Success Stories Ep 92 - "Marketing Human Connection"

There could be a few twists and turns on the road success. 

On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll chat with Jeremy Parker with Swag Space, who has dreamed up develop sold and started over a few times with his businesses?

How do you launch a company, good sales, hire the best people learn from your mistakes. Jeremy will guide us through those questions and more based on his career on this episode of Success Stories. 

This is one you're gonna want to listen to probably a second time. So grab a cup of coffee and get ready to take some killer notes because Jeremy is gonna tell on this edition of the show.

Transcript

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Marshall Atkinson 
There could be a few twists and turns on the road to success. On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll chat with Jeremy Parker of SwagSpace, who has dreamed up, developed, sold, and started over a few times with his businesses. How do you launch a company, drive good sales, hire the best people, and learn from your mistakes? Jeremy will guide us through those questions and more, based on his career, on this episode of Success Stories. This is one you're gonna want to listen to probably a second time. So grab a cup of coffee and get ready to take some killer notes because Jeremy is going to share on this edition of the show. So Jeremy, welcome to the Success Stories podcast. Great to be here. Yeah, I'm excited about it. And you've helped out with Shirt Lab a little bit. And I've been following what you've been doing in the promo space for a while, and you're all about big ideas and going like you're a million miles an hour with your hair on fire all day.

Jeremy Parker 
Somewhat. Yeah, he's seeing opportunities and making sure we attack it full force and with confidence, but being open-minded to change opinions and learn as we go. Yeah, right. All right. So let's start off and just take us back to the early days. So what I've always appreciated about you is that you've pretty much always been an entrepreneur. Take us back to the Househeon days, the early days, and how you got started, and how those lessons of things not working led to your success that you're having now. Sure thing. Yeah, so I actually was a documentary filmmaker in college. I went to Boston University.

Jeremy Parker 
During film school, I made this film called "1%." It was an award-winning documentary film, and we were in Vail, Colorado, at one of the largest film festivals. I'm on top of the mountain, and I looked down, basically in this celebrity brunch equivalent they had after the award show. Half the room was filled with major actors and people you've all heard of, and the other half were more struggling or lesser-known individuals. I asked myself two questions: Number one, do I love what I'm doing? And number two, am I good at it? Both answers were no. It was like this realization right in front of me that maybe filmmaking was not the best path. So I finished up college, graduated, didn't know what I wanted to do, and started my first company. I thought that building and creating a film is really being an entrepreneur; you're creating something out of nothing. I didn't really know what I was good at or what I liked or didn't like, but I started a T-shirt company. That was the first thing I could think of, and I thought, "How hard could it be to start a company?" Famous last words, exactly. I figured that at worst, if the T-shirt failed (which it ultimately did), I would learn how to do manufacturing, PR, and how to build a website—all the different things. I would figure out what I was actually good at and what I enjoyed doing. So I started this T-shirt company called "Tees and Tats," a horrible name. I got better branding as the years went on. But we started this T-shirt company, selling high-end $250 to $300 T-shirts, with each T-shirt being limited edition numbered. We were doing well. This was in 2007. We were selling to high-end boutiques. Now, if I could take your audience back to 2007, this was the recession, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers— all these banks. We came up with a market-relating pricing model because obviously, no one's buying high-end T-shirts when they're losing all their money in the stock market, and all the stores we were selling to were going under. We tied the prices of our T-shirts to the price of the Dow Jones. For every 100 points the Dow dropped, we would give people a discount on their T-shirt price. It was a little cute. I was 22 years old at the time. I wrote this to Mark Cuban. Now, as I was becoming this young entrepreneur and trying to learn what I was good at, he had a blog called "Blog Maverick." I wrote to Mark Cuban, and, within 10 minutes, he legitimately responded to me saying he'd love this story. He asked if he could post it on his blog, and I said, "Go for it." He wrote this whole blog post about me, about entrepreneurial spirit, and how, during these tough times, this is where the world's going to be, how Americans can be seen, that type of thing. That article got picked up by a lot of different readers and ultimately caught the eye of a writer from Ad Age, a big marketing magazine. They wrote about me, so I got this kind of my first wave of PR and press. It was like this really cool thing.

