The Right Stuff in Business w/ Joe McIntyre | Ep. 142

In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast David and Gary talk about fulfillment, fulfillment centers that is, with Joe McIntyre, Founder of Twelve48; an operations consulting and advisory services for e-commerce brands and the 3PL warehousing providers who serve them. Jump in and start your startup journey- that's Joe’s advice; check it out.

Links:
Joe's LinkedIn

Twelve 48 on LinkedIn

Email Joe at joe@twelve48.co

___________________________________

Submit Your Questions to:

hello@thebigpixel.net

OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube

Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

Contact Us

hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC

Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

[00:00:02] Joe: I was six months and three weeks in and still had nothing. On the table, right? So then the conversation was, okay, I've put in a lot of effort. I put in a lot of time. I have felt very positive about a lot of conversations and nothing has closed and nothing has come to fruition. Why?

[00:00:26] David: everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host joined per usual by Gary Voigt, who's getting a little bushy around the edges. They're looking a little old,

[00:00:37] Gary: Yeah, I need a little

[00:00:38] David: shine need a little trim. I missed a spot, but you can't see it because the camera's not good enough.

So I'm just going to stay over here. More importantly, we are joined.

[00:00:47] Gary: missed the spot.

[00:00:49] David: Yes, I just want one little flappy set of five hairs that just flap around on the breeze. It's the only way I can feel connected when I roll my window down and my four hairs fly through the air. It's beautiful. Anyway, more importantly, we are joined by Joe McIntyre, who is the founder of 1248.

Welcome, sir. How are you doing?

[00:01:08] Joe: I'm doing great. David and Gary, thank you very much for having me on. I unfortunately I think the top of my head works like Gary's beard and my facial hair works like your hair based on what you explained to David. Try to windows up so that the four hairs don't blow in the breeze as I go down the road.

[00:01:23] David: I

[00:01:24] Gary: of both worlds.

[00:01:25] David: that the people who have the most bushy beards are often the boldest.

[00:01:30] Joe: Okay.

[00:01:30] David: I don't know if that's 100%, but Gary's got a pretty decent beard and he has hair, so he's just a freak, but most of them, that's what I find. You

[00:01:38] Joe: I would play

[00:01:39] Gary: mid transition.

[00:01:40] David: Fair enough. All right. I don't think my wife who's listening to this podcast with is tired of the hair talk.

So tell me a little bit about your business.

[00:01:49] Joe: Yeah. My business is me. I am an independent consultant and I focus on Improving businesses for companies who are in any aspect of fulfillment. Distribution operations. And that can be on the shipper side or on the provider side. But mostly where the core of my business, my expertise comes on the fulfillment provider side and less on how do we do processes more effectively, but more on how do we grow our business effectively to.

Be most competitive and elevate our customers effectively. And in with that, they elevate their own companies and I get to see a big smile on their face and then go on and help the next person who was much braver than me going, putting their money, their time and their sweat and tears on the line than I did.

[00:02:33] David: So you are, do you consider yourself a freelancer or just your first employee?

[00:02:39] Joe: That's a great question. 18 months ago when I started this, I would have considered myself a freelancer. Right now I'm still a freelancer, but I think I've evolved to. I think of my first employee. I just don't know when number two is going to come in.

[00:02:52] David: That's fair. So take me through that transition. What made you go from I'm cool with being a freelancer to now I think I want to do a company.

[00:03:01] Joe: a couple of different things. When I went out on my own, it was intentional and by design, but not on the timeline I thought I was going to do it. And so I hadn't fully baked out what I was doing, why I wanted to do it and what got me juiced. And I think that was the biggest thing for me. Fell into the trap of LinkedIn at the time of there's a lot of solopreneurs out there and you can do a lot of really great things and it sounded awesome.

And. It has been, it's been great for me and what I've needed in my professional life, my personal life. But then I went on a contract when I was struggling to drum up some business and I went back and was more embedded in a team than I had intended to be. Realized I missed it, right? It's there are a lot of positives to being by yourself, but there's a lot of fun in having some people in your corner that you're working together with towards a goal.

