The Retail Journey
Welcome to the Retail Journey where we will cover important topics, interview industry stakeholders, and address emerging trends as we journey through our mission of helping our listeners thrive in retail. Your hosts for this show are CEO James Harris and CGO Charles Greathouse.
The Retail Journey
Inside the Retail Equation: Unlocking Supplier Success with Casey Roberts of STAT Recovery Services
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Join Casey Roberts, Founder of STAT Recovery Services, as he uncovers how suppliers lose revenue through deductions, chargebacks, and other opportunity areas within the retail supply chain.
Casey breaks down real-world insights on thinking like a retailer, preventing profit erosion, and optimizing the supplier-retailer relationship. From root cause analysis to strategic recovery tactics, you'll gain the tools to spot issues early, fix them permanently, and boost long-term profitability.
If you're doing business with major retailers, this podcast might reveal what you didn’t know you were missing—and what it’s really costing you.
Welcome and Casey's Entrepreneurial Journey
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to another episode of the Retail Journey podcast. I'm one of your hosts.
Speaker 2Charles Greathouse and I'm James Harris, and today we're talking with Casey Roberts, and Casey is the founder and president of STAT Recovery Services. Stat is a deduction recovery service that specializes in the retail market and really specializes in suppliers and retailers working more efficiently together. Welcome to the retail journey, casey.
Speaker 3That's right. Well, thank you both for having me and, as you said, I started STAT eight years ago. As you said, I started STAT eight years ago and it's been quite a journey. I don't know if you guys want to hear a little bit Sure.
Speaker 1Eight years, yeah, exactly, let's get into it A real easy, linear. I'm sure there were never any bumps, it's all just flown by A lot of that journey.
Speaker 3Yeah, I spent six years at Walmart and I thought that was a long time to be at one job, and now I'm eight years into this one, but this has been an amazing journey. Yeah, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so getting to go out and start my own business that was successful. I had started one other business before that flopped. Oh really, within like 60 days.
Speaker 1So when were you first an entrepreneur? When did it happen? Can you be an entrepreneur if you're at a very large corporation?
Speaker 3Is it in your?
Speaker 1heart, or is it about how you get paid?
Speaker 3I think it's just about dreaming big and trying to come up with something new.
Speaker 1I totally agree.
Speaker 1Yeah, I totally agree I think there's so many entrepreneurs over at Walmart because I worked with them where it's like constantly looking at. Totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's so many entrepreneurs over at Walmart because I worked with them where it's like constantly looking at. Okay, this is a neat construct that the industry seems to think I'm going to fit in. What would happen if I just didn't? What if we think about it super differently?
Speaker 1You know I love doing that kind of work, collabing with brands and figuring out ways to actually grow categories by thinking about it differently, and to me that's entrepreneurship. But I think on this side you understand why people say cash is king. I used to use that analogy as a merchant of inventory being Walmart, tying up cash in the investment in your product and if you have too much, that's bad for cash flow. And it was a useful tactic to try to push for what you do, which is efficiency and collaboration between Walmart and its partners. But the reality is the cash wasn't like that wasn't going to change pay cycles or anything. On the entrepreneur side, cash is king is a lifeblood reality for eight years, which is awesome, yeah.
Speaker 2So, from your original business plan eight, nine years ago, when you were dreaming this thing, up to now, how much has changed of today's reality from that first business plan?
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean the first business plan. You know I didn't have really grand visions of you know how big the business could be. I had a vision that I could do something different, and maybe it would only be me and a couple of other people. You know, um, I had never led a team before. Um, I was always an individual contributor when I was at Walmart. So that's kind of all I knew. You know, in the corporate world was just getting things done and kind of driving the success on your own. So you made quite a transition then. Yeah, yeah, I and I had to learn a lot of that the hard way. You know building up a team and you know putting people in different roles and helping train them on different tasks and thinking about the business every every month. I felt like I had to go back through and reimagine.
