Episode 160: Winning Through Complexity, Not Price with Nathan Goldberg / Specialized

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. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

My vice president of sales in all of our sales meetings says, keep asking questions, keep asking.

I love it.

Yeah, you have to, you know, you don't, you don't learn anything by thinking you know what they're asking for or why they're asking for it. You really have to ask those questions.

It's the most common client conversation we each have in this industry., and we have this conversation every day. Client calls you for a specific item because they have a specific product idea in their mind based on their limited knowledge. And you, as the expert, you have a choice. You can either fulfill that request as asked or dig a bit deeper. The best and brightest in our business take a simple transaction and transform it into a unique experience that no one else can emulate. Today on the SkewCast, my guest is Nathan Goldberg, a second-generation owner and president of Specialized, is a graduate of the University of Arizona with an MBA from Arizona State University. And he's responsible for the daily operations of Specialized, as well as the vision, mission, and direction of the organization. There is one thread of thought that weaves its way in and out of my conversation with Nathan today, and it's moving beyond a commodity ask, beyond a transaction. We talk about how to grow this transactional conversation into something far more substantial. Since Nathan and his team handle a wide variety of categories, we also chat about selling more complex products like print and the mental blocks that we all create around business categories that we're afraid of. Nathan also shares why one of his favorite phrases from a client is, "Oh, by the way." Hey friends, I'm Bobby Lieu, the Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. If you haven't signed up yet for Commonsku Sessions at Home, it's not too late. Sessions at Home is the promotional product industry's only virtual conference dedicated to thriving in sales. It will be held on Thursday, October 8th. And now more than ever, it's time to refuel, refocus, and reenergize ourselves and our teams to make sales grow with a passion again. You can learn more and register at commonskew.com/sessionsathome. This episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, Visit commonscue.com. Now here's my conversation with Nathan.

You've evolved from selling forms to medical practices over the years into traditional printing, then promo, apparel, office supplies, even furniture. Now, as I say this and break apart these categories, they sound like nothing but commodities, but your approach is different and more robust than that. Can you Can you tell us what selling solutions means to you?

Yeah, so selling solutions to me means that whatever my customer is looking for, whatever my customer needs for their business, whether it's to take care of their employees, take care of their customers, to help them prospect, it really doesn't matter what it is that they need, but I'm— I want to be the person who can get it for them. And further than that, not just get it for them, but actually create something that's unique and valuable for them. So if a customer is looking for a unique way to finish off an office, then I can do that with furniture and seating and ergonomic solutions that go above and beyond. But I can also take some branded desk items and have them sitting on the desk. So when they show up, they've got a new desk or a new workspace, but they've also got, you know, maybe a wedge with their logo on it or a tumbler with their logo on it. Yeah. We kind of take those different product categories and we put them together to create something that's unique and valuable.

You know, it's funny, we use the word now experience to describe this, but it's true. You're, you, the client calls you for a specific need, which is a commodity-based trigger for many of them. Some of them don't, some of them know now to approach you consultatively, but they call you for a commodity-based trigger and it's our job then to extract that, extrapolate out what, what else you can do to make it a true experience versus a transaction.

Yeah. And people are so used to searching on the internet and thinking that they know exactly what it is that they need. And so they reach out and they're like, "This is what I need." Well, why? Why do you need that? What are you trying to do with it? What are you trying to achieve? How does it affect your budget? Who are you giving it to? And we have these conversations. My vice president of sales in all of our sales meetings says, "Keep asking questions. Keep asking questions." I love it. Yeah. You know, you don't learn anything by thinking you know what they're asking for or why they're asking for it. You really have to ask those questions.

Yeah.

I think that's such a great phrase, keep asking questions, because we typically just want to help the customer. I mean, it comes from a good place. It comes from a good heart. You know, we want to help them. We want to knock this out, get it taken care of. Sometimes we're burdened and pressured and we just want to get the next task done, but we have to.

