00:00:00
00:00:01
Giving Customers Their Lives Back with Michael Rentz
69 Plays6 months ago
In this episode, Michael Rentz, CRO at Gnosis Freight, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- Tech that makes customer’s jobs and lives easier
- Growing container volumes and data complexities
- Supply chain visibility purchasing trends
- The importance of relationships in the supply chain industry
- FinOps challenges in international trade
- Gnosis company culture, sales, and product development
Michael has spent his career helping people live a better life, by moving their goods to all parts of the world. In his role as Chief Revenue Officer at Gnosis Freight, he oversees sales and growth.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to supply chain connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we're going to be talking with Michael Rents from Gnosis. This is going to be our second Gnosis interview in a year. So just want to clarify that they don't pay for this. I saw them recently, and we'll talk about this a little bit in the interview. And I just had some more questions I wanted to ask them because I think they're a really cool team and a good group of people working quietly in the industry. So I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:40
Speaker
Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. Happy Friday. It's good to see you, too. You're actually the second noisest person we've had on the podcast. I think that's a first time repeat for us. So congratulations.
Michael's Background and Role
00:00:54
Speaker
Why don't you give us just a little bit of your background and the background of the company so we can give everyone some context? Sure. So Michael Rintz, I run the commercial side of our business here at notice as chief revenue officer, which I've always too fancy of a term for what I do, which is basically sales, talk to new customers. I've been here four years. So really, I met Austin, fortuitously right after the pandemic started four years ago and Jake, our CTO. So.
00:01:19
Speaker
Been here four years. I started in the industry, industry being international logistics about 10 years ago. So I got my start on the ocean side with Marisk. I was introduced to the business through my mentor in business school who was Jim Newsom, who at the time was the president and CEO of the South Carolina Ports Authority. And so I went to work for them. Amazing experience, but was always a bit more interested in innovation technology, getting solutions into customers hands quickly, a bit more creativity.
00:01:46
Speaker
So I left in July of 2018 and was doing some things on my own. I was introduced to tech stars. I convinced them to do a supply chain and logistics themed accelerator in Charleston. And I had to raise money in order to do so as a corporate backed accelerator. I got two thirds of the way until the pandemic hit and kind of shut everything down.
Gnosis Growth and Operations
00:02:05
Speaker
kind of dusted off the resume and was just trying to pick up whatever gig I could and got introduced to Austin McCombs, who's the CEO of Gnosis. And at the time, I remember thinking, oh, great, another redneck with the trucking startup in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. So I got on the first call, which was on Zoom, of course, because it was the height of the pandemic. And then I immediately realized that he had solved something that I thought was impossible.
00:02:29
Speaker
And it was right here in my backyard. I mean, it was unbelievably fortuitous. I met Jake right after. And then at the end of that consulting gig, I was brought on by an investment bank. We came to terms and I jumped in, hit the ground running full time. At the time, it was just four engineers, you know, working out of a back office of a freight forwarder in Mount Pleasant. And we've grown significantly 40 something employees now in the office, still bootstrapped four years later. So that's how it all started. So I saw you guys at TPM.
00:02:56
Speaker
And you had a conference room down the hall from our conference room. And I think you and I probably didn't see the light of day for three days because we had just customer after customer kind of turning into these private conference room at the TPM show, which for anyone who doesn't know is the big freight conference on the West Coast here in the US every spring. You guys have relatively quietly built this business compared to say a lot of the venture backed companies, I would say including us, right?
00:03:26
Speaker
how? Like, what's the magic? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And it's, you know, it's always a bit more prosaic and not as sexy or extravagant as people want to think it is. I think it all starts with Austin, you know, also is unique. And I think once in a few generation type thinker, he's obviously brilliant, extremely high IQ, but he's also incredibly traditional and old school.
00:03:48
Speaker
But when I started, everybody had to be at the office at 7.30. Everybody had to wear a collared shirt. He was 25 at the time and like no cussing in the office. And I was like, this is kind of an interesting dynamic, but it's that same mentality, that same ethos where it was just like, Austin's also very good at identifying patterns way out into the future.
