Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly

Journey into the Future of E-commerce with Alec Berkley

• Host: Nicole Donnelly / Guest: Alec Berkley • Season 1 • Episode 16

Share episode

Ever dreamt of establishing a successful start-up or yearned to better grasp the fast-paced world of B2B e-commerce? This episode is your golden ticket, as we navigate the entrepreneurial seas and the complex terrain of B2B commerce with our distinguished guest, Alec Berkeley. Alec, co-founder of the e-commerce startup Bundle B2B and now the director of global strategy at BigCommerce, offers a treasure chest of insights drawn from his journey of scaling up from a college side hustle to selling a successful startup.

We venture into the labyrinth of B2B commerce, unearthing the significance of aligning business divisions and understanding client needs for survival and success. Our conversation takes a futuristic turn, exploring how AI could revolutionize the industry. Alec then takes us on a backstage tour of the challenges faced by manufacturers and startups, revealing his secret strategies to overcome the hurdles. 

We conclude by diving deep into Alec's personal journey, where he recounts his experiences growing up in Southern California and building two successful companies by the age of 30. His tales are a testament to the power of turning business blunders into opportunities for growth. So come join us, as we uncover the grit, determination, and misadventures that pave the road to entrepreneurial success.

Looking to overcome marketing blunders and find inspiration from the experts who have been there?

Subscribe to Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly wherever you prefer to stream podcasts!

Get in touch with the team at Tales of Misadventure by visiting dmgdigital.io.

Don’t forget to enroll in our newsletter for more small business marketing tips and entrepreneurial inspiration! https://info.dmgdigital.io/welcome-to-dmg-digital

Intro:

Hey there, thanks for joining us for Tales of Misadventure, a podcast all about business blunders. On this podcast, nicole Donnelly, founder of DMG Digital, talks to entrepreneurs and learns how they turn their lemons into lemonade. Dmg Digital is a content marketing agency focused on helping manufacturers attract new buyers through digital self-serve. Nicole Donnelly is a fourth generation entrepreneur, a girl, mom and an avid traveler. Now let's head into a tale of misadventure with your host, nicole Donnelly.

Nicole:

Welcome to Tales of Misadventure, where successful entrepreneurs share their stories of failure and how they turned lemons into lemonade. In today's episode, we are so excited, I am so excited to host Alec Berkeley, guitarist, husband, future dad and entrepreneur, who is one of the very few who built and sold a successful startup. Alec made waves in the e-commerce world where he co-founded Bundle B2B, a SaaS application that offers enterprise level B2B functionality to businesses of all sizes. Alec is now the director of global strategy at BigCommerce. Alec, welcome to the show. How are you?

Alec:

I don't deserve that.

Nicole:

You're welcome, it's my pleasure. I have been so excited to have you on the show ever since I met you at the good old MEP conference in Buffalo last month and from that first conversation I had with you I was like just enamored by your story and I was like I got to have him on the show. He's got a cool story to tell. So how's your week going? It's Friday. How you feeling Friday?

Alec:

I'm feeling good, spent a good week. Yeah, I'm happy to be chatting with you. Hopefully there's some good nuggets in here. I just started listening to this podcast, goldmines, that's hosted by Kevin Hart, where he interviews people much more successful than you could ever imagine, so I feel like very, very fortunate to be talking about my small snippet of e-commerce success that has existed so far in the universe.

Nicole:

You're too modest, you're very modest, but no, it's pretty remarkable what you've built, considering what 90% of all startups fail. So not only did you build a successful startup, but you sold it, and I just had a live show earlier today with a gentleman, a good friend of mine, damon Vestolka, who helps businesses sell their business put together exit strategy and everything.

Nicole:

And 70% of all people who try to sell their businesses can't sell them, and that's only the people who try. So you are in a very elite class of people who not only built a startup but actually sold it. So I think that's massively a massive accomplishment, and especially at your age, which you're a pretty young dude. So I'm just going to like just build up your ego as much as possible, so by the end of the show, you'll be a massive narcissist. That's my goal.

Alec:

Yeah, narcissist training with Nicole, yeah. So I mean, where do you even start? I guess how I even got connected to the other co-founder, Dong, is an interesting story. I could maybe start there and then you know see where it goes. So I was at Chapman University in Orange County in Southern California.

Alec:

I had a side hustle fixing iPhone screens. At that time it was like iPhone 4 going into iPhone 5. The iPhone 4s you had to take it all apart, like from the back, just to get to the screen. It took a really long time and then when iPhone 5s came out, all you had to do is just pop up the screen and you could do it in like 15 minutes. So really big shift.

Alec:

I don't know if any listeners have ever fixed iPhones before, but when I was in school, particularly in Southern California, with a large paternity and sorority population, I had a lot of clients and that side hustle turned into a pretty successful business fixing phones, no kidding. And the president of Silk Dong was really impressed with that business that I had started in college and said hey, you know, I really want you to come and lead our business efforts with Magento. We just became gold partners. They were really like in the beginning stages I think it was 1.7 or 1.8 open source, and this was when Magento was owned by eBay. I had no idea what Magento was, but at that time it was kind of the leading platform for e-commerce businesses and Shopify and big commerce were kind of just starting out. So anyway, yeah, that was kind of where I got.

Alec:

My start was at a career fair. I went to just the booth that had the shortest line. There was like Tesla and Google and Hulu and all these huge companies that had long lines. I was like I don't want to wait in line and I'm pretty sure my mom had called me to notify me that this thing was even happening like an hour before. So I just showed up and meet Don, but we totally hit it off. And then, yeah, I didn't even really look at any other companies. I said this e-commerce seems like something that will only grow and even though I know nothing about it, I've shopped on Amazon before and I felt like that was the right sector to bring my entrepreneurial spirit.

Nicole:

I guess you could say Well, definitely shows you what a visionary that you are. Even at that time you were able to see the market and potential there, because at that time it was primarily fashion right.

Alec:

Yeah, it was a lot of fashion retail.

Nicole:

Yeah, and so B2B e-commerce was just very nascent at that time. So what a really smart and visionary move on your part to be able to see like, hey, there's a lot of opportunity here.

Alec:

And still to this day, yeah, and how we figured out how to crack the B2B code, I guess you could say was integration. So there was all these different ERPs out there. The ones that we were targeting were like SAP Business One, microsoft Dynamics, great Plains, everest if you remember that company. There was like three or four different ERPs that we marketed integrations for with Magento and we just got all sorts of leads because there was all these businesses that were buying into the e-commerce platform as opposed to doing it custom, but had no idea how to integrate that. And that was just an entire goldmine for us to sort of. Nobody just wants to do integration projects, but that's how you can start a conversation there.

Alec:

Because this was before I think Celigo was just starting out, when they had built something very basic connector into NetSuite, and so we're like, okay, we won't do NetSuite because that's Celigo, but we can provide a whole lot of other integrations, interesting Solutions.

Alec:

So we kind of started on the integration side. I remember doing demos with, like a virtual server with SAP Business One and I would restart it before every single call because it was always breaking. But that was kind of where we got our start and then we realized, okay, maybe we could make this a bit more efficient and productized and get out of the integration business, because integration platforms can sort of satisfy a lot of that or maybe other companies. But how can we sort of take a lot of these B2B tools that we're building on Magento, open source and productizer, accelerate time to market for a lot of these companies that we're asking for the same types of things quick ordering, quoting order to cash with invoicing and purchase orders and things like that. So kind of brought that into big commerce and the rest is kind of history.

