Podcasts about well jason

Jason and Cory sit down with Ollie from the Derby County Blog to review the Barrow AFC game and preview the start of the EFL Championship season! But up first, we review the Derby County - Barrow AFC Carabao Cup game which went to penalties. We also discuss if Derby need a cup run or if it is just an unnecessary distraction and extra fixtures. We also speak about the injuries to the forward line. But the big question... where will Derby finish? Well Jason, Cory and Ollie look into their crystal balls to figure out where the Rams will finish this season. Is this a season of lower expectations? Do any of us see Derby going up automatically? We also pick our favorites for promotion! Plus, as always, we've got our famous score predictions, but not for one but two games! Thank you for listening! Get in touch with your questions or comments. On Twitter: @ramsreview1 ; Facebook: @ramsreviewpod and Email ramsreview@hotmail.com

WIN a Rolex Explorer II!: https://swee.ps/iRKpBOJNo With Rolex prices continuously on the rise, it makes one wonder what exactly is to blame? Is it the company, the retailers, speculative buyers, or is the grey market itself? Well Jason is joined by Josh this week to discuss this idea. They brought Roman Sharf of Luxury Bazaar in to help analyze the state of the market. Learn about this and more on tonight's episode of The Trading Desk!

Tcast is an education, business, and technology video podcast that informs listeners and viewers on best practices, theory, technical functions of the TARTLE exchange system and how it is designed to serve society with the highest and best intentions. A recurring theme from speaking with prospective users is that they feel their data isn't worth anything or because they don't have any social media then TARTLE isn't for them. Well Jason and Alex are back again to tell the world otherwise. No matter how big or how small the piece of data you create, it has value! So wake up, sign up, and get paid! Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global digital identity exchange platform that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe. The show is hosted by Co-Founder & Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Co-Host Jason Rigby. What's your data worth? Find out at ( https://tartle.co/ ) Watch the podcast on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC46qT-wHaRzUZBDTc9uBwJg ) Like our Facebook Page ( https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/ ) Follow us on Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/ ) Follow us on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial ) Spread the word!

Summer has started to wind down but that doesn't mean you don't have time to squeeze in another vacation or two! But what watches should you take with you? Well Jason and guest host Mike Manjos are here to talk about just that! What factors matter most? Aesthetic? Case material? Make sure to tune in and chime in the comment box for this week's show! Check out this podcast as a video: https://youtu.be/wtCLU4p2fgM Buy, Sell, and Trade luxury watches with Jason and Mike: www.thewatchbox.com Shop Pre-Owned Tudor: https://www.thewatchbox.com/watches/tudor/

How do businesses use buyer intent data to increase the number of sales appointments they set by 6X? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, LeadSift Founder Tukan Das breaks down the topic of buyer intent data and provides the best explanation I've ever heard about what it is and how companies can use it to grow the number of sales opportunities. From who buyer intent data is right for, to where it comes from, what type of data you can expect to receive, how companies are using it, and the results they're getting to how much it really costs, Tukan covers it all in this not-to-be-missed interview. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS."   Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Tukan include: LeadSift leverages buyer intent data to help B2B companies understand who is interested in purchasing their products or services. Tukan believes that buying intent, in general, is the most important unit in digital commerce. Buying intent can be measured from online and offline sources and is basically a probabilistic score that indicates the likelihood that a person or company will purchase something. LeadSift gathers buying intent data by crawling the entire internet and looking at public posts for "signals" - where people are mentioning specific things that LeadSift's customers want to track. Signals can include a variety of things such as keyword mentions, competitors mentions, conference mentions, and more. This process is automated and done at scale, and the data is then fed back into LeadSift's data engine and ranked. When you use LeadSift, you get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. One common use case for buyer intent data is with account-based marketing campaigns. Another use case is running audience match ads on Facebook or LinkedIn targeting the buyers that have shown high intent. There are many types of signals that LeadSift can use to generate buying intent data, but working with their customers they have discovered that signals relating to keywords perform better than signals relating to competitors. Buying intent data is useful for B2B companies with 50 or more employees and with average deal sizes in excess of $10,000 a year. Buying intent data is priced starting at $1,000 a month. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the LeadSift website Connect with Tukan on LinkedIn Follow Tukan on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn more about buyer intent data and the specific use cases that can help grow your sales funnel. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, my guest is Tukan Das who is the CEO of LeadSift. Welcome Tukan. Tukan Das (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Nice to be here.. Tukan and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Great to have you. Can you tell my audience a little bit about LeadSift and yourself and what the company does? About LeadSift Tukan: Sure. My name is Tukan. I'm the CEO and co-founder of LeadSift. LeadSift is a sales intelligence platform that helps other B2B technology companies identify which accounts are actually looking for their solutions at any given time. That's the 30,000-feet view of LeadSift. One thing that I'd like to add is we have been working on LeadSift for about six and a half years. Our mission at LeadSift, and we have had a few pivots, but our mission at LeadSift has always been the same. It's around mining publicly available data to predict when a company or a person is looking to buy another product, whether it's a software product or a physical product or something like that. That has been our goal at the company, and in its current iteration, we are helping other B2B technology companies identify and predict which other companies are potentially going to buy their solution. Kathleen: That's interesting. Coming from the world of marketing, there are plenty of tools available to identify when an individual contact is interacting with your website and showing signs of purchase intent, but it sounds like you're talking about even outside of that, correct? Tukan: That's correct. What you mentioned is that's more on the first party intent when someone's coming to your website, interacting with your content, downloading the data or filling out a form. What we focus on is the outside world where they're having interesting conversations, which some of them could be potential signals of buying indicators. Those are the ones that we try to pick up and use as predictions. Kathleen: Now at the risk of getting into the territory of jargon, is this what is commonly referred to as buyer intent data? Tukan: It is. At a high level, yes, it is. Kathleen: This is interesting to me, and I was excited to talk to you about it because I have been hearing lots of people talk about this lately. I feel like it's the newest hot buzzword in the world of marketing, but there definitely appears be a lot of confusion around it, and so I would love it if maybe you could just start by demystifying. Every time I've heard somebody talk about this, they say there's all this publicly available data, and they mine it, and then they tell you who's out there. What Is Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: I think the question I've always had is I want to understand how that really works. What is that data? How specific is it? Where does it come from? Is this GDPR compliance, all the questions that probably you get from of marketers? Maybe you could break that down. Tukan: Absolutely. I have a interesting philosophical view about buying intent. I personally believe buying intent in general is the most important unit in digital commerce. Basically, buying intent, what it means is identifying a customer in the journey of them buying a product. It is basically a probability of assigning a probabilistic score to a company whether they're going to buy your product or a product. That's all buying intent means. Now in reality, buying intent is generated both on online sources and even offline sources. It could be someone coming to your website and requesting a demo. That's a very strong signal of intent, or someone picking up the phone calling you or someone you meet at a coffee shop saying, "Hey, I want to know more about your product, buy from you." They're all signals of intent, but in reality, a lot of those signals are private to you and your own company, but that doesn't constitute the entire word buying intent. To reach the scale, you need to pick up signals that are happening on the outside world, but the reality is in a B2B setting, unfortunately, no company goes and waves a flag and says, "Hey, I'm looking to buy a new database or a marketing automation software." No one talks like that. Life would have been a lot easier. Kathleen: Well, it would be easier for marketers, but it would be hell for that buyer. Tukan: Depending if there could be a way to manage the number of requests and all those things. In the absence of that, everybody who is in the buying intent space, what they are trying to do is they're trying to come up with different proxies or signals and then combine all of them to make that prediction of this company likely to be buying a solution. As with any prediction engine, it can never be 100% accurate. It is a prediction. This is something that we tell all our customers, and I want to clarify this. I think there's a big misconception about buying intent that it is sort of like a silver bullet, "Oh, you told me this company is good market, 100% they're going to buy." No, they are no. It never works that way. If we could predict every company that was going to buy someone's software, I'd be a lot richer. Kathleen: I was going to say that we couldn't afford your services. Tukan: There you go. There you go. I'd be charging money to come into this podcast. With that being said, everybody is trying to look at these different proxies. There are a few different ways of looking at buying intent. Every company in the space has their own definition. The way I look at it or we look at it at LeadSift at a high level is there could be multiple different signals. A signal could be if we see someone engaging with my competitor on anywhere that we can publicly get, that could be a signal of intent. If I see someone engaging with a complimentary company, that could be a signal of intent. For example, our partners are Marketo, Salesforce or even Outreach and SalesLoft. We don't compete with them, but if you see someone using that product or engaging, showing interest about that product, that gives us an indication that they have a tech stack and they are showing interest about outbound marketing, so that could be interesting to LeadSift. A signal of intent could be someone researching or reading up on topics like account based-marketing. That could be a signal of intent. A signal of intent could be someone attending a specific event or a trade show. Those trade shows could be big as Dreamforce. It could be Sirius Decision Summit, or it could be niche events like FlipMyFunnel events that are happening or a webinar that is happening. If you're engaging with that content that the webinar's putting out, chances are this is top of mind for you. You might or might not be in the market right now, but you're more aware of this topic. A signal of intent could be someone growing their team. If I see someone who's hiring for a head of demand gen or someone hiring a lot of SDRs, chances are they are investing on demand generation and outbound marketing is very high. That's a good point to be. If we see someone announce a new product or launch a new partnership that might need a solution that we are doing, that could be a signal of intent. Basically, I think there is this myth or misconception around this black box approach around intent is like, "Ooh, we figured out from these publishers or whatever that these guys were researching about this topic, and that's why you should go after them." I think it's a lot simpler than that. It could be boiled down to all these different signals combining them and then coming up with a final score which are a probability saying, "These are the companies did these different things, and that's why they are more likely to be interested in your product right now." I don't know if I answered that question. Kathleen: No, those were actually really good examples. I guess the question that immediately then springs into my mind is you gave specific examples of if I'm engaging with a competitor or attending a certain conference or researching a certain product, and you qualified your definition of buyer intent as drawing from publicly available sources. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is what, and maybe this is the secret sauce, but what are those publicly available sources of information that reveal that data? Where Does Buyer Intent Data Come From? Tukan: Exactly. To give you an example, let's say you are interested in tracking a competitor or a specific partner of yours, and anytime you see someone engaging with them, that could be an interest. What we would do is we would look at the competitors that companies that you're interested tracking all their digital channels, whether it's social blogs, their forums, their YouTube channels, anything that is out there, and we would see when people are commenting, asking question or anything about them on those channels or on Quora or Reddit, ProductCon, Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere they're mentioning something about that company or maybe they posted a webinar and they are sharing the link to the webinar, which maps to the domain of the companies. That's a signal. That's how we would figure it out. The way we do it, and there is no crazy secret behind it. If in reality all of the data that we're getting is public as I said, if you had 10,000 interns or researchers that are annually going over the entire internet, they could get the same exact signals. We just do it at scale and automate the whole process. Kathleen: You're basically finding a way to scrape all of that and then process it- Tukan: That's it. Kathleen: ... and put a formula behind what is a meaningful level of interaction. Tukan: Absolutely. Yes. Kathleen: That is a great explanation. That is the best explanation that I've heard yet about how this actually works. I feel like sometimes the people who are in the business of buyer intent data almost intentionally make it seem like this black box, but thank you for clarifying that. Tukan: Not a problem. I think there is a problem. I'm actually writing a LinkedIn post about it. I think there is a challenge there where on purpose, there is this misconception and there's a level of complexity that's added when it's not needed. Maybe they do hide some things. I don't know, but for us, it's purely crawling. It is literally crawling the entire public works for you at scale, and then getting this information. Kathleen: It makes sense. I agree with you that there is a problem because I think that the natural instinct when you feel like something's deliberately being presented as mysterious is either you don't trust it. Like, "Are you getting this data from an untrustworthy source," or that it's possibly too good to be true. I feel like a lot of people have shied away. Now, you go out and you crawl all of these sites. You look at all the interactions that are happening. You're able to synthesize that into meaningful insights for your clients. What Kind of Data Is Included With Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: If I am somebody who is purchasing buyer intent data, what does that look like? Am I just getting a list of company names? Am I ever getting down to the individual contact level? How granular can you get? Tukan: No, that's a great question. Because of how we get the data, how we collect the data, we are probably the only company in the entire intent data ecosystem that can provide intense signals the level of a contact. When we give you an information, we would actually tell you, "You should go after Dell as a target account because their head of marketing was recently engaging with your competitor's content." That's what you get. You get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. When we, I guess, score or rank these accounts, we take into account who was the person that was showing interest in an IT services solution, a head of marketing, showing interest about the topic is okay versus if the IT director showed an intent signal. Their score will go up, so we incorporate all of that and present that data to you. Kathleen: You mentioned account based marketing earlier, and I wonder when you then return that data, you're able to get to the individual contact level. Let's say you mentioned Dell. Let's say there's 10 different influencers or decision makers at Dell who are showing intense signals. Are you able to package that together and say it's not just like a laundry list and there happens to be 10 people from Dell somewhere in the list? Is it, "Dell is the company. Here are the 10 people?" Tukan: That's exactly it. The way we presented it would say, "Here is Dell. These are the 10 people, and these are the different things they did." Kathleen: That's really interesting. I can see that being very useful because I've spoken to other companies that have pitched me on buyer intent data, but really all they're selling is a list of company names. It's better than nothing, but I wasted a lot of time marketing to the wrong contacts in those companies. Tukan: You asked a question earlier on about GDPR compliance and things like that. There is a confusion in the market because one of the things that clients tell us is, "How do you get contact level data?" If someone saw an ad on Forbes, they have an IP data that you reversed mapped to a company, but how the hell do you know who that person was? The way we do it is because we don't use cookies or we don't use IP data, we are basically crawling the web. When you're crawling the web, there is an individual who was doing an activity that gave us an indication that this makes it relevant for you to go after. That's how we are able to provide not just Dell but the key contacts that you should be talking to. All of this data is publicly available, so if your SDR was manually researching, he or she would have found this information. We just made it that much easier for them using technology. Kathleen: That makes sense. That was a great explanation. Thank you, very, very helpful. Now, if somebody is hearing this and they're thinking, "Okay, this is really interesting," can you talk through some specific use cases of how companies might use this kind of data to fill their sales funnels? Use Cases For Buyer Intent Data Tukan: I'll give a couple of examples, one more from a marketing perspective, the other more from a sales perspective how it can be used. One of our customers, they're fast growing in endpoint security space, highly competitive. Everybody in that space is super well funded, and it's a massive problem. One of the things they did was they had a list of target accounts that they wanted to book meetings with, basically try to get engagements on. They came to LeadSift, and they gave us that big list of target accounts along with it. They gave us a list of keywords and competitors that are of interest to them or topics. We work in this case was we were crawling the web picking up signals and contacts and pushing them directly into Marketo. A certain percentage of the signals were on target accounts that they were interested in during conversation into, and some of them were just green field or white field accounts or whatever they call them that fit the ICP but it's not in their target account list. We are pushing the data into Marketo, and they have it sync with Salesforce typically. That's the typical flow. When we pushed it into Marketo, they score them. Once the score reaches a certain score, they pass it over to the SDRs to go ahead and try to book a meeting with the contact that we picked up on that target account. Not just saying, "Hey, go after Dell because Dell is showing interest or talk to these three people within Dell because they were talking about these topics that you care about." That's how they did. I'll talk a little bit later about how they used interest in scoring techniques, but the result that they got was they had this started off with 100 accounts, target accounts to have discussions with. Within three months because of this contact and the signals we picked up, they had meetings with 60 of them. That was great, and over a period of six months, they got... I forget the number. It's high six figure in pipeline that they generated from those 100 accounts plus the new ones we identified. That's an example of how someone needs to think 10 signals into Marketo, push to Salesforce coupled with their account based strategy into booking meetings and creating opportunities from there. Kathleen: That's great. Tukan: One thing that we found out from them they were sharing was in the scoring mechanism, they actually found out when companies were engaging with specific keywords versus when companies were engaging with competitors, the key word engagement were actually giving them better results than competitors, which is interesting because my initial gut would have said, "If someone is engaging with my competitor, that's the hottest one I should go after." They found it opposite. It makes sense, but after, I thought, "Maybe some of them might be already too far in the buying journey. Kathleen: Too far down the funnel. Tukan: Yup. That was an interesting thing, so they adjusted the score in Marketo accordingly based on the kind of triggers. The other thing they also did was they were also looking at how many unique people within one of those target accounts were engaging. If one person engages three times, that's not as valuable as three people within the target they're gonna engage in one time each. They were using that because one person engaging multiple times might give you a false positive. They might have some prior relation, but if three people engage or like x number of people engage with this same trigger events or competitors, that's a better signal. Those were some interesting insights that we saw a customer use our data from a marketing perspective and being very successful. Who Is Buyer Intent Data Right For? Kathleen: That is really interesting. Now, in terms of the types of companies that are using this data, it sounds like it is very useful for B2B companies and companies that have a high transaction sales values or considered purchases, if you will, where more than one decision maker is involved. Is that accurate? Tukan: Yup, that's very accurate. In terms of our buyer persona, and when you look at our ICP and clients who have been most successful, so we look at companies in the small to medium sized enterprise, so 50 to 500 employees. Those are the ones. In B2B technology, 100%, and the other is their deal size needs to be meaningful. If their average deal size is, let's say, $1,000 a year, then they don't really need intent signals are even an outbound sales team, but if typically their deal size is at least $10,000, $12,000 annually, in that case, it makes sense for them. That's a sweet spot we have seen. Then there is another group of companies that we work not directly but through our partners. Those are more the large enterprises, so those 5,000, 10,000 employees. You have the HPs and the Oracles and Adobes of the world where we work with our partners. In their case, they do truly a multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy where they take our data. They would do media buys, contents indications, email nurture, and things like that, but our sweet spot is those 50 to 500 companies that are heavy on driving sales revenue pipeline and things like that. How Much Does Buyer Intent Data Cost? Kathleen: Let's talk about the numbers then, because I'm curious. If somebody is listening and they're like, "This sounds amazing. I need to do it," what should they expect to spend, and how is the spend calculated? Is it based on the number of leads you're delivering? How does that work? Tukan: No. This is very interesting because it's not a cost per lead or ad spend or media spend type model. It's a purely subscription-based set up where you pay a flat fee, an organization wide license for your entire company, which is dependent on the number of triggers you're tracking. A trigger could be a name of a competitor or a name of a keyword or a topic or an industry event that you're interested in tracking. Based on that, they pay that fee and we push the data directly into the system. In terms of exact dollar value, it starts at around $1,000 a month. It's not crazy, but that's the price point that we charge, and it's a subscription model. Kathleen: Is there any general sense you can provide us to like if I'm spending $1,000 a month, what should I expect in terms of value? Tukan: Absolutely. Absolutely. That number changes, to be honest with you, Kathleen, based on how niche or how broad they're targeting, but on an average, all our customers get around 200 signals, intent signals a week, so roughly 800 to 1000 signals a month. That's the average. Our model is not capped on the number of signals you get. Some of our customers get a 1000 signals a day. For example, if someone is attending an event or sponsoring an event and they want to track people that are likely going to that event, they might get 400 or 500 accounts a day when the event is happening, but on an average, I would say between 800 to 1000 signals every month on unique accounts. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand correctly. 800 to 1000 signals a month, that's 800 to 1000- Tukan: Accounts. Kathleen: ... in full contact level? Tukan: Yup. Kathleen: Really, if you're saying that you started $1,000 a month, that's for all intents and purposes about a dollar per contact. I know you don't want to call it. Tukan: No, but yeah. Sometimes you can do the ROI calculation if you do want to look at it that way. Kathleen: I mean, to me that sounds like a no brainer. I'm not being paid to say this, but it sounds like a no brainer only because if I do Facebook ads or something like that, a $1 costs to acquire a new contact, and this is a much more qualified contact, I would argue, that's pretty darn reasonable. Tukan: The way some of our customers would use the data and look at it is let's say you use it for a 90-day period, and in the 90-day period, that's a good enough period for you to then activate the data. One is us providing you the data. These are not inbound leads. Excuse me, you still need to nurture them, but assuming you ae following up with the data. Within 90 days, you should be booking 10 to 20 meetings, and then you can do the math from there on. Out of those 20 meetings you're booking, you should be having these many opportunities, and from there, they'll close. It's very easy to do the ROI from that perspective. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect? Kathleen: No, that makes sense. That's really interesting. Are there any averages in terms of results that you see your clients getting? Tukan: Yup. Few things. This is another example that I thought of is from a sales perspective. We are working with a digital marketing agency actually out of New York. They're national. They obviously do Facebook ads and different ads and inbound paid to drive leads. Reference is a big thing, but outbound is also a channel for them to generate leads. What they were finding is the number of meetings that they were generating through outbound was trying down because the way they were doing outbound is as everyone does is by static list of companies that fit our criteria and just hit them. They came to LeadSift to help them identify companies that are showing intent, potential companies that they can brand, I guess, in this case that they might be interested. They ran an email nurture campaign. That's what they're running. On an average, they're getting about 6% of the people that they're reaching out to are booking meetings with them. That is a very, very high number of people that are booking. The industry average is less than 1%, so they have tripled the number of people they're having meetings with in a month using the intense string. On an average, 6% is very high. That's of the outlier. This is not replies or positive replies. These are people that are actually booking meetings with them. On an average, we see... Assuming you have some baseline. You have an outbound process, whether it's email coupled with social and things like that. The average is at least you have twice the number of hit rate or connect rate or meetings rate than. That's the average that we see assuming you have a baseline, you already have a process set up. Kathleen: Well, and if you're not doing outbound sales, because there are plenty of companies that don't have really robust outbound sales programs, I imagine you could still take this data and create a custom audience for your paid advertising. You could do a look alike audience from that. There's a lot of different ways that if you didn't want to do direct outreach to the contacts, you could still pull them into your orbit in a subtler fashion. Tukan: Absolutely. We are seeing people doing that Facebook custom audience, Linkedin ads. That's also one of the things is to do paid media to drive people in there. Absolutely. Kathleen: Interesting. Wow. Well, that is really cool. I love hearing the details of how the sausage is made. It's the first time anybody's explained it really well to me, so I appreciate it. Tukan: No problem. Learn More About LeadSift Kathleen: If somebody's interested in learning more about either the company and its products or about this topic, and they want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Tukan: Couple of things. The best way is to go to leadsift.com. We have a pretty simple website. There's quite a bit of... We produce a lot of content and webinars and things like that, so do check it out. Kathleen: I'll put the link in the show notes for that. Tukan: Perfect. Request a demo talk to one of us or just reach out to me at tdas@leadsift.com. Find me on LinkedIn. My Twitter is @TDas. Just reach out to me. I'm deeply passionate about this whole idea of mining intent from unstructured web. I believe there is no single source of truth for intent. There's different ways to look at it. If you want to know anything more about LeadSift or just a general idea about intent-driven marketing and sales, hit me up. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Love it. I'll put all those links in the show notes. Now, we can't wrap up without me asking you the two questions that I always ask my guests. First of those is we talked a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Tukan: That's a good question. I think I'm going to give altruistically different answer. I think one company, one person that is absolutely killing it is Jason Lemkin with SaaStr. I think they are doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing, creating content that startups find valuable from early stage to growth stage or scale up. Unbelievable content they're getting. They have podcasts. They have the SaaStr show. I think Jason has probably written 100,000 answers on Quora and things like that and his LinkedIn post. I think they're doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing. Kathleen: That's a really interesting one that I've not heard before. Tukan: I thought so. Kathleen: I might actually just then tweet Jason and see if I can get him to come on the podcast. Tukan: You would be amazing because you ask any startup founders, CEO or anybody in a tech startup space, everyone knows about SaaStr. SaaStr itself is becoming the go-to conference for all SaaS companies to go, and it is all because of Jason creating content every day and they're doing a phenomenal job. Kathleen: I love it. Well Jason, if you're listening, I'm coming for you. Now the second question is the biggest challenge that I hear marketers talk about is that the world of digital marketing is changing at such a lightning fast pace, and it's really hard to keep up with current best practices, new technologies and developments. How do you personally stay educated? What do you do for yourself? Tukan: Again, this also might be a different answer compared to what everyone else has said. Maybe because I'm not a marketer by trade. It might be a bit of a cheesy answer, but the best source for me to learn is actually talking to customers who are all marketers. When we talk to customers, we do the first five minutes of a sales call, we ask them. It's what's their process? What are they using? We get unbelievable amount of insights into what this entire world's looking like. They actually literally educate us, which we then use for other customers to get ourselves better and all that. That's one source that I think is phenomenal. The other is actually, I'm part of a few groups in Facebook and LinkedIn. One of them particularly is called SaaS Growth Hacks. It's from early stage companies, super active. There, I get a ton of insights into latest marketing trends, cool hacks and crawl tracking stories or things like that that people are trying out. There's a lot of discussion. People ask questions. People comment. I skim through it at least once a day to get some cool insights into what's going on, what's working, what's not working, what to be aware of. Those would be my two big sources of learning about the latest marketing trends. Kathleen: Those are good ones. I'm going to have to hunt down that SaaS Growth Hacks. Tukan: Absolutely. It's a great Facebook group. Kathleen: Good. All right. Well, there you have it. I will put the links for all of those things in the show notes. Now you know how to reach Tukan if you're interested in learning more about LeadSift or buyer intent data. If you have been listening and you learn something new or you liked what you heard, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That makes a huge difference. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at Work Mommy Work, because I would love to interview them. Thanks Tukan. Tukan: Thank you Kathleen. Kathleen: It's great having you. Tukan: Same here. It was a pleasure.  