00:04:07
Speaker
unbelievably out into the future and picking out different vectors and how they're going to intersect. I think he just saw that we were at the end of this hyper growth, grow at all costs, inject a bunch of cash, focus on gross margin and customer acquisition, don't really worry about churn or really serving your customers or about retention. He just saw that was at its end and just really wanted to take care of customers.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I don't think initially that being venture-backed was out of the equation. We have that conversation every day. When is it the right time to raise money? When is it the right time to pour gasoline on the fire? But it's always never on the sources, but on the uses. It's like, well, what exactly would we spend it on?
00:04:46
Speaker
And I just think Austin has kind of held true to that. And it has kind of helped everybody embody that spirit. And it's like, well, let's just go get a few more customers. Let's just go get a few more customers. Let's just try to stay profitable. The next thing you know, we had 100 something customers in good numbers and good metrics and a really good product from that because we've listened to our customers. And so I just think we kept our head down because there was no other option. Austin was very diligent about that.
00:05:11
Speaker
and put us in a really good position here and then things change around you. And then we have a conversation like this, but I think it was just trying to figure out how to stay alive every day.
Sales Dynamics and Challenges
00:05:22
Speaker
So one of the things that I've noticed from the outside, uh, as I've known, you know, the three of you and kind of the company is kind of a impressive amount of discipline on who you are, who you want to be and who you want to sell to.
00:05:38
Speaker
I would imagine though that A, it's never that clean on the inside and B, that as the person in charge of revenue, there can be some temptation to stretch those boundaries. What's that feel like behind the scenes?
00:05:54
Speaker
Still is probably the most contentious piece of the business, which is sales. I mean, we're really small on the sales side. So of the 40 people, 33 are engineers. My team's probably like five, six, seven people. And I'm still the only like true everyday seller that's out there trying to win deals. So I catch a lot of flack from the engineers, but it starts with Austin, obviously with the culture, but it's unlocked.
00:06:15
Speaker
truly by Jake. I think Jake is, and I don't mean this hyperbolically, I think he's the best CTO certainly in log tech space, but I've seen him have conversations with people that have been in international container trade 30 to 40 years. And I would say Jake is like a top tier expert when it comes to logistics. And so he's a really peculiar and deadly combination of somebody that can think outside the box very creatively, but still has the horsepower of like a coder.
00:06:41
Speaker
And that made it easy for me because a lot of the times it was Jake and me going into these meetings and like in real time saying, yeah, we could do this. Yeah, we could do that. This and that's a dream scenario for somebody that's selling something because I just want to say yes. And then we'll figure out how to do it. And Jake has that same attitude.
00:06:57
Speaker
And so it's been funny to see us have a bigger team on the engineering side who tries to say, no, no, we don't want to do that. No, we don't want to step out of that. But recently Jake and I have been laughing. It's like, cause we're kind of going back to our roots where it's like, let's just sell and create, sell and create. And that's our DNA. Now we don't do that at scale.
00:07:14
Speaker
you know we gotta put some like some bumpers up or like where we can do that and literally technically where we can do that with regards to our infrastructure but i think that we're trying not to lose that spirit of being able to create and build and serve the customers so from the revenue perspective that's all i'm saying is that it makes it easy when i have somebody like jake extremely confident that he can do what i sell
00:07:37
Speaker
What is the target customer? How broadly or narrowly in that world, because if you say the target customer is only people who export yellow flowers from Charleston, right? You can be very, so you will sell them anything because it's a small world. If you say it's anyone involved in global trade, it's a hot mess, right? So how have you guys defined that?
