Ohio University Leader Lounge

Nate Schisler's Path from Rural Ohio to Recommerce Entrepreneur

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This episode features an interview with Nate Schisler, founder and CEO of recommerce company Maven Circular. Nate shares his upbringing in rural Southeast Ohio and how experiences like working in his family's firewood business instilled a strong work ethic. He discusses his career progression in logistics and supply chain management, including formative roles with companies like Lululemon. Nate also reflects on lessons learned about understanding work from all levels of an organization and how that influences his leadership approach today as an entrepreneur in the growing recommerce industry.


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UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to the Leader Lounge Podcast. Nick Windenberg and myself, Amy Taylor Bianco, are here today with Nate Chisler at the Leader Lounge in the Robert G. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership in the College of Business at Ohio University. Welcome, Nate.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice to be here. There's so many words in the introduction. It's like, this is a Robert G. Walter, Copeland of Business. I'm like, okay, hold on. Where are we? Who am I? You can do all that. No, you did great. It's fantastic. We need an acronym. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

it's true. We really do.

SPEAKER_00:

It should be like two full words. It's a sentence, actually. It's so long.

SPEAKER_02:

So we've had some... I have had quite a bit of fun getting to know Nate over the past, I don't know, year or six months, I don't know how long it's been. Year and a bit. Year and a bit. And just getting to know a little bit about your business, a little bit about your family, kind of what you do, and some of your great wisdom for our students, which I think is always practical, and you're always willing to give the piece of advice that other people may not want to give, you know, the unpopular piece of advice that actually makes a difference. So we appreciate you doing that. So I know you started your journey in Southeast Ohio, and I'm kind of curious about your background, your kind of upbringing in Southeast Ohio, how that influenced, or if it influenced, what you went on to do flying around the world and opening different, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I grew up in Southeast Ohio, northwest of here in Athens, but I think we still call it Southeast Ohio. I actually grew up, I mean, it's kind of a cliche name, but the town I grew up in was called Pleasantville. Of course it was. Yeah, of course it was, right? So, you know, small, like one stop sign kind of place. My mother was a school teacher. Of course she was. Right? Come on. I know. But the juxtaposition there was my dad was a software engineer. Okay. And so, and then just to make my upbringing kind of additionally multifaceted, we had You know, I've never talked to my parents about this. Maybe this is a good counseling session we should have here. I can remember growing up, you know, to make extra money, my dad split and sold firewood. And so I can remember from a pretty early age, we had this little like firewood empire on top of, you know, two successful kind of middle America day jobs. And, you know, now I was looking back on that, like at this stage of my life, I can't contemplate trading my time for money in that way to make$100 or$200 to deliver a load of firewood to someone. But back in the late 80s or early 90s, it made sense for the type of upbringing I had. So I think that... kind of variety and experiences is really how I would characterize my upbringing. There was certainly that kind of reality of growing up in rural America and the hard work and work ethic that comes along with that. But I think for me, it was more about the variety and the fact that, you know, I'm living in small town, rural Ohio, but at the same time, we had a 14-4 modem, you know, when they were the size of a VCR, which is another thing. Beautiful tower in the living room. Yeah, it was just that, you know, so we had that kind contrast that like you know i i went to a small public school and predominantly you know farming community but yet at the same time like early adopter and technology and i think that those influences shaped my career in ways that I didn't really understand until much later. But I think about it in terms of, you know, it's like speaking two languages, like speaking, for me, technology and then operations. And so when you look at my career, I've always kind of had one foot in each, like the operational mindset and that like pragmatic approach to things, but then also being able to understand how technology interplays and supports that.

SPEAKER_01:

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00:

Love that. So playing at your timeline real quick. Yeah. From that area,

SPEAKER_01:

