Episode 321: Supercharge Your Growth with Team-Based Selling (Ryan Paules, Radar Promotions)

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.

Ryan Pauls pivoted to the promo industry after losing his job as a manager with a national chain on the same day of his wife's first ultrasound. Now with a new baby on the way and a mortgage to pay, he turned his IT hobby into a full-time venture launching Radar Support, which he later closed despite its success. His break into promo came through a client, Bob Levitt, a veteran and legend in the industry. And as their collaboration deepened, Ryan transitioned from IT to take over Bob's company, renaming it Radar Promotions. The name, chosen partly because the domain was available, symbolizes an elevated level of awareness, which has become the company's guiding principle. And it's something we talk about today, this idea of solving problems for customers. We also talk about team selling. Ryan has made a commitment to create a different kind of company focused around a team selling model, including a unique compensation model. And it's worked. From 2020 to 2023, they grew 900%. Ryan is also one of our speakers at SKU Camp in Nashville in September. But today we'll unpack the story behind what led him to build a different kind of business. Hi, friends. I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at CommonSKU. A few things to note before our chat with Ryan. We are constantly rolling out updates to our platform, and we now have a new streamlined Reports tab in CommonSKU. The sales reports you know and love got a shiny new update. You can now access all sales reports via a streamlined Reports tab. Plus, we added a new report, the Rep Comparative Report, so you can see invoiced dollars by client or order rep and compare it to the previous month or quarter or year. We also added a new feature in Pop-up Shops that allows you to easily collect and validate multiple dropship addresses. And if, if you're wondering, how do I stay on top of all these updates? Well, we invite you to subscribe to The Backpack. Backpack is our email newsletter we send to you on the first and third Friday of each month. It features trends in merch, top articles and podcast episodes, and global news impacting merch life. This newsletter is a blast for us to put together, and we've had such rave reviews from teams who see it as a bimonthly source of inspiration delivered right to their inbox. You can see examples from previous issues and subscribe at commonscue.com/backpack. Today's 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, just like our friend Ryan Pauls and his team at Radar. To learn more, visit commonscue.com. Now here's our chat with Ryan.

Let's start at your current state where you are now. Like you have, you're running over $2 million in revenue and you have how many employees now?

We're up to 11, including me now.

Okay. Where are you all located?

So I am in Los Angeles, actually in Simi Valley, about an hour northwest of LA.

Okay.

Along with our e-commerce manager, Dion, up here with me and our vice president of swag, Jill Spencer, is over in beautiful Panama City Beach. She actually lives in Margaritaville, which I am super jealous of. Our first employee, Corey, is down in Friendswood, Texas, kind of halfway between Houston and the Johnson Space Center. And our administrative services director, Waleska, lives in Richmond, Virginia. And who am I missing in the US? And then 5 more team members in the Philippines, and they are between Cavite, and Tarlac City.

That is awesome. You largely work with clients like you have nonprofits, you have all types of clients, but you work with one of the largest nonprofits in the US or the largest nonprofit in the US. What kinds of projects do you do for them?

This would really be something that I think a lot of distributors that might hear this podcast would really find familiar for them as well. The purchasing that we're seeing from our client base is pretty uniform across what I think the rest of the industry does. It's really just in two buckets. It's internal use swag, so it's more employee uniforms, employee name badges, right? And external use, which is more like the marketing piece of promotional products, whether it's getting a new member or membership drives or board member gifts.

Do you have— you have other types of clients you work with?

What—

give us an example of the other types of industries you work with.

So the other big focus for us is I jokingly or lovingly call private colleges that I could never afford to go to. So we love all of our collegiate clients and the college market's really interesting for us. You know, we, in both cases, both on the nonprofit side and on the college side, we love working with kind of mature, defined brands that really understand the magic of, you know, not just logo slapping. But like knowing that I'm going to make sure a product matches PMS 166, which is one of our college colors here in SoCal, or PMS 2185, and knowing that like when they send an order to us, we are the people that are like the brand stewards or brand ambassadors for their project. And they don't need to worry about that because I'm sitting here with my Pantone capture device ready to color check anything that you can throw at me.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Before we get into— I want to get into your, your background because you've had some pretty harrowing setbacks in your career that we'll unpack in this episode. But I want to ask you real quick at the front end of the episode about Commenscue and your business. What was the most surprising benefit that you didn't expect when you joined Commenscue?