00:08:03
Speaker
I would say that's more of my job than just pure sales is like being the tip of the spear on like we need to go here and we need to get a certain critical mass. It's the BCOs. I think it was blind naivete three or four years ago when we started targeting the BCOs and like we had
00:08:19
Speaker
a lot of success there and we just didn't know what we didn't know and that's difficult to sell to them but it worked out for us. And so I'd say they are 1A and then everybody else is kind of 1B and by everybody else, I mean the non-BCOs and I think it works that way because everybody ultimately is in service to the BCOs in our industry.
00:08:37
Speaker
And because we build products, whether it's software or data for the BCOs, there is a tremendous amount of value in those products for everybody else that's also servicing the BCO. So I think our North Star for sure are the BCOs. And if you had to further constrain that, I would say a thousand containers.
00:08:54
Speaker
or more per year is what I would consider in our sweet spot, which is about 3,000 to 3,500 importers, depending on how you look at it, a few hundred more exporters. And that's a really good target customer segment for just BCOs without going into the other segments. Now we do have a lot of other customers outside of the BCO segment, but like my focus is on serving the BCOs.
00:09:17
Speaker
And 1000 number is just because once you get to that volume, could be 500, could be 1000. Most people have one order, one 3PL at that point kind of managing everything. And like the real problem we solve is like taking away the disparity between the disparate sources of data they're receiving from all the different vendors as they kind of diversify their risk across a handful of carriers or partners. So that's where you really start to see problems become exponentially more difficult. It's about a thousand containers or more per year.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that's when the day the spreadsheet breaks. Like up to that point, you know, you've got a few containers on the water at any given time, and the spreadsheet works just fine. Right. And then, yeah, then this sheet breaks and then they call you, right? Yeah, hopefully. So what are you seeing in the BCOs? What's different
Data Management and Solutions for BCOs
00:10:07
Speaker
now than three or four years ago and what they need from you. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. So a couple things, it's like, what's like real demand versus fake demand? And what do I mean by that? And if you look at like, we're ultimately under the umbrella of visibility, although I would say we've created our own new category, which is container lifecycle management, which is a combination of visibility. But the difference is we also provide the ability execution. So the ability for our customers to do their job from within our platform, it's an operating system.
00:10:35
Speaker
And so what I mean by that is at the height of the pandemic for the first time ever, people in the C suite are going, what the hell is demergent detention? How do we fix this? Why is this so expensive? And you had big movers like Project 44 who were there to say, hey, we can solve this with visibility. And people needed to do whatever they could to fix these problems. And so they on board rapidly or made decisions quickly. And now what that did for us is kind of falling in behind them.
00:11:01
Speaker
was it created a line item in a fiscal budget for visibility for the first time ever where people were having a much more robust due diligence process of evaluating what's out there. Also simultaneously what happened is the demand dropped off. There wasn't really a supply chain crisis. There was too much inventory on hand. The warehouses were at a hundred plus percent and they were kind of waiting on these goods to flow through. Demergent attention wasn't as big of an issue.
00:11:25
Speaker
And so there was demand because they were told by finance to go out, here's your budget, go find a visibility partner. But there was no real like panic demanded like we need to buy this now. I think that ultimately helped us because people were testing other people's data, their products, etc.
00:11:41
Speaker
But so that has been interesting to kind of navigate. I'm sure everybody's experiencing that. Everybody says longer sales cycles. And then up to about a week ago, I would say the supply chain was about as steady state as it's ever been. There were no real disruptions. People had kind of absorbed the impact of the Suez Canal disruption, the Panama Canal disruption. Margins were thin for all the different service providers.
00:12:03
Speaker
and everybody was taking heightened good care of the BCOs. And so the merge and detention wasn't as big of a sticking point. Everything was pretty smooth. And then I would say the difference in data providers, for lack of a better word, whether it's directly from the ocean carrier or from anybody that's selling data or visibility or container lifecycle management, the differences in the quality was marginal because there just weren't disruptions. And so a lot of people started to compete on price. And so it became interesting to like, what exactly are BCOs looking for? And it became
00:12:33
Speaker
any way to reduce costs, whether cost of goods or cost of money. And I think that's where we had a competitive advantage. And that's what BCOs are looking for. Now, the Baltimore thing, obviously, tipped the cart a little bit. So there's going to be some new disruptions. And we'll see how good everybody's ETAs are when there's a queue of vessels waiting at the port. And you can't rely on the ocean carrier milestones. And you've got to be able to toggle between different sources. And it's got to be near real time. And that's where I think our model is very competitive.
