Jason Greenwood

@0:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Flores. Today, I'm here with Jason Greenwood. Jason, how are we doing?

@0:14 - Jason Greenwood

I'm doing very, very well. Thank you. And I was mentioning an offer that was a little bit tardy because I was on a client call just before we jumped on together.

So I appreciate your patience with me today.

@0:25 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, you're good. You're good. So Jason, I appreciate you. So Jason is a business to business in a consulting.

actually really kind of the way I kind of would describe it.

@0:34 - Jason Greenwood

He basically makes your life a little bit more easier. It makes things more efficient. But before we get into all that, Jason, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Who is Jason Greenwood? Jason Greenwood, I've worked in the e-commerce space for over 24 years now. I've worked agency side, built agencies, owned agencies, worked brand side.

I also owned my own e-commerce peer play back in the day. for the last nearly four years, I've owned my own independent

commerce consultancy specializing in tech and ops primarily for B2B e-commerce businesses. But I also consult to investors, platform vendors, and agencies in addition to that.

But I work very, very heavily with business-to-business e-commerce merchants or business-business merchants that don't do e-commerce today but want to.

And my ICP, most of businesses I work with doing $20 million or more, $20 million to $1 billion in annual GMV across all channels.

And in many cases it's D2C brands, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors that maybe want to establish a B2B channel or B2B brands that are solely B2B and they want to do e-commerce for the very first time and have no idea where to begin.

@1:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So take us through the process. work for business-to-business, you work in the e-commerce area. Take us, you know, what exactly is it that the if a client calls you, they're asking for some Greenwood consulting services.

What should they expect?

@2:00 - Jason Greenwood

Absolutely. I sell my services on subscription basis, so I've affected productized my services, but it's a fixed monthly fee.

It's all you can eat. It's purely bounded by a fair use policy, very reasonable fair use policy around it.

And my engagement with merchants will typically take the form of an initial, very deep dive discovery. So, I'd like to think that when you ask better questions, you get better answers.

And I'd like to think that my discovery process is one of the most robust in the world. It's certainly one of the most robust I've ever seen in the 24 years I've been doing this thing.

And if my discovery questionnaire, the initial questionnaire that I sent to my clients before we do our workshops is about 150 questions.

And it covers every single functional area of their business. And it covers every single operational area of their business.

And it asks them every single question you can imagine from what's their current tech stack, what's their current product catalog look like, what's their customer data look like, what do their processes look like all the way from receiving goods to shipping goods out to customers.

customers? Does the order process look like fulfillment look like? What is, you know, what are their financial side of their business look like?

Do they run at ERP today? Don't they? Do they run a CRM? Don't they? Do they run a PIM system?

Don't they? Do they use the customer's platform today or don't they? What do all those things look like? What are their key pain points?

And but more importantly, what type of experience from a self-service e-commerce perspective are they looking to create? What is the experience that they want their customers to have when they engage with the business?

Because oftentimes, most of the brands I work with, jump straight to the tech and they say, what are we going to implement?

we going to implement a Shopify, big commerce, Magento, a Vtech, an Oreo? What is the tech? What is the PIM system we're going to implement?

What's the ERP we're going implement? It's like, hang on a second, let's start with the experience you're trying to create and let's work back from there because usually there's a whole lot of groundwork that we need to do long before we ever start thinking about the technology to enable it to happen.

so oftentimes, we're, when I go in, sometimes the biggest stumbling blocks are lack of buy-in. internally in the business to this whole concept of e-commerce in the first place.

And one of the biggest areas of friction is the sales team, because usually in these B2B brands they have large field sales teams, they've got large customer service and success teams, and these people feel threatened.

Whatever there's a new channel that's looking to be introduced that doesn't require them specifically to run it, they feel threatened.

And so usually when I go in on one of the biggest enemies of a sales team or perceived to be one of the biggest enemies of sales teams, but usually within 30 minutes of talking to the sales team, I'm their best friend.

Because I'm a massive, massive advocate for sales people doing what they do best, which is building relationships, hunting new accounts, and going out and making sure that their customers feel like a million bucks.

But they can't do that if 40 to 60% of their role is an administrative function, which is what I often find.

As sales people, they're going out there, they're winning business, they're taking orders in the field, taking people out to lunches and dinners and all games and all the rest.

And what we're finding is that oftentimes these people, they don't have the time to... do all the relationship building things they would like to do, because they're coming back to the office, they're manually keying orders into an ERP.

They are manually sending out PDFs of catalogs to their customers. They are taking manual quote requests by email and processing those manually internally and then responding to their customers.

They're doing a whole bunch of double handling of data, double handling of administrative functions purely because they don't have any sort of digital services layer to take this load off their shoulders.

So that's a lot what I do.

@5:30 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, no, and I agree. I think there's a lot of, you know, me kind of being in, I would say, you know, double line of the cells kind of industry in my previous roles.

I agree, you know, if I may have been to come back to the office and document all of the outreach I did in the CRM, well, there's a couple hours of my day and then if that gets kind of skewed and have to go back and scrub that information or there's a couple more hours or if I have to pull some data to look where are my consumers at and what's their demographics and all that other information.

don't have like a business data analyst to help me support. that well, there's another couple more hours in my day and those things begin to add up very quickly.

So how do let's let's kind of take a step back. How did you get operational efficiency essentially is what you're doing.

How did you get into this operations? I don't think it's not the most sexiest industry I think some people probably look at, but you kind of make it sound pretty awesome.

@6:19 - Jason Greenwood

How did you get into it? Yeah, well, like a lot of people in e-commerce, when I first got into e-commerce, didn't work in the B2B space.

I worked at servicing B2C and D2C brands, so traditional retailers wanting to do e-commerce. How can we help them do that?

How can we help them do that better, faster, easier, whatever. But what I discovered after 15 plus years in the industry was that business was standardizing very, very rapidly on a few standardized design patterns and processes.

So, you know, when you get to a certain stage of your growth, you're first starting out, maybe as a startup, one of the standard design patterns might look like, okay, you're on Shopify, you're on Clavio, you're on Gorgia.

just and maybe run a zero or a QuickBooks on the back end, right? Then when you get to the next level of growth, you modify this portion of your business or this system or this process.

then when you get to the next layer of your growth, you move to this system. But what I found was that as a senior solution architect, which I am, as someone who helps with process design, as someone who helps with organizational design and just general business consulting, I found that I was getting a little bit bored with those standard patterns of adoption and design.

But what I did find is when I was still working inside agency land, is that the B2B brands that we occasionally work with were the most complex, the most unique.

They had the most unique tech stacks. had the most unique set of requirements. had heavy duty back end systems.

were running their businesses of ERPs. They had very complex and drawn out sales cycles with very complex products, with very complex product attributes in many instances.

I found that those engagements were But the most interesting, exciting to me, because there was nothing out of the box that you could just kind of plug and play and it was just everything was ready to go.

These businesses were all unique and they all needed heavy duty consulting and they all needed a heavy duty dose of empathy for where they were at versus where they wanted to get to.

And then also what I discovered was that most of these brands, because e-commerce is it's e-commerce and the B2B world in particular, is probably about a decade behind in terms of adoption where it is in the B2C and D2C world.

In the B2C world, you would never start up a new startup today and not offer e-commerce. Even if you had physical stores, there's just no chance you wouldn't do it.

There are still lots of B2B brands that don't e-commerce at all. And what I found was, is that when I went into these businesses, they oftentimes had no idea even where to start.

They didn't know how to identify the requirements, they didn't know how to define their requirements, they didn't know how to document them.

They oftentimes had zero digital. capability in the business at all, except for maybe in the IT department, which was running their ERP, right?

And so what I found was that this was just such a, it was an absolutely blue ocean environment and then what we discovered during COVID is put a rocket under the B2B industry because during COVID, all these amazing sales teams and salespeople, they could no longer go out on the field.

They could no longer go out on the road. They could do the regular call cycles. They couldn't go to visit customers on site anymore.

And as a result of that, they quickly realized, cheese, we need digital routes to market. Otherwise, we are dead.

@9:33 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And that really accelerated the demand for those types of services. You know, folks are folks that are listening, that may not ERP is the enterprise resource planning.

So essentially think about this as like, if you're, it's any organization in your institution, you work with any type of software, any type of software integrations is basically your enterprise resource planning.

So like, if you're Salesforce, if you integrate Salesforce into your system, Outlook, hell, Outlook integration into your system. It's different software.

And you know, it's interesting that you're talking about, Jason, which I do find very unique because as I'm beginning to scale this nonprofit that we've created, Latino founders, it is really interesting about it, is this level of processing, like the organization piece of truly going up through the different softwares, like it is like this, it's like a growth stage, right?

So for example, you can, you kind of start out with Gmail, like everybody does, just to kind of do it.

And then all of sudden, next thing you know, you're doing another, maybe like MailChimp, know, maybe up at the mail, and then all of a sudden you're active campaign, which I think is like the Ferrari of Mail Outlist Services.

And so now I'm like, you know, neck deep in learning about active campaign, but it's because the amount of individuals we're now influencing, now people are on our newsletter, and we basically have outgrown certain softwares and services.

Now with that said, I would say from an operational perspective, that is probably one of the most inefficient pieces that I find is

the number of softwares I have to do. You kind of mentioned your goals to kind of simplify that as well.

@11:06 - Jason Greenwood

How do you do that? Yeah, well, usually it's a case of first meeting a brand where they are, because if they've put, you know, if they've spent a half a million dollars on some back-office system within the prior six months to three years, they're not going to rip and replace that whole stack.

So what we do is we meet them where they are and we say, well, that's great. This fulfills this function within the business and it does it really well.

But which data do we need to get from other systems to make that system perform better so that you get more value out of it and vice versa?

What core data, for example, what core data do we need to get out of your ERP or your accounting system that now needs to feed data into your e-commerce platform in terms of product data and customer data to allow that e-commerce platform to do its job in terms of the digital services that you're going to provide to your customers?

Or what kind of EDI software do we need to plug in? to your back office system, which is just electronic data interchange, which is just a fancy way of a completely automated ERP to ERP ordering process, your biggest customers, if you are a B2B seller, your whale customers, your biggest customers, they will not log into your e-commerce website to place an order.

It's their ERP, they'll generate a PO or purchase order in their system, and they want that to dynamically and automatically flow into your system for immediate fulfillment.

And the same with e- procurement systems, you might have the flashest back end system, the operational systems in the back end, but on the buyer side, they may have an e-procurement system, they've got specific software that's designed to aid and streamline the procurement process.

They don't want to then have to export a CSV or a Excel file out of that e-procurement system and then upload it into your e-commerce platform to populate the shopping cart and then click by now, they want that to happen in an automated fashion.

so what we do is we work through all of the use cases in the scenario. by which you want to secure orders from your customers and service them with a digital services layer because even in a scenario where a business is connected to you via EDI for the ordering process, there's a whole lot of other digital services that they usually want to go alongside that.

So they may want to place quote requests through you. So through your buying portal, you have the quote, you want to be able to support the quote request process.

You want them to be able to look at your catalog. You want them to be able to see their pricing.

You want them to be able to view their MOQs or minimum order quantities. You want them to be able to pay their bills, invoices, their statements.

You want them them to be able to lodge return requests where it's necessary. And you don't want them to have to do that by email or fax with their sales agent.

You want them to be able to do this through a digital services layer that's completely self-service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And many of these B2B brands have no idea how to set about making that happen. As you say, even if they've got a Ferrari in the

Back-end exposing those services in a meaningful way to the customer on the front-end is something that they don't yet know how to do Yeah, that's another great point.

@14:09 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

so folks EDI Electronical data interchange. essentially it's automated exchange for your business document. So It's like books might be kind of a good example, right?

you kind of put all your stuff in one location, but a good example of what Jason was mentioning about Not utilizing things about so as I mentioned active campaign We're currently using it for for the actual nonprofit however the website as as I mentioned we're kind of scaling so we're currently using wicks We're certainly gonna be going out and probably go wet WordPress here soon But to that point because I'm going to be capturing these individuals information this data on Active campaign it was imperative that when I actually created our newsletter Subscription model.

actually created it with an active campaign Copy that actual that actual code embedded that code into the website for Wix.

So now when individuals, even though they're using the WIC website when they go and subscribe to our website, it actually goes through the active campaign because that's where all of my works going through.

So that's just exactly what Jason's talking about. he's talking about the EDI, that automated exchange of business documents, it's truly making sure that those integrations are seamless.

When your paycheck comes through from your organization and goes through your bank, right? They're using an EDI automated exchange system as well because again, your financial institute and your work are completely different entities, but still the processes they're trying to do is make sure it's seamless.

Now talk about the importance of this data and how this data helps support a strategic growth and not only strategic growth, but strategic execution because everybody creates goals, but I believe operation helps support the ability to successfully obtain those goals.

by the tactics that you didn't put in place to reach those goals.

@16:03 - Jason Greenwood

can you talk about the importance of the operations efficiency when actually, you know, strategic goals and finding strategic goals?

Totally. And there's probably two key areas here that specifically in the B2B world are not common yet and that creates real challenges with these businesses.

So typically in the B2B world, we have sales specialists that know their vertical inside now. They have a whole ton of tribal and institutional knowledge that resides in their head.

And so they know exactly where on the network drive, for example, when one of their customers makes a quote request or something like that, they know exactly on the internal network drive where to go to get this specification sheet or this PDF or this exploded drawing or whatever it is, the zip file of assets that the customer needs to make a buying decision.

They know all this stuff. maybe even know where on the shelf the print catalog is for this piece of equipment, for example, right?

that unfortunately is It's a very one-to-one level of knowledge that they can only expose it on a one-to-one basis to their end customers.

It is not a one-to-many scalable situation. And the problem is that oftentimes this tribal knowledge is held with people that are 40, 50, 60, 70, and sometimes 80 years old.

And what happens if they pass away? What happens if they retire? What happens if they get hit by a bus tomorrow?

What happens if the worst happens and this person or even if they just go and they leave your business and they can go and work for a competitor?

All that tribal knowledge starts to leave the business before you've been able to digitalize it and make it a one-to-many solution.

And so this is another motivation, which is why we need to get the data and we need to get the processes out of these people's very capable heads.

And we need to get them into a digital system designed to support that process digitally in a one-to-many fashion.

The second thing is that B2B brands historically have always hidden their website login. This is behind a login, meaning you couldn't even see, you couldn't see the catalog, you couldn't see pricing, you couldn't see inventory, you had to actually authenticate before you could see the catalog that was assigned to you, and to see your unique price list.

Now that might be great from a customer experience perspective, but maybe not, but what it's really bad for is SEO, because if I can't see your catalog until I log in, neither can Google.

And so therefore, now that the recent data shows that over 61% of B2B buyers today are millennials, they start their supplier search online.

They don't go to the yellow pages, they don't go to some industry organization, they don't go to some Slack channel, they Google, if they're looking for widget X, supplier for widget X, they're going to type widget X supplier, widget X manufacturer, widget X distributor into Google, and then they are going to go to those websites, they're going to search around, and then maybe then they will reach out to that supplier and they'll say what is involved in setting up a trade account with you.

But if they don't know you sell with this, you will never be part of their consideration. as a supplier of widget X and so B2B brands for realizing we need to ungate our experience now maybe we won't show prices and maybe we won't show inventory but at least we need to have an open indexable catalog so that Google can at least get into its index what we carry for the long tail so that when people are looking for a supplier we are one of the suppliers in their consideration set so these are two ways in which digitalizing data and processes can help grow a business and make it more scalable versus the 100% manual human-driven process from before I'll go back to that initial concern I referred to with salespeople I actually oftentimes recommend that brands incentivize their salespeople first of all don't take away their commission if it if if an order comes through a digital channel in fact I would go one step further I would say incentivize your salespeople so that their name accounts if they migrate from a from a manual human-driven sales process to one of our

Digital Channels, we're going to give you an extra one, two, four percent commission. And you watch, you get what you insane, what you incent salespeople to drive them to a specific channel, you watch them move, they will literally go and sit in a chair next to their customer, walk them through that first one, two, digital orders.

They will hold their hand. They will make sure they have a seamless transition into these digital channels. You watch your business grow, because I tell you, it, and I discovered that when I was working with very large, global B2B brands, they might, for example, it might be a power tool manufacturer in the United States, and they might have enough physical sales reps to service every major region in the country.

But what happens when they go into a new country like India, or they go into a new country like China, or they go into a new country, you know, somewhere in the Middle East or in late time, no matter how much they invest into their field sales capabilities, it is a physical impossibility that they are going to be covered.

be able to cover all those new regions with sales reps. It's just impossible. So from an expansion perspective and from a scalability perspective, the only way you can do that is to bring a whole lot of your services into the digital world.

@21:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I, you know, I actually absolutely love that concept because it's, it's, it's, it's interesting operations. Like once you kind of digitize it and made it more efficient, you are able to, one is a, is a founder, able to take some more time off because now you're really, things are automated.

you really have a good, uh, things are segmentated. So if this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens, right?

And then you also were able to create your customer profile. So your marketing is very exact about what your message is for what your market is and what you're trying to do.

To your point, where is your salespeople trying to lead them to a good example of this is like, I work in healthcare, right?

And to your point, it kind of a lot about what we're talking about. We're first, we're talking about, you know, the different data exchange in Epic is a great example of that Epic medical record system has, it has imaging goals.

with their pathology, I mean, through and all these different softwares that have to feed into this to make sure the patient's chart is up to date and accurate.

Well, then I'll go out to communities and say, Hey, the way, do you know how to access your patient's chart and the community setting?

But my goal is to train them one time, but not the goal is not just to train them. But the goal is to actually build a relationship so they can send us more volume, right?

So they they become more efficient in what they're doing so we can be more efficient in what we are doing.

Because if the community is able to take on more complex cases, then that means our organization is able to take on more complex cases.

And we're able to discharge patients further quicker because their clinical expertise is in the community has been risen, right?

Because of our education or outreach and things of that nature. then all of a sudden the entire state starts to get better and healthier, You're sort of starting and seeing this trickle down effect.

And it's very interesting the way you mentioned it is because you tell the sales people, Hey, where do you want us to take this individual on the funnel, right?

on their sales funnel, where do you want to go? And if you tackle. Please say, hey, if you're at this stage of the cell, if you're at the awareness, these are the tactics you're gonna be doing and these are the goals.

And then on the next one, on the evaluation, right, or the consideration, okay, here are the tactics and here are the goals.

So your sales team knows when they're going either into a meeting with a client or a partner or a community or a market or whatever it is, they should know exactly where they're at on that sales funnel.

So then they'll know exactly what tactics they should be actually exploring and imploring in that community or market or segmentation, whatever it is, because they understand what goals they're trying to get to, because at the end of the day, you're trying to get everybody to the very bottom of that sales funnel, which loyalty, right?

You want them to be a loyal consumer, a loyal client, a loyal partner, a loyal vendor, whatever it is.

You wanna get them down to that loyalty. And so the efficiency piece, I really like the way you're kind of putting it together.

And I don't think, I haven't really begin to think about it this way. And now my brain's starting to turn a little bit too, how to.

makes things even, even automated stuff, because not only do, does it automate and make it quicker, but it also removes human error, I'm realizing.

And this is something my wife has taught me. She's like, you got to start automating this stuff because this whole copy and paste that you have to do, what happens if you miss a letter, happens if you miss a number, what if you put it in the wrong cell and you actually have a formula that's built out, dumping all this stuff in and to your point to the sharing, the knowledge, you know, always have an individual in fact, one of our individuals from our organizations be leaving to a competitor.

And so I met with this individual this morning, it's like, hey, I need, I need the knowledge dump. You, you get all this data, one, where are you getting it from?

How do you put it in, what pivot table, what formulas are you using? Give it to me. So give me all the information, you put it on a shared drive.

So now all the, all the data will get dumped into this, into this document and I'll have it, check it once a quarter.

And he's like, play with it for a week, come back, tell me what you're saying because I'm like, perfect, you know, but this is, it's in

narrative to have these processes in place because he's leaving September or something September third and once the individuals gone.

So is that knowledge?

@25:08 - Jason Greenwood

Well, and here's here's the other upshot to digitalizing these brands. First of all, one of the major motivators in some of the brands I work with in them first coming to me is they literally have their buyers coming to them and saying if you don't offer us self service e-commerce if we have to continue to go through your sales reps to place orders, we are going to buy somewhere else because we've and they will calculate their time that they spend in the back and forth with the sales rep and they'll say if we can save 1% or 2%, especially if they're a wholesale distributor buying off of a manufacturer or a retailer buying off of a wholesale distributor an extra one or two percent directly to the bottom line and cost savings that is massive for these businesses.

So if they think that they can gain 1% 2% 3% in efficiency in their ordering process by buying off of a supplier that allows

loud self-service e-commerce. They'll take that bet every single time. So long as there's no compromising quality, so long as there's no compromising in cost, like major compromising cost, so long as they can get the range of the products and category products that they're looking for, they, you know, that in order to create that loyalty, it is as much about bringing efficiency to them as it is bringing the product and the price to them.

It's about how can we make your business as the buyer perform better and weak. You can have shorter turn cycles.

If you know you can place an order and because of the digital updates we're providing your system, for example, you know exactly when it's going to arrive and be receded into your warehouse.

Well, that means you can flex up and down your receipt team department and your putaway teams. It means they can be more efficient with their time.

So there's all sorts of efficiencies to be gained when we move to these digital or digitalized sales channels. oftentimes they don't even think of it.

know, when I go in and talk to these, a lot of these B2B brands, they don't even use the term e-commerce.

term buyer portal or they use the term seller portal or they use the term procurement portal or they use the term you know they call it everything but e-commerce so you know those of us who live in the e-commerce world of course we think of all these digital services as part of e-commerce services but oftentimes not only does the seller not use the term e-commerce but the buyer doesn't use the term e-commerce and when I go in and I'm consulting and I'm talking to my clients clients and I'm asking them would you would if we were to help this your supplier offer you e-commerce would that be of interest to you and they go no no no we like dealing with Bob or like we like dealing with Jill there are sales reps we don't have dealing with them we don't think and then but when you re-contextualize the question and you say would you like be able to log in and see the full breadth of products we sell would you like to log in and see your special price list would you like to log in and be able to make your quote request automatically and track them right the way from the time

from quote request to quote approval and beyond. Would you like to be able to log in and log a return request?

Would you like to log in and be able to re-download your invoices if they get lost in email and you accidentally delete them or you can't find them?

Would you like to know the current status of your credit limit without sending an email to our CFO or our credit management team to find out what your credit stated is?

And then go, oh, actually, yeah, that would be super helpful. Or would you like to be able to log in and track in order from the time it leaves our warehouse, the time it hits your warehouse, similar to an Uber-like experience?

Oh, yeah, that would be massively helpful. So although the buyer might not originally think they would ever use an e-commerce solution, what we find is after we launch that initial e-commerce solution, they might originally only use it for all these other ancillary services, but we find that usually within six months, if they're living in that interface anyway to do all these other things, it just happens.

Automatically just start using the buy now, but because it's just so much easier and it's so much more convenient for them They might not think they're ever gonna do e-commerce with you But they suddenly just almost like biosmosis they start doing it when they're living in that portal every day anyway Yeah, and you know, think we're out of a great point in regards to the the relationship piece You know, especially with like startups that are you're starting to scale go out and build relationships with your suppliers and vendors Bring them into your strategic growth discussions of what you're trying to do because they're also trying to grow and scale their business And they'll probably work with you.

@29:35 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You might even be able to find some funding through that It's like hey, know, can we have a we have a six month, you know Period of you know products and services or something of that nature and they'll be willing to help you because in fact microsoft I believe they get about like a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars for startups And they the goal is they want to see startups continue to scale because they'll continue to use Microsoft's softwares Right and and they become an enterprise and all of a sudden you have

enterprise and boom. Now you're really kind of going forward and you know I really do like that kind of of just kind of really building out the the the piece and again just the operational efficiency of it is very important making sure you're focused on the capabilities of scaling I think is also important.

think some people will scale too quickly and and next you know you're you're kind of up the creek right and so just being mindful of all those things is really interesting and then I do really again bringing it back to the relationship piece just making sure you're having those you know crucial conversations and being honest because again I think what you're going to see you're going to probably see individuals and organizations that are also trying to scale and so if you have those conversations with them they'll they'll figure out how to do it.

Now why now you kind of mentioned you know you you work your clients are you know 20 million dollar revenue clients primarily how did you build your brand?

@30:56 - Jason Greenwood

So that's that's also a very good question and I'm very fortunate. that Gary V kicked my . I've been listening to Gary V for probably a decade, right?

And you know, regardless of what you think about Gary V, you know, good, better and different, the reality is that, you know, 10 years ago or whatever it was that I first started listening to him, he just harped on and on and on.

If you think you're a thought leader, put your thoughts out in the world and let the market decide. And so back then I was, I was, I was, I didn't even have my own business back at that stage.

I was working for somebody else. I was working inside of a brand. And, but I just thought, geez, I, you know, I've already been in this industry for, at this stage, and I've been in that industry for like 15 years.

I felt like I had a lot to share. I felt like I had, I had a lot of hard one institutional knowledge that I wanted to share with the world, help my industry get better.

And I thought, you know, I'm a big believer in rising tide floats all boats. And if we all get better at this whole thing called e-commerce, then it's going to generate more trust in the market for e-commerce.

And therefore.

@32:05 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I lost it.

@32:12 - Jason Greenwood

And then what I found was is that is that when I first started out, I didn't have a specific goal with my content.

It was like, I want to build my audience before I ever need them. I want to build my audience before I ever need to even think about monetizing them or going to them with opportunities or anything like that.

You have to have an audience before you can monetize an audience, right? And so for years, for like six, seven, eight years, I was just putting out content as fast and as often and as high-quality as I could.

And then what I found was, is that when I got up to 10, 20, 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, I found that once I finally went out on my own as an independent, and I started talking about that, and I started, you know, it wasn't like I was, you know, it wasn't like my content went from entertaining and educational to selling.

And I don't think I ever really sell to my content. today, just try to put out great content that keeps me at the top of my potential customers minds and their feed.

But what I found was, is that lots of amazing things happened for me and my career out of my content that weren't even necessarily directly related to winning new clients.

So for example, I got asked to speak at conferences. I got asked to go and speak at events and retreats and webinars.

And I made so many great friends in the industry. I learned about new technology. was able to up my level education and knowledge in the industry because of the people that I was having on my podcast that were speaking about things that I didn't have experience with.

They were, you know, they were subject matter experts on topics that I was not an expert on. And so in the final thing, the other benefit that came out of particularly the podcast was that if you're on LinkedIn and you see somebody that's really interesting and putting out interesting content, but you direct message them and say, Hey, look, let me buy you a virtual copy.

Let's let's talk shop for 15 minutes. Nine times out of 10, they're going to say no. Because they think you're trying to sell them something, even if you're just trying to meet and make a relationship, they think you're trying to sell them.

When you have a podcast, especially when you have a podcast that's done over 400 episodes, all of sudden, you now have the credibility and the value of exchange to say, hey, I would love to get you on my podcast to share what you know and 99% of the time, they will say yes to that because it has a benefit to them.

There's a value exchange, it exposes them to a wider audience, and it makes them happy. People love talking about their knowledge.

They love, they love talking about themselves, and they love talking about what they know. And a podcast is a great way to create those relationships that you can't create almost any other way.

So the benefits of, I guess, building a personal brand were more exposure of my knowledge to the marketplace so that when people were in the market for that knowledge, they could come to me for it.

But also, I still have the mentality, I'm still trying to put out the absolute best possible, most complete content I can, and then hey, if people want to take that and do it themselves, awesome.

That's brilliant. But if they realize, geez, this is pretty hard. This is harder than I thought it was. I'd rather just have Jason do it because this is just speciality.

Then they can come back to me and I can help them. So they're the value of putting out content and building a personal brand.

I can't even properly describe how many ways it has benefited my life and how many friends that have become lifelong friends because of content that resonated with someone and then I form a relationship with them.

It's, it's phenomenal.

@35:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I could not agree more. I think the podcast selfishly, folks, the podcast has provided myself just an immense amount of free education.

So I think every single one of you who have been on the show, I think we're almost a little over 170.

So just just below your 400, but we're creeping up on you here quickly. to that point, you know, I would say I agree.

I think I get a lot of LinkedIn connections that kind of reached out. And I kind of generally feel like they're, they're trying to sell me.

on something. And sometimes they primarily are, I will agree. And I will admit, you know, previously reaching out to individuals without the show.

It was a little hairy. But now it's almost like the exact opposite where a lot of individuals will reach out to you directly wanting to be on the show.

And it's kind of funny to me because sometimes I'm always like, what, how do you even hear about this podcast?

Like, you know, this is kind of cool. And you know, I appreciate you guys' interest. so bringing on all these individuals, it's, it's been remarkable.

And you know, having an opportunity, like you mentioned, I think it also brings in just other opportunities, right? Things that, you know, the nonprofit, I didn't think that that was something we're going to do.

And all of a sudden, we've, we're two years in, we're raised over almost a half a million dollars. We have, we have an executive director bringing in a program manager.

I mean, we're really starting to scale this business, you know, and you know, the larger we scale, the larger the impact kind of thing.

And so it's, it's really interesting just kind of how it all Just taking opportunities to do things, folks, either go on a podcast, do do a public speaking opportunity if you do get get outside of your comfort zone, you know, just just try to do things and try to do the best quality as possible, knowing it's not going to be perfect always.

In fact, it's our imperfections that make us perfect as humans, right? And so even even the coolest, wrong thing that has been done is actually the probably the coolest thing that somebody else.

So just go out and put it out there. again, the information, like Jason said, if you believe you're a thought leader, put your thoughts out there and let the market decide.

I thought that was possibly the coolest quote ever, because I think that's something that I think a lot of people haven't done previously.

I think I'm starting to do that from the entrepreneurial side, but I'm starting to realize, you know, my career has really been in healthcare, and that's kind of where my expertise lies.

Have I thought about, you know, venturing in that area where I'm really focusing on the You know, if they're a consulting business, talking about talking about the sales funnel, right?

But making a healthcare focus. So, you know, maybe the referring provider funnel, right? So you're, I'm trying to get referrals down to becoming a loyal, referring provider.

Because again, different target audiences. But yeah, it's a really, really interesting kind of thought process. And again, I really do like the way you're trying to create this operational efficiency and making everybody better now.

Jason, what's, what's, what's, what's in the future? Tell us, what are the next five years look like for Jason in the consulting group?

@38:32 - Jason Greenwood

Look, that's a very, very good question. I am fortunate in that my I added. So initially, when I first started my consultancy four years ago, I only worked with merchants.

I did not have consulting frameworks or services or even custom pricing for agencies, software vendors, know, platform vendors, investors.

I didn't have those frameworks. But then I had people come to me and it's like, okay, well, if I'm going to service these people,

Well, at a high level, I really need to have a dedicated framework for this. I need to have dedicated discovery for this.

I need to be able to present real clear and present value for those types of customers. And now as of today, as we speak today, I'm very glad I did that.

And I started doing that two years ago when I started getting demand for those other services from other customer cohorts.

Now, I'm proud to say as of today, as of right now, I have more non merchant customers than I have merchant customers.

Now, I could never, I could never have envisaged that that would ever be the case two years ago, but I tell you, I love it because it stretched me in completely new directions.

It forced me to learn new skills. It forced me to speak a new language with those different types of customers that need different types of help that contextualize my knowledge specifically for their needs.

And I've loved it. It's been massively challenging, but it has been incredibly rewarding. And I tell you, as the economy contracts, you know, with the federal reserve trying to slow the economy down everything else, my business would not be as successful or at least as consistent as it is today.

If I'd stuck with that original ICP of working with these merchants, I'd be in a really challenging place today.

by adding very adjacent services, it has not only brought me a whole lot of joy and fun and challenge, but it's also made my business more sustainable and more scalable.

And I'm going to continue to do that. If there's another customer court that comes to me and says, I think you can help us with this, I will expand and add my services required.

But ultimately within the next five years, I would like to get to a place in a perfect world. And I'm working really hard to make this happen where like 80 to 90% of my income comes from my content.

That's where I'd like to get to. Now I will never not consult because what I find is that when people get away too far away from their industry, you get out of touch with your industry real fast.

So I always want to keep my sword sharp. I always want to keep my finger on the pulse of what's happening in my industry.

I always want to stay current so that the content I'm putting out is current and it's It's relevant. So I will always, no matter how successful my content program becomes or anything else, or I'm looking at bringing out some digital products, et cetera, I don't think, I will always have one to three consulting clients a year, always.

Probably until the day I die, because I think it's really important to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry.

And look, I'm incredibly grateful to my industry. I'm a digital nomad, I grew up in Southern California, lived in New Zealand for almost 30 years, I've been living in Mexico for the last year and a half.

I'm incredibly grateful for the freedom that my industry has afforded me. And so I kind of look at my content as, especially my podcast as a love letter, back to my industry, as a debt of gratitude to my industry.

And I'm looking at continuing to grow that. We're looking at adding, we drop three new podcast episodes week, we're looking at increasing that.

@41:48 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

But I'm gonna need to take on some additional resources to be able to make that happen. Man, three podcast, wow, that's awesome.

@41:56 - Jason Greenwood

And I do it 100% myself.

@41:57 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I do the recording, I do the post-production, and I do. the distribution myself. Yeah, folks, I don't think you understand how much actually work goes into a podcast.

It really is remarkable because you edit the video, you edit the audio, you put in your end screen for your video, then you put in your YouTube, you got your SEO, you got your descriptions, your titles, keyword phrases, you got your tags, you got your links, it's, and some of the stuff you can automate, but you can't automate editing, you can't automate a lot of this other things.

And then the website, you know, each, after each episode, you know, one of our guests will get their own dedicated webpage with the transcription of the audio version of the conversation, photo has the link back to their, you know, their page, there's a blog post, again, to your point, continuing to create content, so people continue to come back because, again, folks, you're trying to get folks down this funnel and the more content you have for them to absorb the more information they're able to consider that's valuable to them, the more they're going to come back, the more they're to continue to continue to come back to your organization could be to come back to your

@43:00 - Jason Greenwood

services or products, because again, the value that you're able to provide them, you're either helping them solve a problem or making it easier, as Jason's doing, making easier to solve the problems, making it more efficient, making them better solutions.

So it's really, really awesome. Now, Jason, what advice would you have for aspiring entrepreneurs that might be listening to the show?

Build your personal brand as fast and as hard as you can with the best content you can, because I tell you, if I tried to go out on my own with no audience, with nobody interested in hearing what I had to say, if I didn't already have 25,000 followers on LinkedIn, by that stage, if I didn't already have a popular podcast, if I was trying to start from scratch in terms of building a group of people or a network around me that I could tap into as a resource, not necessarily to sell to, but even as a resource set.

If I waited until I was ready to go out on my own and start my own business to do that, it would have been 100 times as hard.

Or I would have had to spend a hundred times as much. don't do, I don't do paid and performance marketing.

don't do outbound. I don't, you know, I don't do any of those things that you typically would have to do when you start out your business from scratch, where you've got to spend a whole lot of money to go get your cohort of customers.

I didn't have to do that. And I think that, so anybody that's considering becoming an entrepreneur, it's really difficult to do that today, I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's very difficult to do that today without an audience that wants to hear what you have to say.

And so I, like what GaryVee said to me a decade ago, build your audience before you need it. Because I tell you, once you do need it, if you start building, then it takes a long time.

That's why we'll go against you. Have some random act of going viral accidentally. Some people do jackpot very early on in their content journey.

But for most people, it takes them a while. It takes them a while to figure out their angle. It takes them a while to get comfortable hearing their own voice, seeing their own face.

It takes them a while to get comfortable with with sometimes the hate that comes in or the negative commentary that comes in It takes people a while to grow that thick skin and to figure out the angle of how they want to go to market with their content and making sure that they've got something relevant and you know, exciting that they want to talk about that they're passionate about it takes people a while.

And I think if you start that journey, whilst you're desperate for blending business, know, people people smell desperation a mile away and you know, it's like dog smell fear, it's the same kind of thing we as human smell desperation.

And I think if you can start your entrepreneurial journey from a place and a mindset of abundance versus desperation, you will be setting yourself up for massive success from day one.

@45:43 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, very, very well said, know, and get out there folks and just talk with other people to Jason's point, you know, make sure you actually have a market in an audience, because the worst thing that entrepreneurs can do is curate a solution for a problem that there's no market for, which happens sometimes as well

And that's okay, because once you realize that, you can pivot, as Jason mentioned, he's had a pivot before, The goal is to continue to pivot and continue to keep your thumb on the pulse of what is going on in that market, because things are constantly changing.

You don't know what a next pandemic might occur, but what it does for just be ready to, okay, well, at least this is happening.

I'm starting to see the market do this. Here's the trends I'm seeing. Here's how we're going to pivot. Now, Jason, for those that might be interested in learning more about you, don't want to visit, figure out what you're at online, how can they connect with you, Jason Greenwood?

@46:33 - Jason Greenwood

Where's your information on the internet? Three billion places, LinkedIn, don't connect with me on LinkedIn. I've put out most of my content on LinkedIn, go and check out the e-commerce edge podcast on every podcast channel, including YouTube, and then my website, greenwoodconsulting.net.

If you need any kind of services that I offer and all the podcast information is also and all the links to the podcast are located on my website as well.

@46:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

yeah, those are the three main places. Perfect. And folks, if that you guys forget all that information, you can please visit the shades of e.com to go and subscribe to the newsletter.

all of this information will be on the website. Jason will have, like I mentioned, a dedicated blog post as well as transcription of the conversation and audio version.

And again, please subscribe to the newsletter on states of e. And if you're so kind, we also have a Patreon page for $5 a month, you can actually support the podcast so we can continue to bring on phenomenal guests like Jason.

@47:27 - Jason Greenwood

Now, Jason, are there any last words you have for the listeners? Look, I think, you know, intent matters is what I would say.

And people can smell intent a mile away. And when, you know, I can tell your intent is pure. can tell, you know, can tell you're a nice guy.

think people can tell that even through a screen. They can tell it even through the audio of a podcast or the video of a vlog.

I think people can smell intent a mile away. And I think as long as your intent is in the right place and you, you genuinely want the best for other people, not just for yourself, I think that goes a long, long,

way. if you can hone that empathy gene, you know, we're not all just born out of the box with high levels of empathy.

I think it's something that can be learned and I think it's something that could be cultured in our own life.

And I tell you, the older I've become, the more empathetic I've become. And it's partly because I've lived now in three different countries.

And I've traveled extensively to many more. So I think intent, empathy and travel your  off, travel to as many countries as you can, eat as many foods as you can, meet people from in as many different cultures and languages and pasts and backgrounds as you possibly can.

Because I tell you, if you want to hone your empathy gene fast, go and see the world through somebody else's eyes.

That's the fastest way you could do it.

@48:39 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Very sure. would not. I cannot agree more. You know, your IQ is important, but EQ is just as important when you're building your business in the traveling.

I completely agree. Get out there, travel experience the world. See the world through other people's lenses. It's remarkable how often you kind of go to another country and you realize kind of house.

boiled you are where you are and what you're doing with your life. Again, individuals, folks listening, thank you again for listening.

Please subscribe to us at the shades of e.com. You can also follow us on all the social sites, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube