Episode 358: Imprint Engine's Global Playbook for Promo

Foreign.

They started with two folding chairs, a Google spreadsheet, and now over $150 million later in lifetime revenue. They've built a unified brand experience across four continents. On today's show, we're exploring how Imprint Engine is rewriting the rules of what a modern distributor looks like. Welcome to the SKU Cast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehue. I'm glad you're here. Caleb Gilbertson co founded Imprinegin in 2012 with Travis Viet out of a tiny apartment in Minneapolis. Today, Caleb's CEO of a tech Forward global distributor with offices in Dublin, India and soon Australia. Colin Loughran is Imprint Engine's newly appointed Global Chief Revenue Officer, bringing over two decades of experience across the distributor, supplier and consulting sides of the industry. Now leading revenue strategy from Dublin, we connected with Caleb and Colin at PPAI's expo in January and recorded this in a suite at the Mandalay Bay. We talk about their bold global expansion strategy and why most distributors are getting global wrong, how they're deploying AI across the organization, from department champions to workflow automation and where AI is not quite ready yet. Also, we talk about building leadership culture and a team based selling model as you scale from startup to enterprise. Today's episode is brought to you courtesy

of us at Commonsku.

Over 900 distributors powering 1.8 billion in network volume rely on Commonsku's connected workflow, process more orders, connect your team and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonscue.com now. Here's my chat from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with Caleb and Colin.

Colin and Caleb, welcome.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. This is awesome to have you guys here. Appreciate it. And Vegas, this beautiful view behind us, gorgeous light, It's a beautiful day and I can't believe I get to kick off my week talking to you guys. What an exciting time.

Likewise.

We have so much to unpack. We're going to start Caleb with you because you were on skewcast in April 2022, as we know, and 50 million in revenue. What's the biggest change in the last three years at Imprint Engine?

There's been a lot of change. We've grown. I think we're probably north of 150 million in lifetime revenue now. Our team's twice the size it was, I think, when we talked last time. Our Dublin team has grown significantly. I think we were kind of just starting to launch the Dublin office when we talked last time and now we're probably Close to getting up to 20 people and it's now getting close to 30% of our revenue. It's been a lot. And that was kind of right after Covid too. We were still trying to figure out where the world was going to go. So I feel like the industry's normalized a lot more than it was at that time. And we've grown our leadership team a significant amount as well. Like Colin joining recently has been huge. Mike Schwant probably seen our content evolve a ton in the last couple years.

The videos have been amazing.

Yeah, that's a product of his genius. So, yeah, it feels like we're a different company than we were.

Yeah, I covered this in my intro, kind of an overview of it. But let's hear from you. The scope of Imprint engine now. Locations. We have Dublin. We're about to get into this part of the conversation with Dublin. You're also thinking of growing in other markets. What's the footprint look like?

Yeah, so right now like global headquarters, Minneapolis for North America. Dublin is our EMEA headquarters. And then we in the last couple years launched India. So we're using India as our hub for apac. But then now explain apac. Apac. So Australia, Asia Pacific. Okay, so India has been great. It's been a very interesting market. We went there because it's a very tough market. We like to solve hard problems. So we picked probably one of the hardest. It was definitely a challenge to get set up, but we've been finding a lot of success there, growing our customer base there. It's been very educational but also exciting. And it's also a very fascinating market. People are unbelievable. And then Australia is next. So we're launching Australia this quarter and that's kind of the next map on the.

Yeah.

Is India more both for clients and sourcing and then is Australia more for revenue growth or do you not even distinguish between the two?

It's both for sure. We went into India primarily for sales and revenue and to support our customers. But that did require us to set up in the India supply chain, which is a lot less mature than it is in the US unless you're doing large scale manufacturing. So there isn't a ASI or SAGE in India. It's a lot of small mom and pops and there are big textile manufacturers there. But yeah, there's not that, hey, I need 100, you know, mugs tomorrow. Like that doesn't really exist. So we did have to work on supply chain set up there. And then Australia is a little bit more of a mature Market, I think, at least at this point, we think it'll be a little bit easier to enter. It's much more strategic. We really have always followed customer demand, so that's why we're in Europe.

I see. Yeah.

And that's why I went to India.

Right.

We look at our customers and where they're located and where is their opportunity to support them better. And Australia was that next move. And we'll see where we go from there.

So speaking of expanding, we meet Colin from Dublin. And Colin and I know each other. We met in Vienna last year. So for folks that are listening and watching, we also have a mutual mentor, Rod Brown. Many people who are listening and watching also know Rod. But for this connection to happen is pretty amazing because you have this grow. Were you doing fulfillment primarily in Dublin?

Is that.

Was that core? That's what we started to do there back in, like, 2018. Ish.

Okay.

So, yeah, we started just doing fulfillment, and then we slowly took on more risk and started to build our team up there. And that was around when we talked last time, in 2022, I think April 2022, when we launched, like, our official team. Okay.