00:13:01
Speaker
I've never thought of you guys as visibility, right? I've always thought of you as execution, right? And as being closer to a TMS than to a visibility provider, right? And wherever, you know, container lifecycle management, TMS, like all of these terms, people can hang whatever meanings they want off of them, sort of, but I'm curious, like you sort of mentioned it, but I want to go a little bit deeper on this. When you're selling.
00:13:27
Speaker
is it more important to you to be what your customers need you to be so that they can make the purchase? Because I'm a very, very stubborn person. And for us, it's very hard for me sometimes as a founder who had a vision to go fit into someone's budget line item for something that I don't think we are. But as a seller, have you moved that public facing definition to match the buying cycles? And how do you think about that?
00:13:54
Speaker
No, I think we relied more so on the other side of that coin, which is education of trying to change the market, trying to create a category. I mean, we've seen that with RFPs now where it's like the title of the RFP might be visibility, but the criteria listed in the RFP is container lifecycle management. I'm like, okay.
00:14:09
Speaker
People have an idea what they can get out there and it's helping us. Obviously, you're intuitive and smart, but you've also got time on your side and you've known us for a very long time and we were just execution. We were buying data from our now perceived competitors back in the day and just got tired or Jake got tired of the data being incomplete and decided to try to supplement it himself.
00:14:34
Speaker
and build his own data model and was able to do it. And it worked well enough to where we could stop relying on other's data and just power our own system, you know, that execution piece with our data. And then people found out about the data and it became the fastest growing piece of our business. But when we talk about customers and fitting into RFPs,
00:14:50
Speaker
When you think about notices, think about the software and then think about the data. 90% of the customers on the software side are the VCOs. Now, when you use our software, you use our data, you know, it's vertically integrated, it's powered by our data. But 90% of the customers on the data side are non-BCOs.
00:15:06
Speaker
There are a handful of BCOs that just want the data, the API, to enhance whatever they're doing in their TMS or their ERP or their in-house built system, whatever it is. But it's primarily those non-BCOs, the India, freight forwarders, truckers, ocean carriers, technology providers, other visibility providers that just want good, trustworthy, complete low latency data.
00:15:26
Speaker
So it's good to distinguish between those two when we talk, but you're right. We are more execution. And I think hopefully a lot of those assumptions are coming true, which is people ultimately want to use data. They don't want to see data. And if you're looking at data, something probably went wrong. And if you want to be proactive and manage and getting the weeds and you know, then you're going to need an operating system, you're going to need an execution piece. And that's where we're finding our success on that. I think when I helped build one of the first systems, you know, this would have been 2000
00:15:55
Speaker
one 2002 timeframe, you know, even then like the trendy term and certainly terms did not pick up as much speed before social media as they do now, but like was exception management. Yeah. Right. And that whole idea that if you're logging in, you've already sort of lost the game.
00:16:14
Speaker
The point is like self healing systems or like, you know, the ability, Eddie and I don't think we're certainly, we're not at the point, I think on any system, even the really big ones of like the system calling the carrier and saying, I want that container that was supposed to offload in Baltimore to skip Norfolk and offload in Savannah because I have more access to the rail there or whatever, you know, like.
00:16:37
Speaker
nobody's there. And I think anybody who says they're there is selling something, but that ability to drive action, I think has always been the right answer. And I think we may have lost sight of that as an industry for a little bit, but I certainly agree with you that getting stuff done is the new sexy again.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's what my LinkedIn says, giving logistics folks their lives back. I didn't come up with that. That was kind of revealed to me. I've had people cry on the call with me, where it's like, I'm an inbound logistics manager. I've been doing this 20 years. I've got a family.