Nicole:

So what made you decide? You guys wanted to go to big commerce. And I also have to give a massive shout out to your mom, because Kudas to your mom, because if she hadn't reminded you to go to the health fair, career fair, the career fair, if she hadn't reminded you to go to the career fair, where would you be today?

Alec:

I know.

Nicole:

Thank the Lord for overbearing Jewish mothers. So I hope I bet every time she sees you she's like Alec you owe me.

Alec:

Oh yeah, I mean she's a, she's a gem, yeah.

Nicole:

Oh, I bet, I bet. Well, tell me more like what made you guys decide to move to big commerce?

Alec:

Yeah. So at the time, as I mentioned you know, magento open source was by far the leader. Shopify was gaining a lot of momentum really fast, particularly in fashion and retail, not so much on the B2B side. Big commerce was really interesting to us because both companies approached silk at the time and said, hey, join our agency program.

Alec:

And you know we had evaluated both and we felt that big commerce and the approach that they had, with like the openness and less, I guess, fashion and retail and more non-traditional business types, I guess, attracted us to the big commerce platform also, maybe being a bigger fish in a smaller pond, as opposed to, like a lot of agencies were jumping on the Shopify bandwagon trying to, you know, access that rocket ship which it, you know.

Alec:

I mean maybe if we had done both we would have been 10 times more successful, probably would have right. But we just decided, you know, we really liked the folks at big commerce and their approach and you know Brent, I think, had just came in and he had a really, really good vision for the company and like where where big commerce was going to go, and so we decided that it made sense to just really lean in first as an agency partner to learn the platform. And then, after a couple of years of building up that agency practice and I think there was a couple of initial clients that we had got that were on the larger side, like Harvard business publishing Harvard business review was one, and then Gilden with Gilden Brands was another one you know American Apparel, GoldToe, Comfort Colors they have whole umbrella brands.

Alec:

So a couple of those businesses and doing B2B for them, or learning how those businesses wanted to do B2B, rather and figuring out how we could then solve it on a platform that was rooted in B2C. That was kind of the challenge and it took years and, of course, many failures along the way. You know we definitely signed up for some projects that were we'll just call them overly ambitious projects. What we really do at the time with the big commerce platform. This is before things like priceless and cart APIs exist, where you can override items in a cart or change pricing based off of different customer groups.

Alec:

So you know fundamental things for B2B that were on the roadmap and we were trying to sell with big commerce, basically saying, look, we can do this or we will do this, but also trying to pick up the pieces along the way, knowing that you know we were bootstrapping right.

Nicole:

Oh man, bootstrapping. So in hindsight, do you wish you wouldn't have taken on those projects, or were those failures critical?

Alec:

They were critical. They were absolutely critical and you know some of the relationships are relationships I still have with business owners to this day. Others didn't work out as well, but all critical to you know, pushing the vision forward which was like democratizing, you know, b2b commerce and lowering total cost ownership, increasing functionality. You know, nobody ever wants to be the first or the guinea pig. I think as a salesperson, knowing that your client is the first one, it's tough right.

Alec:

Like how do you manage that expectation of like product development while also delivering a project and doing right by the client Like that within itself is one of the hardest things. It's a balancing act right.

Nicole:

Oh, I can only imagine because you know I own an agency and it's all about client service, client delivery and so if you've taken on a project that, truthfully, there's so much uncertainty on over what you can do, no, doubt is going to take longer than anybody anticipates. There's going to be things that you can't do and to be on the service side of that, to have to go back to the client and be like, well, uncle, we can't do this, that's really difficult.

Nicole:

But knowing that you needed to take those steps in order to build the product, and also though the fact that you were able to bootstrap it, I think is incredibly ingenious, because I think so many people in your shoes would have tried to do the whole VC thing and say, hey, let's just get funding. What made you decide not to go that route? Why did you decide you wanted to do it this way? Is it because you needed the customer, you know, feedback to help build it? And tell me more about that approach? Why did you guys decide to bootstrap it?

Alec:

Yeah, I think well, first off, I'm very fortunate because I came into already established agency with developers and resources and I was more on the business, marketing and product kind of vision side. I guess you could say not so much like bankrolling the whole thing. Those are my other partners. So I think effectively what we decided was the opportunity was so large that we were willing to take a loss on X number of projects in order to get this product that we then could grow and scale eventually into a SaaS business model and then either sell or continue to scale and etc.

Nicole:

Yeah, very cool, oh man. So, tell me a little bit about like you worked at the agency first and then you founded, you co founded bundle B2B with your co founders.

Alec:

Yeah, so what?

Nicole:

was that transition like?

Alec:

Yeah, the agency side, the services business, is very different than the product and you know subscription model business. The mindset shift was you, you have to. I think this was something that you had mentioned before. You have to say no a lot. Right, there's guardrails, whereas the services business you want to be a yes man or a yes woman, right, where you just always placating the client services based model. You want to build that. I know this might not be the right custom module and you might need this other thing, but if you're going to pay the bill and use your allotted retainer hours toward this, who am I to say that you're not able to do this? You are the one, you're the client. You're paying us.

Nicole:

You're the client, you're paying the bills, so therefore.

Alec:

Therefore, we will do it where, whereby, in the subscription software as a service model, you have to be really careful when you say yes because effectively, what you're doing is signing up your product development team to then roll a feature into your core that will then be rolled out to everybody else. So if customer base says I would really like this custom CPQ feature for my t-shirt business, and I feel like you know that's good for the t-shirt business but not good for our, you know industrial distributors that are just trying to, you know get orders quickly off the shelf and you know, have inventory constraints and all these other things that we need to focus on. So therefore, I will say no, but then I will refer that out to the agency business or other agencies right, it could be silk, it could be others. I'm gonna then say, hey, you can still get that thing done. I would still like you to use our platform for what it can do. Just, we're not going to build that module for you. It doesn't resonate with our client base. This time. That could change, right?

Alec:

So that was the major shift was saying no but then redirecting that to someone that can say yes, yes, and then we kind of focus on continuing to build that. What we felt was the core. You know what started out as maybe 40 or 50% of what one would need. That I think ended up being around like 60 or 70% of what maybe a B2B manufacturer, distributor, would need in terms of the commonly asked features that we had seen from you know hundreds of these projects and I guess you could sort of bifurcate that, as you know, manufacturers and then distributors, cause the needs are.

Alec:

There's some overlap between the two and if I'm selling to a business online, there's certain things that everyone's going to need.

Alec:

But then I think, within those two different business models, you know, there are going to be specific things that then you have to look at, which was another challenge, because you're gonna you're going to get a lot of requests that don't make a lot of sense unless you understand the root of where those requests are coming from and you're then able to relate that to a larger audience.

Alec:

And then you say, yes, I will actually build that, because I know distributors do business like that and I will get more distributors if I built this thing into my product and I know you know, like for, for example, building the quoting tool for a long time we didn't have quoting right. We just didn't have it. But ultimately we had to make the decision to roll that into the product because otherwise they're just going to go buy something else and they'd have to integrate that in our system and it was going to be too complicated for what they were paying us. It just made more sense to get that feature. So, even though it existed in other people's software that was integrated with big commerce, we decided to do it because our clients just didn't want to go to another vendor to get that thing right.

Alec:

So that's another sort of I don't know example, I guess, and product development. You know, client requests and requirements and how to scale a business without going underwater.

Nicole:

Basically, yes, especially, you know, because, let's be honest, running an agency it's it's like it's hard to scale a service business. Margins are tricky compared to, you know, other businesses.

Nicole:

But, when you're talking about how you're deciding, deciding to decide, how you are deciding which features you want to add to the product. It sounds like there's just a lot of nuance. There is very subjective and there wasn't really like a firm, like okay, this is our list we're going to follow to make sure that this meets the criteria of creating this product right, Like it was almost like. Just you know, you had to kind of like use your best judgment based on the other use cases that you had and just the other, the other situation that you had. Are there certain features that you got requests for that, in hindsight, you wish you would have built into the product?

Alec:

That's a really good question. I think a lot of those things have now been since remedied, since built into the product. I think one of the major I wouldn't even call this a feature, but one of the major things that we didn't get to pre acquisition that now exists was universal compatibility with any big commerce merchant. So the way that we had built the software originally was all the code existed inside the big commerce theme, so you had to then customize it all within the theme, and the major release that actually took place earlier this year is now like with the buyer portal it can just overlay on top of any big commerce site, so it's no longer relying on whatever code and everything else that they've built to date. They can just now enable me to be login and they have their own like kind of branded buyer portal. Right.

Alec:

So it's a lot more accessible and easy to implement, I think because we had the agency, business and people that could write code all day. We just never did that because we figured out we could just do it, but that was definitely the thing that needed to be done. That has now been done. That was a major, the major like elephant of development work. I think it was almost a year after the acquisition and we John McCann and Micah and the rest of the team kind of rolled that out first as sort of the all right. Now it's universally available to everyone instead of, hey, it's available if you do all of these things and customize the code, which ultimately wasn't the right model for big commerce overall. So do I wish that we had done it? No, because it would have cost us more than $1,000. But what it helped a lot like that was kind of the thing right.

Nicole:

Yeah, no, kidding, like you have to like. That's what's magical about this story is that you bootstrapped it. You have to like, make a lot of like judgment calls based on financial need and based on your cases and resources. And you're still able to build this amazing product. That, frankly, adds a tremendous, a tremendous amount of value for BDA companies now. So, man, if you could like bottle that up somehow and create a framework for other startups on how they go about that process, like that would be.

Alec:

Yeah, well, there have since been, there have since been a number of other companies that I've seen go from agency to SaaS, and I've spoken with a lot of those founders and owners of those agencies and consulted with them and provided my you know, two cents of feedback and making the switch. And you know, some some have, you know, gone through with it after speaking with me and others have stayed out of it because they're just like I don't know I'm ready for that, right, I don't know if I want to do it. So yeah, for sure.

Nicole:

Well, I have a. I just watched something the other day that full disclosure. I'm not a big Elon Musk fan, okay, but I saw this quote from him that I just completely related to as a founder and I would love your take on it. He was talking about someone had asked him if building a business was fun and he said he's like anyone who thinks it's not fun to build a business. He said there's parts of it that are fun, but most of the time it's like you're staring into the dark abyss and you're eating glass. And he said and I thought it was brilliant he's like the dark abyss is that the odds are stacked against you.

Nicole:

You don't know, there's no certainty about the future, you have basically a 90% chance of failure, and you, it's this black abyss, you have no idea. And the glass part is that you have to work on all of the problems that the business requires you to work on, not the ones that you want to be working on, and so you're basically just staring into the eating glass, and I found that to be like, so like I listened to it and I was like, oh my gosh, I totally can relate to this. It is so, absolutely true. So what do you think about that? Did you feel like something similar when you were building Bundle B2B or do you feel differently?

Alec:

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think there are rewarding moments along the way, yes, like where you've really like satisfied a client and they've found tremendous value in that thing. That started from nothing, right, and that kind of keeps you going through the tough times, which there are going to be a lot of them While at the same time, yes, you do have to kind of fill in, like as a partner, as a founder or whatever your percentage of ownership is. The employees are only going to do as much as they're going to do that you've asked them to do, and all of those gaps, which many of them will exist. The partners or founders kind of have to come in and fill all of those gaps.

Alec:

And sometimes I think that's when it's really important to choose co-founders that have complementary skill sets and you don't want to have any duplication almost in any category, and to the extent that you do, most likely one of those founders is going to end up eating glass, to your point, right, because they're going to have to fill in for that thing that they really hate doing. So for me, I ended up doing a lot on the finance side, in the accounting side, because Dong is just super technical and product oriented. So I ended up over time doing less and less on the product and the technical side, doing more on the finance and the accounting, which I don't necessarily like, but I don't hate it that much. Accounting is accounting, it's like those types of things.

Nicole:

That's such a great point about finding founders that have complementary skills. I completely agree with that, and I found that being a founder, being an entrepreneur, is this combination, this weird combination of intense joy. It's incredibly rewarding and fulfilling, combined with this intense pain and suffering happening off and simultaneously. But you feel compelled. It's just so rewarding and so I think it's just this interesting and you have to get really uncomfortable, or not uncomfortable. You have to get comfortable with the uncertainty, knowing that it's always going to be uncertain, and you have to just make peace with.

Alec:

Nothing's going to be Certain and just for a lot of people, they thrive in that kind of dynamic. That said, those same types of people. If you look at their personal life, not a whole lot is there the majority of the time. Right. In the cases where, where you have a fulfilling outside of work life and you have that, it's like how have they done this right? It's so crazy to think that you can scale this business and take care of this like your own, basically, child and then also have like real children, which for me it was like I think I could probably do this again if I wasn't to kind of full circle moment to the intro, like wanting to start a family and do all those other things.

Alec:

So I think, for, for people that really want to have like dedicated time and you know all that for like personal things, whatever your passions are right, like starting a business and doing that whole thing might not be like maybe that's why 70% fail is because 70% of people actually don't want to make the sacrifices that are actually needed the 60, 70, 80 hour weeks at times to keep things going Right. Or, you know, doing the red eye, meeting with the client, going to another place, like the road warrior kind of life. It's. That's what you need. You got a world tour to build a business, especially if it operates globally, which ours did right, so yeah, that is such a great point.

Nicole:

I love it and it's really exciting because you're going to be a dad soon, my gosh you're going to be a. You're going to have a son soon, in a couple months, right? Your wife, your wife is pregnant, so your first child.

Alec:

We're preparing the best that we can. I've told the best, the most common, talking about like feedback from people. Right, the most common piece of feedback is get sleep, get your yes, but how do you actually build up? Doesn't it reset every day? Like, how do you build up sleep like I wish I could like it's vacation time, like I build this up and then right now I'm going to use all this. You know, sleep now that the kid is here is like no, you can't do that.

Nicole:

Yeah, you just got. You got to appreciate the sleep while you have it, so be grateful for it. And then, when the beat, when the baby comes, you have to just take sleep when you can get it. You know like just sleep when you can. It doesn't you're and just expect you're probably not going to get a full night sleep for a long time and just make peace with it, but I'm sure you're used to that.

Alec:

Like I can nap my wife can't nap, she just doesn't do it. But she can also function with less sleep than I can. But yeah, I can basically shut my eyes and be asleep within five minutes at most points throughout the day. That's amazing.

