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There were 412 corporate insolvencies in H1 2024, up 25% compared to this time last year and the highest half-yearly corporate insolvency figure since H1 2018 (435). Commenting on the latest statistics, James Anderson, Turnaround & Restructuring Partner, Deloitte Ireland, said: "These figures put Ireland on course for more than 800 insolvencies this year, as forecasted in our Q1 Insolvency & Restructuring Statistics. This is an increase of 25% on 2023 activity levels and would represent the highest number of insolvencies since 2017, when the figure was 874." The increase in H1 2024 is driven by Creditors' Voluntary Liquidation (CLV) activity, which saw a 33% increase compared with H1 2023 (323 CLVs in H1 2024 vs 243 in H1 2023). Nearly all insolvencies in H1 2024 were SMEs (98%). SCARP There have been 13 SCARP appointments to date in 2024, which is down from 17 in H1 2023. There have been 68 SCARP appointments since its introduction at the end of 2021 and it has a success rate of 70%, saving 672 jobs to date. Anderson said: "The drop in SCARP appointments compared to last year is very concerning. This scheme continues to attract low numbers of companies despite the positive impact it has had on those who have used it. We know SCARP can be successful in saving jobs and we would urge the Government to further invest in raising awareness of this process and its benefits." Debt warehousing Almost 90% of the €1.65 billion debt that remained in the warehouse at the start of April 2024 was either paid in full, secured under phased payment arrangements or included within a proposed phased payment arrangement, according to Revenue in May. Anderson said: "The debt warehousing scheme supported businesses in Ireland during a difficult and uncertain period. The vast majority of companies who availed of it are now either engaging with Revenue or have cleared off their debts. This shows it was a good decision to introduce it and confirms that such emergency measures for businesses can have a positive impact during turbulent times." Sector focus There were 77 insolvencies in the hospitality sector in H1 2024, which is a significant increase of 88% from H1 2023. This is likely due to similar trends in Q1, including increased labour and energy costs, as well as the VAT rate at 13.5% and insurance costs. The mandatory Pension Scheme will come into operation in September of this year. These factors, together with the overall higher cost of living impacting discretionary spend, is likely to see continued distress in the hospitality industry for the remainder of 2024. Anderson said: "We're nearly one year on since the VAT rate of 13.5% was reintroduced for the retail and hospitality sector and we're seeing the remarkable impact costs such as these are having on the businesses involved." Regional focus Leinster had the highest number of insolvencies in H1 2024 (321), as expected, and recorded a 27% increase compared to H1 2023. There were 46 in Munster, 40 in Connacht, and 5 in Ulster (Republic of Ireland only). 2024 forecast Based on the activity levels in H1 2024, corporate insolvency activity in 2024 is forecasted to surpass 800 appointments. This represents a 25% increase on 2023 activity levels and the highest level in six years. Based on the appointments in H1 2024, SMEs will likely continue to be the most impacted, and the Hospitality and Retail Sectors are likely to experience continued restructuring activity in 2024.

