Industrial Insights with Casey Winans

Casey Winans 00:19

Thank you for having me. I can't wait. Let's do it up.

Casey Winans 00:34

Sure, mean, we're kind of coming out of peak, Peak was heads down, lots of work, trying to make things, you know, get through the period anyways. So now you're getting into a lot of the returns, right? So, I mean, in my space, right, I'm looking at it from the WMS perspective, the systems, the early stage, three PLs. There's a lot of white knuckling. There's a lot of manual brute force to get through. And then now what I've seen personally is a lot of folks are...

Casey Winans 01:02

Picking their head up and looking around to figure out how do we not repeat this last peak, right? You know, like the systems, are they a priority? I have folks hit my website quite often, right? I'm still waiting for those folks to reach out, but there's that engaged traffic again of what do I do? You know, and it's coming from all over the country in terms of the visitors that way. I've had some great conversations with people that I talked to last spring.

Casey Winans 01:27

And then with 2025 and all the madness that we dealt with, logistic space, you know, they went heads down, right? Just survival. So now it's like, okay, well, I've survived. Now I need to thrive. That's, that's the big thing I'm seeing there. I'm also starting to see quite a few roll-ups and folks, you know, acquiring, they're asking about it. I see that movement on LinkedIn. I'm engaging with those posts and talking to those folks. And just, I mean, I think it's, it's ripe for that.

Casey Winans 01:57

in a lot of ways, there was a boom. It was very easy, in quotes, to start a 3PL a few years ago during COVID. And you started something, you got a few clients, and then you bump into that ceiling of it's easy to start, hard to grow, because now you need process, you need people all working in the same direction, you need to hire a team, and you need the systems to enforce how you want to operate. And of course, on the other end of it too is probably the first really is the repeatable sales process to bring in more clients, right? You get a first couple and then if you don't have that down, then you're chasing anything and everything, which means you're buying revenue and you're expanding in a way where you can't grow long term, but it pays to build short term. That's what I'm seeing anyways.

Casey Winans 03:16

Thanks for having the audience right here, like the platform.

Casey Winans 03:47

Gotcha, yeah, I I guess so. It's not a way I think about it, right? But if you look back, that was probably pretty formative. I coming into Red Prairie, I had been a software engineer prior to that, and I had been in logistics and supply chain. I just didn't know there was a term that comprised what I had done. You know, I was very technical at that point. So Rappuri opened my eyes. I got to work with some really big clients. I crossed a number of different challenging scenarios, you high volume retail. They were breaking in different spaces at that point. we were building on the product, reinventing the product all while in front of massive clients, trying to get into those different industries. And I learned so much that way. But beyond that, you know, that was my first break into management.

Casey Winans 04:37

which up to that point, I was one of those folks, I think early in my career, was leave me alone. I have my blinders on. I'm going to be a software engineer. And then suddenly one day the switch flipped. Yeah, yeah, probably. The phones, right? If it was more modern now. then I started managing people. And I'm like, I love this. I love nurturing people, building them up, watching them grow.

Casey Winans 05:01

And I did that for the last couple of years at Ripperi. And then I got an opportunity to go work for a 3PL. I followed up here. And we did that for about a year and a half. And then the Ripperi and JDA merged and became JDA. But during that initial merger, they came out with a marketing message saying they wouldn't customize WMS deployments anymore. It's not what they really meant, but it's how it was conveyed. or interpreted and it became this thing where they went to the industry event and a lot of these customers that were in flight seven figure implementations and they're like, what do you mean? This is what I was sold. So it was the perfect time for the partnership ecosystem to kind of take, take, you know, take off and myself and two partners. We, we hung our shingle and mean, realistically, we thought we'd be hired guns mercenaries for a few months just to capitalize, help these customers through. And then, you know, this big JDA would come and eat our lunch and we figure out what we do. But again, they embraced the partnership component and we flourished, right? I did that for five years. We were up to 60, 70 employees. think we did about 12 million the last year before I sold. And that was just a huge learning curve there in terms of getting out, getting in front of customers. then, like I said, I had started technically. But I haven't written code in, I don't know, 10, 15 years at this point now. It's all been on the operational functional side of what are you doing. that's what I capitalized on. And about two years after I'd sold, I had a non-compete, right? So I kicked around doing other things, you some business consulting, COVID hit. And then I took a job at a bigger consulting company. was a competitor to my last one, and we did advisory, right? So it just, these things kind of came along, but I never would have anticipated them, right? You look back and you can see how it all kind of connected. you know, as far as a master plan, I'm not that, I didn't see it coming.