Nicole:

So yeah, I'm lucky and the other thing I would say is tap into that amazing Jewish mother of yours and have her come and help as much as humanly possible, so that you can get some sleep, that is, and don't hesitate. I remember when I had my first child, I honestly felt guilty about asking for help. I was like, oh no, I got to take care of all this and no, just ask for help because people want to help and it's better for everyone if you have and can use the help.

Alec:

We have actually started. We're doing shifts right, because we only have one at her, so we're gonna have. Yeah, I think the first, like three months are pretty much accounted for, but yes, after that I think we'll be then the time where. Okay, so now, who's going to help after three months? Right, but I don't know.

Nicole:

Oh man, so good. Well, I have like so many more questions for you, alec, I could like talk to you all day long.

Alec:

What.

Nicole:

Let's talk about. Let's talk about manufacturing, which is a very something I'm very, very passionate about. We we work primarily with manufacturers at our agency and, and we provide digital marketing services, primarily content marketing, and a lot of our clients are pretty new in terms of like marketing maturity and definitely e-commerce maturity, and we have some that are on the you know the further end of that, where they have, you know, pretty robust e-commerce stores, and so we work with a. We work across the spectrum and there's some real challenges for manufacturers to adopt e-commerce because of the complexity of the sales process and that so many of them have custom manufactured products and the sales teams and distributed and all of that. It's just not as easy as just setting up your t-shirt store and screen printing teas, you know. So tell me, like what is? What do you think some of the biggest challenges that manufacturers have when it comes to e-commerce transformation and how does big commerce is bundle B2B, this? You know these. How do you see that really fitting in and filling the gap for that need?

Alec:

yeah, so it is a bit of a moving target, right, as things evolve and you know the world kind of changes, right. But, like, ai is the biggest topic these days and now we just launched this AI like product description tool, which is, which is cool. So now you can spend less on product descriptions because robots will do it for you, right? So yeah as time passes, you know there's more and more kind of tools that can help with with these types of things.

Alec:

But fundamentally I think and I've said this many, many times before is like alignment of business operating divisions. So primarily it's like the combination of it. If it's a large enough business to have an it with the IT department, with sales and marketing, right, because at the end of the day, like how do you, how do you change management, how do you like, how do you do that right, and it and it's going to be different depending on really like what is like, what's the main driver? Like during the pandemic, it was the pandemic was the driver right now it's a little bit different.

Alec:

It's it's it's more centered around growth and efficiency and profitability, right, but of course, you have to make investments as manufacturer. You know what's the number one thing that I'm going to put all of my money into. 90% of the time is the product right, because I'm I'm a, I'm a manufacturer, I want to keep building stuff and like innovating, and you know patents or whatever it is that I'm doing that's so unique. That is the reason why I exist in the first place, right, and then after that, after product. It's like these other things, right, and so it's after product. What is it right? It's normally sales, right, so you can sell the product. Then, alright, how do you sell the product? Who do I sell the product to? And that's when. Oh, you know, we're going to hire this poor individual and we're going to, we're going to have them.

Alec:

Read the marketing team, right, and I think you have probably the most experience in dealing with these poor individuals that have been, you know, brought in, and it was very apparent. You know, at the MEP conference as well, like some of these marketing folks, and you know, the hands go up. Are you the only one at that? The man you've got this manufacturer that does marketing, or are you? Do you have a team of two or three, and I think the most that I saw was like three, three people, right? Which tells you, okay, this is a product and sales led sort of model here, but you know what is e-commerce, right? That's that's marketing this technology as an enabler to sell more product, make more sales, or you know more education about the product. So what do you need? You need good product data. You need, you know, some sort of source of truth for that product information. That's hopefully not your ERP, because ERP is really bad at data and asset management and you know rich content that Google likes, right?

Alec:

So you know, enter PIM, which didn't exist when we started doing this like, like, product information management systems and digital asset management systems just didn't exist. There was no real need for it, right? But as a lot of these companies start thinking about, like, how do I scale out my global you know e-commerce business or my global marketing strategy if I'm a manufacturer and I have, you know, map pricing? I've got this huge distributor network and they're all reselling my products. Where are they going to get my, my product images? Where they're going to get the specs, where they get all the pdfs and all of these things that need to be standardized and then, from a language perspective, translated content right.

Alec:

So more and more I've found, like for manufacturers, you know, that centralized source of truth for really like the real, really like the rich content and product information that differentiates your product.

Alec:

Having that ready is step zero or step one, and, and a lot of the time, like, because you said there's various levels of maturity, yeah, I think you, kurt, and I were kind of jamming on the idea of like a maturity score for a manufacturer.

Alec:

Yeah, and you know my thoughts were you know, if you're on the lower end of that maturity, you probably just need to centralize all of your information, get it ready to the extent where you can just list a catalog, forget about pricing and bringing in your distributor, services, claims, replacement parts and, you know, sales, quoting online and invoice portals, like all that advanced stuff.

Alec:

You can forget about that, throw it out the window. I just need a catalog and then I would like that catalog to be available online. So somebody is searching for my product, whether that's an end user or a distributor, they could go and find, you know the specifications that they need to make sure that they can continue on with their project. Then, you know, maybe it turns into a sales qualified lead. From there you can go about your business with the offline sales process and then decide at what point. You know, now that you can start bringing data online, you can start bringing sales reps into the e-commerce universe where they might want to leverage some of these more advanced tools that again exists on, like the maybe higher spectrum of maturity scale.

Nicole:

I love that idea of the maturity scale. I think it's brilliant because I think a lot of times manufacturers that I work with they just don't understand e-commerce there's like you mentioned. They're so focused on product and engineering and sales and e-commerce is like this and marketing in general is like this and they're like this is something that they just don't, frankly don't understand and so I think a lot of times what I see with manufacturers is when we're trying to like understand that you know they're they, they're so many of them are want to do e-commerce.

Nicole:

They see it, they want to do it. They don't realize the complexity of it. So they'll come to a and they'll show us a website of some other competitors store and they're like I want that and you're like well, wait a second. This site probably cost over a million dollars to build. Like if you look at the back end of it and this, in order for them to build this, these 10 things needed to have been done first before they could even get there. And you're like way like over here. So let's start over here and then we can maybe step it up to there. You know, like. So I think that that is a really cool point.

Nicole:

I think for manufacturers to really think about is understanding where and for anybody who's working with the manufacturer needs to understand and like, kind of like lower the expectations a little bit and be really realistic with them about where they should be starting and taking that crawl and we say this all the time, but you know, you starting here and and being able to set up an e-commerce solution that will grow with them. Right, that's so important, because where they're going to be today, it's not going to be where they are in three to four or five years, which is a great thing, right. Right, they also need to understand that it's not a one and done thing, like once you build the store. It's. There's ongoing evolution, that happens as you're learning from the market and all of that.

Nicole:

So anyway, I could go on and on about that, but I love the maturity model. Yeah, like, what are the?

Alec:

inputs. You know I've always and you know no perfect formula exist, right, but what I mean, if anyone could do it, it would be you and Kurt. Right, to figure out, like, what is the line of questioning that will allow us to figure out where you are and you know how to at least you know insert the right messaging and solution sort of path based off of that. That progression, right, because it's going to be so different and it's going to always change as new things are developed, like, like I said, with the AI. You know hype and actual application of it. It's it's sort of accelerated a lot of the you know product information, product recommendations, personalization.