And Colin, you have had both experience working with distributors and suppliers. You were a supplier for some time. And then, of course, you've been leading gxn, a global network of professionals.

Well, just a correction, I'm not leading the gxn.

Michael.

Michael Frater leads the name, the gxn, which is, I think, one of the best networks.

But you were involved.

I'm involved, yes. I'm a brand ambassador for the gx.

That's where I got it.

Yes, exactly.

So this is a switch for you. You were. You were like, I'm good in the consulting lane. I want to do that. And then what was it that appealed to you about Imprint Engine?

Yeah, well, I started off actually in the distributor side, but if you even go back before that, I was a buyer of promotional products. And so then I went to the distributor side 10 years. And then I went to Gold Star for 10 years. Then I was consulting. And I didn't really just go decide to go back to be a distributor. I was very attracted by Imprint Engine. Yeah, that's the reason why I moved back to the distributor side. And again, it's only been six weeks for me. I joined the team. But whenever I, you know, I was introduced to Caleb by Jeff Solomon. And so, yeah, when I looked at Imprint Engine, I was surprised that I didn't know them before. Number one, but.

Right.

Number two. And you Know this imprint engine is not a traditional distributor. Right. It's a very modern kind of tech forward global platform bringing together technology, logistics, unbelievable creativity and you know, this real true global service. So I hadn't seen anything like that in the industry. I got super attracted at Endprint Engine. I got genuinely excited by the project and I felt like my previous experience could help me to help this team to achieve their goals.

Yeah.

So you were distributor supplier. You had significant experience in both but you weren't planning on getting back in the distributor business until you saw what imprinted.

I had no interest. I was inspired, absolutely 100%. I was not planning to do this at all. And when I saw the company, I saw also Caleb. Like his vision is very exciting. He's just got a really unique vision for the future of our industry and I really believed in it and so that's the reason why I moved to the distributor side.

Again, tell us a little bit about this move to deciding we need a chief revenue officer because this is a global chief revenue officer. That's unique.

Yeah. I mean it's very intentional to bring in this position at the global level. One we've been so US centric. We started in the US large portion of our revenues in the US We've got great revenue leaders regionally and I had been managing them which is yeah, a lot of work. And you know, I think I know for where we want to take the company. I really need to be able to focus on the technology side of the business.

Yeah.

And I can't do that while I'm managing all the revenue leaders. And quite frankly I didn't think anybody like Colin existed. Like I was like, is there someone that has so much experience on the distributor side and the supplier side is networked globally, understands the cultural nuances in these different regions. I just didn't think that existed. And I think I've told you this call but I think I knew pretty much like the moment I met you. Like this is the guy that I think we need on the team that could be the leader for our global revenue teams and really help us integrate the global teams. And him being in Dublin I think is just going to really help enforce that global vision that we've been trying to instill into our team versus having everything be so US driven. And I think we're already seeing that it's forcing all of our teams to think globally which is our vision is to be a distributor that has one global unified brand experience for our customers. So that was kind of the real big Driver behind it.

Often our customers, particularly the larger you get as a distributor, your clients end up forming a bit of your unique value proposition based on what they're asking. So you have these incredible clients, like just top tier clients. I've dropped names now everyone would know who they are. I always like to ask, you know, did you choose that direction to go or did clients choose it for you? Is it a little bit of both?

I think it was a little bit of both. I mean really Uber being our first like big customer, that really drove a lot of our current infrastructure today and their global needs. Really, that was where we cut our teeth learning about it. But I think that's where we saw the need as well for these big global brands don't really have one company that can execute their needs consistently. There's tons of partner networks and partnerships are great and all, but like there's, it's not one unified experience. Even some of the bigger distributors, they're all global. They may have global offices, but what I've observed is they're not well integrated and they're not running like one cohesive team. That's really what we want. Yeah, we want our customer to experience the same thing anywhere they are in the world. And I think something that gets me excited is going from a small distributor to how do I keep getting excited about this business. I think about what is the next big problem we could solve, where can we evolve to that? And it's building the next phase of the company.

Yeah. Colin, tell us about that global opportunity. Because North America has such a massive spend in just the merchant promo space compared to other countries. Relative, I think it's California has like the fourth or fifth biggest economy when you compare all the countries in the US So but my ignorance, I'm just very North American because that's always been where I've Ben, I would never had a global vision like Caleb did. Tell us about that global opportunity. What do you see as someone who lives in Dublin and has worked with all these companies globally? Because what I thought I saw was global companies going, we need to come into the US because that's where the revenue is. But you're doing a little bit of reversal here. You're going no. Is that because the flatness of the world?

I think the industry in North America is 26 billion. There's a number that I'm hearing a lot in Europe it's about 14 billion. I don't have the numbers for outside Europe, but there is definitely a big opportunity there. And I think for the Global enterprises, the NPRINT engine works with. They are increasingly needing their complex businesses. They increasingly need a global solution even to work with the companies in the future. In North America, you need to have a presence in Europe, you need to have a presence in these other markets

and you have local knowledge.

