Episode 127: From Solopreneur to CEO, Nate Bailey with Ideation

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Nate Bailey is founder and president of Ideation Creative Brand Management out of Portland, Oregon. Nate began his career just like many of us do in this business as a solopreneur. Over the past 3 years, Nate has tripled his growth, his team, and has emerged from solopreneur to sales leader and coach. In today's episode, we talk about this journey from salesperson to CEO, the struggles and triumphs of those early days, and challenges around cash, biggest mistakes, learning how to scale, and we discuss one of Nate's favorite topics and something he does really well that might be helpful to you: sales forecasting. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Commscue. This episode is brought to you by Commscue, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Now here's my conversation with Nate Bailey.

Give us an idea where you were as an entrepreneur when you and I first met.

I was a scared new father who had just started Ideation in 2009 during what I came to find out and did not know when I started it, the probably in the realm of the 3 worst years to start a promotional products agency with the economy, right? And started it as a salesperson, not as a entrepreneur or anything like that, just a salesperson who needed to maximize their income.

Business, but you just approached it like a sales guy.

Yeah, I, you know, I was going to be a one-man show. I remember thinking at the time, if I could do this and I could just sell $8,000 gross a month, that would pay for the mortgage and buy groceries. I had a child in 2007, my wife wasn't working, um, so, you know, things were dire, um, and I briefly worked for somebody as an independent contractor. And so when I started, that's the only network I had. And so when I started ideation, I had no network, nobody to mentor me. It was before Promo Kitchen existed. I think Promo Kitchen was before there was a mentorship program in any regard, whether it's Promo Kitchen or PPAI or anything. So I got on Twitter and was running my mouth about the industry, trying and trying to learn. And you followed me.. And I thought I knew of you through publications, ASI and PPAI publications and Counselor Magazine and stuff like that. And so I think I tweeted, I must be doing something right as a newbie in this industry if Bobby's following me. So I think I DM'd you and I think this was about October of 2009. And I think I DM'd you before DMing was cool and said, hey, I'm new to this industry. I would love to buy you breakfast and just pick Your brain. And I think that's— we met in Las Vegas at PPI Expo, and that's— had breakfast together. And then you, you know, were kind enough to speak wisdom and truth and life and build a relationship with me. And then that led to me getting to know, you know, what I call the Mount Rushmore of our industry, of Danny Rosen and Mark Graham.

So, you know, but you know what, that's— you're always real careful to like give you know, thanks and credit to folks that have mentored you. But most of the power and mentorship resides in the mentee themselves. The fact that you were hungry enough to reach out, regardless of whether it was me or Mark or Danny, whoever, the fact that that hunger resided in you to such a degree that you were going to take risks of all kinds. And that to me has always been like, that's the whole power and promise of the Promo Kitchen mentor-mentee program is that really the results reside in the ambition, eagerness, and openness of the mentee, not the mentor. And the fact that you reached out that way with everyone was, I think, just open doors for you. Um, not just that, but you have—

it— I think what I'm trying to say is that like an indication of your ambition and yeah, I think that if you operate as I operate, knowing that I'm never the smartest person in the room. Yeah. Um, and the— and, and, and I'm not the, um, I'm not intelligent enough to create the best way to do it, but I'm— but I know that other people have done it really well and I'm willing to leave my ego at the door. I think there you can rapidly increase your success by asking for help. And there are, there are lots of people like you and Danny and Mark who are willing to do it if you just ask. And, you know, our biggest thing even at Ideation internally as we've grown and have some really successful people is we'll take the time to mentor anybody. But, you know, we're not going to tell you how to do it, how to coach you if you're not willing to put in the work, walk away from the meeting and then put the work in, you know. And so, you know, you can, you can lead a horse to water, as they say. Yeah, but you can't make them drink. And so luckily, you know, if you are willing to spend time and And like I said, at the time, you know, I, I was desperate to take care of a family. And so, yeah, you know, it always helps, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's the, that's a great motivator, you know? Yeah. So, so, so yeah. So I was trying to find anybody I could to help me.

For those that don't know you, paint a picture where we're at now compared to that young Nate Bailey starting out in the business.

Yeah. I mean, we started in 2009 and we, you know, did less than $100,000 in sales and, you you know, we're going to, you know, finish, you know, we're going to finish 2019, you know, well over $3 million, $3.5 million. And so, and, you know, a lot of fortunate things have happened that accelerated our growth. And, you know, I'm a sports guy like we talked about earlier. And so, my analogy is that Stacy Garrett came to our company. So, we signed the Kevin Durant, the LeBron James of free agency in 2017. I get that analogy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're Oklahoma, so you've dealt with the Kevin Durant issues. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so then that changed the course of the history of ideation and where what we were able to do, the speed at which we were able to scale and what we were able to do. So, you know, I think the moral of the story and we can get into the story is that, you know, a good guy who cared kind of won. Or at least got a break.