Yeah, it's really important to ask those questions because, you know, we— Google and the internet is a wonderful resource for so many things. But when it comes to, you know, when it comes to finding product, like there's— you're always going to be able to find somebody who's willing to do it for less. Yeah. But what you can't find online is someone who can help you develop a strategy around why you're buying that product. Yeah, we— this whole thing started about 15 years ago when customers were saying, you know, were telling us like, hey, we're going to this trade show, there's a bunch of lookie-loos that are going to come by my booth, I just want the cheapest thing you can find so that we can give it to them. And, you know, my, my point at that time was, well, what if you have a really good conversation with somebody? Are you still going to give them that, you know, 40-cent pen? You should probably have a strategy where you have those 40-cent pens out on your table And if you have a really good conversation with somebody, you give them a, at that time it was a clear tumbler, right? Something a little bit nicer, a little bit more meaningful to that person. And so from there, we've helped our customers really develop those strategies because if they're paying thousands and thousands of dollars to go to a trade show, then they should also have a strategy behind what they give out at that trade show. It's not just about finding the cheapest magnet or pen or whatever. Yeah.

Nathan, let's talk about complexity in selling for a moment because we know it's crucial for the salesperson of today and tomorrow. One thing you and I agree about, and that is what my friend Danny Rosen would say, where there's complexity, there's margin. You phrased it this way, you get to charge for complexity, you don't get to charge for simplicity. Can you share more of your thoughts about that?

You know, so when you have access to a search utility like Google or any of the online promo and apparel sellers, they are really good at streamlining their operations and leveraging technology to process orders and produce product very inexpensively. Yeah, I, I have employees and I have people who take the order and double-check the artwork for them, and we have all of these added costs. So I really can't compete with, you know, the 4 Imprints of the world on price. I just can't. But what I can do is I can ask those questions that we talked about. And find out exactly what it is that the customer is trying to do, who they're trying to do it for, and what it means to them. What is the lifetime value of that employee phase? What is the lifetime value of that new customer that they get at that trade show? And I can help them develop programs to go after that or to try to achieve that. And it's more difficult than just simply buying the product because we have all those different product categories. We'll take a promotional item, we'll take a branded apparel item, We'll take a variable data printed piece, we'll take custom packaging, whatever it is, and we'll put it together as a kit and we'll send it out. We've done a lot of projects over the last couple of months during the COVID days where we've had, you know, that have started from the conversation with our customers about what are you doing with your employees? How are you connecting with your employees now that they're scattered all over the city, state, country, or the world? When you hire new employees or when you bring in new people to your company, How are you sharing your corporate culture, your corporate values with those new people that have never set foot in your physical building? And now that you are prospecting over Zoom and over FaceTime, how are you prospecting? How are you connecting with your customers? So what we try to do is we try to talk to our customers, find out what they're trying to produce, and then we try to come up with creative and innovative ways to build programs that we can charge for around helping them achieve what they're trying to do. Because even though it's a really weird world that we live in right now, and there's a lot of disagreement on what, you know, whether it's real or fake, it really doesn't matter. The reality is, is that we're all in this situation where a lot of people are working from home, and how do we connect with them? And as a promotional products distributor, that's something that we're really good at. We're really good at connecting with people. So it's really about having a conversation with the client, trying to understand what they do, and then building a program that's going to produce outcomes for them that we can charge for. That's more complicated than just ordering, you know, 144 tumblers or 144 Yetis and the customer sending them out.

Yeah, and I love that mindset because then you're talking about respecting the complexity and the complicated as opposed to fighting it. Because what you just suggested there was that AI can deliver quick answers and easy answers to transactional purchases, but it requires us human ingenuity to step in, ask the hard questions that no one really asks. What else have you learned to ask that no one's really asking with your customers?