Ever been to firefighter prom? Or any prom, period? Did you enjoy it? Well Jason didn't, and Steve and his many high school friends can't understand why. He also accidentally made Luau Wednesdays a thing while Jason stayed quiet in his studies, spawning many rumors about his ... lonely habits. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/today-i-learned-nothing/support

If your interested in making better decisions, solving problems, getting the best out of yourself and your team and managing your time more effectively, this is the podcast for you.  My guest, Jason Howlett is the Co-founder and change agent @ Manpremo.  Jason’s passion is helping people develop, with the purpose of increasing well-being and actualising potential. Jason uses applied science (neuroscience, psychology and physiology), combined with data, to optimise brain performance and build change competency. For the past 8 years, Jason has been working with organisations and their employees on programmes that develop Leadership and Talent; Well-being; Strategy Implementation; Mindset and behaviour change; Resilience/Grit in individuals and teams. Before focusing his work on people, their mindset and behaviour, Jason worked in IT for 7 years. Jason studied Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London and has a degree in Computer Science from Royal Holloway, University of London. Jason is a certified Personal Trainer and Lifestyle Coach. Podcast Transcript: Well thank you Jason, again, for joining us, and Jason's gonna share brain science and highlight what leaders can do to really maximize their personal leadership based on what we know about some of the science in the brain. He's done a lot of work with leaders over the last several years. So Jason, why don't you tell us what's important for our audience to know today. Thank you Jill. I'm going to focus on looking at a data driven approach to increasing the performance of our brain for personal leadership. We're gonna focus on a subset of the brain functions. We'll look at what's commonly known as the cognitive or executive functions of the brain. These are things that help us to get things done, so they're critical for us being able to plan, to learn, the ability to solve problems, make decisions, and essentially to also control ourselves, to manage how we manage our impulses, but also our emotions. These cognitive or executive functions are also crucial in us building competencies, whether that be leadership competencies or any other particular functional competencies that we wish to learn. Now these functions are there to help us, but they are not there all the time. We do not have an infinite resource that fuels these functions. They depend on several factors being in place. There's two key areas of these factors that we need to consider if we really want to have the cognitive part of our brain fully switched on. The first part is looking at the physical needs. The very basics, which we all know we need, which is sleep, rest, fuel, bio nutrition, and movement. So these things have been proven through neuro biological research to be key in switching the cognitive functions on. To give you an example, if we look at sleep, which is really the number one example from the physical needs, just by trying to maximize a good seven to eight hours of good quality sleep will increase our ability to learn by a minimum of 40 percent. It will also decrease the amount of stress we wake up with, which will decrease the amount of anger and fear that we have. But there are a whole host of other benefits that sleep provides. Because essentially, sleep is the number one factor to help us to learn and memorize things, but also to of course repair and restore the functions in the brain. Another small example is movement. We know that movement's important for our heart and our lungs. But in terms of our brain, there's two key things that regular movement does. It first of all increases the circulation of blood to our brains, which brings more oxygen and nutrients to our brain. It also helps to increase neurotransmitters, which are important for the brain's function. But secondly, regular movement helps to increase factors that help the brain to develop and also become more plastic. In crude terms, you can say the brain is plastic, the brain can change. It's the term called neuroplasticity. But regular movement helps to increase this ability. This is key when looking at behavior change, or again, learning new things. These are two examples of the physical needs, sleep and movement. But let's look at the other group of factors. The other group of factors are our social needs, and these needs are also extremely important. They are things like feeling safe in the environment that we're in, feeling accepted, that we have a sense of belonging, that we have the recognition we need, but also a certain amount of autonomy, ability to have control over what we say and do. These needs, both the physical needs and the social needs, are really crucial to have in place so that our cognitive brain is fully switched on. And essentially a lack of these needs causes the brain to trigger the threat response. This is really important, because when the threat response is triggered, i.e. what we commonly know as the stress response, something that causes us to want to fight or to flee or to freeze. This response puts the brain into a self preservation mode, so it no longer really cares about anyone else other than our own survival, and we become very reactive. The key thing here is that we don't just become reactive, but our cognitive functions that I mentioned before, like planning, learning, problem solving, decision making, they're offline. So the ability to control yourself is offline. So you will act much more under any sort of anger that you may feel, your ability to solve problems, make decisions, to plan, they're also offline. So you become much more primitive in how you behave and act when these needs are not met. We can monitor these needs and actually simple ways. And today if I focus on the physical needs first, we can, by using simple wearables, but of course also medical grade devices, we can monitor the stress recovery balance in our body, which has a direct link to the functioning of our brain. To keep it simple, there is a science of heart rate variability, and heart rate variability just means the variation in time between each beat of your heart. If I was to measure someone's heart rate now, and it came out to be 60 beats per minute, the assumption would be, well, there's 60 beats a minute and there's 60 seconds in a minute, so there must be one second between each beat. But the reality is this is very dependent on how activated or stressed you currently feel. For 60 beats per minute is quite a low recording, but what could actually be happening, because the heart rate is quite low at 60 beats, is that between the first beat and the second beat, maybe there is a second. But between the second and the third beat, there could be 0.8 of a second. Between the third and fourth, it could be 1.2 seconds. The variation is very small. It's within milliseconds. That's not easy for us to measure ourself, but there are devices that you can very simply use, watches, bands, and also medical grade, electro based devices that can measure this heart rate variability. And essentially the lower the variability, the more stressed you are. So that means that using these devices, you can monitor what are the events, situations, or people that cause significant stress, and what are the events, situations with people that promote my recovery? Because going back to the analogy before, when the brain is experiencing stress, the cognitive functions, like planning, solving problems, decision making, they are inhibited. So if we can learn, if we can trigger us self awareness on what is basically draining resources, we can help to better manage that. And this isn't about measuring yourself a life, it's just about triggering awareness. To take that a step further, of course, this would involve regular reflection and for you to actually monitor the output from the watch or medical device you use. So what we've essentially done is built an app that takes all of the input from your wearable, and it also takes in input from your calendar, and it then notifies you over the week on what are the events, situations, that have caused you particular stress, and what are the events that have caused you particular recovery. Using this, you get a better stress recovery balance, and therefore you're better able to keep your brain switched on when you want it to be. I think that's an important point to make here, especially in leadership. You cannot be switched on all the time. I've worked with some people and organizations that even have in the signature always on, and the key thing is is that it's scientifically proven that the cognitive aspect, even if you're not stressed, cannot be always on. The brain goes through periods of what's called task positive and then task negative action. You can think of the task positive like focused attention and the task negative like mind wandering. And it's very important that the brand can go through this cycle of focused attention and mind wandering. I think the key message is that this is about triggering self awareness around, okay, what can help me to optimize my brain performance when I really need to be at my best, and the other things that I can do before I face a situation, like having to either sit down with my team and deliver a good or bad message. It's about when I've got conflict management, managing ambiguity, when I've got to influence people, any of these kind of key behaviors where you really want to be switched on, you know what you can do to prepare for that. But you also know what to do when things do get tough, when you do feel particularly stressed. You have simple techniques, and we're going to go through some of those in a minute, that you can use to very quickly reduce the stress and increase recovery so that your cognitive functions come back online again. This is quite individual, hence why we use devices to really work out an issue, what works for who, because we do find a lot of people already think they know what helps them to relax, but when we measure them, their heart tells a very different story. For example, watching TV. It might feel relaxing, but it's actually a quite stressful, quite activating I should say for the brain, and especially not a good idea to do just before bed because of the way that it reduces the production of melatonin in the brain, and of course that being the key rest and recovery hormones, so your sleep quality is reduced. But there's a whole host of different factors that people can learn about so that they know just the one or two key things to look out for and the one or two key things to practice. They can build a habit around it to to better manage the stress. Thank you. Can you tell me, if we don't have one of those wearables on us, what are some things that we can notice that are happening that are giving us triggers, our body giving us triggers, that we might be in a stressful situation and need to self reflect a little bit? Yes, a super question, Jill. Whenever we experience stress, the biological factors that will let us know, and that's why think it's also important that we don't become dependent on devices, but we learn that if we can tap into the fact that our heart rate is rising. Or maybe we don't notice the high rate, but we notice our breathing rate has increased. Or we feel suddenly our pulse. Literally, we become more aware of that in our head, because we suddenly realized tension in our head. Or sweaty hands. This kind of unease would be the easiest way to say it. Suddenly you feel that tension or unease. That's a great trigger to say, "Okay, let me pay attention to what's happening right now. Let me be more present with myself so I can face whatever it is. Whether it's external, being caused by the environment around me or the people around me, or whether it's my own thoughts or feelings inside." Does that make sense? It does, yeah. I think that sometimes we just don't even realize it's happening, and later we might look, or we might even look at, are our fists clenched, or like you said, sweaty palms. Those are things that I think are important to notice, that that means your body's telling you if we want our cognitive to work effectively as leaders, that's not going to help us. Yeah. It's a super point, and I think that's where time to reflect or a mindfulness space practice, somewhere where you train your brain's ability to have focused attention and to become more aware of what your triggers are or what are the causes of the different things that you're feeling, so essentially emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. This is a key factor in you reducing the time of what's called the amygdala hijack. Or essentially, keep it simple. Let's say someone says something to you that triggers you, and essentially it triggers the stress response. Your brain will launch this response in literally milliseconds. And it can take a little bit of time for your cognitive brain or your consciousness to become aware of the fact that now I'm stressed, now I realize that I'm clenching my fists or I have muscle tension up in my neck. It can take a little bit longer for that to become aware, maybe a second versus a split second. It's a short time, but the process of having time to reflect, on mindfulness is a great way to build that awareness of the fact that something's happening, and then to use emotional regulation or a technique to work with the trigger of the stress. Is there a mindfulness practice that if I'm in the moment and I'm noticing that maybe I'm getting ready for a presentation or getting ready to have a difficult conversation, what's something that I could do fairly quickly as a leader to get my physical back in line and those less stressed so I can think through the way I want to? Yeah, that's a great question. It's quite individual, but what we've found to be the quickest way for most individuals to reduce stress and switch their cognitive brain fully on is simply to sit there for as little as two to five minutes and to follow the following rhythm. You take a nice slow deep inhalation for a count of three, and then a nice slow exhalation for a count of normally four to seven. This is where it's very individual. It depends. But you essentially need to exhale over a longer period than you inhale. What that does is it triggers in your nervous system the rest and recovery response, and that's been proven. If you continued that for five minutes, you actually empty your bloodstream of cortisol, the stress hormone. But even within just two minutes of getting awareness of your breathing, you can change a body from what's called a stress dominant state to a rest and recovery dominant state. That would be the most simple one. Other people like yawning. That's also something that would trigger the recovery response. But I think the breathing would. That simple rhythm, in for three, out of four, is quite easy once you practice that a few times, to do that even in a crisis situation, because you don't even need to close your eyes. You can be in a meeting and practice that and bring more power to your executive brain. Yeah, I love that you said you can even do it in a meeting without closing your eyes, right? Because you can do it without people noticing, but you're getting yourself back. Because sometimes we go into meetings where something triggers us. Yeah, I mean, that's a nice short practice that people can use. You talked about physical needs and social needs. You gave us a nice tip around physical and what's going on in the brain around that. From a social needs perspective, can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. I think the key thing with social needs is that first of all, we need to consider the environment that you're in. We're gonna have a lot higher access to our cognitive functions when our brain is not launching a significant stress response. But that depends on us actually feeling safe. So are we in an environment where there's a constant threat? Some organizations have a zero failure culture, sometimes for good reasons, many times for maybe not so productive reasons. That is something that will ... You know that if you make a mistake that you're fired or penalized, and of course that will mean that you are constantly moving around in a mild stress response, which will inhibit the brain cognitive functions. Again, you can work with that. For mission critical situations where you really need to have zero failure, there are of course ways you can work with a case ... The belief system of the people that are doing the work to reduce that. But let's talk about the more general sense. You've got, first of all, a sense of belonging. We're social beings. It's very important for us to be in an environment where we feel like we belong, because we are beings that depend on each other. As much as we like to be independent, we really do thrive in group. Just knowing that the people around you respect you for who you are, and that you feel that you get regular recognition, helps you to feel like you belong, and that key social need basically helps to reduce stress. On the other hand, if we in a situation where we basically don't get that regular feedback or recognition, then we don't really know where we are. We don't know whether we are doing a good enough job. Are we really meeting the needs of the people around us, and are we also, which is kind of a key thing for our sense of meaning, is are we actually doing something that matters? Are we actually using our time to serve others in some shape or form? Having awareness of that is something that's key to reducing stress. I think what's key here is to think about a meeting situation, because it's in meetings where we tend to have the greatest trigger of our emotions, especially when we're in meetings with people from all different departments. Maybe we don't know everyone in the room, especially if we're meeting them for the first time. What our brain does in that situation is it's constantly scanning to see, okay, well ... Other people listening to me, do they respect me? What do they think of what I'm saying? Am I getting any recognition? The brain is constantly scanning to see if these things are met. So often people are sitting in a meeting room, but even if it's a short meeting, their cognitive functions can be inhibited if they are really feeling that they are not a part of the group, or that they're not being listened to or appreciated. So a simple check in, starting a meeting with a one or two minute check in where people literally share what's at the top of the mind or to use eye contact throughout the meeting. Having meetings where each person has maybe even a short time to share, but everyone shares the key things that they need. That's also making sure that there is an agenda for the meeting. Right, so what do they need, what is the information they can give, do they need to seek approval, but that everyone does get a chance to talk, and that they're listened to, just helps to increase that sense of belonging, respect and recognition. Otherwise people would be in that meeting and they'll be seeking to preserve themselves. So self preservation behavior versus wanting to behave to benefit the group. The tips that you gave, the things that leaders can do if they're running the meeting ... Yes. You said start with a check in to see what's on their mind. Tell me a little bit more about that. What would that look like? Because I could imagine some managers would say, "Oh, I don't have time for that." So tell me what that would look like and help us understand the benefit. Yeah, that's an important point. I think as a leader, what's really key when you get to that meeting is that, of course, you reiterate the direction, why do we have a meeting, what's the purpose of it, what do we want to get out of it, so that that brings everyone into this current point. But I think a check in's important because these days meetings are the second biggest waste of productivity after absenteeism. And the reason for that is, one, they normally have too long, two, they don't have a specific purpose or agenda, and three people go back to back with meetings, which by the way, in your second meeting, you would have lost up to 60 percent of your previous meeting or more without having a short break between the meeting, because again, your cognitive functions cannot, one, retain all that information, but two, your brand needs a break. You need to get this stress recovery balance. A check in is a way the leader can basically give each person as little as a minute to say what's at the top of their mind. And this depends on the size of the team and how close you are. But let's say it's the leader's own team. Here is the sharing. Whether it's a good or bad feeling, you don't have to share why you have it, it's not going into your personal reasons, on the fact that you had a bad start to the morning because you had an argument with your partner. It's not to go into those specifics. But it is important to, especially for the leader to start, by saying what's at the top of their mind. Because what this builds over time is transparency and trust. Trust is number one for a high performance team or a well functioning team of any kind. Especially on the days where everyone can sense that the leader is not at their best. And by the way, again, being social animals, people don't need to say things for us to realize that there's something wrong. Body language, tone of voice, all these things give out subtle messages that there's something wrong. And I think what's very powerful is when a manager shares that, "I'm not at my best today, it's nothing to do with you." That's key, saying that it's nothing to do with you. "But not quite feeling at my best today, so don't take that personally." It allows people to see that they can be human beings in the workplace, and also, especially from an employee perspective, is they're not going to tread on eggshells thinking that it could have been them that caused the leader to not feel at their best. The last point on the check in which I found quite interesting is to simply share what is one thing that you feel didn't go well since the last meeting and why, and what is one thing that went very well since the last meeting and why. Some people call this success of failure, but I don't think you need to use a strong term as failure, but it gives a very short term for the person to reflect on. Some people like to focus on work, or it could be both work and at home. But what is one thing that didn't go well, what you learned from it, and one thing that went really well and what did you learn from that. That's a nice way of having a check in. Probably gets everybody's brain into a more relaxed state to sharpen the cognitive ability and that executive ability of the brain. Yeah, I agree. So Jason, you've talked about the data driven approach to help us with our cognitive or executive function of the brain, and that part of the brain when we plan, make decisions, control ourselves. Especially our emotions to make sure that we're online. You talked about physical and social needs around that and gave us a few tip. What else is important for us to know about making sure that we're able to get the best ... We're able to use our cognitive and executive function so we're effective through the day? I think as a leader, again, what is a really nice practice to build up throughout the day is regularly giving feedback and seeking to receive it as well. Because the nice thing about regular feedback is that you build the self esteem and self worth of the person that you're providing it to. Even if it could be feedback where you feel they could do better, but you're really giving them awareness on how they can grow and develop. Whether it's feedback on something that's gone well or could have been better, you're giving them attention, you're being present with them, and that builds their self worth, and also their self esteem of course. But what it does for you as a leader is it also builds their respect for you. I think this habit of giving and receiving regular feedback is a really nice way of keeping your employees' brains fully switched on and also your own. Because as I mentioned with social needs, the self esteem and self worth for the individual will help them feel safe, feel recognized. That will fully switch their brain on. The fact that they respect you as a leader will give you that feeling that you're also actually functioning well and providing them with what they need. So you also feel a sense where your self esteem will increase, and therefore again, your brain will not be in a stress response. It will actually be in a mode where it's increasing these executive functions. Jason, do you have a specific example of a leader that you've coached, or how you've used this personally to become more effective at switching on that cognitive part of our brain to make better decisions and plans? Yeah. Let's start with what is most likely the most [inaudible 00:28:24] effective for myself, but also for whether I'd estimate over 90 percent of the leaders and people that we've worked within organizations is that it really starts with putting aside time to reflect, and during that time that you reflect, to look at the way that you're also going to be spending your time with the week ahead. So doing this either on a Friday and looking at the next week, or doing it on a Monday morning for the current week. But really not just reflecting on what did you do the previous week, what are the key priorities you have coming up for this week, but also where in calendar have I already set specific times to practice recovery. Whatever works best for me. Have I set specific times as a leader to have the one on ones that I need to have? That time to reflect with others. Not just reflection on your own, it's reflection with others. The other part is ensuring that you also have your other physical needs met, so where are you getting the movement that you need? Where do you have your mindfulness practice, or simply having time to be yourself? That reflection period, which can be as little as 15 minutes on a Friday or Monday, that is one of the most important factors that we've seen making a difference, because that's also ... If you build a habit around that, that is like a chain reaction that promotes all of the other things that you would like to build. Again, a habit around mindfulness or a habit around increasing the time you have with your employees. So that reflection is important. To help people start that habit, we use a tool that basically attracts people's time management. It's completely confidential, so it's not shared with their colleagues or anyone else. But they can use that to look at, okay, how are they spending their time, where do they have back to back meetings, and where do they not spend enough time with the right people, i.e. their own team, with the leaders in the other departments and so on. So you can use that as a way to build that practice up. The key point, with technology aside, is to build that habit of reflection. I love that you said 15 minutes, do the rear view look at the week, and then plan for your week ahead, making sure that you've got time for movement, and you've got time for recovery, and not having those back to back meetings that often leaders have, or sometimes they take pride in having. And of course, yeah, it's also about the 80/20 rule, right? If you do that 80% of the time, it's really gonna pay off. I think that's another thing that's challenging, especially as responsibility grows for leaders, because it's always they don't have time. But that's the thing with finding the right habits. Because I really believe, I mean it's a key philosophy of mine, that if you can automate the key behaviors that drive the greatest success for you, you have way more capacity to do the things that are new or you haven't done before, you need to learn. Because up to 45% of what we do every day is habitual. It's completely automated by, yeah, let's just say the unconscious part of the brain. And that's really important for us. But we need to practice the behaviors before they will become habitual. And we also need to make sure they're small enough to repeat. If