Alec:

You know a lot of the things that were proprietary, like AI driven search right, it's exist for a really long time. Auto, complete, right, even. You know if you are typing on. You know the iPhone use auto correct, guess what that's using? Right, so it's exist for a really long time. It's just now become accessible and reasonably democratize, for you know all to kind of. You know figure out how this applies to you. How do you make this more efficient, even for marketing? To my wife, she's a content writer and as soon as I saw him, yeah, she, she does she looking for work?

Alec:

Yeah, not, not a moment. But when all this stuff started getting released, I said you know you should start using this, because I feel like you might be one of the first ones to be replaced. He's like oh yeah, you're probably right. So now she does kind of like plug in. You know a lot of these like generating captions for you know Instagram and tick tock. You know all of these things like just use it, right, because everybody else is now using it. But you know, apply your knowledge to that, enhance it from there, right. If you're not using it, or you cannot at least get some value out of it, then you're starting from a point of this. You're at a disadvantage, right.

Nicole:

Yeah, you're absolutely right, and we, you know we're content marketing agency.

Nicole:

We are writing all the time and we leverage a I all the time to create content, and so what the role has become for the writer is you're basically the editor, you know instead of right and it's a beautiful thing and it's interesting to see, like, because of how great the tools are now they the more that you train them to speak from the voice of whatever, whoever it is that you're writing for the brand voice, you can feed it all of the information, past articles, etc. And say this is all the information about X brand.

Nicole:

I want you to take this transcript from this interview and create a blog post blah, blah, blah, blah it the more you train it, the better it gets at speaking from that voice and you just become the editor and you just basically treat AI like a toddler, where you go back and say, actually I didn't, you didn't get this part right, so I need you to go back and I'm going to ask you to do it this way, and so it's really quite interesting to see how that is going to is playing out and how quickly it's all advancing.

Nicole:

And I think it also for like manufacturers getting into e-commerce. It does just like you mentioned, you got to get on now, and it's so true for manufacturers. The longer that you wait to try to start this e-commerce journey, the further behind you're going to be when you get there.

Alec:

So it's just so important to start it Higher and a colder data start to embody your brand.

Nicole:

Absolutely. But yeah, no, I think that's great. So let's talk about the future of B2B e-commerce, all right.

Intro:

What do?

Nicole:

you think, like, what are you excited about? What is the future of B2B? I guess we've talked a lot about AI, which is going to be a lot of the future. But where do you like you know, where do you see it going with AI? You mentioned product descriptions. That big commerce recently just rolled that out to be able to, you know, create those descriptions through AI. But, like, what other things are you excited about? That you think is going to be cool. Going ahead, looking ahead.

Alec:

Yeah, there's. There's a lot and I could break it out even by category. Like as a category, there's so much innovation happening and payments and fintech and traditional banking and all of that. And then there's another category which is, you know, the enterprise resource planning and migrating from like on premise to cloud.

Alec:

I grade a lot of those core kind of you know supplier, vendor management, you know inventory management tools with your sales channels to make sure that you can get like better forecasting, quicker turnover of inventory and all of that stuff. And there's sales tools right Like like like better quoting and invoicing. And you know cash time, like from from when you send the invoice to when do you receive the money, and you know decrease like. There's tools in. This actually relates back to fintech a little bit. There's like tools that you can use decrease that time from you know when the order is placed when you receive the money, because you know now I have you know invoice reminders or I have a portal that can.

Alec:

Then you know go and you know process payments or accepting credit cards, but with L2 or L3 data, which means I get better processing rates because I'm selling to another business. Or you know working with companies for in capital like inventory funding. So I was just at a conference last week I can't remember the name of the company, but they'll basically like pay for your inventory if you have a contract with like retailers like Target or Walmart, to like help you because your margins are lower when you sell a retail, but the retailers want your product, and so there's companies that will help fund that turnaround.

Alec:

from when you're like they'll buy your inventory to basically like the middleman. Yeah, to go put on the shelves, and then you know you, of course they're gonna take, take something a percentage, but you the risk.

Nicole:

The financial risk is much less risk is less right.

Alec:

So tools like that, I think, are really unlocking a lot for brands with good products to get them out onto shelves and really test see. Okay, you know like I can more quickly validate how successful this is going to be because there are these tools now that can get me out into the universe a lot faster, more efficiently, more cost effectively than maybe has ever existed Right. So I don't know if that's necessarily the future of B2B, but that is like one interesting kind of tool that I saw with, like businesses selling into retail, which is technically B2B, is just big. Retail is a whole beast within itself, as opposed to, in the traditional sense, manufacturers selling to different dealers and you know those dealers are regional distributors. Then you know adding their value, service, installation, assembly of those products or whatnot, right?

Nicole:

No, I think it's definitely relevant for B2B. It just seems like retail tends to do things first in e-commerce and then it makes its way to B2B, because I mean manufacturers, definitely they. Cashflow is king, so if there's going to be a solution for them where they don't have to worry about trade capital finance things like that I think are really interesting and there's tools that have been doing that for a while.

Alec:

But I think a lot of businesses they don't want to pay those little like fees or things like that to free up the cash. But I think with extended lead times on certain products, like particularly for distributors, you know they might they might want to do that, those types of things. But, outside of, just like trading capital and freeing up cash and these types of tools. I've always thought like these integration platforms right? I always go down.

Alec:

Yes, I mean, there's so many of them out there now, but they really have come a long way. And I futz around in these tools all the time, whether it's, you know, mercado or Jitterbit or Boomi or Celigo, and I'll go find, like, the big commerce connector. It'll bring in all the endpoints. Then I'll go you know an acumatica or net suite, bring in all that stuff and I'll just start you know, doing stuff like All right, can I get this data over here? What do I have to do in the middle from a business process point of view to then change the mapping?

Alec:

And I've always like nerd it out on that kind of stuff, probably because I was doing demos on these like virtual servers when I was like 21 years old. But these days it's pretty interesting to see, like at least in the B2C workflow, how sophisticated it is, how easy it is to take like a credit card order, push that through to a 3PL that you know third party right goes and ships it out updates like I don't even have to do anything as like a. There's a lot of these companies. A lot of them are on Shopify sorry, big commerce but a lot of these brands, these D2C brands. All they do is marketing and advertising.

Alec:

Right, that's all they have to do Because everything else is automated and they just pay a monthly fee and it's all there. But that's B2C, right? Like you said. That's, that's the model. Like, how do you then take some of those efficiencies of like these, some of these companies just being like you, talk to some people. They have no idea about their product. A lot of them are in like supplements and like vitamins and, unfortunately now, pet food. But there's a lot of people out there that just kind of target a market because they know how to advertise and they know, you know, men, men at the age between 30 and 50, are going to be looking at, you know, this type of supplement to improve their Y level of whatever it is. Or like this, like mushroom coffee that I keep seeing ads for regular coffee, right, like, drink this coffee. You're going to be not that type of mushroom, but I guess there's like some you know type of energy derived from.

Alec:

Anyway that's not the point. The point. The point is that I think there's a lot, of, a lot of integration efficiency that can happen if these B2B businesses are really to maybe change or tweak a process and then that can drastically reduce their cost to going online. Right, but I think that change that's why I was talking about change management and business process, because I think historically, a lot of these companies are just you know, it's worked this way for a really long time. This is this is how it's set up. It's cost effective. I don't want to name any specific legacy ERPs, but there are a lot of legacy or industry specific ERPs out there that do some of these things really well, whether I'm in, you know, food and Bev, or I'm in promotional products or any you know specific niche industry where I have my requirements that I need right, I think, as those systems either start to get acquired by the larger conglomerates of SAPs and oracles and others, or you know, they go.

Alec:

They go create these cloud versions of their on premise or older software. I think, when it comes to that business process and how, how I can easily get APIs and web service calls, you know faster, more efficient for things like pricing and inventory. You know orders and invoicing and accounts receivable and supplier vendor management accounts payable, like, as all those things in the back office are brought to the current time, which is happening, then, like these integration platforms will actually be able to do what they do in the B to C world for B to B, because now suddenly the core is more readily able to be automated into the front end.

Intro:

We're not there, yet that's going to be another decade or two.

Alec:

But as that back office progression continues. These integration platforms are just going to get smarter and smarter and, you know, even to go back to AI right as a sequence of like taking an order, getting the line items, transferring those line items into a bill of materials and then exploding that bill of materials into six different vendors and then fulfilling that. You know those little robots in between can maybe take what could could was a six step sequence and just turn it into one, because now the robot can look at every single line item, decide what vendor all those match to and then push that thing and push that blob into the order management system to then more quickly fulfill it Right. So we've got clients like uplift desk that are able to take an order, I got an uplift desk.

Alec:

Check it out, check out my uplift.

Nicole:

It's amazing. I love it.

Alec:

That's the most those guys can have like hundreds of custom lines on an order and still ship it out the same day. Right, that's just big. That's the, with a bunch of custom logic in between. So that bunch of custom logic in between wasn't necessarily easy to do. But I guess my point is it will become easier and easier for that middleware and that custom business process and logic to apply to these more bespoke B2B business processes. Long winded answer, but I think that's the future, truthfully.

Nicole:

No, that is. I got to say that's exciting because I've been in a manufacturer and seen how much manual work happened. So these order type products, oh my gosh, like how many hands are touching it and the back and forth between the supplier, and you know all of the suppliers right, Because there's many yes.

Nicole:

Exactly. And then the lead times and the lead times are different depending on which vendor you're going to, and there's someone on the team that has to follow up and make sure and update and all that stuff and what you just the picture you just painted, seems like a miracle.

Alec:

So all those suppliers that are higher up the supply chain, what if they're more, you know, more readily providing their inventory in their lead times than my back end system can actually read that? So I don't have to go and check. You don't have to have someone go and check that one that's going to be available and then that requires an ecosystem, though, right Like.

Nicole:

In order to do that, your suppliers are going to have to be as advanced as you are when it comes to e-commerce maturity, or please correct me if I'm wrong, but, like I would imagine, in order for that to function the way that you're imagining, it would go beyond one company, and you would have to get your suppliers on board to be able to adopt that technology too.

Intro:

Yes totally.

Alec:

Yeah, and you know for us right, you know we can, and I say us as in the context of big commerce now, but usually you know we start out and we'll get somebody maybe a little more forward thinking on the lower you know they're manufactured.

Alec:

They're really just like bringing in like four or five different things and like smashing them all together, sometimes even just putting four or five different finished goods into a bundle and selling the bundle right. But as you kind of go up, up, up up that supply chain, you'll find, okay, here's, you know somebody that's just supplying the steel right and they sell to, I don't know, like Boeing right for the steel that goes on to aircrafts like. Think about, like Boeing's head of procurement right and like the types of vendors that they're working with. It's mostly all EDI right and EDI those types of transactions, that's. That's eventually going to change.

Alec:

I don't know how long, but that's really old technology. Eventually it will change and when it does, a lot of these bohemiths that are like top, top of the food chain are going to have more accessible data feeds and then, once those are accessible, then the downstream folks, maybe the smaller than Boeing folks, who don't have the means to go set up their whole procurement system with the other system that they've got like these are you know these are smaller companies now have access to maybe data and information that only is previously available to larger companies and you got collective bargaining within that. So I've got all these independent now manufacturers or independent companies that you know because of the access to the information can then, you know, go and go and do stuff like Alibaba is like one example of that like need to be marketplace model right.

Alec:

Where you've got all these different, you know, China based companies, and I think there was a sponsor for the MEP forgot the name, but they were kind of trying to do the same thing. It was like a marketplace conics, was that it.

Nicole:

Oh yeah, connects Yep, connects for for the internal manufacturing. Great idea, yes.

Alec:

Great idea US based sort of supply chain connectivity. You know, send your data to these guys and then the other the other folks will be able to then go and figure out if they can use your products for their projects, and that's kind of that's. That's a great vision, right? I actually still need to follow up with that company. I think that's a great. I think that's a great vision. I think that's a direction. That's a direction that you're headed right.

Nicole:

Yeah, I mean, I think the vision that you've painted is like very exciting, like it's, it's super, like I can visualize in my mind how much efficiency that's going to create for the business and so that they can be more profitable and grow and scale much more effectively across the whole ecosystem. Right, and the benefit is going to be obviously to the end customer, which is, of course, what you want. But, like, how do you like? How do these? Like? I got to tell you I'm in the weeds with these manufacturers that it's just like, it's like a chore to just even get them to just put up their just basic stock items on a store and you know, and then build like just even a simple configurator and you know how. Like to me, like I hear that and I'm like my gosh, how do we get there? Like, how do we get these? There's so many small manufacturers who are just like wanting e-commerce and don't like you know, that's where I'm like. Well, how do we get there, alec, how do we like? I'm rambling no.

Alec:

I think there's always going to be, there's always going to be a percentage of the business that will not go online. In some cases it could be 5%, in some cases it could be 95%. I want to focus on what you think, business, owner, that could be brought online today. Yep, even if it's just 5% of the business. And then you look at that percentage of the business, you create a model and you say, all right, this, this might, this might have legs. How can you then apply that to the rest of the business? Or do you want to create more product lines like this 5% of the business, that could then generate more bottom line to your 95% of the business?

Alec:

Right, so that's not to say you have to go and sell finished goods. But you know, simplify it by simplifying your process using tools that are off the shelf already there. What does it cost you? A couple hundred bucks a month to go. And you know, get a, even Shopify, I don't, it doesn't matter. Right, because I know if you go and buy their thing and you, you test it all out and then you're successful, that you'll be in the market for my thing as well.

Alec:

Right, because it's all a bit commoditized. At the end of the day, I think we have the best you know sort of value to investment type solution for those middle what we call middle market. So anywhere from you know, 10 million to 250 million in total sales, I think we'll give you the most bang for the buck. If you're in B2B and you also want to do direct to consumer, you don't want to do direct to consumer or just B2B, I still think we can do it. But then you're going to be looking at maybe more expensive platforms here on the higher end. But all of that to say, I think look at what's out there, right?

Alec:

Don't you want to know, don't you want to know what's out there, what these folks are doing? You know, that's kind of my pitch to to to these folks right, and if and if and if they've already agreed like this is something we should do, I just don't know where to start. That's where I think we need to do a better job. Right Us as a platform, you guys, service partners there's service partners, other technology partners At the end of the day, like, what we need them to be focused on is building their product, innovating you know, creating better more efficient tools.

Alec:

You know, give me a fancy kitchen sink that washes my dishes, I don't care. Right, you keep focusing on that, which is, you know, innovation on the product side. Let us, you know, figure out where you are in terms of your, your maturity, what kind of solution stack you have today. You know, a lot of the time, if the conversation ends, oh yeah, our ERP is just so old, doesn't have APIs, we don't want to do FTP cron jobs and spend all this money, so we're just going to do an evaluation of Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite or Acumatica or whatever it is, and then we're going to look at or, if they're, you know, industrial supply, maybe looking at Epicor or Infor right.

Alec:

And their solution, and then we'll we'll circle back on the whole e-commerce thing after we've, you know, transformed our, our core business here which not the best answer for us, but, you know, still steps in the right direction will eventually hit a sales cycle with those companies If they decide they don't want to do the ERP and the e-commerce transformation at once, which we've, of course. I think we've all seen companies trying to do the whole digital transformation, where they've changed the back office and the front end at the same time, and it's just, it's just crazy.

Nicole:

Pro Walk Run. I swear I'm like a huge proponent.

Nicole:

I think you hit the nail on the head too and it's what I've seen with some of our clients is what can you bring? Like, like you said, start with the few stock items that you can bring online. Manufacturers are reordering is huge. Everyone's like. Your customers are reordering all the time. Get them to reorder through the platform. Elevate your sales reps to masquerade as the customer and get more of them to create portal accounts so that they can be teaching their customers to reorder through the platform rather than through them. Then your sales reps can focus on those really complex orders and I think that's what I've seen work really well.

Nicole:

Because manufacturers are so traditional and so like. If you're anytime you're going in and you're trying to, you know, change anything, you got to figure out like what can we preserve? What part of the tradition is really important that we hold onto through this transformation that we can keep throughout, so that they're they're not going to be so like resistant and in many of them, like I found that sales rep relationship is like the foundation that that company was built on, right so, and so they have. Sales reps don't feel threatened. You have to position it as like okay, how can we take this store and treat it as a sales admin, rather than a threat to you.

Nicole:

You know, and that's, I think, a lot of what manufacturers struggle with is like they see it as a competition, that it's going to take their job away, when they don't, if they can realize this is only going to elevate them. Just to your point, there are certain sales that are never going to go online. That's a reality. There's, there's going to be complex sales and manufacturing Well, I could be wrong. You know what 15 years from now, 15 years from now, call?

Nicole:

me and we'll have a conversation and follow up and I would love for you to hold me to the, to the what's it called the fire, on that and see if I'm still wrong. But you know, there are still, there's always going to still be, a need for a sales rep, I feel, for complex custom.

Alec:

It's just the role, the role of the sales rep. This is another, you know, arrow in your quiver, if you will right.

Alec:

How do you deploy this tool to your it's? It's the same conversation that we're talking about at every conference to do with AI. Now that everyone's talking about AI, it's like oh, big commerce, how are you guys using this? How are you, you know, everybody wants to talk about? How are you using this tool to now make your business more efficient? It's like it's the same. It's the same conversation, the same thought process, the same type of you know focus on a narrow portion, get some success and then figure out if that can scale out right. That's really what it is Exactly.

Nicole:

So true, you just got to get in the game.

Alec:

Yeah, you have a really good point, though, because a lot of these manufacturers they're, they're, they've been in business for decades, sometimes, like you know, a hundred plus years. So carrying on that tradition, I think, is really important. So what? What from that original kind of tradition? The mission, you know still that authenticity of your company holds through in the digital era, now that you know you're going to be bringing some things into this, you know, digital universe right.

Alec:

I think channel conflict is another one that we overlooked. There's also the channel conflict component, which any of any of these manufacturers would call us out on that if we didn't mention it. So we'll say channel conflict is also there, but navigating that can be done. You can navigate channel conflict, right.

Nicole:

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right With manufacturers, and the thing is you've got to respect that tradition. They built their company successfully to this point using those strategies. So you do have to show some level of respect for them, for them to you. Show them respect for that and they'll give you respect back. Right, if you come in and you're just like this is awful, you've got to change it, like they're going to be like hold on a second, you know what's going on.

Nicole:

We know what we're doing here. So anyway, my gosh, we're already like talking for a minute. I knew. I knew when I booked you for this podcast it was going to be amazing. I was. I think we were going to have so much fun.

Alec:

You'd get two of your prompts. Yeah, I was looking at your prompts last night. Let's see if we can get through like half of these.

Nicole:

I know I'm the worst at that. Everyone's always like Nicole. You said way too many questions and we never do them all. We talk for hours and those drops.

Alec:

Next time we'll go to four hours slot and we'll cut it up into like six different podcasts.

Nicole:

Well, let me see. I want to see, like, what question I feel like I got it. I got three more questions in me and then I have a lightning round. Okay, how about this? Two more questions and then a lightning round. Are you up for it? Are you up for two more questions and a lightning round? Okay, all right. So what is something I like? This question? What is something everyone in B2B commerce is talking about that you feel the exact opposite about?

Alec:

Well, not everybody feels this way. Actually, a lot of people would share my opinion, but it's the need for headless, the need for a headless site. I think that's it's not really needed for, like the majority of it is needed in some global and like international implementations, for things like localization and payment, shipping, tax, translated stuff, like that. That's where I think headless can be really useful. But for standalone implementation, I like any agency saying go headless or use this approach is probably not not the one I gotta tell you.

Nicole:

I have a client who is, like you know, a small manufacturing client, sub 20 million, who worked with an agency, who built a headless website for them. I'm like what?

Intro:

That makes me cringe.

Nicole:

And the thing is is that they can't update like they can't use it. It's not usable in terms of updating the backend to create.

Alec:

That was the whole point. Right, the whole point was to create something usable, right? Yeah, that's the one that grinds my gears the most.

Nicole:

And I feel for them because they spent a putload of money on this platform and they're not sophisticated enough, nor do they have. They don't need it. I cringed when I found out how much they spent on their, and if you saw their website, it's probably like five pages, and I'm anyway, so I actually agree with you on that point.

Alec:

Yeah, maybe that's what. I was going to say Maybe not a lot of people disagree with that, but maybe a couple years ago, when headless was the hype before AI, maybe more people would have disagreed.

Nicole:

Yeah, oh, man, okay. So my other question is okay, I like this one because I have I suck at this I say yes to everything. What's your advice on how to get better at saying no more often? What do you do to stay disciplined about saying no?

Alec:

Understanding, like the value of your time and how. That is really. The only thing that you can control in the world is how you spend your time, and that being your most valuable asset. Well then, more than money. Yes, understanding the value of time and really understanding it and valuing it will then allow you to say no to a lot more things.

Nicole:

That's so true and I think too, combined with having a very clear vision of what it is that you want to achieve in the world. So, knowing what your vision is really like preserving, like cherishing your time and like using those yeah, your purpose, yeah.

Alec:

You have to have you know what am. I really here to do it. You know whether that's in the business world or outside of the business world, and then, okay, given that this is my platform, how do I then make sure I'm only spending time on things, or 90, whatever the percentage is, I'm going to spend advancing this, and if the thing doesn't align with that, then I will then say no.

Alec:

Or if I can't say no, then I'll just punt it way down the road and then figure out if there's alignment later on, which there might be or might not be, depending on where things go.

Nicole:

That too, because not everything needs to happen right now.

Intro:

Oh no.

Nicole:

No. So I love that idea of prioritizing in it. And no now doesn't mean a no at never. It just means a no now.

Alec:

Yes, yes.

Nicole:

That's great advice, alec, and I think it really speaks to your experience, because you've had to say no a lot when you were building your product, so I love that that can go even at big commerce, I have to say no a lot.

Alec:

There's so many partners that come to us you know whether technologists, mostly technology partners, because agency partners you know we'll take them all. But with technology partners, yeah, with technology partners, right, there's just so many tools out there and, to your point, a lot of them are startups and, based off of numbers 70, what 70% are going to fail. So if you spend time with every single one of them, knowing that 70% aren't even going to be around a couple of years from now, then I'm doing a disservice to the company by meeting with every single one of them, and we already know 70% of them are not even going to be there, right, they don't even have a customer base, just trying to attach to us, which, right now, a bad move.

Nicole:

That was what I did, right, that said, but I'm sure when you did that, though you had to prove your value first, and that relationship built over time. It wasn't like we're talking on their door.

Alec:

Yeah, we had clients, a lot of clients on the magento side right, and so big commerce is actually courting us a bit. They were courting a lot of magento partners at the time because it was kind of the new tool. But yeah, these days you can't really get away with that as much. There's too much clutter, there's just so many technology.

Nicole:

There's so many platforms, yeah, yeah. Well, as long as you don't say no to me, alec Berkeley, then I'm okay.

Intro:

Never, never. I'm just teasing.

Nicole:

Oh man, thank you so much. That was awesome. So we're going to do a quick lightning round.

Intro:

Okay.

Nicole:

All right. So you don't like, when I do this lightning round it doesn't turn, it ends up not being so lightning. So if it takes you more than a quick second to do it, that's okay, totally fine, okay, but before I do, actually, I forgot to ask this one question, because you were talking about knowing your purpose. So, I'm going to ask you what do you think your purpose is? Why do you think you're here? What do you feel compelled to do and bring to the world and everything? What is it that drives you now?

Alec:

At this point in my life it is different than what it was when I was 22, wanting to make money, basically, primarily, at this point it's not so much that it's more, not that I have all of the answers, but like taking the little that I do know and now kind of starting a family and going through that whole process of creating wealth in a different way. I think fulfillment, yeah, fulfillment, I think.

Nicole:

I love that. What I love about that is that your purpose doesn't always need to be the same. It can change.

Alec:

Right.

Nicole:

I think that's really important and I love that.

Alec:

Yeah, I think a lot of folks I went to school with private school parents had a company or they had a trust fund or things like this. So they don't have as much of a fire motivation to maybe support themselves, I guess you could say, whereas I did not have either of those things. So I always felt, in order to get to this next stage where I guess I am now, I have to build this baseline of being able to sustain said. I live in Southern California, so said barrier.

Nicole:

It's my hometown. I grew up right here. I grew up right here where you live. Chapman was right down the street from where my grandfather lived. He lived in Orange Park Acres.

Intro:

And.

Nicole:

I remember I used to work at the front desk of his motel, which was in Anaheim, right across from Disneyland.

Intro:

It's very familiar. It's a beautiful place.

Nicole:

Maybe that's why I feel like you and I get each other so much.

Intro:

Yeah exactly, we're both from Southern California.

Alec:

It's an expensive place to live. I mostly surround myself with people that are not from here. I'm sorry, Nicole, Interesting but it's mostly but you're good because you left.

Nicole:

I left.

Intro:

You just grew up here and then left.

Alec:

The people that grew up here and stay. I tend to avoid. They just scare me. It's like you've never left, like, oh my god, you've never experienced the four seasons, you've never been cold? No, just show me.

Nicole:

I mean once you do. I mean I'm going to show you. Just, you got to see my outside right now. Look at that, isn't it beautiful.

Alec:

Oh yeah, I love the changing of the colors. I can get on a plane for that.

Nicole:

Spoken like a true Californian.

Alec:

Yeah, exactly, I'm converted, I'm converted.

Nicole:

Oh, I love your purpose. I think it's beautiful and inspiring and I think really poignant that you mentioned that this is like after you've gone through built this amazing product and everything. What does it come down to Like? The most important thing to you is your family and building a wonderful, full life for your family. There's nothing in life that's going to compare with that.

Alec:

That's it. That's cool, and then I'll probably later on, when they're in college, do the old entrepreneurship thing again. I think I've seen people on the other side of that with the empty nest and I want that Like once they leave, I want to go back into the riskier.

Nicole:

More fun, I guess I have no doubt you're going to be there. You've already built two successful companies by age 30. It's only a matter of time. I'm going to be watching for sure, I don't know if I can wait that long We'll see. I know after the MAP conference I was talking to Curt and I was like that he's going places. He's already been a lot of places, but he's going other places and I want to be next to him when he goes those places.

Alec:

We're in it. We're in it From. Buffalo from the Niagara Falls.

Nicole:

Well, we'll always have anchor bar. We'll always have anchor bar. Ok, we're going to do our lightning round and then I promise I'm going to let you go, ok, ok, oh, and I got. You know what? I got to do this real fast because I got one minute.

Intro:

OK.

Nicole:

What's one subject you'd like to learn more about right now?

Alec:

Farming.

Nicole:

What's your favorite song to play on the guitar?

Alec:

That's a really, really tough one. One of the first songs that was a favorite was Oye Komová by Carlos Santana.

Nicole:

OK, if you were a spy, what would your code name be?

Alec:

Berkeley Warbucks, although that's not a code name, because he's my last name.

Nicole:

That's OK. Oh my gosh, I'm dying. Ok, last one, who is your hero?

Alec:

I have musical heroes and I have business heroes. I'd say, on the musical side, folks like Eric Clapton, you know, I guess like Paul McCartney, those Roger Waters, and then on the business side, folks like Steve Jobs and others that are really just true entrepreneurs and visionaries.

Nicole:

Cool. Well, I see you. You've already followed that path. I see you following it again. This has been so fun, Alec.

Alec:

Sorry, I should say it was the Tim Ferriss podcast. The four hour work week and that first came out was like the next level of like Tony Robbins, kind of like self-help. That actually helped me a lot with prioritizing time and scaling business, listening to that and the people that he would interview and like morning routines and things like that. Not that he's a hero, but he did have a lot of good nuggets and that was before podcasting was really popular. He was kind of one of the major ones, so yeah, shout out Tim. Ferriss.

Nicole:

I love it. Well, Alec, this is a pleasure. Will you come on the show again sometime?

Alec:

I would love to.

Nicole:

It'd be so fun. All right, OK. So as we wrap up this episode of Tales of Misadventure, we're reminded that with entrepreneurship, there's no straight path to success. It's the unexpected twists and turns that shape our stories and make them worth telling. So embrace the misadventures in your own life and let them guide you towards your own blessings. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back soon with more Tales of Misadventure.

Intro:

Tales of Misadventure is produced, edited and moderated by Julie Bacello with Bacello Media, music by Marcus Way. Special thanks to our amazing guests and the entire DMG Digital team. Visit us at dmgdigitalio to get access to all our podcast interviews and other helpful resources, and if you'd like to get updates on the latest and greatest, please sign up for our email newsletter. We'll see you next time for another episode of Tales of Misadventure. Until then, keep falling forward.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Nicole Donnelly

Host