Nate Shutes: Hello and welcome to the Bootstrapper's Guide to Logistics, the podcast highlighting founders doing it the way that doesn't get a lot of attention.
Nate Shutes: We're here to change that by sharing their stories and inspiring others to take the leap.
Casey Winans: It's a roller coaster ride that you might ultimately fail.
Nate Shutes: That's when I kind of knew I was on to something.
Casey Winans: It was very hard.
Nate Shutes: It truly is building a legacy.
Nate Shutes: The more life you live, the more wisdom you have, because, we are where we're supposed to be kind of answering the call.
Nate Shutes: Don't shoulder entrepreneurship on your own.
Nate Shutes: I'm your host, nate Schutz.
Nate Shutes: Let's build something together from the ground up.
Nate Shutes: Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, depending on when you're listening to this.
Nate Shutes: Welcome back to the Bootstrapper's Guide to Logistics.
Nate Shutes: We are doing exactly what we've been doing for years.
Nate Shutes: There's really no change to the structure or format of Season 3.
Nate Shutes: We're just doing the same thing we've always done unpacking the journeys of founders that are building supply chain and logistics companies the old-fashioned way, with their own resources, supply chain and logistics companies the old fashioned way, with their own resources being scrappy, not getting a ton of attention.
Nate Shutes: And I love bringing attention to that myself, because I feel like it's too easy to get lost in the venture capital world or the PR, the social media machine that makes it look like everybody's a unicorn, when the reality is the 99% of businesses out there are small businesses and they've got small business challenges.
Nate Shutes: But it doesn't mean they've got small thinking.
Nate Shutes: It actually means that they've got really strategic thinking because they are committed to their own vision, mostly free of outside influence, and that's maybe one of the most American dream kind of storylines that's out there.
Nate Shutes: So I love getting to do this with everybody each week.
Nate Shutes: Thank you for all of those that have followed us.
Nate Shutes: We're at the 100 episode mark right around now and if you've been here from the beginning, I just want to say thank you.
Nate Shutes: I couldn't do it without you and without our sponsors.
Nate Shutes: So this week we're going to do the same sponsors.
Nate Shutes: So this week we're going to do the same thing, but this time we're going to go deep, with Casey Winans, who's the founder and CEO of Full Stride, a WMS and tech consulting firm based in the US.
Nate Shutes: Casey, good morning.
Nate Shutes: First, it's great to finally get a chance to go deep on a subject that I love warehousing.
Nate Shutes: I know you're an expert, but it's also our first chance getting to really meet and talk in person.
Nate Shutes: So, good morning, how are you, and thanks for being here.
Casey Winans: Yeah, great to be here, and yes, I know we've interacted on LinkedIn for probably a couple years now, so it's nice to put a face to a name as well.
Nate Shutes: So why don't you start, casey?
Nate Shutes: Just give us a little bit of overview so our listeners know who you are, what you've done.
Nate Shutes: You know kind of career-wise, leading up to what your life has been like as an entrepreneur.
Casey Winans: Sure, yeah, I mean, I came out of the gate.
Casey Winans: I went to school for management information systems at Penn State.
Casey Winans: That morphed into getting an internship at GE up in Erie, pennsylvania, where they made locomotives.
Casey Winans: They may still They've been sold there's a new name on the outside but effectively that's where I got to really cut my teeth and I would say, based on that and the next couple of roles I did, I was more in the software engineering realm of things.
Casey Winans: I built some products after I moved on from GE.
Casey Winans: Reverse auctions for procurement that was something that was done in Pennsylvania.
Casey Winans: There is like a Commonwealth nonprofit that turned in and spun out as a startup.
Casey Winans: After that I worked for probably about an $80 million company that was a middleman and bought print cartridges and old cell phones, refurb them to an extent and then sold them for other purposes down the line and we built all our systems in-house.
Casey Winans: So that was my first taste of warehouse management systems, parcel manifesting systems.
Casey Winans: In fact, my first gig what were my first, I guess, project when I started was this 200 page printout of the ups spec and like build a system that we can so we can create our own labels and do these uh ars labels, authorized, authorized return service, uh, and I didn't know that was unusual.
Casey Winans: So I did that, built those out.
Casey Winans: It worked really well.
Casey Winans: But after working there for a couple of years they were realizing that in-house software was kind of rough to maintain right, you were always making tweaks versus being strategic.
Casey Winans: So they started looking at vendors and, totally coincidental, they were looking at a company called Red Prairie and I was looking to move to North Carolina with my family just for other opportunities and I took a job working for Red Prairie.
Casey Winans: I didn't know that at the time, I didn't connect the dots, but I mean this whole time this is probably the first few years of my career I had no idea I was in supply chain.
Casey Winans: I didn't understand the concept of warehouse management system.
Casey Winans: It was just these systems we built.
Casey Winans: They were business systems in my mind.
Casey Winans: I was a software engineer that's what I do but taking the job at RepRary turned me into a consultant on the technical side anyways, the first couple of years and I was working with big companies rolling out very complex software, lots of customizations, integrations, and that morphed into an opportunity to lead the Parcel Consulting Group inside of the professional services, because I raised my hand, called out some things that were happening in the product side.
Casey Winans: I had a background in it that I didn't appreciate for it and that gave me the opportunity to move into management.
Casey Winans: So I instantly went in.
Casey Winans: I had 15 people reporting to me and I was tasked with fixing projects across the whole spectrum of different verticals, because Parcel was seen as getting a tracking number and all the things that happened behind the scenes in terms of like the rules out there, interfacing with carriers, specifications changing.
Casey Winans: No one really understood it until they went live and things didn't work.
Casey Winans: So I spent that time teaching my team and getting that all taken care of and I did that for about a year and a half.
Casey Winans: And then I followed a mentor to a 3PL in Canada.
Casey Winans: Like there you go, they're going to expand into the US.
Casey Winans: I'm going to learn the outside part of the vendor equation Still lots of clients coming and going.
Casey Winans: So there's a good mix and I did that.
Casey Winans: I learned a ton.
Casey Winans: But right, right about that time about a year and a half into that so this is probably mid-2013 jda and repair emerged and the messaging was awful that basically jda came in.