And I think With where my business has gone over the last 18 months and where I can see it going, it will be better with more people. And I will be able to double down on what I'm really good at. If I can find people who want to do something similar to what I've done that are really good at some of the other aspects of it, right?

There's a lot of stuff I underestimated when I went out on my own, but I just didn't have background and skill set for. So I've learned a ton, but I think the biggest takeaway has been I learned that I'm not very good at it, and it doesn't make me really happy, and that's always going to be a limiting factor for me.

So how can I find someone else who thinks the same way, wants to solve the same things, is looking for the same thing in their journey as I am, but just has a separate skill set than I do, and how do we elevate each other? And that would be the question. That's something I didn't think about before.

[00:04:45] David: So those holes in your knowledge, were they things like businessy things like accounting and taxes and that kind of stuff? Or was it holes in knowledge of your industry?

[00:04:56] Joe: Yes. So tactically it was holes in the, I knew I was never going to do my accounting myself, my dad's an accountant. I knew that was not a skill set I had, but selling, selling, my business, I don't have a demo to say. Here is what my product does, right? I sit in front of you as the product, and that's even harder to sell because I need to convince somebody up front that they're, they should entrust their business to me.

And that's something where I know that I have the skills and the abilities to solve their problem, but I don't sign their check over to me at the end of the day. And I think that's something where. It takes a lot of experience. It takes a lot of learning. It takes a lot of willingness to be vulnerable, all things I can do, but all things that take a lot longer than okay, I have no paycheck coming in now and I got to go drum up business.

I can do that in three months, right? That was an area that I underestimated. And I think there's people that are really good at it that love doing it. And I'm not very good at it. I could be, but I don't love doing it. So that's going to be a lot of extra time and energy on my side to get myself to where I need to be for that to be a strength.

I think that's one. The flip side tactically, I know areas of fulfillment. I know areas of running the business of fulfillment. Owning the PNL very well, but I'm not an SME on like robotics. I'm not a subject matter expert on, section three, two, one, so that you can have more margin coming in when you're shipping from outside of the country.

There are people that are awesome at that. And yes, I have a network of people now that I can refer you to and hand you off to, but it would be really great to say this person sitting right next to me. Who I work with every day is really good at this. And together we can come up with something really strong for you.

So it's both

[00:06:45] David: How do you, so if I heard you correctly, you were saying you're not great at sales and you would like to bring on someone who's better at that. Did I mishear that? Or is that accurate?

[00:06:57] Joe: that's accurate. I think that's

[00:06:59] David: do it, but it's not

[00:07:00] Joe: meant of what I was getting at. Yeah. I've bootstrapped everything, right? I've, my outbound marketing is LinkedIn. My sales pitch is me sharing my knowledge at industry events with people I come across on LinkedIn, the network I've built over time.

And that's great to an extent, but that's also. Giving product away for free, which at the end of the day, I went on my own to do a business, right? And so if I can find someone who is a little more honed at that would be a great thing for me. Is it something I can do myself? Yeah. Have I probably stunted my growth to this point?

Financially, yes. From a personal development standpoint, absolutely not. I've learned more than all I would have ever learned by going out and doing that on my own. So that's been, it's been an interesting experience. 

[00:07:42] David: Is your business, what's the right way of saying it?

Do you have a product or is it just advice consulting? Like literally your time to advise and make them better? Or do you like I go and you tell me about your project and I'm going to go build it, right? I disappear for a while and do my typey thing. Do you have any product like that?

[00:07:59] Joe: no. And that's been the challenge on the first year, right? Cause the challenge on the first year is, and you made the comment that I'm much younger than you. And I probably older than most people anticipate, but when I'm, In an environment like this, and I'm getting on the phone with somebody for the first time, I can be at a deficit, because your natural reaction is There's no way this person knows more than I do in this topic, which I'm not saying I know everything at all, but I have a lot more experience than people often think at first glance, right?

[00:08:26] David: Old as Gary. That's not possible.

[00:08:27] Joe: Especially in what I've taken, right? I've spent most of my career with large corporations. And I'm trying to help bring that learning and all the failures and experience I got on someone else's dime to people who have gone and created a small midsize scaling business out of their own hands, right?

And being able to say to them Hey, I may not have been doing it for as long as you have, but I've been exposed to different things than you have been, and here is a way that you can think about something differently. And that's one of the challenges I think is there, right? And it's fun for me.

I think there's an education piece that is, is there, but that's a challenge and that's a hurdle to go through of I don't have a product to sell, right? Like I can't say, Hey, here's the template. Could I do that? Yeah. Are there a lot of people out there that do that? Yeah, is that something that I've now added to my road map of what needs to happen in the next six to twelve months?

Absolutely. But there's also something to You can put a system and you can put a product in place But you still need to at least in the fulfillment world and the operations world Execute upon it.

[00:09:29] Gary: I have a question.

[00:09:30] Joe: Yeah.

[00:09:31] Gary: You've been doing this, you said for 18 months. Now, what size businesses or Companies do you find yourself working with? Is it like newer startups with small amount of people that aren't really concrete in any processes already? And also do you have clients that maybe are a little bit bigger, but they've had a process they've been doing for years and it's just kind of hard to break them up, their bad habits to more or less optimize their outcome from that.

[00:09:58] Joe: Yeah. It's both depending on which type of client it is, right? So on the brand side, it's typically that smaller startup that does can't yet attract the expertise of somebody with an operations, a supply chain background because there's a mismatch, right? What the level of expertise they need is either someone who is not willing to get there.

They're like, Hands really dug in again and, or is coming up too high of a cost, but they're not yet at a spot where they can hire someone full time or an emerging role. So it's a lot of advisory work there or some fractional stuff. They're at a size where they really only need 10 hours a week of somebody to do some tactical things to make sure things are happening.

On the fulfillment side, it's much larger. So it's what I would say people who are in the scaling phase of business, right? So they are large enough now. That they can't be scrappy, right? It just, it doesn't work. They need to be on real systems. They have to have real process in place and they either have that and have had it for a long time and need to adapt like you've talked about, or they've just taken that step, right?

They just acquired another business or one of their core customers has expanded. And so they've grown with them and now they need to take the next step in their growth. And, I would say that is, on the fulfillment side, which is the core of my business, that is where I have the bread and butter.

So it's people who are, somewhere between 5 and 15 million dollars a year in revenue. It's people who are doing 3, 4, 5 facilities and need to understand not how to run the operation within four walls of one building, but how do we run the operation across multiple facilities, right? And it's less about optimizing the process and more about now optimizing the business, right?

There's a lot more that comes into play for them when It's not on site in person every single day at one location where you can see and feel what's going on And you now need to make sure that there's consistency across locations consistency across practice And a lot of that is just resource, right?

That's not so much that they don't know that they need It's that they need it and they need it quick, but they can't give up resources from the day to accomplish that how do they supplement that and that's where I can come in and fill that gap for them.

[00:12:01] David: Practically speaking, I sell soap and I've got an e commerce site. When would I need someone like you? Do I be selling, I'm selling too much soap now that I can't handle it?

I need a warehouse. At what point am I calling someone like you in? When am I overwhelmed?

[00:12:19] Joe: Yeah, for someone like that what I would say the time to call is We are scaling and it may not necessarily be that we're selling too much and we can't right that's something that we can help with but it's more going to be the Decision we have been fulfilling in house because it hasn't been that much and but now we're large enough that's taking too much time away from our team.

And so we need to figure out what do we do next? And the answer may not be, we're moving out to somewhere. The answer may be, we can still do it in house if we make these minor changes, or it can be, we know we need to go somewhere. How can we do that most cost effectively? And for a shipper or someone, a brand, whoever's selling a lot of the times at that point in their journey, they still are going to have a lot of tendencies that a startup is going to have, which I completely understand, right?

Very conscious of cost. Very reliant on people around them that are similar size, similar experience that can lead them to an echo chamber about what fulfillment looks like. And so for me, it's helping them set their business up to be successful and find the right person to work with, to be successful in that fulfillment piece.

When you talk about e commerce, the challenge for a lot of e commerce brands is they control every aspect of the customer experience. Up until the point of purchase and at that point in time when the customer at the most important point has given them money To get the product They lose control Of what's happening, right?

And they are fully dependent on the partners that they've partnered with So if they have gone to a fulfillment provider who? Is not the right fit for them, right? Too big doesn't do their niche can't hit their customer, whatever it may be There's a million different variables for that But if they don't go to them or if they go to them and are with them the customer doesn't care, right?

The customer doesn't care that Joe's 3PL didn't process the order because they didn't have four employees show up, and then they gave it to UPS and UPS like lost the product package, and then when you paid for three day shipping, it shows up 10 days later. The customer's calling the brand about that, right?

So setting up that piece is super important and making sure, hey, This is the best person, according to Google, is the best person for me to be working with, right? Are they the right fit for my business? Do I want to be a big fish in a small pond? Do I want to be a small fish in a big pond? Do I care about it being a very good experience and peace of mind and I don't ever have to think about it, therefore I'm willing to pay a little bit extra money?

Or do I care that it's the lowest price and I'll deal with me having to be on the phone with them every 15 minutes because they haven't processed an order, right? Those are a lot of things that smaller brands don't always think through because they haven't had to that point, right? And that's where I can bring a lot of expertise because I've been on both sides.

I've been a shipper. I've searched for 3PL providers. I have left 3PL providers that haven't been the right fit for me. I've had 3PL providers tell us to find somebody else because we haven't been the right fit for them. So how do you navigate that to get the right thing? Cost of fulfillment is not necessarily.

An indicator of doing really well. It's if you have to fulfill the order twice Because you got, maybe a better way of saying this is, your cheapest option is not always your lowest cost option, right? If you go with somebody who is cheap, there is a chance you are going to rework everything. And when you rework everything, that is just lost margin on that product.

And yes, you save 10 cents a unit to pick, pack, and ship it, but they never picked, packed, and shipped it, so you gave it to someone for free on an expedited shipment, and now you actually just paid that person twice the cost of the product, and you've lost three units of sales versus losing 10 cents to go to a better, more reasonable option, right?

And sometimes that's

[00:16:09] David: in a nutshell right there, man.

[00:16:11] Joe: do. What'd you say?

[00:16:12] David: That's offshoring in a nutshell right there, man.

[00:16:15] David: what people argue all the time. Hey man, I could hire this guy over here. He's half your cost Okay, here's a and I'll tell them I put on my little tenfoil hat. I'm like, here's your future You're gonna go with that person.

It's gonna take you twice as long He's gonna do half as good of a job and you're gonna be really mad And you're gonna call me a year later And i'm still gonna be the same price and that's where you're gonna be now, sometimes they don't call me because they're embarrassed but It still happens, right? I mean You And there are successful stories of someone using that cheaper service,

[00:16:52] Joe: Yes.

[00:16:53] David: but that's the exception, not the rule, I find. And

[00:16:57] Joe: it's because it fit what they were, what their business was designed to be, right? It's just what it is, right? Like I lived, I was fortunate for one of the companies I work for to live in Germany for a while. And they have a saying, right? It's there's no bad weather. It's you, it's only bad clothing, right?

The weather's only bad if you have the wrong clothes. It's the same thing, right? There really are no bad fulfillment providers. There are fulfillment providers that are cheap and you would look at the business and say, I don't understand how this works. But for whatever reason, it does. And it works really well for people who need low cost, don't care if stuff goes missing.

The product margin is really low. They just need someone to fulfill every so often. That's fine. You've got to find the right fit for what you need, and unfortunately that takes expertise, it takes time, there is cost associated to it, and for, I'm going to paint with a broad brush for brands who are scaling, like the example you gave, the soap company that's just taken off, those are three things that are, like, in high demand and low supply for them, right? Because they're doing everything. The three people are doing everything. And that's where someone like myself, or there's a lot of other people who focus a lot more on the brand side than I do, can come in and can be a resource.