Yeah, I— but I also want to go back to those first times we met for breakfast, and we did that— I don't remember how many years we did that every year at Expo. Sort of became our place where we connected. Yeah, you, you have not changed internally from that person I knew back then in the sense that that was always a part of— I don't know if you remember how much that was a part of your ambition was to build this business. So that, you know, that was a part of your DNA back then.. And, um, and I remember it because I don't know if you remember, I would come in with a different set of problems than you had, and mine had to do with, you know, managing 20 to 30 people and just the overwhelming, uh, overwhelming nature of the type of business we were in with everything. And I would bitch and complain to you, and you'd help me, and I would help you. And we wanted to like do one of those Freaky Friday kind of things where we wanted to switch places, you know, all the time. Um, so that was— that always resided in you.

What—

so journey from solopreneur to today, what were a few of those major turning points? You always said Stacy.

Were there a couple of— Well, yeah, I mean, leading up to that, you know, we started as solopreneur. You know, I added a friend of mine, Matt, who's still with us. He's been here 7, 8 years. So really the story starts with ideation being him and I. I was trying to sell and run a business in terms of the proper way to run a business. You know, I told people I was trying to outsell my stupid. I was robbing the— I was robbing the business of its cash. I was trying to, you know, when you're a growing solopreneur, one of the problems that distributors have is their accounts receivables for the next year are more than their previous month's accounts receivables if they are growing. So if you're adding more business and adding more customers, you then add more accounts payable. But your accounts payable and when you're, you know, small and new, you either have no credit and are prepaying everything or— yeah. So, so I was, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul and I was pay and pray, which is my term that I tell people, you know, SanMar would call and say, you owe us money. And I would say, checks in the mail. And then I would hope and pray that a client's check would arrive to cover that check. Yeah, right, right. You know, it's the wild, wild west of running a business. And that's a lot of times I think salespeople who get into this business are salespeople. They're not business operators. Yeah. So we operated that way for a while until finally I got smart. My father-in-law, actually, uh, he's still with us, he's our pseudo-CFO, joined the organization just to help me. I think he was basically nervous for his daughter and grandchild more than anything, right? Um, and I think he saw what you saw, a guy with ambition and a guy with drive and a guy that could go out and sell but didn't really know how to operate a business, or at least a budget. And so he came from Procter Gamble and managed a huge budget and people and all stuff. And so, yeah, we laid down the foundation of operating a business, a very small business, you know, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 business as a big business. And so, you know, we, we set sales goals and not only goals just to say, well, this would be nice to do, but actual forecasts where we spent time looking at who our current customers were, what we thought we were going to do with them. And then, you know, the most important painstaking part of it all is that we set a budget. And so we knew we anticipated the money that was going to come in and we set that low. And we anticipated the money that was going to go out and we set that high and we monitored it closely and made adjustments based on, you know, how those things came to be. And so we still do it to this day. And it's, and it's really been a defining portion of what I think has allowed us to go from, you know, 3 people and $1 million in 2015, 2016 to 10 people and 3— a little over $3.5 million 4 years later, and being able to take on, you know, basically tripling in revenue and tripling in people in very short order, being able to handle that elephant, eating that elephant. Yeah.

Let's go back to sales forecasting for a minute because we're both passionate about this topic, and that was something that we did all the time, obsessed about the numbers and looked at those. What did you learn about this sales forecasting? For one thing, a lot of folks don't— in the industry don't really do sales forecasting.

