made sense. I could safely convince my wife and my family that was time to go start a company and then I had the right skills to do it.

So walk me through the decision to start a company, what did that transition look like?

Yeah. Exhilarating is probably the single word that describes it. By the time that I was ready to make the decision, just the adrenaline… I can remember the moment when I realized that this was about to happen. I had found a customer that was going to basically allow us to begin the company and to begin chasing the vision, and after I wrapped up that conversation I can remember calling home, calling my wife. I was traveling at the time, and literally my hands were shaking with excitement. It was exhilarating. I knew this is what I wanted to do. I was extremely naive, frankly, about how complex it is… which ironically ended up being probably the best weapon that I had. If I would have known what it would take, I probably would have made a series of different decisions.

So not knowing was extremely important to being able to do this and then when I started, it was Ground Zero. I mean, there was no one else. All of the insulation that big business from legal teams, and accountants, and finance, and engineers, and all of that insulation was removed. And so you sort of strip your stuff back down to nothing and you get a really strong sense of where you’re at, and… exhilarating. I mean all of that was, at this point I can look back on it… It’s so rewarding, and really exciting, to have been in that position, to make those choices, to end up where we have. As a result of that I’m very proud of it, but again– I think being naive as to how complicated it is, is probably one of the most important skills to have, frankly, when you when you start something like this.

So are you suggesting that had you known what it’d be like, you wouldn’t have gone in that direction?

I just think that I probably would have, there’s probably a few left and right turns that I would have avoided, if I would have known. I think when I hear people that are younger that are talking about going and being entrepreneurs, the thought goes through my mind: “Wow, do they really understand what they’re about to go do?” And of course they don’t, there’s no way. It’s like having children. You can imagine what it’s like to have children but until you do, you really don’t know, and so… but again, I think for those people that are saying, “Okay I’m going to do this,” their biggest strength frankly is not knowing what they’re about to get into. So I was always going to end up here. This was my passion. This is what I wanted to do, and I feel every day that I’m doing it I feel fulfilled. And every day that I’m not thinking about it, I feel like I’m missing something so.

Then what is that driving force? That gets you excited and out of the bed every morning, you said you had that initially. Do you still have that now?

Yeah, I definitely do. Looking at this situation that we’re in right now, the Coronavirus situation and the test that has put us through, and me personally- personally and professionally… it’s exhilarating, to overuse that word. It’s stressful and there’s certainly all the symptoms of stress that you would expect and with everybody that we’re working with. People are anxious and that manifests itself in different ways, but when I measure our progress and our ability to get through this situation at the macro level not just in days and weeks but more in months and quarters, it’s exhilarating to be making this progress. I get a lot of energy from that. I get a lot of energy from building something. I get a lot of energy from building an environment where we can hire employees, and those employees can grow and develop and become stronger. They can chase their own dreams. I enjoy… I love helping customers. I think every time that I see our product being used in ways that are helping drive value for our customer or value for our partners, man. That is just… I feel like I’m really making a difference, and I think that’s the driving force. I’m not someone that’s idle. I am making progress and making a difference, and that gives me a lot of momentum.

So what sort of realizations or lessons is the virus reveal to you or your company?

Everyone right now, every single person in the world is impacted one way or another by this thing

Yeah.

Every company, certainly. And when you step back and you think about that, it’s really remarkable. Certainly in our lifetimes I can’t think of another situation that has been so impactful, and actually that’s pretty comfortable, right? Knowing that we’re not alone and everybody’s kind of going through this at the same time actually gives me some peace of mind. Like we were talking about earlier, the things that are that are exciting to see… One, because we’ve been tested in such an extreme way, we’ll be coming out of this thing stronger than when we entered it. We’ll have rounded out any vulnerabilities that we had. I’ve recognized that some of the relationships that we have inside the company or that we have outside of the company… You really start to pick out the ones that, “Okay. Boy, those are relationships that are really important not only for us but for them, and we have to pay more attention to that.” And then you realize the converse of that too, where potentially there are situations that you’re in that just don’t make a ton of sense. You kind of of really lean- we use this as an opportunity, and I think a lot of other companies have done this- really use it as an opportunity to lean up the machine. And not in a negative way. Just to become more focused, more deliberate in the things that we’re doing every day that’s been really pretty great to say.

Another observation is, how as an individual I cope with this stuff; and more importantly the reaction to people that are around me, the reaction they have to the way that I’m dealing with it. I’ve become very well in tune with that through this process. Some of the ways that stress manifests itself in me and in the way that that impacts others that around me, I’ve had to become in tune with; and then actively manage to make sure that I’m not just creating more of a scene for a stressful situation that everybody’s going through. They’re truly- like you said, there are really a lot of great things that are sort of falling out of this difficult situation, from my perspective. I know you feel the same. I can’t wait to be on the other side of it, because I feel like we’re just going to spring out of it and there will be a lot of really great momentum as some of the adjustments we’re making.

I certainly hope so, what are the some of the challenges in the industry that maybe you see that maybe existed before the virus but possibly even bigger as the the light has been shone on it even more now?

Yeah, one of the big premises is that our platform and our business is built off– regardless of your industry– physical spaces that are made up of complicated, sometimes extremely complicated machines or technology systems. To keep all that stuff running and to keep it all secure, is really a mission critical type of situation. For these multi facility operators, that are managing many different properties with systems inside of all those properties keeping those systems up and running, servicing them to the point to where you’re maximizing the availability of those machines. Reducing the number of physical touches where you’re dispatching a technician or someone to go service this equipment is important because you’re reducing your costs… those kind of things are the premise for why Banyan exists and why Canopy exists. All of our marketing literature, all of our sales, collateral, it’s all centered in on that.