Casey Winans: They were used to all these turnkey systems on their side, more planning up front.
Casey Winans: Where you have a problem, turn the lights off at five, come back in at nine o'clock next morning and deal with it.
Casey Winans: Well, on the warehouse, the warehouse management space, it's 24, seven, you're not shipping, you're not making money and I'll help.
Casey Winans: Everything's going to fall apart.
Casey Winans: So it was an awesome opportunity for myself and two other guys that I knew to hang our shingle and start a consulting business.
Casey Winans: So my first business and we had no grand plans, it was just opportunistic.
Casey Winans: You know, mercenaries out there for hire until until this new JDA figured out how to plug the hole and then you know, basically, you know, eat our lunch.
Casey Winans: But I fast forward five years.
Casey Winans: We had about 60 people working for us.
Casey Winans: We were doing, we were on pace to do about 12 million the year.
Casey Winans: That that I pulled away and I it just kept growing, you know so you you for help me understand this then.
Nate Shutes: So you spend about 10 or 12 years kind of building the technical knowledge you know both both from a programming perspective and then you're going out into these various domains and learning how to apply your technical skills to different business problems and you fall in love with this one.
Nate Shutes: But there had to have been a moment where you're leaving the relative or perceived safety of a corporate job or a W-2 maybe, and you're like, hey, let's go do this thing on our own.
Nate Shutes: And it was scary.
Nate Shutes: Did you guys just like sit around it?
Nate Shutes: Were you at a bar I'm just picturing you with a cocktail napkin and you're sketching out a strategy, or was it lunchtime or how did what?
Nate Shutes: Was that day like when you and your partner or partners said, okay, we're going to do this?
Casey Winans: It played out like that.
Casey Winans: So I guess the backup.
Casey Winans: I was looking to move on from the 3PL because there were some issues where I just wasn't getting the growth I thought I was promised early on.
Casey Winans: And that's why I went and I talked to one of the guys that became my partner, one of my partners, and he's like let's not do that, let's build something here.
Casey Winans: I got this little bit of traction here with one client, let's figure out what we do.
Casey Winans: And I went back to my wife and I'm like I've always wanted to do this, honey, because I used to read business magazines like crazy.
Casey Winans: It's just one of those like when do I do it?
Casey Winans: And I had actually.
Casey Winans: So I guess I had a business before this, one client, a little bit of work.
Casey Winans: I made like 10 great 10 grand and it was awesome.
Casey Winans: I'm like it felt so liberating.
Casey Winans: But then the 3pl I worked for got wind of it and told me either go full, full time on that one or hang it up.
Casey Winans: And I had one client, a little bit of work.
Casey Winans: I'm like I can't feed my family, so I put it away.
Casey Winans: But that was the catalyst for you know just that, that building it up Like I wanted to do it and I was feeling kind of trapped after that in a W2 role.
Casey Winans: So, having that lunch, and then from there we went, to excuse me, a place called McGregor's Draft House in Cary, north Carolina, and we had lunch there.
Casey Winans: Multiple times we were drinking beer literally in the back of a napkin, like what are we doing here, how do we, how do we get this going?
Casey Winans: And then we spent probably a couple weeks just trying to figure out what we call ourselves.
Casey Winans: That would comprise the three of us, you know, and uh, and more or less we kind of came back and said, well, what about mcgregor partners?
Casey Winans: There's a story that's the.
Casey Winans: You know it's the, it's the cliched, you know, uh, bar back of a napkin story, and we're partners.
Nate Shutes: So there you go, let's not, it was a brew house yeah, yeah exactly yeah.
Casey Winans: So lots of guinness and you know whatever else was.
Casey Winans: You know the local stuff as well, but I yeah, that's how it came to be that's a fantastic that.
Nate Shutes: So there's a storytelling framework that explains most movies and books that we've all read.
Nate Shutes: One of my favorite is the Hero's Journey, and that is the story of the Matrix.
Nate Shutes: Is Hero's Journey Lord of the Rings?
Nate Shutes: Is that as well?
Nate Shutes: And there is a storytelling element inside of those called the watering hole.
Nate Shutes: And there's a storytelling element inside of those called the watering hole and at a certain point in the journey, before it goes from being an adventure where things are safe and fun into being a quest where things are kind of life or death, there's this they call it.
Nate Shutes: It's a scene in all these movies.
Nate Shutes: It's called the watering hole and it's that moment where all the friends band together and decide to go off on this quest.
Nate Shutes: And it's fascinating to me how many entrepreneurs have that same experience of, okay, we're going to leave the relative safety of the Shire or RW2 and we're going to go off and try to slay dragons, and we're in this together and we've come up with the name for our band of misfits and we raise a couple of glasses and make a toast and that's maybe the last moment that things were innocent and fun.
Nate Shutes: And then it gets real and the danger starts.
Nate Shutes: So the first month that you and your partners are the safety is now behind you.
Nate Shutes: Did you like hit the ground running and things were happening how you thought they would?
Nate Shutes: Or was it crickets and you couldn't get a customer to say yes?
Nate Shutes: Like what was the really really early stage?
Nate Shutes: Like when you were fully committed?
Casey Winans: Gotcha.
Casey Winans: Well, before I dive into that, I want to back up just for a second.
Casey Winans: Sure, there was this conversation I had with my wife about doing this and leaving the safety of a W-2, or you know, quote unquote, safety of a W-2.
Casey Winans: And her brother was an entrepreneur, basically like right out of high school.
Casey Winans: So I talked to him and he couldn't envision anything else.
Casey Winans: So he's like, yeah, bet on yourself, you know the sky's the limit, envision anything else.
Casey Winans: So he's like, yeah, like, bet on yourself, you know the sky's the limit.
Casey Winans: And my wife said the perfect thing to me at that moment in time was honey, it's just a house, which really implied that if we lost everything, we still have each other.
Casey Winans: We don't care, you know, and that was like freeing, you know.
Casey Winans: I teared up, I'm like, okay, I get to get to know, chase my dream here.