The Jason & Scot Show.  Podcast about e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Editor note: We're trying some fun new AI features for this episode. The following show notes were written by ChatGPT. We're also let AI remove all the "stop words" in our audio, and we've switched from Google to OpenAI for our audio transcription. Let us know your feedback. In this episode of the Jason and Scot show, our special guest is Sean D. Nelson, the CEO and founder of Lovesac. He shares his inspiring journey of starting the company as a beanbag business in his basement and growing it into a successful public company. Sean highlights the key moments of his entrepreneurial journey, including winning a million dollars on Richard Branson's reality TV show and navigating the ups and downs of the business. Sean has upcoming book and podcast, both entitled "Let Me Save You 25 Years: Mistakes, Miracles, and Lessons from the Lovesac Story." Sean emphasizes the importance of being a direct-to-consumer brand and how Lovesac has found sustained success by focusing on customer acquisition costs and offering a high-quality product. He discusses the concept of direct-to-consumer and shares his thoughts on its significance. Sean believes that having a differentiated product that provides value to customers is crucial, rather than simply relying on an online sales strategy. The conversation also touches on the topic of innovation and how Lovesac has been able to push the boundaries of what a furniture company can offer. Sean discusses their Stealth Tech innovation, which incorporates surround sound into their couches, as well as their commitment to creating products that are built to last and designed to evolve. Sean acknowledges the challenges of operating in physical retail and highlights the importance of their showrooms in reducing customer acquisition costs and providing a hands-on experience for customers. He also mentions their partnerships with Best Buy and Costco to expand their reach. The discussion expands to the future of retail and e-commerce, with Sean mentioning the transformative role of AI but cautioning that it takes time for movements to fully evolve. He emphasizes the importance of being patient and keeping an eye on developments in the industry. The conversation concludes with Sean expressing his long-term commitment to Lovesac and his desire to build something meaningful rather than focusing solely on personal gain. Listeners are invited to check out Sean's podcast and website, as well as his upcoming book, which will be released in January. Overall, this episode provides insights into the journey and philosophy behind Lovesac's success and offers valuable perspectives on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future of retail. Chapters 0:00:46 Introduction and Welcome to the Show 0:08:36 The Journey of Love Sack: From Highs to Lows 0:12:05 Love Sack's Traditional IPO and Company Performance 0:15:49 The Importance of Having a Differentiated Product 0:19:49 The Value and Overhype of Market Movements 0:23:18 Sactionals: Built to Last, Designed to Evolve 0:25:56 Driving a Movement for Sustainable Consumerism 0:31:36 Innovation and the Evolution of Lovesac's Product Line 0:37:07 The Strength of Lovesac's Physical Showrooms in the DTC Landscape 0:40:03 Testing and Learning: Mobile Concierge and Shop and Shop 0:41:52 AI's transformative role in the future of technology 0:50:08 Long-Term Vision vs Quick Profit Episode 313 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, November 9th, 2023. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show. This episode is being recorded on Thursday, November 9th, 2023. I'm your host, Jason "RetailGeek" Goldberg, and as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey, Jason, and welcome back. Jason and Scot show listeners. Jason, we're very fortunate to have a entrepreneur on the show. I'm the entrepreneur side of our partnership. So I always really enjoy these. Introduction and Welcome to the Show [0:49] We have on the show, Sean D. Nelson. He is the CEO and founder of Lovesack. And a little birdie told me that he recently started a podcast himself. He started Love Sack as a beanbag company in his basement when he was around 18. And now it's a public company and doing relatively large revenues over 600 kind of run rate. If I look at the last quarter, I took a little glance at that. Sean, welcome to the show. Shawn : [1:13] Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great to be with you. Jason: [1:16] We are thrilled to have you, Sean. Listeners always like to kind of get the background. I'm imagining you don't have a deep background before you started Love Sack because you started it so young. But can you, like where were you in life when that brought you to start build your own product? Shawn : [1:34] Yeah, strangely, 25 years in and still running the same company I founded as my side hustle in college, which is exactly what Love Sack was. So 95, all the way back then, I made a giant not bean bag because I thought it would be funny. I literally, 10 days out of high school, got off the couch at my parents' house, having this dumb idea, like, how about a beanbag, like, me to the TV, like, the whole floor, like, huge. Drove down to the fabric store, bought some fabric, brought it home, cut it out, and then began sewing it up, broke my mom's sewing machine, neighbor finished it, took three or four weeks to try and stuff it, originally with beads, but couldn't possibly find enough, so looked around the house, I just found out my parents' camping mattresses chopped up yellow foam, you know, like those yellow slabs of foam you take camping, on a paper cutter in the basement. And eventually, I mean, foam, packing peanuts, old blankets, had this thing stuffed and started using it out and about through university, taking it camping, back of the truck, driving movies. Ended up putting it away for a couple years. And by the way, everywhere I took it, everybody wants one. Like everyone's always like, Oh my gosh, what is that thing? Where'd you get it? I was like, I'll never make another one. It was such a pain in the butt and put it away for a couple of years to go be a missionary for my church. [2:58] And came back to finish up university in 1998. And that's when I founded the company. Cause people kept bugging me to make them one. And it became my side hustle in college. And we tried to sell these things eventually beyond our friends and family and beer fest, May fest, October fest, car shows, boat shows, 10 by 10 booths, how we got started. Tried to sell them to furniture stores and they laughed at us and told us it was a dumb idea. [3:34] Eventually, at a trade show got discovered by the limited to this is like, you would not today as justice like in the malls, like little girls pink and purple fuzzy stuff for their bedrooms and, and clothing. Anyway, they ordered 12,000 little love sacks, not knowing it was me and a buddy and like a woodchipper shredding foam in the back of this furniture place. And, and that forced us to source over in Asia, which is, you know, where I had served my mission. So I speak Mandarin Chinese. There's a whole story there I won't get into it it was just kind of one thing led to another led to another week we built a factory to support that 12,000 sack order we then went out to the furniture stores who again laughed at us didn't want our $500,000. [4:19] Beanbags having completed that order wanting to keep the factory going so we finally opened our own store in a mall that didn't even want us there but finally capitulated let us in because they We had a space to fill for the holiday season, in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it just exploded. We did a good job, carpet paint, neon sign, made it look like a proper mall chain store selling giant beanbags, and it just took off. Like, it worked. People came in, flopped down, music bumpin', big screen TV, playin' movies, had a great time. There was a couch in the corner to look pretty, be part of the decor. People kept asking about the couch, And that led us to eventually, many stores later, many states later, invent Saxionals, which is our modular sofa solution, which now drives almost 90% of our sales today. So we're more a couch company by far today than we are a beanbag company. And there was a whole, listen, I'm skipping over decades of time really, but there was a whole transition where we... We went through after we invented the sectionals and solved all these problems people have with couches not only can you ship it to your house via FedEx which was hyper relevant you know for. [5:32] E-commerce and digital marketing obviously but it's watchable and changeable, and movable and it can be with you the rest of your life that that led us to a whole design philosophy that now. [5:42] Drives are innovation we think is a really cool secret sauce called design for life but. 10, 20, 50, 100, 250 locations now. We came public in 2018 on about 100 million in sales. Right around the time there was just tons of fervor in this direct consumer movement. We had farted around, we'll call it as a furniture store, selling rugs and lamps and bowls and baskets and all the obvious things along the way. And it was really when we purged all that stuff around 2015, seeing the Caspers of the world emerge and Warby Parker's and even Tesla with their showrooms. Could we adopt a more e-commerce-led model with showrooms for people to kick the tires, so to speak? And that transition is really what unlocked the lovesack that you see today and where most of our growth has come since about 2015, 16, when we made that pivot, took the company public, wrapped around that direct consumer story. So we're not a digitally native brand originally, we were actually a retailer that pivoted and became digitally led. And now we don't even operate stores in the traditional sense. We don't, we don't stock things there. You know, you don't walk out of there with your product. They're all really online sales and those showrooms are extremely powerful mechanisms for helping people make up their mind around a five or 10, $15,000. [7:06] Purchase where they want to see the thing and sit on it and, and, and see if it's everything it's cracked, it's cracked up to be online. And so we, we, we believe that we really, uh, through that arc. And then by the way, since coming public, I don't know, six, seven X, the company this year, you know, we'll, we'll be on a run rate to the analysts were a public company. So the analysts show us around, you know, it's called 700 plus in revenue and profitable, very profitable and cash generative. So we think, you know, the direct consumer game, in a lot of respects, Love Sack is one of the unlikely winners of that entire movement. Because I think at that scale, there are very, very few, what I call successful direct to consumer brands. And so we're really proud of that. And it's been a long saga, and we continue to grow and change and adapt and evolve. Jason: [8:01] It's an amazing story. And we definitely want to unpack it. But I want to go all the way back to the beginning for one second. Did that neighbor who helped finish sewing the first prototype get any equity? Shawn : [8:13] No, it was my ex-girlfriend's, mom, so about the time she exited, you know. No, it was just a friendly favor, but the truth is a lot of people helped out along the way, and a lot of people had equity or have equity in Love Sack from along the way, but look, we've been through every high, every low. Somewhere in the middle there, I skipped over it just because of brevity. Not only did I win a million dollars on TV with Richard Branson, The Journey of Love Sack: From Highs to Lows [8:38] his reality TV show on Fox Network back in 2005, if you can believe that, the rebel billionaire. But I also guided the company through a complete chapter 11 reorganization back in 2006, spearheaded by Venture Capital, which was painful and ugly and embarrassing and humiliating. So we've been through every kind of thing over these better than two decades. Scot: [9:01] Yeah, my deep dive question is, when you rented or bought the wood chipper, did you tell them you'd be throwing foam in there, or did they think you were clearing up a tree? Shawn : [9:09] Oh, that's so the original story. Yeah, the original woodchipper actually, you know, if you've ever used one in your backyard or, you know, you shove sticks into these things, that's basically what the original shredder was. And it was in the back room of this furniture factory already. They had used it back in the seventies to shred foam, but it had an electric motor, right? Instead of like, okay. Scot: [9:30] So it's okay to be inside here. Shawn : [9:32] Well, yeah, but I had to rehab it because it hadn't been used in like a decade or two because shredded foam had fallen out of favor in furniture. And then later to do that bigger order, we couldn't afford like a proper German, shredder, so we ended up driving out to farm country to find more of those same kind of shredders and actually found a hay grinder called a hay buster can shred 2000 pounds at a whack. Scot: [9:57] And that's a lot of power. Shawn : [9:59] Yeah, it's powered by a tractor. So we, you know, agricultural loan for tractor and hay grinder. I mean, crazy, crazy story in the beginning. Scot: [10:07] Yeah, as a family, you gotta figure out how to get it done, right? Whatever it takes. Shawn : [10:12] Whatever it takes. Scot: [10:13] I didn't know the Richard Branson thing, so that was interesting. Did he like, was he an active investor, or that's like one of those things where his people kind of take over and you never hear from him again? Shawn : [10:22] No, I mean, it was a weird situation. He had a reality TV show, 2004-5, The Rebel Billionaire, you know, whatever, 16 contestants. It was like The Apprentice, but not for apprentices, for entrepreneurs. So my runner-up on the show was Sarah Blakely of Spanx, gives you an idea. Scot: [10:38] Oh, okay, cool, neat. Shawn : [10:39] Yeah, yeah, so we became great friends, she and I, Richard and I. I ended up also being named President of Virgin Worldwide for a minute as part of the prize, believe it or not. So, worked with Richard, worked with all of his CEOs. Totally weird outcome. And, you know, but huge, huge blessing and a huge piece of story. And he was involved in sort of our VC round that ensued on the tail of that. Scot: [11:06] Okay, and then I think I saw that you guys were on Shark Tank, right? You were like one of those that you know, kind of one of the big success stories. Was that the OG Shark Tank or? Shawn : [11:16] No, we weren't on Shark Tank. A lot of people thought that. There was a Love Sack copycat that's on Shark Tank. Okay, and so they got... Scot: [11:23] I was confused because like Google says you were and then I was like, but then I couldn't find the episode. Jason: [11:28] There's a whole TikTok channel dedicated to Love Sack and Shark Tank and it's super weird. Shawn : [11:36] That's super, yeah, people get confused. Scot: [11:42] Yeah, yeah, super weird. Yeah. And then when you did your IPO, was it a traditional IPO or did you guys get caught up in the SPAC craziness? Shawn : [11:51] No, we did a traditional IPO back in 2018 and you know, our stock has been really volatile for lots of different reasons that, you know, COVID was crazy, but the company performance has been really solid. So we're just trucking. Love Sack's Traditional IPO and Company Performance Scot: [12:06] He, I think, was at Graham that said in the short-term it's an emotional machine, in the long-term it weighs your financials. So you got to, it's very hard, you know, I took a company public, not to the level you have. And yeah, it is, I was like, I'm not going to look at the stock, it's not going to influence me. And then suddenly everyone's like, are we making the quarter? And it's like, okay. And then suddenly it's very hard to get out of that, that short-term mindset. So congrats to you for sticking to it for so long. Shawn : [12:29] Yeah, look, I'm actually a big advocate of it, having lived inside of it now for almost six years. Scot: [12:36] Yeah, the transparency is good, you know, and I like that part of it, I think that's good for, you know, to kind of have to put out everything that you're doing, you know, it's a, the ultimate, yeah, it's like, yeah, transparency tends to be a good thing. Shawn : [12:48] I think it's the right way for companies to be governed and ran. Anyway, we could get into that if you want. Scot: [12:56] Yeah, I like the, you know, and you talked about all the other, we call them digitally native vertical brands, like the Warby's and Bonobos and all that. And yeah, a lot of them have not made it past kind of like that hundred million dollar level. And you guys have obviously, you know, six, seven X that, which is awesome. And then, you know, the big knock on Casper for a long time was as we've actually had this guy, Dan on the show, people were able to pick apart the CAC LTV and they found the average selling price was like, Jason will know these numbers, but it was like 350 and their cost to acquire a customer was 400. And they were like, you know, that obviously wasn't sustainable. So it's pretty neat that you guys have figured that out. Shawn : [13:36] Yeah. I mean, that's at the root of why obviously we've had some sustained success. And I think it's also at the root of why there are almost no other direct consumer brands making any money. End of story, full stop. And it's pretty fascinating to watch the whole thing unfold, because it really has been a movement for almost a decade. Scot: [14:01] Yeah, and I don't want to dig into the information you don't divulge publicly, so this is not a trap or anything but is it because the selection or your products, you've kind of cracked the code on Kakao TV, like what do you, and I don't want to know any methods or anything. and what do you attribute it to? Shawn : [14:18] Look, I think, let's start at the root. I think that many companies, product companies, let's start there, overlook the fact that you need a really good product. I think they pick a category and they say, oh, it could be a direct consumer brand. And the truth is, what does that even mean? Do you mean, because here's the funny thing. When I hear analysts and industry people talk about direct consumer, it has become synonymous over the last decade as it's unfolded today with e-comm. Oh, you mean you're an e-comm company and in many cases you do half of your sales through wholesale. So what does it even mean? I mean, if you want to talk about a direct consumer brand, LoveSack may be the most direct. We don't have any wholesale. I'm talking zero, and we only sell through our own channels, whether it's our website or our showrooms. And we have these partnerships, for instance, where we operate our own showrooms inside of a Best Buy or a Costco. [15:26] But you know, so this whole phrase even, direct-to-consumer, I think is really kind of silly. You mean you're a company that sells stuff online and maybe in showrooms and maybe in wholesale? So you're a company that sells stuff. So let's start with stuff. And you have to make, I think, if you want to be successful in the world, it's not a new concept. You have to have... A great product or or you have to have some other really. Hiller efficiency The Importance of Having a Differentiated Product [15:52] and i think what most have discovered it was a list again over this long decade of direction sumer evolution is that without a really differentiated product. You're just another company with a clever name lots of funding and if you throw lots of money at anything it's gonna grow. But you need to be differentiated. So Love Sack, you know, start with the giant beanbags. They were unique, especially in their day. There's tons of copycats out there now. [16:24] Sactionals are extremely unique. The problem is they photograph just like any other sectional sofa. Like if you took an image of Sactionals and an image of one of, you know, out of any competitor that sells couches, ours looks a lot like theirs. But the difference, the differences are myriad in terms of their washability, changeability, quality, and modularity, and many of those aspects, especially on the modular side, are patented at LoveSac. And so once you dig into it, you find that that's the number one driving factor, is we have a product that's truly differentiated, truly gives more value to the customer, and therefore, we can extract more from the market. It's really that simple, right? And that's at the root of why our CLV to CAC ratio it was so high and sustainable and cash-generative and profitable. And then we could go down all kinds of other paths. We could talk about our website, execution and stuff like that. And all of it needs to be there. Look, running a business is multifaceted and difficult. But at the root of it is that. Jason: [17:27] For sure. One of the things I sort of admire about your company is the original premise was not to have a particular go-to-market strategy. It was to have this great product that people wanted to have in their lives, right? And it feels to me like that, the whole quote unquote D to C movement, like this notion that before you solve any other problem, you're just gonna put a flag in the ground, like this is how you're gonna go to market, that just, it just seems silly because that may not be how the customer wants to acquire your product. Shawn : [18:00] Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that, so I think that whole movement that we're a part of, so I don't mean to like bag on the movement. I'm just an observer as well. Like I've been living in it, right? And we put, and I'm being really transparent, we put on those clothes very intentionally. [18:16] Because people that planted those flags were getting funded. People that planted those flags were being understood at the time. And these movements come. Right now, I could hold up a flag that said AI on it and go out there and raise a bunch of money and do something. And in the end, 99 out of 100 of those, flags are going to fall by the wayside after having tons of money thrown at them and Probably 1% of them will go on to you know be the next Googlers or who knows what right? But these movements come and go and and and I'm and this is what I'm saying You gotta be careful. I'm not bagging on the movement because these movements are useful these movements drive economic activity these movements drive innovation But they're often way overhyped, not as, I think, not as, so, you know, I mean, we could get into AI, you guys are, I'm sure, tracking it just like I am. What does that even mean? Oh, you mean like software? You mean like software that, that does stuff in an automated fashion? Like is that, is that, is it really that new? But it doesn't matter. It's a story that's being heard. It's a story that's being understood and it's where the momentum is. And so if you're able to wield, take advantage of these movements in the marketplace to your end, that's what, and that's exactly what LoveSack did. We put on those clothes, we took a concept that had been around for a long time, our concept. [19:42] And look, in the end, the thinking and the development and even like, let's say the web services and all the things available to that movement that The Value and Overhype of Market Movements [19:49] were spun up because of that movement, we benefited from. The money raising pricing aside, momentum, going public, whatever, all these things aside. So that's why I'm saying I think that there is value in these movements, but fundamentally, you still need to have a great business, a great product, something that's truly differentiated, because anyone with some funding can go out, buy a logo, buy a name, and look like they know what they're doing. Jason: [20:20] And yeah, for sure. And to your point, there's a, there's a funny data by going around in, in our industry this week that like over a hundred million dollars or I'm sorry, Amazon's GMV is, I'm sorry, a hundred billion dollars of Amazon's GMV is from AI. And you hear that and you're like, oh my God, that's huge. And then you find out it's product recommendation tiles that they launched in 1997. Shawn : [20:45] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason: [20:47] Which, yeah. Yeah, so I do just want to like kind of wrap up this section, but put it in context. When you open that first store in a mall, like the mall competition for furniture stores was like Expressions Furniture, right? Which no one on this call would even remember probably. And then like by the time you really, after your IPO and really caught fire, you were competing directly against all these D to C companies that were expanding in malls. You were probably competing for leases. Shawn : [21:18] Yeah. Jason: [21:19] It's quite the, quite the journey. Now, Scot mentioned at the beginning of the show that you had recently started a podcast and I'm two part question. How the heck did you have time to start a podcast and tell us what the premise behind the podcast is and what you're talking about? Shawn : [21:36] Sure. Yeah. Just to comment first on what you pointed out, there is this whole strip in the malls now out there right now. But by the way, in these shopping malls that I was told were dead, you know, I could read the headlines of shopping malls are dead back in 2001 when I was opening my first shopping mall and I was forwarded those kind of emails by friends and family who were concerned. And here we are in 2023 and while these things change, they take decades to change. Meanwhile, they've evolved and you have all of these direct consumer players now and it It just cycles through, you know? What the players inside of these shopping centers happen to rotate, and I've watched it all evolve, and by the way, they're rotating again, because a lot of those players are not viable. Some of the best ones, biggest ones, you know? Like, concepts like Peloton, who I think is amazing as a concept, you know? They have their struggles, and so we watch these things evolve. In terms of, the podcast is relevant to this. Let me explain why. We had the chicken, I'm going to go, given the nature of what your podcast is, I'll give you a much broader picture than just, hey, why am I recording a podcast on my own and writing a book? [22:55] It works like this. We had the chicken before the egg. Sactionals being the chicken, we discovered, as we observed and had success with it, we believe are so successful because they are are built to last a lifetime and designed to evolve. Like those two attributes in our product are quite unique. And those two attributes underpin what we call our designed for life philosophy. Sactionals: Built to Last, Designed to Evolve [23:21] I did not found Love Sack to make products that are super sustainable, sustain hyphenable. In other words, things that actually sustain. Who's talking about that? I was just trying to survive. I made a big beanbag, people liked it. Made a couch because people were asking about couches. who has solved all these problems, observed the success, and that success was rooted in the fact that things were built to last, designed to evolve. Now that's led us to this whole philosophy that will inform our innovation on every product going forward, and it's why I'm so confident that we can continue to succeed, is because of this design philosophy that I'm sharing with you openly. Because it's one thing to say it, it's another thing to execute to it. That's the hard part. It's the execution that's the hard part, you know? Now, that said... [24:08] I'm trying to drive a movement. I believe that there are many people that are sort of aware now that we have been conned into buying too much crap. New season, new collection, the merchandising hamster wheel, new iPhone, now it's got a titanium band. Really? Everyone knows. No, it's not even hidden. It's not even like a secret. it. This whole hamster wheel called planned obsolescence that was not an accident, it's absolutely an economic strategy to lift us out of the Great Depression and onward. And it has roots all the way back to Louis XIV. What's my point? The world has just, I guess, accidentally, not so accidentally, fallen into all kinds of rhythms that are unhealthy, unsustainable, and not good for anyone, not good for the environment, not good for people, you know, we're frenetically chasing out. Now my jeans are too tight, now they're too loose, now they're too long, now they're short, now I got, now they got to show my ankles, now they got to drape over my, like, this is not an accident. This is a self-propelling machine that we have created. What's my point? I believe we can drive a movement amongst people to reject that. And I believe factionals is one of the embodiments of that. Things built to last a lifetime are designed to evolve. So that movement is actually my long-term strategy. [25:33] In the near term, I need to... One of the ways that we will reach people besides buying advertising and using it to drive a strong CLV to CAC ratio is through... I don't know, even podcasts like this is through people finding our brand, finding out about me, finding out about the company through... Whether it be me, whether it be through the goodwill of our customers, sharing this or that, the other. And so I wrote a book called Let Me Save You 25 Years. It's our clever story Driving a Movement for Sustainable Consumerism [25:59] at Love Sack. It's really great. I think it launches in January. I spun up a podcast called Let Me Save You 25 Years where I share my own entrepreneurial mistakes, miracles, and lessons of the Love Sack story. That's the subtitle of the book. That's the spirit of the podcast. I talk to successful people, some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and successful people about these concepts. And it's not an interview podcast. We go really deep into some of these concepts. So my long-term goal ultimately, is to write another book that can help drive this consumer movement that I'm describing because I think if we can get a little bit of luck and get people thinking about these things and then eventually seeking out. Products that can do this, and just a lifestyle that is supported in the way that I'm describing. Buy better to buy less. Buy better stuff so you can buy less stuff. Well, obviously, LoveSack will benefit from that as a company that makes better stuff. And so, look, it's a long, long, long, long way around, but you asked the question, and I'm totally serious about that. Scot: [26:58] Yeah. So I'm gonna guess you're not a fan of fast fashion. Shawn : [27:03] No, I mean, that's obviously gonna be I made the topic of the book, you know? Scot: [27:06] And I'm not. Jason's a huge Xi'an fan, so you just really hurt his feelings. No, I'm just kidding. Jason: [27:11] Hey, I wore a Patagonia, a used Patagonia jacket in honor of tonight's show. What are you talking about? Shawn : [27:18] You are speaking my language, man. And look, it's not even about being a tree hugger. I think that people have a brain. And people, I think, are waking up to the idea after the iPhone 15, that holy crap, Apple probably should have been forced to innovate a long, long time ago. Biggest company on planet Earth because they sell us the same thing every year or two. Had we not allowed them to do that, they would have had to use their enormous treasure and enormous skill base to innovate into other categories and and change the world. Instead, we've allowed them to sell us the same thing every year. Scot: [28:06] That's an interesting ethos. Having built a company, about how many people are in your company at this point? Shawn : [28:12] Total about 1,500. It's about 400 at the headquarters and another 1,000 out in the field-ish. Scot: [28:19] Yeah, you're at that phase where there's people at the company that you've never really met before. And it's awkward because they always expect you to know their name and they all know your name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when you get a company to that scale, how do you keep innovating? And, you know, one of the ones that I really love that you guys have done is the Stealth Tech. I think that's genius because I love AV and like having a really immersive experience. And I'll let you explain what it is, but, you know, my wife hates the big black speakers that I try to put all over the house. So I think it kind of solves like six problems in one. So A, maybe let listeners know a little bit more about what we're talking about. And then be I'd love to hear like how do you guys you know it's really hard to kind of you know ideas are easy and execution is hard on execution. It's really hard to like you know nail what you're doing and you have a lot going on and then like keep innovating. How do you how do you like get the org functional that way? Shawn : [29:16] Yeah. I mean, I think number one is you have to, you have to really want it, you know, not, not just like, Hey, I want to, I want to get, I want to get more business. I want to sell more stuff. Obviously there's that. But this ethos that I just kind of unpacked for you that, that we tripped stumbled into does the design for life ethos animates this organization. Like, it is a lot of, it is very motivating to think about, holy cow, now that we know our purpose, and it's been identified, right? Inspiring humankind to buy better so they can buy, you know, everyone's like, it was purpose, purpose, purpose, and hire some consultant, you know what I mean? But for real, if you have something that's truly unique, and it's meaningful, it's not just like words on the wall, it really is motivating, it's exciting. Scot: [30:11] And you bake baked in the products have to get better too, right? Like you, that's not well, so you have to support it. Shawn : [30:17] That's exactly right. Like, yeah, like we have to make stuff that's built to last a lifetime and design to evolve, which is really hard because if it was easy, everyone would do that. And here I am telling you openly about it. Like that's what we're going to do. And I'm not afraid to tell you because most companies won't do it because it's just freaking hard. Like it's a lot easier. Like why doesn't love sack? You know, you brought up stealth tech. So Stealth Tech is full Harman Kardon surround sound, no quality sound loss audio. Perfect audio emanating from your couch through the phone through the next layer of fabric and through the decorative layer of fabric that's washable, changeable, removable, tuned down to the color of that fabric so that the audio is perfect rear, front, center, subwoofer, invisible, beautiful, because you don't see it, it looks just like a couch, and it has all that packed in there, it's radically successful. It's been, it's now a huge piece of our business. And nobody saw that coming, because what would they expect a couch company to do next? A couch beanbag company. An end table, a coffee table, a rug, a lamp, you know, decorative accessories, get into the bedroom, who knows, right? Like the obvious stuff. Scot: [31:32] Meatballs. Shawn : [31:32] And what, yeah, right? Why did we do that? We anyway, we saw the opportunity and we also invented it. So one is, Innovation and the Evolution of LoveSack's Product Line [31:40] to answer your question, a lot of play. We are constantly at our innovation lab playing. So it's not just consumer-led insights, which is a big piece of what we do, but it's also a lot of inventions. You gotta have teams to invent. You gotta have engineers. You gotta have, so you gotta support that. So there's a cost structure there. And that's why LoveSack is quite profitable, but not as profitable as it could be in the future, because we are investing in innovation. And there's a lot of heads. there's a lot of engineers, there's a lot of designers doing things. Now they're not just all running around playing, they also have a very disciplined approach to executing on innovation, like launching Stealth Tech a couple years ago, and bringing that to market, which is a heavy lift because it's our invention, it's our patents, and it was not easy for this beanbag company to get into home electronics in a real way. [32:29] We've done, I think, more than 100 million in home electronic sales and making us a pretty, a pretty big player in that space, believe it or not. Already, and I don't think most people even, you know, would think that. But we're, you know, totally serious about it. So, innovation, wrapped around an inspiring path to innovation, I think is the key. Do you have an inspiring path, or are you just trying to make more stuff? Because if I wanted all those things I mentioned, like I'm over here in Asia right now, I'm in Hong Kong. And if I wanted a whole line of living room furniture with our logo on it to make myself feel good, I could have it in four weeks. The suppliers will do it for me. They've been doing it for 30 years over here for all the biggest brands you can think of, you know? And we could give them some designs and give them some ideas and let our, I mean, it's so easy to just source stuff. I'm talking about, you know, product land. Now we're talking fashion, talking furniture, talk any category you want, the same is true. But to truly invent stuff's a lot harder. And that's why I think we've had success, that's why I think we will continue to have success. Jason: [33:35] Yeah, you know, so I am interested, I mean, obviously the product has to be the lead in solving that real problem for a customer. But I do think another helpful aspect to your business is that in order for those products to be successful, like, they have to be demonstrated somehow. Like, per your point, the catalog for the StealthTech sectional looks just like the catalog for a generic sectional. And so I'm thinking you having your own showrooms was a big advantage for being able to tell the story. And ironically, I'm not sure you opened that first showroom because you recognize that problem. It sounds like you opened that first showroom because you had no other way to get distribution. Shawn : [34:21] Oh yeah, yeah. And that's why I'm not taking any claim as some kind of marketing genius. We just kind of tried to survive in the beginning. And opening a showroom was actually a reaction to being rejected by the big furniture guys, because they didn't, you know, want our product, they didn't believe in us, whatever. They couldn't see it. And so thankfully, it went that way. And by the way, they weren't showrooms, they were stores. We were a furniture store for a decade and a half. And we did all the furniture store things. And we sold merchandise, and you pulled your car around and we loaded you up, believe it or not, or we shipped to you. And it took us a long, long time to, after copycatting all those furniture stores and hiring merchandisers and window dressers and all those kinds of things from our competition to do that stuff in our stores. [35:14] To make that pivot to the direct consumer model that we operate on today that obviously looks very prescient in today's model. Now, the reason I think we've been so successful at it is because we had those 15, 20 years to get really good at operating now 250 locations across every state, almost in the United States of America, where people are fighting and bickering and hiring and firing and touching each other, whatever it takes. The point is operating physical showrooms is not something you get good at in a day or a week or a year just because that seems like the next thing to do. We have a website, now people need to see our stuff, to your point. And that's the approach I think a lot of the direct consumer brands have taken. And I don't think that they realize how hard it is to be profitable at retail and how many pitfalls there are. Where if I want to get a little better at digital marketing, which I think we're pretty good at now, but I can hire that. I can agency that, I can platform that. And so I think that the physical side of things is really underestimated. And so thankfully, our very long haphazard history has played out in our favor in that realm. And I think it's a huge strength of ours, because by the way, now that the economy's pulling back and this and that, we're 250 locations ahead of most that are just really coming around to the marriage of physical with digital and not realizing that, You know, it's not something you can just turn on and be good at. Jason: [36:44] Yeah. And I think it's you, you rightly pointed out that like the whole landscape of DTC hasn't been particularly successful. There's not a lot of wins, but the, the people that are outperforming the average, even one thing they all have in common is they all have some kind of physical footprint to, to reduce CAC, right? So they're either have their own stores or they, they are white selling through wholesale, or they're, they're in front of customers in some way, The Strength of LoveSack's Physical Showrooms in the DTC Landscape [37:09] other than, than Facebook ads. Yeah, I, I did. I think there's a super interesting new evolution. I thought I read about though. So like Amen stores and showrooms are super complicated. People wildly underestimate how many mistakes you can, you can make owning and operating a retail store. And now, now that you seem to have that clicking, you guys are bringing the retail store to the customer's driveways. Is that true? Like talk to us about the mobile concierge. Shawn : [37:37] Yeah, so just like we're innovating in product, we're also always innovating go to market. So whether it's mobile concierge, which is a lovesack trucks, where you can, you know, from the comfort of your home, have us pull up in the driveway and show you our products, which we've which we've dabbled in, and have tested into. And we'll see, you know, where that goes. I think that that has its own just like retail has its own complications, but also more, I think, more. I guess scalable already is Shop and Shop. So our showrooms right now in shopping malls, they're only like 800 square feet. So obviously the metrics are great, right? We're selling very big ticket items out of very tiny footprints with a small staff. There's just good metrics. And I don't hide from that. That's been a big part of our success, right? So we chose a good category in that way. We chose a terrible category in the sense is that the home category has all kinds of other issues. Jason: [38:38] Not the easiest category to deliver the product. Shawn : [38:41] Yeah, I mean, there's delivery, but there's also just the cyclical nature. You couple that with the idea that, look, we are selling you something that we are intending you to have for decades. My sectionals in my home are 16 years old, some of them, made with brand new pieces, made with Stealth Tech. That's pretty cool. On the other hand, unless we give you Stealth Tech and other reasons to come back, like, you know, you've got your satchels and you've made your investment. And so look, we deal with cover. So we're innovating on product, we're innovating on go to market, shop and shop. So these thousand square foot showrooms have been very useful for us. We have 200 square foot showrooms inside of Best Buy's or Costco's, where our people are basically checking you out and allowing you to kick the tires on the product. And then look, whether you buy there or whether you go back and buy online, we don't care. We built an agnostic platform where we just want you to be in the family. So I think these are things that have evolved over time and you've got to test and learn, whether it's mobile concierge, as you described, whether it's shop and shops. And these tests and learn activities can take years to play out and really take to scale and stuff like that. And so I think in this day and age of, hey, I'm gonna go raise a ton of money and build my company to X revenue and exit for X multiple, which is I think Testing and Learning: Mobile Concierge and Shop and Shop [40:05] what drives a lot of entrepreneurial activity. [40:09] That kind of mentality just doesn't have the staying power necessary. And that's why you see so many of these brands reach a point where they have to be retooled, like some of them are going through now. And look, they've made someone rich. Sometimes these founders find ways to squeeze a bunch of money out of it, or private equity tosses the hot potato to the next guy and they make a ton of money out of it. But in the end, what's left? a brand that is at scale, doesn't make money, and can't go anywhere. So my point is you gotta have the stomach to grind it out, to spend the time, to really slow cook some of these things, and to be flexible when they don't work, and shut them down and move on to the next. And so constantly innovating on go-to-market, constantly innovating on product, and really putting in the time and energy it takes to refine concepts, you know. Scot: [41:03] I know we're running up against time, and you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. I know your goal is to bring this ethos out, but if you think about retail and e-commerce, what do you think the next five years hold? You talked about AI. There's a lot of this stuff that's temporal, but anything you think that you believe is going to change the way we shop and buy, either in-store or online? Shawn : [41:29] Yeah, look, I think that it will just continue to evolve, and so I think AI is real. I think it will play a transformative role, and I think everyone's trying to figure out exactly what that is, and nobody really knows yet. I wish I could just give you a clever answer, but I think I've witnessed, AI's transformative role in the future of technology [41:53] you know, that's What's the benefit of having a 25-year perspective is it's like I was saying about shopping malls. The mall is dead, headline from 2001. TV is dead, headline from 2008. Here we are with both of them still intact. By the way, TV advertising is still a big piece of our marketing spend. I know that's kind of mind-blowing because it seems like everybody's cut the cord or gone to this extreme. And I'm just telling you, these movements take decades. And so while it's great to be ahead of a movement, you don't, unless you are trying to drive that movement, like unless you are trying to take advantage of that AI, boom, to go raise money and wave that flag or whatever. [42:40] I've found it's okay to be a laggard. It's not always beneficial to, unless you're trying to build your concept around that and take advantage of that movement itself, let the movements evolve. So I can't give you a great prediction of exactly what's going to happen. AI is important. But how, where the winners will actually be and what the effects will actually be, I think it's way too early to tell. But I do think it's important to keep your finger and keep watching and eventually, you know, to find the connection and lean into that to affect your business. You have to be a little bit patient, I think. Jason: [43:27] Yeah, well, certainly 25 years in, I think you've earned your patience creds, by the way. Shawn : [43:35] Maybe too much. Jason: [43:37] Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to both. Urgency can be useful in certain circumstances, but short time horizons come with a lot of problems, as you have rightly pointed out. That did lead me to one sort of thought question. And you, you referenced some of your, your CAC economics and side note, we've, we've one of the, our favorite guests on the show is this professor Dan McCarthy. Who's, who's a huge advocate for cohort analysis and customer lifetime value based businesses. And so he would be thrilled that you're on, because I know you guys disclose some of your cohort metrics in, in your financial statements, which he loves. And to me, you're in a really interesting category to do that because although your product has invented a reason for customers to come back and you've sort of turned a product into a system, it's not like a fast cycle, right? Like, and so like when you're thinking about like a time horizon for LTV, and you guys have a very good return on your CAC, but compared to most companies, your CAC still is really high, right? Like, you sell a lot of product to compensate for that. Shawn : [44:57] Yeah. Jason: [44:58] So how, like, you know, you're spending five or six hundred bucks to acquire a customer and then you're earning thousands of dollars on each of those customers. Like, was it difficult to sort of have the financial discipline to have a long enough time horizon to see those sorts of high CLVs come back for that initial customer acquisition? Shawn : [45:23] Yeah, I mean, you could call it discipline. In our case, again, it was just survival, being really transparent. You know, we were just trying to find a way to make this business work, and we weren't profitable right out of the gate. It took us many years to get better at retail, to get better at e-commerce, to have a shopping cart experience that was commensurate to the product, because that's really hard with our product. Our product is really weird and complicated. And so that's something that's overlooked with Lovesack. And I think a lot of our copycats and competitors are realizing that. You can't just use a Shopify checkout if you're going to sell something as dynamic as, let's say, factionals where, you know, you can buy a bunch of these and a bunch of those and combine them in a million different ways. How do you, how do you shopping cart that? How do you Amazon that, you know? And so, and so these are superpowers that we've developed over a long time and thankfully given it enough time to become profitable. So to answer your question about, you know, patience, I think part of it is just been our lot in life to, to be, to have patience forced on us. But secondly, real discipline around. [46:32] Our CLV and CAC metrics. So we are, we are, and have been for a long time, carefully monitoring them, tracking them, constantly innovating and refining on the marketing side, these things that I mentioned, whether TV, you know, over the top, linear, nonlinear, digital marketing with its 500 heads, you know, like I'm talking about species of digital marketing, it's such a big word, right? I have to be constantly and tirelessly refined and risk taken and stuff tried and stuff failed and all rolled it and it all rolls up into that CLV to CAC ratio that you can hope you can keep moving and then couple that with innovation so that people can come back and buy more. And so thankfully, look, we chose a category with a high ticket and that drives the lion's share. That first purchase drives the lion's share of that CLV to CAC relationship. But our long-term point of view now is not only to find other ways that we can do more of that, maybe even in other categories and adjacencies. [47:32] But also give like StealthTack, give people a reason to come back and add on. And then by the way, when they do come back, then they face the consequence of, well, what do I do with some of these things that I need to, let's say, I get StealthTack and I got to swap out two of my sides. Well, okay, the obvious answer is I don't want to throw those in the trash. We don't want them throwing them in the trash and they may not need another couch in another room. So it's leading us to services, trade in, trade up, recycle, you know, all kinds of things that will again, give us more reasons to reach out and touch that customer. And so I think that if you relentlessly pursue. [48:13] A good concept with good intentions being driven by good philosophy and purpose like I've described, it's been my experience that the universe kind of unfolds for you, but it doesn't do it overnight. And you can't just have a, at least in my experience, you can't just have a master plan and be like, we're gonna do this and then that and that. You have to iterate to it. You have to observe, you have to live some, like when we launched Stealth Tech, we just, you know, it's easy now to look back in hindsight and be like, well, of course people are gonna want to or trade in their sides or do whatever. But some of those things aren't always so apparent. And you need to plunge yourself into the pool, see what comes of it, and then react to that. And some of those reactions can take years to unfold. Like some of these services that I just described and whatnot, they'll take us years to manifest. [48:59] But the nice thing is, the core business can generate profits that will carry us to that and we'll invest some of those profits in that innovation that I'm describing. But it's like, it's just relentless, man. It's tiring. It's like you have to have the stomach to go the distance. And that's where the time horizon, look, I'm a big advocate of it. Culturally, you know, like when my whole organization knows, like the theme of our manager fest a month ago, this is where we all get together once a year, was 25 and 25 more. And I'm not kidding. Like my personal point of view, if I'm allowed to be here as a public company CEO, if I do good enough to stay in the seat, which is inherent, and that's why I love the structure. It forces you to be awesome, you know? [49:45] If I can do that, but the fact that my organization knows that I'm in for another 25, you know how grounding that is and stabilizing that is, as opposed to, man, when's Sean's gonna sell his stock and bail and go start his next company? That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? That's how I become a bazillionaire, isn't it? I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in building something. And I think that that, I don't know, desire is actually kind of rare these days. Long-Term Vision vs Quick Profit [50:14] I think everyone just wants to be a bazillionaire as fast as they can. Jason: [50:17] Oh, for sure. Yeah. Everybody's assuming you're going to cash out and invest in your first rocket. Shawn : [50:24] Yeah, whatever. And I think it's sad. Look, I'd love to make a ton of money, whatever. That's all great. But whatever happened to the ambition of let's build something awesome, no matter how long it takes. And that's where I'm at. Jason: [50:41] Yeah. Well, Sean, it's been an amazing run so far. This is going to be a great spot to leave it because we have used up our allotted time, but I know listeners are going to appreciate you saving them the first 25 years, and we're going to be super excited to watch what happens in the next 25. Shawn : [50:57] Thank you. Thank you. Scot: [50:59] We really appreciate it, Sean. I know you're in Hong Kong, you're in the middle of your day there, and we appreciate you coming on the show. If folks want to check out your podcast, where would you point them to? Shawn : [51:09] Yeah, wherever you love listening to podcasts, Let Me Save You 25 Years is the name. LetMeSaveYou25Years.com. You can find me on social media, Sean of Lovesack. I'm all over that and love to be connected, slide into my DMs. I mean, I love talking to customers, friends, peers, being very accessible and looking forward to building the movement. Of course, Lovesack.com. We're easy to find. Scot: [51:33] Trey Lockerbie 41 Yep. And the book's coming out in January and I assume it's going to be in all the usual places. Shawn : [51:37] Sean O'Toole 41 All the usual places. Yeah. Let Awesome. Jason: [51:45] Thanks again and until next time, happy commercing!  

$FTTUSD Was leverage based on Internal MTM ala $ENE ? Jail time will be served @SBF_FTX $BTCUSD $MSTR $DX_F @hfrfromthefloor greed is system independent $CLVS $ES_F $GE Econ Lesson from the Depression $CL_F pullback $META begins big tech layoffs $ZB_F $NG https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1djGXlmypeVGZ

How many of our businesses provide seamless customer experiences throughout the entire buying process? How many of us are truly connected to our customers throughout their entire digital lifecycle? Is one and done what we're after, or are we interested in repeat and referral traffic? My guest this week is Steve Apicella, Chief Executive Officer of Strategic DX - Your Dealer Experience, who's mantra happens to be “Connect the Disconnected.” We are going to be talking about exactly that -  connecting the disconnect in the automotive space.Steve and I will review best practices of how you can have beat out your competitors by Connecting the Disconnected Focusing on Customer Journey Embraces Customer Inspire A Lifetime Customer Championing Customer Loyalty Always thinking “Great…what now?”Connect with Steve Apicella: https://qrco.de/bdG9QxConnect with BZ Consultants Group: https://qrco.de/bcqqFoASOTUCON Tickets: https://bit.ly/3PUS7ciRSVP for Fixed Ops Round Table: https://bit.ly/3CH0V2iModern Retail Conference: https://bit.ly/3RhVN8OGA4 Council: https://bit.ly/3QaPiUFChapters0:00 Start1:51 “If we could see CLV as clearly as costs, all firms would get this. But because costs are so tangible and CLVs are a mere prediction, it's really hard to get firms to adopt this mindset. But it's [CLV] the right one, and they should be working hard to become comfortable with CLV as the key driver to this kind of decision.” - Professor Peter Fader Wharton Marketing3:34 We Have A Great Industry and Not Everything Is Broken - There are Disconnect Parts If we Desire Anything More than A One Time Transaction5:00 After Customer Acquisition, Step Two Is Customer Abandonment In Our Industry6:41 Amazon's Strategy For Customer Engagement Before & After The Sale - What Automotive Can Learn From It12:10 What Is Strategic DX - Your Dealer Experience? 15:56 Making Phones Smart Again - Are You Refining Your Processes?17:29 Selling A Customer A Car Isn't The End Of The Relationship; It's The Beginning20:42 What If Sales, BDC, F&I, Service/Parts, and All Other Departments Truly Communicated Leading to Our Customers Having 100% Confidence In Us and the Products and Services We Offer?23:52 It Takes All of Us and Our Contributions26:12 100% Online vs Brick and Mortar27:53 Are We Striving for A Relationship or Transactional Type of Business?28:45 Great. What Now? The Process of Continual Improvement34:36 When Was The Last Time You Truly Communicated With Your Customer?42:14 Hole In One Stories46:40 Lightning RoundFollow, subscribe, rate, and never miss a show!#FactsNotFeelings #MovingAutomotiveForward #ConnectTheDisconnected  #BZConsultants #BZConsultantsGroup #FactsNotFeelingsFriday #SteveApicella #StrategicDX #YDE #YourDealerExperience #ConnectedRetail #CustomerJourney #CustomerLoyalty #CLV #CustomerLifetimeValue #Amazon #FI #Finance #InspireLifetimeCustomer #BeKind #CustomerExperience #Consultant #Podcast #Automotive #CarConsultant #AutomotiveConsultant #CarTalk #CarDealership #WomenInAutomotive #WomenInBusiness #AutomotiveMarketing