Okay, so I think that it's really important to ask why, you know, why are you spending the money to do this? For example, I had a customer reach out a couple weeks ago and say, hey, I need 50 bread pans. And I said, 50 bread pans? Like, what are you doing with bread pans? Well, so what he explained to me was that he was going to send every employee that he had on his team a bread pan. And they had this day of meetings where they wanted to build in breaks and some kind of team building thing. So they did logoed bread pans. And you start by kneading the dough and making the dough, and then you let it sit. And they were going to have content. And then you go back and you put it in the pan and you let it sit and they were going to have more content. So they built this kind of whole day around these bread pans. And I said, "Well, how are you getting the flour and the yeast and all that?" He said, "Well, I'm just buying it on Amazon and then we're going to have it delivered to the house and then we're going to put it all in kits and send that out also." And I said, "Well, do you have a staff of people at your house who can put these kits together? And what about the package to send everything out in?" And the customer said, no, I don't. I was just gonna have my kids do it. Now I know his kids and they're great kids, but like, I don't trust them not to eat the flour and sugar and yeast. So I said, well, just have it all, you know, we can get it all for you or have it shipped to me or whatever. We'll put it with the pans, we'll print out the instructions, we'll put it in a custom package or, you know, labeled package and we'll do the fulfillment. So you can just give me the addresses. You don't have to go to the UPS store or the FedEx office. You just give me the addresses and we'll handle it like from the beginning to the end. Yeah. And I said, the only thing that I ask is that when everybody's done and you post all those pictures on your internal Slack channel, like I want to see what everybody's bread looks like.

It's great. Have you found a good formula for charging for a lot of these services, or do you just charge for product and then hope the customer buys more and that type of mentality?

So my personal, my personal, the way that I live my life, Bobby, is I am willing to pay for help, okay? So when I go to the doctor, I know I'm going to the doctor. The doctor has years and years and years of training. I'm willing to pay for that help. I, as a human being, as a promotional products distributor, as a promotional products expert, whatever you want to call me, I am going to charge for my time. I have to pay my employees. They don't work for free. I have the, you know, not to be entitled, but like I have a right to earn money based on my knowledge. And every promo distributor, print distributor, everybody out there, we all have the right to charge for our services. So when I come up with something that's unique and innovative, yes, I absolutely charge for it. For fulfillment and pick and pack, there's certain, you know, there's certain numbers like $1 or $2 per order based on the complexity of the job. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll actually do a time study to see how long it takes to do something. We'll kind of mock it and then we'll divide that out by an hourly— an average hourly rate and figure out what the cost is. What I try not to do is say, okay, the product was $8.50, the kitting was $2.12, the box that we put the product in was $1.87. What I like to do is I like to say your all-in price including freight is going to be $32 per address. Yeah. You know, and then when they, when they get an invoice, the invoice literally says like bread pan project, 50, you know, 50 deliveries or whatever at $32, you know, it's $1,500.

Yeah. Love it. Simplified for the customer. You know, one of the things too that you have all of these different areas that you can, you can sell. Sometimes that can be a little difficult. So Can you tell me how all these different pieces work in harmony with you and your business?

Yeah, that's a great question. So as a distributor, the, the one, one of the wonderful things about being a distributor is we distribute things. You know, it doesn't really matter what it is, it's, it's whatever the customer needs. So we have a lot of competitors in the print, in the print business that go out and they buy these million-dollar pieces of equipment and all they can do is sell stuff that fits on that million-dollar piece of equipment. Right. They have such a big monthly payment that they just tell their salespeople like, listen, I don't care what it is, I don't want to do it if it doesn't fit on that piece of equipment. Right. When I'm talking to, you know, when I talk to somebody who works for a traditional printing company who has those million-dollar pieces of equipment, I say to them, well, have you ever had an opportunity that didn't fit on that piece of equipment? And of course they say yes. And I said, "Well, what did you do?" And they said, "Well, we walked away." And I said, "Well, imagine literally never having to walk away." You know? Our business is all about relationships. And how do you build relationships? You come through for the customer. So anytime a customer calls me and I say yes, guess what? They're more likely to come back to me the next time. So yes, you know, so the challenge though is we'll work with these great manufacturing partners who have these big equipment and they say, how do I increase my business with you? And we say, well, it just kind of happens, right? Because we're not out there pushing any one product, we're out there trying to build relationships and the product, the orders just kind of fall into those relationships.