You need to know how to do it. And to Caleb's point, it needs to be. It needs to be integrated. So I think that's the opportunity.

Yeah.

And the nuances of trade and infrastructure and just the economies that are so different there and all that's got to be significant. It's a fantastic growth opportunity for you guys. How does it feel? Is that hard as a leader to sort of let go? Are you more. I know how you feel about tech.

So is it more? No.

I'm so glad to be partial.

I am extremely excited to offload the revenue management side of the business. And not that I don't like it. I've actually, you know, I've. I love selling customers. I love the creative aspect of being a distributor. That's why I'm still in it. That keeps me going. But I can't do it all. And, you know, I think I am extremely passionate about technology and I do think that the time is now to, you know, whether it's using AI or whatever, any other piece of technology, I'm beyond ready to kind of let go and shift my mind, which I'm still. I was just telling Colin, kind of trying to clear out the cobwebs or, you know, and letting go of things. He's been really great at just kind of pulling stuff out of me. Yeah. And I'm also surrounded by a great team that's good at trying to. Hey, Caleb. Got this. But I've learned to better at delegating over the years and.

But it seems like expanding your leadership team is a massive step up for distributors who are trying to grow. Where we see a lot of distributors in this advanced category, they're trying to grow into this enterprise category. But it's that particular aspect that's both difficult. A few tips you have for folks as they're looking to do that.

Yeah. I mean, it just. You got to be very intentional. I've learned from making bad hires over the years. And I think building your executive team up, you gotta really look for what areas you can delegate and like. And they're like, we use eos and there's this whole delegate and elevate thing. If I look back 10, 12 years ago, like back when I was doing everything, and if I just the list of things I would love to delegate was super long. I think over the last decade it's just been slowly moving stuff into that delegated out. So I think that's kind of step one. Like what are you doing today that you don't like doing? That should be the first thing you start to look for somebody that you can delegate to.

Yeah.

Over the years as I've done that, you start to see, okay, I delegated marketing out, I delegated operations out. As you do that successfully and maybe you won't do it the first time you start to. That's why I'm excited for the next, you know, year where I, where I'm delegating this really big important part of our business off to see now where I can like able to focus on the thing that I love.

So that's great advice. I want to go back one second to global and then we're going to get into AI. But where's the real opportunity in global right now? Do you see that in terms of countries? Do you still see very North American driven presence or do you not think of it that way? And then maybe I have a second question is where do you see still tension in supply chain? Which is a very broad question Colin.

Sorry for that one. Okay, so I do think the opportunity is global but I do think also that the majority of the business nprint engine was set up in North America. So that's where the majority of the business will probably always be. And it's where the new opportunities, the new growth opportunities will arise. But it's about servicing those opportunities globally and leveraging our global footprint. And that's where the biggest opportunity I think will come for us. And I think you mentioned something about the tension in the supply chain.

Yeah.

So basically our enterprise clients want a global solution. Right. And the tension in the supply chain is that it was never really set up for that. Right. So if you think about our supply chain, people are great in North America, some people are great in maybe even UK or France or Germany or whatever. But there aren't many companies who are thinking globally, supply and distributor really properly thinking properly about this kind of joined up thinking. But there are some and I think the companies who will win in the future won't be the ones who are necessarily the cheapest or the fastest. But if they're thinking connected and thinking global opportunity, that's where the big opportunity at least for Imprint Engine in my mind lies in the future.

Caleb, you mentioned something about there's a broken global system that distributors are Sort of using now, which means they're just sourcing in different countries. But it's not an interconnected, unified way of doing business.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's where a lot of the bigger distributors are operating in right now. They're partnering with other distributors in other regions and working on these global programs. But it's, it's not one unified system, which for me, I'm surprised by that. You look at some of the, literally the top five biggest companies in the industry and you know, they're, they have global offices, there's massive organizations, but they're surprisingly not that integrated, at least from what I understand. And the feedback I get from customers and that's the opportunity I see is really having that consistent experience. And that's going to involve having good technology that really meets the regional supply chain partners where they are. Because again, like, India doesn't have an ASI or all that. So tying everything together is going to be a big challenge, but also a big opportunity.

Cool.

Let's talk a little bit about AI, which I know we are like chomping at the bits of talk about this. We were talking about it before the camera started rolling. We'll keep talking. Where do you see AI making the biggest impact for Imprint Engine over the next 12 months?

For imprint Engine, we've been really intentional about doing workflow analyzation, or I don't know if that's the best word to use, but we literally have gone through and created a champion in every department and started analyzing everyone's workflow and really trying to figure out what are those tasks that could be automated, whether it's AI or just like workflow improvement.

Yeah.

So you have a champion in every department just for workflow improvements.

