405 : Derek O’Carroll – Selling on multiple channels takes an all encompassing approach- develop a desired customer experience work flow

eCommerce Momentum Podcast

I know this has a big title. But it is really important. Don’t try to serve everyone, rather serve your “Desired” customer. When you look at selling that person it takes a different approach. Derek walks us through developing a work flow to ensure consistency. After all that is what it takes to get through in today’s complicated marketplace. Oh and by the way, each marketplace has to be approached differently. Great discussion from an experienced agent.

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Here is transcript- It is automated so it is not perfect but it does seem to get better over time.

Derek: [00:00] Right? And what we did was we said, well, hang on, why don’t we start from scratch and build a platform? We call it a retail operations platform that is built for purpose for one sector and is not customizable. In other words, you can’t go in there and write scripts on it. You can obviously use an API for ’em.

Cool voice guy: [00:17] Welcome to the e-commerce momentum podcast where we focus on the people, the products, and the process of e-commerce selling. Today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.

Stephen: [00:30] Hey, wanted to take a second and talk about Gaye Lisby and Gary Ray’s Amazon seller tribe and their daily lists that are put out, um, and incredible stories that you can read if you go out and check out, uh, amazing. freedom.com forward slash momentum hyphen arbitrage. I know that’s a lot to put in there. Amazing freedom.com forward slash momentum dash Arbitron and you’re going to get 14 day free trial, no money risk, no, no challenges. You don’t want it when you’re done, you get out. But imagine getting lists as grateful as I like to call it, mailbox money. I love that term. Mailbox money. It’s where you can work from your house, buy things online, have them delivered to you and then sell them on a various marketplaces. But imagine you can have somebody else do that for you. So you want to buy time, you want to control, uh, what they’re buying.

Stephen: [01:27] Well, you take these lists and you can join multiple lists if you’re interested and then you can segregate them for the merchandise you want and send them to them. They can make purchases for you on your behalf. Have it delivered to you or delivered to them for prep. Boom, sent into these marketplaces and you could sell. How about that? Wouldn’t that be awesome? I spoke at their conference and there were so many million dollar sellers just using online arbitrage. It’s still available. And again, 14 days, the only way you’re going to get 14 day free trials if you come through my link, it is an affiliate link. Uh, they do pay me, so I don’t want to mislead you in any way. Um, I would appreciate it, but I’d like to see you try the 14 days. I’ve had so many people that have joined. Have so much success.

Stephen: [02:10] It’s very exciting to me and you know, quite humbling to me, um, that they trust me to recommend this group and I 100% recommend this group. I’ve seen the results. These are great people that will also teach you to fish. This isn’t just a, hey, here’s the list. You’re on your own. No, this is, hey, here’s why that wasn’t a good deal over here. Hey, there’s another opportunity and you get to join their groups. And it’s just a phenomenal group of people. Um, just great, great, uh, leaders in that group and these lists are phenomenal. So again, it’s amazing. freedom.com, forward slash momentum, I even arbitrage amazing freedom.com, forward slash momentum hyphen arbitrage. Use that get two weeks free. Try it. You don’t like it, drop out, but give it a shot if you want to add that to your business. Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast.

Stephen: [02:59] This is episode four oh five, Derek. Oh, Carol. Um, yeah, I get a little giddy in this episode because we talk accounting terms and inventory management and it gets me excited. Um, it gets me excited for a, because I’m a nerd on that stuff, but B, it is a place where a lot of companies struggle as you scale to size and you start managing thousands of skews and we do, it gets hard to manage. And I’m not saying we’re perfect at it, so this isn’t me preaching to anybody. What it is is a, Derek offers some solutions for free on ways to um, really look at your processes and then find out where you are and then find the gaps, right? Find that Delta, I always use that term, find the gaps, the things that are wrong and then you can address them. Don’t fix everything, fix the things that are wrong.

Stephen: [03:46] And uh, their company does offer solutions for larger companies, so $1 million in sales, so not, not terribly large, but when you get to that, it gets to be a challenge. When you start handling hundreds of skews or thousands of skews you’re in, you can get in trouble. And so finding a method that will help you get that cost of goods figured out. I think it’s a very powerful, and it’s not as crushing as some of the other companies out there doing it. You guys, if you’ve ever investigated some of those, you can’t get off their phone list and we all know who that is. Um, that’s crushing. That’ll crush you, especially as you’re spending more in advertising like we are. Um, you have to reduce your other costs. And so this is a great opportunity, a very smart guy. Let’s get into the podcast. We’ll come back to the ecommerce women and podcast.

Stephen: [04:31] We’re excited about today’s guests from across the pond. Derek O’Carroll. Uh, Derek Ha runs a company, owns a company’s CEO of Bright Pearl, and he’s going to talk to us about inventory, uh, omni-channel sales, which we all know is the thing that no, you don’t sell on Amazon. You don’t sell on Ebay, you don’t sell on Walmart. You sell on everywhere. And he’s going to talk to us about best practices and ways to reduce, uh, touch. I call them touch points, um, and a whole bunch more. Welcome Derek. Oh, thanks very much. David. Pleasure to be with you today. Thank you for coming. Uh, he’s fresh from the vacation and I’m fresh going on a vacation. So one of us is on edge taking take a guess which one it is. Two weeks though. Say, you know, let’s just start there for a second. What did it take for you to be able to get a team to allow you to take two weeks? I mean, you know, it that that says something that just doesn’t happen without intention.

Derek: [05:31] Well, that’s a great question. I think there’s a couple of things that you need in the mix to be able to do that. So first is you’ve got to have a company strategy that the team are behind and believe in, but most importantly that they can translate that to, um, a level of zero ambiguity about what they do on an hourly basis to be able to play there apart and the team hitting the goal and the company strategy. And, uh, since I joined Bri pro in the last, you know, I joined just over three years ago, we’ve been very focused on that. What are the jobs of work that our customers need to hire us to do on their behalf that give them more time to focus on the important things in life? So to answer your question in those three years, it got to the point probably about a year ago that the strategy became very clear whenever I walked around the office and said, what do you think our strategy is?

Derek: [06:22] I would start to get the same consistent answer back. But then most importantly, when we had a, an event with the staff and the team and I’d meet their spouses, their wives or their husbands, they also understood what the company strategy was, which was great for me to hear. But also the validation was they knew how they were being successful themselves and what they needed to do as a family and as a spouse. Because as we all know, in today’s busy world, there’s always someone behind you, you know, giving you that support and egging you along and giving you advice. And that’s essentially the environment and the culture that we were aiming for. Um, and yeah, so that’s essentially allowed me to go away. Two weeks is a good, is a good time. And I know you said earlier on, yeah. You know, but I’m, I’m, I’m said I’m over the pond, but I’m, you know, I’m two weeks in Austin, Texas and I’m two weeks and I’m in the UK every month, so I’m back and forth. So, you know, I think I deserved it.

Stephen: [07:19] Okay. All right. Well that’s pretty impressive. Uh, I’m going to get eight days, which is pretty impressive. I’m in my world. That’s probably one of my longer vacation. Um, so I’m, I’m looking forward to that. You know, the other thing I was thinking about is, and I know, I guess I can say for both markets, I know what Austin’s market is. It’s the hot market. It’s the hottest place for tech in the u s by far. Yeah. How about, uh, I don’t know where in the UK you are, but finding and keeping those cause cause you were just talking about employee spouses, right. And I always say that when, when you can build, uh, that employee up in front of their spouse and they, they get a little taller, they stand a little more proud. You know, it’s a very, very, a great way to, you know, build up employees. How hard is the market in those markets? I know Austin’s market’s hot to keep those good people. So I mean I, I get that you taught them the, or you help them understand where you’re going. But how hard is it to keep those people?

Derek: [08:13] Well, it, it’s, it’s really hard. So, um, and firstly when I joined Bri Pearl’s u s operations was based in San Francisco. And uh, I, uh, needed a decision based on timeline and you know, time zone. Um, but also when I went and hung out with the people who worked with us back then, they lived in shoe boxes. You know, the quality of life wasn’t that high. And we are an inside sales driven organization. Or the go to market side. So it really made no sense to me to be in San Francisco as we know it was quite expensive. And then I just basically went and did Iraqi across other countries in the states. And I looked for partnership time zone and costs and then skills availability, which is best influenced by, um, the community of tech. And I looked at Colorado, I looked at Detroit and I ended up going to Austin.

Derek: [09:05] And when I arrived, um, uh, there was a concert or a festival on that, that a weekend, which I wasn’t aware of anywhere else and just tick the boxes. But most importantly it was the skillset that were there. And Net migration to Austin was 150 tech workers per day. We’re moving to Austin, Texas. So that gave me confidence that we’d be able to find the right people in the sphere of E-commerce, which is a, you know, it was very competitive. And then it’s about, you know, making sure as we said earlier on, but also that the culture is right. It’s all about the culture that people have that respect. And, and have a fun factor and really get excited about helping customers on a daily basis. And that’s allowed us to go from, you know, when I moved to Austin, we, we essentially were two people when we moved over to Austin because a lot of people, you know, were weren’t on for the transition from San Francisco to Austin. I needed a different skillset. So we rebuild the business right back up and now we’re just under 50 people. We made that change to two years ago. 50 people in Austin, Texas and the U S has now about half our business just over half our business.

Stephen: [10:07] It’s interesting to see in our pre-call, we were talking a little bit about that there are so many options for inventory management, right? As you say, the big players are coming into the market. Um, my experience with that come in from corporate world when the big players come in and they offer some of the bells and whistles, but usually for the larger, larger scaled players, not the smaller sellers, which I would consider myself in the million dollar sellers in those ranges. Um, they, they don’t give enough, they don’t reduce enough touch points because the corporate still has departments and still has lots of people involved in it. What’s been your experience with that?

Derek: [10:48] So like larger corporates have larger merchants have more complex requirements and they gravitate towards the bigger companies like say SAP or Microsoft dynamics or netsuite because those platforms are very configurable or skew, excuse me, they’re very customizable, but they’re only customizable by using engineers, writing scripts and giving clients what they want. It’s very expensive. It gets very expensive and they serve all sectors. Right? And what we did was we said, well, hang on, why don’t we start from scratch and build a platform, we call it a retail operations platform that is built for purpose for one sector and is not customizable. In other words, you can’t go in there and write scripts on it. You can obviously use an API for our more technical minded customers and therefore you can configure it very quickly. And the proof of the pudding is if, if, say, a customer of mine I was, I was talking to, uh, recently, they onboarded to the platform. There’s an a midsize, they identify it 7 million a year across 20 countries. They’ve got about six channels and they were able to move off a legacy system onboard to ours in just under 70 just under Saturday days. That’s calendar days, which might sound like a lot, but when you’re moving their whole back office onto a cloud system, if you were to go to a corporate that would take you about 180 to 250 days, and obviously as you said, is much, much more expensive.

Stephen: [12:17] So they had to be willing to make tradeoffs. Correct. What my experience, and again this goes back to the industry I was in, which in...