philipmckeating: Hey, guys. Uttam Kumaran: Hey! Hey, good morning. Robert Tseng: Hey, mornin’! Uttam Kumaran: Good, how’s everything? philipmckeating: Very good, very good. How about you? Uttam Kumaran: Good. Busy week. I feel it’s… things haven’t been stopping for us, … I don’t know, I thought holidays were gonna be slow. , I’m talking to you guys, but , it’s, for us and a lot of our clients, we’re in, , peak Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff, , . philipmckeating: Totally hear that, . You got the black sweatshirt memo today? Shivani Amar: We’re aligned. Uttam Kumaran: It’s funny, I was at… I was at a get-together on Wednesday, and they had a whole bowl of Element out, … It was funny, and then it was weird, because they had, , that, they had Breeze, they had all these, , CPG, and I was , maybe they got… it was, , some meetup, they got sponsored by CPG, but it was, , they had a… , a candy bowl of elephant. philipmckeating: That’s great. Shivani Amar: , Phil Utham is Austin-based, Robert is New York City-based, and then Phil is based in Boston, and he’s… he joined Element Phil in July. But has worked in CPG, and, , I’m the one who’s, , the CPG newbie. , I feel he has more of a… more experience in, , the CPG data realm. And , wanted to, … I put his proposal in front of you, in front of him. I put your proposal in front of him. Sorry, I had a coffee, and I’d never drink coffee, my brain was, , a little black. Uttam Kumaran: Never drink coffee, wow. Shivani Amar: I don’t drink coffee, and I had a latte today, I might be talking I was , oh my god, I’m, , now just jumping into anxiety. I put the proposal in front of Phil this week, and he had some questions, I thought we could just go through it together today. Uttam Kumaran: , definitely, , and , Robert from my team, both of us lead Brainforge together, we work across all of our clients, , I’m happy to jump in if you guys want to take the lead. philipmckeating: have, shivani, what we talked about the other day, we haven’t shared any of that yet, ? Cool, . And do you guys have that propo… it might be helpful to toss the… document up that we walked through, and just reference a little bit. Robert Tseng: You’re gonna share? . . Uttam Kumaran: , and you can share it, you can run through it. Robert Tseng: This is the deck. Alright, cool. If I need to blow it up, let me know. philipmckeating: , that’s perfect, . Great. We don’t need to watch it, we don’t Maybe. Shivani Amar: A little bit of a timeline slide, Phil? Robert Tseng: Yep, let’s go, let’s just jump to a slide, . This one? Yep. philipmckeating: , , I’m gonna say two things that are… , have some, dissonance between them, but that’s , we can all live in that. I love that you guys want to deliver business value quickly, and I that that’s how you’re wired, that’s the way to be, and we appreciate that, and that’s how we think about things. this… My goal here is to build, essentially, an enterprise-ready solution. And take the time to do that 100% . I’m not… I don’t need to see business value day 14, to trust this process. I need to see… The process, the discipline and structure. And a pathway to get where we want to be. And I, I, , And… the reality is that our organization is… Going to be slower. than what you guys are setting up here. And , , that we need a significantly more robust, , exploratory and information gathering phase, where we get, , all the information together all at once, and then have you guys, , really document and map it. And then go into implementation. And… I recognize I’ve ran a small consultancy at one point in my career, and . It’s important to show business value, because that’s how you, , keep the customers engaged and whatever, . we’ll pay your retainer through that period of time. , I’m good with that. I trust, , as long as I see… I want to see a disciplined process, I want to see the projects being managed properly, I want to see the … you guys asking the questions. Based on everything I’ve seen here, that’s not going to be an issue at all. , And ideally, it’s… that stage is going to take somewhere between 4 and 8 weeks. Ideally, we can get it done in 3 weeks, and I’ll be delighted, and, , whatever, you’ll be our partners for the next 10 years thing. , that’s great. But documentation, to me, on all of this, is really, really critical, because one of the pieces that We’ve struggled with, or we struggle with now, is we’re adding tons of people to the organization, and there’s lots of, , pockets of knowledge and information that… it’s not only that data is siloed, it’s that knowledge about that data is siloed, ? And , , , documentation of this process is… equally as important as consolidating the data. , just… I’ll stop there for a second, and just, , does that framework make sense? I know it’s a little bit different than what you guys , , the approach you proposed, but, Does that feel something that’s comfortable to you? Uttam Kumaran: , maybe, Robert, I can let you talk through, , our process a bit, given those points, . Robert Tseng: , , thanks for clearing that, clearing that up for us. , obviously this 90-day plan is typically just, , our starting point for, , just showcasing our capabilities, how we think about things from, , a waterfall progression, , the different steps, but as far as, , how long each of those takes, , , obviously, it’s suggested to the organization. , we recognize that, , , Utah and I were chatting before this call. We were thinking, , maybe this is a time, an opportunity for us to slow down before we go fast. And , , , , if you want more details around , our discovery process, what that first 30 days really looks . , I… , we’ve, we’ve definitely worked, , I worked, I worked at Ruggle Bowl previously, and , I, I felt there were some similar flavors here were a lot of influx of new staff, a lot of really competent former ex-consultants and bankers, not, , a true data function that’s, , there yet, but a lot of people that can triangulate their own insights that might be butting their heads, and really keeping them all on the same page is really important. And , we were just, , talking through some of, , the cultural dynamics there that maybe we didn’t capture in the initial initial deck, and we won’t really know until we’re inside the organization, figuring it out. But what I will say is that, , if you want us to assess, , the diligence that we’re… that we’d be taking as we’re better framing the problem with your team, obviously, , we didn’t… , these are just initial slides for us, and we tried to write out those objectives based on some of these early conversations. But this would definitely involve us , running… running… meeting every… all the folks in the room that are going to be important for helping us to describe, to frame the problem in the way. And what we found is, , especially… a lot of our clients have a… they’re able to… to call… to describe the pain that they’re feeling, but they may not be able to… they may not know how to describe the problem that they’re having. Maybe, , Phil, because you’ve been in CBG, you have seen… you’ve seen, , the whole timeline, and really what you need is just to build advocacy and ownership amongst your… the folks on your team to see things the same way. And , we’re used to running those type of workshop sessions where it’s a bottom-up. bottoms-up approach, we’re going to do the whole whiteboarding thing, get… sourcing, , what people are seeing. We’re also going to be seeding it with our own ideas as , and, , guiding, , hey, these are some of the problems that are common, , are you able to match the pain to the problem? And, , once we’re able to find alignment there, then we’ll have the… we’ll have the problem framework that you want to see moving forward. , that’s… that’s , , one… one initial thing that I would… I would say, to… back to you, just to keep this com… this part of the conversation going. , , , what do you… what do you think about that? philipmckeating: , that… that totally makes sense. Shivani Amar: One thing I’ll note is that, , when we look at this workstream approach slide, Phil, , this was very much, , I had a few discovery calls, and this is, . They’re… I talk to e-commerce, I talk to wholesale, and then I’m starting to form a perspective on where people need value added. But, , to your point, I’m doing the discovery side with… I’m starting the discovery side with the commercial side of the business, but when Brainforge comes in, . We could have them… it would be nice to have them do discovery, , across the board. Does that resonate with you? Or do you still feel , starting with commercial is the way to go? Starting with commercial is the way to go. philipmckeating: Shivani, you didn’t happen to take a picture of that whiteboard that we did, just the brief one that I did in the… Shivani Amar: Oh, , I didn’t. , the, the, . philipmckeating: The way I… the way I was thinking about this, guys, is … essentially, , I’m gonna describe a Gantt chart, let’s see if I can do this with words, but it’s , , a one-month Gantt chart, or the first row is… is call it, , Shopify. that’s a one-month Gantt chart, where we’re… week one is explore the data, week two is define and map the data, week three and four is import the data, and then the second row, there’s another one-week project in line with the fourth week, which is, , let’s use that data for some project, ? Yep. Probably starting… in week 2 or 3, we start with row 3, which is Amazon, ? And then you have a 4-week… you should have that same 4-week cycle, and then the last week or two, you’re, , delivering. Uttam Kumaran: Channel by channel, . philipmckeating: channel by channel, data set by dataset, because there’s… there’s a couple other things to note. One is that, . our Shopify database is, , really exten… or our Shopify volume is really extensive. I don’t know what you’ve seen, Robert, at Ruggable, but, . at Circle, pulling out a similar history of Shopify, . with, 5chan was, , gonna take… it took, , months. And , , with Shopify’s API limit, and maybe you have got… you guys have better ways around that, but, . I don’t even think we could conceivably get that data out in, , a week. , , we’re… we are gonna need… and Amazon’s probably gonna be similar. Our wholesale business is all on Shopify, , , it’s gonna be a smaller order volume with tags, maybe we can