Firewood Empire. Yes. I mean, you end up in Lululemon. Yeah. Big jump in there. Big jump. So walk me through what happened after. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um... I started a very small private college here in Ohio, had a existential crisis and dropped out and said I didn't want to major in what I was majoring in. My parents said, and this is my OU founding story, they said, well, if you want to keep living here, you have to go to school somewhere. So I enrolled in OU and started taking classes at the regional campus up in Lancaster and was working full time. And I was working in commercial construction for a while. And then I took a job with UPS, you know, at parcel service, about the same time that I started my last two years at OU down on campus full time, finishing my business degree. And so my, you know, that was really my first foray into logistics and supply chain was at UPS. really like powerful formative experience. You learn a lot. It's a strong union environment. So you learn a lot about people management being a punk 20 year old, you know, and everyone reports to you as in the union and probably makes more money than you and is probably older than you. I mean, that was like my job for a couple of years, you know, really cut my teeth as an industrial engineer at UPS and then had an opportunity to move into warehousing and distribution. So I worked for Eddie Bauer for almost four years and participated in some some technology projects within that facility. Moved across the street to DHL Supply Chain for a year and a bit. And while I was at DHL, I just opened a building with them. Heard about Lululemon coming to town, opening a brand new building, which was really exciting, like ground up building. And so it really just started as like, this is the next interesting thing to do. And I didn't really, it wasn't about the company. I was not particularly passionate about yoga. Only having heard of it. Yeah, I know, right? But really embraced like, The culture, I mean, really incredible to work for an organization with such deep culture. And that's where things really, I would say, kind of went into overdrive, moving across the country, doing DC projects for them, spending a lot of time in Melbourne, Australia. I've got the tattoo to prove it. It was a really incredible five-year period of time, lots of travel, lots of move three times in five years. And you just get so much exposure to different aspects of the business when you're basically doing startups for a big company. You're always kind of in at the ground level. I love that, definitely. And then after that, you got this idea of ReCommerce. Yeah, so at the end of my time at Lululemon, I was there almost seven years, they launched what is now called the Lululemon Like New program. And so I was a part of that body of work at the end of my tenure there, and then actually ended up going to work for a company called Trove ReCommerce, which was really the first in the market to build and design these like branded resale experiences where the resale product or the used product is being sold through a branded subdomain of the primary website. And they were the first to this race way before any of the other competitors are out there. And so got to experience what re-commerce meant from the brand side, but then also from the service provider side. And so seeing, you know, kind of how you put a deal together on what works and what doesn't work. You know, what I realized through that experience is that I had what I believe to be a unique set of qualifications to solve that problem in a different way. Re-commerce still is very nascent as an industry, and most of the money and most of the talent in that industry is coming from East Coast, West Coast kind of tech hubs. And the reality of re-commerce, while it's this new, sexy, exciting thing, is that the underpinning of that business is just dirty, grimy returns processing. It's like humans in a warehouse, opening packages, looking at used things, cleaning them, refurbishing them, inspecting them. It's a... Logistics problem. It's a people logistics problem. So it goes all the way back to like, early days of my career at UPS, like optimizing human behavior and human movement, but in a warehouse setting. So it's kind of piecing together all the things that I learned to do throughout my career. And next thing you know, out on my own, you know, consulting in the space. And then a year and a bit after that, we, you know, we opened our own warehouse and now here we are. How's it going? It keeps me off the streets, as my mother would say. It's going great. It's great to, you know, to have your buggy hitch to a horse that everyone is behind. And as an industry, it's all moving in the right direction and having venture money behind it obviously helps keep it moving in that direction. So it's been a pretty incredible ride so far.

SPEAKER_01:

I have more. I was going to say, do you have more or do you want to go first? Well,

SPEAKER_02:

I was going to go back. I was going to go back to something you said earlier. another time when I heard you, but talking about getting into whatever it is at the bottom of the supply chain. So can you talk a little bit about how that's helped you and what you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think, you know, something I didn't share about my kind of the start of my time at UPS was the first job I actually had was loading trucks at night. I mean, I was a I was a OU College of Business, you know, eminent graduate. And the reality was at the time I needed a job where I could get insurance. I was old enough or so old that I could no longer be on my parents' insurance. And it was just, I needed something where I could get insurance right away. And at the time you could get, you know, benefits within like 30 days. And so for three or four months, I was 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. like loading trucks and washing trucks. And, you know, no one knew that I was like, a business school graduate or had a business degree and I just needed the job and really just needed the benefit side of the job. But even that short period of time, three or four months of doing the work made me such a better supervisor and such a better manager for leading people doing the work. And so I've always been drawn to that kind of reality of like, You need to understand what the work is at a very visceral level if you want to be the best at leading people to do that work. I've made this analogy before. My wife cringes every time I bring it up, but she's not here. We're good. She won't listen to this. It's fine. The similarities between a warehouse and a prison, there's a lot. Yeah. People are, you know, no one like graduates high school or college and like says, man, I really want to work in a warehouse. If you're working in warehousing, there's a reason. And if given the choice, you probably wouldn't do the work. which feels very much like my prison analogy. And then it's like a big concrete building with not many windows. There's like a lot of similarities. Forklifts everywhere. Well, yeah, not the forklifts part. But like, you know, obviously you don't want to create like a terrible, you want to create the best work environment possible. But there's this reality that you've got. You're trying to inspire and lead and motivate people to work for you hard and honest and productively in an environment that maybe is not super ideal. And maybe they're there because it's their second job and they need a second job. There's a whole list of reasons why people end up in that line of work. And you want to make that the best experience possible, but you also have to understand how to relate to them as a human being. And I think that comes from understanding what the work really is. It's why in the early days of my career, it was like, I would cringe every time a consultant was brought in. Ironically, now I am a consultant, but I try not to use that word. Because oftentimes they were, you know, that traditional path of like recruited right out of college and yeah, all that stuff. Right. And they don't understand what the work is. They're looking at the numbers and the metrics. And, um, so I think it's super valuable to understand what the work is at the most human level possible. And so the analogy I used, your question is like, whatever your industry is, find the bottom of that supply chain and go learn that and go learn it with humility and make sure you understand that You know, when you get the big salary bump, when you get the big title, that there's people doing work at the bottom of that org chart, and you should understand what that work is. And take care

SPEAKER_01:

of them.