Jeremy Parker 
And that ultimately led me to meet Elliot Pizer from NV Sport. NV Sport is a very large player in the promotional product space and their supplier. But part of their business is very big into colleges, like colleges and their college apparel at different bookstores. I ultimately met Elliot, and we hit it off. I used to go to his office, members in Bryant Park in New York City, frequently, literally like not like 10-15-20 times. And we met, brainstormed ideas, and I liked learning about him and seeing what you could ultimately build in this apparel space. I think he liked me because, I don't know, I can't speak for him. But I think he probably saw something in me in him when I was much younger. Ultimately, he said to me, "Jeremy, I want you to start a business, and um, you know, it could be under a label, and I'll fund it" type of thing. So I ended up starting a business underneath the NV Sport umbrella called "Vote for Art." This idea was very simple. I was 23 at the time. What if you could partner with different college campuses, and you could partner with the licensing department as well as the bookstore. Then you could do a graphic design contest where all these students would reimagine the University of Maryland logo or University of Tennessee, or all these different kinds of things. People would vote on the best design, and the winning design would sell on a T-shirt in the bookstore at the basketball season football stadium. So basically, making college apparel a little bit cooler. We ended up launching this at, I can't remember the exact number, 30-50. I'm a lot of schools all throughout the country. We ended up partnering up with minor league baseball teams like the Lakewood BlueClaws, film festivals, and music festivals. We used to become the contest for all these upcoming events to have their official Film Festival T-shirt, if you will. I ended up doing that for three years. It never took off as big as it needed to, and frankly, I wasn't an equity holder. I was like an intrapreneur, more of an employee. I left that when I was about 25 years old to join my brother. My brother was doing something really, really interesting, and I thought this was just an amazing idea. He basically ran this company called Tadcast Works in partnership with YouTube stars, and all these YouTube stars were making no money back in the day, this was what, 13-14 years ago, making no money, getting millions of views. His idea was very simple. Why don't we get the biggest name brands into the YouTube videos, like get StateFarm and Colgate, like all these companies are doing product placement in movies, product placement in American Idol, and the judges are drinking a coke can? Why can't you get those same brands into the YouTube stars' videos and get them a lot of eyeballs but also allow the YouTube star to make a lot of money? Now, today, this seems like, oh, it's such an obvious thing, right? Every Instagram post is sponsored, every Twitter post is sponsored, 5-10-40 years ago, it wasn't, and he was just getting started. I felt like this would be a great business. So I joined my brother, and we started brokering deals for StateFarm, Colgate, Verizon, Wonderful Pistachios into these YouTube stars' videos and making them a lot of money. It was like the complete Wild West before people knew that oil was valuable, like we were getting in. Then the idea kind of expanded, and we said, "Well, why are we just stopping with these YouTube stars? Why don't we go after all the major celebrities, the guys who have A-list stars, the movie stars, the big rappers? Why don't we go after all these big stars and try to own the rights to their celebrity presence on Twitter and Facebook?" This is still very, very early, so I can't give names. But imagine there was a rock star, theoretically, who had 2,000 followers on Twitter. Twitter was relatively new; we would go up to the celebrity and buy his rights, like we would own the rights to his Twitter feed. Basically, he was not able to barter or promote deals through Twitter unless it went through us. The celebrity didn't really care about that because Twitter was like a nothing platform at the time. It was like he was just getting free money in his mind; he didn't see the big picture of what we saw that Twitter can become. We started buying up all the rights to like guys who now, the 2,000 followers back then, they have 40 million followers now because it caught up, and we were on all these rights and all these athletes and musicians and pop stars, it was crazy. That company ultimately got acquired by a publicly traded company when I was 25 years old. This big company basically saw we were doing, heard that we were talking to all these major celebrities buying the rights, and they wanted a piece of it. So literally from the moment we started that business to the exit was about seven months. It was the quickest; I've never heard of anything like it. When we started the business and we sell it for like millions of dollars. And I was 25 years old at this point.

Jeremy Parker 
After that, I started another business called Vouch. It was a social networking app based on your favorite things. The idea, I think, is still amazing; I still think it's good, but it ultimately failed because I don't think I was the right entrepreneur to build it. You know, there's a lot of lessons we could get into, lessons of why I failed and why I believe I failed. But at a high level, the idea is this: Imagine you could vouch for your favorite things, and your friends could follow you and see what you recommend. And if you're the friend that is the go-to friend for books or movies, they follow you for those recommendations, and that becomes this ultimate recommendation platform. You know, like Facebook is such a big platform, and ever

Jeremy Parker 
was taking a bit and piece of Facebook and maybe making a dedicated experience around it. Instagram took the pictures and Twitter took the status update. And we wanted to take the like button, because we felt like the like button was the most monetizable aspect of Facebook and you can make it cool and fun. That would be a great thing. I spent three years doing that raise millions of dollars and ultimately had to shut it down. So

Jeremy Parker 
Most entrepreneurs who have failures always chalk it up to a learning experience, and there was a lot of learning here. But obviously, we wish we had succeeded. So that was that. And then right after that, I started Swag.com. This is 2016. Swag.com. I had this experience from my NV Sport days doing promotional products in college apparel, and I just saw the industry getting bigger and bigger over the last 10 years before I started, but the buyer was changing. And this was like the key insight: the buyers getting younger and younger. And I figured, why isn't there a platform that appeals to today's buyer, like the 22 year old or 23 year old? So I just went all in and dove deep into who this current buyer is. And I thought it would be the marketing teams and ended up being the office manager. So I learned different things. And maybe my initial inclination was not right. But ultimately, we got to the right thing. And we just started learning the industry as much as I can and getting back into the swing of things. And Swag.com became the fastest growing company in the promotional product space. We went from $350,000 or so the first year to the sixth year doing over $30 million a year. In 2021, we were acquired by Custom Inc., and I've been CEO of Swag.com for the last two years up until last December. So a couple of months ago, I left the role of CEO and I started a new division called Swag Space. And I'm just so excited about what Swag Space is and more psyche you want me to give the rundown on what's Swag Space right now? Oh, yeah, well, let's do this. Give us the rundown on what Swag Space is. And then let's talk about the kind of nuts and bolts Azure works later, just over a year right now, as a teaser. Okay, sounds good. So Swag Space has been an idea I've had for the last seven years. The whole industry is very broken and fragmented. And we all know this, who are listening to this call, whether you're a screen printer or promotional distributor, there's a lot of manual work, presentation decks, phone books, you know, phone calls, closing sales, back and forth emails, lots of different suppliers. The idea is very simple. We spent the last eight years building the best platform for Swag.com that streamlines all of the operations. What if anyone instantaneously could white-label our technology and now have the ultimate platform to make sales for swag? So we make the process of selling swag way, way easier. But then we take a step further: once the orders come in the platform, it hits our back end and we become the de facto supplier. So we streamline the entire operational supply side of the business as well. So if you make the process way easier to sell, and we sear to fulfill, you're removing a lot of the heavy lifting, a lot of the waste of time and energy that people typically deal with today. And you can take that time and spend more time with your family or double down and make more sales is completely up to you. But that's the idea: to really streamline both the front end and the back end and make the entire experience way more simple. And we're gonna get into how that works later. Right. But

Marshall Atkinson 
Let's connect the dots a little bit, right? So one of the things that I appreciate about you is the fact that a lot of the ideas you're working on now seem to come from something that didn't quite work out or an idea you had along the process. And then you go, "Oh, yeah, that thing! Let's really expand on that a little more," right?

Marshall Atkinson 
In and that seems to how you kind of grow your business and kind of morph some stuff around, right?

Marshall Atkinson 
Like, how do you, 'cause we all experience failure one way or another, right? And to me, I really appreciate the Nelson Mandela quote, which is, you know, "I've never lost in my life. I either win or learn." And because of that, I don't have any fear. Like, I just do it. Right? Like, your example, those podcasts. I'm just doing a podcast. No one asked me to do a podcast, but somebody's doing it. Right? And here we are. So, kind of talk about how those lessons and maybe one key thing from something that kind of led you to know that you really wanted to get into doing promo, and that type of stuff. What was kind of the major impact there? Sure thing. So my biggest failure was vouch, that social networking app, and I spent a good three years on it. And for any of the entrepreneurs listening, spending three years on something, and then it not working is a big "look in the mirror" type of moment. Like, where do you begin? Where do you go from here? And honestly, for me, that's what I was like.

Jeremy Parker 
How did you not only pick yourself up and start something new, but what could I have learned from that previous failure that now I could take and make sure I don't maybe make the same mistakes? I'll tell you the biggest mistake I made. That was so clear with vouch.

Jeremy Parker 
I was the head of product for Vouch. I was, you know, one of the founders but also the head of product, and I was supposed to be designing the platform and making a great experience. And I lost sleep every single day about every little detail, like, what happens when you swipe your thumb this way, or you go this way? Or what's the color? What's the button going to look like? All these things. And it took us about a year to build the platform. And when we launched the platform, I realized all the things that I lost sleep over, the customers did not care about at all. And all the things that they wanted, I didn't even think about. And it was such a clear thing. I just wasted a year of my life without learning. And I launched this thing that no one really wanted. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get in their head about how it should be and they have this ego, they might even call it ego. But it is an ego thing. Like it's either a fear of launching because you're afraid of what people might say, or it's the ego, that you think that you have all the right answers, not willing to have an outside opinion. And I think both for me were true, maybe it was an ego thing. Maybe it was a fear thing. Either way, I realized I lost a full year of my life. And ultimately, if I had that year back, I could have built the right solution, I could have had the money to figure it out and pivot and do all the things you need to do to be successful. And we were basically shooting ourselves in the foot before we even started with Swag.com. I didn't wait to do anything. I had a homepage, it was a landing page to say coming soon. Swag.com. And I started making sales from day one. Because I figured number one, I wanted to be a logo wonder. I wanted to get all those amazing brand logos on the homepage, Facebook and Google and WeWork because if people come to my website, they're going to feel confident to use us if they see all the other big-name brands using us. Right, that was number one. But also, I would be talking directly with customers from day one. And I would learn what not to do with types of products or looking for how to do it with them. I mean, even just stepping back, I initially thought our customer for Swag.com was the marketing team. Because it makes sense, right? And marketing managers have the biggest budgets, they're buying for new lead acquisition, you have a team of 10 people, right, and they could be buying for 1000 of their best customers. Right? It's unlimited the budget that they could be spending. So that was number one. But after speaking with all these marketing managers, I realized that everyone's going after the marketing manager, what's gonna differentiate me is Swag.com, coming soon landing page from the 22,000 other promo distributors, nothing. And when I knew this early on, is that the office manager, no one was really appealing to them. I mean, maybe that's changed now. But this office manager was kind of like the gateway into the cookies, like the side entrance is a Trojan horse. And they have a much smaller budget, but they're buying for internal use, you know, the marketing teams are beginning to swag that the office manager is buying from them, the sales teams are getting the swag that the office manager is buying. They don't have the biggest budgets but you're basically getting your business card right in front of everybody from the get-go. And it's a lot easier to get in. So we went all in on the office managers. And I think that one key insight allowed us to be successful, like we could have wasted years of our time going after the wrong buyer. And we really refined it to make sure we're going after the right bar. Now. Swag.com goes after every buyer, right? We get marketing and sales and London office and but in the beginning, you really have to figure out exactly what differentiates you and how you kind of break through the noise. All of those things are from early conversations. So really, it's talking with your customers actively listening, responding to their problems, and developing solutions that they need. That's what was different between Vouch and Swag Space and what you're doing now. Because you're actually actively listening to people and developing the solutions rather than saying, "Here's what I think you want. Let me give it to you." Totally.

Marshall Atkinson 
So that was an expensive, difficult lesson to learn. It wasn't totally amusing; three years, and it was emotionally difficult. Personally, you know, you're 30 years old, and you now have very little money in the bank account and you're coming off of a loss. It's kind of like a real big gut check of like, where do you go from here? So I talk with a lot of business owners, right? And one of the things I hear a lot is that they actually don't want to talk to people. They don't want to talk to customers, it's hard for them to do a cold call, it's hard for them to get them on the phone. They would rather, this is why they're all in on pay-per-click and Facebook and blah, blah, blah, blah, because I don't have to talk to anybody. You see that a lot, right? But what I say is that any big order that's worth anything, is it really gonna be bought on a Facebook or an Instagram ad? Because there's no trust that's been developed yet. This is at the heart of it.

Marshall Atkinson 
This is a relationship business, right? So for me to hand over a PO, where's the money for some stuff, right, I have to trust. I have to believe in you, have to believe in your company, I have to believe that you have the technical expertise to do what I want, to deliver on time, to hit my Pantone color or whatever, right? If I have that trust, I'm all in. Right? If I don't see that, then I don't have that trust, I'm not in alignment. I'm more out more than anything not to buy from you. And so if you don't have that conversation and talk to them about problems, their challenges, how are they using the product? That's the most important question. What are you doing? And how are you using it? Right? Is it for internal use? Are you giving it to a customer? Those can be two different scenarios with two completely different products. Right? And so if you just come into it, that it's a t-shirt order or whatever, maybe a t-shirt isn't the best thing. Maybe it's something completely different than nobody's really thought of that conversation that happens. That's where the magic is because that's where the trust is built. Right? Would you agree with that? Totally. You know, I think, I think especially in our industry, human connection is a really, really important thing. You know, even with swag.com, which is this automated e-commerce experience, we have a lot of inbound sales. People who have that human connection and are helping and crafting presentation decks and allowing, you know, really giving our insight of what's valuable, what is the right product at the right time, really helping our customers. Human connection is such an important thing. But to take a step back, even just to touch upon, people don't like to be uncomfortable. I think that's what's that's the truth. Why don't they have conversations with their clients? Because it's uncomfortable for them. A lot of people don't feel comfortable selling and being out there. Have I talked to I was that way, a long time ago, you have to get over over that discomfort. I think most periods of growth in general happen at times of uncertainty. It's like when you're uncertain about something when you're pushing your boundaries when you're doing something a little bit different when you're a little bit uncomfortable. That's where real growth happens with everything. So whenever I find myself like I'm about to give a speech somewhere, and I hate public speaking, and I'm like, why am I why they sign up for this thing? What am I doing? And then I look back after I'm like, Well, this is this is this is how things are made. You have to do things that are uncomfortable to get you to a place that you want to be. So