And I think that's something that is becoming much more Much more relevant. And I think probably in your space, David, right? The term frac fractional CTO, fractional CI, whatever it may be, it's out there a lot, but then there's this connotation that you're getting this like C suite level, it's going to show up in a suit and no, fractional could be anything.

I can be a fractional data entry frontline, eight hour,

[00:18:25] David: also called part time.

[00:18:26] Joe: Exactly. It's how you want to, it's how you want to pose it and how you pose it also is who you're going to attract, right? The people who are

[00:18:33] Gary: sounds so much more Silicon

[00:18:34] David: I should totally tell my daughter that who works at Chick fil A, that she is a fractional fast food worker.

[00:18:41] Joe: She was a frac, yeah,

[00:18:42] Gary: customer experience expert

[00:18:44] David: there you go. Fractional, sunjoy maker,

[00:18:47] Joe: a fractional site leader for customer experience. You put that on the resume. That's going to hit every algorithm. She'll have jobs

[00:18:54] Gary: Person to person, face to face.

[00:18:56] Joe: you go.

[00:18:57] David: to face sales and logistics operator.

[00:19:01] Joe: Exactly.

[00:19:02] David: It would, when

[00:19:03] Joe: everything's a little bit of

[00:19:04] David: but she holds the iPad.

[00:19:06] Joe: Everything's a PR. But yeah, it's, so it's interesting that's one piece there, but then. 

[00:19:12] Joe: The flip side of it, right? It's the same problem, whether you're a fulfillment provider or a shipper. You're just looking through it from opposite sides of the window pane.

So if a fulfillment provider saying like all I'm doing is attracting startups that I never know if they're going to send a thousand in a week or ten thousand in a week. But I can't get to the next level of client or that's who I want to service but I'm having trouble doing it in a profitable manner.

Now the flip side of that problem comes in. How do you set up your business to do that? You need to have some expectations for them. How do you churn bad clients that you currently have that don't fit what you're trying to do? Or how do you adjust your business to it? And that's where I come in on the other side, because that's where I've spent most of my time. 

[00:19:55] Joe: Yes, I've been on the shipper side and found fulfillment, but I've also Spent the majority of my career in the four walls operating, making sure that our operations are profitable, making sure that we're doing the go to market piece of a fulfillment operations more effectively. And a lot of the, what I see there is it's really good businesses that can lose focus at time and either do the business side really well, but can't do the operation or do the operation extremely well, but don't understand the business side of it.

And all of a sudden the profitability just disappears. And then at the end of the month, it's how do we only bring home 10 cents on every dollar that we brought in, right? That's not how it's modeled to be. So how do you start to bring that all together and run it more effectively.

[00:20:45] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business. 

[00:21:14] Gary: So you've been doing this on your own for a short while and you're kind of in a, what we assume is what we call the slog, which is you're not quite big enough to have people coming to you yet.

You still have to try to. So you or your product to other people, do you have within that 18 months, a story of a really good accomplishment that really motivated you? And then also maybe one not so good situation that kind of made you second guess being on your own

[00:21:44] Joe: yeah, I do. I have one for each. I'll start with the one that made me second guess. So when I went out on my own. It had always been a plan to go out on my own at some point in time. I think I said this at the top, right? When I started my business, I just didn't think I was going to start then.

So I was starting from zero. The plan was always to start it as a small side gig, see what was going on, start to scale it up, and then go. I had a feeling that where I was at before I was not going to be at for an extended period of time. It was just a matter of when was it going to be time for either myself to move on or for us to say hey, like where we're at in the business, it doesn't really make sense for the fit.

And that was part of the journey for the startup that I joined. And I was anticipating that I didn't anticipate to happen when it did. So when it did, I said, okay, let's go do it. And my wife and I talked about it and we said, okay, let's give ourselves, we think this much time is reasonable to get up and going.