Speaker 1You know what the team and the evolution is fast, yeah, and when the base is, you know, zero, you zero, the exponential change is so significant. When you're starting out, I'd love to hear the you could do things differently. What was that initial spark that said all right, casey, I'm doing it, I'm going. There's something that needs to be done. I'm going to go do it.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean working at Walmart. I saw a lot of the problems that suppliers had and some of them were self-inflicted and some of it was just. You know, walmart's a big company, so you know there's a lot of different ways that you have to interact with them. But I got the opportunity to work with two to three hundred different suppliers in that time and dive into specific issues. I'd call their EDI provider, I would go to a warehouse, we would get on calls with their sales team or their supply chain team. So I got all these different perspectives and then I saw how Walmart thought about things and it was very different.
Speaker 2And so yeah.
Speaker 1Typically it's the like which area? Because when you say issues and retail, retail is one of those things that presents itself like there's this linear thing that happens. But the reality is there are a lot of moving pieces, yeah, and they're moving very quickly at Walmart, yeah, because there's a lot of customers, a lot of stores, a lot of traffic, a lot of players involved. So when you talk about issues which arena? Yeah, payment issues.
Speaker 3But payment issues can happen anywhere in the product lifecycle. So true, yeah, so from setting up a contract to setting up an EDI provider, to building an accounting process so that way you can invoice and reconcile to how people package their products and where they put labels, to what time they send something and when they dispute. And even then, when product gets into a store, what happens then? Does it get marked down? Does it get lost somewhere? So anything along that path can disrupt payment or create an issue.
Speaker 2This might be a good segue. I've heard you speak before at different panels, different events, and you talk a lot about how to think like a retailer. Yeah, this might be a good segue. Now, I've heard you speak before at different panels, different events, and you talk a lot about how to think like a retailer. Yeah, how do you, how do you help suppliers think like a retailer?
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, if you're a supplier, you're dealing with, you know, maybe 10 different retailers and then you've got your own internal business to run. So and I see this even in our business you know we have 400 clients, right, so we have to build processes for ourselves so that way we can be efficient. But then we have to learn how to deal with every different client. You know some of them just want to handle things a different way, and so we have to customize that.
Speaker 3With Walmart, you know they're the payer, so they are the one who controls whether or not you get money and what happens to your product. So, being able to step out of you know where you are, and then get in their shoes and understand what their processes are like, how they think, what data they're using, that's where I saw most of the challenges. You know, whenever I was, what problems they're trying to avoid. Yeah, Oftentimes they just couldn't see the other one's perspective, yeah, and so and you know Walmart's a big company they're not going to bend their process for every supplier, Right? So that leaves the suppliers to need to change their process sometimes.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think that's probably true with nearly all retailers, even large or small. They're working with hundreds to thousands of suppliers. They got to have kind of one process.
Thinking Like a Retailer
Speaker 1We've talked about efficiency and I mean I love that word. There's so much that goes on where efficiency is a huge differentiator. A lot of times people think about efficiency as just a matter of cost, but there's a lot of product categories, especially fresh food and that sort of thing, where efficiency leads to product quality improvement. The less time a banana spends in transit, the more time you have it on your counter and it's still good and there's a lot of efficiency that process ends up defining. But things get lost in the middle Deductions as a topic from a merchant point of view, I had really almost no idea how much was out there from the stance of like hey, if you don't pay close attention, there's things you might miss as a supplier.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean deductions can hit any part of the product life cycle, and so and there's a drive to be efficient that can sometimes cost money, right oh? Yeah, when you try to get too efficient as a supplier or even as the retailer it has repercussions sometimes, where it will end up driving up claim volumes or your accuracy will go down.
Speaker 2You save some money on a certain type of core, but your damage rate goes up 20%.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, we've all, with great intentions, either made or seen made decisions that turns out nope.
Speaker 2That wasn't that.
Speaker 1That was not the right call Hindsight's real clarifying for a lot of folks.
Speaker 2We'd like to. We'd like to give something that the our listeners, suppliers, can take away, like what are some things that suppliers can do, either on the front end of a new business relationship with Walmart or just in doing an audit of okay, we've got this much OTIF, this many kind of regular claims. Where do they start on? Just looking at, what do I need to do differently to avoid these things?