pull… just, , pull that out, or may just need to pull all of Shopify out and then separate it by tags, thing. … , all that to say. that’s fine. , the business is operating, it’s growing, it’s… the business is, , doing great. Shivani’s done a great job of identifying, , some clear pain points that we can rectify early, but when I got here, one even had the idea of a data and analytics team. , , I built… just to say this, I will learn a lot from you guys, I don’t have all the answers here, but… at Circle, which is a similar scale business, I built our whole data and analytics team, and we had a 13-person data and analytics team, build it from scratch, had, , Snowflake, DBT, Fivetran. Models on top of them, media mix model. forecasting models. , , a lot of what we’re gonna do here, not only do I have the CPG context, but I have specific. on data and analytics context for this. … . Shivani Amar: , Utam and Robert, what are your reflections on that, , those timelines, now that you’re thinking about how large the data set is? Where does that, Where have you seen, , lengthy timelines to get. Uttam Kumaran: It , , I would say the pain in discovery aligns with how manual or how complicated, , the channel is. , stuff that’s non-digital is where there’s the most exposure to, , , we have to go figure out how to get these sources wrangled. On day one, you’re , , we should start to at least just kick off syncs and arrive at somewhere to land some amount of data, but we have to go channel by channel. And , , we’ve got to meet the people that are managing each channel, understand, , what KPIs they’re going after, and then waterfall that. , putting together, , , we, as I mentioned, we work for a… we work for a pretty large flower e-commerce business, and for them, we did, , a two-month discovery. It was a huge business, and we walked into, . probably the opposite of you guys, which someone… they just had 8 years of, , dbt code and Looker dashboards, and it was a complete mess. And , honestly, , we had to both wrangle all of that and start something new on the side, but it was, , a two-month discovery that… that… we went and met every single person, and we now support the entire, , 6 or 7-person analyst team that builds on top of all the marts that we develop. And , we’re on the same page in the pacing. For . And making that we go channel by channel and do that Gantt-style, approach. And of course, one of the big things that, , wasn’t highlighted here is, and often is not asked by a lot of clients, is, , documentation. I’m, , really happy to hear two things. One, that you’re familiar with. what it is to set up a scope this, and that you’re pressing for documentation. Usually, neither of those are the case when we walk into situations. And , , we do… we are a big, , writing culture, even internally and externally. , we do a lot of writing, we do a lot of… presentation building, we record a lot of looms, and we build, and within , GitHub and in the data platform itself, we document a ton. you’ll have all access to all of that, for . And , again, as we are building that context. we’re codifying that. And second, this is where, for us, the advantage of, , AI that’s available now, that context building is what can go power those insights. And , for a lot of the solutions that we’re developing for clients, clients are now asking us to build chat with data type situations to expand beyond just people having access to a dashboard, which maybe they’re trained to access or not, but that context gathering is really the make or break of that AI system, , and that’s where, . It’s benefiting a lot of our clients that we’ve done this much writing, because that immediately just goes to power that system, and it’s working really, really . philipmckeating: And that’s where, , just… I’d rather take an extra week for every channel as part of the exploratory phase to be , how should we name each. Uttam Kumaran: All the naming convection… philipmckeating: The naming conventions that, , because it’s… again, we have this across the business now, where, , our sales team talks about revenue, and they’re talking about sales, and I’m , guys, revenue is a GAAP-defined term. If you say revenue, and you’re not talking about things that are recognized as revenue by GAAP, I don’t trust you anymore, ? we’re gonna… I want everything fucking defined, and I want. in writing, ? , not , oh, generally we all think it’s this way. It’s , , , . Let’s have a glossary. That’s… That… what we sell on a daily basis, that’s sales, not revenue, ? What the… what the retailer sells is point-of-sale sales, ? . Uttam Kumaran: And, , , two examples there, , Shopify and Amazon recognize returns very differently, , timing-wise, , and these are all nuances that the channel people will not recognize the cross-channel differences until you reconcile them, ? another thing on KPI standardization, I worked on WeWork early on into the IPO, and KPI standardization going to the IPO was one of the biggest projects I worked on, where, , we had the heads of state from every division in, , a physical room in New York. agreeing on, , a Google Doc, and , how do we define gross margin. , how do we define cost of goods? How do we define contribution mar… , all those things, and it’s… it is… it was written down and then codified in SQL. And then there is a committee to define alternatives or variances that can be approved. Otherwise, it doesn’t end up you can’t report on it, and it’s not , , and … but again, it takes muscle to do that, and it takes, , a vision to do that, and again, that’s what’s exciting. for us, in that a lot of our… our clients, , they’re not… they’re thinking about it, , very broadly, and instead, thinking about it this platform where, , there is governance over these metrics is important. , , I hear you on that. philipmckeating: , sounds great. , that… that’s, , that’s really what I wanted to talk about, is just, , that’s the… If… if we’re doing that. don’t worry about proving to me that this adds value in one month, because I know that adds value, ? , I can… And I have budget, , , I can make that decision, and I can win that argument if anyone ever debates it with me. … That’s all, really, I’m saying. , Shivani, what would be really helpful is maybe if we… take that idea of a Gantt chart, could you guys all work together? Robert Tseng: , let’s blow this up and really just, , co-author that workflow mapping. philipmckeating: by channel, and, , let’s define… , , when we’re , , here’s what we’re doing from Shopify, when we get to, , here’s the project that we do in week four, or, , here’s how we deliver value, let’s have, , three or four examples, and then we’ll decide as we get there, , which ones to prioritize, ? Go, , channel by channel, . and again, I’d frame it as discovery, documentation, implementation, value is, , my four phases. Channel by channel, and . Uttam Kumaran: We can drag it around, . philipmckeating: , . We’ll do it in something… , you guys are obviously doing a good job of the planning, and you said the writing culture, that all… it’s gonna vibe , . Uttam Kumaran: Can we do that? And, and, maybe let’s get, , a roughed-out version of that. . philipmckeating: As part of the proposal, and then let’s get rolling here relatively quickly, and , that can be… the… that can be, , that document should expand as we go through the discovery phase, ? , let’s have… The scaffolding, and then we put the detail on it as we go. Shivani Amar: That sounds great. , would you guys, , do you feel you have a sense with them from our previous conversations of getting started on that, and then blowing… Totally. We can talk about, , you want to take a beat with that, or do you want to workshop some stuff live? What are you feeling? Uttam Kumaran: , let’s… let me take what we know, put it together, and I’ll put in, really, where the question marks are, and I’ll just make the scaffolding for every channel we’ve heard of is there. We’ll send it over to you today, and then we can just collaborate on something, and then we can hop on as soon as we feel , , we’re at a little bit of an inflection point. Shivani Amar: That sounds great. Uttam Kumaran: Sweet. Perfect. Anything else, , we can answer, or… philipmckeating: Look, your pricing sounds reasonable. I wanted to hear how you guys react to this conversation. You guys… , I trust from this conversation that your shit, and if you don’t know your shit in 3 weeks, I’m gonna know that, and we’ll talk about it then. I don’t think it’s gonna happen, ? Uttam Kumaran: I appreciate it. philipmckeating: , feel good about this, just, , to me. your… your process rigor is what’s gonna earn my trust more than a proposal, ? , I want to get rolling, and And, , we’ll just give you really specific feedback if we’re seeing any gaps. But, , … I the proposal, I how you’re thinking about it, we’ll figure out… stack and that type of stuff, I don’t think that, honestly, there’s that much controversial stuff that we’ll need to discuss there. there’s different… options and possibilities, we’ll just figure out what works. the only other thing that is worth noting, , in those In those channels, and especially when it comes to this, , . , where I want to be a year from now in terms of documentation and data tying together is… I don’t know if Shivani gave you full visibility, this has been moving fast, but we were implementing an ERP, we were implementing Sage. We stopped that project, because Sage is the wrong ERP. We’re getting started on NetSuite. I expect NetSuite to be implemented probably by the beginning of the fourth quarter of next year, but we’re going to be moving relatively quickly on that in the background. And I want all of my NetSuite data in my data warehouse. I don’t reporting out of NetSuite, and, I want… I want my data to tie. between my data sources. , , , again, in the data warehouse, I want NetSuite RevRec. and be able to tie back and forth, because I’ve seen that that can be really challenging, , with returns, with… timing differences and that thing. just, . as you think about, , as simple things as, , , what is my, what attributes does my order, data element have in it? , I want a… order date, a process date, a ship date, a delivery date, a rev rec date, , let’s have all of those elements, then we can say, . when we pull RevRec, we’re pulling this subtotal, whatever that subtotal is, , minus this field for return flag or something that, and use RevRec date, or however we end up defining that. But just know, , I want that full , , traceability, auditability for how we’re defining and organizing this data long-term. Uttam Kumaran: , it’s a lot of naming conventions and taxonomy in there, too, and , we have a few clients that are using NetSuite or similar-style ERP, … totally. And then, , as soon as you guys get access to that, making we can set up the connection and land that. . , that’s… that’s perfect, great. philipmckeating: We’ll be working with Myers Holm, , which is a big implementation partner, , , we’ll get you looped into that as soon as we’re, , in an implementation phase, where we can start having data flowing, at least. . Shivani Amar: And, , the thing that I had shared with them, Phil, was more around once we have ERP and better inventory management, that’s when we can start, , thinking about the supply side of the equation, with the, . with the eventual goal of having more sophisticated supply-demand modeling. , that, , being a goal for, , maybe a year or from now. That’s what we were talking about, but I hadn’t touched on the REVERIC piece, that’s helpful. philipmckeating: , , and the other thing is… the other thing is, we’re gonna start implementing a tool called Atomic, which is, , an AI supply-demand forecasting tool. But, the thing that, , makes that work is good data in, ? , any forecasting tool is, , , any model, it’s if you put in good data, you typically get good outcomes, and if you can’t do that, then, , it’s a waste of time, … , if we… if we have all the data organized, then… could be Atomic, it could be 5 different tools, we’ll figure out which tool works, ? Which… who has the best model, but as long as we have a clean data set, I know that there’s a model that can just sit on top of this, and we have, , we have this easiest supply chain in the world that I… , for a business ours, it’s freaking easy. , it’s… Shivani Amar: It’s very… Uttam Kumaran: , that’s … that’s Robert’s whole world, and we were just… we have two clients that are now at the point where we’re starting… we matured their data stack over the last 6 months to a year, where now we’re now able to , tried to attempt to replace whatever, , remediary forecasting they were doing, , through Google Sheets, and, , set some outcomes. philipmckeating: 100%. , which is… we’re really excited for that. But, , again, my pretty firm view on that is. people try to do that too early in the process. It’s , you have to have everything else set up , and then that’s an easy exercise. If you try to do it too early. it just… it ends up not really working that . , if you’re hacking that together. Uttam Kumaran: Strained, , you’re. philipmckeating: , the juice isn’t, , the squeeze. You’re , there’s too many manual, , fixes. Versus if you just have the infrastructure set up to begin with. It gets to be pretty turnkey, and… scalable. , you can automate it once you have good data. Uttam Kumaran: And we’re working with clients on, , a gap between what you forecast and actuals, and, , that’s what we attack, but for many people, they re-forecast every, , few months. It’s , what’s the point? philipmckeating: Completely. Shivani Amar: One little thing I’ll sprinkle in, a little bit of a side note, is you and I have spoken about the wholesale team, and how they would love more visibility into, , when a customer is about to churn, or something that. Phil had a nice idea. Phil, can you remind me what that acronym was that was, , to… to rank wholesale partners by their order size and frequency. What was that? . philipmckeating: I do RFM segments? Shivani Amar: You guys know. philipmckeating: That’s what I was saying, I was , once we have the data, , these guys have done this. Shivani Amar: , , you guys got it. , that was… that was one, and I had this big conversation with, , our chief commercial officer, is his title, yesterday about pricing, and you had mentioned, , at some point, are you going to want to do some customer segmentation? And I was , that doesn’t feel pressing to me now. But in talking to him yesterday, I was , at some point, that will also come into play. just, , you’re. was about the kinds of things we would eventually need, , , stay with that. As you’re, , drafting the projects, you’ll have a sense, even maybe better than I do, being new to this industry, of, , what has typically helped customers when these… . funnel, and , , feel free to put that in versus just a reflection of, , what I’ve been sharing with you. Uttam Kumaran: Totally, and it’s what Phil mentioned, that as we’re going, we will attempt to do what exists or not. , if there’s someone at some point created a segmentation, we’ll at least have it there. Then it’s… then we can at least debate it at that point. now, there’s columns that indicate, or logic. then there’s nothing to debate, ? , totally, . , that’s how we operate. We’ll do what’s best in class, and then we align. , perfect. philipmckeating: Sounds great. Awesome. We’ll look out for that later today. Thanks, guys. Uttam Kumaran: Perfect. Thanks, everyone. Alright. Talk to you soon.