Yeah, and Nathan, you and I both have had, because we have had this experience where we're selling multiple things and customers are getting more and more creative all the time, because we had multiple categories, we ended up blending those into more of a holistic solution for some customers, not all, But what is one of your favorite stories of a customer where you're able to blend all of these disparate elements that you sell into a holistic solution?

Well, I mean, there's been a lot of them during this COVID period. Yeah. You know, there's been a lot of them, you know, because we have, you know, it's really hard to put my finger on any one because I really like the creative side of putting it all together. The most recent one that we did was, or is, we're in the middle of this project. It's It's basically 2 kits being sent to 1,000 people. Each person gets both kits, right? So the employees of this company went to an internal website where they picked what their shirt size was and a tech item that they had a choice of 3. So we got the list and the first wave of the kits was a variable data postcard that said, hey, thank you so much for your help. We know that we're working from home and we appreciate everything you've done for us. Here's a shirt that's like, you know, hashtag better together or whatever, whatever the hashtag was, right? And then a week later they get their tech item. Originally all the kits were supposed— all the items were supposed to go out together, but the tech items were backordered because of COVID And so we just came up with a solution like, hey, let's do it, let's get another department involved and we'll do it as two kits and we can do two different thank you letters and whatnot. So I like those projects where, you know, it blends, you know, promotional products and branded apparel. It blends packaging, it blends printed, you know, complex printing like variable data type printing. And you have to match that up with the address. Like, I like that kind of stuff. You know, it scares me that we're going to end up shipping a men's shirt to a female or a female shirt to a man, or we're going to have the wrong name. And so there's like things you have to do. But guess what? With complexity, you get to charge for it.

Yeah, right. You have so much experience, some tacticals around this. Now I get just-in-time distribution, and part of my job as an interviewer is really to be the dumbest person in the room.

And one of the questions I had was, what about micro fulfillment?

What do you mean by that? You used that term when we were chatting one day, and I meant to ask you about it.

Yeah, so micro fulfillment is a phrase that I made up back in like April. And basically what we did was we started having conversations with our customers about delivering, you know, literally doing the fulfillment at one-piece minimums, right? So traditionally, you know, we've done fulfillment and we'll ship 1,000 to this trade show or we'll ship 1,000 to this corporate headquarters or whatever. But we went back to our client base and we said, hey, we can do this micro fulfillment also where, you know, instead of shipping by a pallet or by a, you know, a truckload, we'll ship one product to 1,000 addresses rather than 1,000 products to one address. And it's basically like, you know, it's basically like what Amazon does, right? I mean, Amazon's gonna, if you want one Q-tip, they'll ship it to you.