And why do you think that is? I think that because it's hard work, it takes time to stop. Yeah, it requires you to come into the office between Christmas and New Year's when it's really quiet and not take time off and think about this is what I did this last year and this is what I believe is I'm going to do. You know, we don't look at it month by month, although we do look at it month by month, but we break it down by customer. So, I mean, I'm looking back, okay, what did I do with this customer in January, February, March, April, May, all the way through? And every customer and have an understanding of what it is that we've done. What, what's the, you know, if you do $1 million, let's just throw round numbers out. If you do $1 million one year, but $250,000 of it was a one-time project because one of your clients had a rebrand or a huge anniversary, you better not put $1 million down as your next year's budget unless you can figure out where you're going to make up that $250,000. And so, yeah, Yeah. And, and then there's other, you know, you start as you get into this business. I had a client, a huge hospital that basically ordered every other year. So they'd order a ton in 2016 and that would sustain them through 2017. So we did business with them, um, in the following year, but it wasn't like the previous year. So I knew that there was kind of a cycle of, you know, what that was going to look like. You know, they went from $100,000 client to a $40,000 client. So, yeah, you know, you just have to understand that and then you have to prepare for it. And the thing I like about Salesforce forecasting is if you know what you intend to do and you think about it, you can't have an unsuccessful year. Even if your numbers are down, if you planned on that number, then it was a successful year because you said, looked at your business. I think the big thing is don't let your, your falling numbers be an excuse of why you're not getting new business. And that, that's the key, right? And so I tell my sales team now all the time, like, if you planned on doing $30,000 this month but it didn't come through, That's like not an, oh shoot, we missed it. That's a, I better go flip over some rocks and, you know, on the pavement and find out where I'm going to make up that business. So, yeah, it's just a great roadmap to where you are and where you want to go and what you can physically do. And I'm a huge proponent of work. I hate the term work-life balance. I want people to go on vacation and have lives. So I think it sets up a good foundation of where you plan to be and when and when your busy time is and when you're going to have slow time. And when you have a sales forecast, you can also figure, okay, my February pretty slow, so I'm going to do a lot of content producing. I'm going to do a lot of marketing. I'm going to, you know, do some LinkedIn posts. I'm going to use that slow time to really work on business development where a lot of people, I think, work on business development unplanned when they are slow. So.

Right, right. What I love it too, we both know this, you have residual customers, but you don't have residual projects. And there's so many projects, you know, you have those same events. The customer has an event coming up and they'll do it again. But looking at those details, particularly for your top clients, the fact that you did this for most of your clients is amazing, that you looked at those details to determine where the gaps are going to be in the calendar year coming up. Because it's like this lie we tell ourselves as salespeople that I have no time to work on business development. And yet, if you look back at the numbers and the number of orders, and you'll see this cycle, you'll see this graph of up and down sales, and you'll see these windows where they had opportunity. What did sales forecasting help you do better in terms of business development? I know you already talked about time and where you could focus, but did it start painting a more honest picture to you about the bandwidth you had for business development?

I think that sales forecasting more than anything allows you to start defining who your best customer is and who you want to work with. Because you're reflecting, and we call it weed and feeding hear our customers to say who, who is a great customer, who's our ideal customer, who loves us, wants our ideas, you know, isn't worried about necessarily, you know, the best price, but you know, that our ideal customer is. And it also allows us to work at, okay, these are some, these are some orders I took this last year that were not a lot of money and a whole lot of time, and the client's not really that fun to work with. So those reflections, you know, allow you to remove every single human being that you talk to in your sales world as faces with dollar signs in their eyes and actually look at them and say, is this the best customer for me that I want to work with for the financial purposes? But B, I just want to work with because their company is awesome and I love that brand and I love those people that work there and I'm passionate about their mission statement and all those kind of things. And before Stacy came here, when Stacy and I just got together, you know, just to chat about life and business was that she was passionate about all of her customers that she worked with and really deeply cared about them. And she went after customers that she felt like she could impact because she knew the brand, loved the brand. And so, you know, that's kind of how we looked at our sales forecasting too, is to go through who you working with that just isn't a good fit. And it's okay to tell customers no, or we, you know, we're not the best person or Yeah, you know, that customer, every time you send them, spend an hour and send them ideas, and they call back and said, I found this on 4imprint for way less, like, that may not be the best customer, you know.

So I love your phrase, weed and feed. You've helped to really help us understand that sales forecasting is not as much about future telling as it is about clarity. And once you get that type of clarity with the type of clients you want to work with and weed and feed, as you say, then you are sales forecasting in a sense. You're sort of creating your future in that sense.

Um, the key to weed and feed is that every customer takes up time. So if you have a high, a high time-demanding customer that is a low-dollar-volume producer, what could you replace that time with to go after another $50,000 customer or $30,000 customer? Um, that's average order size $1,800 and good margin, as opposed to, you know, a bunch of $400 orders that you're having to, yeah, babysit and all that stuff. So that's what I like about weeded feeding. Yeah, I'm a big fan of opportunity cost of money and opportunity cost of time. So it's looking at your opportunity cost of time.

Since we've been connected for all this time, you know, I've been able to watch your progress from the outside in, and sometimes, you know, knowing more details What's your role in the company now and how's that changed through this growth journey of yours from solopreneur to where you're at today?

I still write a book of business. I write close to $750,000. This year was the first year ever, so 2019, that I hired an account coordinator, sales assistant. We call them account coordinators here. So I basically operated, managed my entire book of business all by myself up until this year. Which is an interesting story. And so I do, I still spend a lot of time with key customers, my key customers, but the rest of my time is made up of coaching our team and coaching one-on-ones with our account managers, meeting with our account coordinators. The way we operate, we have a position here that's kind of like an office manager. They're the only role in our entire organization that operates both in the sales department and the kind of business finance operations department. And so we are constantly meeting because her and I are the only two people that have our hands in at our organization in both of those divisions. So I spend a lot of time vision forecasting where I want to go and where I want us to go as a team. My favorite part of this all is the coaching aspect of it.

Yeah, it's hard to guess that.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I love sitting down with Stacy and talking about her, her business and her customers and her, you know, time management, which she's great at. But, you know, it just— she's got more work than she has time.

Even LeBron James needs a— needs a coach.

So everyone needs a coach, right? Or counselor, you know.

Yes, it's often one of the same, but it's all about perspective, right? It's just helping, helping shape your perspective.

And that's my most favorite, favorite part of having a team is getting to know people personally, what they want to do professionally, where they want to be. Do they want to be here forever? Is this a stop along their journey? And, you know, we always tell people like, I don't want anybody here that's unhappy. So, you know, I'm here to help them be happy, whether that's a different job, you know, not being here as much, whatever the case may be. And so I love that part of it. I'm a big Gary Vaynerchuk fan and And so I listened to him and I've taken a lot from him in terms of how to listen and empathize with people. And so that's my favorite part. I still love the big picture sales stuff. I am glad that I don't have to write orders or, you know, keep track of tracking numbers and proofs and all that, that I have somebody to do that now, which I think had I done it The great thing about Common Skew— and I know we're not talking about Common Skew, but the great thing about Common Skew is for a solopreneur, it allows you to do more business faster without having to increase your overhead by having somebody assist you until you want somebody to assist you. Yeah. The bad thing about Common Skew is that it allows you to do that. So that's funny. Allows you to do that for too long, right? Exactly, exactly. So, so the best thing I did was bring on, uh, Allie, who's my account coordinator, who really is keen and being able to— I mean, we have clients now that I, you know, we had to figure out a work process because we had clients now that love Allie so much that they just write her directly and say, hey, I've got this project. And all of a sudden I'm looking in our— I'm looking at my dashboard and looking at these sales orders that are being written that I have don't have any idea what the project was or what the request was or anything. So yeah, and she's great like that. But so that's what I thank goodness for Commskew and my ability to look on what's going on inside the business, or I'd have no idea what, what she was writing. Yeah, it's great. It's like, oh wow, $6,000. I had no idea that a customer even wanted that. So that was my sales forecast.

You know what's interesting to me too is that here's this kid kid in high school that took a diversion from sports because you were at this massive school and you were, and you were, um, wanting to be an athlete, but suddenly you're winnowed out because of size. Now you have this kid that has, in his heart, probably always wanted to be in sports, and now you're at— you're coaching a team. And I think this is an interesting part of your journey that maybe we all don't give enough credit to, is some of those desires and dreams that you had, because you could see that come through in your life today.

And as I talk to other mentors, local mentors, and my father-in-law, who's— who helps me to this day, you know, he references— he does a lot of analogies for me to understand because once again, as I stated at the beginning, this podcast is not very bright. He makes it simple for me and he says, you know, if you were coaching a baseball team, if you were coaching a basketball team, this is how you'd want them to operate. If we were, you know, a lot of— he's— we're big into scorecarding our operations here. And he says that if you are coaching your son's baseball team, which I do, and, you know, you would want to know how many errors we had, how many hits we had, how many, you know, men did we leave on base. It's the same thing with business. You're just translating those runs, hits, errors, assists, blocked shots into business items. And then, and then looking at your successes and failures of that. And so, yeah, I love the coaching aspect. I love helping people. That's why I was passionate when I was a chef. I miss being a promo kitchen chef because I loved being a part of that. It's just you have, uh, you know, the business grew faster than I had time between having a family. Sure.

All that stuff. Yeah. But yeah, the whole sports and coaching analogy also keeps it out of the realm of the, the domineering boss, you do what I say. This is really more about helping people realize their full potential, which is what a coach does. And that's, that's awesome. What about favorite project that you or your team have worked on recently?