Casey Winans 07:08

Yeah, yeah, I'm very blessed that way in terms of how it's worked out so far career-wise. yeah, that was probably the formative years was they're getting into working for a vendor, seeing how it worked. The bloody part of it is if you work for the vendor and you're in front of big customers and they don't like how something's designed or how it's been configured.

Casey Winans 07:34

you're the one there that gets their throat choked, or gets pointed at and yelled at. And so you've got to take a lot of abuse that way, just in terms of getting it to the point where the customer is happy. I had to defend product decisions, the bugs, all that stuff. And when I got out of it, and I started getting into consulting. Sorry? Right, yeah. basically, you're the face in front of the customer.

Casey Winans 08:03

But on the outside doing consulting, that's when I realized I could actually be a consultant because then I could empathize with the customer. Like, yeah, it's not a great one, but here are some options.

Casey Winans 08:16

You can be way more candid, know, like, yeah, it doesn't work well at all. This is what we typically see, and this is how you work around it. Whereas here's another product that you can fit in here that does it, you know, wonderfully. And, you know, the integration is pretty, pretty clean, right? So there was a lot of that I could start talking about and having a bigger conversation. And that's more or less where I started gravitating towards. When I worked for OpenSky Group and the running advisory, we started that off. It was lots of conversations early on with. probably the customers that were very small for a Blue Yonder. So when I say that, and you're talking the 200 to $250 million business, they can afford the subscription, the licensing piece of it. They think they can afford the implementation, but those are all happy paths. So when they get into the nuts and bolts, they realize that the timeline wasn't real. The cost wasn't real because there's all these things that they didn't have figured out or there was a lot of assumptions running the day that they had to get vetted. And that's where things unravel very quickly. I could have better conversations about it, but I'll probably leave it there. You can probably have another follow-up question, but there's a lot going to it to how I got here. OK. OK. Yeah. So I mean, I did.

Casey Winans 09:50

Okay, yeah, so I those folks would come in and that's what they wanted. They wanted the Blue Yonder, you know, other people they want. They want Manhattan. The really big names. But the thing that I was, huh, what's that? Yeah, right, yeah, they expect the happy path piece there. The one that the sales guy said, yeah, but then there's all these assumptions that are not spoken until contracts are signed and then reality hits.

Casey Winans 10:18

So we saw them struggle. know, it just, they were great customers, know, clients to work with and great people, but then they choked on this massive product. So part of the advisory work I did there was offering other solutions, giving them something different, maybe a tier down, more mid-market, where they wouldn't be the smallest customer, they would be something much bigger for that other vendor. And you just get better care that way in a lot of ways. And the other piece, I guess the other component of that I think is important for people to know is just like I always equate Blue Yon to like an SAP in the ERP world. Yeah, the difference from those two other systems that are made for more mid-market is an SAP will expect a team to wear some type of hat, like a roll, where if you're a smaller business, there's a very good chance there's one person wearing multiple hats.

Casey Winans 11:16

And when that juxtaposition right there, means that you get into that bigger system and your workflows are so divided and spread out because they're intended for different teams that you're jumping in between different roles, different screens, and it's convoluted, which means it's going to eat you alive. Productivity is going to suffer. Complexity is going to eat you alive that way as well. And then you'll be holding two very expensive consultants to come in and just fill the gaps in a way. That was how I kind of walked most folks off the ledge back to another system that was more right-sized. And that was where...

