Rick Pozniak: You have vast experience, great customer connections and then add digital tools on top of that, you have a very powerful resource, which is why I think reskilling is so important. You probably aren’t going to get everybody to convert and think that way, but boy, it’s worth the effort.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to Make It. Move it. Sell it. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.AI. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today we’re talking with Rick Pozniak, the founder and president of MOVE78 Solutions. Welcome to the show, Rick.

Rick Pozniak: Hi, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Adam Honig: It’s a pleasure. It was great meeting you the other day. Rick and I were at the Applied AI for Distributors event, and we had some breakfast together and happened to strike up a really interesting conversation. I thought it’d be amazing to have you on the show, so I really appreciate that. Maybe a good place to start, Rick, is just tell the folks a little bit about your journey and where you are today.

Rick Pozniak: I’ve been in the industrial distribution space my whole life, specifically in electrical distribution, working for some of the bigger guys, Rexel and Sonepar, and doing a lot of digital work there. But in my past, I really had a lot of different roles; sales, marketing, industrial automation, I sold that for a while. It really let me understand the complete workings of distributors and wholesalers. The last ten years, I’ve really been in the digital space. About a year ago, I decided I could do more helping other distributors. I founded MOVE78. Just a quick note on where I picked the name, people always think I’m in the moving business, but it’s not. There was a movie made a few years ago about Google’s early foray into AI with DeepMind. They started by playing a game, the game, Go, which is very popular especially with Asians, the black and white tiles and you try to control a board, but it’s even more strategic than chess. They ended up playing the grandmaster who was really confident that he could beat the AI. First couple games, the AI just smoked him, and he realized he had to think totally different. Really, the takeaway from this is that man plus AI is much stronger than man fighting AI. He finally beat the AI at one game and made this move that was totally unprecedented for the game, and it was the 78th move of the game. That’s where I got the name for the company. But we’re doing a lot of AI work right now, but still traditional type stuff with customer service automation, expanding digital channels. Most people think of digital as their website and their app, but there’s a lot of different ways customers are looking to connect with the distributors, so I work on that. One of the topics we’re talking about today is digital reskilling. As I’m working on those other two, a lot of companies are asking, “Listen, we know we have to change the culture of our company and get more digitally literate.” I’m doing work in that space as well, too. I’m looking forward to discussing that topic today.

Adam Honig: I want to get back to this Move 78. It’s meta here a little bit, naming the company after the move that the person made to outwit the AI. Here we are helping people with digital and with AI. You’re working on your own secret Move 78 that can help companies, I presume.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, maybe move 156 or something like that.

Adam Honig: Exactly. It’s got to be some number like that. But ultimately, I think DeepMind cornered the market on Go. Somehow, they figured out all of the strategies of those guys.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, it was shocking how big of a news this was, especially for Go players. They believed we were a decade away from a machine beating a champion, but it showed how much AI has come along. It was devastating yet revealing at the same time.

Adam Honig: Now, when you think about the ownership and executives in the distribution space who are looking at their own businesses and thinking about digital transformation as well as AI, do you feel like they’re in the same spot? They say, well, it’s coming; it’ll be here in 20 years. But you say, no, it’s going to be here tomorrow. How do you see that?

Rick Pozniak: Great point. I think they’re underestimating how quickly things are happening. Most distributors have at least some digital teams built already, usually to address e-commerce and digital marketing. But if you’re not incorporating all aspects of your business in digital, you’re completely missing the boat. I think you’re right; we’ve got time. We’ve got time to work this through and time to build the right team, time to re-educate our people. I’m just the opposite thinking we got very short periods of time. I was looking for the right type of analogy to talk about what you just mentioned, and another solution provider and I came up with this the other day. Are you familiar with tsunamis? A tsunami, everyone knows, is this massive tidal wave that just wreaks destruction. But what’s really interesting in what happens before a tidal wave, before a tsunami, is the water gets sucked back, and it’s building up enough water to then do what it does. But in those few seconds or minute, if you’re at a beach, the water disappears and all of a sudden, you’ve got shells and marine life and everything, and it looks super interesting. What typically happens is people start walking out and picking up the shells and just fascinated by what’s going on. Seconds later, guess what? There’s this massive tidal wave that can wipe them out or be extremely destructive. I really think we’re in that space right now where the water has been sucked out and something big is going to hit us in weeks, months, and I don’t think we’re ready for it. Instead of running for high ground like we should be doing or preparing for digital, I think we’re not moving fast enough.

Adam Honig: I love this analogy, and let’s make it practical for people. What is the ramification if they don’t go to digital? Do you feel like there’s new entrants that are going to come in? Is it their competitors that are going to get there first? Is it the manufacturers themselves who are just going to move into dealing with the customers directly? What’s the ramification of not adopting it quicker?