Casey Winans: But one of my other partners, literally that month, I actually you know what, yeah, I had, I had the one partner had a daughter that was just a couple years old, so, you know, still on, probably in diapers at that point, if I get the ages right.
Casey Winans: And the other one had his second, his youngest, the daughter, literally that month, or maybe, maybe July, just before August.
Casey Winans: So like we're all like, like we're in it, but at the same time, like stakes are high, we're nervous, uh.
Casey Winans: But first month it went, it went awesome.
Casey Winans: I mean, it was one of those things where, uh, the one partner had already broke into a 3pl and they were insatiable.
Casey Winans: You know, just more projects, more projects, tons of work.
Casey Winans: Our rates weren't great but they were.
Casey Winans: They were feeding us and we were doing all the work and we had one contractor at that point.
Casey Winans: But then the beauty of where we came out of because we all came out of Red Prairie, jda, now it's Blue Yonder is we'd worked with clients for years, so it was reaching out to our personal networks and we'd get some work here and there.
Casey Winans: It didn't have to be big in those days, it was just something to kind of move the needle, but the it was just.
Casey Winans: It was crazy.
Casey Winans: We were working 80 hour weeks.
Casey Winans: We were killing ourselves.
Casey Winans: It was.
Casey Winans: It was not fun, but fun at the same time.
Casey Winans: I mean, the money was awesome.
Casey Winans: Seeing that come in like it just opened my world.
Casey Winans: We just opened my world.
Casey Winans: We were all making low six figures.
Casey Winans: Before you know we had moved up to director roles.
Casey Winans: So it was like we're quickly surpassing that, wow, okay, uh, we're gonna need to hire at some point.
Casey Winans: So I mean we can kind of get into that piece there too.
Casey Winans: But it was just gangbusters and we started getting other clients coming in and they wanted something.
Casey Winans: But by and large we had dhl where it was excel logistics.
Casey Winans: At that point DHL turned into.
Casey Winans: I mean, you know, they're massive, so we would work for one director.
Casey Winans: Another director will pull us in more projects, clients coming and going.
Casey Winans: So there was just a whole lot of complexity there and we were there to pick up the pieces and definitely augment their teams because we had the depth where a lot of their teams internally they were closer to operation, they didn't know the systems as well and we could get in and do just about anything in it, even the nasty, complex, hairy stuff behind the scenes so you're doing a combination, then, of kind of consulting, implementation plus software development, kind of simultaneously.
Nate Shutes: Very much, yeah, very much yeah.
Nate Shutes: As a business model, consulting is very conducive to, and that kind of work is very conducive to bootstrapping, because you don't have to hire, you're not going to get paid yourself for a while usually, but you're not having to buy equipment, you're not having to sign a lease or hire a massive staff.
Nate Shutes: And so how did you and your partners think about cash flow and keeping the lights on as the business started to grow?
Nate Shutes: And okay, now we've got to make a couple of different decisions.
Nate Shutes: You're getting paid a little bit, but now we've got to take a risk.
Nate Shutes: We've got to hire some outsiders, we've got to maybe get an office and the expense structure changes, which, for bootstrappers, can be really, really uncomfortable.
Casey Winans: Yeah, well the beauty of what we were doing.
Casey Winans: We traveled all the time so, and all of us lived in the raleigh area at that point, but we didn't need an office because there was no no one there to do it.
Casey Winans: So we would work from each other's homes, if we had to, to meet up to figure out something, you know logistically around the business itself, and just daydream and figure out where we're going, what's working, what's not working, how do we go forward.
Casey Winans: But some of the things I learned from the 3PL I worked with since I was one of just a small handful of US employees at that point is they use something called a PEO, a professional employer organization, and they take care of a lot of the HR pieces where we effectively, our employees of our business, are at least to them or at least back to.
Casey Winans: Somehow, I don't know, you can work up PEO, but it was a great way for us to get benefits very quickly, manage payroll, all these things.
Casey Winans: So we had this stuff set up so we could put the contractors in there as well.
Casey Winans: And suddenly you know we could.
Casey Winans: We could out compete with some of the other consulting firms that were popping up at the same time in our same space because they didn't know those things.
Casey Winans: So yeah, it's going to be something I was exposed to and you know, wearing my business hat, I'm like that's really smart.
Casey Winans: So instantly we got that going, uh.
Casey Winans: So that was, that was one piece that helped.
Casey Winans: But, yeah, we avoided most of the overhead.
Casey Winans: Really, we agreed at some point for taking smaller salaries, something smaller than what we had had before, and then we worked on the concept of distributions.
Casey Winans: Now, one other thing that we did have in our back pocket was one of the partners.
Casey Winans: His dad had had a business for years and he knew some accountants down in our area.
Casey Winans: So myself and one of the partners went down and we just sat with him and he gave us some advice in terms of how to structure some of this.
Casey Winans: So that was helpful for the distribution thing.
Casey Winans: And then I also had my father-in-law very much pressing to get a really good operating agreement in place with buy sell language in there which we can get to, because that's the other story, uh, to really make sure that when everything is going well, you guys can agree on terms, potentially, how things dissolve all the things that can get hairy later on if there are disputes or anything like that.
Casey Winans: So we have these things in our favor.
Casey Winans: I didn't really appreciate them at that moment, but it worked out great.
Casey Winans: And then I think there's probably a lot of companies out there that don't understand that and to get into it without it and hope everything just works out and when it doesn't, that's not the time to be trying to hash this stuff out.
Nate Shutes: It is an unfortunate and sometimes ironic reality that the people that you trust the most, that you want to go into business with you, haven't been tested together in battle.
Nate Shutes: You have great ideas together.
Nate Shutes: You maybe have been co-workers at a company before, and those operating agreements and partnership agreements matter the most when things go really really well and there's lots of money to be split, or when they go really really bad and things get dicey.
Nate Shutes: And for most first-time founders I guess I shouldn't say most for many first-time founders those are uncomfortable conversations to have early because everything's going well.
Nate Shutes: Why would I introduce stuff that might be sensitive or might cause us to not be as close with one another and uncomfortable at well said, and the reality is, over a long enough period of time and enough interactions with human beings, one of the core driving forces is self-interest, and that means something different to everybody.
Nate Shutes: You mentioned your co-founders having young children.
Nate Shutes: They would have totally different personal circumstances and needs than somebody who's already independently wealthy and doesn't have any responsibilities, and so those kinds of agreements can prevent lots of future conflict and in some cases they can even decide hey, you know what, after we've gone through this exercise, maybe this structure isn't the right thing before we even get started, and those are some of the things that happen when you're a second time founder.
Nate Shutes: Now you have all of that knowledge and maybe we can unpack some of that in the next part here.
Nate Shutes: But if you are considering starting a business and you've got a buddy or some coworkers or something that you think, hey, we'd be a great fit to go out and go do this thing, Get an agreement written up on paper, Talk through.
Nate Shutes: What percentage of equity is everybody going to own?
Nate Shutes: What are your responsibilities going to be versus the other person?
Nate Shutes: Who's going to be responsible for being the tiebreaker?
Nate Shutes: When you don't agree and you add those things up, put them on paper, and your likelihood of avoiding significant issues down the road just multiplies a hundredfold.
Nate Shutes: It sounds like, based on what you shared, that you may have found some challenges down the road.
Nate Shutes: So what actually happened?
Casey Winans: So we never envisioned it to get as big as it did.
Casey Winans: In fact we were talking about the equity piece you just mentioned.
Casey Winans: So we had accelerators in there.
Casey Winans: So the first month getting started we were all making low six figures.
Casey Winans: A lot of us had some kind of savings.
Casey Winans: But one of them one of the partners had been doing this for a little longer had some cash and he was able to give us short-term loans for the first month.
Casey Winans: So that was a cash flow piece to get us through before we started paying ourselves, and the typical net 30.
Casey Winans: You work, then you bill and then you wait because they've come up with excuses of why the invoice isn't ready yet and all those fun things.
Casey Winans: So that got us through it.
Casey Winans: But part of that agreement was there were going to be accelerators in terms of equity based on that and they seem like big numbers to us.
Casey Winans: You know, a couple million here, a couple million there.
Casey Winans: We hit those and then ratchet up and then we're pretty close to all evenly splitting the pot.
Casey Winans: So that happened.
Casey Winans: That happened pretty quickly.
Casey Winans: So then we revisited the operating agreement to kind of play with what looks like longer term.
Casey Winans: But so we did this for five years.
Casey Winans: Tons of clients.
Casey Winans: We eventually grew to 60 people.
Casey Winans: That first hire was really scary that first year because you know, suddenly we're on the hook for somebody else's livelihood.
Casey Winans: But that worked out well and then we started hiring, you know, slowly at first, and then we started doing multiple ones, but so it ended up being about 60 people.
Casey Winans: We were on track to do somewhere close to 12 million the year 2018.
Casey Winans: Wow, but probably that fourth year we really started looking at what do we want to do and two of the partners wanted to go in and build software and I liked the idea to an extent being naive, coming into it.
Casey Winans: But at the same time, I was also starting to chase something called managed services.
Casey Winans: So we have SLAs and they're paying us for peace of mind effectively to jump in when things go sideways.
Casey Winans: In a warehouse world.
Casey Winans: That's really important.
Casey Winans: Vendors can't do it or if they do, it's just to fix defects and maybe some data, not to understand your operation.
Casey Winans: So I got into that.
Casey Winans: My first client at that point was Advanced Auto and we learned a ton in terms of how to structure these deals and they were massively profitable.
Casey Winans: So I'm like that's probably our future.
Casey Winans: I like that.
Casey Winans: It really kind of plays with the implementation side plus supporting it long-term, but there's always gaps when you're doing something.
Casey Winans: So that's the software realm.
Casey Winans: So we started doing that.
Casey Winans: We didn't know how to sell, so we were burning cash on employees and all that.
Casey Winans: And we got great insights for early customers who didn't turn into early customers.
Casey Winans: And it was just this dividing piece here where it's like, okay, five years in, what do we want to do?
Casey Winans: I like the idea of stepping back to an extent, maybe trying something different and, you know, being a sign of partner.
Casey Winans: One of my partners liked that for a while, but ultimately, two of them decided they were going to go double down on software and I'm nodding, you know.
Casey Winans: So middle of 2018, they decided that they were going to buy me out, and you know it was.
Casey Winans: It was bittersweet, you know.
Casey Winans: It was one of those things where I knew I wasn't happy, but at the same time, this is my baby and you know these were my friends and like this is this is tough, but we had to buy a sale agreement.
Casey Winans: So you know I couldn't stop.
Casey Winans: I couldn't stop the sale, but I could negotiate, and one of the things we had in there that was really good was this concept of we can each go get our own valuation.
Casey Winans: You know, in my mind theirs came back very low, which great you know, it's.
Casey Winans: Just it's the bottom part of it.
Casey Winans: They were hoping to get me out quickly, maybe because I'm I'm pretty past and passive that way, in terms of if it's good for the business, I would do it typically.
Casey Winans: But then I went out and I found a great lawyer on my side who got me in connection with a great appraiser and this guy that's all he does.
Casey Winans: So he came back with all this other information and it was like double the valuation.
Casey Winans: So it took probably this was the middle of 2018.
Casey Winans: We probably didn't finalize the negotiation until sometime in November, december.
Casey Winans: So it was frustrating, right?
Casey Winans: Sure, I bet you know, am I getting paid?
Casey Winans: What's going on?
Casey Winans: I can't talk to people inside the company for valid reasons.
Casey Winans: I mean, I'm not throwing anybody under the bus, I get it.
Casey Winans: But it really sucked because I couldn't tell my story and I just kind of disappeared.
Casey Winans: And then actually the same day, I was told that they're like hey, we want to buy you out.
Casey Winans: My mother-in-law had a stroke and then she ended up dying two weeks later.
Casey Winans: So it was just awful, right, like we were like Alice falling down the hole, no power thing, our world just getting ripped apart.
Casey Winans: And so we got through that.
Casey Winans: We got through the year and this is something that no one knows, my partners included.