Casey Winans 12:01

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's also where like say about a year and half into doing that, I broke off and I started Full Stride. And the idea there was I met so many vendors that were in a mid-market space that wanted to have partnerships. But the reality was most consulting firms are built around the hourly rate, which means we want more people on there and more hours. And then you have the clients that are like, want fewer hours and fewer people, but we want this result. So there's this big, you the alignment issue. So I, I reached out to some of these different vendors and I said, Hey, what if I built a consulting firm that was made for your size of clients? That way we don't outgrow each other. And if the client does get really big, we can celebrate that. Cause now they can move on to a bigger consulting company that focuses on the mass.

Casey Winans 12:59

And I got great reception. had a couple partners very quickly. One was primarily what I did. And I did that for about a year, year and a half. And it was fun while we did it because I got to work with the smaller customers. A lot of them were first time buyers of a WMS. So there was a lot of learning. the fallout there really was, again, they didn't know what they were getting into. There's this notion of If we're, if our operation is manual and it's a bit chaotic, we can buy technology and it's going to solve our problems. The vendor is going to know what to do, but that's just not how it works. Right. You're basically going to enshrine that chaotic environment. You know, a piece of software and it's either going to do what it's intended to do that way and make it really hard for you. Cause you can't be creative and work around it anymore. We're basically enshrine that dysfunction in.

Casey Winans 13:56

you're slower for it, right? It's just a bad mix up. Yeah. And that was the experience I had over, I don't know, three or four clients I had worked with with one vendor. they were sold. They got in there. The client really appreciated me level setting with them. But at the same time, now I'm in the middle between the vendor and the client. And I ended up being the punching bag, which is no fun.

Casey Winans 14:23

They both like me, but at the same time, they both hit me. So it's like, I can't really grow a business this way. This is frustrating. And then they were several of these customers eventually that would just back off. One one would get out of the contract, but they couldn't because the contracts are ironclad. That's just the state of the industry and some of the older vendors. And then other ones just imploded because they realized that they weren't ready for a WMS or they needed something that didn't exist in the solution. A of times it's manufacturing workflows. WMS, almost all of them fall down there, other than really basic kitting, assembly, disassembly. I stepped back and I entered this partnership. So I looked around and I said, what's missing here? What's common across my entire career? So this is probably the first time that I ever looked backwards and tried to find a pattern. And it was.

Casey Winans 15:19

People buy, but they're not ready. It doesn't matter if they're huge or small, but the smaller ones feel it more acutely because they can't spend their way out of it. The big customers will just keep throwing money at it and gripe the whole time, but it happens. The small ones, they get stuck with shelf wear. They try to sue to get out of contracts or they limp along with something that maybe doesn't really even, doesn't scratch the itch they were trying to solve for. So that's where I came up with the model that I do now.

Casey Winans 16:19

Oh yeah. I mean, that's, so I've been doing that for a year and a half or so at this point and it's, been an uphill battle. It's I've learned so much just in general of how to design services, pricing, uh, business development and all these things that, that, uh, typical consultants don't necessarily think about the, you know, they, they hanger shingle an hour. They Yeah. This is, this is a, yeah. So like, this is, this is

Casey Winans 16:47

What I've been focusing on is how do I build a business that I know will support a team and scale up? And I haven't necessarily found it yet. I mean, I'm still a one man shop and I pull in contractors when I need them for different pieces. that's where I'm at. I had a small team. I let them go about a year and a half ago because I just couldn't support them with the transition. they moved on, right? They needed something from me that I couldn't provide at that point. And I wasn't going to go down that path anymore because

Casey Winans 17:17

I mean, quite frankly, my first consulting business, I did it there. And I didn't enjoy it. Just on the road all the time, big clients. No one's real happy. And you don't get to talk to the decision makers. So that was another one of my pieces. Yeah, well, it was money. you didn't get a lot of joy out of it, I guess is what I'm saying. So I'm looking for that too. I want it all.

Casey Winans 19:11

It's actually, I guess in a way it's kind of part of it because I eventually settled on 3PLs and it wasn't on purpose actually. I my experience in the 3PL market was quite skewed. I had worked with so many big ones and with my first consulting firm, we were always labor. which was frustrating because you have more to offer, but everything is funneled back to you. want a lower, lower hourly rate, but we still want your guidance. We just don't want to necessarily pay for it, know, in a way that's really commensurate with what you're offering. And so I had avoided them, but I just, you know, I guess the very beginning of last year, end of the year, there was, know, end of 2024, something like that, I was. referred a 3PL, a small one. And I almost kind of turned them away because I'm like, don't work with 3PLs. the big 3PL blanket kind of thought process and laid over these ones. But then I took it and I started talking to them. And we clicked right away. I was able to not only, I talked about technology because that was why.

Casey Winans 20:28

He eventually hired me to go through and help them, help them select and work through it. But I was able to look at his business model and the evolution he was going through. And I was able to call out some things. Some of it was probably he didn't see it because he's too close. But a lot of it was more of you should probably stop doing that. And it was, it was like that, permission to do that and then leap all the way in. I, I really enjoyed it. I'm like, I like having the ability to influence business model. talk about something very deeply. 3PLs, the margins are paper thin, right? They're super thin. But a lot of times that's because there are things that are not systemized well or captured well. And that kind of bleeds back into what I do on the other side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of that. And to talk about that with folks and really have an impact versus just working with technology is something that I really appreciate.

Casey Winans 21:27

And that's, that's another one of those fulfilling things that I've discovered along the way. And after that, I'm like, I actually do love 3PO, the 3PO space to fulfillment, the variety of clients, the needs, the demand for margin, like all these things that are very complex. I love doing that. And I got to talk to founders, right? The small businesses that want to grow, they have the right mindset. They need some help. Maybe they're not technical, which is it's like the sweet spot. It's the founder that wants to grow that

Casey Winans 21:56

doesn't know about what they should do, right? What are the options? What are the trade-offs? And that's where I really shine. So that's another one of those fulfilling pieces. And the more I do it, the more new opportunities you see. mean, last year there was a 3PL that I wanted to know if I wanted to partner with them, become some type of owner in the business, because the technology piece was something they didn't have. So I get things like that out of left field. where I'm like, okay, well, let's talk about that to see if it makes sense. But yeah, there's a whole bunch of things that I interact with and then systems way beyond what I work with that can fill gaps and I get to meet those interesting people. And that's where I talk to a lot of startups as well.

Casey Winans 23:45

That was, it goes back to COVID, know, being, it was easy to start up, but just like any other small business, you know, you can get some kind of success, but then there's that, a certain size you hit where brute force doesn't work anymore and you risk losing customers. They move on anyways, cause there's a lot of them out there that don't necessarily prize the relationship. And there's three PLs that don't do a good job of being a partner, right? So they lose business that way.

Casey Winans 24:13

You know, it's the fundamentals, picking up the phone, being responsive, you know, being proactive, don't hide things. All these things were universal. And there are so many business just in general that don't do that well. And that's, no one's immune to it. So you see a lot of that.

Casey Winans 24:34

Yeah, so it's entertaining that way to see that. I think that's going where we're going to see the market move is you're going to see a lot of consolidations there. You're see them go out of business, right? So that's hurtful for the brands they're supporting if they can actually support them effectively through that transition of getting their inventory moved or leaving them hanging, right? There's going to be a big mix of that. And there's some companies out there to help.

Casey Winans 25:04

You're also going to see a lot of acquisitions. fact, that's, like I said, beginning of the call. It's seeing more traction around that. Folks are entertaining it. You know, I'm on the East Coast. If I buy a West Coast 3PL, does that work for me? Is it turnkey? You know, do they have the same kind of technology? If they don't have technology, can I invest? And you see those conversations. You see the posts on LinkedIn. I know there's a bunch of like WhatsApp groups out there. I'm not part of them, but man, I would love to be a fly on a wall just hearing it because there's patterns, right? I love patterns, but.