we can start to practice that over time and not punish ourselves too much when we miss it, then we will be able to automate more of these key things and have way more cognitive capacity or performance to address the new or unexpected things that come up in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. That's one thing we'll never have more of is time. It's fixed. Yeah. Exactly. Good point. Thinking about those habits. What is one thing that a leader could do or potential leader could do right now that's going to make them more effective at making better decisions, planning, getting control of that cognitive executive function? I think the number one thing, to be quite honest, it's simply to prioritize sleep. This goes back to the physical needs. I can of course add one that people can do at work in second. Well, some companies here in Denmark actually can sleep during the work day. But the number one is sleep, just to work - and very specifically here - work with the one hour before bed, because that hour is a very important window on which you can impact the percentage of recovery and quality recovery that you get during yours. A lot of people will spend that hour by working, using their phone, or essentially using devices, and all of these devices emit blue light from the screen and decrease, as I mentioned before, the production of melatonin in the brain, and will really decrease the percentage of recovery you're getting, especially the deep sleep and REM sleep. So switching out television> But when you really need to be your best, no alcohol, actually no alcohol at all during the day would be ideal for your sleep, but especially after 4:00 in the afternoon. I mentioned devices, but those last little looks at the phone or email is a really bad idea during that hour, because even though the short look at it will not be enough for the blue light to maybe have an issue, the thought process that that triggers, especially if you see an email that means that there's an emergency has occurred or something you're going to face tomorrow is gonna be something that is demanding, subconsciously your brain is going to be working with that. That's very activating. Getting rid of devices and using that hour to simply either read a book, quality conversations with your partner, catching up with a friend, but actually using something that will help you to wind down. It might be a nice cup of herbal tea. I mean, this is quite individual, but for the majority of the people we see, reading a fictional book or a Kindle that's not back lit is a really nice way for them to allow their natural recovery process to kick in and get a good quality sleep, and that's the number one thing for your brain performance. Good quality sleep. The other tiny tip, which is super simple to implement, which I think has had one of the biggest effects throughout the day for both leaders, but for any employee, is to put in their calendar for ... Well, you can try it right after the call now, but if they're going to be at work tomorrow, to actually put in their calendar specific time. Just block out as little as five to 10 minutes as a private event so no one else can book them, and practice that breathing I mentioned before, where you're breathing in for a count of three and out for a count of four. Because that's one of the fastest ways to regulate your stress recovery balance, and you don't need any devices, you don't need to close your eyes. You just need the trigger to do it, which could be as simple as a calendar reminder. Those are wonderful tips. Sleeping and breathing are two things that we do every day. Hopefully, yeah. And honestly, simple things to maximize that, to help us think more effectively and really get more control over ourselves can go a long way. Well Jason, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your insight, and the great data and research about the brain and how we can really be more effective in planning and making decisions. I wanted to give you one last opportunity to see if there's anything else you'd like to share with the group. First of all, thank you to you Jill for the invitation. Appreciate the talk. You're welcome. The only other thing that I will say is that again, it's important to find what works best for you. And as you mentioned before, sometimes technology can help, but it's not something that anyone should depend on. But it's taking the time to build your own awareness on what are the things that are really draining my resources and what are the things that are gaining my resources is a great starting point on which you can then use to build the personal leadership. And that I think is critical when leading others, because it all starts with leading yourself. The greater the self awareness and self management you have, the greater your ability to be able to be present and to be able to know what to do to lead others. Think that would be the closing point. Great. Thank you. Well, I appreciate your time today and your tip, reminding us the best way to lead others is lead ourselves first. Thank you very much. You're welcome, Jill. Thank you. CLOSING: I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to create more cohesive teams.  Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business.  Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization.  You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at jillwindel@TalentSpecialists.net and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Manpremo: https://manpremoperformance.com/ Article on increasing brain performance: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/brain-performance-1505845 Article on building change competency: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/change-competency

Amazon News Amazon Prime Day this year has leaked and will be July 16-17  Amazon today announced the acquisition of Pillpack for $1b Amazon recruits small businesses, to deliver packages Amazon was fourth-largest advertiser in the US ahead of Walmart, GM and Ford. Amazon is merging 1P and 3P and the robots are winning vs merchants - "hands off the wheel" Industry News Supreme court rules in favor of South Dakota in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., et al.  The ruling effectively overturns the previous Quill Corp. v. North Dakota precedent and opens the door for all states to require e-commerce sites to collect and remit sales taxes to states. Amazon stands to be the biggest winner in the ruling.  Amazon already collects sales tax on all 1P sales.  Amazon will now be able to charge 3P merchants 2.9% to collect tax for them.  Amazon 1P will be more competitive with 3P and other e-commerce sites (eBay, NewEgg, etc..). Small E-Commerce sites and marketplace sellers are the biggest losers, as they will now need to collect sales tax (and likely pay a 3rd party to do it on their behalf), and navigate a multitude of complex out of state sales tax laws that are likely to emerge. All eyes turn now turn to Congress, to see if they will pass a law to clarify/simplify the sales tax collection issue on behalf of small businesses. Listener Questions Alex Volakis asks: Should others try the Warby Parker school bus store concept. Who do you think would benefit most from it? Amit Agarwal asks: Do customers like bundled products or do they like to create their own bundles? What are different merchandising tactics used to sell a collection of products? Jill Dvorak asks: Any leadership or managing through change tactics. at the corporate level to infuse more nimbleness in established brands? "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)" by Clayton M. Christensen "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 136 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, June 28th 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 136 being recorded on Thursday June 28th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason welcome back Jason and Scott show listeners. Well Jason listeners that are paying very close attention will notice we took a little bit of summer vacation off so we haven't really podcast for last couple weeks but it's exciting to get back to it and we have a lot of news report on and some analysis of some big things that happened in e-commerce of the last couple of weeks plus we've had some listeners very patiently waiting some for with some questions that they wanted to ask us so that's going to be rude the real focus of the show tonight. So let's start off with some. Amazon news your margin is there. It wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without some Amazon news and there is no shortage today we're going to go through kind of the cream of the crop here so that the big one is and I know you've been on pins and needles Jason like I am is when is Amazon Prime day well it has leaks and it looks like it's going to be July 16th to 17th and like last year they're going to do kind of the day of the half of deals so I'm pretty excited I've been saving some of my Gadget money on the side and I'm going to be watching carefully to see what's offered this year. Jason: [2:04] Yeah I am right there with you it's it feels like as the as it gets more and more in French do not do the deals and stuff get better every year and I think there's been some interesting evidence that it's now starting to have a meaningful impact on back-to-school that people are literally. Like planning their back-to-school spend around Sunday. Scot: [2:25] Yeah any gadgets on your wishlist or I think you already have every flavor of the Amazon Echo if it's cracked but anything not that you don't have. Jason: [2:35] So to be honest of the stuff that's currently available I there's nothing on my wishlist so I'll be. Curious to hear if there's some deal that usually it'll be a deal on something that entices me or something that's relatively new released there are some new fire products that I don't have but I'm not sure I really need to add him to my repertoire. Scot: [2:58] Got it I I save all year for my little accessory cables so I'll probably be buying like 20 iOS cables and USB C use and we go to those like crazy at my house so this is my time of year when I stock up on all that good stuff. Jason: [3:14] My wife thinks I have a hoarding problem with those things and I like but I'm not smart enough to wait for the deal so I you know I get my eyes I would be the one customer that would do the subscription service from anchor. Scot: [3:26] Yes I Do by a lot of anchor product on Prime day that's like there the juicy stuff I keep an eye out for. Jason: [3:32] Yes and I'm a little OCD about it I like I have much cooked my cables color coded so I got all my lightning cables are red and All Nite Nite my USB or black so I can. Easily visually identify what I need. Scot: [3:50] Brickell there was a big acquisition today I know that you're probably excited about cuz we've talked about this category on the show did you see that one. Jason: [3:56] I did I did and I have to go back and check our predictions but I think this is even one of my predictions for the air which I'm so excited about. Scot: [4:05] Darn it. Jason: [4:07] Yes I I thought you might not have considered that but there today Amazon announced that they acquired a company called pillpack and this is a 1 billion dollar acquisition which is not the biggest obviously with with Whole Foods but on the bigger side of the Acquisitions for Amazon and pillpack is a male fulfillment Pharmacy. They specialize in custom packaging so their primary customer are. Dogs that have chronic conditions and have to take multiple prescriptions daily and pill pack make these. Custom packages of their particular caplet so you get this right you know nicely old. Baggy of the pills you're supposed to take everyday and so that simplifies life for a lot of people that have to take a lot of medications. And it is a good customer experience and arguably. [5:04] It is in and of itself a nice way to reduce friction and improve the. The prescription processed but I think the reason most people are are super interested in the Amazon acquisition is less because of their unique Twist on mail-order prescriptions and more the fact that. This is Amazon buying a licensed Pharmacy and jumping into the pharmacy space with two feet. We've seen them sort of toad it before course they they made an investment in drugstore.com many years ago and last year they got a bunch of. Medical equipment pharmaceutical licenses in a bunch of states which allowed them to sell like. [5:47] Oxygen dispensing equipment and gloves and a lot of the the medical equipment but this is now giving them access to actually fill. Prescription medications and so you know a lot of us have been speculating that this would be another industry that Amazon would attack. And you're as usually happens with these things with Amazon. That you know I think they're market cap went up by you had ate the investment a billion dollars their market cap went up by like 15 or 20 billion today depending on what time you looked, and the big pharmaceutical companies Walgreens and CVS lost about 15 billion dollars in market cap today and it was kind of funny I think Walgreens had an investor call today and and that you know that. That the Walgreens CEO at you know actually other the phrase that we we make fun of on the show all the time, that he's not very worried about Amazon that pharmaceutical Pharmacy is much more complicated than all the other categories Amazon's tackled and it'll be much different. Scot: [6:50] I'll never figure it out just like a apparel and what Macy's said there they can't figure it out return. Jason: [6:55] Exactly return Macy's is positive the returns are too complicated and all the apparel companies are positive that everyone wants to try clothes on before they order on them. And not excetera excetera usually a Bad Bet there are complications to the pharmacy but I would argue that that Amazon is very good at solving for complications. And then just a couple other sort of interesting Snippets around the acquisition there are rumors that that. Walmart was the primary acquire of pill pack and the Amazon swooped in at the last minute with a higher offer and sort of. Stole pill pack out from under Walmart. Scot: [7:40] Do you know if I know Amazon with myself registering in a bunch of States just go back to them into all the us or you know. Jason: [7:51] I don't think so but I think he'll pack has only certain states that they had access to and there still is a pretty big bear you're like like still having the pharmaceutical licenses one thing but really, be a hundred percent in the pharmacy space you also need all the insurers. To agree to partner with you and light accept your. Your claims against all the various insurance companies and so what would a lot of the traditional pharmacies think is the big barrier to Amazon is the Amazon doesn't have those. There's deals with all the insurers and so you know. Not sayings on can't cut all those deals and they probably will but that's potentially a multi-year process and so a lot of people are speculating that the day 1 Amazon would focus on the subset of the pharmaceutical Market that's paying out-of-pocket for for medication either because they're under uninsured or because the. Because they have some limitations or restrictions on the insurance that make them want to pay out of pocket and then you know there's. I got some speculation that Amazon would would even acquire an insurer which would then of course let them be the Fulfillment partner for that right and there's. There's that you know there's a separate initiative the Amazon is doing with Warren Buffett. [9:19] Yeah around revamping Healthcare and and you know one of the the speculated outcomes of that is a potential new insurance product that could potentially partner with and with Amazon Pharmacy. Scot: [9:30] Yeah they just announced the CEO for that energy so seems like it's getting some momentum there for those who didn't listen to kind of our predictions for the year maybe you know what what's this mean for a CVS or Walgreens near us a Amazon successfully can compete on the pharmacy side at least the pill dispensing are those things convenient enough still or do you think that this is a problem. Jason: [9:57] Yep so here's what's interesting so that the traditional drug stores that are Walgreens and CVS is. Their whole business is predicated on foot traffic coming in to fill prescriptions in so the. Like they they don't tend to be super price competitive on all the over-the-counter products that they sell in the store and they don't tend to be a destination for any of those products for very many consumers but what happens is you going to get your Lipitor and you realize. That you need some snacks or you need some tissue paper or you need some Advil or whatever the case is while you're in the store. And so have a significant number of customers no longer need to visit Walgreens to pick up their prescription. The Walgreens brick-and-mortar model literally doesn't work like there is not a like another compelling reason for traffic to go in those stores. [10:56] And so you know either that would you know put Walgreens in huge distress or Walgreens would have to sort of find some way to reinvent their their retail space. And you know most most of that analysts look at those retailers and say hey the big Investments those guys are making these are in insurance companies and they're really their their plan is to sort of pivot from being a brick-and-mortar retailer to being a. A healthcare provider that's not tied to brick and mortar. And you knows we talk about a few times on the show Amazon doesn't have to capture 50% of the pharmacy market or anything like it you know if they can take a a 10% or 15% and in the traffic of those stores. [11:38] Like that probably put them over a Tipping Point that makes those doors not profitable and so it's. A very material threat to traditional drug stores. Whether Amazon successful or not if a bunch of consumers just decide that it's better to have their Pharmaceuticals delivered to home. I'm in there many companies trying to do that then you know that puts that same stress on those drug stores, it's been interesting the kind of traditional mail order pharmacy hasn't really gained a lot of momentum so there's a insurers insurance companies drive people to mail order pharmacy and there's a percentage of. Consumers there get their stuff VIA mail order at the percentage of people that use my order has actually shrunk a little bit in the last couple of years and so it'll be interesting if. Amazon can come up with a new enough experience or these custom pill packs are a big enough value-add that they, you know permanently change that that consumer Behavior which will you know really put a challenge in the drugstores and I I would expect to see a ton of drug stores close. Scot: [12:44] It just sounds so slow mail delivery. Jason: [12:47] Yeah and maybe mail is the wrong word right like I mean you know you can imagine all kinds of same-day fulfillment centers like at the moment. You know people tend to get get the home delivery of prescriptions when they're tronic things that you take you around right and when you you know God forbid you're sick and the doctor calls in a prescription or you go see a doctor and they call in a prescription that you pick up like those are the things you're more likely to walk in and and get that but of course there's no reason that pharmacies couldn't. Prepare those those meds or Amazon you don't own pharmacies couldn't prepare those meds and deliver on in 1 hour to your house. Scot: [13:26] Yeah yes so it could be a cool Prime thing like Prime Pharmacy where yeah Auto refills the pharmacies I deal with like they never called the doctor and do stuff right so Amazon consult a lot of that stuff so. Jason: [13:41] There's a ton of friction in current experience that like we as consumers are just learn to deal with that that you can imagine someone like Amazon taking out of the experience and and make it game changing like in the in the same way that Uber disrupted the taxi industry. Scot: [13:57] Cope well that was one of your predictions of one of mine was about Amazon delivery and today there was an announcement about that sort kind of kind of even on this I guess Amazon sent out this really interesting effectively up a call to on chores to build delivery capability that that Amazon will then leverage there as we've covered on the show a lot there the really worried about the capacity out there in the network they're building their own direct this is really what I would consider a call to arms for entrepreneurs to build a 1099 kind of delivery Network yeah I talked about going out starting a business for a minimum of 10K wish you the vans that are Amazon branded uniforms and then they talk about how and their models of doing this. [14:43] You can make up to $300,000 in profit a year that's pretty interesting in. A little unknown thing is FedEx Ground did this they had they had a lot of 1099s their individuals and then there was some kind of a court thing that happened where that was deemed did they should be employees so they world all that up into businesses so when you see FedEx Ground delivery out there it is a it is a 1099 Network it'll frequently say you know FedEx Ground operated by and they'll be some little LLC brand they're kind of small down by the door. Doubt they have built a similar, Network so this is going to be interesting to see how Amazon build this out if they're certain areas they're targeting and then also what this means for the flex drivers which is more of an Uber individual kind of a thing there's a lot of work a lot of people believe the Uber 1099 model is at risk that that same kind of litigation will happen that they're actually should be treated as employees this would Guild Amazon another kind of an option on delivery if that were to happen to the flex driver thing too so so kind of covers several basis I thought that was pretty interesting. Jason: [15:55] Yeah and I in my mind I could imagine. That it's easier for Amazon to enforce and Achieve certain service levels with these. Individual with his business operators over the 1099s i e you know it's like you can require these businesses to buy these Amazon branded trucks into wear Amazon uniforms and things that are like, less convenient and economically viable to impose on individual 1099 work. Scot: [16:32] Yeah I should have mentioned it but one of the things they're going to provide is the software so there, I can give you all the software needed to run a business like this I think it's from an acquisition they did that they have kind of been using internally or maybe as part of flex and now they've there they're part of this whole deal is they will give you the software which is kind of a clever way for them to have visibility into the SLA is right they can kind of see if your using their software in the cloud presumably they be able to see you know how you're doing against LA's the required to use their software because they didn't want to be able to see them. Jason: [17:08] Yeah I mean I read through the whole program and to me it feels exactly like franchisee model like I mean they've they've completely template eyes the whole business they they give you all the processes and software like they literally have like. The Dead training program down in the hiring recommendations for these businesses and they have the whole economic model is it like they essentially say that like hey you know depending on how quickly you scale you're going to make between you're going to net between 70k and 300K a year in this business. [17:48] Anything else about the Amazon do it by the way what I just found someone interesting the Amazon delivery was this big plans PR thing and they had a bunch of media to Seattle and they you know gave the media all the story under embargo and so you know today was the big announced a and they got a bunch of press over that over all that and then it it feels like I kind of got stepped on when they announce the pillpack acquisition you know which they did none of this pre-press planning for. Scot: [18:20] Yeah yes sometimes the best plans going to get Crush by that the dip The Pride react to Walmart into that position was on its own timetable that they couldn't control and it just kind of unfortunately probably landed on the same day happen sometimes. Jason: [18:36] Another interesting thing that came out last week is at age does this evaluation of all the top advertisers every year and a surprise, appearance on the top 10 list was Amazon as the fourth largest Advertiser in the United States so they're spending more on Advertising then folks like for GM and they're the retailer that spending a listen advertising so they're actually spending more and advertising than Walmart it. Scot: [19:10] Yep that's interesting it's funny because it's for you know for the longest time basil said they would never really do marketing cuz they prefer to put all that money into shipping fee and you know that that word of mouse with mouth was the best marketing but then once they came out. With Kindle they had to really kind of start doing some marketing In and Out imagine if you looked up the bulk of that is going to be around Alexa. Jason: [19:34] Yeah no I think that's I think that's why Fair they develop a bunch of owned Brands and they've they've had the market to support those owned brands. But I do think you know that and they've kind of had them float on this they are also investing a lot more in Performance Marketing for just a core retail business at the moment then they. They have it in the recent past said so you know you leveraging Google products and things like that to drive more traffic to Amazon. Scot: [20:03] Another interesting Amazon news piece this is kind of more internal facing but I think listeners will find it pretty fascinating it was a little bit of clickbait so that you know the article came out of Bloomberg and it it showed one of the the Kiva warehouse robots and it said you know Amazon's robots are moving for the warehouse to headquarters which kind of you like what are they going to deliver pencils or what's going on what's really happening is as we've reported on the show we had to Andrea lay on and she was telling us about some projects they had internally where an AI World very frequently negotiate with indoors and they call it this whole hands off the wheel initiative, there's several layers so that there's there's vendor negotiations but then there's also you know on the first party side. [20:52] Putting machines against humans to see who can piss pick the best products to put on Amazon and buy. [21:00] And at the same time you also have the marketplace side of Amazon so what's happening is it looks like they're squishing all this together now the guy that ran the third-party marketplaces moved over to a new project that's on an ounce Peter Pharisee so they wrapped up the marketplace and the 1pt mused to be very despair teams you I would go to Amazon in in meetings and introduce people across his team so it was funny and it looks like the Common Thread there is less peep so more machines can imagine these categories because they effectively do a better job more machines doing negotiations and less people and then this kind of integration of 1p and 3p I think this is good because we found a lot of vendors get really confused and mixed messaging from Amazon where they'll go to one team in Amazon the go to the marketplace apparel team and say hey we want to do X Y and Z in those say you know oh no you have to do this that the other and then the one p team will get a whole different answer so I think this ultimately be good and you're the 3p team the three-piece cider Amazon bigger than the one piece side so I think it'll be great to have a lot of that DNA kind of mixed in there and you know there's a downside this Automation and can be pretty frustrating to companies that are used to the old school you know having going to. [22:23] Bendle and chicken someone's hand and showing them the products and those kinds of things this is essentially you can stay home and chat robot and have the same outcome of the Amazon now so you know it'll be interesting to see how vendors net out on this change but it did pretty interesting the automation you know what they at least according to Amazon's data has beat out people is as it comes to merchandising