00:17:10
Speaker
And I'm spending at the height of the pandemic 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And people said, I want to rearrange the furniture in my house. I want to take my kids to the water park. And now I'm being asked to do stuff where I have no idea how to do it. And then a solution like ours where it is as simple as managing by exception.
00:17:25
Speaker
and just freeze up their time to kind of keep the containers moving. And people were like, thank you. I think our industry is awesome. I think it's relationship-based. I think it would be a very boring world if we automated the ability to have a system intelligently tell something to skip a port and go to the next one and offload here. I wouldn't be in the industry if that was the case. You know what I mean? That just wouldn't be fun. Picking up the phone, getting to know people, interacting with them, having a relationship with these people is what makes our industry special.
00:17:55
Speaker
I think you would agree with me on that. But at the same time, being able to free people up from things they didn't sign up for is what we
Motivations and Team Growth
00:18:02
Speaker
do. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What's your favorite part of all of this?
00:18:06
Speaker
I would have said what I just said, which is helping people, our customers, making their lives better. I know that for a fact where it's like I am 100% confident that when they use notice, their lives get better and they're ultimately able to pursue whatever it is they want to pursue in their life. If it's taking their kids to the water park or rearranging the furniture in their home or
00:18:26
Speaker
whatever it is, reading books. I would say it's a strong competition now from the young folks I have on my team that I'm seeing exceed my expectations and perform and come into their own and have their own voice and authenticity and tone and close deals and learn to code when they're not supposed to learn to code. That drives me more. It's like seeing the people that I've hired come in, exceed the expectations,
00:18:56
Speaker
become their own individual, become high performers, have a good life. That is up there with the customers. I love that. That's what picks me up out of bed in the morning. I'm going to say I'm deeply offended anytime and everyone else is getting this on audio, but I can see you.
00:19:11
Speaker
Anytime somebody with a full head of hair and no gray in their beard says the young folks on our team, it hurts me a little bit. Just going to let you know that one. It's funny how fast it comes, doesn't it? Yeah, I know. That part is insane. I'll be 36 this year. I'm the second oldest person who knows this. A whole bunch of people listening just want to bless your heart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking that's old.
00:19:35
Speaker
Well, interesting kind of maybe a slight aside, but I was at the customs, used to be the trade symposium at something else now, but the big customs event is in Philly this week. And I had dinner with some people who were my age when I met them and are now about to retire. You know, I'm 45, right? They're now in their fifties and sixties and I'm still the kid there.
00:20:04
Speaker
So we talk about this being a relationship business, but it really, really is. Especially in these little segments, whether it's you're in compliance, whether you're in the tech pieces, these subgroups, you'll see the same people for 25, 30 years. So you better treat them well.
00:20:22
Speaker
Yeah, you better treat them well and you better like being around them cuz you're gonna be around them. And if not, then that's okay. You know, but this might not be the right industry for you. I was thinking about international business. And I was thinking about like, what is international business? And I was thinking about South Carolina. I'm from South Carolina. South Carolina has always been good at international business for hundreds of years.
00:20:42
Speaker
And i was like why is that and it's like what are like truly international things you know that you can say are the same everywhere and it's food it's drink it's dancing it's family it's like those types of things it's like you don't need language to communicate when it's like no matter where you go in the world you can pretty much guarantee people are going to be eating or drinking or
00:21:03
Speaker
Dancing going out, you know, and it's like you got to enjoy that respect that and the differences in that but no that's kind of what unifies people And that was certainly what was a feeling about Mariska like going to work internationally was like that I was like that seems amazing I would love to go see other cultures and experience in the same things that kind of fuel us You only say that because you've never seen me dance. Otherwise you'd across that off the list right away Outside of gnosis, they've just take your product roadmap out of this question
00:21:32
Speaker
If there was something in the industry that is outside of your control that you could change, what bugs you?
Industry Frustrations and Accountability
00:21:39
Speaker
What would you like, man, if everyone could just fix this.
00:21:42
Speaker
I don't know, man. Maybe honoring the contracts has always been the most peculiar thing to me. It's like whether you're on the ocean carrier side or the non-ocean carrier side. It's like if you book 10 slots to fill up this week and you show up with eight, you still got to pay for 10. Or if I book 10 slots and I show up with 10, but I can only get eight on and I get rolled and everybody's like, oh, well, that's just part of the business, but you aren't charged for that. That doesn't apply anywhere else in life. You know what I mean? I know nice checks and Gordon, those guys are trying to solve that.
00:22:11
Speaker
But it's like you book an airplane ticket and you show up and they're like, oh, sorry, somebody more important than you showed up. You'll have to get on next week's flight. That seems crazy to me. I'm a lawyer, a licensed attorney. And so getting into the shipping industry straight out of law school, I was like, wait a second, this doesn't make any sense. And now people kind of overcorrect. Every vessel is booked at 130%, knowing that 20% is not going to show up with what they bargained for. And then we're going to roll the rest. And I would change that. You know, I just think that that is crazy to me.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah no i agree and it's funny everytime someone says contract to me i sort of mentally substitute the word price sheet like it's not really a contract it's pricing sheet right and we're all gonna agree that if this thing happens this is what will pay for it and kind of just leave it at that.
00:23:00
Speaker
I would say that is driving probably the most innovation. But from our company's perspective, but from other companies I see having really good success is like, what am I going to pay for? And figuring out what exactly am I going to pay for? A lot of the times, you won't get an invoice for 90 plus days after something happened that you're responsible to pay for. And then when it comes time to reconcile that, the data you need to be like, it might be an overcharged or undercharged isn't available anymore. And so if some people call that auditing, we've had a lot of success with that lately.
00:23:28
Speaker
I think people who have never had to mechanically deal with it really don't understand how absolutely insane the financial processes that support, especially international trade and especially the ocean business and the end rage around ocean, how like nuts it is. I was at a customer the other day and one of the things that I do repeatedly with our customers because we do so many integrations is
00:23:56
Speaker
when they're starting a new initiative, sometimes I'll go in and spend a day with a customer explaining to them all the mistakes they're about to make in the hope that occasionally they won't and accounting ones, they'll go, okay, we're going to bring in a third party accounting package to sit next to our TMS. And we just like, I spend a day with them going, okay, have you thought about the fact that you change what's in your financials?
00:24:22
Speaker
in real time, all the time, and actual accounting software doesn't work that way. Yeah. Yeah. We can write a number to actual accounting software, it's supposed to be the number. And we're always like, oh, you know, delivery will be 600 bucks. Well, it's really 603. Oh, well, really, they needed, you know, a liftgate and really the driver was late and really this and this. And now it's 747 when the invoice comes and everyone goes, okay,
00:24:46
Speaker
Right? Like, that's cool. It's nuts. Can I do a big product announcement on your podcast? Sure. We're doing something we call like a FinOps, which is financial operations. And again, it was driven by our customers for that exact use case, you know, and it's like, urgent point solutions come to us and try and buy our data.
00:25:05
Speaker
because everybody needs good track and trace data, whether it's auditing or whatever. And it's like, okay, well, we have the data. Why don't we just build the point solution on top of it? Kind of fits within our theme of this operating system for international shipping containers. And you're right, maybe 50% of an inbound logistics manager is financial.
00:25:22
Speaker
pre-audit, audit, accruals, remittance, paying, you know, everything. And it's like, okay, we have all this information, we can do it. And we started to do it, and we've done it enough, and there's enough demand. And it kind of fits the market, what I was saying at the beginning of the call, where like, D&D is really not an issue yet. Most people are pretty well taken care of, but people are still trying to train costs, cost of goods, cost of money, paying people faster.
00:25:43
Speaker
you know, accurately. And we found I think 15 to 25% of all invoices are inaccurate, and about 75% of the ones who count from the BCA perspective was an actual mistake. People were like, Oh, my bad, you know, and then some of them get like pushed back. But yeah, exactly what you said, like, was there actually wait time? What exactly might be in charge for? What are the assasorials in real time that are changing with the market? That's a real issue right now. Well, I usually try to wrap these up with like, let's take a moment and let you pitch, but sounds like we got there naturally.
Enthusiasm in Sales
00:26:13
Speaker
I'm excited to see that stuff. I mean, I think it is the last bastion of spreadsheets really, is sorting all that crap out and fighting with your accounting department. Yeah, that's why I get uninvited to certain panels and stuff because I can't help but pitch. That's how every call is a sales call, really. I'm sorry. Well, it's funny. When you're into something, when you're excited about it,
00:26:33
Speaker
You want to talk about it, right? Like that's a natural enthusiasm. I think we have the similar end results, which is what y'all do makes people's lives easier. You do the same thing. You give people their lives back. And so I think we share that kind of in solidarity. I'd be curious to know we're at the end of Q1 or some people's Q1. Let's just call it calendar year Q1.
00:26:52
Speaker
Where do you think we are relative to where you thought we were supposed to be? Everybody wants to tell us what the year's going to look like from an economic outlook. We're three months in. Where do you think we are? I think this year is only nine months long. You know what I mean? I've been planning, I think the last third of the year is going to be a wash because of the election. So I was like, if you're going to get it done, you got to get it done before October, basically. This is what I told my sales team and my board in December.
00:27:16
Speaker
Word for word. That's what I told them. I kind of triangulated a few things. One, it's always good to get down, and I'll give Ben a pitch here, but the Ben Gordon Summit down in Florida, if you can catch the invite because he was able to listen to a lot of the CEOs from the LTL and truckload side talk about their pessimism for the year.
00:27:38
Speaker
privately. It's like this whole, a lot of people saying the same thing, which is at the beginning of every year, people are like, oh yeah, by the end of the year, it'll be fixed. And then they're like, but where's the data to support that? There's just sort of blind optimism. I agree that from a software selling standpoint, the hardest point is getting a customer to make a decision. That's the thing that's hard and people can only make
00:28:05
Speaker
so many decisions and they don't like making decisions under a cloud of uncertainty, just as humans.
Economic Outlook and Strategic Sales
00:28:11
Speaker
And so to kind of break down why I agree with you on this election thing, it's not a question from the perspective of a software salesperson. So setting any opinions about the candidates aside, it's not a question of who's going to win and somebody waiting for a particular outcome. It's a question of uncertainty and people and markets both hate uncertainty.
00:28:34
Speaker
And so yeah, I don't think you're going to see a lot of people wanting to make strategic purchases. And I think both of us sell strategic products, right? We're not selling Kleenex. So yeah, I agree with you that the second half, especially the fourth quarter are going to be, you know, a little bit rough because, you know, election takes you basically up to Christmas, right? From a sales window standpoint, then you're back into next year. So yeah, get it done now.
00:29:02
Speaker
I am a little bit optimistic that the economy is landing a little softer than maybe we thought it would. So maybe it's not so bad. No, I agree with you on that. I wish there would be somewhat some unification on like, is it going up or is it going down? And I think the uncertainty kind of kills everybody's ability to make a decision, but personally, professionally for your work. And then there's this being in the growth, a scale up phase of a company and the whole idea of nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
00:29:31
Speaker
de-risking these decisions, you're not selling to a business, you're selling to a person. And somebody's got to put their name, their signature on something to push it over to finance and say, hey, this is what we need. And there's already a lot of pressure or cost pressure and organizations in every industry have trimmed headcount. It's about like these people have families to take care of and don't want to draw any unnecessary attention to themselves. And it's not really the environment to take risks.
00:29:59
Speaker
It all comes down to, on our side, maybe a similar for y'all, de-risking these decisions. And it's not just for one person, it's basically for five different stakeholders. And it's all a slightly different value proposition of like, why is this a safe decision? And why is this actually going to make your life better and your company's business better? It just takes a tremendous amount of horsepower and clarity to get that message together and push through with timing. Timing is a big key on that.
00:30:26
Speaker
I think we also maybe got a little spoiled salespeople during the pandemic, whether the narrative was good or bad, whether it's going up or going down. When there's a clear unifying global trend, it's easy to know how to sell something because you just talk against that commonality. We're actually sort of, if we said, when do we get back to normal?
00:30:48
Speaker
Now we're back to like, oh, it's all complicated. You know, it's not Star Wars where it's like, here's the good guy and here's the bad guy. And we're going to go blow up the Death Star and therefore everyone's going to be happy. Yeah. Right. You're selling a much more subtle set of things in a complicated world, but that's really how it's always been. If you block out those couple of years, at least for the 25 years I've been doing this, I can't think of a time when that wasn't true.
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Except for those couple of years of the pandemic where it was like, it was so easy to create the narrative. Like the work of the marketing department to support the sales team was obvious. Yeah. Right. There is a pandemic. You don't have good data. We're going to get you good data. Or there is a pandemic and your freight's not moving and you need better collaboration with your transportation providers. Yeah. Right. Like boom, boom, boom.
00:31:41
Speaker
Now the hard work starts of like building long-term sustainable change over the next 20 years. Yeah, exactly. And then we can both retire and then somebody else's problem. That would be amazing. Just flash forward. We're good. I think I'm built for retirement. Honestly, people are like, you won't be able to sit still. I think I'm built for it. Let's wrap with that question then. What's your retirement look like?
00:32:02
Speaker
Man, you know, I spent a lot of my life facing adventure, you know, whether, I mean, I spent time in South America backpacking Southeast Asia. I got to travel a bunch from Mariska and that was always like the next big adventure for me, you know, based off of all my friends that are having kids.
00:32:18
Speaker
That seems like the craziest thing you could do right now is like have kids. They say that it's insane, but it's beautiful and wonderful. So I would love to have children. That looks like retirement for me is like to be able to live on some land on a farm or something similar, you know, with some kids. That's retirement. I used to read a lot, but I'm transitioning more into trying to work with my hands.
Vision for Retirement
00:32:41
Speaker
And so whether that's like gardening or farming or smoking meats or cooking or stuff like that, you know, I'm kind of over all the books now. That's awesome to hear. And again, it's proof that there's a lot of different paths and a lot of different people in this industry. And you know, we all somehow figure out a way to get along. You know, thanks so much. This has been a blast. I know we had a wonderful conversation. So, you know, appreciate your time. Hope you enjoy the weekend and I hope everybody enjoyed the episode. Thank you. Appreciate it.
00:33:12
Speaker
Thanks again to Michael for what was just a fascinating conversation. Again, just love talking to the guys over there at Gnosis.
CO2 Emissions Report Promotion
00:33:20
Speaker
If you haven't had a chance to download our CO2 Emissions Best Practices Report, make sure you head over to Chain.io and there's a pop up to pull that down. We had a lot of fun over the course of last fall, doing interviews with a ton of cargo owners and freight forwarders and brought some wonderful partners in to get a broad view of
00:33:40
Speaker
where companies stand from an mission's perspective. So really excited that that was something we could get done and make sure to head on over to the site and get that downloaded. Also check out, we've got on the blog a bunch of new product updates and we've got some new content coming out soon, specifically targeted at some of the gaps that exist in supply chain data for shippers. So where are the challenges and the struggles as far as bringing in
00:34:08
Speaker
great third party data to drive innovation, to drive digital transformation in this highly collaborative industry where most of the data you need lives outside your company.
Episode Conclusion
00:34:18
Speaker
So be sure to check us out there. And as always, find us on LinkedIn, find Gnosis on LinkedIn, and we'll have the link to their website in the show notes. So thank you for listening.