Yeah. I like the phrase because it reframes the concept for the customer. You know, I've always loved that about when you introduce a new service or a practice with a customer, if you can label it and name it and create an experience around it, then you'll have some, you'll have better mnemonic success with them remembering it and deploying it. I had another question for you because you have been doing this for so long and there has traditionally, I think this is changing, but traditionally there has been resistance with salespeople, for example, cross-channel selling. So print people would stay in their lane, promo people would stay in their lane. Why sell print? Because we have a lot of promo folks who listen to this and I think it's a great opportunity for promotional folks who will say they don't sell print, but they do because they sell, you know, they might sell presentation folders or they might sell some other kind of aspect. But you mentioned to me that print is more difficult to commoditize than even promo. But can you explain?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, honestly, like, I think there's a lot of reasons to sell print. First of all, everybody who sells print is also now selling promo and apparel. Maybe not everybody, but a lot, you know, even people who have those million-dollar pieces of equipment, they've added on print, promo, and apparel, right? The other thing is your customers are buying it from someone, so they might as well buy it from you if you have that relationship. If you don't have that relationship, you're gonna need that relationship because they're gonna go to, you know, 4imprint or they're gonna go to Vistaprint and they're gonna just commoditize you. And nobody wants that except those sites. You know, so yeah, traditionally, you know, you have a print salesperson and you have a promotional product salesperson. I remember years ago when I was buying equipment, I bought my black and white copiers for my high-speed copier shop. And then I said, okay, I need to talk about color copiers. And the black and white copier salesperson told me, well, I can't talk to you about color copiers. That's a totally different department. And I was like, I didn't understand. I didn't understand why I couldn't buy it at the same time. So what we've done is we've tried to move away from people, from our sales reps saying, well, I sell print or I sell promo or I sell furniture or office supplies or anything. It's really about like, I develop relationships with the customers and if it's beyond my knowledge level, then I'll bring in our CEO, I'll bring in the president, I'll bring in the VP of sales, I'll bring in, you know, the product experts. I mean, we have, you know, 8 customer service reps that work for us that are really good at print, promo, some combination of the both, apparel. And so depend— regardless of what the customer needs, the salesperson can bring in a product expert when it gets down to that product level.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there's a special uniqueness that's sort of created around folks that are able to, to flex to both or to any category whatsoever. It The customer appreciates that simplicity. And they also complement each other. We've both learned that through the years.

Yeah, and also, sorry, I just wanna say one thing. I think there's also like, there's a lot of overlap, right? Like packaging. Yeah, right. Packaging used to be just, I mean, it's how do you, custom packaging is both print and promo. Signs and banners are both print and promo. Right, right. So it's like, where do you draw the line if you're a promo distributor who quote, doesn't sell print, Where do you draw the line? Because technically everything is promo.

All right. You know, we create, we create these mental blocks, these limitations for ourselves that we don't even realize it. Because that's a great point, Nathan, that, you know, you're selling print. And that's what the funny thing is. I struggled with this with my team, my sales team. You know, they were like, I don't really do print. Commercial printing is too complex for me. But they'll turn around and they'll sell an 8-color, 4-color process t-shirt. Right. Or some kind of a very complex t-shirt thing. So I think it's a mental block that we give ourselves. And yet in our industry, this willingness and this curiosity to learn more is traditionally what is constantly what sets apart the thriving salespeople that tend to progress in the business. Because the one thing you can count on is the complexity growing and the fact that the categories, once a customer trusts you, will widen.. And so you should be prepared to not— and I used to joke with folks when they would come in as new employees on our team, I would say, look, I know you think I have all the answers, but I guarantee you today the customer will call me about something I have no clue what to do about that product. And so it's an opportunity.

Yeah. I mean, I remember years ago, I brought in a customer from two printing companies to do, just do the fulfillment and, you know, the fulfillment, you know, so we do the production of the printing, we put the products in our warehouse and then the employees around the country go to our website and they order the product that they need.

Right.

And there were some cool things that we could do that they weren't getting now. But I remember sitting there thinking, you know, this is going to be a good deal for them. And then they said something. They said, oh, by the way, I love— oh, by the way, oh, by the way, holiday gifts for all these people. And our spend is about $100,000 a year. And I said, oh, by the way, we do holiday gifts for a lot of our customers. So "If we do a really good job with this program, can we have an opportunity to do your $100,000 a year in holiday products?" And they said, "Yeah, of course, 'cause you'll already have it set up. It'll be great." So sure enough, for the last 4 years, we've been doing $80,000 to $100,000 a year in their holiday gifts. And it's super complex, so we charge for it because it's 250 or so sales reps across the country that all order different products. I mean, they get like a basket of options. But they order different quantities and whatnot.

So yeah, yeah, I love that. One thing that you and I talked about a little bit was providing value and learning your uniqueness as an individual and as a team. And one thing you said that I always love this conversation is figuring out what you are uniquely gifted for and sell it. How did you do this? How did you and your team arrive at this?

Frankly, Knowing what you're uniquely gifted for and what you really like to do, I think it comes from trial and learning, right?

Yeah.

So we did a bunch of kidding projects years and years and years ago, and after every kidding project we said, well, that really stunk, right? Or why was that so painful? Or why did we run into such deadlines? So we just kind of refined it. And then as we got into more of them, we knew what to expect. And we were able to plan better, we were able to communicate with the customer better. Like we'll use Microsoft Teams now to have a channel where we're actually directly communicating with the customer on these large kitting and fulfillment projects, letting them know we're hitting our deadlines and whatnot. But I think that, you know, really the way you determine what you're uniquely gifted for is you just have conversations with your staff and you try to figure out like, what is it that I really like to do? Am I a good salesperson or am I a good operations person? Do I really like to do the sourcing or do I really like to do the selling or the big thinking, the strategic thinking? For me, I like to sell a concept and literally move on because as soon as the customer says, yeah, that sounds awesome, I've lost interest and I've got to figure out the next awesome idea.

Right.

And so I think it's important to build a team around you that complements you. You know, I have so many wonderful employees that, you know, are so much more detail-oriented than I am, or so much more execution-focused than I am, or can find literally that needle in a haystack like we all have to so many times in this industry. Like a bread pan that can be laser engraved.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you have a favorite customer project that you've done, not necessarily just since COVID but that you've done that sort of exemplifies you or a customer project that was sort of a turning point in your mind? Because you're basically, to cap real quick on your journey, you are, is it third generation family business owner?

Second generation. So my dad started this business in 1985. Okay. And I joined him in 2000 when I graduated college. And my dad is still active in the business, though this is his last year. He was, we were supposed to, he was supposed to be able to retire, but then COVID hit and, you know, we're now it'll be by the end of the year, but yeah, it's a second generation business. And, you know, that's one of the just wonderful things about this industry is it gives you this opportunity to be entrepreneurial, to be really helpful to your clients. Yeah.

Do you have a favorite customer project? Like, was there a moment when you went to college and you decided you were going to get in the family business? Was there a light bulb moment for you that represented in a customer sort of the fruition of all of these different things?

Yeah. So, you know, I always wanted to work with my dad because my dad— I always felt like my dad was somebody who helped people in their business. Right. And I like— we both love helping people grow their business. I mean, you really look at what makes America America. It's not the Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 companies. More people work for small business, and that's really who we're dealing with. And I really like to help them be successful. And as they grow, they develop these inefficiencies in how they produce and distribute product. So to answer your question, I really like all projects that are recurring, that I can be a little strategic and help my customers achieve certain things when there's a bit of technology included because it makes it a little bit more unique and a little bit more valuable and there's more stickiness there for the customer. I like projects that leverage the resources that we have, like the people, the warehousing, the fulfillment, the equipment that we own, the small number of digital pieces of equipment that we own. I really like anything that helps my customers achieve what they're trying to do that happens all the time because I like recurring revenue.

Yeah. And it sounds to me like you like seeing all these pieces come together, you know, for a solution that works for them too. Let me ask you this, Nathan. You obviously learned a lot from your dad. What has he taught you the most?

How long do you have?

Was there an example that you can share from us that sort of exemplifies what he's taught you?

So I think, so there's two pieces. The first piece is I remember when I was really young in my career with my dad and he came back to the office and he was so happy. And I said, Dad, what's going on? He said, oh, I just had a great sales call. I said, nice, what did you sell? He said, I sold 12 exam room tables. And I said, Dad, what are you talking about exam room tables? Like, we don't sell exam room tables. And he said, Nathan, he said, you know, if my customer needs it, I sell it. And I said, well, where are you going to get them from? He's like, I don't know, but we'll find them and, you know, we'll do fine on them and the customer will be happy. So that's a story about my dad. I think the other, the other piece that I got from my dad is that the most important thing in business is to take care of your employees. Through this COVID thing in early March, I remember having to stand in front of my employees and saying, "Get your stuff, go home." The world shut down, I think it was like March 12th. We had to cut everybody's pay. It was really a rough time. But my dad and I talked earlier and we're like, "Well, we're not going to cut their pay if we don't cut our pay." And so everybody took a pay cut. And fortunately, we jumped on the PPE bandwagon really early and we had some really good months there. So we restored everybody's pay and we started at the lowest earning, you know, the lowest earning team because we knew it affected them the worst. And then we kind of moved up and everybody in the company except for my dad and I are now whole. That's great, man. So very early on, if the customer needs it, we'll get it and take care of your staff because they're really the ones who are doing the work.

Vital, vital. Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate those stories. You and I and the PSDA organization as a whole have been talking a lot lately about how we must evolve to be relevant for the future customer. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, it's interesting to ask that question of you, Nathan, because you're standing on the precipice now of owning this business that you've been a part of for so long. But also there has to be this renewed fire in you as you take on the reins and as you're looking down the road. What do you think? How do you think we must evolve to be relevant for the future client?

So I really think that you have to look at your business and say, well, what can— what's going to be replaced by technology and what can be commoditized? You know, that customer looking for 20 Yeti tumblers or, you know, 5 shirts or, you know, 50 shirts or whatever, that can be replaced. I mean, people can find that stuff online. They can, you know, if they, you know, if you Google that stuff, you can find it and you can place that order at 10 o'clock at night on Wednesday night when a lot of us have the time to do this kind of stuff. Yeah. So I think that, you know, to not get commoditized, you have to, you have to invest in your education, you have to invest in technology, you have to invest in your trade associations. Like you mentioned, PSDA. Anybody who's considering or who's selling, quote, traditional print should be a member of PSDA. The sourcing, the education, like for all that stuff, to be able to bring something innovative and unique to your customers. It's the same reason that I sent, you know, a third of my staff last year to PPAI. Gotta go. You gotta go through the new products pavilion. You gotta talk to people. What are the trends? Because, you know, the computer, Google, is not going to reach out to your customers and say like, hey, this is a really cool way for you to thank your customers, or this is a really cool way to thank your employees, right? When your customer thinks about, hey, how can I recognize my employees, or How can I do new business development? Or what's the cool thing for the trade show? That's where you get commoditized. But when you're bringing it to them, you're bringing value.

Yeah. Nathan, before we close, any final thoughts? I always love to give our guests final thoughts.

I mean, you know, if anybody wants to continue this conversation, I'm always open to having conversations with people. I love, you know, the collaboration that happens both in the print and promo apparel space. We have some just awesome manufacturers. There's awesome distributors out there. Some of my really good friends are friendly competitors. I will say that the other thing that you'll see on the print side more so than the promo and apparel side of the business is on the print side, there's a lot of cooperation and coordination between distributors, right? So I'm doing a project for a distributor out of Dallas. I've got a guy in Portland, Maine who's done projects for me and we kind of all, you know, band together to create these, you know, these solutions to our customers.

So yeah, that's really cool.

Yeah, if a customer says like, hey, I have a big presence in Boston or New York, like, I have a friendly competitor in, in that area who I would, you know, have a warehouse with their product there.

So I love that. Do you sell— do you, do you provide like non-compete type documentation, or are these just relationships you've developed through the years and you just trust each other?

They're just relationships that I've developed over the years. Love that, though. You know, I don't know. I mean, non-competes, like, I'll sign a non-compete and I'll, I'll live up to it. But most of the deals that I do with my friendly competitors, we do it with a handshake or now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I mean, NDAs and all that too. But yeah, I see that and I see that a lot through the PSCA and it's been something very refreshing. I think our— the promo industry has been slower to do that, but I do see it changing. And of course, in the, in the CommsCue community, it is sort of a big part of the community itself. The richness of the community itself is this being willing to reach out and help each other. So we've seen it in our microcosm of the industry, which is a pretty big swath of the industry. But, but we're seeing that change take place a little bit as well.

Nathan, Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Bobby. I enjoyed the conversation, so I really appreciate the time.

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.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.