Casey Winans: We ended up getting life insurance that kept us afloat, so I couldn't negotiate for it and have to take a smaller deal.
Casey Winans: So it was a blessing, huge blessing.
Casey Winans: But at the end of it I had to sign a non-compete for two years and I got a chunk paid up front and then I got a chunk paid every year for several years and that kind of got me through well, pretty much going into COVID, because COVID kind of really rocked a year later.
Casey Winans: But what do you want me to?
Nate Shutes: unpack there.
Nate Shutes: Well, I mean, first, what I'm picking up on is just how human all of that is.
Nate Shutes: That has nothing to do specifically with logistics, it has nothing to do specifically with finance.
Nate Shutes: It is just a very intense lived experience of somebody who and I'm sure if we asked your partners that were there, they would have a slightly different version of the story and they would say some of the same things of like yeah, it was really hard for us too.
Nate Shutes: But I think we glamorize entrepreneurship I know I do, I'm guilty of it at times and the realities are it's very hard, it's very emotional, emotional.
Nate Shutes: It is a different kind of sleepless night when you're dealing with equity and distributions and maybe a an ending, a partnership that's ending that.
Nate Shutes: There's not a lot of people that can understand that kind of pressure and stress.
Nate Shutes: I'm sure your wife vividly remembers every week of that and if she probably flashed back to when you were all starry-eyed and like, hey, let's go do this thing, and she said it's just a house, you know, to get to that full circle moment on the other end of it.
Nate Shutes: That is.
Nate Shutes: I mean I'm not going to spend too much time on the storytelling part of our narrative and how that all works.
Nate Shutes: Uh, that is.
Nate Shutes: I mean, I'm not going to spend too much time on the storytelling part of of our narrative and how that all works.
Nate Shutes: But yeah, these are quote life and death and from a financial standpoint, uh, stakes they're not um fun, they are terrifying.
Casey Winans: Oh yeah, yeah, it's, and it's the typical thing when you've had a business for a few years lifestyle creep.
Casey Winans: Yeah, I bought a new, bigger home.
Casey Winans: I had a daughter in college.
Casey Winans: I had, at that point, I think, I had my two younger kids.
Casey Winans: They had been homeschooled for a while for other reasons medical for one of them, but I think they were in private school at that point, right, so I was doing all these things that were valuable to my kids, really pouring into them, that required a sizable income, and then suddenly the rugs pulled out and what do you do and what's going on?
Casey Winans: And I had a lot of guilt actually too.
Casey Winans: I mean, here's the other human person.
Casey Winans: Part of it is for those five years and then years before it I traveled like crazy.
Casey Winans: So it was constantly like I'm seeing my kids grow up through, you know, facetime, talking to my wife, you know, and odds and ends.
Casey Winans: And there was one project I did where I felt like I lived in Memphis for two and a half years, I mean every week, four days, four days a week there, constantly.
Casey Winans: So there was that coming out of it.
Casey Winans: So it was relief on one end, you know.
Casey Winans: But you know friendships are kind of getting pulled and pulled apart, ending, you know, uncertainty about what's coming next to me.
Casey Winans: So there's, there's all those.
Casey Winans: It's all that human drama that was in there at the end of it 2019, you know, like the very beginning of the year.
Casey Winans: So I think it was, I think it was December 31st.
Casey Winans: We signed the papers and I was no longer an owner, got a chunk of money, got the promissory note for X number of payments and you know, I that was kind of cut out from everything I'd done for for years.
Casey Winans: So what do you do next?
Casey Winans: And you have to reinvent yourself.
Casey Winans: Or, uh, and and honestly, I did sensationalize entrepreneurship.
Casey Winans: There was a lot of relearning, unlearning at that point, cause I thought my stuff didn't stink.
Casey Winans: I realized that there was a whole bunch of things around business that I didn't know, that it was just the perfect storm of being in a space where there was a lot of demand and I just happened to be able to build and capitalize on a network when I didn't have it anymore.
Casey Winans: You're starting from scratch so much harder.
Nate Shutes: There's also a loss of status.
Nate Shutes: That happens.
Nate Shutes: You're used to being in a room and having influence or authority and the network.
Nate Shutes: You get customers, you've got suppliers, you've got clout of a kind, and then one day you realize it was all situational yeah, I mean true, there's.
Casey Winans: There's folks I haven't talked to since I left mcgregor, just because you know we there was that six month period where separation and even before then, like moving into different roles, where I didn't talk to as much.
Casey Winans: So if they listen to this, this is probably their first, uh guess, perspective of, or at least my perspective of, what happened and why it happened.
Casey Winans: And so I'm I'm pretty private that way.
Casey Winans: I overshare sometimes in other spaces, but I've been quiet in this in terms of detail, but I think.
Nate Shutes: Thank you for for trusting me and our audience with a very vulnerable insights.
Nate Shutes: I mean, this is part of why I do what I do is I?
Nate Shutes: Lots of folks out there are owners themselves, or are about to be, or have been dreaming about it for years, and I want to help prepare them, in some cases just tactically.
Nate Shutes: Hey, you're going to need to get really good at accounting.
Nate Shutes: You're going to have to understand what a GL code is and how a balance sheet and the income statement work together or don't at times and statements of cash Well, you're going to learn all that kind of stuff.
Nate Shutes: Plus, you got to be a part-time lawyer, part-time HR generalist and you're going to miss a lot of your kids' sporting events and and and and so to help prepare them for those kind of rough seas that might come, stories like yours, I believe, add significant value.
Nate Shutes: Now you can tell somebody else hey, don't make the same mistakes I did.
Nate Shutes: And oftentimes people are like no, I think I want to burn my hand on the stove myself before I listen to what you say.
Nate Shutes: But now you've gone through it yourself and then you had to sit out for a couple of years and now you're doing full stride.
Nate Shutes: So let's shift then.
Nate Shutes: Second time founder, new organization well, for new name?
Nate Shutes: Where did full stride come from?
Nate Shutes: What does it do and what are you doing differently now in your next venture, gotcha?
Casey Winans: so in between starting full stride and exiting McGregor Partners, I had a two-year COVID the ugly part.