Yeah. Or just general. We want an expert in every department that everybody on the team can go to and say, how do I use AI to make my life better? And they're kind of becoming that subject matter expert with AI in that specific department. So we've taken them through some exercises and we're really, now we're quantifying all those opportunities, like analyzing every task that happens. You know, can this be automated? Where can it be automated in the process? And then how much does that cost? Like, where's the return on investment? If we were to invest a million dollars into this department to automate these workflows, what's the ROI on that? Are we going to save a salesperson 50% of their time in three years? Like, that's much easier to quantify. And I think this last year has been obviously upskilling our team a lot of education. We want to make sure put the basic tools, access to Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude getting into their hands the basics of prompting, all that stuff like got to do that as like the bare minimum. And then now we're actually starting to implement fine tuned whether it's agents or simple tasks that we can using AI to actually do a piece of the work in the process. Yeah, and again it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole and like waste time. So that's a big, that's going to be a big piece of where I'm going to focus. A lot of my energy is making sure we are investing in the right areas versus if you can't, you can't do it all at once as well.

So yeah, there is a lot of experimentation time that it takes. I talk about that in my presentation this afternoon that how much time you have to spend doing so wisely. So you've allocated that responsibility to a group of folks that can group think that AI and I imagine these folks will roll up to respond to you and that's pretty cool. You co founded Merch AI. What do you see as the biggest opportunity in promo right now that most

people are missing using merch AI? No, I think, I mean like AI is great at doing all the major LLMs are great at doing general tasks and I think if you learn how to prompt really well you can do certain things. But I think scaling that up is the trickier part. Yeah, that's where I can go into Nano Banana and I can get a simple mockup done by myself, you know, pretty easily and it's not that difficult, but trying to do that with 500 products in an efficient amount of time. I think that's why one of the things Mercury is trying to do is it's really enabling people, simplifying it and the industry generally is slow to adopt new technology. And I think part of that is because sometimes technology is complex. So trying to keep it simple and make it very accessible for people to utilize this technology without having to be an expert in prompting that.

I've always maintained that distributors have a unique value prop in just knowing the intelligence of their customers and their verticals and how they buy and what they do.

Yeah.

And so you have 13 years of order data, client preferences, supplier performances.

Yeah.

How that I imagine in your head is becoming a huge competitive asset as you look at using AI for analysis.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's a big Piece of the future, I think, for all distributors is understanding your data and how to actually get good insights out of that to make decisions for your supply chain or for your customers. And there's tons of great analytic tools out there to do that. But I think you also got to look at your own business, though, too, because not every distributor is the same, so there's not like a easy button to just get it. You got to look at. All right, what are we trying to do? Are we trying to grow program business? And if we're trying to do that, we got to look at all of our programs and look at the profile of those customers and figure out what's actually working, and then take that and try to go sell some more customers that are fitting that profile. It's an art.

Yeah.

It's not just a.

Not an exact science.

Not an exact science.

Where is AI not ready yet. Where do you see? Despite the hype that's going on with AI and we're all so GoPro AI.

Yeah.

But where's it not ready yet?

There's still a lot of hallucinations that happen depending on what you're doing. The insights I get from the Merch AI team, especially on imaging, like, it's really, like, it's so exciting. You're like, oh, I can generate this image super, like, quickly and easily, but they still hallucinate so easily. And I think in our industry, especially where products need to be a little more exact, you're like, hey, I want to create a. A red crewneck sweatshirt. It'll generate that look great. But if it's like, hey, I want to generate this Bella Canvas 3001 CVC. Right. You know, and I want it to have this background, and I want this logo to be on it. Like, doing that at scale is much more difficult. And that's just like, apparel is actually probably one of the easier things. Like once you get into a folding chair or something like that, like, where there's a lot more complexity in the product, it's not there yet. Where. Unless you have very, very advanced prompts that can really fight against those. Those hallucinations to. Right. You could definitely do it at a small scale. Like, you sit there for a couple hours or maybe 30 minutes and prompt and get what you want. But trying to do that with a full supplier catalog is. Yeah, yeah.

The inconsistencies, too, right now are just one of the hardest parts of the imagery is just that one day it can be brilliant, the next day, like, what the.

Yeah. And it's. And I think the models are also changing. What's Nan and Banana one week and then ChatGPT released their new image model. And yeah, so it's kind of like constantly checking all of those and seeing what works. And I think they're going to keep getting better, I think. But today for our industry, that's where people get the most excited is the imaging. Obviously, like data analysis and stuff like that is great too, but that is getting a little bit more commoditized. Like analyzing a spreadsheet is a little bit easier than an image and like visuals. So, yeah, I think it's not quite there yet. And where we will see it the most in our industry in the next year will be around, like analytics stuff and predictive stuff around inventory or on the sales side. It's great for you. Get a new lead. You can know everything about a company super quickly. Some of those sales and marketing tools are. There's tons of options there. And you can kind of see the categories where the AI applications have, you know, kind of boomed the most. It's like sales marketing, CRM tools, outreach. Yeah. Legal accounting. Some of those areas that are very data driven. I feel like those are going.

Yeah.

Much faster than others.

So a lot of sales insights, sales intelligence, forecasting, deal reviews. And I'm sure you're already using AI for RFPs that come in to analyze your strengths versus the RFP.