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean, you know the first step is try to think like the retailer. What data sets are they using? What caused the claim in the first place? Was it something that you did or something that they did? How do you want to present that to them? What backup do you want to give side might give you some clues on. Oh, if I just change that small process on my end, they're not going to change their process. But I know if I make a small adjustment here, then that will reduce claims. So, thinking like the retailer first and taking a step back and asking yourself who do I need to talk to? What process do I need to leverage? What data do I need to be looking at? Because if my data is different than their data, when I go to dispute something or ask for that money and I'm presenting the wrong information, they're not going to know what to do with it and they're unlikely to take the time to try to translate it.
Speaker 3Yeah, to translate it. You know they don't want the burden of proof put back on them. They want you to tell them the right story with the right information, put back on them.
Speaker 1They want you to tell them the right story with the right information. Yeah, earn the proof is a great sentence when it comes to effective data use. We talk about data a lot. As a merchant used it a lot to prove what the customer's telling me, without bringing the customer to a walkthrough to say, hey, tell them, you know, tell my leadership why I decided to buy this. It's the data that shows the story of where they're going, what they're missing, what they wish that they had, and in this space it's, you know, proving, hey, this was missed. I think everybody's on the same page of what should happen once proof is here, but the journey to get there can be nonlinear, sometimes difficult. I think everybody's on the same page of what should happen once proof is here, yeah, but the journey to get there can be nonlinear, sometimes difficult, and most people want to help you solve it Totally.
Speaker 3But if they have 100 things on their plate, how much time is it going to take to help you solve that problem? So if they're limited on resources, then they may not jump in. That was my job and so it was kind of a cool experience to be at Walmart and they said go dive as deep as you need to you know and figure out what the problem is. But not everybody has that time or that opportunity.
Speaker 2That is interesting though and I think that's a perspective that a lot of suppliers don't have that you were challenged as a Walmart employee to fix problems that were causing deductions on certain suppliers. So I think there's a false kind of understanding that you know deductions regardless of retailers, just kind of a money grab. But I've heard you talk about this. You know about payer bias. Do you mind jumping into that a little bit, because I think it'll be pretty illuminating.
Speaker 3Yeah, you know I hear suppliers say, oh, I think they're just holding back my money and it's not as intentional as some suppliers sometimes think it is. It's just Walmart is a big company. There are a lot of things to take care of, so your little problem may not get the attention that it needs. And there's also, I think, in any payer and payee relationship. Anytime that you're writing the check, you want to make sure that you don't overpay Right, and that sometimes defaults to underpaying just a little bit.
Speaker 3And it's not about keeping that money, but it's about not accidentally overpaying, because sometimes it's hard to go claw back that money once you've overpaid.
Speaker 2So it's not quite the intentional money grab that some people characterize as it's typically an issue that would happen in the supply chain, that would cause a deduction. It's really a cost to Walmart that wouldn't have been there had the thing been done right.
Speaker 3Yeah, and then they've got to research it and try to figure out how to pay it back. So you know, and those, all those things take time and resources.
Speaker 2So that helps you bring back the stuff that was accidentally not paid. Yes, it doesn't bring back the stuff that was accidentally not paid. Yes, it doesn't bring back the stuff that was legitimately not paid.
Speaker 3Yeah, there's an error somewhere, and that error could fall on the supplier side or the retailer side and that could cause a deduction and most people with the right evidence and the right data are going to want to pay that back. But there is kind of a default to underpay when there's a discrepancy and then let that get reconciled later.
Speaker 1I appreciate that mindset shift of just trying to get to like no, this is the more efficient thing to do, you don't want to overpay. Everybody can agree like, yeah, no one's trying to overpay anything. Trying to be precise is great, but there's a level of investment necessary to be very precise and sometimes time might be part of that. I don't think anyone wants to get paid slower.
Understanding Deductions and Supplier Bias
Speaker 3There's a lot of things suppliers can do to stop those discrepancies from happening, and that could be going back all the way to looking at your contracts and making sure that they're set up the right way. Making sure that they're set up the right way and that purchase orders are coming across with the right terms, to how an item is set up. To how you transmit something on an edi document. To making sure that you have the right information and the right qualifiers. Um, also, timing is a big issue. It's uh, you know you transmit things too early, the invoice before delivery.