and negotiating with Thunders. Jason: [22:50] Yeah for sure who the things are interesting to me about that merger I do feel like there's a way when they were more siloed in which sellers could potentially take advantage of this I was so I do think they're brands that, wanted to sell 3p on Amazon didn't want to be one piece hours because they wanted to control their own pricing like in in principle, if you're going to be a three-piece seller on Amazon Amazon has the right to like also be a one piece seller but a lot of, Brie and seemingly fell between the cracks there and we're able to be pure 3-piece hours without being bothered by the 1p guys and there's a lot of speculation that now that one p m 3 p r kind of merging that like you know that Aunt Amazon going to be a lot more purposeful about who can be a 3p seller without without Amazon having the option to be a one piece hour. [23:46] So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, and then that's the thing that I chuckle at with the hands off the wheel I think it's a super app metaphor if you're a very big seller on Amazon you do have a a human contact and you have this personal relationship and I think what's funny about that is it's exactly like the the safety driver in the autonomous vehicles like you know it maybe makes you feel better that there's a guy sitting in the driver seat but he actually isn't touching the steering wheel and so you can have all the good conversations and take him to dinner and do other relationship building you want. But at the end of the day it's the computer that's deciding you know what the the terms of your your trade relationship are with Amazon. Scot: [24:35] Summary of some of the Amazon highlights over the last couple of weeks biggest news item is our very own Supreme Court in the United States got involved in e-commerce and I know you have a lot of interesting insights on this one so I'm anxious to hear your thoughts about what happened there. Jason: [24:57] So this is a case that the Supreme Court heard several months ago and they they ruled I guess this would be the last week now. The actual case the Supreme Court ruled on is called South Dakota vs Wayfair Overstock and do egg and a lot of people sort of shorten it to South Dakota vs Wayfair. And essentially South Dakota passed a law that said we're going to require sell sellers. To collect sales tax when people in South Dakota buy goods from them even if the seller doesn't have. A presence in South Dakota and that there's actually a precedent. Based on a ruling the Supreme Court ruled on in 1992 that South Dakota can't do that right like there's this. President called quill which was confusingly enough it was actually quill vs North Dakota. That the Supreme Court ruled on a 1992 that essentially said. [26:03] In order for a seller to be required to collect sales tax for a given State they had to have a physical presence in that state to establish Nexus and so a lot of. Pure play online retailers. Based on that rule like avoided having a presence in big populated states so that they didn't have to charge sales tax in those States. And it actually determined where Amazon's corporate headquarters would be when Jeff Bezos was starting the company that. President was already in place and so they they pick Seattle because it was a good techhub that didn't have a huge population and wouldn't be a huge customer base and avoided. Having a presence in States like California that would be huge customer bases and in the early days of Amazon. Amazon was super restricted with their employees they wouldn't let their employees you know do business travel to the states they wouldn't let the campus recruiters like go to the the job fairs in the college dates because they were there being super careful too. Avoid establishing a physical presence so they could have avoided paying taxes. [27:11] Into this this the Supreme Court in this ruling essentially reverses that quill precedents and so so so now it's going to be possible for states to pass a law that essentially require. I'm all us out of state sellers to collect sales tax and remitted to the the states. [27:34] And you know there's a couple of interesting things in that first of all. You are a ton of the media you know I was writing about how what a big win for Mainstreet this was and you know how was a blow to Amazon and. You know that the national retail Federation you know kind of claim though it was a victory for retailers and in tax fairness and all these things. The reality is in my mind the biggest winner in this deal is Amazon and the reason I say that is because. Amazon is already collecting tax Amazon gave up avoiding that Nexus a number of years ago. They're collecting tax in every state that has attacks and the reason they do that is they wanted to put distribution centers everywhere and they wanted to put Prime now centers everywhere and they just found it. Was better for them to collect the taxes then to have all these impediments on where they could have a physical presence. So this actually makes Amazon more competitive with other online pure plays right so it it it actually makes Amazon more competitive with Overstock and Newegg and and like all these. Visa vertical specialty retailers like a faucet that you know specialize in plumbing fixtures in our aren't collecting tax. So it helps Amazon's 1p business be more competitive. [28:52] That detect the sales tax that Amazon isn't collecting is from 3-piece hours who have the option to collect the tax or not and most don't. And so this ruling is going to require all of Amazon's 3p sellers to collect tax which is actually going to make Amazon's 1p business more competitive with the 3p business so that's a win. Also Amazon charges a 2.9% fee on all sales. In order to calculate and collect tax for those 3p seller so this is a huge new service fee that Amazon is going to start collecting from all their Marketplace vendors so that's a. A big win. This ruling makes Amazon more competitive with everyone else and really doesn't hurt Amazon's competitiveness. In any meaningful way. [29:47] Which is which is interesting and I would argue a lot of the the the media and info Scott wrong when they when they first heard about this announcement. Who's probably getting hurt by this is a lot of the small sellers right if you are a a a small business that's primarily selling via 3p on Amazon and eBay. You know your your cost just went up and potentially. There are about 12,000 tax jurisdictions in the US and so every one of those jurisdictions in theory could now pass a law that says you have to collect their tax and they can each have their own rules for the tax. And So It Goes could be a huge burden to the sellers. [30:32] Track and calculate these 12,000 different tax laws and so you're not allowed to have to cut the tax but you have to pay a bunch of money to collect the tax. Properly and that is a potential big burden for the small sellers. I would argue there's very few small brick-and-mortar retailers that aren't also trying to sell online and aren't also trying to ship out of state. So you know when people talk about this benefiting Main Street it's only benefiting the dinosaurs on Main Street that haven't figured out how to launch a Shopify site yet right. And so so it is going to be a potential burden on a new small businesses. And what's going to be most interesting to watch now is that the South Dakota version of the tax law is a very mild version of the law. It essentially says that all the different cities in South Dakota can't charge their own individual taxes that that dumb. We're going to have a Statewide system that's easier for businesses to comply with. And it'll also says that the state can't collect taxes retroactively so no one's going to be on the hook for their sales over the last 5 years but. [31:44] Any new state could now pass out a more aggressive version of the law it has more burdens for the the small business and that even tries to retroactively collect taxes for The Last 5 Years and it's it's unclear based on the Supreme Court ruling weather whether the states will be able to get away with the more aggressive version of this wall so that it's it's kind of going to the tech e-commerce taxes into a little bit of chaos while this all plays out and you know I think. [32:15] Everyone's hope which seems like a long shot is that what what could really simplify all this is it Congress sort of enacted a a lot the clarified what what how State should treat the taxes and Congress could pass a national law that essentially say is all the states have to, you know follow the same system in charge the same rate and there's lots of draft of these kind of laws there was one that was drafted a couple years ago called The Marketplace Fairness Act and it could allow all the states to collect sales tax but dramatically simplify the process of collecting those taxes for all the the online Sellers and protect all the online Sellers from retroactive taxes and things like that so like the right thing to do for our economy would be for Congress to pass a law but it you know it seems like there's a lot of partisan stuff going on in Congress and you know doesn't seem like there their they're passing a heck of a lot of common sense legislation at the moment. Scot: [33:19] Another interesting win for Amazon is there's a fair number of people that don't use at ba because Amazon just parked around an FBI and if you're one of these companies that's really you know of a carefully watching where your Nexus is you can't say to Amazon you can't say two things you can't say I only want my product Cindy's FBA facilities you also can't say you know where is my product right now so I can make sure that I'm tracking where I kind of I could have Nexus or not so presumably this get rid of that both objection and now you might as well just use that Paso another win for Amazon is FBA if we're going to go to a world pretty quickly here which seems like what you're predicting where every state is charging some form of tax. The NFPA is another enough was going to get more users because it's going to be enough there are no negatives for for doing that around Nexus. How do you say so if I may say I'ma an eBay or an Amazon Seller today what do I do do I need to start, cutting taxes out there one should start that right now like what's the action item on. Jason: [34:30] Yeah so at the moment you're only on the hook for the state you have a physical Nexus and and South Dakota. The each state has to pass an out-of-state tax collection law in order for them to then put this burden on on sellers and there are a number of states that have laws going through their state legislature right now and so you like your your immediate action is that you you do need to start you do not have a tax liability in South Dakota based on this ruling but you can anticipate didn't very short order all the states are desperate for money so of course they're all going to pass along some of the legislators are in a position to do it real fast summer going to be slow and and complicated the burden is going to keep going up and almost you know certainly the the way that most sellers are going to have to do this is you're going to have to pay a third party to calculate and remit all these taxes on your behalf and so that's another big winner in this is companies like taxjar and vertex and Olvera and those those companies that help businesses calculate and remit sale. Scot: [35:44] Yeah now, physical stores the taxes get down to you know literally the municipality so you could be in you know Secaucus New Jersey and they have a different apparel tax there's a tax on shipping but then certain there's no food tax or something that you cross into another area and the taxes are all different do you think this is going to get that complex or are you to the municipalities going to try to take there local tax structure in Buckhannon National kind of for that City kind of. Jason: [36:16] So here is going to be the balancing act all the municipalities would have like to pass their own laws so Secaucus would definitely like to have their own tax collection law and have their there sales tax laws imposed on all out of the jurisdiction Cellars the thing that's going to keep them all from doing that is that there's a a clause in the the the. [36:45] Though the prevailing tax laws that says States cannot put an undue burden on cross-state Commerce. And so the argument is going to be that it every municipality have their own set of laws and Secaucus has a tax holiday on this particular day and doesn't text food and all these different things the bat is going to trigger the Commerce Clause and and put an undue burden right and so part of the reason that the Supreme Court said they ruled in favor of South Dakota is because the law is was very carefully written to try to minimize that the the bird and right inside they don't date the it explicitly does not allow individual municipalities in South Dakota to have their own tax laws like they are there there's a Statewide tax system for out-of-state Sellers and so it knows. Supreme Court rule on any other than the South Dakota version so if Secaucus now pass is a really you know burdensome law and again Secaucus could also say and you owe is taxes for The Last 5 Years of sales. [37:58] Then you know someone's going to be able to litigate that and say it's a violation of the Commerce Clause and that potentially could make it back to the Supreme Court and you you know, the Supreme Court could choose to hear it or not and they could you know essentially say hey the South Dakota version is we going to bed the more you know arduous Secaucus version is not legal and so you know every States going to have to balance how aggressive they want to be you know with with how much we go Jeopardy they they they want to assume you know in case these things get where to get it. Scot: [38:36] Yes it feels like it's going to take like 5 to 10 years for this all the sort out and it's kind of a kind of a boring Plumbing topic but I think it's important for listeners cuz a lot of articles I read we're super confusing and I think you did a good job of summarizing. Jason: [38:50] One last point that just was kind of sad I give you actually listen to the the oral arguments in the case like the justices were asking really good questions how expensive is it for a small business to calculate their tax liability if this if we rule in favor of South Dakota how you know how much is incremental cost is is that going to impose on Wayfair bright and. It was really embarrassing, how little tangible information the lawyers in both side of this case had and how e-commerce works and I I say that like. If your lawyer like arguing a case before The Supreme Court that is like the Superbowl of litigation right and you'd expect like the most prepared best teams and yet you know it it's felt like the the level of preparation in knowledge about how digital Commerce work you know was was pretty pretty lacking in the justices openly expressed frustration that they couldn't get. You know clear answers to who you know some some reasonable questions about this so it you know it's further further evidence that, you know the economy and Technology are way way way ahead of the legal system. Scot: [40:08] Oh I nominate you to be a expert for the next to supreme court hearing on this. Jason: [40:13] Yeah I would make myself available that would be a pretty awesome gig. Scot: [40:19] Yeah and you get to wear a suit how fun is that. Jason: [40:21] I I have done some federal expert witness stuff in the you know I am willing to wear a suit for the the fees that you're able to charge as an expert witness. Scot: [40:31] Cool that that kind of wraps up the news section of the show and let's transition into some listener questions. [40:44] Question question question question question. Alright get the echo turned way up on that one our first question is pretty Technical and it comes from a friend of the show Scott Silverman this one goes back you mentioned this kind of in a phrase recently sniffing the tires Scott wants to know what do you recommend is the best technique for sniffing tires. Jason: [41:15] Hey Scott I totally appreciate the question sort of two-party answer if you are a casual Tire sniffer I think what you want to do is just you know get down on the ground get your nose is close to the tires as possible and you know really just sort of in intake the the fumes but if you're going to be a serious professional Tire sniffer what you really want to do is get the hydraulic jack and raise the car up to nose level because that actually allows a lot more oxygen under the tires which which you know helps more molecules get in your nose and really get you the whole bouquet of the tire. Scot: [41:56] And of course it's important to take the vehicle for a spin before you do this you get that like nice fresh smell. Jason: [42:03] Yeah you do want the rubber warmed up absolutely great point. Scot: [42:06] Our second questions comes from and I'll do a blanket apology there's some last names in here that may be a little tricky but I'll do my best this is from Alex Velasquez and he asks should others try the Warby Parker school bus tour concept and who do you think would benefit most from it I had no idea what this was so I figured this was a good question for you. Jason: [42:27] Yep so this is one of the early marketing tactics at Warby Parker did I think they actually did this before they open the formal store I'm so they I think they may be were using their corporate headquarters is a showroom but essentially what they did is they bought an old school bus decked it out and started driving to events and venues and things and letting people try on their glasses and it was a super effective marketing vehicle it's sort of a mobile pop-up store if you will and so in general I would say those kinds of things are a great tactic particularly for e-commerce business is what you know you feel like you'd benefit from a physical presence so I got a pop-up store avoids a lot of the costs of permanent rent you know which a lot of the times of the year the traffic in that that store is going to be low so you can do a pop-up just around Peak times and instead of it being fixed to one location the idea behind this bus is you could send the bus to a lot of different locations so there you know what be purchased per ticket clever and they've done a bunch of versions of since the school bus so they continue to use that tactic I do think it's a good customer acquisition and brand building tactic. [43:45] The there's actually a retailer that's been doing it much longer LL Bean literally have a. A bus built in the shape of their iconic rubber boot that they drive around and let people try on boots and kind of build their brand. Do that and they send it to outdoor festivals and stuff where where people might be interested in the boots so I think it's a good tactic. A lot of Brands could potentially benefit from it but the brands that would most benefit from it. Is if there's a a physical a or experiential element to the kind of products you're selling, so that it's not only are you building your brand awareness but you're also helping people you don't get that tactical experience so if you're selling. You know food and and you going to give people a chance to try it or you're selling apparel that gives people a chance to try sizes or. I feel the textiles are or you know things like that are particularly going to benefit from these kind of mobile pop-up store. Scot: [44:51] Cool and thanks for the question Alex. Jason: [44:59] So I think the next question is from vomit. A gyro and thanks God for just claiming that were massacring names do customers like bundled products or do they like to create their own bundles what are different merchandising tactics used to sell collections of product. Scot: [45:19] Yeah this is this is a good one you know it it kind of depends so. I like a system where the consumer has the you know a fair amount of power and convenience and they can choose to either buy a core product and its Associated add-ons and you have any Commerce system that is smart enough to kind of recommend the right things you know so it's not kind of recommending these things that are kind of random but they're frequently bought together. Which is a feature that you see on Amazon all the time now one tactic where this comes up a lot is in the world of marketplaces where. Frequently you'll be selling where you see this the most is in digital cameras this is kind of case study of this so what you see is you go to Amazon and you search for you know a Canon D40 which is a common camera and you know the tops quc is that core camera body SKU. [46:18] But then what a lot of people do is they will create a new skew by creating unique bundle. And I'll take a camera a memory card a set of lenses and a bag and a variety of things and I'll create a new skew a new Ace in in Amazon parlance and that is you can kind of a. You should have separate from the competitors for that Coeur Camera. [46:43] The be there for you know when consumer searches for Canon D40 if you've done this right you should have a pretty good shot at showing up higher level and then see you can effectively have a price that is much just submitted Lee discounted for that bundle and you're effectively hiding you know the discount in the margin by obfuscating it to the consumer making it harder for them to price compare so some things now you know this whole truth holds true for other marketplaces like eBay and Walmart eye center now the downside of this is Marketplace in her wise to the store frequently kind of challenging these things and saying you know does a bundle really make sense what are you doing here are you kind of ruining the customer experience. [47:33] So I've seen that used in it as a merchandising tactic there on your own website to I don't think I've seen as we have a child as we have this very clever skateboard a Cellar and they've come up with a couple private labels like their own wheels and things like that so when they they take a deck and skateboarding you have the deck which is just sold without wheels and and the the other pieces there and then they they take some private label stuff or owned brands do use Jason's language and it does create this kind of unique bundle that then isn't available anywhere else, and they can do a lot of relaxing things with pricing on that because they can't really change do the map the price but when they put their wheels on there they can offer this bundle that that is never more competitive anything else out there because they have got a known brand on the wheels and they have more margin and they can pass it on to the consumer so those are some of the things that come to mind for me Jason anything you want to add on bundling. Jason: [48:31] Yeah I would just say like the there are two similar but different things in my expenses, in different circumstances consumers want both so so every e-commerce platform uses a different vernacular but, binocular would be bundles versus kits right and so in this scenario a bundle could be. [48:56] A set of things that are recommended to go together right so shop the look you you one quick button and you add the blouse the pants the belt and shoes. But all four things get separately added to your cart and then you could edit the cart you could get two pair of the the blouses if you wanted and you could delete the shoes if you already had two shoes for example so it's, a shopping convenience to put related items together you know in and apparel is a common version of that like in crafting it could be a kit or project I got all the. All the items you need to make a sweater or something like that in food it could be by the recipe to get all the ingredients for a particular dish. But you know of course the customer might already have salt so you you know the customer could take salt out of the cart after they. They bought that bundle in a kids are often. Hard coded things that have to go together so it's one skew it shows up as one line item in the car you can't edit it. If any of the items in that cat are unavailable then the itin. The kid is unavailable in the order we get back ordered and things like that and so there are certain types of products. That lend themselves to kits and to your point. If you're going to have a special price on the the multiple item configuration than you probably want that to be a kid because you wouldn't want customers to. [50:25] Then delete three of the four items and still get a special price. But in some cases you just want to make it easier for people to buy multiple things and have a higher overall cart and then there's. A lot of nuances in the kits are they. Hard-coated manual kits what you would often cause static it where you know the skews are permanently tied together are there Dynamic kits that are built by recommendation engines or things like that are there customizable kids you know that have different options that customers can pick via VIA attribute type selections and and so it is super complicated thing and it is one of the things that can differentiate some of the e-commerce platforms from the others is their support for a broad range of these different options vary wildly and then when you throw in the ability to offer promotions on top of these bundles or kits that can get super complicated and so that you know if you know that that's a core part of your business that might drive you to select one one eCommerce platform versus another because it might have better support for the that the particular model year use. Scot: [51:35] Is anyone using AI to solve this like. Yeah I think I need Amazon's is kind of a group thing I'm sure there's gotta be like 10 AI vendors out there trying to solve this kind of Phoenix recommended product. Jason: [51:51] Yeah and I mean this man takes get tricky like I would argue that the the Panic recommendation vendors that have been around for 12 years like they're rich relevance in a certain is like they're there heavily AI base solution so it's almost like. Saying it AI recommendations versus not as kind of a difficult distinction to make the, that most of the product recommendation product that I'm aware of the you know are going to be closer to you. The most common model is they're going to recommend other products and you have to click each product separately to add it to the car they may offer bundles which is one-click ordering right in in Amazon does bundle the recommendations the right so right below the main product information on the product detail page there's always going to be up by these bring three things together which is you know it's the AI base recommendation engine is putting the three things that you most want together and you can choose to add one two or three of those things to your cart so that just that S Mart Convenience that Amazon's done to try to get the aov up that's the company that's the best example of using AI to actually create schitt's if you will is probably going to be Stitch fix right because they send one skew to your house which is a fixed with five items in it and they're primarily using AI to select which five items they send to your app. Scot: [53:18] Wrinkled her next question comes from jeweled work and she a skinny leadership or managing through change tactics and then over on the Facebook group I asked for clarification on that if I gave her a couple choices there and she said you're more at the corporate level so let's assume you're one of these Brands that's been around for a hundred years this is very much in the news right now where allottees activists are going into the established Brands and brand houses and shaking them up and you know really getting agitated they're not doing enough direct-to-consumer you seen folks like Campbell's down 30 40% due to all these changes happening and you know I heard your question is essentially how did these companies become more Nimble you know you've had this guy a hundred year plus world where the consumer didn't change very much and now they're changing constantly. What what do you recommend a brand do to get more nipple. Jason: [54:13] Yeah it's a great question Jill and the real answers if I had a perfect recommendation I probably wouldn't be bothering to do this podcast cuz it would make my job so much easier that I'd be you know waiting on an island somewhere because