Casey Winans: I actually took a job.
Casey Winans: I was recruited by somebody a peer that used to be a competitor and I worked there for about a year and a half heading up advisory.
Casey Winans: So I got to learn a lot of the stuff that happens before they select a vendor and get an implementation, which meant are we building business cases?
Casey Winans: Does it make sense?
Casey Winans: Here's different vendors, where are they better, worse for you, based on what you're trying to achieve.
Casey Winans: And then just structuring all that and I did a lot of that with fixed fee arrangements.
Casey Winans: So no longer per hour, you know where this, this, this messy part of we want more, they want less.
Casey Winans: You know, and then we're fighting over inputs and outputs versus like, what are we achieving?
Casey Winans: So I did that for a year and a half.
Casey Winans: He retired.
Casey Winans: I didn't really mesh well with the rest of the executive team, so part of the ways.
Casey Winans: But taking all the things that I learned there, I wanted to put into full stride.
Casey Winans: And full stride really is like you start slower and you ramp up and then you're running right.
Casey Winans: So that image in your head.
Casey Winans: I wanted to work with the mid-sized businesses that weren't well served by Blue Yonder, the ones that I had seen buy them, always choked and they struggled long-term if they didn't just abandon ship at some point.
Casey Winans: So I'm like there needs to be somebody there advocating for them.
Casey Winans: And one of the things that didn't go well with my first business and the one I was working with afterwards is when your time and materials and your project-based the ones that get you going early on to feed you eventually are the ones that you get the scraps or don't even get any attention because you're chasing ever bigger paydays.
Casey Winans: So with McGregor we were going high, six-figure, low, seven-figure implementations versus the five and six-figure we did at the beginning.
Casey Winans: Same thing with the other company I worked with.
Casey Winans: So these other ones, these clients, were getting the scraps, the ones coming.
Casey Winans: They were coming and looking for, say, blue Yonder and you can potentially pay the subscription fee, maybe pay for a small implementation, but you're always going to struggle with this.
Casey Winans: They're going to eat you alive because there's all these assumptions behind the scenes in terms of how it's structured for large business, not midsize.
Casey Winans: So we started looking at that company.
Casey Winans: In between, I started looking at other vendors that were maybe a tier lower, didn't have the partner.
Casey Winans: Ecosystems really wanted to grow, wanted some outside influence partnerships to go.
Casey Winans: So I took those agreements and I literally one of them.
Casey Winans: I wrote an email.
Casey Winans: My wife was like how did that work?
Casey Winans: It was maybe six, seven lines.
Casey Winans: After I talked to the CEO of one of those vendors and I said, hey, I made the case, you want partnerships.
Casey Winans: You felt like you missed the boat on that one.
Casey Winans: What if I build a business that didn't outgrow you and we can talk?
Casey Winans: And he's like, let's do it so instantly.
Casey Winans: There you go.
Casey Winans: I had my first partnership.
Casey Winans: Then I went out and I started the LLC and all that.
Casey Winans: But she was kind of dumbfounded Like, how did that work?
Casey Winans: I spoke his language.
Nate Shutes: You know if I can deliver great.
Nate Shutes: So you closed the deal in one email.
Nate Shutes: Is what you're saying.
Casey Winans: Yeah, more or less that's really what it looked like.
Casey Winans: You know, there was a conversation before that and some back channel things with some some some folks that I knew in the industry, but that was how my first partnership started with a vendor and I went in and I started working.
Casey Winans: As you know, I went back to being the guy who was turning the wrenches and configuration and talking to clients.
Casey Winans: So that was that was that was me, my, my deal.
Casey Winans: I was going to be an implementation partner for midsize businesses, midsize vendors, right Connecting the dots there doing?
Nate Shutes: what does midsize mean?
Nate Shutes: By the way, can you define that?
Nate Shutes: Yeah, so going back.
Casey Winans: I mean anyone that's probably doing.
Casey Winans: I guess it's more, so much that I'm trying to get back to that original thesis because it was a little fuzzy.
Casey Winans: But anybody who's looking for WMS at that point, so maybe outgrowing an ERP or even in the sense of a 3PL, that's the first system.
Casey Winans: You need A big thing to run your operation but they're not big enough for the big names in the new half, the vendors out there that want to grow in.
Casey Winans: A mid-sized business is great for them.
Casey Winans: It's a quicker implementation.
Casey Winans: It's the first one.
Casey Winans: Land and expand as they grow.
Casey Winans: If you do well, it's virtuous.
Casey Winans: And then I'm in the middle of figuring okay, well, how do I do this profitably where I build a team and I don't outgrow anybody?
Casey Winans: They outgrow me and I celebrate it Like that's not something you see in a typical consulting firm.
Casey Winans: That's just.
Casey Winans: That's just the business model that doesn't exist.
Casey Winans: You know, like my first one, we just kept growing and then people fell off the bus as we got bigger and bigger, unfortunately inadvertently.
Casey Winans: So I started doing that.
Casey Winans: I did that for several months and then I hired my first employee, paul Hinman, and we were working together and we were a great middle where you could see, it was sold to somebody who wasn't ready.
Casey Winans: They were typically first-time buyers and we were the ones that were level setting after the fact.
Casey Winans: The vendors kind of liked it, but they didn't like it.
Casey Winans: The clients appreciated it, but didn't like it because we were delivering bad news.
Casey Winans: And then we were always the ones getting the black eye and, regardless of us being there or not, we could see the ones getting the black eye and, regardless of us being there or not, we could see the other projects going on with some of these vendors and they never, really ever, transitioned to fully supported live.
Casey Winans: They were tethered and there was no real leadership on that side of things.
Casey Winans: So it was coming in and you're asking the customer what they want versus leading them with some type of process, and so at the at the very end of 2023, I pulled back.
Casey Winans: I'm like this is this is enough, it's, it's, it's a lot of money, it's great money.
Casey Winans: I can probably keep hiring this way, but I hate my life again, like I don't want to build another body shop and that's the effectively what you know where I'd worked outside of vendors.
Casey Winans: I'm like I don't want to do that.
Casey Winans: I want this to be meaningful.