Marshall Atkinson 
So let's talk about swag.com for a minute, right? So you built that. And that kind of turned into swag space that you're doing now. And I think a lot of people who are listening, they're developing and they're building their business right now. They might not want to sell it, maybe they do, I don't know. But they still have to build their business, and whether you're selling T-shirts, selling plants at a nursery, it doesn't really matter. You got to build your business, you got to find your customers, you got to do all the stuff that you need to do. Right. So talk about building your company, maybe some lessons you learned, you actually got somebody to buy it. How did you, why did you decide to sell it? And then how did that kind of morph into what you're doing now?
Sure. So swag.com from the very beginning, we were figuring things out. It wasn't like, I wouldn't say from the moment we launched, we were successful. That's not the case. I mean, every entrepreneurial journey, there are ups and downs, there are side doors. I mean, it's a lot of learning and a lot of building the right solution for people. But on the sales side of things, things were growing really fast. So we went from 350,000 our first year to 1.1 million, 1 million to 3 million, to 7 million, to 15 million, 30 million. Like every year, it was doubling, doubling, doubling. We know now we have about 15,000 companies that buy from us, but we were just getting every single thing.

Jeremy Parker 
That we made in profit was getting reinvested back into technology. That was our differentiator. You know, everyone always puts—and I'll touch upon this in a little bit—people put the human connection and sellers at one end of the spectrum and automation e-commerce on the other end. Even I thought, when we started swag.com and were building this automated solution, that we were going to crush all the human connection sellers. That was my initial feeling, and I was wrong. A couple of years later, I realized that the human connection aspect of the industry is always going to be there. People want to deal with people. If they didn't, then Amazon would be the biggest company in the world, and we'd be doing billions of dollars in revenue. There’s a different type of customer that wants different things. So I knew this, and I've always been thinking about Swag Space. We’ll get to that in a second. Since the very beginning, I realized there is this human connection that's not going anywhere. E-commerce automation is not going anywhere either. Is there a way to really bridge the gap and bring these two things together, allowing human connections to handle customer service and what they love to do, but use technology to make their lives easier? That was the backdrop I was thinking about for the last eight years. This is a long time coming for Swag Space to launch. With swag.com, we were growing tremendously. It got to a point where there was no reason for us to sell. I think that's when most companies get acquired—when it's not really the focus. My co-founder, Josh, and I were not thinking about it. We were in the midst of COVID, and as you can imagine, COVID was not great for promo companies. We went from the highs, growing extremely fast, to COVID hitting, and our sales went down to pretty much zero for March, April, and May—three terrifying months. We had to cut our salaries and a lot of our employees' salaries. We didn’t want to cut anybody, so we had to keep the team together. But we were really cutting and trying to figure out ways to survive it. Then this "Aha" moment came to us: everybody else we were competing against was doing the same thing. Everyone was hunkering down, trying to let this pass, feeling uncertain about what was going to happen to the industry. We thought, this is the right time to double down, go all in, spend more on marketing, get in front of people when no one else was, and really try to win this. That was one part that I think really allowed us to jump out of COVID and expand. The other thing was learning from the customers. In 2017, I was in Chicago in a tech program called TechStars. Part of TechStars is they introduce you to other founders and entrepreneurs in the area. When I was in Chicago, they connected me to this company called Jellyvision. It’s a 250-person company in Chicago. I met with the CEO, who said I should meet the office manager to see how they buy swag and maybe learn something. I remember going up to the second-floor office and seeing about five different office managers and interns unboxing swag, reboxing it, and writing handwritten note cards. I asked what they were doing, and they mentioned the term "Account-Based Marketing," which I had never heard of. They were buying swag from all these different locations, unboxing it, reboxing it, and sending these kitted boxes to their best customers. I started talking to their CMO, who said it was still very early—probably in the first or second inning—but Account-Based Marketing was a big thing. I left that meeting thinking, this is our future. This is what we should be building. Why are people buying from all these different suppliers to consolidate and rebox? It seemed like such a waste of time. What if we could allow people to buy on swag.com with a click of a button, decide to send that swag to inventory to be warehoused, and then upload the CSV file so we could handle all the distribution, or plug into Shopify and handle the automated distribution, or plug into Zapier? It was such a clear vision that if I didn’t go to that meeting, I would have never seen the future. We spent a year and a half building this vision of swag distribution. We launched that in January 2020, one or two months before COVID. The entire platform was branded as an Account-Based Marketing solution for marketing teams because that’s what we thought. Two months later, COVID hits, the world shuts down, and we're trying to survive this. It was this insight: we had this amazing technology that we're not using because no one needs marketing automation right now. We had the chutzpah to go all in, push the boundaries, and go against what everyone thought. Why don't we rebrand our entire Account-Based Marketing homepage, website, and design? We have the tech; let's just repurpose it and make it all about engaging with your remote team while everyone's disconnected. How do you keep the company culture?

Jeremy Parker 
Driving engagement if no one's in the office—these were the things they wanted. We had the technology; we just didn't have the right vision and focus. So, we went all in with this individual distribution, engaging with your remote team. All our advertising was focused on that. No one else was advertising this because no one had the platform to do it. We made this really hard pivot, and it worked. We went from $7 million in 2019 to trending toward $14 million in 2020, but then it looked like we might drop down to $6 million. Instead, we ended the year with $15 million, more than doubling our 2019 revenue despite COVID. As you know, the industry dropped tremendously during that period. We kept the momentum, hit $30 million, and continued growing. I think a lot of what entrepreneurship is about is realizing there's not one way to get to the right answer. It's about being open-minded, listening, and sometimes just going with your gut and making quick decisions. Let's be flexible. Exactly.

Marshall Atkinson 
So what does was Jelly Roll? Or jelly fish or whatever? Were they your first customer with a new platform? Ah, no, I honestly, I don't think any of us are marketing in 2020.

Jeremy Parker 
You got the idea from them? Yeah. Did you sign them up? Yeah, we definitely signed them up as a regular customer. I don't think they were the first, but during that period—oh, we never know. I just want to know, like, hey, this was all your idea? This is where it came from? Was it you? Yeah, yeah. I think I definitely told them that. I've mentioned it on other podcasts and platforms and given them the credit. It's always important to acknowledge things like that. You never know. And I always say, why was I in Chicago during those three months? I left my family, left all my friends. You never really know the value of these incubators. Is it valuable? Is it a waste of time? Then there are always those moments of realization, like, well, I wouldn't have ever had that idea if I hadn't done this. In hindsight, it's always way clearer than it is.

Marshall Atkinson 
Well, one of my business segments that I’ve done for a long time is based on the phrase, "You must be present to win." Sitting here in my office, what am I going to learn? If I go to that trade show, that networking event, or do something new, I might not know what I will gain. I’ve been to tons of events that were giant losers and wasted my time and money. But I’ve also been to events where it’s epiphany after epiphany, and that leads to the fun stuff, right? You’re not going to achieve anything different by sticking to what you're doing now. If you want a different result, you’ve got to do things differently. The only way to find that out is through experience—getting in front of people, asking them questions. I love that type of stuff. You know, there are introverts and extroverts. As an extrovert, I'll ask anybody anything. But I recognize that

Marshall Atkinson 
Right. So

Marshall Atkinson 
all along the way.

Marshall Atkinson 
It started with the Jeremy Parker show, right? You've got a team of people doing all this, right? You can't be a lone wolf and build stuff. So talk about the importance of making the right hiring decisions. Employees are always the true reflection of our business. If you're like many folks, you might have gone with someone who didn’t work out and had to pivot to find someone better. So, how do we know, especially these days when almost everyone who wants a job has one, how do we find the right person who’s missing? What should we be thinking about? Yeah, that’s a great question. Hiring is very difficult. For me, specifically, it was very hard in the early days. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for when hiring for swag.com. I definitely made some bad hires—not bad people, all great people—but just not the right fit for the culture and the time. I might have relied too much on resumes and accolades or the shiny companies everyone’s heard of, which gave me confidence they could do the job. But there’s a big difference between someone who worked at Facebook and someone working at a 10-person startup. It’s about finding the right balance and skill set.

Jeremy Parker 
In the early days, I personally don't think I helped my case. I was probably more of a micromanager, and it took me a while to move away from that. I think, in the early days, when you're the founding CEO, it all goes back to ego. A lot of it’s ego—you think you have the right way to do things. When you hire people, you're overly involved, at least for me, I was looking over people's shoulders and maybe not being the easiest boss to work with. I had to really learn how to hire people, feel confident that they were going to do the job, and then step away. For the last four years, I’ve been really good at that. And it got me

Jeremy Parker 
To reduce, there's a period in our early days, about three years in, I hired four people who just weren't the right fit. They formed a clique within the company, and we had to lay some people off. It was probably my fault. At the end of the day, it's always the CEO's fault when you make the wrong hires. That moment was a significant realization for me. I remember looking at my co-founder, Josh, and thinking, "How are we going to fix this?" We were down a lot of people, and we needed to make a change. We needed to get better at screening people before bringing them into the company. We decided to focus less on experience and more on the people themselves. We were a small company, so we wanted people who were motivated, hardworking, and flexible—people who could roll up their sleeves and adapt to different tasks. We looked for individuals who could grow into their roles, even if they didn't have all the knowledge or experience yet. We believed we could train them if they had the right attitude and work ethic. For the last four or five years, we've had an amazing run. We now have people who have been with us for seven or eight years. People don't leave, which is great. That's the kind of culture we want to build—one where people are happy, stay with the company, and feel fulfilled. Looking back to 2017 and early 2018, compared to where we are now, it's like night and day. A lot of that comes from hiring people you believe in and trust, and then stepping out of the way. Allow them to shine, make mistakes, and figure out how to navigate challenges. When employees have the confidence to handle their tasks, they become better at their jobs and feel valued. Building a culture where people feel valued is crucial. It's a lesson every entrepreneur needs to learn. No founder inherently knows it; there's always some ego involved. But if you can step aside and let people shine, you'll see immense growth.

Marshall Atkinson 
I love that. That's a great answer. And, and he talked incredibly fast.

Jeremy Parker 
By the way, everyone says it, and I've tried to slow down, but I can't. So, it's all good. All right, let's wrap up here and talk about your new baby, Swag Better, right? If you're in the decorated apparel industry, you've probably tried to sell promo items and gotten confused. What is column pricing? How do you navigate it? There are so many options like pens, Stanley Cup rip-offs, the next fidget spinner, or whatever, that it becomes overwhelming. You'd rather just focus on your main thing, like printing shirts or embroidering polos. You gave me a demo, and your platform is incredible. I want you to walk people through it—why they should pay attention, why they should sign up. How does it work? How will it make them a big stash of cash without much extra work, other than getting the sale? You handle everything. So, give us the lay of the land. No problem. Let's go back to 2016 when I started Swag.com. I did everything the traditional way: back-and-forth emails with clients, manually creating presentation decks, price quoting, checking different suppliers, and wasting time ensuring suppliers had enough inventory and the right colors. Calculating end quantity pricing, creating invoices manually, collecting money and sales tax—all of that took a lot of time. Then the real work began: placing orders with different suppliers, buying blank goods from one place to send to the decorator, managing account managers, and ensuring everything was on time. If you needed to do boxes, you had to deal with a 3PL for consolidation. It was so time-consuming, and I'm someone obsessed with time. I found myself spending about 20% of my time selling and 80% on the tedious tasks. There was so much wasted time. Since 2016, I’ve been thinking, what if there was a way to streamline that 80% and give people their lives back, allowing them to spend 100% of their time on selling, or taking a vacation, or hanging out with their kids, instead of dealing with all the back-and-forth? That's the high-level idea. Now, how do we fix this situation? With Swag.com, we built this on.

Jeremy Parker 
Easy technology, it's unbelievable. Find what you're looking for, design it, buy it in a matter of seconds—click on the button, add all the stuff to inventory, individually distribute to multiple addresses. We spent a lot of time building Swag.com to give our 15,000-plus customers an awesome experience. Once we got acquired by customers, it got me thinking, why don't we take this awesome technology—literally tens of millions of dollars of technology that we've developed over the last eight years—all the profits, as I said before, went back into technology with this amazing platform. For the full-time developers developing great things and keep developing. We take this tech, and we white label it for everybody and for free. So imagine you're Jenny Promo. They come to Swag Space, they upload the Jenny Promo logo and your colors, press a button—instantaneously, you have this amazing e-commerce experience that has the Jenny Promo logo with their colors, and it's really easy to check out. So the first thing Jenny Promo could post is this link on our homepage. Her customers could go to the site, self-serve checkout, build boxes, do everything that they could do at Swag.com. Now, will they do that? Maybe. Maybe there's a small percentage chance that Jenny Promo's customers will actually self-serve. Or realistically, what's going to happen is Jenny Promo's customers are going to Jenny and say, "Hey, Jenny, can you help me out?" because that's what they're used to. They're used to that human connection, right? We built so many tools that allow Jenny to use technology to her advantage. So let's say Facebook goes to Jenny Promo. Jenny Promo instantaneously, in seconds, can create a presentation deck for our client, for Facebook. And we built all these different tools to create a deck. Let's say Facebook says, "Jenny, I'm looking for a Moleskine notebook and this bottle and this water bottle and this tote and mug." Jenny could build the cart as simply as the e-commerce experience. Press the button and share the link with our client or the client clicks on the link is like building a cart. All the products are set up in the cart and Facebook can easily check out. Once the customer checks out, Swag Space collects the full amount including the sales tax, we remit the sales tax, we're handling it, we give Jenny Promo a 30% commission on the order so it's a large commission, it hits our backend, and we start production. No more need to collect money from the client, collect sales tax, remit the sales tax, buy it from this supplier, buy from that supplier—we become the de facto supplier. So how the system works is so simple. Have this awesome site get orders into a really frictionless thing—whether your customers want to do it themselves or you want to build the carts and do all the work for your customers. Once the order comes in, we handle production, we handle operations, we handle logistics, we handle the supply side—everything, basically, really streamlined. Jenny Promo could go back to selling—that's the idea. And we've been having some amazing success so far. I mean, people are really diving in. We initially felt like it was going to be great for promo distributors because obviously if a promo distributor is selling promo, why wouldn't they want to just make their lives a lot easier? And we think that is the case. But the more we think about it, the more we're talking to the industry, it feels like promo adjacent even makes potentially even more sense—screen printers, party planners, event planners, designers—anyone who could sell swag. This is instantaneous and free and allows them to make sales. Yeah, it's the office manager.

Marshall Atkinson 
So the reason I like it is because I think a lot of people are used to doing what they know best. And they're not experts on water bottles or tumblers or yoga mats or whatever. And the reason why we don't get them to have what I call the "Would you like fries with that?" strategy is because we're just not versed in that, and it's hard for us to get into it because we just don't know what we're talking about. And then when you find a resource like this, where you don't have to join an association, you can just get the tools, and you could be selling. And of course, what I love about it is the technology makes you look better.

Jeremy Parker 
Than maybe some technology they're already using. And of course, one of the things that they need to go over is, you can do embroidery, or screen printing or whatever, right? Or you can actually send those orders to yourself, right? That was one of the things I really liked. So exactly, so early on. I didn't even think about it until we had these conversations. So going back to listening to our customers, initially when we were talking to screen printers. And they said, "Well, can I handle all the embroidery orders myself or apparel orders myself?" And initially I was saying no, no, you can do apparel your own way, but use a separate site for hard goods. So you could just disable the category we have that today. So we built it where any screen printer could just turn off apparel and just have a hard goods swag site if you will, need to do the apparel themselves. And that's working for some people. But a lot of the feedback was it'd be great if I could do everything on this site as well. So what we're doing now and it's going to be launched in about a month and a half is every screen printer or embroiderer could add themselves as the de facto supplier so they can keep apparel and apparel orders happening on the site. They

Jeremy Parker 
will automatically get funneled to them. And if somebody buys a notebook or water bottle, it gets funneled to the customer network of printers to be done. And you can make it even more granular; imagine like a screen printer doesn't want to take any orders under 100. So if there's an order for 25, it will go to the customer to be printed. If it's 75, or 105, it will then go to the screen printer on record. Or they can say, let's say a screen printer only can handle, you know, up to seven color prints. But the client, you know, has a nine-color print. So if it's over seven colors, it goes to the CustomInk. If it's under seven colors, it goes to them. So we're building it very granular. And what's cool about it is that we're learning from our clients, we're learning from our customers, we call it Swag Space Members, we're learning from our members on what the right thing to build is. So just imagine when you sign up for this platform. This is not the end, this is the beginning. Like you, we want to learn from people. So building the right solution is only going to get better and better and make your life way easier. And it's new, like I mean, like new, like this year new. This is 15 days or so old. Yeah. Did I tell you it was new?

Jeremy Parker 
Okay, well, great. Well, I think, is there anything else that we needed to cover before we go? No, I think I would love your audience to check us out at swag.space. That's the URL, swag.space. There's an Apply button on the top right, please apply. We're not accepting everybody. We want to make sure we have the right people who are, frankly, very interested in growing their business and being open-minded. I think that's the biggest parameter. It doesn't matter if you do $1,000,000 or $5 million, $10,200,000, or you're just starting. That's not what's important to us in having users. It's about people who are open-minded and willing to learn something and willing to take the time to test it out. And what's cool about the platform is there's no membership fee. If it doesn't work for you, don't use it. The whole point is that we want to make your life easier. But I would ask your audience, Marshall, this is the big thing.

Jeremy Parker 
In the first month, you should make a sale on the platform. That's it. Like everyone has a customer that wants promo, make a sale, make one sale. It's so easy to do, make one sale. If you don't make a sale within the first month, my belief is you will never make a sale. You just won't do it because you're gonna go the old way of doing things, and you're gonna forget about it, and it's not gonna become part of your nature. Make a sale within the first month. See how easy it is, how much your life gets improved, how much money you could actually make. And I'm telling you, you're gonna be hooked, and you're gonna want to stay and be a really big customer.

Marshall Atkinson 
Well, that's a good pitch. I love it. I love it. So thanks so much for being on the show today, Jeremy. So what's the best way to connect with you as someone who wants to learn more about what you do? Or maybe how you can help them? Yep, please reach out to me. My email is jeremy@swag.com. I still have the swag.com email.

Jeremy Parker 
Reach out to me, Jeremy Parker, on LinkedIn. And I'd love to work with you guys and help out or just answer any entrepreneurial questions. No, I always love meeting fellow entrepreneurs. 

Marshall Atkinson 
Great. All right. Well, hey, thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate you. All best wishes on this new venture. I think it's awesome. Thank you so much. Great chat. Thank you for having me. Well, that's our show today. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, so you can stay up to date on the latest Success Stories episodes. Have any suggestions for future guests or topics? Send them my way at Marshall@MarshallAtkinson.com. And we'll see you next time.