So not to get too much into my background, but, you know, I was very familiar with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop for my prior roles. And so when I I mean, I describe it as falling into this business. When I fell into this business, that was where I went because I needed to be able to create an estimate really, really quickly. And you think of all of these things that as a first-year distributor, you don't know. You don't know what CommonSKU is. You don't know what any of the other softwares are. You just know what you know at that point. And so that's what I knew. And I remember I had to do a training video for Corey. Where it looks like a Twitch streamer for me, like my little face in the corner and my screen up front. And it's 15 minutes to set up a product properly in QuickBooks Online to take like Sage data on one side or Distributor Central data on one side or ASI and then put it into QuickBooks over here. And I knew that that was utterly unscalable. Yeah. And that was our process because that's all I knew at that point. When I saw how CommonSKU brings in so many diverse data feeds to like, if you're an ASI person, it brings in ASI. If you're a DC person, brings in DC. If you're a Sage person, you know, you can bring in all that stuff to just run because we were like kind of crawling.

Yeah.

You know, the idea of like, oh gosh, I've never sold XYZ product before. That means I have to set up the product in QuickBooks. That's going to add 15 minutes. To this project. And that's not— that time is not even creating the estimate or sending it to the client with like a background of why the product is. You're in 30 minutes just to send an estimate. And I watch— I remind myself with these videos and I watch them every once in a while and I like, I'm like, thank you, CommonSkill, my process.

What has been the strongest benefit managing a stronger team?

So, and this was something I didn't have the, you know, that whole thing of you don't know what you don't know.

Yeah.

When we started and I remember I jumped on the webinar with Kareem 2 and a half years ago.

Yeah.

And I was like, Kareem, I can save you the morning and I'm going to be your easiest sale of the day. Just tell me where to put in my credit card number. I've watched every video on YouTube that Common Skews put out. I've sold myself.

Right.

And like, I'm ready to go. Like, let's do the onboarding today. And so that was really the process. But at that point, when I was like a one-user CommonsCue client, I didn't realize the immense benefits of that connectivity, not just to the external industry data feeds, but internally where I can assign a task with today's date to any one of our 11. I mean, I think we're up to 12 users on CommonsCue now. For every team member. I can assign a task. I can see sales forecasts for everybody for the team. I can see who's converting estimates to sales orders. I can see who's converting sales orders to invoices. And the internal data and the internal just connectivity, being a completely remote work from home company for everybody spread across two continents, that, that native connectivity internally was something that I didn't really have the appreciation for when I first started to know this thing's going to grow with me because you don't know you have that need until you have the need.

Yeah.

And then you find out like in another software, oh no, you can't really tag a team member. That's not how the software works.

As a leader, how does that help you create a stronger future? Does it give you bigger visibility? What is it that enables you to do as a leader?

It, it's helping me do probably my biggest personal improvement area, which is get out of the weeds because again, it's great if I'm in front of a client and I can recite their brand guide and their PMS values. Yeah, but that cuts the other way too, where I'm in that and I'm seeing like, no, Dallas to Virginia is 3 days in transit. You need to upgrade this to 2-day air.. And when you're in the weeds, like very many distributors who start as solopreneurs find it very difficult to get out of. Yeah, that the connectivity allows me to say I don't have to deal with this problem right now myself. I can tag Corey or Jill or Waleska or somebody else on the team to say I need help with this. This is a task for tomorrow.

You have one of the most resilient stories, because you faced a series of setbacks in your career as an entrepreneur. Take us back to— you were in franchising before, so right before 2008, you invested in a franchise. And then, of course, we all know what happened in 2008. For those that are new to the business, 2008 was the massive recession that hit. Shortly after, the corporate office of the franchisor decided to reopen and hired you. But paint us a brief picture of what that experience was like.

Yeah. So I graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 2006 with a degree in entrepreneurship. I use that degree every day. If any college kids are thinking about a degree option or high school kids stumble across this video, I love that degree option. It is the Swiss Army knife of a business program. If your school offers it, it's a great option no matter what direction you want to go, because it'll teach you everything. A college can teach you about entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

And but I walked the stage with my little stole and my whole cap and gown and the whole thing in escrow to buy into a national cookie franchise that at that point had 300 stores and I think 30 in California. And this was an existing store that had been in operation for 20 years and it was just retirement time for the owner. And I was like, there were some family connections who we knew the store, we knew the owner. So there's a little comfortability or familiarity, I should say. And I remember I would run up to all my professors in my senior year with all my due diligence paperwork and my P&Ls that I got from the seller. I was like, look what I'm buying. Look what I'm using my degree. And they'd look at them for— I remember Richard Kennedy is a CPA in Southern California and was my accounting professor in 2006. He looked at it for about 12 seconds and said, you're buying a $36,000 job. And I mean, to see him distill 30 years of accounting knowledge into, you know, years of a P&L, like I think it was 2004 and 2005, it would have been like the, the reporting period on those, those statements. He'd look at them for 12 seconds and just right off the cuff was like, you're buying a $36,000 job because he could just see that. And he looks at this stuff all day and he knows. And I'm like, it's 2006, I can grow it. There's a lot of upward mobility I could see, an opportunity that was kind of untapped in that market and that business. And that's really where I started from. In hindsight, I wish I would have listened to him.