it is a huge challenge in general you see digital native companies are much better at being agile and nimble then big established Brands and it just so happens in my practice I mainly work with big established Brands and they all struggle with being at a a speed disadvantage TD small companies and the one exception is you know that the giant company Amazon is annoyingly. Add jolyn and Innovative despite their their size in the fact that they're you know now 20 years old. So two things to think about here the first is like a big question always comes up is. [55:07] Ivory Tower Innovation versus Grassroots Innovation right so you know Ivory Tower would be, let's set up an innovation lab right you know your target let's set up an innovation lab you know your Minneapolis wet set up at univation lab in San Mateo California and let's hire a bunch of people whose only job is to be Innovative and let them come up with all the new ideas. And if you're a store manager in Minnesota you know it's not your job to be Innovative right and so I having a dedicated focus on Innovation the hope his bees Innovation labs. Can can be more efficient you know there was a huge Trend in retail towards these labs and. Target Nordstrom Zappos Walmart you know all we're opening opening these stand-alone labs. [55:56] While some retailers definitely still have these Labs I would argue the trend is a little bit against the stand-alone lab so we've seen a lot of the retailers including Target Nordstrom. And a post move away from the dedicated Innovation lab model and so the alternative is. Create the ability for Innovation to come from the the main line Grassroots employees right into the the Marquee example of this is not a retail for me it's it's a Doe B and they had this clever product called. [56:29] Process called the Adobe Redbox and essentially any employee at Adobe that thinks they have a good idea for a new. Product or process or or service at Adobe can apply for this thing called in Adobe red box and it's a Innovation kit. And it's all the tools you need to sort of prototype your idea and get it to a level where you can present it. 288 sort of jury of Senior Management at the. Add Adobe and so it you know it's pretty clever it has things like a debit card in it that you can use to buy you don't web hosting services and it has. You know I'm feeling codes you can get to you know provide to some of your colleagues have them help you with certain things. And said that the idea is to make it easy for anybody with a good idea anywhere across the the organization to pursue that idea. [57:30] And so it the moment I see more retailers trying to Foster Innovation through. Providing processes and tools to their main line employees than I do the Ivory Tower but I certainly seen both work and I've seen both fail. The biggest advice I give to Legacy clients. To succeed in Innovation is not so much where that Innovation sits in the organization it's how The Innovation is approached and here like I highly recommend. Serta imitating the Amazon model right so you know Amazon famous we have this to Pizza teen model in the the premise behind that is. Hey any project we do we're going to narrow the scope such that it can be performed by you know a team no larger than could be fed by two pizzas. So that could be you no one four digit software developer or you know it might be six or seven people in your department. [58:31] But the idea being. The way to do Innovation is not to do some Grand pilot that has to integrate with 37 Legacy systems and has to get approval from 18 different departments and requires a team of 40. And you know by the time you you get an experience to live you will spend so much money and effort that you know if if the experience isn't successful. You know you you passed your company of Fortune and even if it is successful like the the business probably you know shifted from the time you started to the time you finish. The most successful Innovations are when you can you know find gorilla ways to do things scale at and make the the. Hiwot as independent and distinct from the rest of the organization as possible right and so to me the great example of that is. [59:23] Amazon Prime now, you know when they said like hey we want to deliver stuff in one hour they didn't say all right let's get a meeting together with the leaders of the Fulfillment center and figure out how we carve off some space in the Fulfillment center and figure it out we, change all our software in the Fulfillment center to support this one hour delivery and do all these things they they got some guys that said hey we're going to buy our own you know even though we own all this stuff, we're going to buy our own building for this pilot and we're going to write our own software and we're going to just keep things as simple and independent as possible get the experience out there in front of the customer as quickly as possible and learn from the customer, which elements of our idea are valuable and value by the customer and which ones aren't then we're going to refine it from there and only after we've. Proven The Innovation and unrefined it are we going to figure out how to integrate it into the rest of the Enterprise so I really like that sort of. Independence and you know we highly encourage a lot of these big Legacy Brands to sort of adopt a more agile. Business process so we talked about ad Joel a lot as a development technique technique but it really can be a a business process and you know sort of isolate these these projects as much as possible and make an independent initiative. Scot: [1:00:40] That's awesome so I'm up I come out at from a startup bad guy perspective I'm on my 4th company I started and like you have worked with a lot of Brands and I think the step a lot of them get wrong is what I would call buying soda I'll start doing something kind of innovative like selling director something and then the VP of sales will say woohoo oh hey wait a minute what are we doing I've gotten upset Channel partner that's upset wrestling direct and then doll the panic in the unwind the whole thing so before you go down some of the steps you recommended you know I think. [1:01:17] The key is got to get complete buy-in from the whole management team that this is going to be something they're there once committed to a book that I I now that kind of started this discussion is the innovator's Dilemma. This is kind of a must-read for people interest in this topic in this by Clayton Christensen I will put a link in the show notes and you know what does essentially does it talks about, how do companies get in this position and why and then it has some cases of the very few companies that have gotten out of this position so it's really important to get that buying from everybody because if everyone's not bought in you'll get this whole failure cycle of trying to do something really Innovative as a brand and then it gets squashed by people that really aren't bought in and then you know there nothing too happens and companies that are large and older is a lot of ideas get squished because what I call exception base management where you come up with this idea and then to what is start to happen to edge cases well you know what if you know a you know what if this isn't profitable what if this and that the other and that. [1:02:25] Becomes you just get kind of stuck in tar with that you have to have to get everyone bought into taking some risk that the company's also not used to Basil's has a really good letter on this stuff about it Amazon where they have commit to disagree is kind of thing you know so so you know we disagree but let's try it and see what happens like why not try it. Go try something and to that and there's really good book Jason mention you're taking some of these ads all kind of Concepts out of software development putting them in your company one of my favorites is called Lean Startup sat is geared towards when you're starting a company but I think big companies can learn a lot there and it kind of educate you on the languages start upset you know Facebook kind of famously has said go fast and break stuff and that's really kind of craving orientation towards not worrying about the exceptions and guessing put something out there and take a little risk and then see how customers react to it and then course-correct quickly so the answer to you know what is what you know maybe not and. [1:03:30] We won't know until you try so you got to kind of get your culture oriented towards trying stuff rapidly, iterating versus kind of a 18 month cycle of planning and hand-wringing and getting every little detail done and then putting something out to be agile yet to be able to put something out and fail I go over and over again the case study there for Amazon that's classic is the fire phone you know they they put a phone out there there's a million reasons that would fail and it failed Jason I think they're the only people that have one but if they didn't fail at that Fire Phone they would have never done Echo because they really wanted to be in the platform World they realized the failure the phone that that was going to be at and then they went all in on Echo and. That is part of the culture they have is it's okay to fail just going to do it quickly and inner eight and learn you can't just kind of like digging infinitely deep hole. Jason: [1:04:23] Yeah that's great advice. Scot we have a few more a great listener questions but I actually think we are going to have to hold them for our next show because it has happened again we've used up the an hour of our listeners very valuable time. And so if you enjoy the show we certainly would appreciate that that five star review on iTunes if you have anymore questions or follow-ups on these questions please do jump on her Facebook page and drop us a line or hit either of us up on Twitter because we will pick up the remainder of these questions and any new ones in the next show. Scot: [1:05:03] Thanks for joining server buddy. Jason: [1:05:05] Until next time happy commercing.

Friday, February 23, 2018. Education Leadership and Beyond: Surviving & Thriving with Andrew Marotta. Blog #36: Carolina on my Mind with Jason Brenner. Podcast #36- aired Saturday 2/17/18. 9am live or on the app anytime country 107.7 WDLC, 106.9 WYNC, Wall Radio, & Pocono 96.7. Carolina on my Mind... Proud to welcome my good friend college to the program on episode #36. Jason is an attorney, a father, an avid boater, and one of my college roommates. We are blessed to have a tight group of buddies from our time at Guilford College and Jason and I remain close with these guys today. In prepping for the show, I reflected about my time at Guilford and my friendship with Jason. I did not know much about life in NC prior to college and Jason was one of the guys who made me feel comfortable and welcomed me to a new, different environment. Here are some reflections from the podcast: Carolina on my Mind...I didn’t have any of these things on my mind or even close to it when I arrived at Guilford. It was through my friendship with Jason and our group that I learned about these and made them part of my life, then and today. Academic focus: Jason displayed a great focus on his schooling and responsibility to take of his studies. I learned from him and adapted some of his practices for myself...always finding a quiet place to study and making the time to do so. JAZZ: Growing up in Staten Island NY I was not exposed to jazz much. It was oldies with my folks and straight Z100 & WPLJ....pop music/top 20 stuff. Jason played the bass and started a cool band called trio con carne. Cool, cool, and cool. He was a cool cat. I enjoyed the chill atmosphere at the shows and the smooth sounds. It taught me to relax more and just enjoy the music. It didn’t have loud boisterous lyrics yet soothing music that I enjoyed...who knew? I’d never seen TEVAS before arriving to Guilford....If you happen to not know what they are—they are an active sport sandal. Jason pretty much wore them everyday and why am I am writing about my college roommates footwear? Him wearing those sandal taught me to chill-lax a little. I was always in my basketball sneaks or some sort of athletic footwear. Wearing those sandals kinda showed me it was OK to relax every once and a while and enjoy life, enjoy the Monet. Jason is real good at that and I believe those sandals represented that feeling. Boating: not much experience here. The only boat I’d ever been on was the SI Ferry....and my thought was if you were asked on a boat by an Italian that you were going to be put in cement shoes and dumped!!!!! Well Jason along with our friend Fernando introduced me to the world of boating—fresh and saltwater. Some of our best memories are sailing with our group off Oriental NC and Newport RI. Like the jazz and sandals, I found the sea to be quite soothing and peaceful vs. the hectic hustle and bustle of NYC. Jason and Fern are excellent sailors and boats men and I am blessed to have friends with these skills and desire to be on the water. Europe—Jason studied in London in the fall of our junior year along with our friend Jon. Two years later, Jason led us on a trip for the ages to Italy and France post graduation. He was experienced and knowledgeable of his surroundings. That experience gave me the itch to travel internationally with my wife and we’ve been fortunate to travel to places like South America, Italy, Ireland, England, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. Jason opened my eyes to this world of travel with has had a profound impact on my life. Can’t wait to go back! Tobacco Road: If you’ve ever traveled to the Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham, Greensboro, Winston Salem regions, you quickly learned about tobacco Road—Growing up in Chapel Hill, NC Jason was/is a huge Carolina fan. I got to experience the famous Halloween parade on Franklin Street and saw up close the national championship run in 1993. This was all foreign to me and having a first hand tar heel to show me the ropes was cool. Lastly, I’ve had many an adventure with Jason—trips to Boston, Miami, NYC, Seattle, and Fort Lauderdale. Too many stories to tell and most not appropriate for a blog on leadership and education....I cherish those memories and am truly blessed to have a great group of friends: CHEERS FELLAS! Book recommendation: No Complaining Rule by John Gordon Quote: "To be rather than to seem." The NC State Motto! Next week's guest is: Founder of the Good Dad project now called the Dad’s edge: author, speaker, and podcast host Larry Hagner Go out and change the world for the better.

  EP115 - Amazon Q4 2017 Earnings Hot Take This episode is a hot take of the Amazon Q4 2017 earnings Amazon Q4 2017 Earnings $60B Revenue =~ $129B GMV ($47B 1P + $82B 3P) New Amazon A+ Content Options Amazon, JPMorgan Chase Health Care Project Supreme Court to hear South Dakota sales tax collection case UPS - Amazon Problem eBay - PayPal breakup Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 115 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, February 1st 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 115 being recorded on Thursday February 1st 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual are you with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott Sugar Sisters. Well Jason her here we are on the first day of February 2018 is zipping by and today was interesting because it's kind of like the Super Bowl of two companies. Well yesterday we had eBay in Facebook announced and then today we have the Three A's Amazon alphabet / Google, and Apple so a lot of news coming out of those results and the all these companies are announcing how their fourth quarter of 2017 went which is. Exciting in the world of retail cuz that's the, the biggest quarter so tonight we're going to really focus in on Amazon on this episode and I were to have a hot take on some of the dialysis of their fourth quarter 2017 results and then at the end we have some time we are going to hit a couple other highlights of some of the other quarterly announcements. So long tail lizards know this but it's always important to refresh Aaron's memory when you look at these different results it's important kind of think about the Baseline out there and as an industry were growing looks like. The holiday Ecommerce came in at 16 dating percent retail came in at like 4% Jason is that kind of what it's been. Jason: [1:54] Yep yep maybe even a little higher like for 4.5%. Scot: [1:57] Go to those are those are kind of the benchmarks and you know I think the the the way I view the world is, if you're going faster than those are gaining sure if you're growing slower you're losing sure if you're not growing you're. You're pretty much toast to the role of e-commerce in retail so let's start outside with some big picture things so Jason I thought for you first we talked a lot about. Conversational Commerce and all. Echo ecosystem and this is this is probably the most strong bases code I've ever seen in any of Amazon's quarterly press releases for the last 20 years, read it in its entirety so Bezos said quote our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic and we far exceeded them, we don't see positive surprises of this magnitude very often expect us to double down so that was pretty interesting and kind of like a, you know if you have to read that while you look at that picture of Jeff Bezos where he was like you seen the me where he was like super geeky on one side now he's all ripped, so you have to you have to imagine the rips of Jeff Bezos list of some kind of saying that one they sold tens of millions of Echoes In the. [3:12] Precious is the issue is not over 50 bullets I would say a good quarter of them were around Echo. [3:21] Anything you want to add around Echo. Jason: [3:23] Yeah it wasn't just funny because I remember it wasn't very long ago maybe even 2 years ago. Echo was just trying to get some traction and I think you mentioned to a reporter that you thought that it potentially could be the next billion-dollar business from Amazon and that was a, shocking surprising prediction that the people were asking you to back up and you know. [3:48] Tens of millions of of a echo devices get you pretty close to there. Scot: [3:54] Yeah yeah yeah yeah if we assume so I guess the lowest you spend is like 40. Four. And then you're the most you can spend is like 150 so I imagine the average is a hundred bucks. Jason: [4:10] That would even sending it a hundred bucks each either so that's that. [4:17] Exactly so as per usual you you were right and then you know I think it's one of the scariest as I keep seeing about this is. What you did now the top two selling products on Amazon. Like are that that Echo. And the fire stick. Scot: [4:33] Yeah and since we're on the topic over on the Google side they were asked when they're going to start monetizing it and they're CR sudar. Which I think is how you say he said that they're really just focused on the user experience and nailing that and monetization is very far away so that was interesting that you know that date. Why do people read that quote is in committing their little bit behind and they can't really worry about monetizing until they catch up with where Alexa / Echo are. [5:03] Cool so continue with the big picture Amazon's total revenue in another footnote is if he heard me say some numbers that may be a little bit out of line with what you read and special leases or are seen in the news. I always take the voice two sets of Amazon numbers there's the ones that are just the wrong numbers and then there's the ones that taken to the consideration, the effects of foreign currencies in Wall Street sign that's XFX set of the excluding the foreign exchange changes so if a British pound oscillates 20 or 30%. That will just your earnings so if you strip that out it kind of is more apples to apples so I was going with the Apples to Apples numbers so that being said Amazon's revenue accelerated in the fourth quarter 36%. [5:48] And that's up from a 34% growth rate in Q3 and they came in with a 60.5 billion dollar Revenue number which is not too shabby and you know every. Every quarter public companies tend to give guidance in this was very much at the top of Amazon's guidance Wall Street was expecting. Let's see. [6:11] Yes so this was also above wall Street's expectations are expecting 59.8 and so does exceeded by it looks like .7 which doesn't feel like a big deal but that's like $709 so. That's that's pretty pretty nice beat the key drivers of the quarter were amazon-web-services Wishes the cloud computing and then they have this, tricky category called other Revenue, and moose while shooting let's agree the biggest Chunk in there is ADS so that business we talked about a lot on the show which would include the AWS and AMS and AMG businesses, That Grew that also accelerated growth and it grew 60% versus 58% the last quarter. Amazon had a very high probability and prove pretty dramatically in the quarter Marjorie gross margin sticked up last quarter they were 35.2 and they took up the 36.4 so that's what you would call a hundred basis points kind of move which is. Pretty substantial at these levels on the conference call to see if I owe attributed it to the North America business and Retail doing really well at scale eight of us contributed to that as did he actually caught the ad business is starting to kind of. News the needle on Gross margins here which which I think is pretty interesting because it's actually pretty small I think it's. [7:32] 6 billion annualized so that would be like. Maybe 2 billion at this point in the fourth quarter so it must be just pure margin feel to move the gross margins of the larger 60 billion dollar business. Not any meaningful way enough for the CFO to call it out so a lot of folks are reading the tea leaves there and saying that it that ad business is really starting to. [7:54] Can I show up in ways it hasn't before. [7:58] And hopefully they'll be a day when it gets to be big enough that they have to carve it out like today w x and they crawl curious is really see what's going on inside of their. [8:06] Let's see about that. [8:10] They also made kind of another one of these kind of things you have to parse where they said more new members joined Prime in 2017 than ever before which I think you know when your growing. [8:19] The rate you're going you would assume that's the case. But then most estimates out there Amazon does not disclose the number of prime memberships out there most folks kind of put it in about 60 million us households out of. 250 us households so it really good penetration there some surveys as you go up into the upper upper income levels you get north of 50% penetration and they did say 5 billion items shipped with prime over the year. [8:47] That puts Amazon and I just put that in perspective not even half of Walmart when you look at it this way, so that's interesting but you know Walmart I don't think they've announced yet but they did typically have been growing kind of you know their eCommerce is growing pretty strongly now overall they've been growing low single-digits I I would be surprised if they don't, youngest Walmart comes in above maybe 5% growth All In. [9:17] Doesn't it was a nice surprise is this is the first quarter we're prophets of come in over a billion no you and I talked a lot to people that the number one thing. That you hear when you talk to Executives about Amazon is, oh well she's giving a pastor unprofitable there a money-losing kind of business the only thing inside of their that makes money is the cloud computing etcetera etcetera know those things are true so if you took cloud computing out the whole interview at Amazon still makes money I even if it took ads out I'm sure now it is true that you carve out the retail business that show you a p&l for North America, and international North America is quite profitable and then International is still losing money but that's because they're building enough they're investing like you know, two billion dollars in India there still investing in China they just watch Australia you know there's something going on down in Latin America Brazil so so, it's just because that investing pretty heavily there so. [10:15] Not only did prophets come topically dollars for the first time in a quarter that came in at 1.9 billion this is really big surprise for Wall Street cuz I think they're expecting more like 500 million now it was so that is one time so Amazon did say that about 800 million of that 1.9 billion, I was from the new tax plan that rolled out so they're decrease in the corporate tax rate in United States helped out Amazon pretty immensely. [10:40] But you know what's interesting is you not talked about this but but it really doesn't care about profits which sounds weird and the reason they don't is when you're public company it it's almost impossible to. [10:52] Grow profits in a way that makes sense because of the way accounting treatment happens, yeah your Revenue gets spread out your cost gets spread out and all these things happen so Amazon believes a better measure of how the business is doing is free cash flow and that was 3.3 billion so a lot of cash getting generated Amazon even though they continue to invest in a torrid pace and fulfillment centers in those kinds of things. So that's the big picture Jason you want to look at the retail side. Jason: [11:22] Yeah and I just one sort of thing that I always chuckle about like there's a number of people that feel like, to some extent Amazon manages their Investments to make sure that they don't have a significant profit, inside like under that Siri you can imagine that they were like mildly annoyed at the the tax savings that kind of came in with this big lump profit at the end of the year. Scot: [11:46] Yeah they didn't say that on the cob but it's possible. Jason: [11:52] Inter on the the retail side of the business and we will break this down when you get into the marketplace but from a pure Revenue side North American revenues we're at 37.3 billion for the quarter which is up 42% year-over-year growth so again, you know you can tear that to the the kind of. Ecommerce industry growth at 16% and you know they're they're continuing to eat up a market share at a, a pretty scary place so I can I really only know of one retailer with meaningful volume that's, potentially going faster than then that's that's Walmart and obviously they're growing a much smaller number and cheer Point International grew slower at 22%, and you know that's that someone interesting like obviously they're still in in the early investment stage in a bunch of these markets but the but they're, they're sharing a lot of those markets is much smaller so you know it it's actually easier to grow much faster and so that, to me that that highlights the fact that they still have their work cut out for them to to win and be a meaningful player in some of those big big International markets particularly India that there, they are in a knife fight in. Scot: [13:04] Yep absolutely and then I will be in the marketplace which is where I spend a lot of my time so the way I think about it is if there is a, the pie chart of Amazon or our kind of a diagram, you have AWS and other if you pull those out your left with the retail business and the retail business has two pieces what we call one p which is the traditional wholesale model in 3p which is the marketplace model Amazon is always historically been pretty. [13:31] Kind of Silent about giving details about the marketplace the one the two things I do talk about our unit growth so overall in the entire retail entity unit growth was 23%. Pretty interesting and it makes you kind of say all right if the retail business if you kind of look at the the midpoint of that 42 and 32 the retail this is probably true kind of mid-30s unit growth, you 23% how did they grow mid-thirties, and that's just selling that's an increase in average order value essentially so you know the value per unit that goes through is gone up so everyone gets a lot of nice multipliers in their model up because the scale they're at so how these to talk about. The number of users that requiring that slow down pretty dramatically and but then Revenue itself accelerated that's another indication that the revenue per active user was really. Growing because of prime the other metric they disclosed is they talked about a unit mix between 1 p + 3 P that is now 51%, that's not a high water mark I think she wanted you to as a 51% and Q3 a dip to 50% because of all the echo, Prime Day Day stuff and it came back here to 51% for the holiday quarter so long was long time ago she was the show know that this is, Marketplace peace is really important because you know to really understand the impact of Amazon there's their associate iceberg, and we really only see the tip of the iceberg and that that big kind of mass underneath the water at Amazon is the marketplace so here's how it works on the canal walk you through the mail so if we round numbers they did $60 in Revenue. [15:10] 5 billion of that was eight of us so you take that out and now you have essentially 55 billion in retail there's like a billion or two of ads in there but let's keep, math simple at 55 billion now. [15:23] Well it says 51% of units were three p that doesn't mean that you take that 55 in / 1/2 because the way Amazon a recognizes revenue for each this, pieces of business is different in the 1p world Revenue equals sales so I saw hundred-dollar widget. My road is $100 easy reptile rooms used to doing it but in the 3p World they County Road SE, when a third-party let's say we have I don't know Jason's audio shop and you know he has all this awesome audio equipment he sells $100 mixer on there a Amazon collect $10 as the commission so now what happens is you have the revenue is actually the $10, and the transaction value of the item sold as what we called gmv or gross merchandise value in the world of Market places so you have this kind of. Weird thing that happens where the actual transaction the volume is not Revenue anymore it's a small percentage that Amazon takes his commission or we used were taking it so. [16:23] If you take that 55 billion for the quarter, and when I do my analysis on this about 47 billion of that is first party so that leaves caught, but that 8 billion for third-party is really just the commission rate and. I argued if you want apples to apples this to other retailers you have to gross that back up. Because when someone bought the audio device from Jason store on Amazon vs Best Buy, Best Buy lost $100 even though Amazon only made $10 if that makes sense to the transactional value is the Zero Sum game out in the world of retail, so if we take that 8 billion that's the revenue for third-party, and we assume just going to keep it easy to take rate of 10% you have to effectively * 10 and you get 80 billion so first party was 47 billion and then third party is about 80 billion, so you're by my math when you had this up the total gmv for the quarter would include 1 p + 3 p is 129 billion. [17:32] This is all a very long way of saying essentially Amazon's Choice as big as people think it is and when you look at that context you know if that's what they're doing it accordingly rate. 20 billion multiply that by four you get 480 billion then an Amazon Apples to Apples is as big if not bigger than Walmart at this point we actually look at the transactional implications. So did the other natural question is so if I'm saying 47 billion first party. 