Rick Pozniak: I think you hit on all of them. It probably won’t be any one of those that will disrupt a distributor’s business, but it’ll be external forces, like some of the other distributors, maybe not even in their space, like electrical or plumbing or HVAC, but an MRO distributor that has figured out this whole digital game and sells into their space. We know that Home Depot was bought into distribution now, and they’re really good at it, too. I think all these external forces, I’m still waiting for a pure digital distributor pop up and really disrupt things, too. I think they will be disrupted from all angles. If you’re not ready, yikes.

Adam Honig: I feel like distribution in particular is more vulnerable to this disruption than other industries. If you’re a manufacturer, you’ve got your process for producing products. People can copy the products at some level, but it takes a lot of investment and startup. But to get going in the distribution to start an AI-first or digital-first distribution business has a lot less overhead than some of these other businesses. You don’t have that ownership of the product in the same way. That’s what makes me concerned that there might be more vulnerability there.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, I totally agree. At the end of the day, a distributor is a middleman. Yes, we’re doing a lot of work to add services to increase our value, but we’re in that middle of the supply chain, so I think it’s even harder to be completely digital, but more important, because you got the manufacturer on one side and your customers on the other, and you got to be digital on both ends.

Adam Honig: We work with manufacturers and distributors, and one of the trends that I see in manufacturing is that there’s a generational hand-off, if you will. The grandfather started the business, the father’s running it, maybe handing it off to his daughter now to be the third generation, and they are much more digitally capable than the older generations, and they’re thinking, oh, why can’t we do e-commerce, too? Why can’t we go directly to our customers? I think if that trend continues, it just continues to squeeze the space where the distributors play. That’s on my mind.

Rick Pozniak: It’s funny too, in the electrical space where I’m most familiar, there’s lots of consolidation. it’s a lot of the smaller distributors just thinking they can’t do digital, so they’re selling out to the big guys. In many cases, they are too far behind to catch up. I came from big distribution, so I know that there’s a lot of resources being thrown towards digital. But the midsize and even the larger small guys, the cost of software has come down and they’re extremely nimble. You can do digital really good and not be the big guys with tons of resources and deeper pockets. I think everybody can do digital if you have the mindset and that gets back to everybody having that mindset, not just a digital team.

Adam Honig: Do you think it’s mostly a mental holdback at this point on the part of the distribution from going digital? Is there an organizational concern? What’s really the holdback?

Rick Pozniak: I think so. That old saying strategy for breakfast, that’s true. If you had everybody in your organization thinking digitally and coming to you with ideas on how to improve this process or that process and once you do and implement a solution, everyone buys in instead of having to spend months or years on the adoption piece, you’re going to kill it.

Adam Honig: I totally agree. This is one of the things that was so interesting about our conversation a couple of weeks ago is for people to adopt a solution like Spiro does require a culture change. It requires people to be willing to try to do things differently. There’s older, more experienced workers who are very eager to adapt technology, but somehow a lot of people aren’t. That’s definitely something that we see a lot of.

Rick Pozniak: That point about an older experienced worker adopting technology, they are the most powerful people in an organization. When you have vast experience, great customer connections, and then add digital tools on that, you have a very powerful resource, which is why I think reskilling is so important. You probably aren’t going to get everybody to convert and think that way, but boy, it’s worth the effort to try to change the mindset of your most experienced people because there’s so much value there.

Adam Honig: You’re not recommending that we just use AI to get everybody out of the organization then.

Rick Pozniak: No. It’s funny being in this space that most people equate that’s what my mission is, but it’s not. At least, we’re a long way away from that. Augmenting people, I love that term. Augmenting people in their current roles makes them that much better, that much smarter. They’re able to kick butt and do twice or three times as much as they could a couple of years ago.

Adam Honig: The more experienced workers, of course, are your product experts. They’re your customer relationship owners. They’re the trusted advisors, probably, for a lot of people that you’re dealing with, so not having those people doesn’t make any sense at all. But I’m curious. In your work with this more experienced workforce, what strategies have you seen to be successful in helping people make that shift to using digital and thinking about things differently?

Rick Pozniak: It’s funny, I have to admit, I’m in the experimenting stage right now. I do offer a course. It’s called “Building Digital Confidence for Experienced Employees,” a full-day course. In this course, you explain why your company uses technology. What is a tech stack? How does your company use that to conduct its business? Then, you talk about AI, friend or foe. You take a full day and start showing them that technology doesn’t have to be evil or it’s not going to replace you unless you let it. However, the problem is most people don’t have a full day, and definitely taking them off-site to do it in person is difficult. So, I’m trying to see how we can do this through online courses. There’s not one method either that works. Well, obviously, every human learns a little differently. I’m trying to see what’s the best way to reach experienced employees. In the past month, I’ve talked to seven or eight HR people from different-sized organizations at distributors, and even they have very different opinions on what is reskilling. Typically, when I start that discussion, they say, “We have a training department.” I’m very much of the belief that reskilling and training are two totally different topics. Training is learning a particular skill; reskilling is changing your mindset. Most HR people are still struggling with that themselves too. How do we change the culture of our company to accept digital? Some of them just believe it’s organic, and it’s going to happen. The more digital tools we throw in front of them, the more they have to learn. In a way, they’re right, but you’re going to lose people in the wash when you do it with that method. Why not be proactive and try to get them on board in this early stage of digital implementation if you can change their mindset? It’s way better than forcing digital tools on them.

Adam Honig: I think you’re on the money with that. I think today, it really is a mindset change that the technology, while some of it can be complicated, a lot of it really isn’t. It’s more like you have the willingness to invest a very small amount of time to see how something works. I live in Boston, so there are diehard Red Sox fans here, and they’re never going to root for another team. I feel like sometimes that’s the attitude that people have about what they do. They say, I do it this way. I would never do it that way because the Yankees do it the other way, or I don’t know what their reason is, but it’s really just more of mindset than aptitude.

Rick Pozniak: It’s shocking how many people believe their little slice of what needs to be done is so human or relationship-driven, and technology can’t take care of that. We’re just seeing in the last couple of years, this is so untrue. At the conference we were both at, one keynote speaker played a clip of a digital customer service agent, and everyone in the room thought it was on the receiving end of the call. It turned out that the chatbot was making a call to transportation companies to source some flatbeds and then negotiating the price on it. I’ve never seen 350 people go silent like that when we all realized, no, it was the outgoing call that was the chatbot. There’s no limits on what can eventually be done, and back to reskilling, if people see that before they’re fully convinced of the benefits of digital, they’re going to be scared as hell that, “Wow, I am totally going to be replaced.” That was one far ahead example, but most companies are not in that space and won’t be there for a long time. Is it important right now to deal with their heads and their brain and their mindset? You’ve mentioned it a few times. That’s what we got to deal with in the next year, for sure.

Adam Honig: You know what, Rick? I’m getting this idea that what we actually need is AI to help us with the change management first, and then we will really be going someplace. We got to get on that. We’ll work on that. But you mentioned the strategy of, I don’t want to say instilling fear, but making people aware if they don’t get on the train, they’re potentially going to be missing out on stuff. What about incentives? I know we’ve worked with companies that have put formal incentives in place to try to get people to break the cycle of behavior, whether it’s a monetary thing or a recognition thing. Have you seen that work in your world?

Rick Pozniak: I haven’t seen a great example of it working, but it’s to use a carrot or a hammer to get things done. We should investigate all the ways of being positive with reinforcement and give incentives. I don’t have a good answer on that one. Like I said, it’s still experimenting on what works and what doesn’t. It’ll definitely be the company’s experience too with that. Is their culture typically just forcing it down employees throats, or are they a company that really likes to spend at least a little bit of money on adoption, change management? One of the other things I’m helping companies work on is scaling of projects and implementation. I’ll tell you, typically, and you would know this too, when you invest in a piece of software, usually companies are used to just scraping up enough money to pay for that software. We don’t need training or change management and adoption processes, all that. That’s usually what causes a tech project to fail.

Adam Honig: Yes, a lot of companies, they just show up with a box of software, and they drop it off and say, good luck with that. Let us know how it works out. That’s totally a recipe for disaster.

Rick Pozniak: I like a McKinsey report that says for every dollar spent on software, spend a dollar on training and change management. That would be really nice. I think success would go way up, but I don’t think companies are quite ready to spend that kind of money on the soft side of tech.

Adam Honig: It’s hard for companies to make the decision and see what the ROI would be. It’s something we see a lot. They know it’s going to work for them. They know it’s going to benefit them, but they can’t quite put their finger on where they’re going to get that extra dollar back from. For a lot of businesses, that’s the holdup.

Rick Pozniak: I know it was like that with e-commerce. Distributors have spent a lot of money implementing web shops and mobile apps, and most of them say they haven’t gotten the ROI they expected. But I have done quite a bit of work in that space, too and my belief is that a customer using your website is what your true goal should be. They may have different ways of giving you an order and holding them back from placing the order online, but getting them on your website, using your tool to find the right product and engage with you that way, that’s what the ROI should have always been measured as.

Adam Honig: In my experience, a lot of these companies have implemented great e-commerce systems, and they still have the same sales team talking with the customers on a regular basis and dealing with them directly.