Yeah, absolutely.

How do you distinguish between doing AI for show versus AI that actually helps run the business?

I think what we've learned is you got to be a little bit careful about letting your people just like all of a sudden waste like their whole week trying to do a prompt or something like that. Like, it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole. It's exciting. But the next thing you know, you're like, hey, I didn't get any work done today because I've been prompting all day. That's the biggest thing, and that's what we try to do with our champions program, is try to get those champions as well educated as possible on how to do things and maybe give them a little more Runway and then bring it back to the team. So the team's not. The whole team's not experimenting. You got a few people experimenting and then bringing it back and help you avoid a little bit of that prompting sprawl or whatever. The. Whatever. Yeah, you can just. Which I've done it myself where all of a sudden I'm like, oh, it's. I've not checked my email. I've been Prompting all morning, but I had fun while I was doing it. Yeah, it's like a video game.

Well, Caleb, to you and Travis, congratulations. You won our Distributor Entrepreneur of the Year award. That's phenomenal that we have watched you guys. And of course Mark and I were there in your facility. We've been in the Minneapolis facility. It's absolutely amazing. How has commonscue had an impact on you and what you and your sales team can do, especially given how much you've grown?

I mean, we started the business literally using a Google spreadsheet as our ledger for orders on Aaron. He still says I was the longest sales cycle prospect that he had trying to convince me to cut over, but we were, I think we're doing around 3 million in revenue when we joined Commonsku.

And now just for perspective for folks.

Yeah, over 30 million. Yeah. Okay. I mean, it's been critical to the growth of our organization and I think commonscue's done a really good job of growing the community too. I think that's something we've been proud to be a part of. It's an incredible platform for what we needed to do at the time, especially as a small distributor. I'm excited to see where it goes as the enterprise features get developed and whatnot.

But yeah, what are like some of the key things for you as a leader that made that decision? You have real time visibility, production.

Yeah, I mean, I think reporting was a key thing. Like as we were eight people and basically Trav, myself and one other salesperson, it was easy to track what people were doing. But as we started to scale the team, we needed to have visibility on who's selling what, where the POs are, who's cutting those POs. Actually having visibility to our full order life cycle, that was critical to being able to scale the business.

Yeah, something very unique to imprint Engine and that I think that myself, I just think is complementary to what commonscue has tried to do is that the industry has shifted from clients buying from a lone wolf salesperson who worked alone and may have had some support. We've talked about this. Instead you've built these nucleuses of teams and it's a team based selling model. I've always felt like Commons Q really did develop for a team based selling model. And since we've moved from these lone wolf reps into this team base, how do you think about the balance between all of that admin and selling? And how has Commons Q helped accelerate or help support that team based selling model?

It has some great features around Being able to group people together and tagging orders and whatnot, it seems so simple. But having that client rep and that order rep on every single order and knowing what they're doing and being able to report on what they're doing allows us to actually see what each team's doing, what their bandwidth is. We run KPIs every week out of common SKU to see what everyone's doing in the organization from the sales side and the production side of the business. That really helps us drive our decisions because we can kind of see what's coming or what's not coming. Yeah.

Real time data as well as sales forecasting. I mean, when Colin and I in our previous lives were distributors, there was a lot of hidden information. We didn't know you had to run reports that could take forever and they would. But so now that you can see forecasting ideas, the fact that the real time, you can get your finger on the pulse of the business today, this morning.

Yeah, exactly. Any moment I can go and see where are we at at this moment in time?

This also has a big part of not just Commons Q, but building culture has got to be a big part of how you all are thinking of growth from now on. How do you as a leader, as we segue from just Commons Q as a platform to commons you, how it both helps culture, but also just you as a leader. How do you facilitate this, create accountability and all this without, you know, with that same cultural entrepreneurial energy?

You just got to be intentional. I mean, that's like you have to actually live your core values and you got to make sure you hold your leaders accountable to living those core values.

Yeah.

When I say intentional, you have to constantly be on it. Like it's, it's very easy to drift away or one person to drift away. So if you really want to maintain those core values, like not only do I need to live them and, and constantly be looking out for them, the leadership team needs to be doing that, need to be hiring around that, firing around that. It literally something you have to constantly be paying attention to. If you get lazy with it, it will spiral and become chaotic.

Yeah. Culture is something we think it's going to happen on its own, but it's actually something you have to drive.

It's totally living and breathing.

Yeah. Colin, you saw something. What is it you saw in Impermen's culture that was so attractive to you?

I saw a real entrepreneurial flair. I saw a vision. I saw a team that is very, very talented and really wants to Grow, really push the boundaries. And it's something very new to me compared to the traditional distributors that I've always known in my experience. And so they're building something very unique there. And I really bought into that.

Yeah.

You're onboarding multiple leaders in the organization, not just roles. There's a big distinction there between just onboarding a role and onboarding leaders.

Yeah.

How do you make that distinction? How are you making sure you do that? You and Travis as the founders?

Yeah. I guess it's almost like a sixth sense. You can tell when somebody has that emotional intelligence to be a leader.

Yeah.

And even bringing Colin on like he was in the supplier side for 10 years. Of course, everyone asks the question, well, why are we bringing someone in to run our revenue team? That from. From the supplier side. Right. I knew the role needed to be filled, but what was more important than the specific industry or distributor side experience was the leadership experience. And that's really what I saw in Colin is like, I'm confident he can learn the distributor side or not learn, but maybe relearn. Relearn, Refresh yourself.

Absolutely. It's changed.

It's changed a lot. But being able to. Having the emotional intelligence to be able to lead others, I think that's. Not everybody's a good leader. And for me, I meant I make a lot of, like, gut decisions when it comes to hiring key leadership positions. And I think anytime I haven't followed my gut, I've been. It's bit me so bad. I definitely take my time too. And then it's not just a me decision as well. I try to include her, like for adding something, somebody to our leadership team. I want buy in from my other leaders. Bring calling on. I've wanted everybody to meet him. I wanted everyone to kind of click. Yeah.

We first met in June.

Yeah. Yeah.

For the first time. And we met a lot. Yeah, we talked a lot.

Wow.

And then finally joining pretty much December. Yeah.

Okay. So it took six months.

Yeah.

Yeah, we took a lot of time. Yeah, we took a lot of time.

You're now running this 100 plus person company. Somewhere around there, you've got this global footprint. What do we underestimate? This is to both of you because you run large organizations too. Colin, what do we underestimate at this phase in your growth as leaders?

It's a tough question.

One thing I can talk to from previous experience when you're running a global organization or global teams.

Yeah.

Is the different cultures. All right. And there can be so many misunderstandings based on different cultures. So I think you've got to have an understanding. It took me many years, lots of mistakes working with the Americans versus the French or the Germans or the English or the Irish or people maybe from. From Asia, India. We had people from Jamaica in previous roles. You've got to understand the nuances of people's cultures. And communication can break down over simple misunderstandings. It's really important to know what the cultural norms are. And you've got to be there. You've got to go there. This is something I've learned by mistake in the past. You've got to go to those regions, not just work there remotely. You got to go and be with them, spend time with them, because you'll not see things unless you're really there. So that's important.

Yeah. That was a big part of all of 2025 for me, was living in Dublin and spending time with that team. If I had not done that, a lot of things, I wouldn't have met Colin. That team wouldn't have been where it's at now, which is they're in a very healthy place and tremendous growth potential. Two years ago, I would have never thought I would need to do that. Yeah. Like Colin mentioned, whether it's me or him, we gotta spend time in different locations with other things we might be underestimating at this stage. To those. What does it look like to have an organization that's twice the size? What are the next levels of leadership? What are those additional layers that are gonna be needed, which we've started to think through that. But as the organization grows, even looking at the organization now compared to three years ago, we have middle management now in a lot of areas that I never thought we would need. And I think it's going to be an interesting but fun challenge to kind of build out those teams and figure out how to make sure we have that balance of growth. But management.

I agree.

There's one other point I would add to. Caleb brought all of the global leadership team together in Minnesota in December. I think it was probably the first time.

Right.

Very exciting when you get everybody from other countries into the same room. And I think that's super important too. You've got to bring the team together. That's where you build the glue that holds everybody together. So getting everybody together is crucial.

Yeah.

What's kind of astounding is this is already a very complex industry, as we all know. Now you're writing global on it. Now you're saying to me, you've got to spend time taking a lot of time build. The model that you're building is complexity upon complexity. Yeah. So kudos to you. Your definition of work has changed a little bit.

Yeah.

Doing great work. What does that mean to you now?

I probably look at it in a few different ways. There's, how much revenue are we doing? How many employees do we have? I think for me, like, good work is really helping other people grow. That's where I feel the most reward in my day to day. Like, even building the teams, like the Global Revenue Summit, it was almost surreal, like having all those people in the same room. That aspect of where I'm focusing my energy is. It's much different than writing some code today or I'm sending out a presentation or I'm closing a sale. It's very unquantifiable. You know, from a number standpoint, it's like it's a feeling. More abstract work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it's definitely. I've spent a lot more time doing that. And it's. When you haven't done that before, it's like, why am I doing this? You know, I can't quantify the value of.

Yeah.

This effort I'm putting into it. And now that I've been doing it more and more, it's. It's very clear that's where I need to keep spending a lot of my energy and. And not just me, like, also making sure our leadership team knows how to do that as well. Because it's not just about me being able to develop people. Like, they need to be able to develop people. That's where we're going to keep pushing each other as leaders to keep elevating our team, really helping everybody grow.

And on this topic, Colin, developing salespeople is one of the most important things that you can do as you're growing your business. How many give us an idea of. Since we're under this guise of culture, abstract work, doing great work. How many salespeople are now going to be going forward for the Imprint Engine brand? Or do you even think that way, given that so many leads are coming in through the web as well? So what does that footprint look like for sale, the sales team going forward?