SPEAKER_00:

And take care of them. Because you've been there before. Right. Love that. That's very, very impactful. And we have a staffing recruiting firm. And we, every year, when I was an undergrad at high university, my dad, who owned the firm at that time, would send me to the sketchiest, dangerous, most heavy-hitting utility place they had. I mean, I was working warehouse. I'm forklift certified. Because you learn that humility. You learn that you're not good enough for any of those jobs. And after a summer of that, you then want to go back to college instead of staying at mom and dad's house, right? So how much of your leadership skills are you... obviously have now, do you think was bred in that environment? That was bred telling words. 100%. I mean, I don't want to get my parents' credit, of course, but 100%. My last year at UPS, I oversaw driver operations for a large facility down in Chillicothe, and I was 22, and the average full-time driver on my payroll was earning six figures and had 15 years experience on average. I had 55 or 60 people at that time that I was responsible for. You learn how to be a humble leader at 22 when that is your workforce. When someone's kicking your teeth in. Yes, right? Um, you know, you also learn some kind of basics around like performance management, which was really, really helpful that you only really get in a union environment. But the reality is like, how do you, how do you find a way to lead and inspire people when that's who you are? You're like the punk kid coming up in organization who decides to go into management and didn't, you know, didn't drive for 10 years before doing it. Um, yeah. You learn how to talk to people and treat them like humans and treat them with respect and at the same time find ways to motivate and inspire them. I would attribute 100% of that. That and I think some sage sales experience. I worked for Gateway Computers. You probably know who that is. I worked at a Gateway Computer store. I felt like I learned how to talk to people because I had to. It was a commissioned sales job. That was the Cal one, right? That was the Cal one, yeah, the Holstein Cal logo. Yeah, I think those two things together, those were really formative experiences in my leadership style.

UNKNOWN:

Nice.

SPEAKER_02:

So how do you learn that? So you've got to get in at the bottom of the supply chain, jump in, take some of the experiences. But we're graduating college of business students, undergrads and master's students. What can they do early on? So that's a piece of it. But you're also talking a lot about the person and understanding the person. What else can they do early on to... Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

I think there's something to practicing the art of storytelling You know, there was a question earlier today about like sales advice and I probably should have jumped in but I don't consider myself a sales, a salesperson in the kind of air quotes version of the word. As a business owner, I'm selling always in some regard, but I think there's this stigma around like, what does it mean to be a salesman? And of course we all think about like the used car salesman, right? That kind of meme of an experience. But someone who I work with, she uses, the way she says is I'm not a salesman, I'm a talesman. Meaning I'm telling stories and I'm telling them from a place of authenticity and believing in what I'm saying. I'm not trying to persuade you or convince you. I'm just being the most honest version of myself. And people gravitate towards that. And so I think like practicing that art of storytelling, practicing that art of like... explaining who you are to other people and how you show up in social environments. There's a myriad number of ways to do that. Everything from, you know, there's organizations like Toastmasters to, you know, pitch competitions and just putting yourself in like uncomfortable situations, getting some frontline sales experience. I think it really comes down to like learning the art of persuasion and doing it in a way that you are authentically putting that person's best interest first. You're not trying to convince them or manipulate them of something. I think all of that ties in very tightly to leadership. Leadership is, I think, at its core about persuasion, which is obviously very synonymous with sales. And so I think that's a really important piece of round out a skill set.

SPEAKER_02:

What do you have to, if you, if you could answer this, what do you have to know about yourself in order to do that? Right. So, so leadership's about persuasion, persuading, but what do you have to know about yourself? Like how sort of the honesty with yourself or what do you have to,

SPEAKER_00:

I think, I don't think there's a easy path to get there. I think you have to do some like difficult work in some regard. Um, I had an experience early days at Lululemon where, um, As a manager, I was strongly encouraged to participate in a weekend self-help seminar thing. It was like Tony Robbins, but compressed. Was everyone strongly encouraged, or was it just you? No, everyone was encouraged, but I needed it. It was called Landmark. It's still around today. you know, in two and a half days, you do some, there's a lot of crying and awkward things happening. And like, you learn to just like set all of that, you know, kind of clamshell that you've built around yourself, like set it aside and just have some honest conversations with yourself. Um, I think a lot of it also comes from fear. I think even young people today are just afraid to be authentic. That's why you usually hear me say things at the advisory board meetings like, you can't make a wrong decision. It doesn't matter because you're going to be doing something else in two years anyway, so don't be afraid of the decision in front of you. I think you just have to practice it. It definitely doesn't come naturally. It's not for me. I don't know if it does for other people, but it's a muscle that has to be developed.

UNKNOWN:

Thank you.