Remote management is great because it drives operational efficiencies that reduce your cost profile, all of that. And different industries were more accepting of that message than others. Some of them are more mature and they’re thinking about the impact that a platform like Canopy can have, and some of them are just sort of learning. And what we’ve noticed is that the virus situation and this concept of social distancing and not being able to be present in front of these machines all the time, has just exploded the realization that, “Okay, this is really really important stuff.”

My favorite example that we’re involved in right now is, we have a partner that builds industrial cold storage and refrigeration equipment. They sell into large manufacturing facilities, they sell into food distribution facilities all throughout the country. And naturally the latter is extremely important right now. You’ve got these acres and acres and acres of physical warehouse space where perishable food products go in, and the environment inside of these facilities has to be maintained in terms of humidity and cooling in order to protect the perishable goods. And so this refrigeration equipment uses ammonia to process cold air, so it’s mission-critical type stuff: if it fails and if there’s an ammonia leak, not only do you lose the perishable inventory, but you could lose human lives. Because the systems, they’re massive in their complexity and they’re important. So it uses Canopy to connect to those systems for centralized monitoring: so that if there is any kind of alarm, or any issue, they can notify the facility management teams to go address it. That sounds like really important stuff and it may sound almost obvious that this is important technology that you have to have, but you’d be surprised at how few of these systems are actually connected into a central management platform.

Well when the Coronavirus started to really impact the ability for technicians to be present inside of these facilities to monitor real-time what’s going on in these machines, they needed real time-visibility and our customer was able to all the customers that had subscribed. They were able to go just help them be more successful than implementation, but for the other customers that had not yet adopted to Canopy they were able to light them up almost overnight. Our distribution of Canopy just exploded in this particular situation because, there was this realization that, “Man we really need this, particularly in a time when food distribution so important. Getting product in the hands of consumers, protecting people and keeping them safe so that they weren’t socially interacting with one another… it just felt– going back to where we talked about earlier– it felt so good to see that our product was helpful in a time like this. So that’s one of my favorite ones that has recently happened where a customer has doubled down on the use of Canopy.

It’s one of those situations, too, where we’re not concerned about the commercial relationship at the moment. The focus is, “Let’s get this thing in your hands and working for the value that you need and get through this critical phase.” But it’s so evident that, by doing that, one they’re taking advantage of the product and its capabilities today, and we’re building this relationship that’s extremely sticky with these partners. There’s no question that on the backside of this thing that these folks are on going to want to deepen their relationship with us because we were all there for one another at a time of need. It’s a good story definitely.

Definitely and in this case, “sticky,” it’s a good word. It’s a big increase in value. So if you were to take your crystal ball out, what changes do you see coming in the future of the industrial space?

I think from a crystal ball point of view, I think as the cloud kind of lifts and we come out of this thing… There’s no doubt in my mind that the world will be different. I sort of used this analogy with a friend the other day. It’s like pre-9/11 and post-9/11, the introduction of TSA at the airport. There’s going to be a new normal, and I think that part of that new normal will be that acceptance or the realization that this concept of remote interaction, remote management, tying it back to what we do… I think it’s going to be: the understanding of what the technology is that does it, and the value that it brings, will be crystal clear in people’s minds in a way that hasn’t been over the last… we’ve been in business for seven years and it’s a constant sell. I think some of that friction will be removed as a result of this.

I think that the change, that you’re getting back to some level of what we would expect to be normal in the past. I think some of that in certain industries– I know you asked about industrial specifically, but other industries that we’re involved in like, retail for example– I think it’s going to be a slow roll. It’s going to take a lot of time for things to get back to normal. But specifically for industrial, I feel like the adoption of what we do- the understanding- is going to accelerate. And the one other thing I would add is the appetite for some of the new advances in technology around machine learning, artificial intelligence… I think the investment that’s going to be made by the industrial control industry; and leveraging that technology to help absorb data, identify patterns in the data that then can be reacted on… I would expect that’s the next big wave of innovation that’s going to happen.

Yeah. I agree it was big before, but it’s already definitely… it’s an even bigger deal now. Well Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show. for viewers who’d like to learn more about your company, where can they find you?

Yeah, so the easiest way is to hit our website,www.banyanhills.com check us out on LinkedIn, any of the social channels. We’re there, we’re present. Reach out to us we’d love to help. We’d love to tell you more about the Banyan story, about our products and services… if there’s anything that we can do to help especially in this time of time of need, we’re 100% there. And then just for you. Thank you so much for having me back on, it’s always great to talk with you and I appreciate the opportunity.

Well you’re most welcome, thanks for sharing and I hope you have a great one thanks for coming on again.

Alright, thanks so much.

Well that’s a wrap for today’s episode, thank you so much for joining me on the IndustrialSage Executive Series. We do this every week, join me next week as I interview another guest and bring you some great content. Listen if you are listening, on any of the podcast stations we’d love a review. If you’re not on our email list and you want to get this great content sent to you to every single one week and then some, go to industrialsage.com and sign up for our email newsletters, and there’s a lot of other content you can sign up for if you want. We’ve got other series and manufacturing news. You can sign up for all of it, or choose which ones you want. Don’t miss out. You can do that today, and I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!