Casey Winans: I love helping people and I want to help American businesses effectively.
Casey Winans: The mid-sized mama pops getting bigger, maybe getting into private equity, but I want to have a meaningful impact there.
Casey Winans: I don't want to get them after they've gone corporate because then I'm just talking to a middle manager who doesn't have real say.
Casey Winans: I'm like I want to talk to the leaders.
Casey Winans: So we stepped back and the big question I had in my mind was what does across my career?
Casey Winans: I've been doing this for 20 years what's the commonality?
Casey Winans: And my thought process then was no one's ever really ready when they buy.
Casey Winans: Was no one's ever really ready when they buy.
Casey Winans: No one really talks about all the stuff at the business level that should be done.
Casey Winans: That would help influence who you're working with but also impact all the things that come along.
Casey Winans: You know, when you get into configuration and design there's I can't tell you the number of times I've gone into a meeting and I've asked a simple question at least I assumed it was simple and you get multiple answers and people look at each other kind of shocked like oh, you're not thinking the same way I am and instantly like guess what that derails the project?
Casey Winans: We're going to spend more time in design than anyone anticipated, and unless you get more budget, something's going to have to give, which is training, testing, go live, support, all the things down the road that are like forever away, and I'm like that's, that's the part we need to fix.
Casey Winans: So we started brainstorming.
Casey Winans: I'm like what have I done that's been successful?
Casey Winans: And that's when we started carving up and coming up with something called Clarity.
Casey Winans: First, and it's a framework.
Casey Winans: I have three big questions, with questions inside of that, all geared towards letting people know should you invest now and most of the time?
Casey Winans: If it's not, yes, it's not yet, because if you're growing, eventually you're going to need one.
Casey Winans: And then there's things behind it that are objective.
Casey Winans: Another one is where aren't you ready, which is a hard pill for people to swallow.
Casey Winans: So we get into that Unpacking that around teams, process data, all the things that an ERP doesn't necessarily need or will probably should.
Casey Winans: But you can get away with it because there's another aspect to the whole operation that way.
Casey Winans: But so we started doing that and that's where we went full into it, and I've walked away from a lot of revenue to get there.
Casey Winans: It was pretty painful and then eventually, since we weren't getting traction until just after uh, I had to.
Casey Winans: I had to let that guy go.
Casey Winans: You know which was like losing your right arm.
Casey Winans: It really sucked.
Casey Winans: And it was at that perfect time though, too.
Casey Winans: He was getting married, he was buying a house.
Casey Winans: They want to start a family.
Casey Winans: He needed stability that I couldn't give him.
Casey Winans: Where, where I'm I'm second time I can do this.
Casey Winans: My wife works, so there's some cushion there too.
Casey Winans: Two of my kids are out of the house at this point, so it's just different all around.
Casey Winans: They weren't then, but they are now.
Casey Winans: So I bit the bullet and said, well, I'm going to go double down on the mission-based piece of this, and so I had to start from scratch.
Casey Winans: I had to get my message out there, figure out how to talk to people, figure out how do I get in front of an audience.
Casey Winans: Podcasts became part of that plan Right on.
Casey Winans: Little by little, towards the middle of the year, I started getting more leads coming in, and so I didn't have to do any weird consulting gigs anymore.
Casey Winans: That kind of kept the lights on, but, you know, divided your attention Didn't really, didn't really help my mission, and I've been doing it ever since.
Casey Winans: It's not it's not something where I'm getting enough traction yet to hire a team.
Casey Winans: It's like feast and famine I'll get a couple, then there's a, there's a, there's a you know dry spot, and then I get more.
Casey Winans: So it's it's like start and stop jerky.
Casey Winans: So I'm in survival mode still at this point, you know.
Casey Winans: And then I've been looking for what's in my.
Casey Winans: Am I pulling too much versus, or am I pushing too much versus pulling where clients are coming to me?
Casey Winans: And this is a problem.
Casey Winans: So I have the.
Casey Winans: I guess I'm blessed enough to know that I have, if I can be, I'm finding the fit and I'm going to have something that I enjoy doing long-term, that I can build a team around and I can choose to either sell it or keep going and maybe run it forever and sponsor other businesses, cause that's how my brain works.
Nate Shutes: I always see other opportunities, but you got to pick one and go with it, and well, Casey, I love your honesty, just the way you talk about the realities of, because there's a temptation to over-represent size, like for a lot of startups.
Nate Shutes: They, oh, we're a global company because one of their founders, you know, was born in Canada.
Nate Shutes: You know, no, you're not global.
Nate Shutes: Somebody's address is another thing, yeah, and sort of like puff up and try to appear as something that you're not, and it sounds like your approach is the opposite and it might take longer as a result, to get, maybe, where you want to get.
Nate Shutes: But it sounds like you have a much deeper sense of clarity about how you want to run a business, this time around very much, and you're zooming out and looking at the whole family experience and the financial side of it and the the impact on your employees.
Nate Shutes: You mentioned the one that had to leave um to start a family and those are the kinds of learnings that you can't read about.
Nate Shutes: I wish we could.
Nate Shutes: I wish somebody else could just download all of the learnings and then apply them immediately and increase their odds of success.
Nate Shutes: Two or three X, but that's just not human nature when folks are willing to talk about these things in such a candid and frank way.
Nate Shutes: And I don't know what happens next for you, of course, but I love that you are putting yourself out there, because I'm convinced that when you show up that way, there are some people out there that are absolutely attracted to that way of doing things, and we just try to connect them.
Nate Shutes: So when we grow awareness for smaller businesses, you don't have it all figured out.
Nate Shutes: You're not a $50 million a year thing, you're very early in the process and we want to offer that support to you.
Nate Shutes: I also just love talking warehousing and WMS and all that stuff myself too.
Nate Shutes: So selfishly we could record for a couple more hours because I want to know what those three questions are that you ask.
Nate Shutes: I've implemented a WMS myself.
Nate Shutes: I've opened new facilities under an existing ERP that had a WMS module inside of it and I couldn't change anything because it was a copy paste of all the other distribution centers and it didn't quite work for the way I wanted to do it, and so I feel the pain of having been the user of the WMS, and so maybe you and I we need to have our own McGregor brew house conversation sometime, and I want to pick your brain on all the ways to do it more expertly in the future.