And this is what our target should be. We need to have at least X amount of revenue by the time we get to the end of the year. And at that point in time, it would have been about like seven months, I think. So I gave myself seven months to say Hey, let's get proof of this can work. I need some startup. 

I was six months and three weeks in and still had nothing. On the table, right? So then the conversation was, okay, I've put in a lot of effort. I put in a lot of time. I have felt very positive about a lot of conversations and nothing has closed and nothing has come to fruition. Why? Why am I doing this? Like this? This is fun. But I also don't get to do a lot of the other fun things I used to because I'm not spending a lot of cash, but I'm also not bringing any cash in. So 

[00:23:23] Gary: and your, all your time is now 

[00:23:25] Joe: correct. Okay. It was opportunity costs that I missed out on.

It was, I was okay knowing that nothing was going to come in at this point in time, but at some point in time, I also was not generating anything like I would have on W2. And I had this moment of, and I sat down with my, it was like just after New Year's and I was like, okay what's the plan?

What are you doing? When are you going to start applying to jobs again? And I said, I have this idea that if I make this transition in how I focus who I talk to and how I focus my messaging, I think I will get better opportunity. I just need the entrepreneurs. I just need four more weeks and I just need one person to say yes and I'm going to be fine.

And I got the four weeks. And in that moment, I told myself I was being too strict on what I listened to too many people on linkedin. I said, this is what I think my value is. And I'm not deviating from it. Priced me out of every single opportunity that I had. No wonder I was getting ghosted on a lot of stuff, like looking back on it now. But I also was going to be more open to be more flexible actually on what opportunities I was open to. And so I had avoided contract opportunities. I had avoided opportunities that were very small because I thought that my differentiator was it's partnership focus. And I want to come in, make a difference for you and leave.

And I wanted to be super impactful. And that was something that was a barrier for myself that held me back very early on when I just needed to get traction. And when I told myself like hey, I'm gonna be open to more stuff the floodgates open to an extent, right? I found an opportunity that was a little bit outside of what my core scope was gonna be It was a contract role for somebody who was going out on paternity leave They were like I need someone who's not looking for another job because I know this guy's coming back I just need somebody reliable for 12 weeks To do the job keep the lights on if you can move it forward great And I said fine how many hours a week do you need?

I said we need 30 hours a week Perfect. That's great. That gives me 10 hours to keep trying to find something else. And I had a bunch of these small opportunities that I really loved and were the whole reason I had gone out on my own anyways to help people like that and do things like that I wasn't willing to take because I would have had to have done like 60 of them a month for it to make sense because they were really early in their journey or only needed some of that advisory work.

And we're like, I really only need you for two hours. Two hours a week, maybe 10 hours a month total. And it just wasn't going to make sense. And once I gave up on that, because I had listened to too many people on LinkedIn and social media before it's okay, now I've gotten back in the rhythm and now I'm getting opportunities that are coming through.

And now I am saying no to stuff. Cause I filled my time and I'm less stressed and I'm less desperate. And so I think it's two sides of it, right? Like a win and this barrier where it's I had this moment of the wall where I was like, Hey, I gave it a go, but this was not meant to be for me, maybe I'll try it again in the future, I know things now, but I gotta go back to making some money.

And all it took was a little bit of flexibility from my side to say no, the goal going out on my own was to be able to work on what I wanted to work on, make an impact, have some flexibility, be more present for my daughter and my family. And these are achieving it. It's not the way I thought I was going to, but this is achieving it, and I'm actually getting closer by doing these things to what I wanted to do than I was by holding on hope that I could do it in some specific way.

And that was like a massive unlock for me. And maybe there's still a chance that, David, you talked about it earlier, right? You have to go out and find it and kill it and bring it back and cook it and eat it and also figure out how you're doing it again the next day and at some point maybe I go out and I don't find anything right and a contract ends and it's not there and I don't have the next opportunity and I say, Hey, you know what?

It's time to move this to the side again and keep building and keep working, but I need some something sustainable there. And then I come back or maybe that's the point where I go all in on, Hey, let's bring somebody else in that can put some time towards it also. And by them putting time towards it also in whatever capacity it may be, we're able to bring in more.

