IndustrialSage

Hey, so, on today’s episode I have Mr. John Joyce here, who is the Global Marketing Director for Brennan Industries, and he is going to share with us an awesome presentation that he gave at Content Marketing World, which is part of the Content Marketing Institute. They had a summit for industrial market, it was called Industrial Marketing Summit, and he gave a really awesome presentation that I’m super excited to have him on to present to you, our audience. John, thank you so much for coming on IndustrialSage.

Yeah, I’m glad to be here, thanks for having me.

All right, so John, for those who aren’t familiar with Brennan Industries, what do you guys do?

So Brennan is a hydraulics manufacturer. We make hydraulic fittings primarily and related products, and we sell them all over North America, Europe, and Asia. And we have some ancillary products related to the hydraulic industry too, so mostly stainless steel and carbon steel hydraulic fittings is our bread and butter product.

Okay, awesome, all right. And so, a little bit about you as a background, because I don’t always do this on IndustrialSage, I kind of want to do it because I get to know the people behind the marketing here, so tell me a little bit about your background, how did you get into marketing, were you always in marketing with industrial companies, or what’s your story?

So I started my career off, I’ve always been in communications. It wasn’t always marketing. But I started off in a media production company, and in that company, I worked in graphic design and video production and conference production, multimedia production, all kinds of different types of content production, I guess. So in that company, I worked my way up to Director of Marketing, and I did that for a number of years, and then after that I went off and started my own agency. So I ran an agency for about 12 years, which was fully integrated marketing, both traditional and digital, and worked with a bunch of different kind of clients, from some sports teams, local sports teams, banks, industrial clients, a variety of different types of businesses, and that’s where I first got into industrial marketing, was working with clients in my agency.

Very cool.

I sold my agency and then became a consultant. Kind of an international industrial marketing consultant. We lived overseas for a number of years, in Morocco and in Portugal, and then came back here and became the Director of Marketing for Brennan Industries, which is in Cleveland.

Very cool, ah! The world traveler over here, with a lot of experience.

I’ve a little, done a little traveling, and some marketing in different areas of the world, which has kind of been an interesting experience, too.

That’s really cool. So, actually, just off-topic, well maybe not super off-topic, but okay, Morocco. How long did you live there for?

We only lived there for about 6 months actually. So it was a kind of a hop skip and a jump between the US and Lisbon. So from US, we went there, and then we moved to Lisbon and lived there for about three years.

And how was that?

It was awesome, actually. Yeah, the economy is very different, but I mostly did consulting with US-based clients or I did consulting with a company in Saudi Arabia too, but basically, not companies in Portugal because their economy is one that’s suffered recently, with the economic downturn and whatnot. But it’s a great place to live in terms of the climate, the food, the culture, the music, everything is great there.

That’s very cool. That’s a place I would love to go visit, or country rather, I’d love to go visit. That’s pretty cool. Very neat. So I kind of want to jump in to a little bit about, on your presentation that you gave, and the title was very exciting. Saying how you guys were able to increase your leads by 800% using content marketing. So that is lots of big flashy, big numbers, big percentages, and this weird thing called content marketing, which none of our audience knows anything about. I’m being very facetious obviously. But…okay… we were talking about a little bit beforehand here, oh content marketing, and oh, maybe in the industrial markets are a little like. Tell me this story, how did you guys start into this, and give me some background information.

So, I don’t know, this was probably about 2015 when I started at Brennan. And when I came in there, they were like a lot of other industrial manufacturers are. And this isn’t to their detriment, I mean, a lot of industrial companies are kind of in the same boat, which is generally speaking, 10 to 20 years behind the times of other types of marketing, and even just other types of business in general. So when I came in there, they were spending a lot on magazine ads, trade publication ads, and that kind of thing, which I knew from other experience just wasn’t the best way to spend money and get kind of a return, and very very hard to track leads that are coming from that, and drive anything, it’s very, it’s just like you’re throwing ads out there into the ecosystem and hoping something happens.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so at that point, I immediately knew I needed to change things to a more digital-based, something a little more modern, digital marketing approach using content to draw people in. So not to really give a basics in 101 content marketing, but in a super short nutshell, the difference is instead of trying to go out to where the customer is and interrupt what they’re doing and get their attention, you try to be a source of knowledge, a place they go to when they’re looking for information about your products, or things related to your market. So we had none of that kind of content at that time, and had no momentum in that area, so we just started on square one, with the blog, putting content out there. And one of the things I said in my presentation, I showed a graph that showed our growth, and it was an exponential type graph where it starts out real low here, and it goes like this and then goes like that. And the reason why I showed that was to show that it took a good year and a half before we really got any kind of momentum or traction off of our content marketing program. And then it’s kind of been exploding for the last couple of years, just growing off the chart as we just continue to build it.

Because one of the things about content marketing is, it’s a momentum-building approach, like rolling a snowball down a hill, you start with just the tiny little bit, and you just keep adding layers and layers and layers, and that first tiny bit doesn’t go away, it’s still those first things that are still bringing people in, and still converting leads. And we’ll go back and fine tune them, but they’re still out there, so as you expand your content, the effectiveness expands, the reach expands, conversion rate increases, the number of leads increases. And yeah, we saw really exponential growth over time in the amount of leads generated, and the process is pretty simple, but it produced outstanding results to us, to where every year since I’ve been there, I’ve cut the advertising budget in half every single year, for regular ads. We still do a few, because that would be in my brand building kind of category. It’s okay to build brand, that’s important. But the majority of the budget has just gone into developing more and more content and more different types and attracting leads that way.

That’s awesome. All right, okay, so you said it took some time, obviously, to able to build and start getting some of those results. And you said you were doing blogging. What did that look like in terms of frequency and what were you blogging about?

Yeah, so, what we did, our process, it kind of begins with research, even way back at the beginning, it starts with research, so we go to the sales team or go to the actual customer and try to identify what’s an area that people don’t know something and they need to know it, you know?

Yeah.

They did it in our space. We feel like we know everything and everybody else already knows it, but in reality they don’t know it. You overestimate what the market knows, because you’re so steeped in it, it just seems like, of course they know all this stuff, but they don’t! So we identified some areas that would be educational areas. And we just developed content targeting those educational areas. And basically, at the very beginning, it was very slow. We would create some content piece, some sort of what you would call now premium content piece, like a whitepaper or guide or whatever it may be, and then support that with blogs and social media and a landing page, et cetera, and we might’ve done one of those for something like the first year, just trying to figure out how to do it, you know?

Yeah.

But now, we do about four to six new pieces a year. Also, we take the old pieces and rework them or extend them. So we’ll take an old piece and make it into a series of infographics, or a video, or something, because that old content, even though it’s older, is still relevant, it still matters. So one thing I want to address real quick, you’ll probably get around to asking me about it, but I just think it’s important to establish, we talked about it earlier, which is the difference between industrial marketing and other types of marketing that are out there. And one of the things that’s unique about industrial marketing is it’s not just an impulse buy, for instance, in consumer marketing obviously, things are much more an impulse buy. This tennis shoe makes me feel special, I’ll buy it.

Right.

With manufactured components that go into someone else’s manufactured component, you have a whole company that you’re trying to sell this product to, so there’s new product development team, which is engineers and buyers, and then there’s a supply chain team, and executive team, and you may have OEMs and you may have distributors, and they have, all of those players are doing things for totally different reasons, and have different motivations and are really looking for, completely different types of content. That’s another thing that we’ve tried to do is provide content of real value for specific audiences. So maybe really valuable engineering content about certain things about an O-ring, or different types of materials that go into a product, or even content in the form of CAD documents or drawings or measurements or cross-references, pressure ratings, all of that data is still content. And that appeals to an engineering person. We provide information that might appeal to a distributor, or to a procurement person. And all of that, all those people get different types of content. So that’s another thing we’ve expanded over time. The different audiences we’re trying to reach.

Yeah, and that’s fantastic, that’s great. Because obviously everybody’s got a, as to your point, a different reason on why they want to buy or they’re in a different area. So when you said you’ve kind of evolved with that, are you writing out personas, or sort of developing that, and then, as far as your content strategy, how do you, are you developing it based off of that, like sit down once a year or something, or what does that look like?

Well, we talk about this stuff constantly, way more than once a year, but, and we don’t do personas in the fine-grained kind of traditional, if I can say traditional, the way you would think of personas, like this is Bill Bob, engineer, and he’s 45, and whatever. We don’t develop them to that degree, but we do target personas, like I laid out before, like OEM in specific job positions, distributor in specific job positions, MRO, different markets, hydraulic, aerospace, pneumatic, and we lay them out like that but not for instance down to like personal details. A lot of times you see in personas you would have so many, the matrix is big enough already but this map way, you know?

Right.

So then we just, we have approached it from what do we think would be the most effective route in to a new company. The first foot in the door in most industrial things like this is through the new product development group through engineering. So that’s how, that’s where we started, and then we just have expanded into other groups from there, just because it seemed like the engineering side of new product development team specing in your components into their assemblies, made the most sense to hit first. If a guy in engineering isn’t specing your part, a guy in procurement isn’t suddenly going to buy it, you know, because of your whitepaper. That was the approach we took. Start from I guess tactically, strategically, what made the most sense according to the buying process.

Yeah, that makes sense, and I think it’s a very smart approach, and we talk about this a lot on this show as well. A lot of people say, okay great, we need to do this, we need to do blogs. What the heck should we do, where do we start? And you mentioned very early on you went and you sat down with your sales team, you talked to your customers to get a sense of, okay, boots on the ground, what are you guys looking for, or what are our customers or prospects always asking for, so you can really help them to be able to use that content throughout the sales process or even be able to help dare I say generate leads, you know, that way. Or you’re going to be able to, hey, we’re able to nurture these people. They already know who we are, because they found some great content, that we’re helping to educate them. They might not be ready to buy today, but maybe six months down the road, or a year or what have you, when they’re ready, we’re here, we’re ready to go.

Correct. Yeah, the idea is they come across your brand in the marketplace out there. They start getting a favorable impression, maybe they see something that piques their interest enough to click on it. They drill in, they navigate around, like one of the things we’re doing now is ungating older content. We already have enough gated content, so now we’re going back and making ungated content. So as you navigate around, without even putting information in, the website is giving you value. So we really try to give value, to provide value. So, the content, a lot of the content is ungated or just requires, you might have to put your information in but you’re still getting something of value.

Yeah.

And another thing we’ve done that’s been super successful is going old school, which means, like for me, one day we just decided we were producing this thread identification guide because there was a need in the market for education on the line of identifying threads, okay. In our product there’s lots of different configurations, different thread types. They look very similar, they’re hard to tell apart, you’ve got to get it right, a lot of confusion. We said okay, we’re going to make this guide, but this guide, we’re not going to make it a PDF. Like everything else in the world that’s a PDF. We’re going to print this guide, we’re going to make a 20 page, 28 page booklet, and print it in full color on glossy stock. It’s going to be nice, because we try to do everything excellently. And we’re only going to make it available in a physical form, okay? But, we’ll give it away. So this was a test, and this has been basically the second most popular thing on our website, is people download, well you can’t download it–

Yeah, yeah.

They put it in, and we mail it to them for free, okay? Costs a couple of bucks for us to mail that, but two dollars for a lead is actually pretty cheap.

It is, yeah.