We recently did a project for, you know, one of the largest cloud computing software companies in the world. They had an event in Portugal. They needed 100 pieces and it was a $20 budget. So, you know, not a huge project, but I think it goes to show how we think and how we operate. We ended up doing the polycarb wood combo handstand sunglasses. But then we added a full custom pouch, fully decorated custom pouch for them, and then stuff the sunglasses in the pouch and delivered them. And it wasn't a huge project. It wasn't a lot of dollars. But that's just kind of how, you know, it would have been easier, faster for the $20, you know, $2,000 order to just take the sunglass order and deliver it. But, you know, we took the extra step. We did some design work internally here for the pouch and, uh, you know, really kind of gave the customer a better, more retail experience than just sunglasses in a poly bag.

What projects taught you most about the business this past year or recent years?

Well, we made a big move in May from small office that we originally operated in into a combo warehouse space. So we have warehousing now. And so we came into this new office space in May and we tried to really be everything to everyone— warehousing, fulfillment, all that kind of stuff. And that's a difficult, difficult business, as you know, from from your previous job. And so we really had to take a look at what are, what we were really good at and what we didn't want to be good at or weren't good at. And, and then the technology we needed around it. And so I've spent a lot of time developing and understanding what is our sweet spot for fulfillment, how much do we want to take on per client, and then putting the tech inventory technologies around that. And then we kit a lot. We do a lot of kitting here, custom I'm kidding. And understanding the labor, the time commitment, the margin that's in that, it's, it's more difficult than just selling a product at, you know, the industry margin and billing for it and invoicing for it. So, you know, you have to calculate labor costs and all that stuff, which, as you know, you and I have had conversations about this and you've been instrumental in helping us figure out how to calculate those costs. So That kind of stuff is— those kind of operating procedures and processes, for me in general, is difficult. And I'm the type of person that's like, let's just take care of the customer, let's just take care of the customer. And which is great, and I fully believe in that. I'm a big proponent of Warren Buffett's quote, you know, we can afford to lose money, a lot of money, but we can't afford to lose any reputation, not even one ounce of it. And so we do a lot of things and we take care of the customers as you can. But, you know, as a business owner, as somebody running, you know, an organization with a lot of cash coming in and out of it with obligations, you can't just give away— you can't just give away costs and you can't give away labor and stuff like that. So really, you know, the most difficult thing isn't a specific project, but it's our customers are asking us to do more for them because we do do, I believe, such a great job for the basics that we are having to figure out the proper work processes to not only do that, um, in a financially fiscal— or financially, uh, financial responsibility, but to do it in a way that our customers don't get mad at us, right? Because when you start adding services like kitting and boxing, putting things in a box, and those types of things, you're taking more risk than just hoping that Leeds puts stuff in a box properly and delivers it. And so you better be able to— if you're going to tell a customer that you're going to— that you can do something for, you better be able to execute on that. And so I think a lot about that process.

Any, any competent distributor has this happen to them where a customer is so— becomes— trusts their services and their ideas and everything so much that they begin to ask more and more and more of them. Um, are you— I hear you kind of grappling with where's the line, um, or did you already wrestle with that? And are you trying to just make sure you navigate that? You want to take care of the customer, but you also don't want to exceed, um, any boundary that you have for making sure that your team is spot on with the things you do incredibly well or that you make the most profit from?

Yeah, we already wrestled with this in 2015. In 2016, we did a rebrand, and in that rebrand We, you know, constantly are thinking about our services and who we are and what we're, what we want to be. And, you know, I think a big topic of conversation in our industry in general is where, where does the promotional products business evolve to? What separates us from being an order taker, a dot-com? What can, what are those things that we can do? And so You know, as a young, driven entrepreneur, we did a rebrand and we're having to unwind that even to this day. What our messaging was when we launched our new website in that, you know, we were going to be an experiential agency and we were going to go to hotels on behalf of customers and pick out restaurants to have the event. And we were going to, you know, really be a full-service agency. And, and you quickly realize for various reasons that those things are not what you want to do. For me, I did not like a business that exchanged time for money. It also caused me to have to travel a lot and, you know, all those kind of things. So we really backed out on that. We were doing event setups. You know, we had a customer that we still work with, but they did their own trade show. So we were doing, you know, on-site plannings and all the collateral and all the signage for it and all that stuff. So, so, you know, we went and ventured out kind of what I say outside of our lane. And then we quickly decided we didn't like being in those other lanes and we shrunk back down to really what we, what we are great at. And instead of being everything to everybody, which I think we all want to be sometimes, we decided let's be great at one or two things and be really, really great at it. And so we really focus on on merchandise, branded merchandise, so promotional products, corporate apparel. And, and we really think about how to deliver that to our customers in a, in a more special way, um, than just, you know, taking an order and, and delivering it.