Casey Winans 26:29

That's something I've definitely thought about, right? The private equity piece, helping do due diligence. They're looking for one to see what the technology looks like, the systems, are they repeatable? Do you see cracks? Just so, because not all the private equity folks that are looking to acquire are past operators or have been in that space where they would catch those things, right? So.

Casey Winans 26:54

very much, right? yeah, especially when know consolidation is coming. It's just how it is. But the flip side of it really is, and I haven't really talked about this publicly, guess. It's my business. Yeah, well, like to the 3PL owner, is my business sellable? And technology and systems play a huge role there.

Casey Winans 27:21

There's the buyers that will come in if they can get it very cheap. They don't care if it's manual because they're buying it for some self-serving reason, maybe a client list or maybe the building, the location, something they'll bring what they have. But a lot of the buyers, want something more turnkey. So that's where you're going to get your multiple from. And that's the hurtful thing with a lot of business owners just in general, not even 3PL space, but just. smaller businesses, they have this inflated sense of the company and the market shows them reality. It's demoralizing, right? What do I do? Do I keep doing it? If it's not worth anything, do I shut it down? But there's that path to, well, let's do some investment and guess what? Now you have something that's sellable and there's a lot more buyers out there for that type of asset.

Casey Winans 28:19

There's that, right? Like, hey, this is a profit machine now. If I've built a system, yeah, you have options. That's the big thing, right? I can sell or can, the profit here is enough. I've built a big enough team where I don't need to be in the day-to-day.

Casey Winans 28:37

and I can go enjoy life, kids, grandkids, whatever, whatever a case may be, right? You travel and you have something that's providing income too. So there's just so many paths forward and those kinds of conversations really light my fire and get me going because I like the bigger picture. And then let's look at systems and technology and process to make that a reality.

Casey Winans 30:01

yeah, very, very much. Yeah, very much. Technology is a big part of it, right? A client's going to come in, especially depending on how sophisticated they are or their past experiences being burnt by, you know, maybe a low tech manual 3PL is they're looking for something where visibility and transparency is a big part of that component, right? It's, I go self-serve without having to call you? Is calling this It's strenuous on both sides of the fence, right? So if we can get in there and get more answers, questions answered on our own, then great, right? Plus, it's a proof point in a way, right? So it eases the client when they're looking. It's a sales. tool as well, like, here's what we provide. Here's the questions you can answer on your own. Here's the things you can do to modify orders, improve your inventory, all kinds of things there you could do. And those are selling points. getting back that there was another topic I wanted to talk about there, too, that there was a good tangent, but I think I lost it.

Casey Winans 31:17

And that's actually that that's the point when you said that again, it re it kicked back in. So. By our journey, like you talked about how you usually have like a very small compressed timeframe, we got to jump, what can we get done? There's a component to that. What I see in the most of the clients that I work with, in fact, actually most of them are probably under 5 million. So on my website, I have the readiness broken down by revenue buckets as a proxy for complexity and upside. I get quite a few in the smaller end and it's there.

Casey Winans 31:49

They've tried the DIY approach, which means they've gone out, talked to vendors, they've seen demos, and they're hoping that I'll see it, I'll know it when I see it. That doesn't necessarily come because the demos start to kind of blur together. There's nothing definitive out there that kind of pulls one or the other. Yeah, exactly. Like, you have that? shiny. But it's like, can we do it? Can we use it? Or what if I get this wrong?

Casey Winans 32:17

So there's a lot of those efforts that fizzle out or they'll go and they'll get a recommendation from a peer. But often enough, there's no context around it, right? There was a reason why the peer went out and got this system. And it might not be the same for your business, but that's lost in translation. And then there's the budget piece of it. I guess what I was trying to say there is there's an educational component to it all. And that's been half my challenge. Exactly, right? In fact, I've had way more customers, well, customers, way more 3PLs that have already bought a WMS that have discovered me. And they're like, wow, man, I wish I would have known you back then. But they've made that leap. They went on their own. And there's a.