And so net, net, I'm actually better off and we're going to grow it faster and we'll see what happens.

[00:27:39] David: the

[00:27:40] Gary: That's like the classic pivot.

[00:27:42] David: It was. 

[00:27:44] David: That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell. I think it's really refreshing to hear that. The best advice I got is, make sure you carve out every day for sales. When you have one big client or you've got work to do, it's so easy to forget that. Some people will go even a step further and say, wake up every morning and spend two hours on sales and then don't think about it again. Then do it again and do it again. Over time, that 10 hours a week or whatever will bear fruit. It's so easy to get lost in that. 

[00:28:15] David: And the other thing is, I think you bring up a good point about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is great, but it's a, I find it's mainly the people who post a ton or one of two people, and we do LinkedIn. I certainly don't have a problem with it. We're very busy on it as a company. But. Mainly, not mainly, one big group of people are unemployed. They, I've found like people I know over the years and I've known them say 10 years and they, you can tell when they've gotten laid off or something because suddenly they're just,

[00:28:46] Joe: Active.

[00:28:47] David: They're active on it and they're like philosophical

[00:28:50] Gary: they're experts.

[00:28:51] David: yeah they're, this is how you're going to change X industry and I'm here just meet people and we're going to, We're going to get together with a hug and it's going to be great.

And okay, that's one set. And then you've got the others, the other extreme, I should say, are they're like the Gary V's of the world who they make their presence known that they're a brand and they're everywhere. And then they've got their followers, reposting their junk and whatever.

And it's really easy to get lost in there when you need real advice or see really how to do something. It's neither of those because Gary Vee has already made it. Now, I'm not saying he doesn't have good advice. I like a lot of his stuff, but it's different. It's not what you need right when you're getting started, right?

And the dude who's just waxing poetic, hoping to God someone listens and might reach out for a job opportunity. I don't, and what's funny and you know it's not legit because they always come out so earnest and I'm not making fun of these guys at all. They come out so earnest. I'm here and I'm here to be a community.

And then, it's fake because when they get that job, they vanish. There's no community anymore. That was just a lever you were yanking. And that bothers me a little bit because we push. Articles all the time. I think we post like 180 times a month. It is nuts how much our team pushes and that is to create somewhat of community to create some sort of audience.

And so it's if you're going to do that, do it. But just anyway, I'm off on a

[00:30:18] Joe: No.

[00:30:18] David: but

[00:30:19] Gary: as a disclaimer the Gary Vee David was referring to is not me. It's a different Gary Vee.

[00:30:24] David: Oh, Um, okay. No one would actually want to listen to what you had to say here.

[00:30:27] Joe: Yeah, I wasn't following before. I was like, I don't, I've enjoyed the conversation to this

[00:30:32] Gary: I get confused a lot with that guy, but he's a clown. I was Gary

[00:30:35] David: I am sure lots of people confuse you with a multi gazillionaire marketing genius. Okay, sure,

[00:30:42] Gary: It happens.

[00:30:43] Joe: But I'm glad

[00:30:44] David: pencils and crayons versus Gary V Okay.

[00:30:46] Gary: Just to kind of wrap everything up in the 18 months that you've had with this experience so far, what are your top three pieces of advice for any new business or entrepreneur. 

[00:30:59] Joe: There's no good or bad time to start. You're going to make mistakes. If you think you're 100 percent ready and have 100 percent product. You're going to knock it out of the park. And there's going to be days that you feel every end of the spectrum in an hour.

But if you're going to do it, go do it.

[00:31:16] Joe: That was one of the things that I struggled with very early on. It's like, all right, I'm going to do this. And then it's like, why am I doing this? And just keep going and it will compound and you're going to make mistakes and you're going to learn, but like fewer people are paying attention to every single detail and every single step you take than you think, right?

Everyone's the star of their own show. Not everyone's watching everyone else's show. So just go do it. And you're either gonna knock it out of the park and chances are half the people will know and half the people won't or you're gonna Fail utterly and far fewer people are going to know about that than not and you're going to be better for it in the future So there's a chance that I flame out in the next three months And i'm probably just going to go do something else and i'm going to be better at whatever I do next for it Or i'm going to be super successful and it's going to be because I just went and did it so just get out there and do it I think that's number one.

I think the second thing is that. 

[00:32:12] Joe: While we all want to think what we're bringing out there is super unique, there's at least 10 to 15 other people that are doing probably very similar, if not the exact same thing that you're out there trying to do and that's good. Because that's going to cause everyone to be better at what they're doing but there's also no one template for how you do it. Kind of comes back to what we were talking about with everybody that's out there on LinkedIn.

There's going to be somebody that's doing exactly what you are doing, you are modeling it after. 

[00:32:41] Joe: That's going to say, Wake up at 4. 30, go do a cold plunge, run three miles be extremely disciplined in your diet, X, Y, and Z, and you'll make X million dollars a year. And for every one of those, there's also somebody who has in your industry doing exactly what you're doing that has had the exact same result, maybe even a better result that you have never heard of that wakes up at like 10 a.

m. And just figures it out because that's what works for them. So know who you are, know what you're good at, know what you're not good at, and then embrace it because authenticity is what's going to get you further than anything else. Like you talked about Gary V earlier, David, I think.

Gary Vee resonates because whether you like him or not, he's authentic. And you know that's what's going to happen, right? It's, it may be a gimmick, but it's authentically a gimmick all the time. And so the only people that may, if it's a gimmick, the only people that know are the people that see him in his lowest moments behind closed doors. So know who you are and just be it, right? I can be a great voice out there, but I also know that comic relief is something that I'm there for. So if someone's looking for a fulfillment expert that's going to show up in a suit and be very buttoned up I'm not that person, right? I'm going to be there, I'm going to roll up my sleeves, we're going to figure out what's going on, I'm going to be there.

Talk to the CEO the same way I'm going to talk to the person that's packing the box. We're going to figure out what the problem is. We're going to laugh about it. It's going to suck for some minutes or whatever. And then we're going to go, I'm going to poke fun of myself. I'm going to poke fun of the person who does like the cold plunge, whatever the case may be, but it's gotta be like, and I know that's my ethos and who I am. So that's what I'm going to do. And that's helped me more than it's hurt me. And so I think that's the big thing. Look at other people, see what they're doing. Take what you think works and is good for you. Leave behind what hasn't, right?

There are very few, 100% unique ideas and unique people that are out there. Everyone's borrowed a little something from someone else along the line. And then. 

[00:34:31] Joe: The last one, I've been very verbose the whole time, but this one's pretty concise. Focus, but iterate. 

You have to stay committed to your decision, right?

Like my decision was to go out on my own and do it you and I talked on the first day, it would sound a lot different than it does right now But the core of what i'm doing is the same. I want to help small brands. I want to help fulfillment providers I want to help small businesses that are trying to make their dreams and achieve what they want to do Be better through the experience that i've had early on it looked one way Beginning of this conversation will look one way, it may look different after I go back and listen to this and think about what we've talked about and make some more changes as well, but be focused on what your decision is, but be flexible on how you're getting there because you're going to learn along the way and stuff's going to come up that you weren't expecting and you got to be able to be willing to change your path, but keep your same end destination.

That's the biggest thing. That's where I see people miss them and where I almost did.

[00:35:29] Gary: you brought up going through every emotion within an hour, and that's something that comes up quite frequently on this. Podcast when we're talking to other business owners and entrepreneurs. And that is wholeheartedly true. David mentioned it all the time too. So yeah, that resonates. Now, Joe, if anybody wants to learn more about you or your business, what's the best place to reach out to you besides LinkedIn?

[00:35:51] Joe: On LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I post once a day. It is true, but that's the best place to find me just because it's the easiest. 

[00:35:59] Gary: Okay.

[00:36:00] Joe: email works also . 

[00:36:05] David: Love it, man. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us this week.

Have a good one everybody we'll see you next week.

[00:36:13] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.