Rick Pozniak: Worse yet, a salesman who doesn’t even know how to navigate a customer through their own website, I just view that as horrible.

Adam Honig: Yes, it can be tricky. Going back to the incentives, one of the strategies that I saw that I thought was really interesting is, and this is a local example, so I don’t know if it’s going to work for everybody out there. But we were working with this company in Texas, and there was a famous barbecue place in this particular area of Texas that they lived in. They had a gift card for the barbecue place that if people did so much technology adoption of this particular type of technology, they got a gift card to it. I’ll tell you, for this culture, for this company, that was the thing that helped people just say, well, I guess I got to try it. It wasn’t perfect. People have different styles and everything like that, but it definitely helped break the ice on adoption. I wonder, if carefully tailored, that’s the place to start. Maybe save the stick for later and maybe start with the carrot. That’s what’s in my mind.

Rick Pozniak: I agree. Texas barbecue, you can’t go wrong with that.

Adam Honig: Yes, everybody likes that.

Rick Pozniak: I’m curious about your opinion on even just training for the tools you guys offer. Is everything online? Do you do any in-person? What success have you guys realized?

Adam Honig: We do primarily Zoom-based trainings, Teams-based trainings with people. We tend to do very short trainings, no more than an hour, maybe even 45 minutes. We’d rather schedule multiple sessions than try to cram everything into somebody’s head all at one go even if that takes more effort on our team. The ability for anybody to learn is, beyond a certain amount of time, really hard. The problem with going on-site is you want to maximize that exposure. You flew somebody in. You’ve got a subject matter expert there. You really want to take advantage of it. Can you really hold the audience for that half a day or day? That’s the challenge that I’ve seen.

Rick Pozniak: I’m going to bring up a topic here that you’re either for or against. When we do the training, I seem to notice that testing after the training has completely gone away. I’m a big fan of testing to see what was retained by the people you trained. That seems to be a no-no now. Getting back to the reskilling, I think there’s more and more, even just in preparing for this call, I wanted to see what’s available now on digital literacy testing. It’s a great way to see where somebody is, and then at three months, test them again to see if there was progress. But boy, when you administer tests to people, they get really anxious. They get upset that you’re testing what they know. I’m a fan of that, especially now that if we’re able to test digital literacy, I think companies need to start looking at that and seeing where the base of their employees is at and then applying training or courses to deal with the mental aspect. A lot of digital literacy is on your own using tools, learning how different interfaces work so you can pick things up quicker. I’m a fan of that. Nobody that I know of is doing any kind of digital literacy testing.

Adam Honig: When I hear that, the first thing I think of is trigonometry, which is something that everybody hates getting tested on. I totally understand why there’s resistance to it.

Rick Pozniak: Are we bringing back bad high school memories for you here?

Adam Honig: Mostly, because I have to be helping my high school-aged son through all of that again now. But instead of testing, I wonder if there’s a way that the participants can be providing feedback. You just learned about this software product that we’re implementing, instead of saying, did you learn it properly? But say, what was your feedback on how your experience was with the learning? That could also give you some understanding of the learned capability at the same time, but it would be less threatening. Is that an option?

Rick Pozniak: Sure. I know my opinion is that probably on the far end of the spectrum because of what you just said that it turns people off. They’ll try to avoid it. The amount of stress people have just from taking simple tests is large. If you could work it into gentle feedback would probably be more successful.

Adam Honig: I mean, everybody likes to tell you their opinion about something.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, no shortage there. I agree that if we could find out a way to get that information in a less threatening way, for sure.

Adam Honig: Yes, totally. Rick, this has been really interesting conversation. Can you tell the folks at home here how they can reach out to you if they’re interested in learning more about the course that you give or any of your other services?

Rick Pozniak: Just visit my site, move78solutions.com. There’s more information on what I do on the reskilling stuff, the courses that we offer.

Adam Honig: Rick, I really appreciate your coming on the show. I loved talking about how we can reskill people and really help distribution companies get ahead of the curve because definitely that tsunami is coming right at them. There’s no question in my mind.

Rick Pozniak: I agree. Thanks for having me on here, Adam. I enjoyed the conversation.

Adam Honig: Right on. It’s my pleasure. As a reminder to our listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. Be sure to subscribe. I don’t know, Rick, do you think we should tell people to give us a five-star rating or something like that?

Rick Pozniak: For sure.

Adam Honig: We won’t give them a test. I promise, if they give it a five-star rating review–

Rick Pozniak: No tests.

Adam Honig: No tests, very good. But please go ahead and give us a nice review, share it with a friend, and we really appreciate your tuning in, so looking forward to seeing you on the next episode.