So that's what we do now. Along that lines then, now where you're at, where you've grown to, what is your differentiating factor now? What do you think comprises the Ideation DNA?

You know, I think our secret sauce, as we talk about it here, is that we are, we care about our customers as people and we care about them as, as their projects. We come alongside them as an extension of their marketing department. And we, you know, we really focus on customer experience and on customer service and that they constantly know what's going on with their projects and that we— that they don't ever have to wonder where things are at. And I think the thing, the reason people come to us is because we are more than willing to do the extra work to provide creative ways to think about how to deliver something as opposed to just, you know, handing it out. We're willing to kit We're willing to do— add a hang tag. We're willing to store your product, send it out to your event, and then take it back in. So I think, you know, a lot of what kind of, you know, we're small— we're big enough to handle any project in any size customer, but we're still in a lot of ways small enough to be adaptable to the needs of our customer. And if, if it makes sense for them and for us to to do it, whatever that task is, then we will do it. And we're also willing to say we're not the best to do that, but we want to be the resource to tell you who the best people are to go do that. And so we'll send customers to printers or, you know, experiential people who we know that may be a better fit to get them taken care of, because at the end of the day, we just want to take care of our customers and then we'll wait for the next promotional product order.

If we, if we have to pass on something. What has Commscue enabled the business or you to become? Maybe enabled you as an owner to become? How's it, how has it powered you as an entrepreneur scaling a team?

Well, the, the best thing about having Commscue and having a team is using the dashboard and the reporting, the reports to find out how the business is operating. Are we meeting our sales forecasts? On a daily, monthly, yearly, weekly even basis. So, you know, that's the great thing about it for us is that I can check in, you know, from my desk. If, if Matt has an issue or Stacy has an issue or one of our account coordinators have an issue with a job, I can hop into that sales order and see what's going on. If they don't know how to do something technical in CommonSkill, I can, you know, get up from my desk and show them, you know, we have had some newer, a couple new people come in and, you know, there are some things that we do with common SKU and managing people who want to be invoiced early but they don't have product yet for budgeting purposes. And so how do we operate, you know, how we operate common SKU when we have those types of requests from customers. And so that's what I like about it most is I can see, you know, at a 30,000-foot level, I can see the entire side of the business and that we can all work collaboratively as well. You know, we just had a meeting earlier this week about, you know, we— now that we're getting larger, we're really becoming more, you know, working in silos. So, you know, accounting departments and finance departments and operations departments and all that stuff, but we still have to communicate to each other. The sales side still needs to communicate communicate to the accounting department who's sending out the invoices. And so we're really starting to utilize the notes section internally on every order to tag people who need to be made aware so that, you know, the head knowledge isn't the head knowledge and that, and, you know, Haley isn't walking up and talking, who's our account coordinator, walking, talking to accounting. And it's just a conversation that we're actually putting it in Common Skew so that for the history of the history of the history, no matter who's here, we can always see what happened with that order.. And so we're really utilizing that as an organization, which I like, which I like a lot. And we can tag people in it when they, when they need to be made known. And so that's really been a huge success for us as we scale. And I think understanding how to scale and how to departmentalize is, is a huge chore for a solopreneur to learn how to do because, you know, our natural instinct is we've done everything ourselves all by ourselves and we, you We constantly want to have our hand in every aspect of the business, and Commons Queue really lets you see what's going on, inspect what you expect, as I say, without actually having to micromanage.

Yeah, and it sounds like maintaining that intimacy of a small team, or as a solo printer working with a few people, to as you grow, then being able to maintain that consistency of communication and where everybody's at and everything, that's huge.

Yeah, every action we make operationally, we always ask the question, is this scalable? Scalable, because there are things we can do now that aren't scalable, but we can do it because we're still small enough to do it. But then multiply that problem out or that thing out by 7 more salespeople and 7 more account coordinators. Now, can we really do that special thing that we're doing for this client or for this sales rep or this employee?

So yeah, we ask that question quite a bit. What's your heading into 2020? What's in your mind? What's on your brain as your overall strategy for sales and marketing?