Nate Shutes: When you think now, wrapping up, who is the type of business or somebody that you would be a great fit for, that should reach out to you.
Casey Winans: It's funny you say that because we were talking about the geeking out on the business side.
Casey Winans: So one thing I've discovered recently is I had a referral from another podcast I was on.
Casey Winans: This was a small 3PO.
Casey Winans: They were morphing from FBA prep into a full-blown 3PO and they realized they need some help.
Casey Winans: They had tried WMS themselves a year before.
Casey Winans: It didn't go well for all the reasons of why I do what I do.
Casey Winans: So pulled me in and while I was working with them, they were captivated by the quick wins that I offer, which I just do as a you know like hey, this kind of helps offset my fees.
Casey Winans: Well, they, they drank it up and they were so approachable and you know they're a small business.
Casey Winans: So there's, you know there's not a big budget for consulting.
Casey Winans: I'm probably the first one they've worked with, or maybe in a long time, because they had a bad taste in their mouth.
Casey Winans: That's what I'm up against.
Casey Winans: But so I'm really thinking about doubling down in that space of upstart 3PLs, because they need, they need the WMS right off, right out of the gate.
Casey Winans: I've been working with distributors too, but there's that, that, that milestone of we've finally outgrown the erp with the module, wms module and everyone is in alignment with that, or they're at least asking the question where I can come in and help paint the picture of yes or no.
Casey Winans: You should do this, 3pls.
Casey Winans: It's much earlier, uh, the organization's more flat so we can have the conversations.
Casey Winans: They enjoy this, this content.
Casey Winans: That's where they found me.
Casey Winans: I can be real, super real and polished, or corporate, yep, you know all the things that I, I value, I might, this, I get to be more, uh it's.
Casey Winans: It's a combination of the warehouse management guy but also the business consultant guy, because I come in and ask like are you capturing all the revenue you should be capturing?
Casey Winans: Because I know in a 3po world, you know labor is massively expensive, the margins are low and what I'm seeing you do here, do you capture that?
Casey Winans: Because if you're not doing it consistently, you're giving people free rides and that's killing you on the back end here, whether you see it or not.
Casey Winans: So I love that part and that's really kind of opened my eyes.
Casey Winans: How do I get in front of more of those folks?
Casey Winans: And I've met so many other entrepreneurs that have networks in that realm, either like matchmakers or other some other offshoots of that, that are like oh yeah, we bump into these folks all the time.
Casey Winans: We we don't have any way to help them Like, well, yeah, perfect client for me, let's, let's, let's help them make them bigger.
Casey Winans: They're good for you, I help them, you help me, so everybody wins.
Casey Winans: So that's where I think I'm really going on that side of things.
Casey Winans: It's it's the smaller upside upstarts, and that might not just be 3pls, I don't know.
Casey Winans: I've bumped into some brands on the e-com side that really want to get in and do their own fulfillment and they have the same challenges of yeah, what do we do early on?
Casey Winans: What do we do?
Casey Winans: We're kind of figuring out and making it work, but is it dumb?
Casey Winans: Like you know, are we doing things the hard way, versus like you come in and tell us to make a change and suddenly you know we're three times more productive.
Casey Winans: So that's the kind of stuff I like now.
Casey Winans: My big challenge now is how do I make that profitable for me long term, where I can build, sure, and not just be limited to me?
Nate Shutes: so well.
Nate Shutes: It's a another puzzle to solve and that's what you've made your career on is connecting the dots, moving the Rubik's Cube around digitally to support the physical world that needs to be moved around, and the four-wall ecosystem of a warehouse is so underestimated and misunderstood.
Nate Shutes: The complexity inside of it is astounding and also just a lot of fun.
Nate Shutes: It's where the real work gets done.
Nate Shutes: Tons of hardworking people that get up in the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning, show up at a distribution center an hour later and get to work and lifting heavy things and walking long distances and driving heavy and sometimes dangerous equipment, and they're interacting alongside technologists and finance professionals and customer teams, and I always like to tip my hat to them.
Nate Shutes: I'm responsible for a distribution center right now, you know, with around 30 or 40 people, and I always love to honor them because they do the work that doesn't get seen and if we, you know leadership and technologists and vendors do our jobs really, really well, they also benefit.
Nate Shutes: It's a safer work environment, it's more ergonomic, it is less taxing, it's more intelligent.
Nate Shutes: How it's done and engaging those folks in that kind of work is a blast, yeah, and so, yeah, it keeps lighting the fire for me talking to you, casey, because I it's easy to get lost in the business of business sometimes and need to zoom out and say, why are we doing this?
Nate Shutes: Oh, that's right.
Nate Shutes: Mostly do everything that we do for people, our families, our teams, our customers, and so thanks for bringing that full circle today and we wish you nothing but the best.
Nate Shutes: Again, I always end by saying we're all rooting for you.
Nate Shutes: We really are, and I can't wait until you get up to full stride yourself, and then we can come back and do an update in a year and say, hey, where are they now, casey, what's up?
Nate Shutes: And we can hear from you.
Nate Shutes: But thanks again for being here today.
Casey Winans: Yeah, my pleasure.
Casey Winans: Thank you for having me.
Casey Winans: This was therapeutic for me.
Casey Winans: Just, you know it's in your head, so getting it out there in intelligible ways.
Nate Shutes: Well you did.
Nate Shutes: You did a great job, and I know there's going to be tons of folks that learn a lot from the journey that you've shared so far and that will be rooting for you too.
Nate Shutes: Thanks, casey.
Nate Shutes: Awesome Hope.
Nate Shutes: So, all right, take care.
Nate Shutes: Thanks for listening to another episode of the Bootstrapper's Guide to Logistics, and a special thank you to our sponsors and the team behind the scenes who make it all possible.
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Nate Shutes: To learn more about the show and connect with the growing community of entrepreneurs, visit logisticsfounderscom.
Nate Shutes: And, of course, thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories.