Transcript

Adam: 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 are not talking about that today.

Instead, we’re talking with Jonathan Thompson, the VP of sales at an old-school distributor called E.B. Bradley. Those are his words, not mine. He’s joining me today to talk about managing multiple companies during the buying cycle. And if you think that you have a complicated sales cycle, you have nothing, nothing at all. That’s what we’re gonna talk about with Jonathan. Sometimes he waits for years when something happens between the next step, and he’s got all kinds of crazy people involved. We’re gonna talk about that. We’re gonna talk about the movies, we’re gonna talk about sales and maybe even work a little flamenco guitar sound into the podcast if we can do it today. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us today.

Jonathan: Thank you for having me Adam.

Adam: Hey, let’s talk about you for a second. Actually, let’s talk about you for the whole show. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about E.B. Bradley and what the background is there?

Jonathan: Absolutely, so E.B. Bradley’s been around for 90 years, we were founded in the great depression almost by accident. The founder of our company, E.B., Earl Bertrand Bradley was in college in the Midwest and his lifelong friend from college kind of stayed out there. He moved back to California and his buddy needed help servicing some of the customers in California with a drawer slide product.

Everybody uses them every day. You pull your drawers in and out, you can’t do it without that. So, he started helping them and eventually that blossomed into this massive business on the west coast for over 90 years, kind of by happenstance. And it happened with customer demand. When he started filling orders for these drawer slides, people just started asking him hey, can you get me this, can you get me that?

Adam: So one man couldn’t open up a drawer and that’s how this whole business got started?

Jonathan: I think it was actually one who man couldn’t ship drawer slides from Minnesota, I believe it was or Michigan, and so now I’m here.

Adam: Gotcha. What is the range of products that E.B. Bradley helps with today? 

Jonathan: You know, our product architecture is pretty vast. We have over 27,000 unique skews, 300 vendors sourced from all across the globe, and we service a lot of different markets. But if you were to generalize it, I would say it’s the interior building industry. So when you walk into any space, whether it be a hospital, a school, or your own kitchen, there’s a good chance that if you’re on the west coast, a lot of those products came through our facilities and were manufactured by our partners.

Adam: Well it must have been a good time to be in business over the past couple years, there’s been a lot of renovations. Everywhere that I look, people are redoing stuff like that, has that been the case?

Jonathan: It has. Our business is pretty well balanced between commercial and residential. Normally when one of those environments is down economically, the other tends to be up. So we’ve been very fortunate to have a stable and steady growth throughout the history of our company, taking recessions and certain things into consideration. The last few years, yeah, it’s been interesting to see. Sales numbers are obviously through the roof and the shelves are empty because you’re selling more and you can’t get the products that you need as quickly as you need to, but we’ve been fortunate. Like I said, that product architecture helps us out because we have alternatives to fill the needs of our customers. I joke that it’s very easy to have mediocre sales where I’ve been in this kind of economy. You can definitely hide behind the numbers of demand.

Adam: Gotcha. Well, I told people at the top that we were going to talk about complications, what is it that makes your business complicated?

Jonathan: There are a few things, and I think it’s kind of the evolution of our industry. If you go back to the fifties or prior, there was a finite amount of materials that you used to construct a cabinet or to build an interior space, right? And it was predominantly focused on wood products, such as plywood or solid lumber. And at some point between say the fifties and the seventies, before my time in our industry, it switched from solely functional needs, you know, any day box to hold my stuff that opens a drawer and holds my spoons and knives, and it transitioned to fashion. People started expressing themselves the same way that they do with their clothing, with their interior spaces; businesses define themselves. I mean, when you walk into a Target or a Walmart, you know you’re in a Target or a Walmart. Because that space, you know, the color scheme of the kiosks and the tile that they choose or the linoleum that they choose, it all mirrors each other because they want to create this environment and express their individuality as a company or as a homeowner.

And when that happened, a new market opened up for architects and designers and traditionally architects focused on the exterior of the space. If you go to Chicago and New York, you could see the personalities of the architects, just in the exterior facades that they built. And we started to notice that some of the decisions of what was getting bought were made long before anybody started building the product in and of itself.

And this was in my CEO’s time, Don Lorey, where he started coming across this more and more, and our vendor partners started opening up these new positions that called on architects rather than designers to influence that buy at the front end. So when you look at our customer list, we actually have two separate sales divisions. One that has zero financial transactions with us at all. Very difficult for us to understand if the money we’re investing there is paying fruition because it’s a long sales cycle. If someone decides to build a hospital today, we may not get the order for two or three years because there are city permits and concrete. And depending on what part of the country you’re in, weather plays a big factor in that as well. So it makes tracking our success a very long time-period and very difficult to do. Historically, the way we’ve done it is by hiring people we trust and communicating internally. There’s no real first domino you can knock over that says oh, that was the catalyst that caused this down the road.

Adam: Yeah, so the complication is people are making plans many years in advance before they need your products, essentially. And they’re being made by these architects or people who are not actual buyers.

Jonathan: And we have an entire sales force dedicated to just calling on those folks and finding a way to help them with the solutions they need. We offer a plethora of products from horizontal surfaces, like countertops and shower wall systems to our core business, which is hardware, laminate and products that you use for case goods. And we’ve married that product architecture to give, not just the architects and designers, the ability to create an entire space.

Our new motto is every idea made possible. When we came to that, it was because we had to focus on both sides of the business. We had to make every conceptual idea possible within our product architecture, but we also needed to make the fabrication and to the end-user actually building this work as well. And that’s an area in our industry where the bridge hasn’t been built fully yet. The fabricator or the person who’s building it, their best friend and their worst enemy is that designer. Because that designer can think of something that oh my God, this is gonna be beautiful, and the fabricator is like, I can’t build that, that’s impossible, that’s not structurally sound. Or you don’t understand what I have to do to build it. So we kind of look at ourselves as stewards or liaisons between those two entities that nowadays don’t exist without each other. 

Adam: Right, and I assume there’s not a lot of room for error that if something’s being spec’d out ahead of time and it can’t work, two years later, what do you do? How does that happen?

Jonathan: Well, and timeline, right? I mean we’re facing it now, and I think the whole world’s facing it now. And some of these plans that they had two years ago, they didn’t think there was gonna be a supply chain crisis. When they quote these projects two years ago, they don’t think that we’re gonna have record inflation down the road, so it creates a little bit of chaos and havoc. But in my experience, when that happens, the cream rises, and the best of the best perform well under that stressful situation.

Adam: Right, and so you’re a sales team that calls on the architects and the influencers, so they’re really helping to guide the process. They’re not making a sale, they’re just influencing things down the road. 

Jonathan: They are, they’re kind of the curators of the menu. They help that sales team along with our vendor partners influence what our product architecture looks like and influences what designs we have that are gonna be on-trend. We really do partner with them and ask them for their expertise. Hey, what are you seeing in six months or 12 months? What should we start incorporating into our catalog? What designs do we need to bring in now to help you in the future? So they benefit our business more than just spec’ing a product for us to capitalize on the finance in the future. They really drive the fashion of our business because they’re on the front lines.

Adam: Gotcha. And help me understand this. So two years later, they’ve spec’d it out for the hospital, and it comes to the point where they’re going to start working on the job. Do you have to resell your product again at that point, or is it pretty much done at that point? 

Jonathan: It’s pretty much done at that point, so long as the distributor or the manufacturer has the credibility to provide the service needed. Because now you have a timeline and dependability that comes into effect and they have a drop-dead date on when that project needs to get done. If your inventory or your manufacturer can’t produce that product in that timeframe, that’s when they have to go back to the designer and say hey, you picked a bad product that we can’t rely on. We gain a lot of credibility on both ends when all the fabricators are telling the designers hey, I’d rather use this product that E.B. Bradley distributes because I can trust that it’s gonna be there.

Because there’s this whole bidding process that happens in the beginning, that all of them are a part of. The architect and designer specs the project out, the GC bids it, and then he goes through the subcontractors who we deal with and the subcontractors, they have their favorites, right? They want to exert their influence as much as the designer wants to exert theirs. And there’s this kind of gray area in the middle where the war tends to be fought, but if you have the right products and you have the right service, that’s really where it’s won.

Adam: And does it ever work the other way where you didn’t get the influence on a job and two years later they call you up and they’re like oh, we’re building this thing, we really need your help. The spec that we had didn’t work at all.

Jonathan: It happens all the time. And as a sales leader, that makes me very excited and frustrated at the same time because if it’s happening one way, it’s happening the other. At the end of the day, what I tend to focus on is customers and relationships. And I try to cascade that down to my team because if that architect and designer didn’t specify our product at the beginning, while it may be a win that the fabricator is fighting for us and trying to flip that in our direction, how do we get that information? How will we build that relationship on the front end so that it doesn’t happen again? So, servicing both sides of the market gives us a unique opportunity to leverage the information and get us in front of the right people.

Adam: Definitely. Now talking about information, how do you find that you’re using technology to help you with this?

Jonathan: I’ve heard and seen that technology’s on an exponential curve. I’m probably younger than most in my position. And I’ve definitely inserted a lot of technology into our sales organization over the last four years, but I’d say the majority of it was injected right when COVID hit. I used to be a national account manager and I was on a plane all the time and I still couldn’t see all my customers. And 10 years ago I was using virtual meetings, I was using GoToMeeting, and at that time it was like a unicorn, no one knew what it was. I would send them a link and they’d think I was trying to phish them or something. So transitioning to the virtual sales world wasn’t difficult for me to absorb, but when the lockdowns happen, we were literally locked out of seeing our customers. And our industry is very old school, we still have customers today that fax in their orders to us. So getting them to jump on a virtual meeting with you, you’d have to be a fantastic salesman to do that. 

Adam: You have to fax them the zoom link so they know what to type into their computer?

Jonathan: Exactly, or a carrier pigeon or pony express, whatever. Depends on what state they’re in. When we went into lockdown, we had to find things to do, and the first thing we focused on was just cleaning up our digital contact list. Hey, we have all these people that we can’t see face to face, how do we get them visuals of the products quickly? And it was hey, scour the business cards, get the emails, let’s figure that out. And it gave us a chance to pause and connect the two sides of our business, the specification team and the outside sales team calling on fabricators.

And what started is just welfare checks of hey, let’s get everybody together, let’s have a virtual happy hour. Because we’re a very communal company, we enjoy being together and COVID stripped us from that, and we found a way. And what happened was we’d be having the virtual cocktail hour, just a welfare check with everybody, and one of the spec reps would say oh, I did talk to a designer and they have this project that’s coming up in two years and I think it’s gonna go to this fabricator. And now I’m witnessing this communication happening and I wanna turn the dials to make it happen more. 

So I whipped out Excel, I put this big spreadsheet together with everything. It’s got the pivot tables, the conditional formatting, the color codes, and we slapped it on Microsoft teams, and now I have both sides of the business communicating with each other. And within a year we’re tracking 384 of these projects. Some of them are happening next month, and some of them, two, three years from now. Ironically, one of the first projects we put on there was a casino project in the Northwest. It was a pretty large one, we put that on in May of 2020. Last week we got the order for it. It was literally project number 10 that was on there. And we’ve had a few come to fruition in between there obviously, but that one was the model of okay, we’re onto something here.

Adam: Yeah, that’s awesome. Now I know you and I have talked in the past about my love of movies and I understand that there’s a particular movie that really speaks to you about business and sales. Do I have that right?

Jonathan: There’s far more than one movie. There is one, and it pains me to call it a movie because it’s actually a true story, and based on a book. It’s Moneyball, the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s.

Adam: Now is this because you’re an A’s fan?

Jonathan: I am not an A’s fan, I’m a football fan, so I root for the team that’s gonna end the baseball season as early as possible. I’m obviously a Dodgers fan and an Angels fan, but I think you have to own multiple pieces of apparel to call yourself a fan, so I can’t say that I’m a fan. I just root for the home team and whatever’s gonna get football season here sooner.

Adam: Going back to Moneyball, how do you feel Moneyball the book, the movie, the concept influenced you in business?

Jonathan: A few ways. I’m big on statistics, and I think that you can’t hide behind the numbers, the numbers show you something as long as you’re looking at them right and calculating them right. And for an organization that had the lowest payroll in major league baseball by far to do what they did from a statistical perspective… And for the listeners that don’t know, Billy Bean, and his group basically looked at baseball differently. It used to be about attracting what was perceived as the best talent and putting together the best roster based on big names and how many home runs they hit. What the Oakland A’s did was look at what actually manufactures wins and its runs and what manufactures runs, base runners. And when you break something down that simply, there is a formula you can follow. And I think there’s something there for all businesses to pull from. And for us, we’re in the outside sales business of customers. And if I want to get more revenue, what drives my revenue? Well it’s customers and how do I get more customers? Well, it’s meaningful customer touches. 

So if I can find that equation of what the right number is per rep, whatever their geography is of hey, here’s what a good sales call looks like, and here’s how many you need to get in a certain time period. They’re gonna have a higher chance of reaching success than anybody else. And from the outside, looking in, it may sound like a little bit of big brother, but if you came into our organization, you know that it’s about finding the right model because there’s a number out there that says too many sales calls are detrimental to your performance as well.

So it’s kind of that combination. And our CEO quotes this all the time and it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but they don’t really know if he said it, but “It’s not what you don’t know that’s gonna get you in trouble, it’s what you know for certain that just isn’t so.” And I live every day with I don’t know. I think that’s one of the smartest phrases you can say. I don’t know what that right number is, but technology and the intelligence and the work ethic of our entire team is gonna help us get closer to that. In 10 years, that number is probably gonna be completely different than it is today, so you have to be able to change.

Adam: Right, I think that’s a really great perspective. I mean I’ve always felt that sales and baseball have a lot in common. You know, you win a customer, you lose a customer, you get on base, you don’t get on base, you got a lot of binary steps in there that you can track. So I think that’s really great advice.

Jonathan: Yeah, and you can have high-performing individuals on that team and you still lose. You could have low-performing individuals and still win. If you look at the overall success, there’s a culture that’s involved in these successful franchises, right? The Yankees of the Yankees, the Red Sox of the Red Sox, the Dodgers of the Dodgers. And in any season, one of them is going be up there and that’s not by accident. And then a year later, you have the Red Sox saying oh, I see what you’re doing over there Oakland, I need to figure something out. And low and behold, world series, here we come.

Adam: There you go, but you never had to trade Jason Giambi in the middle of the season as a result of your sales performance though. You’re like we gotta get this first basement out of here or something like that.

Jonathan: Let’s hope not, that gets handled on the interview process on the front end. 

Adam: Exactly. Well Jonathan, I really appreciate you joining us. I really love talking about this with you, learning about how your company went from one man with a problem, with a drawer opener, to a big business that you guys are running today. And all your perspective on Moneyball and what it takes to succeed in this complicated world we’ve suddenly found ourselves living in. So I appreciate you being on the show today.

Jonathan: No, and thank you. I think that talking about these things and learning from others is what I attribute the satisfaction in my job to. I learn from people from all different industries. You, for example, I mean being able to conceptualize what we actually could do with technology, it all happened on a LinkedIn post of all things that catapulted me down this other road. So I’m less excited to listen to this podcast, I’m more excited to listen to your other podcasts with people who are far more intelligent and have much better stories than I do.

Adam: All right. Well I’m sure people have enjoyed this one, but if you want to take Jonathan’s advice and listen to other podcasts of ours, we do have them all available at spiro.ai/podcast. Or of course you can subscribe to them wherever you normally get your podcasts. But if you did like Jonathan’s and my conversation today and what we had to offer, go ahead and maybe give us a good review. I’m sure Jonathan would appreciate that, I know I would. Otherwise, we do appreciate everybody tuning in today and we look forward to speaking to you at our next episode.