80 billion third party this kind of like 1/3 2/3 out of the total why is that unit number 51%, and do you know the number gets very skewed the the bulk of one p units and Amazon her books and digital items they even include like if you bought a 99-cent app on your, you know you're your fire your Kindle kind of device that counts in there so. It seems have a much lower aov compared to 3p so so. But that's the unit mix is 51% but the GMB mcscuse higher towards third party so usually kind of like how to get the ends up being like 62% this year versus 38 on the other side so. [18:46] Now. Other there's other ways to calculate this an Amazon is is gives when they release their quarterly The Q's which is there SEC document state day damn it. The annual one. [18:57] They'll be some numbers in there that give us another view of that and when you look at while she puts out there in the ballpark might my way of doing it tends to come out a little bit high so I'm kind of in the other 129. And I've seen some of the analyst kind of looking more at like the 1:20 so we'll see you don't no matter how you slice it though. Pretty huge Amazon's bigger than people think it is and this whole entity is growing at in a 38 36% year-over-year and they're really just kind of. [19:30] Destroying Shear I'm sure we'll start to see articles coming out where you know I seen Art summer day where they got half of the e-commerce growth but I think it's probably actually be bigger than that and I think they they definitely took up a lot of the overall retail growth when you looking at the scale these numbers. Another last thing is, you're one of my favorite things every year is the Bezos annual letter that doesn't come out until they do their final SEC documents in this works little Insider baseball on your public company you put out this quarterly reports and you do a very quick audit on that, with Auditors to put them out but then when you do your annual and you have to go back and kind of do a forensic audit of the entire year so that'll go on and then usually in the first week of April is when Amazon publishes, their annual numbers to the SEC which will include an annual report and that will have the business letter so we have to wait in Fortune until April to read that. Jason: [20:25] Yep and that definitely will be worth waiting for I mean great great breakdown I know there's a lot of detail there for folks that are newer, that gmv point Scott makes a super important I just like to think of that as that's how much money consumers gave Amazon in exchange for goods or how much of a consumer's wallet Amazon got and so that's why, when you're comparing any other retailer that the really important thing is what share of the consumer spending did Walmart get versus Amazon versus Target or anyone else and so if you're up, a retailer that doesn't have a Marketplace like Target and you say you you sold 50 billion dollars for the quarter. That's how much of the consumers dollars you got 50 billion bucks and then in Amazon case they said they they got. [21:13] 43 billion in Revenue but that actually equals 82 billion of consumer spending and so obviously. [21:21] There they are out there killing it now Walmart also has a Marketplace it's a much smaller percent of their total revenue but so Walmart is another retailer where did you want to look at him really closely you also would try to back into a. GMB number versus Revenue. [21:39] So moving forward Amazon doesn't think they're slowing down either so they they set their their q1 guidance in that. 47.8 billion to 50.8 billion so that would be somewhere between a 34 and 42% year-over-year growth so. [22:03] You know it so middle that's 38% which again growing much faster than the overall industry. Second biggest player in the industries Walmart they are growing even faster than than Amazon in e-commerce at the moment and so when you. You talk about the 16% average there on a heck of a lot of retailers that are growing at 16% and most other e-commerce sites are actually. Doing much worse than that because the two guys at the very top of the echo system are are growing so fast. [22:34] You know it's it's crazy to see the biggest players in the industry growing this this fast. [22:43] So you know the interesting to see what sort of numbers the Wall Street analyst put out in terms of their projections for the 2018 and 2019 models but I don't think they they do the these disclose to their names cause that writes got. Scot: [22:58] Yeah I saw one guy updated this model and he said 20 18 lb 234 billion and 2019 lb 284 billion so. Still still really big numbers one of the things that was you know making some of the Wall Street guys a little skittish is. The revenue guidance like you said is pretty solid at kind of like a 38% growth point at the midpoint, evidence of used Amazon coming at the height side there was kind of thinking it'll be 40% so we'll see but then their bottom line guidance was pretty light so it's kind of like 300 million to a billion which kind of either is conservatism or Amazon saying. Hey we're going to, we had a great fourth quarter we're going to go to another investment cycle so the Wall Street folks that that Paul Amazon the kind of live in fear of these kind of Amazon ghost these Harvest. Swear they'll Harvest a bunch of investment state made this this year is very much a harvest year so you're really good bottom line. Probably under spent on capex from an entry no overachieved on the bottom line as well and then, Aaron lives in fear that they're going to wake up one day and say alright we're going to best. Three-blade dollars in original content or you know a you know our whole load fulfillment system with trucks and everything or, so that's just kind of things ratchet up there the worry. Turn off the wall of worry gets higher and this is the one kind of negative that I saw everyone call out was you know what. [24:28] What could they be spending that much money on that's like an incremental billion and a half of spend and they're going to Wawa color on that and, they're kind of elusive on the phone call about giving any details what's going on there so it's going to be a wait and see you through the first quarter one thing I always watches the announcements around number of fulfillment centers so that's what we'll keep an eye on that, add to my knowledge I didn't see them announce any in January which is kind of unusual they may have been in a quiet. So maybe we'll see a little bit of a raft of those coming out now they've announced earnings. Jason: [25:01] And there's a whole you know there's there's a big crop of openings that they try to get done before holiday obviously so it it makes little sense it would slow down. Scot: [25:11] Yeah they they I'm sure they need a month just kind of breathe. Jason: [25:16] Yeah so one other piece of interesting Amazon news that's come across my desk this month is not directly related to the earnings but I still think is exciting is it appears a lot of. 1p sellers on Amazon are getting new options for what content they get to put on their product detail pages. I'm so historically there's basic content that you provide to Amazon and Amazon you know puts on that PDP for free and then there are like richer media options that would let you do things like. You know have some product comparison charts are some some animated tutorials explaining your product or videos or things like that. And those are often called a A+ content and they're super important to. The the engagement and conversion rate on those on those pages but they're you know they generally have been a premium thing that Amazon has as charged for. And this quarter we're seeing Amazon start. To give away a bunch of what were the traditional a plus content options so making them free to any seller and they're adding even more exotic. Options that you can pay for it so it's essentially a lot of sellers are getting the option to customize their pdp's to a far greater extent than they. Ever been able to before and you have given an Amazon has become such an important distribution point for so many products. [26:47] That that's really important to a lot of sellers so it's interesting to me that they they continue to evolve that pretty rapidly. Scot: [26:54] Could you know there's always this kind of it's hard to keep track of these things are available to 1 p and summer 3p and summer both do you know. Is this is an on both sides or is it just for brands or is it is it also third-party sellers. Jason: [27:10] Yep so I have primarily seen this exclusively on the one p I can't definitively say that it's not available on the 3p but like one of the things you have to think about it's it's hard for Amazon to sell. Actual like extra product attribute opportunities on the 3p side because all the seller share. The same PDP into essentially. You know one one seller would be paying for that extra content and then all the the other people piggybacking on that listing would be riding along for free. [27:43] So like for the most part I see that these opportunities at the PDP level are exclusively to one piece hours but but Amazon isn't quite frankly they're not very good at life. Publishing open price West and saying hey here's all the programs we have in here's how much they cost and they're the same for everybody you know what it feels like for the most part of the offer everything and negotiate everything on a. Need your account by account basis and so like not not every Star tends to get the same options for the same deal. Scot: [28:22] Cool so that's kind of some good Roundup of Amazon's quarter any other interesting Amazon news before we kind of widen the lens look at other companies. Jason: [28:33] I think I think that's an interesting conflicting rumors out there about Amazon's effort to monetize ads on the Alexa echo system. Scot: [28:46] Gulfport what are you here. Jason: [28:48] So they're there had been some rumors at the beginning of the year that a few big sellers had been offered a. [28:57] Promotional opportunity. 2 baht to be the recommended product via voice Commerce when someone's ordering a product for the first time so so is that sounds more complicated than it is so you say Alexa to order batteries and you bought a bunch of batteries before, Amazon going to use your purchase history to try to predict what batteries are talking about, but if you've never buy batteries before Amazon is going to come back and say I have a Amazon elements 8 pack of double a batteries is that what you want in you, can say yes or no in so there was there was some rumor that like Brands were given the opportunity to be that that Amazon Choice product and then last week Amazon sort of came out publicly and said no no no, you know we we've looked at at adding adds to the the Amazon Echo System and we just don't think that makes sense and we think it's disruptive to the user experience when so they, they sort of explicitly said that they're not doing that so so, the stuff you heard about Google like that could be that we don't see ads from any one invoice which I don't think any of us are going to feel very bad about. Scot: [30:13] Yeah one thing that was interesting that there was a lot of talk about is so a lot of the the business and world leaders were at Davos and I need to use that platform to announce that this kind of interesting contortion of, Amazon Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are going to pull their efforts and work on Healthcare and is very nebulous they're going to start a company, it's not clear who's going to owner run this company and it's kind of going to be dog food in whatever this is they build for their own employees sounds like what they're doing, but you know this causes ripples throughout the world because that we talked on the show there's been Talk of the Amazon opening kind of a pharmacy online and then you start to say. Amazon nursing pieces that kind of think about your Amazon. Using the cloud services to kind of have health services so, yo a nice portal for employees the ability to manage all the healthcare programs and then Berkshire Hathaway has a big division that does insurance so they could kind of provide that. Then you would also need some kind of a you know a financial service piece around that too so that's give me something to really watch but that's good. [31:27] This kind of thing could disrupt the entire insurance industry or you know all the HR systems out there so or it could be a big nothing Burger so I have to kind of see where it goes it's kind of a, free nebulous right now but it was all the Talking Heads could talk about for for quite a while. Jason: [31:44] Yeah yeah and your point like it it you know if it's them trying to aggravate their buying power across those three Enterprises that's, probably not a very meaningful so you know did the three of them together don't employ as many people as Walmart so they're probably not, going to let you know make dramatic changes to healthcare system but if Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and Jamie dimon are trying to collaborate and figure out a, a new product or a new a new way to solve the healthcare problem for employees that you know. Is there a free smart guys that have a broken paradigms before so that potentially could be interesting and exciting. [32:20] Another piece of non Amazon news that has has everyone buzzing is. Early in the year I think the first week of this year the Supreme Court announced that they were going to hear a case which is I believe South Carolina versus Overstock. [32:41] Dot-com and so this is a case about sales tax. [32:46] At the moment there's a the Supreme Court has ruled on one sales tack case which is. North Carolina versus quill and in that ruling essentially they said that in order to be required to collect sales tax. You have to have a physical presence or a Nexus in in each state in so if you have no presence in that state you're not obligated to collect text a lot of lawyers were really surprised by that that ruling. Because there are a lot of other occasions where your required to comply with the States laws even though you're not physically in that state. [33:24] But be that as it may that's been a lot of land and e-commerce texting for a long time is. If you have a if you have a physical presence in a state you have to collect tax if you don't have a physical presence in that state you don't. [33:37] So again most of the omni-channel retailers with brick-and-mortar stores in every state. There they've always had to collect tax Amazon has has slowly negotiated into paying taxes in in essentially every state as they've opened more. More of fulfillment centers in distribution centers and so today Amazon Flex tax in every state that has a state tax oh. A couple states don't don't have sales tax like a Portland Oregon and in the maybe Nevada or Florida. But sit there collecting tax everywhere said they're not really affected but if the Supreme Court rules in favor of South Carolina South Dakota in this. This new case the which they could you know here in a I want to say March of this year that suddenly obligates all other online sellers to start collecting tax. [34:30] And there a couple interesting things that happened then. Number one like you potentially have to calculate a different tax to collect for every municipality which potentially could be more than a thousand different tax districts in the US. So that becomes a huge burden for small companies that are selling online to have to figure out all these taxes. It's probably a huge Boom for the commercial tax companies that will sell services to all these guys so you can you can you know that's an extra fee for all those like you know small Shopify sellers. [35:03] And in my mind the biggest entity out there not collecting sales tax. Is actually Amazon 3-piece sellers Sowell Amazon collect tax on other one piece sales they leave it up to the individual 3-piece sellers what whether they have an obligation to collect sales tax or not and overwhelming majority. [35:22] Don't except for in the state they're doing business in and so if the Supreme Court ruling goes against Overstock it could have a very pronounced effect on three-piece selling on Amazon. Scot: [35:35] Yeah and it's pretty complicated to because there's a bunch of scenarios right there's there's a scenario where I'm I'm a seller on Amazon, and I have Nexus in North Carolina which is where my warehouses and I'm shipping all of the country so that's one so what most sellers do there is they say they collect the sales tax for North Carolina and Amazon has settings for this so say it up 7% in North Carolina I will collect that but the other states I don't have a Nexus etcetera, maybe you're more sophisticated Celerity out to our houses so that gives you 2 points in Nexus but and. Amazon doesn't really open on this Amazon says you're responsible for figuring out your own texting. So so Amazon's listen to saying we're not going to your lawyers here we're not going to accept any liability for you collecting you're not collecting that you tell us what you want to do and then they actually give you some, they rolled out some nicer apis that give you kind of that you know this this tax software used to be hundreds of thousands of dollars and now Amazon's rolled out whatever they use sellers can have access to it for you still pay for it but not really at the scale it's it's pretty reasonable, but then it gets complicated right because I'm using FBA. And you don't there's a PA is pretty much in Most states I think like 40 States and you, it's not very easy to get from Amazon where your product is once it gets kind of into that cloud of warehouses it gets distributed out and you also don't. You don't have a lot of control over today selling Amazon hey please don't put my product in Illinois cuz I really don't want to pay state sales tax there that's not really how the. [37:11] The phone network works so. What most sellers do is they just kind of say well you know I'll I'm small business how can I take the risk on that so this this could be you know. Can I kind of clothes McPherson these guys that you know they may I end up having them a relatively complex set of States they need to figure out and, not a lot of great infrastructure for figuring out where their products are the release valve on that would be so perfect Prime and there was a release a press release Amazon's investing more and more around giving sellers that are kind of larger scale the bility to have their products Prime enabled meeting their Prime eligible and are primed as they like to say and, and then using their own warehouses to get them to the consumers and two days that could be, you know it's interesting Amazon's doing a lot more around there obviously I think it's primarily cuz they want more Prime eligible product but you could see it as a, a way of kind of if sellers were freaked out about this and wanted to have more control over Nexus that that's the answer essentially. Jason: [38:10] Yeah yeah I can imagine there that Amazon is it is potentially rooting for South Dakota in this case because, a lot of the 3p sellers feel like one of the reasons they can be competitive in one of the reasons they can they can sell their goods even when Amazon is also selling their saying Goods is because of that tax advantage right and so potentially if they don't have that tax advantage to two good things happen for Amazon. The one that Amazon 1p product wins the buy box more often. [38:41] And number too it's hurting and suddenly forces everyone in the Amazon Echo System 2. Comply completely with with the law and it eliminates all this gray area of who's collecting what tax on FBA. And so that you can imagine in some ways Amazon would say hey in the long run that's cleaner now in the short run that could mean three PCL slow down on Amazon which is you know one of them are profitable elements so. So who knows one thing I would point out. Is the Supreme Court rules in favor of South Dakota so now everyone's obligated to collect tax everywhere it's very likely. The Congress doesn't just sit Pat right so there was a lot of of work on legislation about at what kind of sales tax internet sales company should be collecting. A number of years ago and there was this thing called The Marketplace Fairness Act in. The the main notion in Marketplace Fairness Act is hey every online so I should be collecting tax but which should be a simplified tax so we don't have all this. This complicated math and so instead of having a thousand different tax rates maybe we agree that all online sellers pay one simplified tax rate. And so you can imagine of the Supreme Court rules in South Dakota's favor that might be the impetus. To Congress to pass some sort of like that and. [40:13] Conversely if Overstock wins there's like 8 more cases from other states that that are also in the queue and potentially could get to the Supreme Court later so it's not like. Even if if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Overstock that this is over so it's the interesting thing to follow. [40:31] Moving on to a couple ass little news news Clips UPS also had their earnings call. Yesterday or today and one interesting thing that came up they had a good quarter as well. [40:48] But the. They there they beat their estimates in their stock still took a little hit largely because they announced that they're capex spending for next year was going to be much higher. Then it had been in any previous year and the explanation for that was that they're being forced to invest a lot more in sorting centers and airplanes. To make all the the residential deliveries that they're doing for Amazon more profitable and so you know that the sort of pithy had a headline is that UPS has an Amazon problem. They're having that invest a lot to to deliver what they're already delivering to Amazon and of course. Amazon's needs are only going to grow you know potentially 38% more. Scot: [41:34] Yeah and the other two could be a bit of a trap here where, they're having a grow their infrastructure to support Amazon and Amazon is growing in structure outside of UPS so it's some point you know if your UPS you have to kind of start to wonder how far ahead of your skis can you get on that before it gets kind of risky. Jason: [41:51] Exactly if this was a video podcast we'd be playing Admiral Ackbar saying it's a trap right now. [41:59] Reference I threw in there just for Scott in the last earnings that jumped out at me from this week eBay had their earnings called yesterday, and I I think they the like met or slightly better beat their earnings but the, the big drama was in there called they announced that they're. Mandatory partnership with PayPal whom is a reminder that used to own and and spun off as a separate company when they spend them off, the spin-off included in agreement that eBay we keep using PayPal for a certain period of time so that. Of time is now expiring and eBay has announced that they plan to shift payment providers from PayPal to a big European payment processor called Aiden, and so that, they probably has some implications on eBay but it has potential huge implications on PayPal because I think eBay is something like 18% of PayPal's Revenue. Scot: [43:04] Yeah they the CFO of. PayPal is on CNBC any shows 18% but it was like their slowest growing peace there's little shade there's something going on between those two companies are definitely got to get zika nomics driving it but it seems like there's some more kind of, they are not really getting along very well right now. Jason: [43:22] Yeah and it's like I would like to cenarios I you can totally imagine that this is an actual break up, and if so that is interesting that says something about how competitive in the marketplace PayPal is if eBay really feels like there's a meaningful savings to be had by shifting to this, to another payment processor that, you know potentially said something negative about PayPal's competitiveness but you could also Imagine the eBay and PayPal are negotiating their first, fees agreement since they're they're sort of mandatory partnership expired and all of this could. Potentially be somewhat posturing is there sort of negotiating with each other so you could think of it a little bit like the showtime having a break up with Time Warner or while they you know. [44:08] Weather negotiating how much the cable company should pay for free HBO or Showtime or something. [44:15] And with that we have Perfectly Used up the allotted 45 minutes we had for today as we're trying to get the shows a little bit shorter for our listeners so we greatly appreciate. Your participation in the show today and if you have any questions or thoughts as always we love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on Twitter we we have a couple of good good questions that came through this this weekend fact on Facebook. So I think I have some answers there in fact. And of course if you enjoy the show we would very greatly appreciate you taking just a second jumping over to iTunes and giving us that 5-star review, we don't we don't charge anything we don't run any ads on the show so that way you can you can pay us for all the time we put in that show as right as a nice review on iTunes. Scot: [45:06] Yep thanks Wilson there buddy. Jason: [45:08] Until next time happy you comercing.

EP114 - Great Retail Bifurcation, Kasey Lobaugh of Deloitte http://jasonandscot.com Kasey Lobaugh is a Principal and Chief Retail Innovation Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP, he first appeared on episode 68.  You can follow him on twitter at @klobaugh.  Kasey and his team publish some of the most useful research in the industry including The New Digital Divide which helps quantify the effect of digital on in-store purchases, and the Deloitte Retail Volatility Index which measures disruption in the retail industry.  Kasey sat down for an interview live from the NRF Big Show, to discuss some new research he'll be publishing in March at ShopTalk.  Kasey is giving our listeners an exclusive first preview. Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 114 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, January 15th, 2018. New beta feature – Google Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded on Monday January 15th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your Tahoe Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Good morning Jason and welcome back Jason Scott. [0:42] Well Jason one of our most popular shows of 2017 much to our surprise was when we had our mutual friend Casey lobaugh on from Deloitte to share what they're singing retail Casey is Chief retail Innovation officer and a principal. For the retail practice at Deloitte Casey welcome back to the show. Kasey: [1:00] Thanks I'm I'm happy to be back. Scot: [1:02] Don't worry we're excited to have you on we're all here live together so that's exciting too we rarely get to see our guest so I just want to say your hair looks amazing today good you're having a really good hair day. Kasey: [1:12] I was up all morning. Scot: [1:13] Yeah okay good good spot a product in there. Jason: [1:17] Having the best hair amongst the three of us is not is a very well bar. [1:21] Welcome to the super rarefied air of the multi time guests honored to have you last time on the show you give us your. [1:30] Your full background but like obviously the the shows expanding exponentially so there's a lot of listeners that may not have heard your first episode so can you remind us just a little bit about how you came to your role at delay. Kasey: [1:41] Sure thing and worse all thank you guys for having me back thrilled to be here long time listener how about that. Set my background I've been with the lawyer a long time in the fact is I think about the number of years it's a bit scary I've been I'm approaching 22 years with the lawyer in our retail practice. Jason: [1:58] And you were the first teenage party. Kasey: [1:59] That's right that's right I do. Scot: [2:00] Doogie Howser ability. Kasey: [2:02] Early on you know early on with with the letter i really focused on e-commerce so we're talkin your 99 2000 2001 time frame you're helping retailers, Enrique's launch e-commerce figure out what it meant to to operate. The other operations in place and then we went through a period of time where we were helping retailer scale and it was really all about maturing business processes you had a new technologies that they gave more sophistication around e-commerce. After that I did a bit of a pivot and started working on this thing that it's time we were calling multi-channel, omni-channel helping retailers figure out how the channels work together and did a lot of work around on the channel strategy and then more recently I spent a lot of time on the future of retail like where is it going next how should we think about it, what are the implications how do we create in a winning strategies against a very fast evolving retail environment. Scot: [2:57] Cool awesome let's start with, taxable? Sitting here it's January 15th the dust is still setting settling on holiday 17 what what do you think about what are some of the insights that you drew from holiday 17 come in early look of of what you got song. Kasey: [3:11] Great question you know so an interesting enough we do we do a report for our clients we don't publish it, Alba we do share with her with our clients about what we saw us we just put the wraps on that last night at the highest level I'd say it was a good holiday obviously we believe it's the best holiday you and many many years now. For retailers on upper upper around 5% 4.95% so clearly a good holiday and then, no surprise e-commerce in a put up about 50% of the holiday growth but that also means that there's some gross that's coming from brick-and-mortar when you look at it and pure. Dollar amounts it's about a 60/40 split 60% of the gross you know coming from an e-commerce standpoint 40% of the growth dollars coming from brick and mortar and maybe that's a surprise because we sort of look at it. Brick and mortars growing up 1.71 .9% somewhere through there but when you do the math it's actually a big amount of dollars. Scot: [4:09] Yeah that was the 1% against 85 to 90% so so the number that squirts out speaker. Kasey: [4:14] We lose track of the number of dollars that come along and that's one of the things we try and highlight the second thing I'd point out is so you know meaning of are the retailers in the marketplace I I like to stay there. They're celebrating but in many cases that you sort of have to look at that someone skeptically the markets at 5% so if you're up. 2% if you're up 1% that means you may have had positive results but you're losing market share relative to the market so we sort of always have to think about these things. Yeah from a relative standpoint so if you are as strong as the market. But if you're stronger than the market great if you're not as strong as the market that actually shows that you still have weakness relative to you know what's going on with the consumer and so I wouldn't take too many Victory laps too soon and that's part of what are our findings or reveal here. Jason: [5:02] Obviously we're doing this show from the internet Big Show in New York City I know you guys haven't had a chance to get to the show yet any like expectations going in what it what do you think the big topics are going to be this year at the shop. Kasey: [5:17] Yeah so that that's a good questions I think about the show one of the things I've heard a grown, and I even tweeted about this earlier in the week was I'm always anxious to see what the new buzzword is the vendor seem like they're in this this arms race to figure out who's going to coin the. The next bus word whether it's. Cognitive Commerce I saw you know seamless we know from years past multi-channel on Beach and I threw out those buzzwords lot around personalization a lot around blockchain and so there's a lot of vendors who really trying to coin the buzzwords, the interesting part is Buick historically the buzz words have never been the answer. The right there if you think about it did you go back to we've done the study where you go okay back let's go back 5 7 years wear on me Channel. Was Devo's new safe who were the ones that retailers that were winning around on me Channel and when you look at it you go they were winning because they had capability. At the end of the day they're actually we're not the winners, and so you still have to tear that apart and look at it and and be skeptical and I encourage everybody be skeptical of the buzz words and Sarah challenge whether or not those are are are really winning strategy so that's why I go to the floor I'm really looking at, what are the new Buzz words and what's being said by the industry and how should we think about it. Scot: [6:34] So I guess you're not all in on cryptocurrencies not going to do at KCI Co. Kasey: [6:39] I don't know though if we just added Bitcoin to the show here you're at your Stockwood Skyrock. Scot: [6:46] Yeah we we are going to do a Jason Scott Coyne so just to let you know later in the year we'll talk about that. Jason: [6:52] I don't want to disclose too much too early. [6:55] But I actually what I was at CES last week and like turn-up Kota to like literally launched us a cyber currency and got got some ridiculous kissing their evaluation. Kasey: [7:08] That's awesome by the way I believe in the power of blockchain and I think it's going to be revolutionary but that's different than the hype around cryptocurrencies this currently going on. Scot: [7:18] But then the show doesn't want to talk about future stuff but, what are the reasons you're here on the show is you guys have a new report coming out in March and I think it debuted at shop talk so we'll be excited to watch that and we're really excited cuz you have offered to give our listeners an exclusive early look at the report here on the Jason Scott show. The report is called the Great retail bifurcation this is a topic near and dear to my heart my full-time gig right now is on demand Car Wash what's 50. And I talked about this all the time because people say and I talked to some folks and they say why would someone pay for a service like this why don't they just go to a $3 Car Wash so I, bring up the bifurcation so you guys have been a great resource in there, old report and I'm excited to see this new report coming out so let's dig in the report let's start out with you know you guys have, come up you can write about a lot of different topics why the bifurcation and what's the Genesis of the report. Kasey: [8:15] So one of the things we try and do as we try and look at what's going on in the industry what's conventional wisdom. And you know honestly one of the things I always try and do it take on conventional wisdom about, what's going on and if you look historically you know we had done a big report that we called the digital divide that looked at how mobile devices were being used, and we thought the industry wasn't thinking about it correctly, because they were thinking the industry largely at the time was thinking about Mobile in in into the degree it was generating transactions and we said, we actually think we have to look at it differently and let's look at how it's influencing in store sales if you work all that reports, that was sort of conventional wisdom first that we took on and then subsequently we wrote a report called the retail volatility index when you know a lot of retailers at the time were you thinking about, and instill today about you know the big online retailer and to the degree that they're affecting, retail and so we took that on this a while there's something else going on here and if you guys are call it was really the fragmentation of share that was happening that was happening at nearly the same Pace as we were seeing consolidation. And so from that you know we started scratching her head about it. The conventional wisdom today and we hear words like digital transfer retailers need to do a digital transformation or. Yeah that the idea that there's this retail apocalypse going on right now. Scot: [9:47] Call Ed Mulligan. Kasey: [9:48] You have Molly getting nervous you know that somehow the industry is being young traumatically just dropped in and by the way that's usually put in the context of people shopping online and not shopping in stores anymore we also heard that is a narrative that, so it's the millennial the Millennials ruining but he got to see the list of all the things the Millennials are ruining right. Scot: [10:07] If they're killing everything. Kasey: [10:08] Everything including retail. Scot: [10:10] Fabric softener. Kasey: [10:10] So we decided this or that start big and clearly what are those. Scot: [10:16] But not avocado toast their they're putting all their money and avocado toast. Kasey: [10:20] The new things that the tide. Scot: [10:22] Tide Pods yeah they're it while they're eating those. Kasey: [10:24] They're eating that's right. So so we started to take on this conventional wisdom so we said so let's figure out is any of this true and which parts are true and which parts might not be true. So that was that was really impetus this her to take on the research at the time we didn't know what we were looking for we just knew this was the conventional wisdom and we wanted to start tearing it apart. So we started looking at by the way this this research has been going on for about 16 months now so we started looking at the economy first now. At the time we were started as we started to dig into the economy we started the recognized actually strong, now you know even if you clearly a lot of people to recognize today the strengthen the economy go back 16 months and all the signs were there that the economy was strong you know the unemployment rate is at near historic low, you know already, and that the home price indexes have Rick of the index has rebounded and it's actually now got your the highest home prices we've ever had so record-breaking home prices consumer sentiments gone through the rough we know that and the median income. You know for the for the consumer has now exceeded where it was in 2007 so by all. Citations you going to go wait a minute we have we have a strong economy so how can we be having the retail apocalypse if if the economy stats. Scot: [11:44] The good news is unlike the Great Recession of 08 it's not on the back of it so people actually saving during this kind of unit boom cycle so so it feels like it's Cena doesn't mean it won't go down but it's definitely better set up then we had kind of liking o 6:07. Kasey: [11:59] That's right I mean really if you think about that in the last year this idea about the retail apocalypse is really taking on a ton of momentum at the same time the economy and you know the consumer. You know it's strong right now only that but then you look see. Markets gone through the roof right so we've got more you know more value on the balance sheet of our consumer and then even when you go over and you look at. Retail industry the retail industry is actually showing strength and it's been showing strength for some time. You know one of the things we've looked at is the correlation between GDP and retail sales and there's always been a strong correlation and in fact if you look back over the last 18 months retail has been outperforming the GP, it you know at a pretty significant clip right so in 2017 we saw three and a half percent retail sales growth. And at the same time we saw GDP about 1.7%. If you look at the projections for this year gtp's supposed to be strong last couple of quarters has been 3% or so and and of course the holiday we've seen good results there as well. In our own survey we did a bit of a survey around the great retail bifurcation and ask people hey did you spend more in the last 12 months and what we found was 44% of people we surveyed said I spent more 41% said I spent about the same so, is 80% spent the same or more okay that all lines up as well even when we look at. Retail by categories we find strength now it may not be in all of the categories you know from time to time the categories are different but we saw that we've seen Home Improvement. [13:37] 5.2% of beauty cosmetics and fragrance at 5% Home Furnishings 3.3 apparel seem softness, about 1% by the way we've done a deep dive into apparel and one of the interesting thing was we found there is is a real deflationary pressure around prices that we've seen units of apparel growing faster, but then with a deflationary pressure on prices and we'll get a little bit into. Scot: [14:03] You think that's private label cousin on her. Kasey: [14:04] It yeah so as we think about the great retail bifurcations you hear me as we tear this apart one of the things we see you know has to do with with the consumer and their. Available dollars to spend so if you did a couple that idea with our previous your report the talked about fragmentation of Cher let's Bears entry we've seen. Competitive forces really driving deflationary pressure so you're off price you know fast fashion and a lot of these pressures for the build-up and they're causing for deflationary pressure. [14:39] So you know what's that paint I just painted the picture that says. The economy's strong right relatively speaking and retails actually doing well write 3.5% who can complain about that so then that you know cause you to think further about okay. Well then what's going on what what what are we missing especially if you look at the headlines and headlines across the board you know from. From the Press repeat this really you know they have painted this really bad picture about retail that means to me that. There's something missing so what we did is we said well let's let's keep digging deeper. And there's a there's a quote I was love Sarah finding the right quotes to think about situations and Albert Einstein said you don't have to know everything you just have to know where to look. Okay so we took that we thought about that and in retail what where do you look like you look at the consumer right but consumer tells us. You know what's really going on so he said okay let's take all of that and let's dig deeper you know into the consumer so can we don't know what we're looking for. So we looked at generational differences we looked at Regional differences with hypothesis hypotheses around Urban vs rural, gender we really started trying to rip this apart and we did our own survey to support this we looked at publicly available data through all these dimensions and. One of the things that started to reveal to us was when we looked at it through the consumers economic lens right. [16:13] That's where we started to see differences I'm going to talk to a little bit later about the idea about millennials, the reality is we did not see dramatic changes generationally right we didn't see dramatic difference is urban versus rural cuz I had some hypotheses around that it was really when we looked at it through this consumer economics lens. That we you know we're able to start to see some things so what we did we took. We took the consumer and sort of broke them out into three cohorts and we use. That the government's classification around this around low-income middle-income in high-income starting to try and figure out how they behaving different how are they shopping different you know are they. Your do they have the available money where they pressured right now those are the kinds of questions we looked at so the low income consumer you know has income below 50,000. The middle-income 50 to a hundred thousand high-income is a hundred thousand or more and you know sweetheart to look at that interesting part it's like a 40 40. 20% split so 40% of population low 40% mental 20% high and of course if you look at something simple like home ownership clearly you see that's cute with 49% of low-income only homes + 83 + percent, High income owning homes as we ever is reporting that we looked at income while how they performing from an income standpoint we looked at. Non-discretionary expenses right cuz we no income minus non-discretionary leaves discretionary or disposable and really that's the amount that. [17:46] Really drives retail so we thought let's rip that Apartments understand net worth difference is xcetera and here's where we saw. [17:55] A profound. Difference here's where this was the aha moment this is when we dug into this this is for us what what the find that the research report when we started to see how drastic the difference is worth and for me personally I would tell you you know Apollo retail. I listen to that Jason Scott show I do everything I possibly can to understand what's going on and for me this would really wasn't haha MoMA. So I know when we probably all know we've heard about the bifurcation of income between the income and low income we probably heard that for a long time but the degree to which it has happened you know in the last 10 years for me was shocking. The degree to which event is happening last 10 years. And so when we start to look at that the fascinating part about this like if you look from 2007 to 2015. What we find is that over 100% of all income gains went to the top 20%. Over 100% that means the other 80% of the population. Didn't do so well you know -2 flat fast for 80% of the population right so think about that in some ways I called this the last decade. And for meeting of our consumers by the way it was I talk to my own colleagues I talk to the executives across retail like to remind everybody where where we fit where you fit as an individual within that because you have to keep in mind. [19:23] You know you know that that you're you're doing favorably in this income it are in this environment if you're an executive if you're you know technology vendors many of the listeners of your shows and unlikely the owner of a car wash. [19:39] That's right the owner of a spiffy car wash. Jason: [19:42] Regular listeners that the show will know that Scott travels with his own gold Throne that he's actually sitting on right now is he's doing the. Scot: [19:49] Yes and I wear my unlike snoke I wear my gold robe. Kasey: [19:52] I'd say over over 20% of all income gains went the sky apparently right. [19:57] Show me where this this was really profound I would say in 2016 continue to be in some income games and some of those games actually were spread out more than they've been in the past to where at least at this point. In a SS 2007 low income has actually gone positive slightly but they're you know that you see some some gain here. The problem is income isn't the only component here that matters right so I've heard this like why the stock market stock markets up right well the problem is is that. The top 20% own 93% of the stocks so any depreciation in stock. Is all almost flowing to the same top 20% who have gotten the income games, and by the way I don't have the facts behind this but it was my own personal belief that when we talk about digital disruption we talk about technology technology is fueling. This is bifurcation of the income where you know if you think about the available jobs today read some of the other day that said there are now more. Open positions that are going unfilled than ever in the history of our economy. And you think okay why is that will unemployment rate slow while there's a lot of people though that. Positions that have gone off of the unemployment rosters there no longer speaking and it's I believe it's a mismatch between the available jobs which you know are more technology-oriented and available skill sets. Scot: [21:28] Olympics Girl Scout on the 80/20 so so that's a population so if there's 300 million people in the US 80% are in that haven't kept up in 20% or a head. Does the wallet split preview it seems like the wallet because the 20% or so affluent it seems like they would almost be like. [21:45] 90% the wallet 5% or 10 on the wallet sideways backflip. Kasey: [21:49] That you're absolutely right right right so there's a small percentage of population that's really can controlling it a big part of that that you cannot expend. So the interesting part though is you dig deeper as I dig deeper this only gets more pronounced because all we've talked about so far as we talked a little bit about balance sheet, stocks we talking about income when we then look at non-discretionary spending this gets more pronounced in that non-discretionary expenses of skyrocketing. And as they've skyrocketed the effect of the lowest income has been the most traumatic I mean think about Healthcare is during that same time. 2007-2016 up 66%. Education up 41% food housing Transportation 1810 + 3. Do you put all that together and you put that against a flat to decreasing income and what that does is it puts pressure on to disposable income or discretionary spending. In fact when we look at when we look at that proportional impact it really becomes pronounced it that the non-discretionary expenditures for the lowest income of a 22%. So again zero to negative and an 22% increase in non-discretionary spending. Scot: [23:04] The only relief is gas prices are down from that time frame. Kasey: [23:08] That's right that's right so there's some there's some there's some. Scot: [23:09] It's not offsetting what the increases. Jason: [23:11] Hello it is funny I mean we're talking about how these macroeconomic things affect consumers gas prices to me is always one that I think of is a little bit of a red herring. [23:24] Close attention to it and follow it super closely but it's it's not a big chunk of that. [23:30] Non discretionary budget for for the average household so it's it almost seems like people sort of overweight at like we're at their Healthcare is taking 30% of your not discretionary money in gas is taking 2%. [23:45] Doesn't matter the gas is cheaper. Kasey: [23:47] Right right you have to sort of look at it in aggregate that's what we tried to do is look at 9 discretionary and aggregate knowing that there's no shifts occurring and what was it was fascinating as I talk to her about deflationary prices. And apparel and slice of a Factory CD player Sherry prices in certain areas we see inflationary prices, I haven't been able to tear this apart to figure out know what tribes that deflationary pressures what drives inflationary pressures. I have my own hypothesis again this is not a proven fact yet at least that I've been able to prove out but I believe that those areas where technology has been able to make more inroads and more impact, drives the deflationary pressures those areas where it's slower to adopt. Alesso so freezing by talks about Healthcare you know being an industry that I personally believe is still tons of opportunity and technology is not made as many in Road maybe it has an inner in other areas. [24:48] So okay well let's dig deeper okay this gracious let's talk about the scratch the discretionary share of wallet then, what's the consumer left with the fascinating part here is low income has had a negative 16%. Change in discretionary wallet in fact they've gone negative. I ain't 2015 their discretionary well it went went negative a dramatic change from 2007. And if you go up the only the only cohort that had any increase in discretionary is the high income. 4% increase in a 4% may not seem like a dramatic increase but when you put it against the the amount of dollars that are you know coming in. Scot: [25:34] $100,000 plus you. Kasey: [25:35] It's a significant amount of additional money so when I start to think about that in fact you what we show is going to low-income. Now has a net change in discretionary income of nearly $3,000 negative. While the the highest income is up around $32,000 net change in their discretionary income so we got one consumer that has money. Money to spend in one consumer who is more pressure than ever around. Therefore you got to think about price sensitivity of the bottom 80% versus available dollars of the of the top 20%. Scot: [26:17] You talk about low medium high at the very beginning now your time got two buckets what happened to the medium guys. Kasey: [26:23] Why I start a group those together I'm sorry so I start a group together when I talk about the 80 right who are doing not as well. Scot: [26:31] Exact more like the low then. Kasey: [26:33] That's right so I started just divide it like the top 20% doing well the other 80% is pressure. [26:41] Okay so then I started thinking further about this idea about what retailers are really competing for discretionary income there two competing for disposable but we also know over the last 10 years something else has changed and that's, new categories of disposable and specifically we look just at 1 devices devices and data plans so if you went back to 2007 you know who was spending money on devices and data plans, due 2016 of spinning at Force what we now know is all income. Cohorts are spending on devices and data plans and if you looked at digital spin. As a percentage of income digital meaning on the device for the low-income category except 3.6% just in the last year. And high incomes only at .71% as a as a percentage of their dollars going towards this category okay so what was to say that. For that low and middle-income categories that used to spend on certain retail you know items and spin. There their discretionary disposable is squeezed and another portion of that is going to new categories or spend that maybe they weren't too in 2007 just shows more and more pressure building up and for us we sort of you that is, increasing the price sensitivity that those categories have right so that for us was sort of really interesting about. Tearing apart the consumer because at the macro level the economy is doing well let's not doing well for everybody okay at the at the macro-level you think retails doing well. [28:20] Let's dig deeper and figure out what what's going on so what we started to do is to say okay well if that's occurring how might that be manifesting itself on the retail industry itself. And you know there's another quote that I like to quote often is follow the customers they change. We change and that was from the Tesco former CEO we talked about like evolving the value proposition of the retailer in accordance with what the customer actually wants crazy philosophy right. Jason: [28:48] That seems super and Kim. Kasey: [28:49] That's right it does so how can we look at retailers in the context of what I just discovered here. And so we took retailers you guys know me I was like to think about Frameworks to measure performance of the industry in the aggregate we put together a framework to look at the value proposition. Every Taylor's simple-framework on one end of the spectrum we looked at price. On the other end of the spectrum let's think about it in terms of Premium premium products or services. So if you're a top price retailer you're getting plotted in a to the left if you're a Premier Service or product exclusive product your plotted farther to the right now. How about called is a subjective plotting right because we're just sort of making an assessment of where. Retailers are relative to each other but we thought it was a helpful and by the way there's a ton of debate. Kind of debate myself my colleagues working through fighting and there was a lot of really in arguments about these relative placement. A single dimension on a value proposition probably isn't fair it's more complex than that. We use the framework to look at the foreman so as we planted everybody out we came up with three categories right if you're on the far left let's call that price based retailers if you're on the far right. Lascala's Premier retailers and in the middle that's calling balanced right so if there's a retailer that doesn't necessarily offer exclusive. Really exclusive products or extremely exclusive experiences but they're not cheapest either they a nice mix of Prada. [30:24] And promotion in a Serta falls in the middle so those are sort of the three categories so we said okay we got three categories now let's look at the performance of those categories. And this again was another huge aha moment for us is when you look at the five-year Revenue growth of of those retailers for a price-based you actually find they've been incredibly well. Insight over a five-year. The growth is north of 30%. If you're up earlier base retailer we also find their growth has been incredibly good in fact we find that north of 60% that we see. His last drink there now the problem is and I gave you you may have noticed that I overlooked in that it is those Balance retailers over the same five-year. We're seeing about 2%. Growth of those okay so it's really, bifurcation of where the strength is in the industry and again if you were late that back to a consumer one consumer who is incredibly price-sensitive because of a constrained discretionary spending and another consumer actually has. More money to make more decisions the questions are they buying more stuff. Where they buy more premier stuff are they buying more Premiere plus Services you know oriented by the way you'll hear a lot you know in the industry by all people want experiences not stuffing, yeah I challenge you to look through the same lens is that all consumers want experiences not stuff, I think there's a lot of consumers who are just trying to get by you know with with squeeze dollars. To figure out how to buy the stuff I need just to get by there is a consumer though who has more than enough money to spend on more experiential things than maybe they think they might. Scot: [32:01] An inconvenience is a huge factor form to that's what the whole car wash things about like yeah they're they're so busy because to make over that under K you can't just you know you're working 60 80 hour weeks the convenience factor for those premium retailers is a big. Big part of it as well white why they're choosing that retailer. Kasey: [32:19] I think that absolutely makes sense is that there's an element here that says at some point you're willing to change it trade dollars for time. Hey has to do it while I have extra dollars I don't have extra time right I'm willing to do that so anyway as you dig deeper by the way if you look just in the last year that same exact framework what we find is in last year except if your price based your up north of 6%. If your Premier based your up 8% or so and if your balanced if you're the balance retail your negative so weak that that cohort for us is negative 2% or so. So by the way I would call out that not everybody in the cohort. [32:58] Forms like the cohort rights and every cohort there's an Amelie's where there's a price-based that's negative and there's a premier that's negative in there someone balance is doing a little bit better than others so that that's absolutely there. In aggregate but we find a strength and weakness and that's really what we were trying to identify. Scot: [33:14] Yeah I need this is what hurts the mall base retailer because I'm all is neither you don't go to the mall saying. Oh my God I'm going to save so much money right you go to the dollar store the club and does usually Arnot Mall. Y'all so don't go to the mall saying oh my gosh this can be so convenient because you know if the park over here it's busy hike over here and so some malls I think kind of end up being in that Wasteland in the middle right now. Kasey: [33:36] Yeah I met many of the companies that are warm all based absolutely fall they're not although but many of them apps. Scot: [33:42] But the Apple Stores obviously bucking that Trend but. Kasey: [33:44] By the way one of the things I did point out his this is a lens to look at the industry there are other lenses that also have a credibility you know the idea about are you off mall are you off you know re Mall based might be another lens to look at this. Jason: [33:58] I would also just point out. [33:59] All of these definitions shift overtime which is funny because there was a gyro in which you would have Define the mall as convenient. [34:08] Like we put all the stores together in one place and surrounding them with a bunch of parking that was much more convenient than having to drive 15 miles to the store and today that same structure feels like. [34:20] The inconvenient shopping experience because what are our expectations have just. Kasey: [34:26] That's right that's right. I'm right by the way we looked at this then performance along a lot of Dimensions we looked at return on assets return on Equity we looked at PE ratio we're looking at everything we can look at that they would help us understand, performance of these cohorts in an across-the-board on every one of those Dimensions you'll see the exact same. You know if you looked at yet when you look at the graph in the report visually looks the same with strength on in the off price strength in the Premier and weakness you know in those that are in the middle. [34:59] Even if you looked at here's there there's my other favorite conventional wisdom store closings. This is closing stores the whole industry were closing stores closing brick and mortar stores that are being closed there's actually if you if you need it out there's more stores opening than there are closing. Further if you then look at it via the same categories that I put forth you see the exact same thing occur you know price face retailers they're opening up stores in fact they're opening up stores like crazy. Premier bass retailers also opening up stores and it's that the balance retailers were the vast majority of the store closing you know is occurring. Scot: [35:35] So there's like 7000 closures last year I think is like the number that a lot of people put out there so you're you're saying that there was more than enough more than 7,000 openings around the the value side and the other side took character. Kasey: [35:50] What we did we went out and we studied at 10 Case press releases we tried to collect the everywhere we could and we use theirs there's varying reports that include and don't include some. Certain companies but we were able to get everything we could see and what are what what are study found is that there were more opening in the work clothes. [36:09] We also looked at net promoter scores, long the same three dimensions and we find the exact same thing where you know consumers are 22% more likely to recommend price-based retailers than they are these balance based retailers their hundred 10% more likely to recommend Premier retailers than their balance. Retail so we find the exact same thing that really has to do with what's the consumer want. This is the simple idea about how is the consumer changing how are the pressures on the consumer changing and then how are you as a retailer you know evolving and meeting those those changing to man. By the way the interesting part here is if you look at digital through this lens right what we find is the vast majority of price-based retailers are physical with very little, digital presence very little digital offering of course it once you get to the premier side you find digital matters a lot more as it pertains to Premiere but I was like to look at this through that lens of life. Yahweh. If you looked at ticket take a price-based retailer who's had signs of success over last 10 years and you look at them in and tell them they need to do a digital transformation or, or go back 10 years time and tell them the way of the world is e-commerce, they would have missed if they done either one of those things that she was opportunity they've had in the last 10 years the amount of value that they've generated, you know my entire career has been about digital in retail and I certainly believe that the future of retail is predicated on digit. [37:40] However I don't think being digital is the only strategy I don't think being digital is a sufficient strategy right. Jason: [37:49] It's not much of a differentiated. Kasey: [37:50] How much are the temperature like retailers need to have digital and Technology fundamentally sort of ingrained in what they do but how that manifests itself and how they create value propositions around that needs to be that's the Strategic question. So anyway that that's sort of the Highlight you know you think about this great retail bifurcation says look on one side we've got income that's really changing their for the consumers changing and therefore, if we look at retailers in success or weakness it actually corresponds and I'm fairly well with what's happening at the consumer at the wallet love. Scot: [38:24] So if I made from value and Premier I kind of know what I need to do I'm in good shape but I'm balanced what do I do. Kasey: [38:32] Actually. I'm not sure that anybody knows what they need to do I think that's the that's the hardest question because the world is evolving and Retail environment consumers evolving so quickly. That how you think about that consumer and how you think about creating value propositions one of the things we believe is it is increasingly granular. You know Aunt in the value proposition actually is also increasingly modular so instead of having the big you know. Monolithic value proposition that you're going to offer up to the consumer what we see is. Fragmentation fragmentation not only of the market but fragmentation about how I approach the market if somebody call this personalization. Right beside you that I talk to you different than I talk to you the next Consumer what we actually take that idea further. And this idea that says no not just how I talk to you that's a marketing thing but how I approach you how I serve you my value proposition 1 assortment I bring to you we got to take all those things and safe. That has to come become increasingly granular granular and modular how I take that out the market that's what's happening to the competitive base and frankly that's happened that's what's happening to the consumer as well. Scot: [39:44] So so some of the. So like Nordstrom and tax and I don't talk about the Retailer's but when I look at Nordstrom's and Saks the kind of have two phases of the consumers they have the the luxury side and then. You know then they also have the price side so that you know that Nordstrom Rack and Off Saks so that's it seems to be an example, like what you're talking about. Kasey: [40:03] Yeah what was that without a doubt that's an example and in fact if you if you if You Pull A Part the vast majority of big strategic moves that any retailers have made recently they really do line up with this idea about some cases there. They're different brands some cases their Acquisitions of brands that you'd go while that doesn't make sense with. You with your customer base and if you looked at it through the Senate lens you got all that makes absolute sense less that's a choir a brand that actually lets me approach you know and and capitalize on a different customer in my customer base. Scot: [40:37] Well there's tons of talk about Millennials word where do they fall into this mix. Kasey: [40:41] Yeah you know that's that's a great question cuz I was another thing we took head on this conventional wisdom that says this is all the money all the Millennials destroying all of this. And what we found was. Well I'm some ways that's true but the reality is it's more intricate than that so at the highest level when you average all Millennials together we actually find in our study we find. They behave differently they behave in many ways that you might expect a shop online more often they go to the store last off, you know those things but here's what really is fastening when we when we separated the Millennials by the same income cohorts here's where the big aha was as it pertains to millennials. It's only the high in Cumberland you that actually really skews the entire collection towards the behaviors that you would expect. The low-income Millennial actually behaves very much in line with the low-income consumer so we looked at propensity the shop online and what we found is a low-income Millennial shops online roughly the same way a low-income person does. Meeting Tom middle-income Millennial does the same way also looked at whether or not they shop at discount stores and we found the same thing very much in line with the high in Cumberland Hill though. Is is skewed dramatically towards behaviors and therefore they as a subset, of the Millennials actually skew the entire collection of Millennials that way so when you pull it apart and then it becomes really obvious now the issue that you have is when you look at the high income Millennial you find out that's about 6%. [42:13] The population or so it's a small portion of the population that really behaves differently one of the things we counseling and caution is to sort of think that the millennial is a group. Now is that consumer we actually have to play the part we also looked at an interesting question is fragmentation of spin when you do shopping stores how many Shores at stores do you shop at when you do stop and shop online how many. How many different places to shop online and what we found was high-income across-the-board skews hired a fragment or spend across more retailers. The millennial online shopper skews. Almost off the charts in terms of the number of different retailers that they're willing to shop shop with online that's very interesting insight. Scot: [42:58] The shop at a lot of very few. Jason: [43:01] The highway promiscuous in the. Kasey: [43:03] That's right that's right that's right. Jason: [43:04] Does a user than play this but just to save it stated explicitly like so all Court cohorts. [43:10] Gain wealth as they get older right so the older the color is the more wealthy 10 aggregate but one of the things that's been unique about Millennials is they've gained wealth much more slowly. [43:22] Then previous cohort So when you say hey there's a a high-income group in a low-income group. [43:28] That hiding from group is actually much smaller as a percentage of their total population then was true for Gen xers. Kasey: [43:36] Yeah that that's a great point cuz we all like to imagine when we said around as retail experts that we are and we imagine you know a millennial and how they shot, you know what there their they're probably wearing yoga pants they've got 3 smartphones they probably avocado toast I think you mentioned that, you know we got the idea of a millennial that the problem is that idea is a very small portion of the millennial one in five Millennials live in poverty. 2/3 of Millennials didn't go to college don't have a degree and the older Millennials 26 and 34 are the cohort with the highest rate. Of uninsured medical incidents are the incidents that most frequent lead people into poverty so there's many people who are millennials today who are not doing so well they really fall into categories that we don't often think about when we talk about money. Jason: [44:25] Yeah it's fascinating and I run into some retail all the time is just. [44:29] Our industry was born based on these kind of urban legends in the you know this kind of word of mouth like oh this is who our customer is this is what their economic situation is in in you know you're you're bringing us another example of. When you really look at the data the urban legend off and doesn't hold up but I used always chuckle. [44:50] Personas are big thing for retailers he's going to need to return to have this Persona who their customer is and I have this premise that on average every retailers Persona is 10 years younger than their average. [45:03] Because I want imagine that they have this like young hip Shopper and yet that that usually isn't who shopping in their stores. Kasey: [45:10] Something about this cuz I just I just shared data that most of it is you're looking in the rear right we're looking for looking back think about you know here we are interesting about the, the buzzwords I'm in route back to this idea of the buzz words that were the big buzz words here at dinner after last 10 years. In what I just showed was that there was something going on in the marketplace that none of the buzz words were. Where anywhere clear to close to write were talking omni-channel retails the future in Mobile link. Important in that they weren't good and that if you did them right they wouldn't be productive but there's a whole collection of retailers that that went a Direction. Around the cut off price you know that was incredibly lucrative over the last 10 years that none of the buzz words. [46:00] That opportunity and when was thinking about business with him. RetailMeNot retail strategy we got to keep in mind that this is about finding opportunity. Finding where those pockets are of of demand or pressure or needs that we we can figure out how to capitalize on those in and serve those and provide to those right, and if we look into the future we have to figure out, where are those evolving opportunities where they coming from next and how do we think about those too often and Retail we think about capability we think of mobile. The capability when we don't think about is is this idea of need right and the changing competitive environment and how our competitors are thinking about unlocking those opportunities so you know I got passion about this idea about. You know Zig when everybody else zags write the passion about this idea about thinking in more granular ways about where there's opportunity and being skeptical. I'm a bender let me be clear I'm a vendor but be skeptical of us off of us vendors who who you know show up with the buzz words and show up with these simple ideas that are conventional wisdom about what success looks like. Jason: [47:12] With the very rare exception of Jason and Casey be very skeptical of the vendors. Kasey: [47:16] That's right you want to be skeptical of Scott. Jason: [47:20] Scot used to be a vendor now he just helps make our life better by having our. Scot: [47:25] Agnostic vendor so what channel does being somewhere so choose your own strategy. Kasey: [47:30] You guys now that that's those are the highlights of the great retail bifurcation in the report you will be launching in. The March will be sharing with few of our clients between now and then but in March we're going to be in a launching it and you will see it will make sure we push it out to the market. Scot: [47:46] Did you guys projected Ford like as it's only going to get worse or so like some of the tax cuts and we're seeing some people raise minimum wages for retail employees was trying to see some movement at that lower level I don't know if it's me and you don't fit. WD projector for door. Kasey: [48:01] There's no projection on it but we certainly have had, plenty of conversations of course this is it gets wrapped up it gets wrapped up very quickly and threw a political positions and thinking and and how you believe these things that are happening now policy changes made manifest themselves. You know I would share my own personal view point would be that. In a meeting of the changes that have occurred recently including the continued growth in the stock market skews towards one end of the Continuum you look at the tax cuts and you have to decide whether or not you believe. The trick is trickle-down effect will. You know ultimately find its way to the lower lower ends of the income Spectrum I'll refrain from providing will have to have more conversations over a beer about whether or not we believe one way or another. Scot: [48:51] We don't get into Kenzie in economics here at the end of the show. Kasey: [48:53] That's right it is it's a great question about whether or not you know the things that are occurring from a policy standpoint or only going to accelerate this or whether or not they're going to solve this. Scot: [49:02] Cool Whip between now and when the reports out what should should listeners they're interested in this topic where would you point them like maybe your Twitter feed or. Kasey: [49:11] Yeah so it will certainly in the Twitter feed will continue to offer more things out but I thought I would share this look we're sharing with our clients you know that the initial findings I'd be happy to share you knowing conversation with anybody in a prior to our official, no more States and reach out to me via email or Twitter LinkedIn any of those ways I'll be happy to know begin sharing some of this there's nothing super secret here, let me thrilled to share this with anybody that thinks this would be helpful. Scot: [49:40] Awesome and then what's your Twitter handle. Kasey: [49:42] Caleb. Scot: [49:43] Caliber. Jason: [49:44] And we'll put that in the show notes so you just have to click the link. Scot: [49:47] Go to last topic so you spend a lot of time thinking about the future you you're heavily involved The Singularity University and and you know we always have this fun topics around Ray Kurzweil and stuff what anything would we think about the next 10 years what does it hold for. Kasey: [50:01] And I always like to say you know if you think that you've seen disruption you know you ain't seen nothing yet. Cuz the reality is if you don't we study this in the retail volatility index when you when you really think about okay is the industry being disrupted today I think pretty much people would say yes being disrupted but if you say. Artificial intelligence isn't disrupting and I can't come up with an example this is all this is Ben and blockchain isn't disrupting and driverless cars aren't disrupting and you know advances and in human health. So the vast majority of the the Technologies even that will see over it at interrupt. Disrupting today the destruction that were talking about today is really after 20 years of first and maybe second year second generation internet Technologies. Web IP protocol mobile devices you know so and we start celebrating him. Of those and you know I look at it and go boy this next Generation that are just now coming online, are going to make that pale in comparison but I finally I comes back to the exponential curve of advancing Technologies in the impact of those Technologies where we're now starting to feel the acceleration of that. And I think things like I think things like blockchain and its ability to. Open up the marketplace are really going to have a profound effect once once we figure out what and how do you use blockchain to open up Trading. [51:34] Inventory providers and customers and you know there are retailers today that play The Ledger. In between suppliers and customers today what happens when you don't need a company. The place at Rolex that do I think I'm pretty bullish on that it'll take awhile for that to you know evolve and unlock the advances in artificial intelligence there's a great presentation of singularity, on the advancements in what what like why now why are we talking about it now when you see that presentation about well here's how far it's coming The Last 5 Years it's mind-blowing, about how far it's gotten so I'm confident that in the next five to seven years that will have a profound effect though you know I guess I tell people you ain't seen nothing yet that's my view. Jason: [52:21] It's funny one of the things I've learned from from Singularity is the human brain just isn't wired to sort of. [52:29] Project these exponential changes and so we have this tendency to think linearly and you go home and there's been a bunch of change we're probably. [52:36] Most of the way through that change when in reality I wholeheartedly agree that like the overwhelming majority of disruption were likely to see his still. [52:45] Still in front of us which is great news for the three of us at this table because there's going to be a great role for our businesses and more importantly the Jason and Scott Show podcast. Kasey: [52:54] The interesting part I'll add one more common is that it's not usually the technology itself the technology gets all the attention it's the changing. Competitive Dynamics it's the changing barriers-to-entry it's the changing idea about what it means to compete. That we lose sight upright weight we want to think about our competitive model as it stands and will attack on whatever technology is and in largely will be the same but the disruption comes from the changing. Competitive environment that's what changes not just that a you know my competitor now has a mobile app I need a mobile app to know. That's not it it's like I talked to her earlier about deflationary pressures on prices and apparel it's those sort of changes that come from the technology that we miss when we don't double click and triple click into what are the implications. Scot: [53:43] And the consumer changing more rapidly than we can react to him to your point about the the quote they have. Kasey: [53:48] One of the things we're saying this is back to buzzword right this are buzzword we're saying this isn't the retail apocalypse it's more like the retail Renaissance, brightest idea that there's a spirit of change that's occurring we sort of put it into the to the Renaissance. Where technology became important in science became important and the question is whether or not you can evolve. You know during the Renaissance. And that's really what we're at because the industry isn't week the industry has strength there are winners and losers it's happening at a faster Pace than ever but it's not the apocalypse. You know and it in its demise it's actually in its you know when someone gets in at a day here as we as we figure out how do we compete in a new environment. Jason: [54:34] Well that is great news and that is a great place to leave it today because it is happen again, we've used up all our a lot of time so we certainly appreciate your time Casey is a reminder if you enjoyed the Today Show we certainly appreciate a 5-star review on iTunes if you like to continue the conversation you're welcome to. [54:52] Click on over to our Facebook page and leave us a comma. Scot: [54:56] Yep and a kind of a fun thing is you get to play you are in a rock band so you have in your your your night gig are night gig is podcasting in yours is playing a bass guitar so there's a big a jam session at the Retailer's get together at the soap look forward to seeing you rock out tonight. Kasey: [55:12] And I look forward to it. Jason: [55:13] Until next time happy commercing.

Welcome to episode 87, today we welcome Rolling Stone sports editor Jason Diamond. His book Searching for John Hughes came out recently and you should read it. Why is he on you might say? Well Jason has some amazing punk/hardcore references in the book and he’s an old hardcore kid! Nuff said. We talk about his sports writing, musical beginnings, struggles in life with abuse, his parents divorce and how the book ties it together beautifully with John Hughes references. Cheesy as it sounds, life is a journey and Jason’s book shows you can come out happy even after messing up along the way. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/washedupemo)

Jason Vitug, founder and CEO of Phroogal.com, a financial education service for millennials, is back on So Money. Go back and check out his first episode if you haven't tuned in before, it's episode 170. Last time Jason joined me, he had just ended a 10,000 mile road trip, called, “The Road to Financial Wellness: A tour to get people talking about their financial wellness”. It kicked off in Portland, Maine, on June 1st and it wrapped up in L.A. During the trip, the Phroogal team visited 30 cities in 30 days. Well Jason is headed back on the road for another trip. This time his goal is to host one event in each state. It's also going to coincide with his new book he has coming out on June 7th. His new book is titled, "You Only Live Once: The Roadmap to Financial Wellness and a Purposeful Life." For more information visit www.somoneypodcast.com.