Casey Winans 33:13

There's a, I guess, an angle that I'm looking to explore in a way where I don't need to be an expert in any given WMS, where I'm in there turning and building a team that way, because it gets more tactical. I like to stay where I can have an impact on a business at a higher level with the leaders. But it's, they get in and they only use 20%, 30 % of the system, and they don't know where to go, what's available to them.

Casey Winans 33:39

You know, what are the trade offs? What are the other people doing? You know, what could they do physically different that would translate to something better in the software to accommodate that? And it's a term like, so I use readiness for what I do today, but I use the other term leverage of getting more leverage out of what you've already bought. And so I'm going through the motions there of trying to vet that out and work through. I got some free assessment tools online for folks to go through and figure out.

Casey Winans 34:09

you know, do I need one? Am I ready on one hand? And then am I getting a leverage? Am I getting leverage out of what I already bought? And they come with diagnostics and reports to kind of give them an idea of where they should go next. But it's also, it's from their vantage point, right? So there's bias in there. The readiness piece is a natural, the assessment is a natural transition into my service, which it is now I'm looking at them, I'm going in, you know, on site, going through the motions and giving them

Casey Winans 34:39

less of a bias perspective of here's what you here's what I see. Here's what I know would slow you down or stop you prevent you from getting the upside. And here's a plan to get there. And here's some vendors that make sense for you. Right. So I tried to like across that buyer journey is I'm offering tools and services that make sense so they can take a step forward each time. So I'm building that on the leverage side to is trying to figure out where I would be. And I've used the term quarterback. way more than I use program manager or project manager because those are less less used in the smaller business. But everyone knows how we're back, right? I'm your guy, right? There's a lot of coordination. There's a lot of people. There's moving things forward. There's knowing what play to call and all that.

Casey Winans 35:59

between faculty. Exactly, there's a progression. But there's also, it's There's a door there.

Casey Winans 36:30

So there's, I talk to the vendors all the time, right? I get demos. I have one coming up with another vendor by the week after next when I get back from traveling just to get it.

Casey Winans 36:41

Exactly. exactly. There's some that I've actually talked to and I've got into their training curriculums just to get in there so I get past the polished demo and I can get in there and touch it myself and they give me a sandbox and gives me an idea of what's possible, what's not. I'll come in with my use cases that I know are important to a 3PL and see how deep it goes and it gives me an idea. And there's probably opportunities for me to share that or build something around that in the future. But now it's just, gives me the curated list of who's who and when should I pay attention to them, working with a certain client and should I filter them out? Because that's part of what I get paid for is they don't want every possible vendor out there. They want the three or four that they know that I know would work and the rationale for it. then beyond the product itself is what's the vendor like? Are they mature? Right? Or is it just a sales machine with nothing behind it?

Casey Winans 37:40

You get a lot of that. Or is it two guys in a garage? I'm like, that's great right now. But when you need more, are they going to be there? Or do they grow with you? All these considerations. What's their mindset overall towards consulting? There's some out there that are going to be.

Casey Winans 38:03

Well, if you were going to say, generically, and say WMS, there are several hundred, right? Very few are actually designed for 3PL first. It's very common for the 3PL pieces to be bolted on, or like an after thigh, or just some other layer in there. And bling is third class in a lot of them, if it's there. Very minimal.

Casey Winans 38:27

in horror stories, even the big vendors out there, there's customers that just don't like their systems and they work around it. Case in point, we now have 3PL billing software companies that are coming up that are integrating with the WMS polling activities and different things from logs and data to build out the invoicing. So you don't have a leaky bucket anymore. You're not doing things. You're not. doing favors for people because you don't know how to bill for it or it's in the contract, but you know, it was too hard to figure out. So we just don't charge for it. So it's a growing ecosystem and it's pretty fun time to be in it, watching it evolve.

Casey Winans 39:16

Yeah, very much. I'm one of the very few that focuses only on 3PL, right? It's interesting when I have talks with vendors too, right? If the model makes sense, they're like, but you only work with 3PLs? I'm like, yes, because this is only part of what I do, right? I talk about the business side of it, their pain points that way, the things that keep them up at night. I work on that. That's a big part of what I do, not just general warehouse operations. I could, but. and you don't stand out as much. People don't have a reason to go and think about Full Stride or Casey, if I'm working with everybody.

Casey Winans 40:12

Very much. There's still so much that's manual. Old school in the sense that, know, handshakes, know, fuzzy contracts. mean, you name it. There's holdouts and there's new businesses that come in and don't know any better. that's just how you start unless you actively invest or seek out different solutions. It's on the person. Wear one more hat.

Casey Winans 41:17

That's

Casey Winans 41:24

That's a good point. I see that in some sense, right? That the big ones will acquire something that's smaller mid-market to capture the customers and maybe some capabilities that they couldn't build fast enough. Maintain two products internally, but their balance sheet looks better in so many ways. There's that piece of it. The small ones, there are so many small ones that never really escape the garage, right? And then the startup scene, they got a few customers. They were allergic to contracts and pricing in a way where they get extra money. So you see a lot of that and then you'll see them 15, 20 years into it and it's still a couple people and they have a few customers, but they didn't really go anywhere. There's lots and lots of those out there. But you said something else that caught my eye because personally, I've been using something called Replit, which is an app for basically

Casey Winans 42:23

Building it's AI driven agents to build apps. I'd done that with my assessments and I can, I can talk to something and it produces it without me having to know the technology and do all the iterations that way, which I probably could, but not, but not a good use of my time, you know, the exchange wise, but I can, I can bang something out very quickly. And I have been like world changing for me. I can imagine that we're going to see more of that where we're going to see some vertical apps coming. it changes the.

Casey Winans 42:53

the buy versus build dynamic of which one do we do. And I've always historically looking back, I can probably maybe on one hand tell how many times I've said build something because they were so unique. Most of them, not that I try to build. In fact, actually a lot of the vendors, not a lot of the vendors, but some of the WMS vendors out there are really 3PLs with their own custom software and they're trying to sell it.

Casey Winans 43:21

totally different markets. mean, totally different businesses in general. In fact, that was my first consulting firm. We did consulting, we saw some gaps, we built some software, but selling that versus the services and the people we had, we had to have separate teams. It was two businesses in one, which it caused all kinds of infighting and led to one of the reasons why I left. But it's that kind of dynamic and you see a lot of them there. They have a few customers.

Casey Winans 43:52

and how do you sell it? Selling is selling software versus selling services that consultative sell. Totally different. Totally different skill sets, and that's where a lot of folks get caught up to, and I see it all the time. During that two-year non-compete, I talked to a lot of different software companies, service companies trying to become software companies, and that's what I preached all the time, is you need to be two, or you pick one, and then you go in all in it, right? Because you can't have, you can't serve two masters. because something's going to fall down. Your costs are going to be bloated and you're not going to escape and become whatever you wanted to be because something's holding you back.

Casey Winans 44:52

Yeah.

Casey Winans 45:16

Yeah, very much. If you decide to leave vendors, what's the process of getting your data back? What do you need? How do they make it easy on you? Those are things no one ever thinks about. It's like when you start a business with two partners or something, upfront is the perfect time to flesh out what's it look like if we decide to part ways. When everyone's talking and happy, you have the buy-sell agreements, same kind of concept in your contracts. Do we know clearly?

Casey Winans 45:45

what that would look like if and when we decide to produce. It's almost never addressed.

Casey Winans 45:52

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not easy to go through that, but it's smart, right? Responsible. So I've lived through that multiple ways. So I think I bring that to the equation as well, right? Just thinking through the whole process. And here's why you want to do it, because you don't want this pain of not having it.

Casey Winans 46:58

Yeah, there's some vendors that are, I mean, everyone says AI, right? It was marketing buzzword soup. You got it on your website. We're AI something, right? Driven like whatever. Like it's not, a lot of it's vaporware or it's in the lab and you know, it works in one scenario only, but there are some vendors coming out now that are young enough and they focused on it early enough where it's actually core. And what they're doing is they're

Casey Winans 47:28

So planting some of the roles that used to be needed in say, bigger operations, someone you would call a planner or dispatcher who coordinated all the work out there so people weren't standing around. That was always something that back, this goes back to my Blue Yonder days of. we would be in there, some of the consultants, we do a great job of coordinating. We could troubleshoot fast, and you could get the floor flooded with work. No one was standing around. Then it's that hard transition of putting somebody else in that place with the right tools, and you see productivity go back down. And if they move on, they have a bad day, sick day, whatever, that right there just kind of hose the whole operation in a sense, right? People are standing around. The newer... software that I'm seeing a couple of different vendors anyways, is they're building AI around that to orchestrate that with rules and parameters. And the cool thing in my mind is an AI can look at so many more variables than a human can. If you're a consultant and you're good with the product, you could do quite a bit. But there's that human level of how many things can you juggle where the AI can grow wider and make correlations that you wouldn't not quickly. If you had enough time, yeah, but you're racing. So I'm excited about seeing that come to fruition. I know most of the vendors out there are trying to do it, but you have the legacy infrastructure and the big ones. have customers that don't want to upgrade or a million customizations. So making it work for them is hard. so that's something I'm pretty bullish on. the other piece is one of the reasons I even moved to the format I'm in now where I'm not an implementation partner is I knew at some point based on technology and AI coming at the traditional professional services model of implementation, lots of consultants, big budgets, that was going to be eaten by somebody from the bottom up. These easy to use, easy to start with systems were going to get better and better. And as they came up market, they're going to eat everybody else's lunch if they're not trying that themselves or not able to transition. And think we're at the very early stage of seeing that with a couple of different vendors. So I actually had a conversation with one yesterday saying, OK, yeah, great. So you're trying to cut that out because you didn't want to grow that arm in your business. I get it, your software. You want to sell licenses and access usage, but you don't want to be in the game of doing the consulting piece of it and mapping and all that stuff that's human intensive. But. You can't get rid of it even if you embrace AI at the middle of it because if people don't know how to answer the questions that AI is asking, you're not going to get results. So there's still that upfront work. There's still the trade-off governance piece of it. Like that part, there's room for consulting, but it has to look different. It won't be an army of people. It'll be something smaller like a strategist. so that QB role I talked about, that's kind of what I'm working on to figure out how to play that role where it makes sense for these businesses where and they're enough or my team's there enough, but we're not doing the work for them. We're not in the middle. We're not costing a lot of money, but we can make a model work around it. And I think that's going to be important because another thing with the warehouse in general is you're never finished. It's continuous improvement every day, all day. You can always improve something. Circumstances change, new clients come, new technologies, new regulations. And you need to be able to refine what you do and understand trade-offs. if you're using AI by itself to make a change, chances are it probably doesn't have the context to understand that, well, it's done this way for a number of reasons. And we can make it work for the new one.

Casey Winans 51:08

But we might have broken something over here. So it's important to have someone in there masterminding that and offering trade-offs and just the big picture piece of it, or just letting them know what's coming and how to navigate that. Why don't you leverage this now? You've done all these pieces. Here's the next tier of the ladder. Let's work towards that because you're going to get better margin out of it. So that's where I see the industry going. is the old school consulting model that's going to wither away from the bottom market going up. And the biggest companies are going to be the slowest. But it's a different beast at that point. You're dealing with multi-headed companies with multiple ERPs, different business models. mean, complexity is always going to be there. And there's room for those systems. I mean, you look 20, 30 years down from here, and maybe they won't be what they look like today.

Casey Winans 52:01

around right there's always room for supplanting even though it doesn't feel like they'd ever be unseeded.

Casey Winans 53:10

Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you.

Casey Winans 53:15

All right. There you go. Yeah, all right. That's where I'm hoping to meet a lot of people.

Casey Winans 53:25

See you, bye.