Speaker 3It can cause problems, you know and some of that is a little more difficult to manage. So some people don't do that. But monitoring what happens after you send something out, you know we all like to believe, hey, I sent it out and they're going to, they're going to take it in just like I sent it out. But that doesn't always happen. And so a lot, of, a lot of hands touching things along the way, and every time something gets touched that's an opportunity for something to get misplaced, something to get routed to the wrong area or someone to miscount. But there's quite a bit in, you know we call it invoice compliance, where a supplier can monitor what they're sending out, when they're sending out and how it's being taken in, and you can get ahead of a lot of those deductions.
Speaker 2Stop them, and you might have already done this, but how does stat come alongside a new supplier that comes in and says, hey, I've got this problem. How do you help them? Maybe they've been doing this for a long time and they've got their processes and they worked for a long time. And they've got their processes and they worked for a long time and now something changed and that's not working. Um, you know, sometimes maybe it's forced for the trees, maybe it's just you don't know what you don't know. How do you all come alongside and consult them out of those kinds of situations?
Speaker 3Yeah, um, you know, when a supplier first talks to us, sometimes they have that problem. You know that's, that's a big deal to them. They're having weekly meetings on it. Sometimes it may not even be that, you know, monetarily. Let's not just define this as what you've stated it as. Let's go back and let's look at the whole picture.
Speaker 1So we like to look at that root cause approach. Anybody who's in my mind like you're doing anything right in this sort of retail space. They don't just take the surface level symptom. You go figure out, okay, what caused this, what's going to make it happen again next time, what's the broader context? Because sometimes something might look real bad or look real good and with a little bit of zoom out, a little bit of perspective, it changes your entire understanding of the situation. Yeah, I love that approach.
Speaker 3Sometimes they're just defining the symptom yeah, totally, and we need to go back. Sometimes they're just defining, you know the symptom yeah, totally, and we need to go back and be like, well, there's actually we can treat that, or yeah, or we could try to find the root cause, swim upstream a little, and we try to look at every transaction. So I think that's what's different than you know. Some of suppliers own internal processes is they'll get focused on a deduction. You know they is they'll get focused on a deduction. They're seeing this one thing appear on their check. But when you go back and you scan every transaction, you get a better story. And then you do that over a two-year time frame and it starts to put some things together for you Like, oh, you continue to have this issue. It doesn't always pop up as a claim. Sometimes there are issues that sit there for years and because suppliers aren't getting a claim, they don't do anything to fix it. And then something changes in their process or Walmart's process and now it's just every other transaction has a deduction.
Speaker 1Yeah, kind of giving me some FOMO, a little bit Like all right, what do I not know? Need to go dig in and scour through some data to make sure you find the answer to that and some of that is just taking our suppliers on that journey too.
Speaker 3Like, help them step back because they can. You know they know their business better than we do. You know we may see a lot of information and, you know, get the opportunity to audit. You know various issues, but they know their business. So we try to bring them along that journey of. You know, take a step back, think about the retailer's perspective and then come up with a solution.
Speaker 2You shouldn't have too much FOMO because we work with stat recovery on all of our clients too much FOMO because we work with stat recovery on all of our clients.
Speaker 1I'm just like in the mind of a supplier, thinking about you know. You said the first step is, you know, take a step back, think about it from a rethought perspective. The first step is realizing you might have some unwarranted deductions, like if you think, like no, I don't have any unwarranted deductions, like, oh great, maybe take a look at every transaction and I bet within some math we're going to find you do.
Speaker 2Maybe it's not a huge amount, but it probably is. It's surprisingly possible to have deductions that you're unaware of. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I had no real understanding of it as a buyer. So on this side it's been quite eye-opening to see wow, there's a lot of that and it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. As a buyer I didn't. A lot of people say buyers don't buy because replenishment managers are the ones that actually click the button, but it turns out they don't actually write any checks, so none of us actually bought. It's when the check comes that truly the buy happened.