But you have this evergreen optimism. The entrepreneur has an evergreen optimism that they are going to grow. And you're probably thinking that's just the beginning. How did that inform— like, what was the most valuable lesson from the setbacks that you apply today as a promotional products distributor?

Um, I— if I had— it's, it's hard to distill it down because there's internal, like, HR-type lessons, there's external customer-type lessons, there's vendor, there's credit, there's financial, like, lenses that you can answer that question through. I think that the biggest thing that I took away from that experience is if you can solve a customer's problem, you will always be busy. And if you can really drill down, and this is an interpersonal communication skill that I work on every day. You know, 75% of our buyers right now are female. So I make a point to like, I might, when I'm chatting with you and Mark at the SACS show or the dinner party when I last saw you in person, I might like, we might have a banter back and forth where I cut you off and try to add something mid-sentence. But for a lot of our buyers, I make a point to not cut anyone off. Because I know that this is a trigger for them. So this interpersonal communication thing, because this is a retail store for the cookie store. So this was something that you were talking to people on the phone or in person. And it really like sharpens that tool. If you think of like the salesperson's tools and really that learning what their problem is and striving to truly solve that problem, not thinking about it from the perspective of this is my array of solutions, but making sure that you understand their problem and I'm going to bring this solution to bear on their problem. Yeah, it's not so much what's my catalog of options, like, here's my catalog, let me know what you like, right? Tackling that problem from a different perspective, from the client perspective. Yeah.

If you were to talk to Ryan, you know, then from the vantage point of where you're at today, how would you encourage him? Or what would you say to a fellow entrepreneur today who is struggling, particularly a distributor, in the face of adversity like that?

You know, you hinted at it a minute ago. The evergreen optimism is something that I think every entrepreneur has to have. And the more entrepreneurs that I talk to in every industry, vertical, every category there, you have to be able to manage like that battle between your ears. I've heard it put different ways in a bunch of different, you know, blogs and books and stuff. But, you know, that the external world just is what it is. And the internal world, like your own brain, is, I think, where people get hung up the most. And if you can't get yourself out of that mentality, you need to do something to change that because there has to be like a fire in people who want to go into entrepreneurship to wake up every day, you know, and to use a— was it Gen Z we're on now? A Gen Z term like slay. Like you have to wake up and slay. Every day, whether you're tired or depressed from your sales performance yesterday or, you know, my first sales job was selling newspapers in Los Angeles door to door to get through my first 2 years of college. Yeah. And you get enough doors slammed in your face, you learn how to not let those doors affect your next door, right? That was kind of a crucible for me in my sales career.

Kind of have a series of questions I want to ask you about a very unique compensation structure you have. But before I get to that, and this ties into it a little bit, Did that experience with that professor being able to glance at that P&L and look at that net profit and tell you you had a $36,000 job, did that change the way you can look at your own bottom line after that franchise experience?

I think that the, the biggest, you know, as somebody who, who was just literally graduating with a degree, right, that thing that they say they do as opposed to actually have done it, and that what I didn't realize was such a far separation between those two concepts. I think that the biggest takeaway from that conversation was it wasn't the nominal number at the bottom of the page. It was how that person, the prior owner, was working, what they were doing on a day-to-day basis to derive that number.

I see.

And it was, you know, in the cookie business, they talk— or really entrepreneurship in general— they talk about working in your business versus on your business. And this was— that every dollar of that was working in the business. Where it's like if there was a delivery on their way home, which I did too, like I fell into the same trap every day. If there was a delivery on the way home or on the way into the office or the cookie store from where I lived, I would take it home with me the night before and deliver it on my way into work. So it was an early delivery and that was a great thing for everybody, but it wasn't my superpower. Like, right, you still don't need to be delivering cookies. Yeah. You know, and the prior owner decorated a lot of cookies and she was a fantastic decorator. And in that franchise, a lot of the owners are fantastic decorators, but I would challenge them when I was in within that owner cadre of people, I would challenge them to say like, what kind of like the cookies look fantastic that you hand decorated, but what kind of marketing have you done today? Like what kind of new clients have you gone after? Yeah. These are really just bakers who are very artistic and very creative. And that section of their brain is very different than the stuff I was talking about.

Classic entrepreneurial challenge and story. Now, at Sku Camp, you're going to unpack a really interesting topic. You looked at the industry and you thought, you know what, we're going to do compensation a little bit different. Can you share a little bit about your unique compensation plan? Maybe give us a glimpse of it here on the SkuCast?

Yeah, I don't want to steal my own thunder from September. Right. I'm looking forward to my first time at SKU Camp, but yes, the, at Radar Promotions, we don't have any outside reps. So that's kind of the headline and everyone is a salaried employee. And with that, no, nobody has a book of business. Nobody has, this is my client, you know, all of these very common industry things that the rest of the industry deals with. And so that has created a, a culture and a comp plan that kind of are the same side or different sides of the same coin where we are all bonused off of the same number every month. So while our administrative services director, while not directly like involved in sales, she is very client-facing in terms of accounts receivable and on the vendor side, accounts payable. And a lot of stuff that it touches customers, but she's not selling. Right. With that said, she's bonused off of the same number the salespeople are, which is, you know, our forecasted number for, say, June that we're in right now. We're all shooting for that same number. I don't have like my forecast and Jill doesn't have her forecast over in Florida. It's just one number for everybody, which is just the, the June forecasted portion of our 2024 number.

That, that's really cool.

So everybody on the team, is that quarterly? Is that annual?

How does that work? It's monthly because I worked under a quarterly bonus structure at the— probably my favorite employee relationship I've ever had in my career. And but it was a quarterly bonus structure and it was a singular sales target for just me that I was responsible for individually. I could draw on company resources to hit that goal. But for the most part, here's your quota, go meet it. And if you do, you get a bonus. Yeah.

Is that—

is that— how have you seen this change your team? How does it— how's it really impacted the way they help move the business forward?

And this is something that it was definitely a failure point when I kind of dreamed up this idea of a singular bonus and a team-wide bonus, which— and I didn't get to say it, but it's basically 1% or 2% of your annual pay is that monthly bonus. So it's also self-adjusting based on where the person is in the company. You know, a new beginning team member, it's still 1% versus Jill, our vice president of swag. It's still 1% of her annual pay. It's a larger nominal amount, but it's the same percentage, right?

If you hit—

if you hit goal for the month. Exactly. Yeah. And What I didn't, when I dreamt this up as just this creative solution for something I'm trying to do, I didn't think about the internal effect or aftereffect or takeaways that it would leave the team with, which is this immense sense of collaboration. Just this morning, I got a message from somebody on the team that realized that we missed a split shipping file that a client sent to us and sent everything to the one place. And while not, I mean, the sale amount won't change in that example, but that person was asking for help. Like, what do I do? It's like, you know, we're going to do some shipping labels. We're going to schedule a FedEx pickup. There's stuff we can do and work together as a team. I have no idea who the client was for that project. I just hear that there's a problem and the team member needs help. And that is the culture that I'm trying to foster here. Is that while I don't like everybody just running to me with problems, and that is a frustration for every business owner, right? Like, I want these people to feel empowered to solve their own problems. But if they've never had that problem come up before, how could I ever expect them to know how to fix it? Yeah. So it also leans into the training side. So yeah, the internal culture is something that has been really unique because there is, it's not you, it's not these little mercenaries, which is what it's become. Yeah.

Yeah.

It creates mercenaries and hierarchies, right?

Yeah, right. Well, you have these, these kind of these field guys or gals that are out just selling all day towards their quota, which if that's the company culture and goals that you're trying to hit and you can just add up 10 people's quotas to equal the company quota, it works. But there are these unintended consequences of that type of comp plan where you, you lose that because, you know, Joe and Sally could have neighboring territories, but Sally has zero incentive and actually a disincentive to help Joe, and vice versa. That's a good point. Their limitation is time and their capacity. Yeah, it's like, I got my quota hit, Sally, I can't help you.

Yeah, could possibly at the worst create combative, combative rather than collaborative energy around there. With our last 4 minutes, thanks for sharing that, Ryan. And for those that are listening, Ryan's going to unpack more of this at SKU Camp, so we'll get more details there. With our last few minutes here, what excites you the most about the business as you look forward?

And this is really— probably comes off really selfishly, but I'm okay to share that with my fellow SKU community. And that is this infinite scalability. And, you know, in the cookie business, I knew I was limited by 1,600 square feet, the number of hours in a day, and how big my oven was. You know, those were like the limiting factors of how fast I could bake and decorate cookies. Here, there is this, you know, as, as we've grown it, I think 900% over the past 3 years, there's this kind of trajectory that we can keep up with that trajectory. It's going to be really, really hard because running a really successful $500,000 distributorship is very different than a $5 million distributorship. But we're trying. And that scalability thing is something that is a big focus for me to make sure that we can preserve why we're growing the way we are in that nth sales dollar as opposed to the first sales dollar.

Yeah.

What do you, what do you enjoy doing when you're not working?

So one of my favorite hobbies, and I haven't gotten to do it lately, is competitive shooting. And last one I was at, I think I ranked in the top 25% of shooters in that like group. It's amazing. And so that's like one of my favorite hobbies. I, I still have a piece of lead in my forehead from a ricochet. Maybe the day before SKU Camp, I'll have the plastic surgeon take that out of my forehead, and there'll be a really cool story about what happened to my forehead.

I've been skeet shooting many times. It's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun.

What— last question— and what book, podcast, video, movie has made the most impact on your thinking lately? It can be personal, it can be professional.

So I'm a big Audible fan. I can't listen to Audible or anything that requires me to like really focus on the content while I'm working. So I listen to music, which is much more passive for me, but like I try to go on a walk every morning. And so I listen to Audible right now. I'm on Super Communicators, which is really fascinating stuff about breaking down how to communicate from one person to another. The The section I'm on right now is a doctor who was having problems talking to their patients about the COVID vaccines during the pandemic. And this was like the, the way he approached these conversations in the beginning of vaccine hesitancy and what he learned through that process of actually being in a room with parents or people who were talking about the vaccine or parents of their children. Fascinating stuff for me because starts to make me think, what do I say to clients or vendors or colleagues in the industry that trigger resistance to have a dialogue with me or to be forthcoming with me or, you know, whatever the problem is, how can I improve that? Again, I'm always trying to like sharpen that tool. Yeah. The other stuff I really like, anything from Grant Cardone, if you guys listen to him, one of his biggest takeaways, and hopefully he doesn't bang me with something like trademark problems here, but when he says like, success is my duty. That stuff is, I think, what people need to hear right now, where it's not selfish, it's not like pro-capitalist or any of this other stuff. It's like people rely on you to perform and you need to do that. Your family, your team members, your employees, whoever you are in the world, somebody relies on you. So that success thing, like, yeah, we're staying flat this quarter. I'm just happy to stay flat. We will— I will never say that. Yeah, like if we're like, if you're not growing, you're dying. That's a big thing for me, clearly. And movie side, like War Dogs with Jonah Hill, Wolf of Wall Street, and The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard are my 3 favorite movies. They're all about business or sales. They're kind of crude, but if you can get through the crudeness, there's some nuggets in there. Like the War Dogs thing where they just saw this like government contracting business. And they were like, you know, they said all the big defense companies go after the whales. We go to the bottom of the Excel file and we're like going for the crumbs. But the crumbs— and that's exactly the word they use— the crumbs are $100,000 contracts. Yeah. And I love that, the scrappiness of that movie and that story. They all ended up in prison, but that's a separate part of that. Within the industry, Jenna Quaranta, at HPG and her field sales academy. Yeah, the stuff she's doing there is fire. That is like when I talk to industry people, I want to just like fellow distributors. Yeah. That I find difficult to find peers with because it's like, how do you— who do I talk to to say, how did you deal with 74% growth in 2023? Yeah. And I'm like the John Travolta meme looking around like, who can I talk to? There's not a lot of people. So when I talk to colleagues, I want to just bring Jenna over every time and say, talk to this person. She has all these answers about how you tackle markets, how, like, what is your focus? How should you approach a client? This stuff that she's doing, and it's almost all the content is put out for free on Instagram. She does have a paid subscription that is totally worth it. And outside of that, more on the Instagram world, Jeremy Minor. Is the 7th Level Sales Coach or Academy. The stuff he's talking about, about tonality and communication styles with clients, like in person or verbally over the phone, is so interesting to me because this, like the psychological side of selling is very fascinating for me. And I love learning about that whenever I can.

Yep.

Those are awesome resources. Ryan and Jenna's amazing. Ryan, thank you, my friend, for joining us for this brief conversation. I know we could have unpacked a a whole lot more because we have a lot more to talk about, but we'll do that at SKU Camp. And thanks for being willing to share your comp plan and other details at SKU Camp. So I'll see you this fall.

Thanks, Bobby. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes, questions, or to our blog at community.commskew.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.