Alex Carlson recaps the action in penny stocks on the OTC Markets and Nasdaq. He covers MSVI, TTNP, WTRH, PHAS, MYMD, ADHC, CLVS, APTX, HGEN, LWLG, and WNFT. All stocks have been discussed on https://insiderfinancial.com/ To sign up for our FREE alerts and eBook, go to: https://signup.insiderfinancial.com/ To sign up for FREE stocks and trade OTC on WeBull, go to: https://a.webull.com/i/insiderfinancial Disclosure: We have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this video. Insider Financial is not an investment advisor; this video does not provide investment advice. Always do your own research, make your own investment decisions, or consult with your nearest financial advisor. This video is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities. This video is our opinion, is meant for informational and educational purposes only, and does not provide investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. For more information, please read our full disclaimer: https://insiderfinancial.com/disclaimer/ msvi stock, ttnp stock, wtrh stock, phas stock, mymd stock, adhc stock, clvs stock, aptx stock, hgen stock, lwlg stock, wnft stock, otc stocks, nasdaq penny stocks #pennystocks #otc #nasdaq

Alex Carlson recaps the action in penny stocks on the OTC Markets and Nasdaq. He covers GCLT, VXIT, TOUR, SEII, CLVS, IPSI, DUTV, WSFT, and ILUS. All stocks have been discussed on https://insiderfinancial.com/ To sign up for our FREE alerts and eBook, go to: https://signup.insiderfinancial.com/ To sign up for FREE stocks and trade OTC on WeBull, go to: https://a.webull.com/i/insiderfinancial Disclosure: We have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this video. Insider Financial is not an investment advisor; this video does not provide investment advice. Always do your own research, make your own investment decisions, or consult with your nearest financial advisor. This video is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities. This video is our opinion, is meant for informational and educational purposes only, and does not provide investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. For more information, please read our full disclaimer: https://insiderfinancial.com/disclaimer/ gclt stock, vxit stock, tour stock, seii stock, clvs stock, ipsi stock, dutv stock, wsft stock, ilus stock #pennystocks #otc #nasdaq

Episode 191: Bear Talk - A weekly episode of trade reviews by Reed & David. Both traders decided to go over their trades on a weekly podcast to further improve their game. The podcast screen-share can be found on Friendly Bear Research YouTube Channel. The trades covered in this segment are from June 21 - June 24, 2022.Stocks reviewed in this Bear Talk: GGE, CLVS, DNAY, VEDU, JZXN, TIRX, SNTG, MDJH, WRAP, TNONBear Talk weekly trade review screen-share: Bear Talk YouTubeSocial MediaReed HrynewichInstagram: reedhrynewichTwitter: reedhrynewichProfitly: reedgolf19David CapablancaInstagram: reverse_longTwitter: reverse_longYouTube: Friendly Bear ResearchProfitly: reverse_long

Featuring SPXU SQQQ TZA UVXY (inverse ETFs) | ATER BMY CLSN CLVS CNQ DDL EURN EXC LULU NCLH NNOX NRGV OUST RH SAVE STT SWN TWTR UNG Trading Risk Disclaimer All the information shared in this video is provided for educational purposes only. Any trades placed upon reliance of SharperTrades.com are taken at your own risk for your own account. Past performance is no guarantee. While there is great potential for reward trading stocks, commodities, options and forex, there is also substantial risk of loss. All trading operations involve high risks of losing your entire investment. You must therefore decide your own suitability to trade. Trading results can never be guaranteed. This is not an offer to buy or sell stocks, forex, futures, options, commodity interests or any other trading security.

Featuring ATER BE BMY BORR BRCC BUG CAMT CLVS DOCN FTCH GGPI JMIA KOTS KWEB LLL NCLH NIO NIU PERI PGEN PINS PLTR QS TAN TKAT TOST TSLA TWTR Trading Risk Disclaimer All the information shared in this video is provided for educational purposes only. Any trades placed upon reliance of SharperTrades.com are taken at your own risk for your own account. Past performance is no guarantee. While there is great potential for reward trading stocks, commodities, options and forex, there is also substantial risk of loss. All trading operations involve high risks of losing your entire investment. You must therefore decide your own suitability to trade. Trading results can never be guaranteed. This is not an offer to buy or sell stocks, forex, futures, options, commodity interests or any other trading security.

Featuring AAL BRCC CCJ CELZ CLVS DATS DDOG FLEX FSLR (TAN) LAC LGVN MULN NCLH (CCL) QSR NAIL SLI SWN TLRY TOST UAL VTNR Trading Risk Disclaimer All the information shared in this video is provided for educational purposes only. Any trades placed upon reliance of SharperTrades.com are taken at your own risk for your own account. Past performance is no guarantee. While there is great potential for reward trading stocks, commodities, options and forex, there is also substantial risk of loss. All trading operations involve high risks of losing your entire investment. You must therefore decide your own suitability to trade. Trading results can never be guaranteed. This is not an offer to buy or sell stocks, forex, futures, options, commodity interests or any other trading security.

Option Block 859: Betting Against The Death of Outlet Malls HOST:  MARK LONGO, THE OPTIONS INSIDER CO-HOST: ANDREW GIOVINAZZI, OPTION PIT CO-HOST:  MIKE TOSAW, ST. CHARLES WEALTH MANAGEMENT  FIDELITY HOT SEAT:  Konstantin Vrandopulo, Trading Strategy Desk, Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC TRADING BLOCK SEGMENT Black Friday online sales hit all time high. Trade Deal with China, tariffs on Brazil and Argentina Technical analysis and options trading at Fidelity in ROKU, AMZN, CLVS, AAPL ODD BLOCK WWE Call Roll SKT Line-In-The-Sand Puts MAC Line-In-The-Sand Puts TCO Line-In-The-Sand Puts STRATEGY BLOCK  Covered Call writing and adjusting AROUND THE BLOCK CRM, ULTA, LULU earnings

Option Block 859: Betting Against The Death of Outlet Malls HOST:  MARK LONGO, THE OPTIONS INSIDER CO-HOST: ANDREW GIOVINAZZI, OPTION PIT CO-HOST:  MIKE TOSAW, ST. CHARLES WEALTH MANAGEMENT  FIDELITY HOT SEAT:  Konstantin Vrandopulo, Trading Strategy Desk, Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC TRADING BLOCK SEGMENT Black Friday online sales hit all time high. Trade Deal with China, tariffs on Brazil and Argentina Technical analysis and options trading at Fidelity in ROKU, AMZN, CLVS, AAPL ODD BLOCK WWE Call Roll SKT Line-In-The-Sand Puts MAC Line-In-The-Sand Puts TCO Line-In-The-Sand Puts STRATEGY BLOCK  Covered Call writing and adjusting AROUND THE BLOCK CRM, ULTA, LULU earnings  

Here's why post-approval setbacks have caused Puma Biotechnology, Clovis Oncology, and Regenxbio shares to tumble, and if any of these stocks are finally worth buying. Stocks: PBYI, CLVS, RGNX Check out more of our content here: TMF's podcast portal YouTube Twitter Join Our Motley Fool Podcast Facebook Group LinkedIn StockUp, The Motley Fool's weekly email newsletter

Sarah E. Toms is an Executive Director and co-founder of Wharton Interactive where she has built award-winning EdTech teams that develop highly engaging games and simulations, which are played by tens of thousands of students globally. Her drive to modernize, transform, and democratize education led her to co-invent simpl.world, an open-source simulation framework. As an entrepreneur for more than a decade and a demonstrated thought leader in the technology field, Toms has founded companies that build global CRM, product development, productivity management, and financial systems. She is dedicated to supporting women and girls in technology through her work with the Women in Tech Summit and techgirlz.org. Follow her on Twitter at @SarahEToms.   Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, Fader co-founded Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm that was acquired by Nike in 2018. More recently, he co-founded Theta Equity Partners, which focuses on customer-based corporate valuation. His expertise centers on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and strategies that arise from these data-driven tactics. Fader is also the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and he has been interviewed in The Wall Street Journal, APM’s “Marketplace,” NPR’s “Planet Money,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Forbes, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @FaderP.   Questions   Could you tell us some of the things that really propelled you to take it a step further especially focusing on the difference between customer centricity and customer lifetime value and how an organization can really identify what that is for them. In the book you also focused on the difference between customer centricity versus product centricity. Could you share with us a little bit about that?And do you find that organizations are shifting more towards customer centricity and less in the product realm? Could you share with our listeners what are some necessary elements that help to support customer centricity in an organization? How is it that you integrate the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) and align the customer service strategy with a proper CRM solution? Could you share with us a little bit about the loyalty programs in terms of does every organization need a loyalty program in order to have an effective or have a true reflection of what their customer lifetime value is to understand the whole metric process? Based on your experience, your research, your exposure, different interactions that you've had with different people. How do you view customer experience today and what do you think it will look like 5 to 10 years from now? Could you share with us maybe one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your day to day operations? Are there any books that have had really great impacts on you that you'd like to share with our listeners that you think will help them in their own journey? Could you share with us, maybe one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people? Where can our listeners find you online? What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you revert to that quote to help you to become refocus and to get back on track?   Highlights   Peter shared that they build a bridge from the first book to the new one and to the simulation that was mentioned that Sarah has developed. So, the first book was about this radical idea that a company can potentially make more money and have more sustainable, defendable success by focusing more on the differences among its customers by celebrating heterogeneity, that if we can figure out who the right customers are and kind of double down on them, enhance their value, find more like them, that that could do better than just obsessing over version 2.0 of the product. But the thing about the first book, it was good, and he hopes that if people haven't read it, they will but it was more definitional, motivational, aspirational, here's this concept, here's what it can do for you, here's the problems with a lot of companies out there that are failing to go in this direction. So, it was trying to get people to kind of wake up, but it didn’t really give them specific guidance how to put one foot in front of another and that's one of the things that he and Sarah have tried to do with their simulations and this new book basically takes a lot of those ideas and kind of crystallizes them, goes beyond just the simulation, makes them very real, talk about real companies, real actions.   Sarah shared that what was interesting to them was when they started writing the book they actually started to create sort of this Frankenstein, it was a combination of a simulation manual and some interesting stories and interesting content about customer centricity and how to actually put customer centric thinking into action and they brought it to their publisher and they said, “Get rid of the simulation stuff, flush out more about the book, make it a standalone piece if people want to run the simulation and read the book. That's fantastic.” But they really need something that engages folks who are working in the trenches day in day out and give them a clear guideline for how to become customer centric.   Peter stated that it goes back to some of the concepts in the first book was taking conventional business practices that they just accept as this is just how you run a business, you put the product first, that's all about what product should we develop, how do we fine tune it to meet the needs of the customer, distribution, promotion all about the old four P’s that we talk about in marketing. And we're saying, “Well no, actually let's build a business around the customers, the more valuable customers and have that.”And sort of say what product features will be most appealing, they say, “Here are the most valuable customers, what is it that they want?” And so, they start looking at product development and product management quite differently. Again, when he wrote the first book it was more about just this provocative kind of let’s do a 180 on the way we think about business. But they still stopped short of actually saying, here's an overall playbook which of course is the name of the new one to begin to not only embrace the metrics and all the “mathy” stuff that he likes to do but the thing more about how to build the right kind of organization, how to send the right kind of message, how to establish the right kinds of principles. Again, tremendous credit to Sarah for taking some of the best practices from the software world and bringing them over.   Sarah stated that at the end of the book they have a manifesto which really comes from her experience in technology and software development, where she experienced something very similar to what she’s learned now with partnering with Pete over the last four years…..five years that's happening in the marketing science world as well. And that is it, they're being inundated with all this data, there's data insights and data collection and it's becoming cheaper and easier and faster to just collect swathes and swathes of information about their customers and how they behave and what makes them buy etc. And the problem is that a lot of it is garbage and so we had something similar happen in the software development realm in the dot.com heydays where they had this tremendous capability with technology and the problem was they were really weighed down by old bureaucratic bloated software processes, she’s talking about waterfall where they had to write reams and reams of documentation and they weren't able to work leanly and be able to keep up with the technological advances in a way that was in line their our customers and their business users and what they actually wanted from the software that was being developed. And so, this sparked an idea as she was having these conversations with Pete and she said, I think what we really need for customer centricity is we need a manifesto as well. We need something that will really focus business people, it will give them just simple clarity around what is important and what they need to double down on with regards to customer centricity.   Yanique mentioned that the book is a playbook, anybody in an organization in a leadership role or non-leadership role can pick up the book and they will be able to have a guideline like step by step as to how they can really master customer centricity in their business, whether they're an organization that has customers that come in or they're an online business.   Sarah stated that the way that they've laid out the book from the playbook perspective is to really think about those different functional areas. Our goal with this to most definitely make sure that this was a cross-functional conversation. This playbook is not just for the sales person or the marketing person, this is for the data person, it's for the finance people, it's for the folks in H.R., the folks who are developing the products are indeed, this is for everybody. And it's really again pivoting and pivoting so that your customers are at the center but understanding that this heterogeneity at play within that customer base and how are you really going to focus in on what you need to do. So, when you're thinking about acquiring those customers, when you're thinking about retaining them and developing them, when you're thinking about having conversations with those in your technology team on how to tag them and track them and understand what information is actually important when it comes to figuring out who's valuable today, who will be valuable tomorrow and when I'm acquiring new customers who's more than likely going to be valuable to the organization and then taking all of those conversations and making sure that folks in your finance team understand what that means from the customer lifetime value standpoint.   Peter stated just to add one other example to that, he thinks Sarah mentioned that one of those elements being retention and development, they look at the array of new tactics that are available to either make your customers more valuable and have them stay around longer. So, things like a loyalty programme or a premium offering or customer experience or strategic account management and the problem is a lot of these tactics are so new, they just weren't done. They didn't exist a generation ago and so, companies don't really know which one to use when. When should be lean towards the loyalty program versus the premium offering? You really need a playbook to kind of lay out all these tactics and come up with a solid framework to give companies guidance about, don't invest in all of them but think strategically and have a good idea of would it makes sense to start one or pivot to another. So, that's just one example where they're starting to get much more tactical and starting to deal with issues that just aren't in what say your traditional marketing one or one type course.   Peter shared that for him, a big part of it is all about Customer Lifetime Value. And again, he acknowledged it's a bias because that's the kind of research that he has done, those are the kinds of models and activities that he has commercialized in a couple of different ways but to do customer centricity right, you have to be able to have that CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) magic wand, you have to be able to look at a customer's past interactions with you and say here's my best guess about what they're going to be worth in the future and to line up customers in that future looking way and to use those numbers and those differences across customers to really drive all these tactics. So, a lot of companies are eager to get into the tactics, they want to do that customer experience campaign but they're saying it won't be nearly as effective if you don't have a good quantitative assessment of the value of customers before and after you do that kind of campaign.   Sarah shared that one of the shining examples that they use a couple of times in the book is Electronic Arts. So, Electronic Arts is really one of the most mature organizations that they've seen with regards to customer centricity. Every day as players are playing their games they are collecting data about behaviours about what they know about who's more than likely going to be a high, medium and low value customer and they're feeding that information back to the game studios, they're letting them know, “For our high value customers, did this part of the game work the way we thought it was going to, did we see this as high engagement as we were hoping and if not why not and what do we need to do to pivot in the actual game development.” They're using information about these customers with how they advertise to them. So, not just saying, “All right well, here's our advertising campaign for this game, we'll put it out there, it'll be out there for a month, three months, five months.”They're using that information about their customers to actually fine tune how they target and attract the customers that they're looking to seek.   Yanique mentioned that it is definitely a combination of many different things all in one in terms of an organization looking at how the customer is interfacing with their product or their service, the frequency of them utilizing that product or service and of course to spend.   Sarah agreed and stated that RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) is still key. RFM is a marketing technique used to determine quantitatively which customers are the best ones by examining how recently a customer has purchased (recency), how often they purchase (frequency), and how much the customer spends (monetary). To build on what Peter was saying about customer lifetime value in chapter 1, they spend some time delving into problems with CLV that they see that are common out there and mistakes that are being made with the calculation itself. So, CLV itself can be quite complex and there's lots of open source ways to leverage and create CLV calculations within your organizations. But they do spend some time going through the mistakes which should hopefully shine some light on how to be tracking and calculating CLV correctly in your organization.   Peter stated that on the CLV side, he learned so much not only from the research that he does and interacting with students and executives but through his first startup company called Zodiac where they were working with a wide variety of companies calculating the CLVs for them. And it was surprising because he really thought he is just bringing you the CLVs, “I am the expert here, take the CLVs and make money rain down from the skies.” But it was a great learning exercise for him to see the kinds of use cases that companies would come up with and actually, Sarah basically gave the list of them a few moments ago and she was talking about all of the different tactics that you need to understand and align and do in an accountable way - customer acquisition, retention development, with that customer experience campaign, it's not enough just to give people glasses of champagne when they walk into your store, you have to do the CLV calculation, you have to say how valuable were they before this campaign started, how much more valuable are they afterwards or better yet, more realistically, how many customers meaningfully increased in value and how many of them are the same as ever before. So, CLV gives us a really good lens not only to make decisions but to evaluate decisions after the fact and so again, just seeing the way that companies have been using it very creatively as far as he’s concerned across a wide variety of functions and by the way that includes getting outside of marketing and maybe in a bit we could talk about the idea of customer based corporate valuation. Let's get the CFO into this party as well so we could talk more about that but to the other part of the question, it also goes to having really good CRM systems which is a big part of Sarah's expertise.   When asked how do you know which one is the right CRM to go with, Sarah mentioned that unfortunately there aren't any great additions to CRM yet that they've seen. In her conversations with a number of the companies that appear in the book, L.A. Dodgers is a great example, they have had to build their insights outside, so they use salesforce and they're then doing the analytics sort of outside, their tracking all of their customers in their CRM but then they're running a different algorithms etc. in other systems which is unfortunate. So, she thinks Peter would agree that a lot of the companies that he has been working with they're having to kind of roll their own if you will because there isn't a good solution out there yet.   Peter agreed and stated that that is unfortunate. They were in the process, they were creating that solution through his company Zodiac, but Nike bought that firm which was of course a wonderful outcome but now it's all under the swoosh. So, he really hopes that companies can learn from those experiences. And again, a lot of that through that they're trying to convey in the book both laying out these frameworks as well as these specific company profiles that Sarah has been referring to.   Sarah stated that just to go back to the original question there was the whole point everybody thinks, “Okay well, customer service, it's to turn ugly ducklings into beautiful swans.”This is another point in the book is really think and this was to Peter's earlier point, we've got all of these sort of ways that we engage with our customers, ways to increase CX quality, ways to increase hopefully customer loyalty but it's very rare that you take somebody from your bottom tier from a customer lifetime value standpoint and boost them all the way up to the very top. And so, rather than think that you can do that and expend a tremendous amount of energy trying to achieve that impossible dream, just look at what you're doing and understand who you're serving from a CLV standpoint. So, customer service is really for your lower value customers and the same with loyalty programs like understand that that's who you're really targeting those types of programs to.   When asked if all organization needs a loyalty program - Peter stated no and a lot of companies are finding that the hard way because there's this lemming like behavior out there that, “Oh, we've got to have one too. It's a box that we need to check, some of our competitors have one.”So that's why they really try to come up with a framework that says, “Under what circumstances do you really need a loyalty program?” Sarah just said, if you think about it logically, a buy nine get one free just kind of a basic loyalty program, that's not appealing to your top platinum customers, they're going to buy from you all the time anyway.They're looking to deepen the engagement not necessarily just to buy more stuff.Whereas for those middle to lower customers if we could get them just to buy a little bit more often that that's how we can create more value out of them. So, a big part of it is that loyalty programmes are aimed more at the middle to lower tier of your customer value pyramid. And if that's where your main strategic focus is at a given time then great, that's the way to go but too often companies are thinking about the loyalty programme as something that would be appealing to or aimed at the tippy top customers. And again, they're with you not because of points, not because of bonuses, put it this way if that's why they appear to be really valuable customers, if it's all because of the goodies that comes from the loyalty programme, then they're not really loyal, then you're kind of bribing them to be with you. So, you want to find ways to appeal to the high value customers that's just a very different kind of thing, something like a premium offering where it's not a matter of giving them stuff, it's actually a matter of getting them to actually potentially pay a little bit more to kind of show their loyalty, to show that they want to have a different kind of relationship with you, that they want to have that kind of badge of honor to show that they're different than most customers. So, they're trying to bring some logic and discipline to things like loyalty programs and customer experience and customer service that they feel just doesn't exist anywhere out there to date.   Sarah shared that they actually have a new blog post or article coming out very soon that talks about customer experience and the fact that it is not customer centric.And they outlined this in their upcoming article. There are just a few small steps that organizations could be taking to become more customer centric when it comes to see CX. She alluded to this earlier in the conversation when they're talking about CX, they're looking at different ways to really reduce the friction that their customers feel when they're interacting with them, with their brand etc. And there are many different ways to measure CX and how they're doing with respect to CX, whether it be CX quality which is measured by effectiveness, ease and emotion or customer loyalty which is measured by advocacy otherwise known as a Net Promoter Score, enrichment and retention. And one of the problems that Sarah and Peter have is that these CX measurements, these metrics are one dimensional, they don't really tell them anything else that's happening with respect to their customer and that interplay with the brand. And so, what they've done with this article is they've created another framework where they're looking at the CX metrics, again switching costs and switching costs as they know are a way to measure another form of friction that their customers are experiencing. And so, what they've done in this new framework is they've said okay if they're looking at high switching costs against their CX metric and they're doing really well with customers, they've got caged customers but they're very loyal and they're happy to be with them. What they should be doing with them versus customers who have got a low CX metric and low switching can cost. So, those are their revolving doors if and that's where something like a loyalty program might come in. They don't have a lot of friction from the standpoint of staying with them, they want to try to raise that a little bit so they do stay with them more and they can extract a bit more value from them so a loyalty program would be perfect for them and then for anybody who is kind of stuck with them because of high switching costs but they've got high value, let's look at making them happier while they're kind of stuck with them. They want to keep them engaged and then hopefully once competition comes in or those switching costs may be lower, they still are able to retain them as high value customers.   When asked about tools and apps, Sarah shared that for her and her team, she’s still a technologist, she has had the absolute pleasure and honor of being able to write this book and really double down on the way she thinks about her customers that she’s designing technology for. Agile is what she lives and breathe by. So, she works with teams that are international, she brings the best of the best to the table and she doesn’t really care where their brain is as long as she gets to leverage their brain and being able to run lean teams is very important to her. And so, Slackis her go to and this is a way that she’s able to communicate very quickly and rapidly with her teams. And then also where she’s actually tracking software changes and her sprints and that kind of things, so they use GET Laband Jirato do a lot of that management. And that kind of approach, that lean approach is something that again they talk about in the playbook and the importance.   Peter shared that he’s addicted to Twitter, but whether it's for news, sports, entertainment but also just a whole bunch of people that he follows who are always looking for the best practices of how companies are using their customer level data. So, just the million anecdotes a day some good, some appalling but it's just a great way to learn a lot of different stuff and then make up your own mind about which is good, and which is not so good but good to have that kind of broad exposure. Peter shared that he doesn’t read books anymore, Twitter is the firehose that really keeps him attached to the world.   When asked about books that have had great impacts, Peter stated that he has a couple, but he’s actually very interested to see what Sarah has to say because as she was starting to develop this simulation and then write the book, she took a whole bunch of books off his shelf and kept some of them a little too long actually. So, it would be interesting to hear which one she said were the ones that really shaped her thinking the most, but he'll share which one is at the top of his list. It’s an oldie but a goodie and it’s really one that got a lot of these ideas started, it's a book called The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value by Frederick Reichheld. Kind of interesting, he's a Bain Consultant, not an academic and this was a book he wrote back in 1996 which is ‘500 years ago’ for all intents and purposes and basically laid out this idea that not all customers are created equal and if we could figure out who the just right ones are then all of these great things are going to happen, there will be this virtuous cycle once we find those customers because they'll will stay with us longer, they'll buy more often, they'll be cheaper to serve, they'll be strong advocates for us, they'll make a lot of referrals. And so, it was laying out this idea that loyalty manifests in lots of different ways and provides this kind of multiplier source of value, it's just a matter of figuring out who those just right customers are and they kind of stopped short of that, they didn't talk about lifetime value and so on. But he thinks it really was something that started this conversation and a lot of us today especially the younger generation thinks that we've been talking about these ideas forever but really until the mid 90s they were just not part of the conversation.   Sarah agreed with Peter and stated that she did so much wonderful reading and thanked Peter for your amazing library and contribution to that. She mentioned at the beginning of the interview that their guiding goal with this book was to land in that cross functional space and to really try to ignite a conversation about really the organizational and cultural changes that must happen cross functionally in organizations in order for customer centricity to really take root and she stumbled on this book called The Silo effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers by Gillian Tettand it is a fantastic book, it's one case study after another of where breaking down the siloing effect that happens in organizations where that has been good for some organizations and where it's existed, where it's been really perilous and difficult. So that's one book she most certainly recommends. The other book that she recommends is The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, but this gentleman has it right, you shouldn’t be trying to overdo it with every single customer, and he has written some incredible books in the CX space as well.   Yanique shared, I am familiar with Frederick Reichheld, I read a couple of years ago when I just started this business, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, I haven’t read The Loyalty Effect but he definitely opened my mind up when I read the Ultimate Question.   Peter stated that he’s glad that Yanique made the connection. He (Fredrick Reichheld) laid out these ideas but in 1996 but it wasn’t until 5, almost 10 years later that he kind of translated them into the Net Promoter Score, this is the metric that’s going to help us identify companies that have been doing a good job at finding those customers and deepen those relationships. So, a lot of people think that Net Promoter Score just sort of appeared in the early 2000s, but it was really decades of work and thinking and just careful consideration by Fredrick and his colleagues at Bain that made that possible. And again, that revolution he thinks sparked a lot of the work that we’re doing and great admiration for the folks over there and enjoy his own collaboration with them.   Peter shared that he’s super happy to talk about his new startup.He mentioned the idea of customer based corporate valuation, let's get the CFO involved in this customer centricity thing. So, he has a new company called Theta Equity Partners, thetaequity.comand that's exactly what they're doing. It's a finance play, they're actually working with a bunch of private equity firms, Late-Stage Venture Capitalist, talking to some Hedge Funds to basically say, “Let's value your company from the bottom up, let's look at how many customers you are acquiring, how long are they staying, how many purchases are they making, how valuable those purchases, add all that stuff up and say that will give us more visibility and more understanding of the value of a company than the traditional Wall Street approach.”So, they're doing this for real and it's really working and it's actually creating a meaningful dialogue between CFOs and CMOs that has just never existed before, so it's been just a thrill to expand the conversation in a direction that he never thought he’d even be capable of doing but to see how receptive the finance and investment audiences for the stuff.   When asked if there was anything is there anything, she’s working on to develop herself or her people - Sarah shared that she is. About a year ago she launched a new team at the Wharton School called Wharton Interactiveand they are building platforms to transform education. So, when you're looking at creating experiential learning in classrooms, it's expensive, it takes a long time, it's hard to change and fine-tune once you've launched experiences and really what she has discovered over the last six years being in this niche in EdTech is that platforms provide a way that forward where we can start to build truly transformational experiences for less cost and ones that we can then fine tune and learn from and so they're leveraging ultimate reality gaming,they're leveraging even smaller things like text messaging and social media patterns to really create social learning and don't democratizing that educational experience for the learners. So, a lot of the work that she has been doing with Peter in understanding and fine-tuning folks’ eyes to heterogeneity with customers, she has been starting to think about how they bring that into learning space and creating more fine-tuned and tailored experiences for the learners knowing that not everybody learns the same way. So, that she’s very excited about, very proud of you can find out more about what they're doing at www.interactive.wharton.upenn.edu.   I'm especially intrigued by Sarah's approach to education, I do think it's something that will definitely impact customer experience in the long term. When I think about my daughter who is 13 years old and some of the challenges that they have in schools, trying to get through to these children with the information that they're trying to simulate. I find that we're teaching children in 2019, but we're using methods that were applicable in 1975 and it's clearly not reaching the audience that we're trying to reach now, they just need to be stimulated in a higher way. And so, I hope some of the work that you are doing, it materializes that it can stretch to different parts of the world like Jamaica. Because I don't know what it's like in the USA, I'm sure you probably have you greater exposure to better opportunities, but here, I can see that the methodology that they are using is definitely not as impactful and I think based on what you are saying if hopefully that can become more widespread in the long term these children who will become business owners or employees in organizations that we’re all going to have to be customers of it would be great for them to have that experience from early, Yanique mentioned.   Sarah shared that she has a 10-year-old son, she also has 3 teenage daughters and we're not just teaching the same way we did in the 1970s, we're teaching the same way we did in the 1900s, so there is a lot of work to be done in moving the needle and with a lot of pride.They're doing some amazing work at the Wharton School and it's with great partners like Peter Fader who are willing to take the leap and who are also pushing and challenging teams like hers to think outside the box and bring something new to the table for the learners.   Peter shared listeners can find him at – www.petefader.com www.thetaequity.com www.customercentricitymanifesto.org   Sarah shared listeners can find her at – Linkedin – Sarah Toms Twitter – @SarahEToms www.interactive.wharton.upenn.edu   When asked if there is a possibility for the playbook to be developed into an online course, Peter shared that he has some older online courses that are more about the kind of original aspirational, definitional, motivational stuff. The best thing that they have is the new customer centricity simulation, that really brought them together.   Sarah shared that they've got the existing simulation, it's usually played in teams and usually played with faculty or teachers who are facilitating the experience and so they've got that experience. Her team is also starting to work on a steam-based game, so folks who are interested in learning can just go to steam and they'll be able to download a single player game from that marketplace. And then she also has designs to work with Peter on creating something in the alternate reality gaming space on their arc platform and that will be a massive online offering, hopefully not too far down the road from now.   Sarah shared that she has a quote, and this is from the founder of the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin. This is a quote she loves, and it is her world, it's “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.”     Links   The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value by Frederick Reichheld The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers by Gillian Tett The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Frederick Reichheld

Pete Zapit Productions Presents… Street Levelchillwave/lo-fi/jazzhop/chillhop "I no longer need my power tie, because I always have, my power finger.” — Pete Zapit https://twitter.com/petezapit petezapit@gmail.com If you enjoy this podcast please tell a friend, and take the time to rate, review and subscribe in iTunes.Tracklist— 1.Konteks - Paton St. Interlude 2.Konteks – Dusty 3.Blvk – Withu 4.Kupla – Seasons 5.Sweeps - sweet spot 6.Dweeb –Wax 7.Don Philippe – Ferroweld 8.Tomppabeats – Lips 9.Datfootdive & hentaimaster - broken bonds 10.Saib - Sakura Trees 11.AzudemSK, Slowy, Dennis Real & Adlib Swayze – Kreislauf 12.wuf - Quiet  13.Slowy, FloFilz & 12Vince – Showdown 14.Kasam - Coffee & Smoke  15.Dream Easy Collective & soho – stay 16.hurlum - stressed  17.Cozy Collective & soho - Take Me There 18.FloFilz & Psalm Trees - Smooth Wit' Any Groove 19.mndbd & leaf beach –Ice 20.Too Ugly - Uptown Express 21.Guru Griff - tonight  22.Made In M & Smuv - Old Roots New Trees  23.Sensi – Chains 24.Emapea - Downtown  25.Engelwood – Springtime 26.Too Ugly - Cafe Nervosa 27.digitalluc - t8ps 28.keem the Cipher – Bonds 29.AzudemSK & Orange Field - Schlicht and ergreifend 30.Alecs DeLarge - North Street 31.Konteks - Summer Lounger 32.Joe Corfield - Cheat Sheet 33.leaf beach - Solitude  34.L One – Newage 35.Natty Reeves – Solace 36.Mayple Syrup – Paris 37.leaf beach – Shades 38.Saito & Lester Nowhere - Glare  39.Keem the Cipher - Second Movement  40.Mayple Syrup - Jakarta  41.Sup Nasa - February  42.FloFilz – Dulce 43.Mayple Syrup - The One You Liked so Much 44.Spaze Windu – Kreislauf 45.Gonza - Ashbys Harp 46.Freddie Joachim - Love Is 47.Birocratic - Handsome People  48.BROCKBEATS - morning mist 49.Jazzinuf - House Red 50.Caleb Belkin – Winter 51.Estrugarda, Bassti - Sierra Leone  52.Mayaewk - Be Honest 53.Syndrome - Lust  54.CLVS – blissful 55.emune – Bonfire 56.Kavv - My Sunshine

Welcome to Episode 169 of The Future Beats Show My co-pilot this week @pazmal ➤ Facebook.com/DjComplexion | Twitter.com/Complexion | instagram.com/Complexion Onra - TFBS Intro Jhyve - Keep Doing You Nobl - Ardor (Co-Produced By Teeko) Sua - (Oh No) She Don't G L U E 7 0 - Til You Say Sua - Tokyo Beat Ramen (Featuring Coastal) Dexter Brandon - Put Yo Hands Daehan (대한) - R U Ready Daju - Jhené Aiko - Jukai (Daju Flip) Daju - Daniel Caesar - Best Part Feat. H.E.R. (Daju Remix) Shaqdi - Colorless Zodivk - Roses Nobl - Soujourn Slowly, Slowly - -) Forgot2Savethisone -) M-Cubed - Thirsty Sorsari

Option Block 306: Crazy Biotech Action Trading Block: A mild selloff on the street. Still not many bids for volatility, except in select names. VIX due for a spike according to the Wall Street Journal.  NPR calls options "The riskiest place to invest outside of penny stocks." Odd Block: Puts trade in Clovis Oncology Inc. (CLVS), puts trading in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ALNY), puts trade in Five Below Inc. (FIVE), and calls trade in China Finance Online Co. (JRJC). Xpress Block: A big mover on the OX desk was LULU. Stealth selloff in crude and the 10-year. Beam bought by Suntory today for $16B. Strategy Block: Tosaw discusses one small piece of trading spreads with 3-4 legs. Around the Block: Earnings around the block: BAC on 1/15; CITI, GS, and INTC on 1/16.

Option Block 306: Crazy Biotech Action Trading Block: A mild selloff on the street. Still not many bids for volatility, except in select names. VIX due for a spike according to the Wall Street Journal.  NPR calls options "The riskiest place to invest outside of penny stocks." Odd Block: Puts trade in Clovis Oncology Inc. (CLVS), puts trading in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ALNY), puts trade in Five Below Inc. (FIVE), and calls trade in China Finance Online Co. (JRJC). Xpress Block: A big mover on the OX desk was LULU. Stealth selloff in crude and the 10-year. Beam bought by Suntory today for $16B. Strategy Block: Tosaw discusses one small piece of trading spreads with 3-4 legs. Around the Block: Earnings around the block: BAC on 1/15; CITI, GS, and INTC on 1/16.