Caleb, you might know the numbers better than me if we think about the three layers.

Yeah, I mean, I think.

And we've got so many new roles in the pipeline too.

So, yeah, I don't think we really look at it as a strictly off a number of salespeople necessarily. I mean, we definitely have a pretty good understanding of how much a salesperson can handle from a revenue standpoint. But we've also, last time we talked, we were a forever reactive company at that point. You know, we've never had. Not done marketing yet. And we've been just taking what we got. And we've now the last couple of years really moved towards our going out there and getting new customers. And that one part of that is marketing, which we focus a lot of energy on building our brand around that. But we have our account management team, which we call client success team, but we also have what we call our growth team. So now we've created a division of the company that is just fully focused on growth, whether that's acquisition, new customers, or growth and existing customers. So. Okay, I see.

It's not just business development alone.

Correct. Yeah. So we've had a business development team that's. Travis spends a lot of time in business development. We've kind of molded the clay a little bit to like have this team that's really focused on growth across the board and really even supporting growth that our client success team is managing. Because some of these big organizations have, if you look at a Microsoft or an Uber, really, the number of buyers they have is insane. They work with tons of distributors. We're not the only distributor that services them. But for us, there's tremendous growth opportunity within those accounts just by.

Yeah.

Having people focus on them. But, you know, it's finding that balance of people managing the existing programs and existing customers versus people that have the time to go deep and. Yeah. Find those new relationships.

I'm so glad you said this. This perspective is so interesting to me about the business because we typically think of revenue from a business development, new logo, growth only. Whereas what you just said. We know 85% of our business is driven by referral. And so you have new logo opportunities. What you've just unpacked is you have a hell of an opportunity with existing customers in your program because of the enterprise customers that you serve. But then you have these acquisition opportunities. So on any given day, one of those can look like an interesting. A better opportunity at the moment, depending on what it looks like. Do I have that right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. There's just different channels of growth. And that's really what we've tried to do with this new growth team is they should be thinking about all those channels and not just one. Okay, yeah.

Let's talk about the industry future. You had this really cool article called swag 2035.

Yeah.

You predicted a lot of really cool things. One of them was something I was surprised that came up because I'm surprised because we still talk about this. Potentially the walls between suppliers and distributors would be crumbling or crumbling. What do you mean by that?

I mean, I think it's already happening.

It'll be interesting to get your perspective too.

I think it's already happening on the factory direct custom stuff. You know, in the last decade you started to see a lot of distributors going direct to the factories in China versus 20 years ago. They would go through one of the traditional suppliers to go source that for them. So it's already happened on that side of the supply chain. It's happening. I mean we source stuff direct all the time and almost all of our competitors do.

Yeah.

It's become easier to interface with directly with these factories.

It's about to get so much easier.

It's exactly. AI is only making it easier. There is a high chance in my opinion that it's eventually works its way into the supplier distributor roles that are currently happening today in our industry. If I'm a supplier at some point I have an AI that can do everything a distributor does. I'm not going to need the distributor. You'll still always have those like creative distributors that are very white glove service like that. It's going to be harder and harder for those like mom and pop distributors to provide the same value that they do today. When an AI can do it faster, cheaper. Yeah, so we'll see if that happens. I think there's always an aspect of customer service that's going to exist. But 2035 is a long ways away. Who knows, we could have a robot that can pick up the phone and give you the same level of service

in an instant versus the binary relationship between the suppliers and servers, as you said over several years now, has been sort of shifting. And you've got a very unique POV on this because you've been involved with a global supplier, you've been involved as a distributor. What's your take on this? What I mean, are we. For one thing, I know we think of the world too binary. Yeah. Suppliers, distributors. What is your take on what's going to happen with the supplier distributor relationship moving forward?

Well, Caleb and I discussed it the first day we met. We kind of had similar views. Like Caleb, I see the supply chain in the Far east has been completely disrupted and also I'm seeing across the world some examples of the things changing a little bit. And there are some very big suppliers in the industry or companies in our industry who have a distributor division and a supplier division. And I'm seeing more and more of that and I think with the technology change, we're going to see more of it happen in the future. It's not going to be, it's not going to continue to be the same. But you're probably aware that as distributors, in all my 23 years in the industry, they've always been a little bit worried, is somebody going to come and take my lunch or something like that. There's this kind of paranoia. Right. I think that it's going to change in ways that we don't know. But yeah, I see it breaking down a little bit more in the future. But potentially some companies having a supply division and a distribution division, maybe more of that, it'll look different.

It sounds like those who are more flexible to what's happening are going to win.

Yes.

And the interesting thing about Imprint Engine is you have a very, very strong, unique value proposition. And that's what always. I've always felt like if a distributor has a very strong evp, then that's going to save them from a lot of that disintermediation that might have.

Yeah, yeah. I think if you're only selling commodities, you're going to get wiped out. Yeah.

We're seeing more acquisitions, more roll ups. Where does Imprint Engine Fitness? You're actively looking for other companies?

Yeah, absolutely. We've done some small acquisitions the last couple of years and we're actively looking for them and entertaining other opportunities. I think that's definitely an area for growth for us for sure. There's a lot of distributors that have great customers and great salespeople and we have physical infrastructure and technology and the global aspect of what we do, they can plug that into our system. There's instant value to be had there, for sure.

So Caleb, you've gone from two folding chairs to 100 plus employees. What do you miss and, and what do you miss about those days?

Yep.

But then what do you enjoy doing now that you really didn't know that you were going to enjoy at this phase?

What I enjoy doing now at this phase is just working with the people more. It's a different type of work. Early on it was do everything and now it's much more work with people and develop people and build a team. It's like a living organism at this point and you're constantly having to nurture it and make sure it doesn't. Yeah, one arm doesn't die. And so I really enjoy that aspect of it. I recently listened to a podcast with the CEO of Nvidia it's something that's struck a chord with me. He was asked, how do you work today now being so successful compared to when you were almost bankrupt multiple times? And he said, honestly, I wake up every single day in fear that the company is going to be shut down and we're going to go bankrupt tomorrow.

Yeah.

And I was like, you know what? That's how I operate. I literally like every day. And I think that's a tricky thing for any entrepreneur is like, being able to shut it off is so difficult. Yeah. And I never really thought about it that way, but I have that same we might die tomorrow feeling that I did when we were two people just like trying to figure it out. I still have that today. I don't know if that's ever going to go away. And I listen to that CEO of Nvidia, you know, he's, yeah, you're doing great. But also, do I want that to go away? Maybe not.

Yeah. I've heard that from more CEOs that that peak is where they're actually more worried at their peak than they were in those early days when they had very low risk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So when you were at 3 million, did how did you envision this would play out? This is a pretty amazing story.

Not at all. To be super honest, I never thought this could be more than a few million dollar.

Yeah.

Company. That was probably just me being naive and not understanding the industry at the time. At that point, it was kind of just a fun project. As it started to grow and once I started to see it, this could be bigger than just a small side hustle. Once it started to snowball, then my kind of vision took over. Like, okay, what's next? How, how big can we go? Like, where is the market opportunity? That's where my entrepreneurial drive kind of took over and took us to where we are.

I guess you've got a lot of experience in this. You've seen global vision that many of us have. Have not seen.

Yes.

How enthusiastic are you about the future of just this industry, period? But then also imprint engineering?

I'm very enthusiastic about the future of our industry. It's becoming more global. I've been very fortunate. This industry I would never have imagined. It's taken me around the world, to nearly every continent. And I'm seeing in all the industry networks and groups, there are more and more people who are looking to go global, looking to find global partnerships, global connections. It's happening today. It's the most exciting part of our industry. If you ask Me, people with ambition should look outside their own regions and try to make partnerships. So I'm very excited about the future of the industry globally for Imprint Engine. The story is incredible. It's so inspiring to hear it, but I almost feel like there's quite a ways to go. We have big ambitions at Imprint Engine and I'm super excited. I've been there before in a situation where we scaled a business for me to 80 million. It was an absolute blast. Very difficult at times. And, yeah, I'm just really excited with the team in Imprint Engine. There's so many things going for Imprint Engine. The creativity from the marketing team for me is elevating the whole industry, actually. It's super cool. So it's a very unique company and I'm excited to be part of it.

We didn't even get into the fact that merch as a marketing medium itself has just exploded in its impact. So that's such an incredible thing for us to be looking forward to.

I actually kind of have an idea somewhere planted in my brain that branded merchandise as a marketing medium is going to potentially become even more powerful because of AI's cannibalization of the digital world. And it's going to just get harder and harder to get in front of people and make an emotional connection. So I think the future is bright for the industry, for those that are able to capture it.

Yeah.

But I would say one last thing. I wonder what you think of this, Bobby.

Technology.

It's amazing and everything, but relationships are more important than ever. Yeah. And no matter what side of the industry that you're in, and I don't see that going away.

Yeah.

In fact, it could be that because of what you said and because of AI, we're about to see that become even far more important than it ever has been. And this industry has always been very much about relationships.

Yes.

Caleb, last question. What are you looking forward to the most as you head into 2026? And as you think of that, how can you encourage other leaders? Because they're looking at building a business. They see Imprint Engine, they're like, yeah, we want to have that kind of fire in that vision, too.

Yeah. The thing that I'm most excited about is really getting focused on the thing that I love to do the most, which is tech. And I think for other distributors that are trying to build up this business, look at what you like to do and figure out how to delegate the things you don't as quickly as possible. Because your business will grow if you can focus on what you love to do the most, and you'll have a lot more fun doing it.

It's great advice to close on Colin. Caleb, thank you so much.

We're sorry.

We miss Travis here, but he's here in spirit. But you and the team have done some amazing work, and we're so proud to be a part of your story.

Yeah.

Thank you very much. Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

Cheers.