Speaker 1I just you know as a merchant would have decided it. But it's interesting the more holistic you get to think about the business, the more some of these dots start connecting for you. I really liked being in merchandising and when I got my first job outside in that tech space building tools in tech opened up my eyes. The whole different angle of the problem trying to solve which is delight customers and help them save money, live better, save time or, if you're at Sam's Club, just making savings simple and making it easy to be tickled to death that you have a membership to shop there and you come back more often. That's the macro, but underneath all that there's so many things that go on. There's a lot of solopreneurs who have great products, great solutions, and there's a lot of boxes that track across the data and the nuance of the data and making sure you're actually maximizing the situation.
Root Cause Analysis and Value Addition
Speaker 3I try to take the same playbook to my business that you know we we do with the suppliers is. I bring in consultants and outside parties to give me a different perspective, and whether that's for how we're set up as a leadership team or auditing our own books, or, you know, we have data collection and audit processes set up. I bring in experts who specialize in specific things because they're going to challenge our own team to step outside of their box, Because any company that gets beyond a few people starts setting up silos and roles. You know, starts setting up silos and roles, and if you let those things just become the norm, then you know they'll capture 80 or 90% of the things that they're supposed to do, but those, those little bits, fall off the end.
Speaker 2Well, I've I've been around for your kind of growth over the years and you started with a handful of people and I don't. You've got more people now than we do and we're somewhere around 30 and I think about the different um evolutions that we've had to go through from solo to 30. I mean it's got to be like five, yeah, like five full evolutions to become what we needed to be for this new either number of clients, number of number, amount of complexity, yeah, and you guys have surpassed that. So I don't think you've probably stopped evolving since you hired your first person.
Speaker 3No, sometimes I didn't even get a chance to stop and enjoy, like, oh, we just evolved to this level. Now let's all just take a break and let's do it this way for a while, because it was growing so fast. There's that one to five person team, and then there's that five to 10, and then 10 to 20, and then 20 to 40. And every time we were just constantly having to reimagine what the team looked like and what products and services we were going to offer to suppliers, because when we were small, there was only so much we could do, and then, as we grew, we could do more for our suppliers, but then it was almost like, okay, now we have to go back and try to sell more or discover more about what they need. So that's been a pretty eye-opening journey for me, because you know, I remember the things that we did when we were less than five people and you just did all of the things.
Speaker 3If somebody asked you for something, you just did it, and if it didn't make any money, then you're like, okay, I'm not sure I'll do that again, but I learned something from that?
Speaker 1Why do you think you've grown so fast?
Speaker 3I think we have a strong attachment to money and value. Just our business model is about bringing money back to suppliers but then helping them have transparency around how much does it, what does it take to do business with Walmart, how much money are you making and where do you need to invest more resources? So I think just being so close to the dollars has been a growth driver for us, because there are some businesses where the results are less tangible or it takes longer to realize. With ours, you see it pretty immediately Within 30 days you're getting money back and then you're able to reinvest that money back into your business and your relationship with Walmart, and the results come pretty quickly.
Speaker 2And start to fix the things that caused that issue in the first place.
Speaker 1I love that intense focus on value addition. That's the whole point is to be able to add value. I think a similar perspective of some suppliers look at Walmart under like there being a deduction that was unnecessary, that should get paid back as a money grab. That was unnecessary, that should get paid back as a money grab. There's some folks out there that look at anybody in a third-party spot and like, oh, you're just trying to get money. I think those that are successful not at all. Are you kidding? I'm here about adding value. I'm here to solve problems that would go either unsolved or unrealized until they're way bigger. Yeah, you know there's a lot of these problems are similar, they're going to happen, ongoing, and if you're really good at understanding where they are and where they've been and you've seen a lot of them you get to find them way faster and reduce the size, and that, in reality, reduces a tremendous amount of costs in the entire system. Yeah, wouldn't exist if the value wasn't, you know, far exceeding the cost that was brought.
Speaker 3Yeah, just understanding like what can be paid back and what can't. I think that's you know. When you're in a business relationship with someone and you don't know exactly how much you're going to get paid or what something's going to cost, that unknown can put a lot of strain on the relationship. So you know there are certain deductions that are not going to be paid back because they're legitimate, and being able to identify those versus the ones that you need to go and put time and energy into and that helps you define. All right, this is how much money I'm making here. This is what I need to do to optimize my business. So just understanding that makes your relationship better with the retailer.
Speaker 2And yeah, you're not wasting your time on deductions, You're actually trying to grow your business.
Speaker 1Yeah, I was told often as a merchant that you know Walmart's one of the best retailers to work with. Because you with, because if you say you're going to do something, you do it. That's kind of like how I grew up. I also kind of grew up professionally at Walmart, so there may be a little bit of correlation in how I think about those sort of things. But curious from your perspective how much that shows up in your experience that like no Walmart, they're not trying to do things. And then I'm not sure if you're also working with folks outside of Walmart, because we only do Walmart and Sam's. I'm curious of your perspective of how that holds true, because you're where that rubber really hits the road.
Speaker 3Yeah, I mean I've spent more time working on the Walmart business, so we also do Amazon, Target and a little bit in Kroger, but I think Walmart is a is a great retailer to work with. You know their size and their scale and you know when they say they will do something. Oftentimes they do. You know, um, and you know there are unforeseen circumstances that sometimes, you know, disrupt um. You know what we hope will happen. But I think you know walmart has been a great driver of growth for a lot of companies and I think they're pretty fair. They're a large corporation, so understanding how to deal with them, uh, is important, yeah, but once you understand that and you realize, like, what their expectations are, and they tell you, hey, I need this, and then you deliver that, then your business is going to grow.
Speaker 1I love that In merchandising I often talked about. The most valuable asset at Walmart was customer trust, and if that ethos remains then we're all on the same page. The deduction should be whatever actually was necessary so that we can protect customer trust, whether it be quality, efficiency, speed, inventory management and I've seen that hold true. I think it's a major differentiator because the top retailer has of those things they're difficult to keep up with, but if you can keep up with them, then you're going to be on that growth journey with Walmart?
Speaker 3Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2You mentioned some other retailers a minute ago. Are there any trends like just kind of across the board trends you're seeing in your segment of the market?
Speaker 3trend you're seeing in your segment of the market. I think over the past couple of years we've seen some of the post audits or those charges from the two-year lookbacks getting closer to the event and that's across multiple retailers. They don't want to leave something out there for two years and then hit the supplier with some unexpected charge.
Speaker 1It's a good thing right.
Speaker 3Yeah, it is a good thing, but it also, excuse me, can require a little more work on the front end, gotcha.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest thing is capturing dollars whenever you're supposed to pay them, identifying compliance issues before they balloon into some bigger problem and the clearing of those items closer to the event.
Evolution and Adaptation in Business
Speaker 1Yeah, Feels like speed's a major competitive advantage. I mean, really I could finish the sentence there. Yes, thank you. But in this space where being able to scour through, understand, quickly get to recommendation, take action, yeah, how has that evolved over the last eight years?
Speaker 3More and more data and automation. Yeah, especially at the major retailers. The way they're using data is different, the processes that they're putting in place, the utilization of third parties, whether that's in aggregating data or analyzing it, or having third parties do different functions. So we just see more and more information being available and then that information being used to drive efficiency. And then we see some of those bumps in the road that come with efficiency, because you know you get too efficient and it ends up messing something else up.
Speaker 2I'm a big fan of the Tim Collins book Good to Great and one of the three kind of primary things he says in there is large organizations can only do three things well. So when you start getting into some of these like granular transactional things, it's probably better to get another organization that's just doing that. Yeah Right, they'll do it really well, they'll drive the cost out of the process, give you the finished result and you probably save money, yeah, in the process.
Speaker 3It's probably the same, you know, in the, in the sales world too, you know it's true for us.
Speaker 2You know we we work with partners that do things that we don't do. That aren't a part of what we do. You know it's not part of one of our three things our big three things.
Speaker 1Like stat recovery, that's right. What's in a name? Why, uh, why stat recovery?
Speaker 3Thought about this for a long time. Um spent months just throwing names back and forth, and I like acronyms. I think coming from Walmart there's all these acronyms and I couldn't come up with a clever name. So I was like, well, let's just try to fit it in, let's just try to create an acronym. So it's Supplier Transaction, audit, technology, nice.
Speaker 1It rolls off the tongue. I'm glad he called it STAT. Stat works great.
Speaker 3We had a lot of trouble with our logo, trying to fit those things like underneath the letters somewhere, so eventually we just Someone just said actually, maybe let's just go with STAT, yeah, let's call it STAT.
Speaker 3And even at first we were just STAT recovery consultants because, you know, at that point we didn't have a lot of technology, so we were just there to advise and help suppliers fix problems, get really hands-on. And then we rebranded as Stat Recovery Services because we've got the technology services and the audit and consulting services. But sometimes we just call ourselves Stat.
Speaker 1Yeah, totally, because it's hip, it is hip, so we call ourselves High Impact sometimes Quite often actually, yeah, it's so we call ourselves high impact. Sometimes quite often actually, yeah, it's high impact. Analytics If you want to email us, got the rest of those letters in there? Yeah, that's awesome. So if I'm a supplier to Walmart and Sam's or Target, kroger, amazon, et cetera, and I'm either unsure that I'm operating efficiently or maybe even unaware where my empathetic FOMO comes from for them, what would be the right sort of next step?
Speaker 3You know, just inviting us in. You know, or you know, if you want to engage an individual or a third party, invite them in and have them not rely on your open AR report or what you think is the problem. So, help me identify what the problems are and then see if that matches up to the things that you have.
Speaker 2We do some of that discovery work, we show the opportunity before.
Speaker 3That was kind of the playbook for us in the beginning and it's still. What we do today is first go in and we'll take a look at what they have, what they think their issues are, but then we like to take a step back, analyze everything. That's free analysis and sometimes we come back and we say you know what you're really doing, everything that you should be doing, you've already cleared everything. It happens occasionally, but most of the time there's things that are getting missed. It could be under tolerance, it could be something that got denied and you wrote it off because you thought, well, it was denied and it seemed to have a valid reason. But there's actually more information there that would uncover it should have been paid back or an approved yes, yeah, and so I like that, so you prove the value as a part of the reason for actually working together.
Speaker 3Yeah, we show where the money is and different ways to go get it, and then where we see some of the problems are. Occasionally Well I say quite often actually, you know, we get pushback from the teams that are doing those jobs, those jobs, and I think they believe that we're there to make them look bad or that we're going to take over their job, and that's not it. The team asked me the other day on one of our calls. They said what's your greatest value, or what's that's greatest value, what's the corporate culture? That word that really says who we are and I was like our greatest value is value.
Speaker 2I thought that was really clever.
Speaker 1Our greatest value is value.
Speaker 3But that's where we are there to add value.
Speaker 1And if we?
Speaker 3can't add value. We don't work with you know that company, because we've always wanted to be associated with real dollars and value and for people to be able to see what we did, and not that we're just coming in there and saying, oh well, you could hand your process off to us and maybe we could do it cheaper. That's fine, there is some value in that but we've always looked for a little more impact. We want to have a high impact. High impact man, you need it quickly.
Speaker 2So stat Well done. Oh, you need it quickly so stat Well done.
Speaker 1Well, I love that. I think that's part of why it's really easy to partner, because it's very much an ethos we have. I often say, like I'm not looking to plug a hole that doesn't need to be filled. We want to solve real things, and for me, a solid litmus test at the end of the day is I don't want to receive a resentful check from a client. Yeah, like, if you're writing me a check, it's because you're like, just really glad we decided to partner on this and what I did was of great value to you and your, your company, or of high impact yeah, of high impact all right.
Lightning Round: Failures and Lessons Learned
Speaker 2Hey, we usually finish these up with a lightning round. Okay, I got just a handful of questions, kind of fun little things. I'll start off here. We talk about fail fast frequently, right, it's how you learn what's one of your biggest failures in business that you'd want to share.
Speaker 3My biggest failure was probably not realizing early on that we needed to develop a company culture and, coming from an individual contributor role, I thought, well, everybody just does everything and we all just do stuff and we get satisfaction out of doing things and making money. But people come to work for different reasons, and it took me a few years to really understand what was driving the people that were coming to work every day. Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was career growth, sometimes it was being challenged and trying something new, and so Sometimes, it's a sense of belonging.
Speaker 2It's community. Sometimes it's very sense of belonging. It's community. Sometimes it's very intangible. What motivates an entrepreneur to do their thing is probably not what motivates the majority of the other people, and learning that it was a big one for me too, that's awesome.
Speaker 1I love that realization and having it early enough that you wouldn't have the growth you have without people wanting to be a part of the squad.
Speaker 3Yeah, I wrote the team a little note a couple weeks ago and I was thinking back to my Walmart days and saying our people make the difference. And when I was at Walmart I was like, oh, those are just slogans that are up on the wall on the wall. But as I've grown, you know, in business and matured.
Speaker 3I'm like no our people really do make the difference because we're a relationship based business. You know some some people say, oh, you're a tech company. I'm like, well, we use technology but we build relationships with people because they have to trust us to go in there and take a look at their business and not feel threatened. And you know, when you find money you don't want them to go. Man, now, now I've got a bad taste in my mouth because I should have found that and now I look bad Like we try to make our clients and the people that we interact with. You know the heroes and so people you know whether it's employees or whoever you're working with at a client those people make the difference.
Speaker 1I love that. What are you reading lately?
Speaker 3Well, I never read a book in like 10 years. People always ask me.
Speaker 2I'm glad you just said that.
Speaker 3And I tell the team I don't read books.
Speaker 1Memes.
Speaker 3You get a good meme. You read I read plenty of emails.
Speaker 1Oh yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 3I read some news. I'm actually trying to get more into reading. I have a little project that I'm working on with my son. I'm trying to get him motivated about it because I I do like reading. I'm just not a very good reader, like you know I'm. I'm the guy that wants a picture book. Um so we're trying to come up with a little bit of a a different way to consume, Do you?
Speaker 2do podcasts or anything like that.
Speaker 3Um, occasionally I listen to a little bit. My wife likes the audio books, but I should. I should get into reading. I've been so focused on the business for the past eight years that, you know, sometimes you just put hobbies and other things aside and, uh, I'm realizing now that some things I should probably do just for my own wellbeing yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2And we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll wrap with this. Uh, from the last 12 or so months, what's the one of the biggest things you've learned?
Speaker 3um, been kind of an unlock yeah, I think, oh, it's something I've learned about myself, but also about the business. Looking at myself, I realized, oh, I'm not a doer anymore. I got out of doing stuff and I think I didn't realize that that transition was happening Right. But also, as I've gotten out of doing things, other people have picked up those things that I was doing. They're making those decisions and I need to let them. So that's probably been like a huge transition. Yeah, it's a realization as well as a realization about myself, but also an observation on those around me that as I stepped back from doing things, they picked up all of those tasks and they do them better than I was able to do them. So that's over the last 12 months. That's been cool to see.
Speaker 2Well, I wouldn't sell it short either, because you're doing something, you're leading an organization. You're doing less and leading more. Yes.
Speaker 3That's important Influencing other people to do things you know and challenging. You know, I think the biggest thing that I bring to the table, you know, with the team today is perspective. You know, whenever I would start an audit when I was at Walmart, and then you know, even after I was, like you have to assume that everything's wrong. Okay, like just the data's bad. Whatever information you have from the past is wrong and then go through the careful steps of proving which pieces are right and which pieces are missing. Um, so I'm trying to, you know, continue to give that perspective to the team of like, wait, let's all just assume that everything that we've heard up to this point is wrong and let's just take a step back. If we go on this journey, we'll prove some of those things to be right. Hopefully that's not true.
Speaker 1Yeah, hopefully everything is right, but we'll find out.
Speaker 2That's awesome. I like that. Oh, go ahead sir.
Speaker 3Oh, I was saying the other thing about I think that's been an eye opener for me about the supplier world is there are so many different needs out there. We kind of came into this with one particular area that we wanted to focus on and as technology has evolved and retailers are putting more data out there, suppliers are applying more data and more analytics. There's just so many opportunities in our know, in your industry as well.
Speaker 2That there's a ton of things that we could do to drive efficiency and change, and growth creates opportunity. Yeah, and there's a lot of both right now. Yeah, awesome, okay, so I really appreciate you spending some time with us. It's been, I mean, I've worked with you for five or six years and I learned some stuff today, so hopefully everybody else did too and, as always, thank you for joining us. You can check out our videos or audio podcasts on highimpactanalyticscom or YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for joining us.
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