And so we send that guide out, and the result has been we’ve gotten many people who come back to us and say, can you send us a case of 100, we’re going to use this as our training material for new people who are coming on board, because yours is the nicest and best guide along these lines, and so quickly we realized, one, there’s definitely a need, and two, this is a value, not just the information, but think of the last time somebody wrote you a physical letter. If somebody wrote you a physical letter, if you went home and there was one in the mail today from a friend of yours, you would read it and you would feel like, oh, he took time and wrote me a real letter and look how nice this is. Because we’ve gotten so digital, that the physical is gone. So now when you have it, it’s like unique again.

You’re 100% right. It’s funny to see that sort of come back, sort of full circle, and we’re starting to hear that a lot, and even experience it ourselves. I remember, so we, every year, we do the insights report, so we survey 150 manufacturers or more about sales and marketing trends, and we put it into an e-book and a downloadable, it’s 52 pages, all this. But I’ll never forget, we went and printed it, and I remember looking at it and being like wow, this is amazing! It was our own thing, but it’s just that physical form was amazing, but to take it to the next level, where you guys are actually sending it to them, yeah. It’s funny, you get stuff in the mail all the time, primarily because of Amazon, but as far as a letter, or something like that to your point, yeah, when’s the last time that happened, outside of being a bill, and nobody wants that.

Or junk mail. But the thing is, this is something somebody asked for. So it doesn’t go in the garbage, we know it doesn’t. People get it, we started including a little form in there that says, a flyer that says gives this to your friend if he wants one. Just give it to him, it has the web address and he can download, or we’ll e-mail, see I can’t even say it. We don’t physically mail him his own copy, and we get a ton of people who get this guide, their friend sees it, they give him the paper, their friend goes and, goes and orders one, and we send it to him too. I think it’s something simple, but the difference is it provides a different sense of value. So you get that thing, it sits on your desk, you hand it to somebody, it’s tangible, we make it at our own expense at a very high quality, and it leaves a good impression of the brand, and it’s seen as value. So we’ve actually extended that, to even catalogs. Of course, our catalog, our products are online, but we still develop catalogs and we also make those available. You can download them, but we’ll mail it to you for free. Because product catalog, product information in a physical form, it’s actually still wanted by a ton of people, and it transcends the inbox or the downloads folders a little differently than just another PDF lost in the shuffle of PDFs, and now you’re nurturing–

Absolutely.

Info and whatever, but okay, instead I’ve got a physical item, and that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense, it’s funny, I’ve seen a lot of people with the product catalogs and they still, they do the dog ear, you know. So you go through it, and you can kind of, because you can get totally lost in the digital. Yes, you can measure, you can do all that stuff. But there’s still an element of that. But one thing I think that, just really commend you guys on, which is great, is a lot of companies you’ll see that, yes, we still have the catalog, and that’s what they’ll send. You know, it’s like oh! Do you want to, I mean I know you guys will do that, maybe later down the funnel there, but it’s like, the key word is value, is that you guys are providing value and you’re educating people and that it’s like, you’re helping them in their jobs do something. You’re providing value, you’re being thought leaders and experts in your industry. And so instead of saying hey, buy from us, it’s hey, how can we help you? This guide can help you.

Exactly.

And the same thing with what you guys are doing with your content online that is digital. And I think a lot of people kind of get lost, particularly in the industrial and manufacturing world, it’s like oh, we’ve got to sell, we’ve got to, we want that order, we’re going to the trade show and I want to come back away with all the PO’s and the sales. The way people buy is totally different now, you know? I mean, to be honest with you, actually, I don’t even think that it’s really shifted so much, like the process of how we buy, maybe the medium is a little different, right?

Right.

But it’s all about that value, I love it, that’s, and educating, that’s awesome.

Yeah, I think what’s changed is that people, marketing, has become a huger part of the funnel– of the sales funnel than it ever was before because of the self-education approach to buying anything.

Right.

And how are people going to self-educate if you’re not giving them educational stuff, basically. So that’s what we really try to do is do that, provide that value, so when you’re looking for the information on how to choose what it is, or what are the differences between this and this, or whatever it may be, that we are the ones giving you the answer, and that’s a value exchange. And through that process, you begin to build a relationship with the company, just like because you go to the same bank and work with the same teller, or buy your bagel at the same place in the morning, you start to get to know those people, they know what you want, you recognize them, they recognize you. There’s a rapport that starts to build there, even though you’ve never really hung out with that person or anything.

Right.

You didn’t have them over for dinner, but you know that person on some level, and that’s what you’re doing as a brand in the digital space when you’re providing this education. You’re basically saying look, you can get to know us, you can see what we think, we’ll help you, we’ll invest in you, we’ll provide you value, and then you’re building a trust basically between your brand and your consumers. And hopefully, what we’re trying to do is target all those different people in those different roles so that they all have the same experience. And they’re like, yeah, their procurement guy’s like yeah, Brennan! And the engineering guy’s like yeah, Brennan! And then when it goes to the buyer or whatever, he’s like oh, Brennan, yeah! And you just get a string of green lights, because there’s several people involved with an industrial sale, it’s not just one little simple decision. They take a year or two, sometimes.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So, that’s the goal.

Yeah, so, all right. So this is what you did here. An 800% increase in leads, and that took you what, a week?

Right, so that’s over four years, comparing the beginning to four years into it. But the increase was so big, we actually had to create a new role, of inside sales more or less, we call them Business Development Manager, to handle the leads, because we get so many. And then we actually had to put together a lead routing system, a software solution, for routing those leads. Because as an industrial company that works with distributors, a value that we give to distributors is our lead generation capabilities. So say you’re a little distributor, you can’t have a massive content marketing initiative going.

Right.

But we can, and you’re our distributor and we’ll give you those leads, because we’re not going to sell to your leads. I mean, a lot of these leads just go to our distributors, right? So that’s another way you’re just creating value by investing in that lead generation system. And now it’s a funnel for all your distributors, and when they’re choosing what product am I going to carry, they look out there say, well who’s working the hardest to get me leads, you know?

Exactly, yeah, exactly. We on a previous episode that we had here on IndustrialSage it was one of the things that we were talking about, was how can you, for those who are going through working with distributors, how can you facilitate that, and really, how can you use marketing in different ways to be able to sort of help them there, and that was one of the things, is just make it easy for them. If you’re sending leads to your distributor, I mean come on, hey, look, I got these people and they’re ready to go. Even if they’re repping other, or they’ve got other competitive products, I mean they’re going to say, oh these guys are making it easy for me over here, this is helpful, keep it coming! You’re making my job easier. This is awesome.

Sure, yep.

Okay. So I’ve got another question. All right, so great results. Obviously it takes time. Obviously it didn’t take a week, I was joking. It took a little bit more than that. And where a lot of companies are in, maybe a similar boat to where you guys were maybe four years ago, or even five years ago, is maybe they know, okay, yeah, I like what I hear, I would love that, we want to do this, but we think we know how now, but there’s inevitably always that obstacle of getting that buy-in. What did that look like for you guys?

Well, since I was kind of coming in to a new role there, I had a lot of automatic buy-in, but for somebody else already in that role, what I would say is, I mean, it’s clear that this is the direction everything is going. There is a lot of hesitation, I suppose, and even when I was getting started, there was hesitation, but once results start coming in, the hesitation completely goes out the window. And you start seeing some results. So what I would say is if you’re going to make the move, and you ought to make the move, to a more digital and content-based inbound strategy. So drawing people to you. If you’re going to do that, make the commitment to do it, and don’t do it half-heartedly. It takes actually a lot of effort, it’s a major change from a traditional, we’re just going to create ads. You find yourself basically slowly turning into a media production company, your marketing department.

So we have a video guy on staff now, we have designers, we have video equipment. We didn’t have any of that kind of stuff. So over time, the transition to the marketing department is actually kind of profound. There’s a lot of changes that go on there. And a lot of new, I guess, expertise and a new skillsets, that need to be there. So it’s going to take an investment, and it’s going to take some commitment, and it doesn’t happen quickly. So that’s actually kind of like the triple whammy for the FCO, I mean the CFO, who’s looking into everything going, our marketing is going way up. Well I can tell you though, and the publishers won’t want to hear this, but you can cut that publishing budget. I really doubt you will see a change. We’ve noticed no change in four years of cutting the advertising budget down, half each year, we haven’t noticed a loss in the amazing leads that those ads were pulling in. It didn’t, it went the exact opposite. The advertising graph goes like that, and the results graph goes like that.

Yeah.

So there might be fear of, oh well, we’re going to drastically reduce our ad spend in order to make money available for content marketing, which is some new unproven thing, but, yeah, do exactly that. Take money out of your ad spend, and put it into content marketing, and just commit. And don’t be afraid and just go for it. Doing it half-hearted is just going to make it take even longer, you know? And just know okay, we’re going to settle in, and it’ll take a couple of years to get this thing up and running, and we may actually need some new people, or some training, or all these kinds of things. But put it as a goal on somebody’s job description and say you’re responsible for making this happen. We’re going to go this way.

That’s awesome, wow. Now that’s just some great wisdom there. That’s some great thoughts, I mean, yeah. It’s not easy, I mean I get it. But you’re 100% right. You have to make that investment, that’s where everyone is going, it’s the Blockbuster or the Netflix. I mean it’s where things are going and to not be afraid. But it is exciting to be able to see those results, when you start seeing those little things. Oh wow, this actually, this is interesting. It’s new. And so it can be scary. But there’s light, there’s a big light at the end of the tunnel, and no, it’s not a train. It’s actual light, right, it’s a good thing. So John, listen, I have really appreciated and really enjoyed our conversation. Before we wrap up, anything else you’d like to leave for our audience? Leave it open-ended?

No, I mean, I think just to recap, I think it’s definitely worth doing. I mean, content marketing isn’t a silver bullet, marketing in this day and age changes rapidly. In 10 years from now, it’ll be something different than the content marketing approach we’re doing now. But the key is not to be afraid of change, and even though your business model may not have changed drastically in 40 years, or your parts or whatever it is might be, I heard one company at Content Marketing World saying they still sell an item that’s been around for over 100 years, so okay, but the world is changing. The way people buy things is changing. The way business happens is changing, even in these stalwart industrial sectors, so don’t be afraid to push the envelope in your marketplace, and honestly there’s a really good chance you might rush straight to the front if no one else’s doing it. If everybody’s lagging behind, then go for it. And I think you’d be surprised with the kind of results you see.

And that’s the opportunity right there. So John, with that, thank you so much. If anybody has, would love to reach out to you, what’s the best way of getting in contact? Do you have LinkedIn or Twitter or something?

Yeah, LinkedIn you can search me, or Mr. John Joyce on Twitter is easy, so you can look for me there.

Perfect. We’ll do that. John, thank you so much for spending some of your time with us and sharing a lot of your great insights.

Glad to be on, Danny, thanks for having me.

All right, so how about that. Man, that was a really awesome episode. I really enjoyed that a lot. There’s a ton of takeaways from that. I think for me, a couple of them are, we talk about this a lot on here, it’s the long game, and that’s exactly what they were, they were playing the long game. This wasn’t something that they turned on immediately and boom results, which is to be honest with you a lot of times is that expectation. Oh, digital things are going to go viral, and we’re just going to hit a couple of buttons and things are going to go magical. And it’s not.

There’s a lot of fear involved, there’s a lot of learning, as you heard John say, for the first year, they had one type of premium content, and they were trying these different things, and they said okay, this that works, or this didn’t work, and now let’s double down. And now look where they are, they’re creating new positions inside the company, because it’s shifting the dynamics of how sales are happening. They’re able to really excite their distributors, be able to pass leads to them and help make it easier for them. So there’s just a lot of incredible benefit from this. So listen, if you’re sitting there on the fence, saying, gosh, I don’t know, we’re getting here towards budget season, planning season, if you’re a calendar year company. January is just around the corner. Now is the time to really put those plans in place, get things going, lock down that plan, and say we’re going to start doing this, and map out a plan. It doesn’t have to be super high level or big, but start. Start doing something, start getting those results, and keep moving forward.

So that’s all I’ve got for you. Thank you so much for watching this episode of IndustrialSage. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them for you on the show. You can reach out to us, IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on any of the podcasting stations, we’d love a review. If you’re looking at stuff on social media, hey, make some comments, share the love. We’d love it. And that’s it, that’s all I’ve got for you. I’m Danny, this is IndustrialSage. Thanks so much for watching.

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Alright, thank you for joining me today on the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by the CEO of Kindred AI, Marin Tchakarov, coming in from San Francisco, California. Marin, thank you so much for joining me today.

Danny, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Well, I’m excited to jump into today’s episode, but before we get into all the good things here, could you tell me, who is Kindred AI? What do you guys do?

Yeah, so we’ve developed an artificial intelligence platform that, through machine vision, grasping, and placement technologies, together effectively solves for complex commercial problems at our customers in real-world settings, in production settings.

Excellent. Well, the talk of the town right now, not just right now, but it’s been before: digital transformation. We’re seeing huge leaps and bounds. And, now, because of this fun thing called COVID, I suspect that we’ll get into that; it’s accelerated that conversation for lots of organizations. And I’m willing to bet that you’ve probably experienced the same thing. And we’ll get into that here a little bit more in the episode. But before we do that, I would love to get to know Marin. I want to get to know you a little bit better. Tell me, how did you get into this space? Take me back.

Sure. It’s been an interesting, long journey. I was born and raised, I grew up in Bulgaria under the iron curtain, and in a family of scientists. We immigrated to the US just about as soon as we could right after the wall fell. That was probably one of the most transformative changes in my life, really. It was, in many ways, a classic yet modern-day immigrant story where we all came, barely speaking the language and had to really ramp up and immerse in this culture and in this world. That’s taking you far, far back.

No, that’s great. I love it.

I’m extremely fortunate and proud to have had a relatively long career in technology and, so, it’s been a path of building a brand, for one, for myself in terms of what I’m passionate about with respect to trends, technological trends and how I, for one, perceive them enveloping in the future. And, so, most recently, prior to joining the artificial intelligence and robotics world, I was in the connected devices, smart devices world. I was at companies like Jawbone and Pebble prior to Kindred.

Okay, so I’m always fascinated by hearing stories of people, particularly immigrant-type stories. What was it like transitioning from coming over and, then, starting anew? What was that like?

It was a massive shock to the system on so many different levels. Obviously, the language barrier. Look, I knew just about enough English, based on what I’ve learned from watching American movies in Bulgaria.

Yeah.

So anything from the very basic language barrier to culture to just completely different economic and political systems where the abundance that we have in our world here and how fortunate we are was a staunch contrast to where we came from as a family. So it, to this day, continues to be the most formative inflection point of my life. And that’s probably because of how incredibly hard it was to tackle all of those things in as fast as possible type of fashion and be able to integrate, really. And, so, I would say that that was incredibly formative for me and put me on a very different path.

I can only imagine. What were some concrete examples? Obviously, it’s not easy. I can only imagine. I haven’t been in that– the only thing that I can maybe relate to is when I lived for a year in Mexico City. I’m half Mexican, so it wasn’t– it was still culture shock and language barrier and all that stuff, but I didn’t traditionally speak Spanish. I learned it. But I can only imagine your entire– that’s a huge lifestyle disruption. Everything.

Yep.

But what were some of those concrete examples you said you’re drawing on that today that was, from a formative standpoint?

Yeah, yeah, many of these experiences were effectively learning how to swim in the deep end of the pool, metaphorically speaking. It was one of those things where, for instance, I had to learn English very quickly. I immediately enrolled in college, and there was no ramp-up program. It was just full immersion with what you knew, as little as that were. And, so, the ramp-up time was very compressed, and the stress levels were pretty high. And, so, that was an example. I still remember, to this day, reading a chapter in my psych 101 book in freshman year of college here, which took me three hours to do because I had a Webster dictionary next to me.

Wow.

It was a 20-page chapter. And, so, every third word, I’d have to go back to the dictionary and do that akin to–yeah, as I went, I had to really power through full immersion. So, on that vector, that was incredibly challenging. Culturally, we–again, there was no training wheels. I couldn’t understand folks and what they were asking or saying. I had to ask people to repeat numerous times and roll with that. And, of course, economically and politically, the system was so different that there was this complete shock in the way of perception of our reality where there were just so many choices that it almost–not almost. It actually made us all, I speak for my entire family–made us all feel bad based on where we were coming from. There were just so many–you could just walk into the grocery store, and there would be 55 different types of cheese, and we were used to two or whatever.

Wow, wow. So I imagine gratitude is probably a good word to describe some of the—

I think that’s an excellent way to describe it. I think it’s been a mixture of gratitude and responsibility and fortune, so gratitude that one has gotten the ability or has gotten the opportunity to find themselves in a situation like we had and the responsibility to do something with it.

Yeah, well, so—

Not to lay it to waste, yeah.

So this whole thing is a great story, but you were talking about in your freshman year, it took you three hours to go through that. Psychology isn’t exactly the easiest thing to go through anyway, so we’ll start with that. But after college, what did you do? How did you start, and what did that growth track look like?

Yeah, great. So I grew up in a family of scientists. My folks were PhDs in chemical engineering. I, for one, was incredibly, very scientifically inclined throughout my whole adolescent and early life. I was on a very firm path to be a physicist. In fact, that was what I was going to declare as a major after that freshman semester back east where I went to school. And I changed my mind. I discovered an affinity for business which, certainly I had always had, but we were in a different economy. We were in a different world back in Bulgaria under the iron curtain, and that wasn’t viable and, so, I always had that affinity. I just sort of changed gears and said, “Listen, I’m going to change. I’m not going to do physics. I’m going to do finance,” finance and accounting and just a general business focus for my career.

Excellent. I find that fascinating. I love hearing these stories. My grandparents have some similar stories, and it’s always– I feel thankful just hearing– You’re right; we have so many opportunities, and we take this for granted or sometimes can take it for granted. We need to be appreciative and be thankful and actually have that responsibility, the duty to do something with it. Looks like you have done something with it. I’m sure you’ve done a few things. Tell me a little bit now, as you transitioned a bit more into this space. Obviously, we have this COVID situation. We have digital transformation disruption that’s happening. It’s being accelerated. I’m hearing from people saying, I think we’ve been pushed, maybe, five years, if not more, out of necessity. What are some of these big challenges that you’re seeing in the industry right now? I think maybe, specifically, with some fulfillment issues and sorting and picking. You were mentioning that you guys have some experience in that.

Yeah, challenges, and I would actually probably look at them as, or I do look at them, much more from the angle of, actually, tremendous opportunities ahead of us. What we’re seeing in industries, yeah, look, the pandemic’s been a tremendous catalyst to the growth of certain segments within the industry like ecommerce versus brick-and-mortar businesses. And, so, all of our customers are, most all of our customers are retailers with brick-and-mortar presence as well as ecomm business. And, so, what we’re seeing is certainly a very significant shift in that proportion of ecommerce growing by leaps and bounds since the pandemic unfolded. And that’s creating, we’re deserving unprecedented levels, far beyond what we had seen previously in any peaks. We’ve been in, I should mention, we’ve been in production for almost three years with some of our customers and with a growing fleet throughout that period of time. And, so, we’ve been through a few peaks. We’ve been through three peaks now. And every peak’s been more and more busy, and there’s been a growth in ecomm just generally in proportion to overall business. And this has just catalyzed it to a very different level. So I see opportunity there with us to capture that growth potential and to continue helping our customers with the excellence that we committed to provide in the way of service. And to scale, to scale ahead of that growth that we see that we’re in the midst of and that we see continuing indefinitely.

Yeah, absolutely. I think right now, what we’re hearing as well, is just, the big– there’s a big, big word. I think right now, it’s probably just uncertainty, so the ability for actual resource planning, the ability from demand forecast, right now, it’s incredibly difficult. I was talking earlier, we had another interview earlier today. We were talking about, obviously, looking at, sourcing suppliers. You’ve got offshore suppliers in China, Asia, and everywhere else. And everyone’s scrutinizing their supply chain right now, looking at saying, “Wow, we really need to make sure we have depth in our chart,” so to speak–I’ll pull some football terminology here–to make sure that we’ve got a diverse portfolio so that if we have a major disruption, that we’re able to respond.

But at the same time, you’re also looking at it from a forecasting and demand standpoint to be able to say, “My gosh, we have no idea if we’re going to have–” hopefully, we’re not going to have a return of what we did in February and March where, from a retail, specifically let’s say on groceries, standpoint, and other products and services, massive runs and having inventory issues. So these giant spikes and, then, these drops, but having no way of being able to really forecast. Unlike, we’re mentioning ecommerce. Okay, well, actually, this is a great example right now. What is Black Friday going to look like this year? Who knows? It could be off the charts. Obviously, there’s been a huge growth trend for the last several years. But is there going to be a certain amount of fatigue? Is it going to be huge? What does the economics look like? Obviously, we have an election coming up. These are major, major things. What are your thoughts? Loaded question.

Yeah, no, it’s an interesting environment. We’re small; we’re a nimble start-up. We have just shy of 100 employees across, between two offices in San Francisco and Toronto. So even pre-pandemic, we were very nimble and flexible with respect to how we work with one another, obviously 2500 miles apart. And, so, we are trying to be very nimble and flexible and respond to the market forces as real-time as we can. That being said, we’re preparing for a big peak season this year. We’re seeing that, with many of our customers, there’s still some backlogs with respect to COVID peak, shall we call it?

Yeah.

It’s been a prolonged peak. We’re seeing a major shift towards ecommerce activity and boost in that channel for businesses. And, so, there’s no reason to believe that this upcoming peak would be any abatement from that, or at least we’re not banking on it. We’re preparing for a big peak this year, and we’re trying to, we’re doing everything we can to stay ahead of it and prepare and serve our customers with the right excellence and service that we’ve signed up to do.

Now, that sounds great. One question, and we get asked about this, especially as we’re looking at new technology and certainly when you hear AI, machine learning, all these really cool, exciting terms. From a practical standpoint, how are you able to help manufacturers or helping in the distribution centers or any type of fulfillment activity? How do you guys tangibly– what does that look like? How do you actually employ AI to solve some of these challenges?

Yeah, so, and again, I’ll bifurcate the answer into pre-COVID and now timeframe because a lot of the trends and discussions are about what a catalyst the pandemic has been with respect to automation. But the reality is that, again, we’ve been in operation and in production with a growing fleet for the preceding almost three years prior to this pandemic. And, so, we’ve been watching these trends unfold pre-pandemic which is that, with growing ecommerce volumes and activity and just in general with the growth of that channel as a business from any of our customers, it’s just simply been hard to overcome labor shortages, whether that’s due to weather, whether that’s due to sickness and other illnesses and issues, or whether that’s due to local labor market shortages, it’s one of those aspects where our robotics system, which we call SORT, our AI-powered robotics system SORT, basically steps in to fill in that void and help with productivity in collaboration with humans on the floor and increase that productivity for fulfillment centers. The nuts and bolts of it are that our robots, through their artificial intelligence-powered machine vision, and, again, grasp and stow capabilities, effectively do the most mundane, repetitive set of tasks that otherwise, in history, humans would have done. And, so, SORT complete end-customer orders that are, then, packed out by associates of our customers.

So what we’re having is a very different way that humans collaborate with machines that we haven’t had before, even a decade ago, let alone prior to that. And, so, today, in many of our customers, what’s fascinating to me and incredibly endearing is that, many of our customers, those associates actually anthropomorphize their robots. They call it “my robot.” They name them. A customer associate could work alongside three to four robots and help, basically, effectively, supervise three to four robots at the same time. And they take ownership for those robots. Like I said, they name them. They have friendly competitions with others in the fleet. And, so, it’s a pretty neat thing to see how humans and robots who do the mundane and repetitive work, work alongside one another to make for a more engaging, basically, work for the humans in that environment.

So I’m going to ask you a question that I ask–we’ve talked to a lot of different robotics and technology-type companies, and, obviously, the number one question– I think it’s the number one question that we hear, and I’m sure that you hear as well– is, are robots taking over jobs? Are they going to push people out?

No, no. Well, I’ll speak to us. I won’t speak to other robotics companies or other robotics systems. With respect to Kindred AI, our robots are designed to work alongside humans. They require humans in the loop. They’re collaborative in nature in that respect. On one hand, I’ll say we’re incredibly proud of the solution we’ve designed and developed over the years. We were founded in 2014. We made our commercial debut in 2017, and we’ve been in production since. And we’ve been fine-tuning and refining the speed, accuracy, and reliability of our systems since then, and we’ll continue to do so. And, so, today, I’m incredibly proud to share that our robotics systems are over 99% autonomous within what they do, but they need humans in the loop in order for the whole function, for the whole cycle to be completed. Without a customer associate supervising and managing those robots, the whole situation comes into a halt within hours. So we absolutely need humans in the loop, and that’s the design. The design is to have a collaborative system that creates a safer, frankly, particularly in the COVID era, safer, more healthy environment for those workers at our customer sites to operate alongside our robots while increasing throughput and productivity.

Yeah, absolutely. So pull out your crystal ball for a second for me. What’s the future look like? Where are we going?

I wish I had one, but I would think that–look, these trends that we are observing and the vector that we’re on, it’s safe to probably conclude that it’s here to stay in that this pandemic has been a major tide in that harbor that’s not going to abate in the future with respect to requirements and desire for automation and with respect to the growth of certain trends within the industry like the proportion of ecommerce. It’s simply safer for folks to shop online from their homes. That’s just going to continue into the future with certain growth vector of its own, whether we come out of the COVID pandemic next year or whenever, I think that trend is here to stay. And, so, I think the name of this game is more automation and smarter ways to address these complex problems that many of our customers are seeing.

Excellent, Well, listen, I could probably go on all day, just talking about– I’m fascinated by everything and all of the changes that are happening, specifically in this field in regards to all the digital transformation and all the technology and all the solutions that are rolling out. It fascinates me, and it’s exciting. So thank you for taking time out of your day to spend some time with us here at IndustrialSage. For those who would love to learn more about Kindred AI, what’s the–you got a website we can go to and check you guys out?

Yeah, www.kindred.ai.

Perfect–I don’t think it could be any easier than that. So, yeah, for those who are interested, go check out kindred.ai. And, again, thank you so much for your time today and your insights.

Danny, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Have a great day. Cheers.

Thanks, you too. Well, there you go, another great episode with the IndustrialSage Executive Series. It was just a great story. I loved hearing his story just about how he came in and all of the… some of the struggles and the challenges of going through and how he’s drawn a lot, from a formative standpoint, from that experience. Anyways, and a lot of other great nuggets, talking about robotics and AI and how that is disrupting the industry as we know it, and that ecommerce–we’ve been hearing that a lot–that’s the future, and that’s where things are going. So super exciting and interesting there.

Hey, so listen, if you are not on our email list, I highly encourage you. You need to go to IndustrialSage.com right now, and you need to subscribe to get on our email list or lists because you’re missing out. And you’re missing out on great content like this. We have other things. We have other shows that are coming out soon. We’ve got news and all kinds of content that you don’t want to be missing because things are changing so quickly, you need to hear from other companies. You need to hear from other leaders. What are they doing? How can you bring that into your organization? How can you solve some of these challenges from an operational standpoint, from a lead gen, sales, and other areas? So, hey, don’t miss out. Go do that, if you haven’t. If you have already, thanks, awesome. So I will be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage. I’m Danny Gonzales. Thanks for watching or listening. Bye.

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Organizational buy-in is one of those topics that I think a lot of marketers really beat their heads against the wall with, trying to figure out, “My gosh, how do we get this change? How do I get upper management to realize that we need to make a different direction, we need to do things differently? We need to bring in some more digital strategies.” Well, you are in luck today, because for today’s episode we have Malika Waller here from Landis+Gyr who’s going to walk us through some amazing tips on how to just do that. She’s done it, she’s lived it, and she’s going to share these golden nuggets of wisdom with you for today. So we are in the Optimum Productions Studio, and I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Malika, thanks so much for joining us. Before we get going on this, can you please just tell me a little about yourself and about Landis+Gyr just so we can get ourselves familiarized with you and everything.

Awesome, yes, my name is Malika Waller. And I’m originally from Buffalo, New York. And I graduated from the University of Maryland. I was studying marketing and logistics, of all things. And I started marketing about seven years ago, and I’ve been working at Landis+Gyr for about the last two years. Landis+Gyr, if you’re not familiar, is in the utility space. So we enable utilities to have knowledge at the edge of the grid. So that means the meters on your homes, working with that. So we’re enabling this smart grid of the future. So right now, utilities are in this interesting place where things like solar and energy is coming back on to the grid. The infrastructure was never set up for that. So we’re helping them manage the grid so there’s no brownouts and blackouts, hopefully not. And making sure that they have the technology, the meters themselves, and software and everything that would create a whole solution for them. So we’re very future forward, and future-proofing the grid for them.

Awesome, that’s interesting. Yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned that the infrastructure wasn’t there necessarily originally to be able to, I guess having power generation being pushed back in. It’s more like we’re taking it in this way.

Yeah, I thought that was really fascinating, too. It’s like, yeah, it was set up for one-way. Not two-way.

Interesting, well, speaking of being maybe set up for maybe a specific different way, has Landis+Gyr in the past, have they typically had some sort of digital marketing strategy? How are they set up?

So marketing team-wise it was, you could say siloed. It’s a very much set up by product and each product marketer was in charge of kind of the whole campaign flow and marketing of a product. So now the team has kind of shifted and changed based on the skill set, and need, and strategy. So a lot of that now focuses on skill set of PR, digital marketing like myself, events, stuff like that. So we’re kind of like a catch-all for all the products now. So merging different stylists together. And I’ll say, initially there really wasn’t a digital strategy. It was, “We need to be in the digital space, we need a website. We know that there are components that are out there in the digital world, but we’re not experts in it, and we don’t have the expertise on our team.” That was part of the reason I was brought in two years ago. And I started as the digital marketing and design specialist. So mainly they brought me in to kind of work with our agencies, kind of finesse some of the stuff that we’re doing. And just kind of understand what the agencies are saying. They’re giving feedback. They’re giving suggestions. Speaking a different language, that everyone is kind of like, “Okay, what does that mean?”

It’s like translating a little bit.

What does that actually do for us? And is it the right thing that we should be doing? So the next move was to bring in somebody to, I’m really focusing on them. So that’s where I came in. My role morphed a lot. I think because some of the skills that I brought to the table but also, showing the value of digital marketing and where that’s kind of going. The utility space is a very aging space. A lot of people have been there their whole careers, their whole life. It’s one of those, “If you’ve been there ten years, you’re still new,” kind of things, especially at the utility side. So our business kind of mirrors that as well. And we’re coming to a point where there’s aging workforce and a lot of people with all that knowledge that are leaving. And similar with digital, nobody had the skills. And now there’s people in the utilities that have those digital skills. They know how to use the Internet very well. Not that older people don’t, but the way they interact with digital is different than in the past, which would have been traditional media, prints, a heavy emphasis on events. And the shift from talking to who you know, versus kind of doing research on your own. A lot of that’s come to the utility side as well. So we need to be there.

Exactly, yeah, so just a totally different shift in the buying cycle, in the buying process, and how people really consume information.

And that has totally changed.

So when you mentioned when you first came on, you were kind of that liaison maybe between the agencies and in turn maybe translating some of that information. What were some of the different maybe tactics that you guys were using then? And talk to me a little about what you were using then and then how you kind of made that transition. Was there an aha moment or what happened there?

So a lot of the ‘aha’s for me that I kind of brought to the table was using our data differently. We had a website. We had emails going out, not a strong nurture presence. So we weren’t really segmenting or looking at the data we were getting from people who were engaging with us. What people were doing on the website, not really paying attention too much there. A lot of our focus has been brand awareness. And what I’m trying to bring to the table is looking at that data and saying, how can we make our messaging more impactful where it needs to be to the right people that are looking for it. Something that we’re doing, like I said, we’re kind of enabling that smart grid to new territory. We’re kind of looked at as just a metering manufacturing company, and we do way more than that. So getting that message out has been such a shift in what we are traditionally doing that we need a place to do that. And digital is that place to do it. So understanding kind of who’s already engaging with us, and what they’re engaging with, which at the time was a lot of metering stuff. Looking at our only metering products, and not our network solutions, and all the things that we bring to enable utilities to do the further technology that they need. So we needed to shift that messaging, and it’s really hard to do it if nobody’s picking up magazines.

A little bit, yeah.

Yeah, and if you’re only able to speak to them at events. Or we do a lot of sales presentations, but If somebody is already starting that journey of looking for something and we can actually be there as a source, not only is that brand awareness, but we’re actually engaging them and they’re looking at Landis+Gyr as, “Yeah, they do that too.”

Right, at the right time.

Yes, exactly.

So right messaging at the right time, absolutely, and that’s great. So maybe talk to me a little bit about this challenge of that organizational buy in. So okay, you came in and you say, “All right, we need to be looking at things a little bit differently. We need to be looking at our data and let’s get in some feedback there and maybe we need to be transitioning a little bit more, a little more digital marketing.” How did you start to make that approach and start to build that case from that?

From the beginning.

From the beginning, yeah.

When I started, when I walked in the door, I said, “We’re doing digital.”

And then you snapped your fingers and then it all happened.

Yes, it happens overnight. No, it doesn’t happen overnight at all, it takes a lot of education. A lot of people know what digital is, everybody has a smartphone. You’re in touch with the digital world pretty much all the time. And so people think that they know all that digital can do or provide, but they don’t. And you’ll fall back on what you know, which is definitely more traditional marketing tactics. And so, education of the landscape of what digital marketing is. There’s the, I’m sure you’ve seen it, the chief Martech marketing landscape that showed the exponential growth of marketing in technology. Showing that graphic to my CEO and to the upper management? That was something that they never even thought of. And it kind of mirrors what’s going on in our industry– I mean our industry is not as rapidly exponential of businesses coming onto the scene, but going from a couple of players to many smaller players doing different things. It resonated with them. So educating people on what digital is in the context of the business. And why that would resonate or why that would be important to them was really important, that was number one. The second thing I would do was, I was the evangelist. If I could talk about digital marketing, I would.

You’re all about it.

Yeah, if I could get on the agenda to even have five minutes to say, well this is what we should be doing in digital, I took the opportunity to do it. And I made sure that it was audience appropriate and not, I can get really into the weeds on what digital can provide. So making sure it’s audience appropriate, but any chance I could get to talk about it or maybe next things that are coming up or trends. Planting those seeds of, “Digital’s doing this and digital is doing that.” And the next things that we could do in the digital realm, was something I was very heavily looking at to do. So any opportunity I could see, fitting that in, I would do that.

I mean, you’re selling it well. So you had sort of that sales mentality. And then I guess one good word that comes to my mind is intentionality. You’re very intentional about it, and I think that’s fantastic. And then a note on the Martech stack, when you were talking about stuff. If any of our viewers aren’t familiar with that, it’s that there’s a great infographic, you can find it all over the place, where they talk about-

Yeah, Google it.

Yeah, there’s the thing called, “the Googles,” you can find it, but it basically talks about all the different marketing technology. The rapid growth from what, I don’t know, and I don’t know. Within five years, it’s gone from, “There are a couple different things,” to now, “There’s over different types of marketing technology.”

Yes and the logos are way, way smaller.

Yes, you need a magnifying glass to be able to see what they are. But just a great illustration just in terms of where things are going and how rapidly they are changing, it’s growing exponentially to your point, so.

Yeah, and the skill set needed to manage all those emerging technologies and integrate them across your campaigns. That’s something that you have to take into account. So you can show that and you can let them know, hey, we’re at this little chunk and it’s going to keep growing. And that’s also part of the educational part, letting them know where we are today. And even if we make a little bit of strides, we won’t be so far behind when we turn around tomorrow. And our competitors are doing something in this new space and you have to catch up. So you definitely want to keep trying to move forward. And especially in BB, it’s all ready trailing consumer technology or consumer BC selling habits. So you have to take in account that everyone at the end of the day is a person at the end of it, even in the business. You’re going to have to develop your strategies to adapt to people’s interaction with things and their comfort level and how that keeps growing with digital. And if you’re not there, how you’ll look, right? You won’t look innovative, you won’t look on top of what’s going on or even if your business is still thriving. If you aren’t updating your website, if you aren’t showing up in Google searches, people may not know that you’re even open.

Exactly, it’s very true. Very true. Those two points really, education and really just evangelizing, just, big time, right? So all right, you’re doing that, what’s next? I guess at a certain point, you say, hey, there’s something to this, let’s try XYZ or we’re going to give you a little budget. What happened there?

So getting budget…

That’s the easiest part, right?

That’s my fourth thing: “Give me all the money.” Well marketing, it has a magnifying glass on it. We’re cost centers. We spend. And so getting the money, you really need advocates in the room. You need somebody, because I can’t be in every meeting. I can’t be there educating everybody all the time, I do have to show results. But if you have an advocate to kind of speak on your behalf, in those meetings, getting a budget is a little bit easier. Because they’ll start seeing the value and if ten people are saying, yeah, we should look into this digital thing. Let’s give some money towards investigating what we could do. Then it’s a little bit easier. But also celebrating and showing success. So a lot of times, even I get kind of like the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. If you don’t stop and celebrate little wins, and show that there’s improvement or we’re showing up on Google, or our traffic is up. And those little wins, if you don’t show them, nobody will know about them. You’ll keep moving forward and it’s really about showing those results because, again, back to the educational part. If you’re not really setting the expectations, a lot of people think, “Well, it’s digital. It’s fast. I should see results next week.” And that’s not the case. There is definitely a long life cycle of what digital can bring when those results start coming in. Six months out from when you start something, is typical, you can start benchmarking from there, definitely not overnight. Two months, a week, you might see some improvement, but really what you want to be working towards is longevity and building upon whatever you’re doing. And so you have to set those expectations, and educate people on to why it’s that way. But again, celebrating it. Again, when you have those opportunities, if you can go in meetings and talk to people, letting them know, “Yeah, our social media is up. Our website visits are up. Our conversions are up.” Whatever the success measure is there, you can maybe talk to one KPI at a time, but talking about it when it happens is really important. And then people will want to keep fostering that. And letting you still work in new things or try new things to see down the line where that gets us.

Yeah, that’s awesome. So, then at what point did Landis+Gyr just kind of say, “You know what, let’s go all in on this,” or “Let’s just really dive in”? What was that? I’m assuming there’s a critical point that they hit, they said “Okay, yeah, Malika is definitely on to something and I think that we need to put some more resources to it.”

Yeah, you know, it was kind of bubbling. There’s a need for it when you want to have traffic, when you’re talking to prospective clients and you want to send them to a nice web site and all of that. That works, or that people can find things, and there is definitely this frustration brewing, even internally,

Sure, yeah.

Of just finding things on our web site.

Yeah.

Finding things, finding us listed with press releases. All the good things that we’re doing as a business just wasn’t showing up in the places that we really wanted it to. And that’s where digital can get a lot of bang for your buck in bringing the attention where you want it to go. So, that was part of it, and I think I was talking about data before. Bringing in tools to look at that data, a lot of how we were writing things was very internal-speak. And so finding a tool that could help us say, “What are people actually searching for in our industry? And how are they searching for that? What language?” I mean, English language.

Sure, right.

But, “What kind of words are they using when they’re searching for distributed energy resources? Are they looking for the whole word, or are they looking for DER?” And a lot of things that we were writing, we’re very inside, technical, engineering-speak and not, I have a question and I’m searching for an answer.

Right, that’s great. How did you guys find that information?

So we definitely looked into a tool. BrightEdge is what we use right now.

Okay.

So it’s a big aggregate of search information out there and we can really dive in really granular to specific pages or specific websites that we want to see how they’re doing or how we’re competing against them, with recommendations on what we can do. So it kind of tripled, quadrupled, the amount of ME’s that were there.

Which is great.

Yeah, we say “We acquired more arms and legs without actually bringing a body in,” with tools like that. So investigating tools that will work for what you’re trying to do, and data is a big thing for me that we didn’t have access to. And so that– we use things like HubSpot. We use different emailing programs. We work with agencies. So there’s a lot of moving parts…

Yeah, sounds like it.

…to bring that all together and to have another tool that can do a lot of the administrative gathering of information for me to just look at.

Right, yeah.

And analyzing quickly was really important, so talking about tools like that: just, what do I need to actually be successful was a really important part of the conversation.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. Excellent.

Yeah.

So, maybe we back up a second. I was curious, I meant to ask you this before, but what was that first toe-dipping exercise that you did to be able to get results. What did that look like?

To get results in our campaigns? Or results in buy-ins?

In terms of results in buy in, but what were those first initial marketing tactics? What did you do, to say, “We’ve got a little buy in, we’ve got a little bit of budget, all right, now we’re off to the races.”

So some of the stuff was a lot around piggybacking off of traditional things that we’ve been doing. So introducing some landing pages for our events. So, “How do I incorporate digital into things that we’re already doing?”

Perfect, that’s great.

We were going to events but we were not giving follow-up places for them to go. So giving them actionable things after a show to come back to– which seems very simple, but gathering materials and making the messaging appropriate and desirable to come back to. Getting all of that together and showing, “Okay, you can do this in a digital world, you don’t have to send out another piece of collateral or meet them face to face. You can do that in addition, too.” But immediate, when somebody’s up thinking about something at o’clock at night, when they can’t call…

Exactly.

…or you can’t see them: having a place for them to go, that is really speaking to whatever they were looking for was part of that initial success in showing, okay, you could piggyback on something and see results. So upticks in traffic, and people knowing where different collateral was. Even the salespeople being able to say, “Hey, you can go to this page…”

“This is awesome!”

“…for something specific related to what I am talking about,” was really helpful.

Excellent. So I love that example. That’s great because you’re talking… It wasn’t like, “We’re going to completely go on this whole direction over here. We’re just going to shift and trail blaze this thing.” And everyone’s like, “Ugh.”

It’s hard.

Yeah, but really working with what you have, so let’s halfway make this better. And then definitely from a digital perspective. And then what were some of the results? I imagine you said celebrate, look at the results. What were some of the celebrations that you had? What do they look like?

Yeah, celebration came in the form of putting on a monthly meeting of saying “Here’s where our traffic is, here’s how our followers are going.” I put that on the calendar. I said, “Hey we need to talk about digital regularly.” And so bringing that in to– we live and die by PowerPoint. So making sure you have a Powerpoint ready to go to highlight those things. And let them know what those impacts are to them. That’s a form of celebration. I didn’t throw a party with balloons or anything .

Sure, no, but that’s great. There’s actually a great key thing that just popped in my head what you just said. Is that you said earlier on that it’s really important to be able to really speak in the language of your customer. So making sure that it’s not too internally-focused on whatever they’re searching for. That we want to make sure that we’re speaking in that language. But in that same sense though too, by doing these reports, you mentioned, your organization is very PowerPoint heavy. Same thing there, internally making sure that you are speaking in the language.

Yeah. Yes.

I love that, that’s great.

That’s really important. Especially to get that buy in. If you are talking apples and they want oranges, you’re never going to be getting the same thing you want out of each other. And it’s definitely mutually beneficial, one for the business to invest in digital, but it’s also beneficial for me because then I get to do the fun things in digital that I want to do.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s awesome, absolutely. No, that’s fantastic. Let’s talk about, initially you were making some of those changes to maybe what are some of the things now from a digital standpoint, obviously you guys are probably doing a little bit more than just landing pages for events…

Yeah, yes.

And things like that.

We’ve definitely grown our social media, search engine, marketing, so focusing on that.

Okay, yeah.

So now we’re trying to do more of that outreach part of it and getting our brands out there for things that typically aren’t associated with our business. Again, we are not just metering, so we have to be where software people are. Which is in Google. The world of Google. And not on that second page of Google, which is where we-

Which is no man’s land.

Live. Yeah. It’s just crazy out there past page one. But that’s where we sit. There’s a lot of things ahead of our content and changing what we’re doing on the website and increasing some of our paid advertisement positioning and ads there has really helped kind of slowly move us up. And like I said, changing the language is huge. I mean, Google is crawling sites and it’s going to pull in what seems relevant. And it’s not really a human behind there, so it’s just going to look for those same words contextually. But, being there, and having those words on our page, and paying attention to that, has really garnered success in moving up. So not just focus on brand terms, because, if we type in “Landis+Gyr,” we’re going to come up first, hopefully, most of the time. But when you type in things like “smart meter,” or “smart meter technology,” or “grid analytics.” We want to be there.

Right, yeah.

And some of those words are kind of huge umbrellas of, it could be different types, especially when you’re talking about analytics, that could be medical. It could be any industry that has analytics, but how do we start showing up there? And what content do we need to provide for that? So it’s a content play which marries so well with digital. And the fact that you can change it, we can refine it. We can continuously improve everything that we’re doing and see those impacts along the way.

That’s awesome. So one other question I wanted to ask. And this is about Landis+Gyr, maybe we should have asked this earlier on. But it totally slipped my mind. They primarily deal with distributors or they sell directly to end users? Is there a mixture? What does that look like?

So, our customers are the utilities themselves, and then we do have distribution partners. But yeah, we are not the end consumer, so I would never sell you a meter directly.

Sure.

But we would sell to people like Georgia Power. So that’s kind of where we play.

Okay, excellent, and does that alter some of the, obviously depending on if you’re going through, you get channel partners working through distributors, versus selling directly to the utilities, or the Georgia Powers, are the selling companies of the world. From a digital marketing standpoint, maybe briefly touch on that. What does that look like for you guys?

Yeah so, let’s see how I phrase this. Definitely I want to be thought leaders. So again, at the end of the day there’s a person there. And the things that we talk about, there is a lot of engineering, high level thinking going on.

A little bit.

And so some consumers are just not aware of the language. So there’s that part, but speaking to our customers, definitely talking about the benefits and what that does for their business, that’s usually where the focus is. And really sharing our vision of how we see that going. A lot of utilities right now, especially different energy climates right now, I won’t get into all that, but they don’t know what to do next. And they want to make the right investment and Landis+Gyr is very interoperable and very future-proof. So we make it so that you really can’t make a bad decision and you’re not wed to us forever. Although we want you to be our customer for life. You aren’t, and so as technology changes and grows, we’re growing along with that. But we understand, maybe down the line, there’s something that you want to add onto your system, we can pair with that, we make our technology in that way, with open standards. So we talk a lot in those terms for utilities and our end customer of what that would mean for you, and the benefit of working with a partner like Landis+Gry.

Great, well this has been great, it’s been really fantastic. So I’m going to ask you one last question and I’m pretty sure I know what the answer is. But… Don’t be too worried. Maybe a little, just a little. I’m just playing. It’s very simple. What do you tell that person who’s watching or listening right now who’s saying, “Gosh, my company, we need to make this transition but I’m really struggling with how to do that?” You touched on it.

Yeah.

We talked about it a lot. What advice do you have?

So, again, those four main things. Education, educate yourself, educate your company on what digital is, be the evangelist, definitely anytime, anywhere you can talk about it, talk about it. Gain some advocates, so there’s going to be some people shaking their heads, “Yes, I understand, I like that.” Get them onboard. Hopefully they are higher than you as well, depending on where you are in an organization. But get you, your level and above shaking their heads that, “Yes digital is something that we need to do.” And get them talking about it on your behalf as well. And celebrate, celebrate whatever little success, big success, but take time to celebrate it and show results. That’s going to be a main driver of getting more people engaged and excited about digital marketing.

That’s awesome, wow, it’s perfect. Thank you so much, thanks for coming on. It’s been fantastic. Definitely learned a lot. And so if anybody has any questions for you, where might they be able to reach you?

Yeah, I’m on Twitter at @malikadidit.

We’ll put that up there.

M-A-L-I-K-A-D-I-D-I-T. So you can ask me questions there. Find me on LinkedIn.

Awesome, great. Well, thank you so much. So again another really great episode here. Really, getting that organizational buy in is definitely a big challenge. Like Malika was talking about: take those four steps, those pieces of advice. If you’re sitting there say, “Gosh we really need to figure this out. How do we do this? What do we do?” Education, really talk about it. Really educate yourself, help to educate your company and then evangelize, keep talking about it, get really excited about it. Talk about all the different amazing things that you can do with it. And then start getting those internal champions, other people that will be able to sort of sponsor or be able to talk it up and work with you. And then once you’re able to start making some inroads and start doing a few things, really celebrate with those results. I love that, celebrating. And then showing those results, showing back that value. Doing those things is really going to help you. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it will help to really course correct and really start moving that boat just a little bit so you can really get those results you are after. So thanks again so much for watching our episode. Malika, again, thank you so much for coming on IndustrialSage.

Thank you.

And as always, please be sure to share, like, subscribe, all the good things. If you are on iTunes we’d love a review. If you are watching these on the website, please subscribe, get those emails, share it with your friends, colleagues, and assorted relatives. And until next time, thanks so much. I’m Danny Gonzales and this is IndustrialSage.

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Alright, so thank you so much for joining me today on our IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Mark Bondurant, who is the CEO of Twin Oaks Technology. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you today.

I’m excited to do the same. So before we jump into everything, and for those who aren’t familiar, tell me about Twin Oaks Technology. What do you guys do?

Sure, Twin Oaks Technology offers a variety of services. Predominantly what we focus on in the industrial warehouse industry is a warehouse management system. So over 30 years ago, I started in warehouse and distribution and had the opportunity to work with different companies in different industries which has led me to open up Twin Oaks Technology. In 2012, I started out with one office and four employees, and here we are, eight years later. I have two offices, and we have 14 employees, part-time employees, and I’m still on the hunt, trying to hire more people.

Oh, excellent, very good. So I want to know a little bit more about you as a person. So take me back. How did you get into this space before Twin Oaks and everything?

Sure, so 30 years ago I did start working for a very large wholesale distribution company. It was a 400,000 square foot facility. And that exposed me to a lot in the warehousing industry. My background and degree was actually computer science and accounting directly out of college, but I landed a job there, started out as a programmer, ended up rising to the IT manager, eventually to the VP of IT and operations over the facility. Eventually, ultimately, that company was sold to a much larger company, a publicly-traded company, that was a holding company, and it allowed me to have exposure and work with a lot of other companies, distribution facilities, and serve on a technology steering committee for the publicly-traded company. So I really appreciated… that really helped me advance my career. I got to learn a lot about different warehouses, operations, different people. And they opened up a lot of doors for me personally to travel to see other operations in China, India, several countries in Europe, Mexico, and Canada. So that was pretty valuable to me.

That’s great. So how did you, what’s the story behind starting your company?

Sure, so I was with the company for a number of years, and I love working on solutions. That’s one of the things that I really strive to do. And in 2012, it was just the right time. It was an opportunity to come along, and I wanted to open up my own business. So we took a leap of faith and did that.

So tell me, what was that moment when you made up your mind? Typically you wrestle with it. Well, maybe I should do this. Well, no, go back, pros and cons and all this stuff. But what was that moment when you said, “You know what? I’m doing this, and I’m moving forward”? What was that like?

It’s a little bit exciting and scary at the same time when you make that. When you have a steady paycheck from a good company and you love working with people that are there, it is definitely a little frightening, but at the same time super exciting. And I knew that with the skill sets that we had to offer, technology we had to offer, there was a lot of value proposition, and I just really enjoyed working with a lot of different companies and people. So it was the right time to do that.

That’s awesome. So was there anybody in the past in your career journey that really made an impact on you?

Oh, definitely. I would say that the opportunity to work with– I’ve got the chance to work with CEOs, vice presidents, presidents of operations, warehouse managers. Even the people on the front line, the factory workers and warehouse workers, I love all of that. You learn a lot from just working with people who are in that. But I’ve had some great mentors. They’ve taught me a lot through my career, a lot about leadership, company culture, running a business, the finance side of it. So I’m extremely grateful for the mentors that I’ve had a chance to work with over the years.

That’s great. So let’s go into a little bit about some of the challenges that you’re seeing in the industry right now. Obviously, there’s a few. And obviously, being in the technology space right now, I’m sure you see, I’m sure a lot of challenges that you have seen that were there before Covid, I think there’s a lot of challenges that are probably the same, if not accelerated because of Covid. And, then, there’s new ones. What are you seeing right now?

Sure, so I will tell you I heard another person commenting recently, and they had a question. They said, “Well, Mark,” they said, “which is more impactful, Amazon or the pandemic?” And the answer I replied was, “Amazon was the pandemic.”

That’s a great answer.

At least for warehouses and logistics companies, 3PLs. I think that Amazon has really set a new bar and a new standard, and if companies do not respond to that, they’re going to be in big trouble. So, yes, the pandemic brought on a whole different set of challenges with social distancing, the warehouse work environment. How do you manage that? There’s a lot of pressure from people. You have to attend to that. Cleaning the environment and, then, with Amazon it was the speed, the service levels that they pushed on us. And, then, labor shortage, that’s another one I would say is an industry challenge. And, honestly, I think social media is one as well.

Hmm.

Today, with the reviews and with the– you can get slaughtered. If you’re not performing the service levels, it doesn’t take very much but one or two reviews to make your company or a company to look really bad. So social media and the feedback and the constant feedback, I think, has set a new standard for us as well.

Yeah, absolutely. No, that makes a lot of sense. Obviously, the speed of information that is happening, speaking specifically to that social media comment, yeah, that can do some harm. Especially now, as we’re seeing, there’s a big, big shift into using more social media, especially as you’ve got changing dynamics, changing demographics. There’s more adapt to using these technologies. So, yeah, that’s certainly a challenge.

And, now, it can do great benefit for a company, as well.

Absolutely.

One of our clients of which we had implemented our WMS solution, they were going through their fourth quarter with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And some of the speed with which the orders were being processed within two to three hours of the customer placing the order, the order was already shipping, and they were receiving tracking number confirmations. Well, I will tell you that, from a social media perspective, that was awesome to see all of the comments with incredible, fast shipping. So it goes both ways, and it’s just another one of those variables we have to stay on top of.

Yeah, exactly. So just a couple other questions on here. So as far as the type of companies that you might work with, is there, is it– I imagine ecommerce is a big place. Is there any other vertical or other areas that you’re focusing on?

Sure, from a channel perspective, let me answer it that way.

Yeah.

Really, we focus on three primary channels, one of them being ecommerce. Our systems and our solutions are… very much have unique features for that. But, then, we also service the wholesale channel and key accounts. So if a warehouse, a 3PL, a distribution facility has those different types of channels, they work perfectly with us.

Okay, great. So what are some of the– we were talking about some of these challenges that are coming up. How are you guys solving some of these?

Sure, I would say that we have implemented a number of unique features. We have multiple pick methods specifically designed if you’re picking ecom orders or you’re picking wholesale or key account orders. We put in some unique tools, I think, that are not out in the industry, tools that will allow companies to negotiate better shipping rates, tools to allow them to reslot their forward pick locations, inventory consolidation tools. And, then, we provide real-time statistics at the warehouse level and also at the employee level. I think that that sets us apart, but also it’s our integration. We’ve integrated our solutions with Fetch Robotics, Vuzix Glasses, Amazon Alexa. So if you want to talk to your WMS, you can ask it questions like, “How many lines have we shipped today?” Things like that. Android phones, PLCs, laser dimensioners, inline scales, conveyors, being able to talk to all those pieces of hardware.

And, then, at the same time being able to integrate with software packages like ERPs, ecom platforms like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce. And, then, there’s a lot of packages out there, a lot of things that are happening, I think, that is forcing companies to make some different decisions. And by that I mean, I think you’re going to see less monolithic solutions like big, giant ERP systems that do everything, and you’re going to see more integration in terms of different packages and software. These big, giant packages are costly. They’re risky. They’re not adaptable. And I see more movement towards being able to have best-of-breed packages, being a WMS or be it an accounting system and, then, have those systems integrate and talk to each other. And, then, finally, one thing to answer your question, our solution we provide is both cloud and on-premise. Then, I think that we’re very reasonably-priced. We’ll go right up head to head against some big, tier one-type solutions. And I think we stack up pretty well with that.

Well, who would be an ideal customer profile for you?

Sure, so an ideal customer profile would be a customer that maybe has a distribution facility. It can be a customer or a 3PL. Usually, 20,000 square foot would be the smallest, all the way up to… it could be a 500,000, 750,000 square foot facility. It can be different types of industries. Like I said, ecom, wholesale, key account, that would all fit perfectly in our equation. And by the way, we service some small accounts, too, that are not ready for the robots or the robotic solution. That is perfectly okay. They are trying to technology-proof their solutions so when they grow to the point they’re ready for it, then we can put those solutions in place. And we believe that our solutions are not, it’s best not to modularize them and sell you different modules. You get it all and, then, you can use what you need or want of it. So that, I think, is part of our unique proposition.

That’s interesting; that’s very cool. No, I love it. So for those who would like to learn more about you, what’s the best way? Assuming checking out your website, they can go learn more about you there?

Absolutely, they can check out our website, twinoakstech.com. They are welcome to call us. We’re very personable. We do webinars. We did an in-person webinar at MODEX, this last show. And, by the way, we got voted in the top 10 of all of the seminars. We were in the top 10 selection on that.

That’s great, congratulations.

Educational seminar, yeah, thank you. Yeah, so we’d love for customers to reach out and talk to us. They can call us or send us an email or hit our website.

Alright, well great. Well, there you have it. So Mark, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series. And, yeah, for companies that would want to go check more out about you guys, go check out the website and, then, go see– maybe they can help you out with a challenge with one of their solutions.

Excellent, thank you.

Thank you. Alright, well, there you go, another Industrial Sage Executive Series. Thanks so much for watching, or listening, if you are listening on any of the podcasting stations. Hey, listen, real quick, if you are not subscribed to our email list, you need to do that right now. Go to IndustrialSage.com and subscribe. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. We have a lot of other content that you’re missing out because we want to get more episodes like this where you can hear from other executives about new technology, new solutions, understanding what your peers may be doing or people doing in your complementary markets. So go sign up there so you don’t miss out on all this great content. And I will be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

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Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage episode. Today is a special new segment. I have Haizol, who is a Chinese manufacturing company who we’re going to be interviewing. I have Jennifer Grant, who is the marketing manager over there who’s going to be sharing some insights about what is going on on the ground in China. They are a company in Shanghai and we’re going to hear their story on sort of what Jennifer experienced through the pandemic, what the response has been, what’s going on over there. So this should be a really great episode. We’re looking forward to it. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Thank you very much for having me Danny.

I’m excited about this episode because I think there’s been, there’s a lot of news you hear about in the media. There’s a lot of different stories that are coming out. So I’m excited to sit down with a manufacturer and kind of hear your story, hear Haizol and what is going on, what your experiences has been, what your insights are. So before we really jump into all that, to kind of lay the groundwork, could you tell me and our audience who Haizol is? What do you guys do?

Yeah, of course. So we’re focused on custom parts and component manufacturing. So we specialize in CNC machining, injection molding, casting, stamping and fabrication. So to keep it very simple, we have two routes to market. We have our Haizol.com page which is essentially a sourcing platform where you can hop on, release a request for a quote as a buyer and receive verified quotes from suppliers within 24 hours and our suppliers are based in mainland China and we also have them in Southeast Asia. We also offer a one stop sourcing solution as well where Haizol will handle the processing of your parts from start to finish.

Excellent. So obviously there’s been– a lot of things have happened, what’s been the impact with COVID specifically to these companies, these manufacturing companies in China?

Right, I mean this is a really interesting question and certainly one that’s been discussed at length in recent months. So COVID has definitely had an impact on China’s manufacturing sector from February as we all know, the government policy was implemented and it forced a lot of the factories to shut down for at least a month which essentially halted the economic production during that time. That was at the end of January until around March, except for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. So the disruption was quite substantial in terms of, we have many buyers who usually come to visit the factory and if they’re not going through Haizol, buyers who source manufacturers in China as part of their routine, come to visit the factory to see the quality, to see the capabilities but unfortunately all of that was stopped since January and still until now our borders are closed for any international customers.

Yeah, so that’s a little bit of a challenge and that was happening back in January and February but how has it kind of, it seems like we’re hearing a lot of reports that it’s coming, it’s back, obviously you guys are having a faster recovery because you guys went through it first. What does that… What’s that been looking like for you guys?

Yeah. So China has been on the road to recovery from February until now, I would say there is now actually a complete restart. So we saw an incredibly fast bounce back which was actually crucial for the factories because obviously when they were closed they had to keep running based on the savings and the cashflow that they’ve got. So it was crucial for them to get back on their feet as fast as possible so that they were actually able to reopen and not shut down completely. So I’d say now the situation in China has improved considerably and lead times are back to normal.

Oh, wow. Okay, that’s fantastic. So all in all we’re looking at, it was like one to two months or so that things were really, really shut down and then they started trickling… When things started opening, was it just, was it a very quick recovery? Like just snap a finger, or was it kind of trickling in and then kind of ramped up? What did that look like?

Yeah, I mean, it was trickling in, so what China did was the key factories and the key manufacturing plants were able to reopen quicker than a lot of the others but they did drip feed their employees back in. So it was a case of say, 10% go in this week, then another 10%, until it gets to full capacity and this way they were really able to control the health and safety and abide by all the regulations in China to stop the spread of the virus. So it was definitely drip feeding back into normal capacity.

Yeah, we talked a little bit about the response from China to COVID: obviously a lot of lockdowns and all that good stuff. What we are hearing from our media here in the States, was that just a lot of, well, huge responses in the sense of like building factories but building hospitals and just like big lockdowns. What was your personal experience with that? Like in the company? What was that like going through that for you?

Interesting one. I have to say it all happened very fast. So once China did start responding to COVID it acted very aggressively. So immediately at the end of January, towards the end of January, it undertook national mobilization to, basically it asked every person to do their part to stop the spread of the virus. So the public was notified that there was a virus, we should take immediate action. We should wear masks, wash our hands, use disinfectants and then they deployed 50,000 medical workers to the main area at that time in Wuhan to deliver the needed resources to the epicenter there and yeah, as you mentioned, 14 temporary hospitals were actually built in Wuhan, all at a very, very fast pace. So it was really a case of two weeks for all of this to happen and then obviously national lockdown happened after those two weeks.

Yeah, that’s interesting. And then we were also hearing about, I guess what they’re calling it over here is “contact tracing,” but it’s just… as far as being able to track down maybe those who have been tested positive and then, “Hey, who have they been in contact with?” What… we’re hearing some interesting things on how they were rolling out with technology and stuff to be able to do that. What does that look like?

Yeah, that’s it, again, exactly what’s been happening. So it’s China’s track and trace system and essentially it’s deployed to locate and test everybody who’s come into close contact with somebody who has had the virus or somebody who’s got the virus themselves. So the government can monitor exactly where they are. So we have two main apps that are doing this, it’s WeChat and Alipay, these are two of the most commonly used apps within China and have almost actually replaced cash payments and these enable the government to track people’s whereabouts and also prevent those infected from traveling. So each individual has its own health status code and this code either shows green, yellow or red which reflects your current health situation. So as you enter a checkpoint, for example, a railway station, even many restaurants, bus stops or any public venue, they’ll first ask you to show your health code before they allow you to enter. So it’s all very stringent and very controlled.

Interesting. So that’s still fully active right now?

That is still fully active. So even though we’ve almost recovered from COVID-19, we still have to present those health codes and actually we’re still wearing our masks anywhere in a public place. So it’s compulsory for example, on any public transport to keep your mask on and for any public events, you have to show your green QR code status.

Okay. But like going into a manufacturing facility for example, is that a protocol that is being enforced I guess by the manufacturers? Or is that something that government’s enforcing or what does that look like?

So this is being enforced by the government. So if it was the employees who are there daily, it would be probably, the standard would be a temperature check and also regarding the keeping your social distance, they wouldn’t necessarily have to show the green QR but if there was any buyers visiting that factory or anybody who wasn’t normally working there, they would be required to show that and it’s not just that it’s by law, Everybody is abiding by this because as a collective we all want the virus to-

Be done. Right.

And all of the organizations are following this.

Yeah. One interesting thing that you mentioned in there as well, this was kind of an interesting aside, but you said that… Alipay and WeChat. So WeChat’s kind of similar to like a WhatsApp; and Alipay I’m assuming is- I’m not familiar with that- I’m assuming that it’s a cashless payment system, like a PayPal or something like that, is that accurate?

Yeah.

Okay.

So they have many, many functions. It’s actually all we use in China, most of the time is our Alipay or our WeChat. So it is a form of wallet, digital wallet. So where we carry our money and it’s also a bunch of other stuff where we book tickets, where we communicate with friends, where we make phone calls, where we can read the news, a multitude of functions for both of the applications, we can send money, transfer money to a bank, transfer money to each other and yet this also has all our whereabouts inside so that also allows us to have the green QR. So if I was to go into a place that was in lockdown for any reason and I traveled there and when I came back, it would be WeChat and Alipay that show my green QR has now gone.

Gotcha. Okay, so that’s inside of those apps. One thing that I, again, I think was interesting, you’ve mentioned that now everything is kind of, it’s gone a little bit more cashless. Was that the case before COVID or is that a result because of COVID that now things are being pushed more cashless?

No, it’s been the case for years here and it’s just becoming more so as time goes on. So before, cash was still accepted in all of the shops but now for example, there’s many local shops that actually do not accept cash anymore. So if for some reason you don’t have WeChat or Alipay, you can’t actually make a purchase and there’s been times where also I’ve gone to take some public transport. Most of them do accept cash but there is some where you’re in a particular queue, for example, they will not accept your cash. So it’s not really a result of COVID but yeah, it’s been a progressive thing for the last, I say three to four years.

Okay. Interesting. Okay, I’m just curious about that. That’s very, very, very interesting. All right. So let’s kind of move on a little bit more about looking at manufacturing, sort of globally and how companies have been affected as well. Let’s talk about a little bit of supply chain and sourcing raw materials. Obviously there’s a lot of manufacturers that go to China as part of their supply chain. They’re the big suppliers there. How has that all been affected? I mean, you kind of mentioned a little bit before as far as like buyers not actually being able to get onsite to do quality checks or whatnot. What did that look like initially? And what does it still look like now?

So yeah, I mean, it has had a huge impact on buyers worldwide who would typically come to China to source their suppliers and it depends, how much of an impact depends on how much they were reliant on suppliers within China. So, first of all, the complete closure of the factories initially had a huge impact and took a huge toll on supply chains globally, Manufacturers that use components in their products that are mostly sourced from the infected areas. For example, Wuhan at the time, for example, 500 car part manufacturers operate and need to find alternative sources outside China because they actually source their car parts from Wuhan or if they can’t find alternative sources they’re forced to shut down their production. So it has impacted manufacturers a great deal and even though we’ve reopened, our borders are still closed, so nobody can come in and do any quality checking or source suppliers easily if they haven’t already got them in place.

Yeah, that’s a little bit of a problem. I think we’re going to get into that a little bit more, about the response on there but what of, I guess, challenges, what Chinese companies face? Obviously we’re talking about how some of the other companies are coming in and buying because they have Chinese suppliers, but what about the actual Chinese companies inside mainland China? I guess that would be Chinese companies, right?

So yeah, you mean the Chinese companies themselves. Well, yeah, I mean, it’s two fold, isn’t it? Because on the one hand you’ve got the buyers who have had production halted or had their parts delayed, the lead time delayed but at the same time, Chinese manufacturers have lost a lot of business. So within China they now have a huge shortage of orders from countries who are still struggling with the virus or they have a slow drip feed of orders from countries which are in recovery from the virus. However, these orders are small and much smaller than they were compared to 2019.

So now the rest of the world is suffering from forced closure and repercussions of a lockdown or still in lockdown. So medium and small sized businesses just don’t have the capacity to make the same orders they were making before. So on that hand, Chinese companies are suffering in terms of orders, they’re more reliant on orders within China. Funnily enough, we actually conducted a study on this this year, our own firsthand research into Chinese factories and how exactly they’d been impacted from COVID and what strategies they were adopting. So it did seem that they’ve all been affected quite substantially by COVID and it just seemed the ones who were reliant on orders from the rest of the world, their ratio of orders from worldwide versus in China were more, obviously they’re the ones struggling more because now they’re fighting to get more of the mainland China market which is already quite saturated. So yeah, really tough.

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting and it’s a big challenge because you always hear about diversification of your portfolio, making sure that your business isn’t coming from one place but then, you know, you have something like this happen, it doesn’t matter how resilient… I mean, we talked: obviously there was a big talk about resiliency of supply chain and whatnot but it’s just a very unique situation to say the least. So how are some of these companies, like what are some of the strategies they’re using to sort of adjust and pivot, to respond to the shortage? You mentioned that, hey, we’ve got a lot of companies that maybe have a big global presence, but now because of their shutdown, orders are dropping, oh hey, now let’s focus on mainline channel. Okay, well now it’s oversaturated because everyone else is doing the same thing. How have they been responding? What are those strategies?

Yeah, right. Another interesting one. So from the research we conducted last month, we found there was two main coping strategies that were being used. The first one is market expansion and the second is strategic transformation. Now market expansion strategy typically focuses on marketing efforts to stabilize their existing market. So whichever market they were already in pre-COVID, they would just focus on that. So consolidating old customers and at the same time, trying to develop new customers and expand into new markets segments and also strategic transformation which is embracing new opportunities to carry out strategic transformation. For example, offline to online, we’ve seen many factories who previously were just finding their buyers offline in the traditional way, now moving digital and becoming more agile which is really necessary to respond to something that was so unexpected. So the organizational structure has changed too.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So as far as kind of pivoting in here, we’re talking about supply chain: a big, huge topic right now. How do you see the supply chain strategy moving forward for Chinese manufacturing companies?

Yeah. So for supply chain in China, the manufacturing companies, I think the impact of the pandemic within China is obviously very widely evident and though I do think that they have the resilience to move forward quickly. From our research it highlighted that business owners’ confidence was actually contributing to the results of how well that they have succeeded. So we found that companies who are more agile, who are more open to change are more likely to recover faster and I see the strategy going forward as a more online strategy. So I see most of the manufacturers now focusing on finding new customers and new market opportunities on a digital platform and just agility and actively responding to current challenges. Yeah. So I think increasing their marketing, not being stuck in the traditional ways and being able to respond to anything that they’re facing and try to expand into new markets will prove beneficial and drive them forward.

Yeah. So how does it relate to future supply chain strategy for those who are manufacturing in-house or outsourcing to suppliers?

Yeah. So for those manufacturers in-house or for those outsourcing their part manufacturing, I’ll say this year has definitely taught us that just having one manufacturing stream accessible is risky and some of that risk can be alleviated by having several options to market. So they can’t rely solely on one geographical location. We’ve seen that China was completely shut down. So if those people didn’t have any other supply chains in place, they were totally stuck. So if they reach out and have more suppliers and make more connections and keep a more flexible and adaptable strategy, it will result in a more stable supply chain. So yeah, I think this is really, really important and for those who manufacture in-house or outsource, I think that stabilizing their supply chain is the key for the future and not necessarily moving their supply chain but finding different routes to mitigate risks should anything like this happen again.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a huge topic of concern right now as companies are evaluating their supply chains. There’s a lot of talk, we’re hearing about like, as you mentioned, moving it and as well as also exploring other options to be able to say, “Hey, how can we diversify this and making sure that the resiliency aspect is there and it’s strong?” relative to actually moving a whole entire supply chain. I mean, it sounds like a little bit of a challenging task there, how difficult is that or easy, I don’t know?

So if the supply chain is very fixed and stable, it’s super difficult to just remove the supply chain. So it’s like what happened with some companies when China was in lockdown, it said, okay, we’re just going to up and move our supply chain to a different country. It’s not that simple that the supplier doesn’t know your parts. They’re not familiar with you. It’s hard to establish that initial relationship with them. So it requires a lot of time and planning to set up. Rather, I would recommend using an existing sourcing platform who already have supply chain networks set up in various locations and countries that the buyer could leverage as and when needed. So this will ensure supply chain resilience and stability without having for the buyer individually to find new sources to manufacture their products. So, again, going back to digital manufacturing, I believe that we will see companies worldwide turn to digital manufacturing over traditional means in an attempt to mitigate that risk and steady their supply chain.

Yeah. So– and just another quick question as far as companies: again, we were talking about moving supply chain. Have you seen a lot? I mean, there’s a lot of talk, there’s been a lot of talk. Have you seen a lot of movement where companies are just, they have completely pulled out or they’re talking, or they’re looking? Have you seen a lot more uptick in terms of conversations that you guys are having with companies saying, “Hey, we need to adjust”? What does that look like?

Yeah. I mean, we’ve had some new buyers coming from abroad, especially European buyers who have come on board because they want to prepare for the future and they know putting all their eggs in one basket is not the way of the future and so they want to use a sourcing platform like Haizol where they have all of those options. We have a database of over 200,000 suppliers and geographical spread is very vast. So it’s becoming more and more frequent that we are finding buyers who have this standpoint and who are coming to us because of the situation and likewise I have heard of some people wanting to, for example, stop manufacturing in China. Well, this was more February, March time. In the end it’s better to wait it out than try and move your whole supply chain because the time to take to set up a completely new supply chain by yourself is also, yeah, very time consuming.

Yeah, It seemed like there was, yeah. That timeframe, lots of talk but then I think as, it seems like as China is starting to get back was back online a little bit more, it was a little easier but I think the diversification piece is probably the more active piece happening, they’re saying, “We’re not,” at least for the moment. I don’t know, nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next hour, let alone six months from now or two years from now.

I know, what a crazy 2020 so far.

Oh, it’s been horrible, nuts, but… so let’s talk a little bit about digital manufacturing. You’ve kind of talked about that a little bit there: that it’s a good practice to go from. I mean, you’re hearing about digital, digital, digital. Anyways, we’re talking about digital transformation for years before going on in all aspects of the business, from anywhere from generating sales and leads and opportunities, certainly sourcing suppliers but the actual manufacturing piece. How does it really tangibly though, from a digital manufacturing standpoint, what are the tangible aspects that help that you can employ this to really help defeat these effects of COVID-19?

Sure. I mean, personally for me, digital manufacturing is definitely the future. It’s a sphere which allows companies anywhere in the world to source their manufacturing parts and components from the comfort of their own home. So now with obviously remote working becoming the norm and also lockdown becoming a norm and a loss of geographical locations, the relieving the need to travel and vet out new suppliers yourself is a huge advantage. So the digital platform does this on your behalf. So essentially they have sourced and verified their suppliers already in terms of capacity, capabilities and quality and put them all together into this database which can be accessed worldwide. So a buyer anywhere can just hop on and have the access to manufacturers across the globe in a very transparent manner. So they can see all the capacities of the factory, the certifications, what kind of parts and jobs that they’ve made previously. So you can see if they’ve done something similar to what your project is. So extremely transparent and extremely convenient.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it makes sense. It seems like it’s a good answer, especially if you can’t travel and you’re in lockdown. it’s a little bit of a challenge. So what has Haizol’s response been through all of this?

Yeah, so we’ve tried to be very, very customer centered. So from the beginning we focused on our buyers obviously and we wanted to protect our buyers. We wanted to protect the lead time as much as possible and we wanted to have the minimal disruption possible on their supply chains and obviously they want to then sell to the end user or user product. So we know how important that is. So what we did was we made sure that customers were at the forefront of the strategy. We took a step back. We brainstormed what issues they’re facing pre, during and post-COVID and how our strategy needs to change to be able to fit and accommodate the new needs and the new demands. So we found that our customers were really looking for reassurance and to have a reliable supplier.

Again, someone who’s not restricted by geographical location, that they can produce their parts and they can have their parts produced without that risk of the factory that they’ve chosen closing down. If it did so, their production will be halted or stopped. Whereas if they use Haizol, we would shift that production very fast to another geographical area or factory that would also be well suited to that project. So, as I’ve mentioned briefly before, we are lucky enough to have a wide network of partner factories spanning not just throughout mainland China but also in South East Asia. So this gives our buyers a kind of safety net. If for one reason, a supplier was unable to do their job, it will be shifted.

So supply chain disruption was at a minimum, and that was the main concern we found from our buyers was messaging us, contacting us to say, “Will you still be able to produce? Will my lead time change? Can I still give you a request for quotes?” And so we tried to keep it as stable as possible. We pushed for our factories to reopen as soon as possible under the health and safety requirements of course and we leveraged on our supply network and our existing suppliers as much as possible to ensure minimum delays.

Excellent. Well sounds like you guys were set up very, very well, I think from the beginning to be able to help to adjust to this and be able to help to really solve a lot of these very unique but very critical challenges for a lot of these manufacturers globally. So, and Jennifer, I really thank you for spending some time with me today on IndustrialSage. for those who would like to learn more about you, your website, we’ll put in the show notes, what is that real quick?

Yeah. So you can hop onto our website at www.haizol.com and from there it’s free to open an account. You just submit your RFQ very fast. Actually they can submit a request for the quote within one minute, so super fast and then they can get quotes from verified suppliers who fit their project.

Excellent. Well Jennifer, again, thank you again. Thank you so much for spending time with us, kind of sharing your insights and your experiences and Haizol’s what was going on and what is currently going on in China. I think our viewers will find that very, very valuable. So thank you.

Thank you very much for having me, Danny. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you again.

Thanks. All right, well that wraps up today’s special new segment on IndustrialSage. I’m Danny Gonzales. Thank you for watching or listening if you’re on the podcast. Hey listen, real quick. If you are not on our email list, you need to go to industrialsage.com right now and you need to subscribe. Why? Because you’re missing out on all kinds of great content like this special new segment that we just did right now. So go do yourself a favor, do that so you can learn about what other companies are doing. You can be on the leading edge of what’s going on, especially right now when we have things that are changing at a drop of a hat. So that’s it. That’s all I’ve got for today. Thank you so much. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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