We are big in practicing what we preach here, and I think we think, believe that the best way to go to market is to use what we do as a good way to do it, to do it. So, you know, we have a birthday program, we have a program for our customers that we know are going on vacation that we recognize them with a have a great trip and a piece of swag. We have a referral program that we send to the person. It's all card-based. And then, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a custom card that we've printed and made. It's a, you know, we have a birthday one, we have a referral one, we have, we even have one for those few times a year that we mess up. And so we really are focused on executing that consistently. And, you know, when we get a new opportunity or a new buyer at a— either a new client or a new buyer at a current customer, you know, we send them a swag bag that's just like an onboarding bag that we want our clients to do when they have new hires. We send them an onboarding swag bag to welcome them to our team and really try and engrave them in. So we're really trying to focus on on how, as we all get busy with taking orders and doing all the things that your typical day does, how do we consistently execute on those kind of things. And so that's what we spend a lot of time focusing on. You know, we've been around for 10 years, but, you know, at a scalable— I would just— was saying in a meeting that, you know, I— even though we've been around for 10 years, I still consider us a startup because up until 2017, from 2009 to 2017, we were very small. You know, we were almost like working from out of your house, even though we had offices. But now we're, you know, we're at a scalable, you know, we're scaling at such a level that we have to implement processes and procedures to operate efficiently. And so, you know, that's what we're really doing in every aspect of the business, not just operationally, but in marketing as well. And how can we, how can we come up with a marketing strategy that's sustainable for us? And we do a lot of cool stuff. You know, we, we do a lip balm mystery lip balm campaign last year that was hugely successful for us. And so, you know, our biggest thing is to do, you know, we got into social, we got into Facebook ads, we got into content creation, and that's all great. And for every business, it makes sense to do that stuff. And I'm a big believer in it. But, you know, at the, at the end of the day, we decided our number one focus should be on practicing what we preach. And so a lot of the marketing we do, a lot of the marketing we do is around trying to show clever ways of using promotional products to go to market.

So that's what we do. It sounds like this operations and procedures and just continuing this growth, yeah, with the larger team is like this next business challenge that you're trying to conquer.

It's like you're in the middle of it right now. Yeah, like it's, it's in the top of my head, and it's something I talk about a lot because we literally just had an all-team meeting to talk about the processes and procedures of ideation so that we can operate efficiently And, you know, I firmly believe that no matter what your sales numbers are, what your budget is, and what your expenses are, that efficiencies drive profit. And so, so we talk about where, you know, and I don't recognize it. One of the slides that I had was a square with somebody looked like they colored in a giant ugly mess of a circle outside the lines. And I told my team, this is my my mode of operation, my default mode of operation. And so processes and procedures is not how I see the world. And so I'm a creative, right? So it's something I really, really have to work on. And so we talk about it a lot and thank goodness, David, our CFO, that's his bread and butter. And going back to, yeah, don't be the smartest person in the room, understand what your weaknesses are and don't you know, don't have an ego about it. Bring in people who can come alongside you and fill in those gaps. And so it pains me to have to do processes and procedures, but man, when we get it right and we implement a process and procedure, you know, it's kind of like, man, I don't want to clean my bedroom, but man, it feels good. Or my closet out. But when I do, it feels so good. And so yeah, that's our big thing. And we had some— we had a gal that worked here who was fantastic, but she had some medical issues and ended up having to leave because of those medical issues. And what we came to find— and that was the that position I told you about, that's the office manager. And she just figured stuff out and we didn't put any process and procedure, write anything down. And so we, we didn't know how she did it or what she did while that position was empty and we were filling in for her. And then we didn't know what to tell the new hire what to do. And so, so I'll give you a great example. We have clients that come to us and say, hey, it's the end of the month, it's the end of the year. We want— we have $50,000. But we need you to invoice it right now. We're not sure how we're going to use it. So we do that. And then we write sales orders against that once they decide what they want. Well, we were putting the order in production or we were putting the order, creating invoice so the order would show that it was invoiced in common SKU. And then we would, I would unlock it and put it back into production so that we could then consider, continue to continue to manage the production of that order once they decided what items they wanted to do. Right. Well, once the customer got done and that was delivered, our account coordinators would put it in— it's already been billed, so there was nowhere for it to go for us. So, so the— we had to go back into the sales order and move it back into invoice because the system already thinks that we've invoiced it. So it's done even though it's back in. And so, you know, that's a very simple process, but I know about it and I told my team and verbally, you know, somebody that was directly dealing with that. But that's a process that we put down and then we shared it with everyone. This is how you handle— Yeah, you know, this is how you handle pre-invoiced orders. And so, you know, we So yeah, so just processes and procedures for as much as we can so that if I'm not here for whatever reason or we have turnover for whatever reason, that it wasn't head knowledge that walked out the door. Right, right.

And I love your point there about by codifying these processes, you're freeing yourself as an entrepreneur to let the business run. And you know, all these systems and processes are about the entrepreneur, empowering the entrepreneur to build a business that can duplicate success as opposed to be reliant upon whatever's in your head.

Yeah. And it's It's the goal of constantly thinking about, um, can this business operate if I'm not here?

Yeah, right, right. Um, you just— in fact, you were just traveling, what, last week and the week before that? And, you know, were you able to operate? I know, I know from, from hanging out with you that work-life balance— we both hate that phrase, but we know what we're saying when we say it.

Um, it's very important Yeah, and I've never in the 10 years that I've had Ideation, I've never been able to go on a vacation. You know, I always say the great thing about our current technology is that you don't have to be handcuffed to a desk to operate and do your work. The great thing about CommonSKU and about Office 365 and all those things is that I need an internet connection and a phone, not even an internet connection. I just need a phone and I can write an order. I can do business. And I operated that way as a solopreneur for a long way, a long time. But, you know, you don't ever really take time away and turn your brain off when you're doing that. You're just working in a different location, albeit it may be Hawaii or whatever the case may be, but you're still working. And so the great thing about scaling and going back to, you know, I wish I would have hired somebody earlier, earlier is like this is the first year I've been able to take two kind of prolonged vacations and I still always check in and check my email, but it's a lot of forward to Allie and Allie, please take care of this type stuff, you know. And so Right. It's, it's been really enjoyable for me. And I tell Ali all the time when I get back, I try and really tell my team constantly how thankful I am for them. I believe that they're my customers just as much as my customers are. And so, you know, it's just been a real blessing for me and my family to have somebody that I know and trust to handle the business. And then Stacy's here and, you know, Andrea's here. There's a lot of people here now that can help me me when I go on vacation, just like I help them when they go on vacation. And so, so it's been, it's been really, really great. And, you know, I tell my people to go on vacation, to leave, that this is, this, this should, this should support their life. This should not be their life. And so I, I think it's very important that I, as the leader of this organization, organization, you know, walk the walk. And so I want them to feel empowered too, that it's okay to go on vacation and your vacation should be a vacation. And I feel like if I spend my vacation working and they know that I'm trying to work on vacation, that the expectation is that, that they do the same thing. And that's not at all what I want. Yeah. Nobody should feel like that they need to work more than I work because it's not their company and I don't, I don't expect them to work more than I would work and, and I expect them to work less than I would work. And I would expect them when they're not here that they're not here and that they're— I don't expect them to answer emails or to call and check in.

That's, you know, yeah, because ultimately, you know, you have a healthier employee when they're that—

when healthier. Yeah, I'm constantly trying to figure out how to keep people, and we have done a great job of hiring people and keeping people. And so, um, you know, I want an environment where, you know, I want people when they leave here, they're, they're, you know, we had a couple people leave and they were crying when they were leaving, not because they were fired, but because it was a better life decision for them because of this, that, or the other thing. But they did not want to leave. They had to leave. Um, and that's what I I want people to feel like they're family here.

Well, Nate, man, this has been an honor.

Yeah. I say that every time.

Well, I appreciate it. It really has been because we've known each other all these years and watching you from those early days and seeing that in your eyes, where you wanted to go and how you wanted to grow the business. Yeah. The fact that you've stayed true to that vision is encouraging.

It's funny that we used to talk about that because it's one of those things where you wanted my life and I wanted your life. And I even think that I was encouraging you to have my life life. Um, even on the back of my mind, I wanted your life. Um, but you know, it, it comes with its own challenges, right? I mean, managing people. Yeah. And so, you know, be careful what you wish for. And the biggest thing I think that I, that I learned, um, in our growth stage and, you know, going to Toronto and talking to, to Mark and Catherine and looking at some businesses to acquire that, you know, $5 million does not mean $2 million in profit. $5 million can mean $90,000 in profit if you're not careful. Perhaps all that is, I don't care what your volume is, I care what your bottom line is. And so that's really what I've learned is that, you know, having a $10 million company was the goal at one point. But if $10 million company means more, more headaches for managing people and, you know, less money at the end of the rainbow, then there's not a whole lot of reason to do that. So I think there's a sweet spot for every free for everyone, you know.

You just said much better than what I was trying to say, that when I saw that young kid with that ambition in his eyes, I saw that top-line guy with those hitting those numbers, hitting the top 40, hitting whatever list it was, uh, being number one, uh, and then your values shifting in the sense of who it is that you really wanted to be and what was going to make a healthy business, right?

Been good, man. Thanks for hanging out. Yeah, it's been great.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKUcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comonsku.com.

Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening. Mm-hmm.