#260 - Conor Robbins - Sphere Trading (Fixing the Broken 3PL Landscape)

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Don't forget to use code just Shane White and you'll get 30% off your order. Hope you guys love both these products. I'm trying to not only bring you guys products that I use, but that I believe in on the podcast. I'm not taking ad reads for any brands that I don't really believe in. So anyway, hope you guys love both those products, yourroutine.com and NeuroRost.com. I've added those links to the show notes. I hope you guys love it. And I got an awesome guest coming up right after this. All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Shane White show. I'm pumped today to have Connor Robbins on the podcast. Connor, welcome to the show, man. How are you? Good man. Thank you for climbing me on. Absolutely. I feel like our meeting was a little serendipitous because we had this first meeting because of a mutual client. And I immediately was like, oh shit, me and Kyle always joke about how one area after a noble, someone needs to go solve is just the 3PL, just mess of what it is. And meeting you and getting to ask you some immediate questions about your background and how you got into it. I was like, oh, I gotta have you on the podcast. Because I'm sure there's a million people in this industry that would love to hear your story and learn more about sphere. So without teaming up even any more than that, would you mind giving everyone listening who doesn't know who you are just a little bit about you and a little bit about sphere and then we'll dive in? Yeah, no, totally. Well, no one, definitely no one knows who I am. I'd say, definitely very hidden. Yeah, so I'd say the basic guess on my background so far is that I started in startups in college. So I went to Fordham University, took my classes and then very serendipitously just got an internship at a tech startup as I was looking for some side money to pay for tuition and community costs. You know, ultimately had more or less a full time role and responsibility there, like sort of my sophomore year, I'd say. So that's sort of like the bug I caught. And then a series of like individual projects, I'd say like probably similar to you, like serendipity sort of takes the wheel and like pulls you in a direction and ultimately ended up at a company called Miss Jeff in Brooklyn. And I joined right as the Satan Schoozer happening, which was sort of a big blow up event, that big viral shoe events in collaboration with Lil' Ma's X. We ended up getting sued by Nike. I had joined right after that lawsuit essentially. I'd say it was like, I was actually, I was interviewing for another job, funny story, in Napa Valley at the time. And I remember like the shoes dropped and the Nike lawsuit happened and it was like trending on Twitter number one. And I was sitting in a conference room in Napa Valley doing this interview and looking at my phone being like, "Shit, I should probably miss your job." So that was it. I just decided like this is where I wanna be and ultimately like worked out, got to start. I think it was like that next Thursday or something like that. And yeah, it was a scrappy small team. I didn't really have any experience like period, little loan and consumer. But you know, we didn't have a marketing function. And so I was sort of like the most junior person where they decided like, hey, we're gonna hire for inexperience and just sort of hustle. I believe that was the strategy. Yeah, and then sort of, again, I think it went relatively well and got to hire out a couple people and run that team for about a year. And so that was my like, for-line until like consumer goods. And then the 3PL thing happened because I was kind of just traveling and taking a bit of a leave and just trying to take some time to think about what I wanted to work on. And knew I wanted to start a company and I didn't want to do a thing where I raised money and then sort of saw not a lot of traction after two, three years. Was really interested in consumer goods. And like honestly, it was kind of like, I was looking for permission to just keep learning and the 3PL experience seemed to just be broken enough that I was like, I can win here with like hustle and ingenuity and just trying to be on top of stuff. And I get to learn another side of the business that I didn't really have a lot of exposure to and fill a pain point for a customer segment that I looked up to and wanted to learn from. And 3PL was like, right? Like you're really partnered with brands, right? Similar to what you guys do. Like you're not like a SaaS vendor that you occasionally get a service ticket for, you know, you sort of just like put the credit card on by and it runs every month. Like you deeply integrated into the operational process of like a brand. And so it was kind of like a very obvious like, hey, I get to learn a part of the business that I don't know nothing about. And if this goes well, and I get to work with like, smart people, then like, I'm talking to them every day. Like we have two similar clients that like you're familiar with. And like I am like super grateful that I get to like hang out with those guys every single day and like work for them every day and like watch the businesses grow. Like I'm learning a ton. So that was the idea and it's been working out so well. That's amazing, man. Yeah, I would agree. It's fun. Like when you work with people like that, you like feeds off of everything you do. You're passionate about your portion of it, but then you're part of something way bigger, right? And I have to give a shout out to it's funny. If anyone's watching right now, a lot of people listen, but we actually have quite a few people that watch the podcast. Though this is how I first heard about you too, Connor was, was basically one of the brands was trying to get up and running as fast as they could with you guys. And you were like sleeping on the floor at the 3PL's. The story I heard, very like Elon Musk, ask of Connor here. And but like right now, you're like literally in the, I just love it. You're like in the warehouse. Like you're just part of this thing right now. As we're talking on the podcast, you broke away to do this. Thanks for the time. But I think for everyone listening who maybe, you know, a lot of people that listen are definitely in the CPG industry, but there's definitely a lot that are not. And so I think for anyone listening, kind of a little bit of an additional background and why I thought this was so interesting. Talk to Connor. As I've worked in CPG from our expo are on. And then I was at Walmart. I like help them stand up. Some of their early fulfillment centers. So I was in those huge massive, you know, fulfillment centers that Walmart has. I know number one, how complex it is, but also number two, how bad of a service provider, 3PLs can be to young brands. And so it's been interesting is, is like through my experience, just like, it just seems like a lot of brands bang their head against the wall. Honestly, similar to like what we're doing with nobles, like with agency partners, where you just feel like you're one of so many and it's just hard to get someone on the phone to actually get help to actually have high levels of service. And I would say like responsiveness and also getting your product either whether it's checked in or shipped out on time and the data behind it to make sure you actually know what's going on with it. And the list goes on and on and on. And that's why when I met you, I was like, oh shit, you're actually trying to solve something that is like a macro problem in this industry. When you first like, when this resonated with you and you said, hey, this seems like a problem I can go solve. Obviously, very audacious love that in the part of the story. What was like step number one? I always love diving into this in the zero to one story of you. Like, you have this idea great. But now you're like literally if someone's watching, you're sitting in a warehouse that you are you own and you're running and how did what was step one for you to even kicking sphere off and how did you go about figuring that like how to start? Yeah, sure. I mean, so I should say like one caveat is like, I think anyone young when they started a business, like you start and you're kind of like, I'm going to take over the world and then you sort of have more grounded sense as you go and like pragmatism sets in, I guess. And so yeah, like you mentioned, like I don't view what we're doing is like a macro ultimate scalable thing. I view it as like a word on industrial service business. Like yes, we have warehouses, but I believe it's a little bit misleading to say that we're an industrial business in the sense that like, like really what we should be looking at and studying for inspiration is like the McKinsey's or the C.A.s of the world, right? We're a service business. And that's how we think about it. And yeah, in terms of the zero to one that I'll back up and tell the story briefly, which is like, yeah, so I had decided that this was the direction I wanted to go in. It was like really excited about, you know, fulfillment. Ultimately, we started in a pretty specific niche. We started doing alcohol fulfillment. That was like all we did for the first like probably year. And the way that happened was I had met a few people who wanted a particular one guy in particular who had been running alcohol brands and just had described this as a problem. They were like, we'd love to sell them online, but we can't because of like restrict regulation and packaging considerations and these types of things. And so that was like the introduction to this thing. He actually the guy that I was spoken to, speaking to, had a like a general outline of like what the solution for this could look like to build more of like a fulfillment, a traditional fulfillment center for alcohol industry because the way that it was working with it, majority of how it works today still is that you like you have independent liquor retailers that fulfill online orders because you need a, you need a liquor license to sell alcohol and brands can't go acquire those licenses. So you literally have like liquor stores fulfilling orders. And so we're like, well, if we build a proper fulfillment business and we just do alcohol and we have this licensing, like that'd be awesome. And so ultimately like grew from there and we ended up like moving to other categories and now we have more warehouses and it's great. But that was the start of it. And yeah, in terms of like how we started like I didn't, I didn't raise a bunch of money for this. I did not like, there was no VC. There was no like, you know, like life's the little life savings that I had from sort of previous, you know, previous or prior ventures that like rolled into this. But so I was like, how do I do this as cheaply as possible? And like again, just step by step, like how do you sort of start to de-risk this and start to like prove that people are willing to pay for this and you can actually handle it. You can like all this stuff. So we actually started out of a self storage locker. That's how I like I did this to start. So like I would say. Yeah. So I kind of think as a cube smart. So I decided Washington DC and was like where I was going to start this because of some of the alcohol related stuff. I won't go too much to do there. But that was like the best place to get license to do this. And so I packed up my car and I drove it on a Washington DC. And I would want to drove around and I spent like the next week driving around like all the industrial parks, like kind of just walking into warehouses and like asking if I could subly space. And no one wanted to entertain it. It was not something people were interested in like helping out with. I'm like also a bunch of booze. I'm trying to self like can you just give me a little order of your warehouse please. Literally literally. And I actually will say one thing that you learn pretty quickly is like in Washington DC a lot of like pretty much like half of the industrial space because like no one opens industrial businesses in Washington DC like you just wouldn't do it. The space to expensive. Yeah, we don't have to go into. I was but I was so curious because that's seen it does seem like a. Again, I was a part of like the Walmart dot com decisions of not decisions necessarily by like yeah, where they stood them up and DC was never on the road map. So I was curious why you said DC it was really only people out alcohol. It was literally just for alcohol. And so that was the idea. So I was driving around to try to find some most of the industrial spaces federally leased. So if you walk if you go around and you're like walking into a random industrial building, it's like Homeland Security or the FBI or like you know like buildings. Yeah, buildings you probably shouldn't just like stroll into and so like you know you definitely catch some eyes when you're like walking up the Homeland Security, you know warehouse and you have no idea that that's what they do and asking if you can tell these. So it's like I'm from Indianapolis. So like there's a huge huge warehouse park like west of downtown. So you're saying like you just went to one of those like warehouse parks and that end up being like all of these like three letter agency warehouses. Yeah, literally like literally it's it's V street. It's in DC Northeast like you go to like near the Costco like it's all like federally leased. So that's hilarious. Whoa. Yeah. In DC as like a as like a local government like is generally pretty cash strapped because their biggest tenant is the federal government doesn't pay property tax right. So like if you think about it like that's true. So anyway, so you got a lot of parking tickets in DC and I'm convinced that's like one of the reason the structure like. But yeah, so I couldn't find any sublies opportunities. So the next best was kind of like okay, well how much space do I actually need? It's like probably like a hundred square feet, a couple hundred square feet. Like you don't really need that much to get started. And so. I just wonder one one question is important there for people listening. Did you have an alcohol client to start like did you have somebody lined up or you like hey, I think this is a need for this space. If I get the space, I think I can get a client. It we had one. Yeah. So there was one person that was willing to work with us, which is a whole other story that like we should probably tell offline. Yeah. It's just more of a. For the zero to one store. I think it's important to know like having a taste like you might have a business opportunity. Is it important? Yeah. It's it's it's it's one piece of your story. I'm sure where if you think back like even just having a small sense that hey, you might be able to get this business. Allows you to then be a little risk here to say like I have one person that will work in this because honestly the reason I stopped there was wet with nobles. Very similar. Like we had one brand that was like yeah, like we you know, we're kind of at a place right now where we don't want to pay for a big agency. We'll definitely let you guys like take the wheels and prove out what you're saying you can do. And it's all like sometimes it's all you need. You see one per you might get a hundred knows first, but you see one yes to just give you a taste of like hey, I can do this. Um, so anyway, sorry, keep going. I thought that was important to stop and for everyone listening. No, 100% that's exactly what it was. It was just like one person that was kind of like, um, actually the first couple were people that were just completely clueless. Like I don't think they really knew what F3 P.L. did. They didn't know what the film it was. They were just kind of like I know that you do this and I know that I need this. So like, I don't know anyone else that does this. So like let's do it. Those are the first few and it up like not being people that we worked with long time, but um, of the clients that we are like are sort of like we've worked with for a decent amount of time now. Like it was exactly that, which is like a, there was no misleading like hey, we're this big warehouse. It was hey, like I'm going to shove every day. Like I'm going to be only a sort of phone every day. Like, and I think that was like appealing for like a younger, you know, more scrappy scaling brand that didn't want to have fulfillment in house, but like wanted someone else to take care of it. And it was like like nervous handing their stuff off to like a big warehouse that had a larger clients that they're prioritizing. So like, and that's always going to be an opportunity that exists if you like want to start a three-pillar any like service business like this. It's like there will always be a market for like smaller up and coming brands that just like want you to pick up the phone every time they call and like not be lower on priority stuff. So that's exactly what it was. Very cool, man. Okay. And so you're, you're in DC. So what ends up happening? You just, you get a bunch of nose from these like I can imagine. FB eyes probably like yeah, Connor no, you cannot have a piece of our warehouse joking but like what did you do? So what what in the back? So you're like, fuck it. Let's go get a storage unit. Like how did you go from from that to that? Yeah. No, it was just I walked I just decided I needed a couple hundred square feet and that was it and I was like, where can I get that? And it's probably you know, keep smart. So I just walked in. I said, Hey, can I see you know, can you show me what you have? And then that was it. And so like, yeah, I got freight delivery. I had to borrow the neighbor's palli jack because I didn't have that in realising you need that download a truck like this is just showing you how much I knew at the time. And yeah, and so I like loaded it up got some boxes from you line and like a label printer and just started shipping and then like like anything in life like it's just it's just incremental. So like over time you like you know, you have more orders than that are then you can like print labels for an advance and then bring to the keep smart. So you're like, well, how do I get a label printer in here? Well, I need electricity. Well, how do I get electricity? Like there's no outlets like and then the you know, I ended up finding a way to siphon it from the light bulb. And you just do a bunch of weird scrappy stuff like that. And that's and then you have a little keep smart 3PL and that's how it happened. That's incredible. I can imagine I'm sure you do. I always find it fun. Do you have I'm sure you have pictures from back then? Did you do you stop a million pictures? A million. Yeah. It was so ridiculous. You're sitting and you're sitting obviously at like a legit warehouse and to think that you started there. Were there so I mean, guess like there's what the weather in DC? It's not like it's nice. So were you in that was it like heated? Are you there in the winter? Like freezing your ass off packing boxes out? Like I'm trying to I'm trying to envision what this is like. Yeah, it was not comfortable. Like it was in by the way, for sure people that live there, like it's not like this is not like a nice stuff at all. It was freezing in the winter. It was hot as all in the summer. Yeah, but like I don't know, you got to do what you got to do. And like honestly, like I personally have this mentality. I'm sure you do too. Like you have to be a little bit like naive and like not fully yourself, but like a little bit self self-serve, sure to like start a business. And so I don't know, you just show up to cube every day. And like I was like every time I saw you. It's funny. I'm like I'm ballin right now. Like it's a sick. I'm so successful. And you pull it to a cube sort every day. It's a little bit delusional, but like you kind of just got to do that. Yeah, but you know what's funny. I mean, there's not I don't think there's a single success story out there where there's not some sort of that story where there's this scrappy mentality. Like you, I think if you just like boil down almost every founder story, it's like you you see a problem or you see a need and you just get it's almost like blinders on. And it's just like I'm going to go solve this. And then there's issues that come up every day. I always say the biggest change from going from a W2 job to being an entrepreneur is that you get hired and fired every day. Feels like like you basically like you'll maybe sign a client or you'll sign someone that you're going to put the orders for and then something crazy happens that feels like it's the end of the world and this business is about to blow up. But then you get a call at five o'clock and you can you sign some another client. It's like you have to get used to just getting punched in the face, but also like almost like confetti going off. It's like the most kind of fucked up mental thing of all time. Like it's like on a daily weekly and you zoom out from like a couple months and you're like what the fuck just happened. I always say that's the best way to describe starting a business. It's just like if you don't write it down or somehow keep track, you kind of just are you're blazing ahead and you just you take the wins and the losses is kind of like you kind of like rub just kind of write them off your shoulder because you're just ready for the next thing. Like whether it's something you got to deal with or it's a win. It's constant. And so I'm sure you feel the way it's like that. It's almost like the highs and the lows become just like a midline of just like I'm operating. Totally. I mean they kind of like severity of the highs and lows like increases like a high is significantly marginally better and a low is like holy shit like the whole thing could fall over. But it's you don't feel that way because you've kind of like you're more adjusted maybe. But yeah, I mean other people I don't know the people that I like try to spend time around like older people at least. Like the ones that I look at I'm like you haven't figured out are the ones that have a more pragmatic perspective like the whole thing is a game right. And so the whole thing is game you can't take any one winner loss too seriously. It's not like you're not you know you're not the main character in a movie like it's just it's just you're playing this big game and it's just fun and you get hooked on it. And that's what it is. It's just like you show up every day and like you gotta decide if you're just one of the people that wants to play the game or not. And like if you like it and like you'll probably just know immediately because you'll just spend all your time on it. So like kind of sleeping on the floor. But yeah, I love no that's such a I'm gonna make turn that little part into a clip because that's such a good point. It's so true. It's like a big video game. Let's go let's go back. So you're you're at the you're at the storage unit. I love this so much like this is maybe one of my favorite stories I've ever heard. And how long did you operate out of there? Like where did you finally say all right Connor? Like we're at the point where we need to expand or move on what how long were you there and then what was kind of the impetus for the next stage which I'm sure what that was. Yeah, it was probably around a year to be honest with you. So I really tried to milk it but like the storage locker like it wasn't just one. So like we ended up with like seven. Like 10 by 30. What's 10 by 30 is 300 square feet times what's time seven? That's like basically a couple thousand square feet. Yeah 21 hundred square feet. Okay. Oh that's pretty good size. So the thing to note here is that like again I didn't have any experience. This is not something that like I went around and asked people like I ended up meeting which people started three peels later on the road and like you find out that like sort of at two 2500 square feet is like the entry level warehouses of sorts like if you're going to get a natural space you pretty much like getting some 5000 for a feet is generally like not easy like there's not a lot of that but like in that range just try to is where people try to play and I had heard from a bunch of people that like they had gone and just least warehouses someday wanted. I'm like dude I could not have like I couldn't have afforded that like to put my name down on like a five year lease or three year lease even even if you're able to get away with one right like on that much space I was just like I can't be cheap. No I mean look it's not I mean it's manageable right so maybe a few thousand bucks a month but like at the time when you have nothing and there's no clients like a few thousand bucks a month is like I need that to live. So yeah that wasn't an option but yeah I mean like we got to like a pretty a pretty decent size for the setup that we had and like we had like seven cubes they were all the same floor I would run in like when I would open I would open all the cubes so like the whole thing was open and we had like you could like if you were working at like our warehouse quote you would like walk around and you see all the open cubes and everything was barcode and like the whole thing was set up so it was like a decent legit setup like we could get the job done um but ultimately like you get to a point where like you're pushing a lot of orders out like we had FedEx that came and did like a did like a rep visit and I've never seen someone more confused in their life they were like because they saw our numbers they saw how much we were doing we weren't significant we weren't shipping like an insignificant number of orders and they came through and they're just like I like I'm at warehouses significantly larger this that we're doing much less volume like this is a little bit absurd that's got to be a good feeling though because you probably realize you're like oh like this is way more profitable than it would have been if I would have at least I mean maybe maybe not I don't know what the cost is for all this all in but I have to imagine that's I mean it's probably a good feeling for you you're like yeah so you can do a lot with a little yeah 100% and it's so important because it's like you're gonna have to your tuition is like all the mistakes you make right and so it's like if you know you're gonna make a bunch of mistakes and it's gonna cost you money ultimately because you're the one that's on the hook or it then like you better like keep your costs really low to like while you pay that tuition and then we're still paying it right but just like relative to what you're making you should just try to spend as little as possible that's a really yeah that's really good advice for anyone starting a business I know we I learned this at our x bar they they actually were fantastic at this but like just being frugal as much as you can be for as long as you can be it's like a it's a philosophy that we try to instill all the time is just like constantly questioning do we need that do we need to pay for that you know it's funny it's like sometimes I think some people think it comes off cheap but when you're an entrepreneur it's like every penny counts and so if you can get away with running the operation with less and it's still efficient and you're servicing your clients and at the end of the day the performance for them is where it needs to be which is ultimately what matters then all the other stuff's kind of fluff kind of become a big fan of less is more and everything in life so that it home for me yeah did you and now in this point is you sorry go for it go for it now I was going to say in bad times it's it's pretty easy because like you don't have as much coming in you just have in necessity it's really hard when like things are going well and you're like signing a much deals to like oh yeah for sure how have you tried to handle that because I could see in your world to again now I'm thinking back to my time at Walmart like it's there's things that can help speed up your life make things easier that I could see like making investments into catbacks and different things that would speed up but at the same time you're like and do we need to spend money on something like that I don't know what are some examples of things like that you've had to just think through storage like like the CubeSmartsperer example like we could have easily afforded a small warehouse like well into when we were using it and like and I was just constantly like how do we stack up until like all the way to touching the ceiling how do we like do all these things clear at more space to like pay less to like I had like a metric which was like what is our like wrench per like pallet slot right like or like you know that was like sort of our metric and I would just track it and I would like every month religiously I was like how low can I get this number and so like I don't know but personally like I do think that like um you can either like coach yourself into that or sort of build a habit later in life or you can be fortunate to grow up in an environment where that's instilled in you very early on. Unfortunately, my mom's a small business center. Her business is attached to our house growing up. So I watched her running the business and she was very much like no one touches the center with that obsessive over those types of details. So in the summer, it was always just slightly warmer than was comfortable and winter is just always slightly colder than it is comfortable. And we just kind of have to get used to it. Like I can't, I personally like I can't, I can't like see myself doing it. It's just like, I don't, it's very natural like to just try to find ways to like cut past. That makes a ton of sense. When you were back, how long did you do it with just you and when did you end up piring folks to help you? So I did it more or less by myself for the first like a year. And I ended up having a couple of people that were like remote and I think. But sorry, would FedEx game, where is it just you? Yeah, it was just me, but I had a friend from Portland who built the WMS that we use. And he was out visiting and like helping me install barcoats for the first time because I didn't know how to do that. And we didn't have any desk or tables or anything. So we were just sitting on like boxes on the floor and the FedEx wrap came up. And so it was like him and like me and we had like, I think we had like the, we had gone like Costco, yeah, like RANX and we had that like giant Costco size like PETA chip bag or whatever and like artichoke dip and like he was just sitting on the floor in a bunch of boxes. So it was like the two of us. It was like. Oh, here he is. It was most big. But yeah, it was just me for the first year or something like that. And now we have some, we have people full time now. Like on the like account management side also like packing, we have to employ full time for that now. So that changed like basically this year to be honest with you. Like we were all part time up until like last year. Okay. Well, yeah, because when did you officially start this? I don't know if I know the exact date. We're probably a couple of years old. Okay. So for sure. So you okay. So what was it like? Because I always think this is a fun one. The reason I bring this up is even in my experience, it's funny. All the roles I had before Noble, I never, I had one real employee ever at our X bar. And I would even call him JT if he ever listens to this. He was kind of like a half employee. Like he basically, he did so much that went directly to our CFO that I always laughed like, technically he was on my team, but I always considered him like a peer more than someone on my team. But for you, like making the leap to hire people, especially just sort of like be able to like pick and pack and ship orders out. What was that like? Because I think that's like such a, for any entrepreneur that's such a pivotal change in your mindset is letting go of something that you own and putting the onus on somebody else to hopefully honestly make it better than what you were doing. But ultimately just letting go of something and letting them run with it. Do you remember that feeling or remember that first thing you let go of? Yeah, 100%. I mean, so the thing to note, I'll talk maybe about the packing first and then like about some of the account management stuff because there are two different roles. I think they required a different thing. So the packing thing, well first on the being cheap thing, I think like it's important to note that like at mischief, my boss gave, who's the founder of mischief, had this thing that he said, which was like we don't hire until we until we're bleeding essentially, what he said to me. And I like very much honestly, deeply believe in that. And so like I always joke because I was literally bleeding. My hands were like kind of getting cut up and like bleeding a little bit from all the boxes. But yeah, I mean, so it's like it's time to get to it. It's finally time. Yeah, exactly. And then when you get to that point, it's like you can easily afford it, right? Because like you're you're maxing out what you can do and you know that you're going to be able to do it at least twice as fast because you're just going to your be owner, right? Like obviously you're just going to be able to put more into it. And so at the time we did it, there was just like economically, it was like a pretty conservative decision. And then, you know, obviously like it's in necessity, right? Like you can't like if you want to like the really, I got a pragmatic way to think about it. It's like if you want to get from like, you smart to like, you know, a million square feet or whatever your goal is, I don't know what the goal is. But like, um, you know, you can't pack every box. It's just not practical or realistic. So you knew you had to do that. And then same time, it's like a, it's a process bit like three goals. It's a, you know, it's a process driven business, an operational, intensive business. And so like a lot of what you what what I did at least was like, how do you stress tests like what we had built? And so like, again, I don't know how other people do it. I don't really talk to other like young three-pial operators. Not something I like really care much to do. Mostly because I think it's broken. So it's like, what's the point? But the way I did it at least, was, um, I just knew that I had a process for doing things. And like, I knew that I probably had a lot of intuitive sense for like, how to do them. And I needed to make sure that like all of that was intuitive to someone just using or WMS and using our system and process that we built. So, um, it was like by someone in, training them up. And then like, I literally stood behind his older and I just watched him. And I would just like take notes on my phone about things that I would change. So like, he would do the packing. And I would just correct him as he went. And then after the day, I would have this long list of things that like I should probably change this, this, this, this, this, and then go and change. So like, over time, you just like implemented things that made it more obvious to someone that was joining from scratch. Got it. Love that. It's like the, um, a process we use is basically we loom a lot of things. That way, exactly. It's kind of like, it's kind of like the exact same thing. A little harder in person because you got to probably have like a, you know, a video of them doing it or a list like you said, that's great. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. You start to realize, right? Like, all these processes that maybe you think like on the face, like, oh, I don't, I do this. I don't know if I could really hand that off. I feel like every entrepreneur I've ever talked to says that. There's always like something. There's some, there's some task along the ladder where it's, they're like, ah, that's like something I do. And I think that's something that I've been trying to dig into with entrepreneurs on here. It's really interesting because ultimately, like, everything is teachable. Like you're learning, whether you just learned it on your own or figured it out a million different ways. So everything's teachable. But I think as entrepreneurs, that's like the hardest thing we all face is maybe not there's definitely entrepreneurs that are good at it. But I think in general, that's a, that's something that a lot of people face. It's hard. I can imagine for you to, like, you go from trying to win business and you're packing out packages in your own storage unit. So it's like very much, I'm sure you had your clients were like, texting and calling Conner and talking to Conner and expecting answers from Conner. To then that first day, you start to realize like, oh, like, there's going to be orders today that I'm not a part of. And I just rely on this person on my team to make sure that it lives up to the standard that I've been doing for a year now. Is that something you kind of had to fight with or deal with? Yeah, kind of. But I think again, like, if you, like, I don't know, like Mr. Beast says this thing. I've heard the Mr. Beast, like, like, he makes clones of himself. Like, that's how he owns boards people. Like, he's a huge room. I don't think I've ever heard of this. I love him. So I think I've never heard this thing. Yeah. No, so it's like, I think it's, I think, I don't know if I'm totally accurate on this, but from why I understand it's like, if he hires someone, you know, senior enough, like, basically they spend the first, I think it's like up to two months, like, just like following him. And that's all they do. And like, they're not doing their own stuff. They're literally just following him and doing exactly what he's doing all the time. Jeff Bezos had a version of this and actually Andy Jassy was the CEO of Amazon right now was that role for Jeff Bezos and then it upstarted AWS. But he was like his like mini me or like clone or whatever. Like anytime he flew on the plane, like, Andy Jassy was on the plane. The same with Mr. Beast. He's basically like, look, I can like, give you onboarding docs. I can like do this. I can do that. Like, I can do so much stuff for you. But I do think there's something to be said for like, especially in the early days, like when you do have the time and like ultimately, like, when I hire one person, that person is one half of the business, 50% of the business. I'm 50% they're 50% right of the like total makeup of the organization. If you're just like human capital, like obviously, I'm probably going to do more work, but like generally speaking. So it's like if if you're basically diluting your sort of like yourself by 50%, you were 100% now you're 50% like, you should probably spend a lot of time like figuring out how onboard that person make sure that they're like, they're on the same page, especially with the service business like 3PO's. So yeah, we would just like, like I did that. I just followed them around and like I would just watch what they do. And I'm of course correct and like the same like they would follow me around. So like kind of sort of by the time I like stopped watching and just let him do stuff. It had been a bit where I had seen enough and it was like, he was kind of just, he didn't really need me there. It was more just being like paranoid. So yeah, but that's I think that's a generally a good rule. Yeah, I like that a lot. I know I never heard of that. I think it's um yeah, I'm trying to think it's funny, like being I'm trying to think back to all the roles that I've had over the years like being the new guy and it's true. And maybe just like everyone's learning styles different. I would have thrived in just following my boss around like being in all those meetings and even like sitting over a shoulder and watching what he's doing and fucking Excel versus like sitting at my desk silently all day, just trying to like read through documents. Like it's that's I don't I didn't took me forever to get up to speed on a couple things because I was just doing it on the sideline. It's like it's kind of like the man I think of Renate's like, you gotta just get in and be in there and figure it out and fail. I love that. That's that's really cool. I actually have never heard of that before. I'm mine's racing because I'm thinking about all the all the things I could do to apply that to. Um so you so when did you what was like the first real warehouse then it's the one you're in right now? No. Today maybe like I just as a picture is like what we like where like where we are like what does the business look like from square foot perspective. So we have three warehouses we've got um one in Washington DC which is like we had the CubeSmart situation we jumped to a warehouse in DC which is where we we still operate that. There's a lot of it is all of our alcohol shipping which is still a piece of junk on our business and we're continuing to invest in. That is a 5,000 square facility and then the facility I'm in now which is um you know in Maryland, we're like 30 minutes, like, yes, east of West Virginia to give you an idea of like where we are. But it's basically like an hour or just under an hour from the first one. And this one is 25,000 square foot. We have another 25,000 square foot on the back of the building that we have, we're tripping option on that so we can run it that too. But significantly larger, obviously. And then we've got Portland Oregon as well for West Coast for, you know, dual note fulfillment for larger brands, especially that, you know, want east and West Coast coverage. So that's like kind of like the makeup so far. Damn, that's a fucking huge jump. Yeah, I'm thinking about this now. Like, wait a minute, we're going like little baby steps that I feel like you just jumped. Especially go to just goes West coast. What a great, what a great move. Because that's another thing we could dive into that I know I've I've ran into issues trying to help brands get into three PLs that I didn't realize you guys had. Yeah. And and but by the way, like I think it's doable, especially in client service and client service, like you can you always have the opportunity for your like next deal to be your best deal. It just requires a couple like things. It requires like a saying note a lot of deals. Right. So like as you progress being like having the ability to say no to deals and it sucks and like it feels weird and uncomfortable at first, then you usually have to be like consider to the fact that like, you know, if they're not going to be a client that you focus on a lot, then like they're probably better off somewhere else. And it's probably going to hurt your business and to let your time anyway. So the opportunity cost of being a client that is not going to be your best client that is like your time. And it's a service business and you only have so much time. And so therefore like it's a pretty high opportunity cost. So there's a like I don't know if you for like the Warren Buffet like he was talking to like this class and he gave the punch card analogy to investing, which is like if I gave all of you punch card and had 10 slots in it. And you all and it represented every investment decision you were able to make for the rest of your life. You only had 10. He's like I guarantee you do pretty damn well. And so I think about the same thing with client services, which is like I generally think if I gave you a punch card and I said to you like you only that each of these punch cards represents like a client that you could take in it, but basically in the entirety of your business, like you'd probably think really, really deeply around the clients that you take on and who you spend time with. And like is this marginally better than the last right? This is like move as forward as moving the needle for us to get really excited about working on this. And so like that's honestly like we've we've definitely grown very quickly, but I think that's the reason, which is like we've said, notice things that are we feel like are going to move us backwards or that we wouldn't be really excited to spend a lot of time on because ultimately it's a service to the people who are spending it to anyway. And we just say yes to the things that we are really excited about. The average client size is just like significantly larger now because of the fact that we've done that. That's a really interesting point. Yeah, the service business, it's fun having you on here because like a lot a lot of the founders have had on here, you know, are the founders of a lot of the CPG brands that we both know and love. But it's interesting talking to you because that's exactly like that's such a different side of entrepreneurship that I probably haven't had on here enough is the service side of the business is because that's the it's like a it's almost like you think about two different types of businesses when you think about a CPG product, for example, you try to make the thing you're selling the best possible thing you can for lack of better words and you try to just get it into everyone's hand. That's kind of like at the highest level, like what what you're trying to do, right? But then as a service business, you're you're obviously doing something that is helping them in one of a million things they need help with. But usually the biggest constraint is time. That's usually like the kind of flip the coin. And so you deal with the same thing that I deal with. And that's a really interesting way to think about it. Have you how have you kind of gone about doing that? So like are there are there like specific things you're looking for in clients I'm assuming or there is it a size thing or like how have you gone about developing your process Connor to be like, yes, what's a yes or a no? Yeah, so like a lot of itself ish to be honest with you, it's like what do I personally get excited about? Like again, like I view spheres like a vehicle for me just like I get to learn a lot. And like ultimately like one of the reasons I love this category so much and what we're doing, especially the logistics style of the business is like I had experience the marketing side, I now have to learn about the logistics side, but also like I love mapping like the amount of stories of these like brands that we love that like started with somebody that had some distribution or logistics related position and was able to understand, you know, because everyone has an intuitive sense of what consumers like because we're consumers and we use things and like that's the easiest part. The hard part is like how do you understand the business and what is like what does the market want? Like what will pull? And like ultimately don't potagio their zone at like right, he started running a distributor like a direct to retail distributor like actually in the beer distribution business like Anthony von Mandel like he started Mike's Ardell emanate and white cloth he started in the distribution business he was an importer he imported correct who's the first import Corona actually Canada as well. And Peter right Peter worked in logistics business and then ultimately like what was your retail strategy when Rx launch right it was like very targeted niche and like so I just like I think that like like that story rings. Yeah, you know the story is over and over and over and over and over again. And so it's like that's kind of like why I like doing this. And so first of all like back to your original question which is like a I'm very excited about CPG like I grew up like loving food like there's a whole like nutrition aspect like how I like grew up and like that's very interesting to me. And so like I just like CPG as a category. And so like I generally will only look at CPG things. Second from a size perspective. Yes, like we're big and we need to fill up space. There's a fixed cost business. We've got three leases like you got to fill a warehouse right. So ultimately like that's important. So we're not like working with people that are you know just going to start out. If they are just getting started out started out like we are willing to do that too. But like is this someone with track record that we feel we can partner with that like we like I don't personally again this is just preference I'm very selfish now. Like I don't want to do the deals where I have to explain what three pills do every time we start working with someone. And you run over each other much times. There's a lot of confusion. Like you have a rookie chef and a season chef in the kitchen. Like I'm not the season chef. I'm still very early. But like generally speaking more experienced than like what is the three P L. So like when we work with like you know new brands. It's like we're working with a guy who is at like Red Bull and like healthy kombucha and where else was he like some other liquid death right and he's starting a beverage brand. It's like perfect example. Like he's been there. He's done that like I don't have to answer any dumb questions like and we're having answered them questions. But like he's he's a great part. He's gonna run faster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's an early deal that we're looking for. But like otherwise it's like size right like category right like within the CPG realm. And if that's kind of the gist of it like we were we're less inclined to look at like cold storage related things like we do look at them. It just sort of depends on like what they're looking for. We work with like one person that does it. We have to like outsource that and like subcontract that or like sub lease that space which is just a different Yeah. It's something in addition to what we do which like we're willing to do it. So I'm sure you've done research that one just as much if not maybe slightly worse than my experience with general 3PL is is frozen or in refrigerated. So that is certainly an area of opportunity. So Connor I wanted to the one thing I wanted to make sure we spent a little time on here at the end was around people who are listening like like I said at the very beginning and you know this it's a lot of CPG folks that listen to the pod. What makes you guys different I think we know we both know it's broken and we know what you saw when you started this. What do you guys really lean on as for sphere like what are you guys trying to do different to really help CPG brands in the 3PL space and what separates you guys the most you think. Yeah. Well I'll preface by saying we're still figuring it out right. So like I don't want to we don't have any like any silver bullet here and I think that's kind of like the like ultimately look we want to build a big business and so like we're still trying to figure out like what that means and like what the value prop is to get there and like it has to be more than just service but ultimately I'm going to beat a dead horse here which is like service and I think that we try to think a little bit more deeply around like 3PL as a service business and like I think most people like it's not really like an industrial business in the sense that we just kind of like run our process and you fit into our process and that's it. I think we try to be really hands on the end of the day like we are operational partners in this thing. I'd say like one caveat to this is like alcohol really differentiates us right so if you're an alcohol brand like there are as you know if you're an alcohol brand there are really not a lot of places to go a lot of places to go like are not properly set up to do sort of like irons like in mass fulfillment so you end up like just hitting it ceiling pretty quickly so we do that pretty well but yeah I think we try to think about just being a service partner like a really really deep service partner probably similar to how you guys think about your business right like it's you're you're a little bit more integrated than most folks and again like there's no one silver bullet to what that means in practice it's like many things it's like how do you handle you know like miss handling like what do you do when things go wrong right like that's a question I think more people should ask vendors before they sign up with them not as like everyone's talking about well everyone's talking about the 99.99 percent accuracy rates but I'll tell you from experience it's really not that complicated it's not hard to do and so like if our inner world where everyone has like 99.99 percent accuracy rates like what are you doing in the point zero one percent of the time like that's where most of your time and energy and stress is going to go and so like if you're vetting someone like ask them push them on that like that's something to ask about like we try to do like same day resolutions like you like there's a lot of like little things in 3PL that I think are just lost on us like best practices that had been invented when e-commerce became a thing. Like if you've read Tony Shades book, the Sapo's Founders book, like delivering happiness. No, I have. He writes an entire section on their fulfillment center. And I'll give you a couple examples of things that they did. Well, one thing that they did is they ran 24/7 fulfillment times, right? And so like in a world in which like most people were not doing say day of fulfillment, they were running a facility 24/7, which is less efficient because you can't bulk orders. Like you can if you like spread your fulfillment times out more, but they did it anyway. They also had some like little program acting that would just randomly upgrade repeat customers to overnight shipping. So they did that. And so we've done that before. We've literally put automations in our in our partners stores where we cover it where every, you know, I'm making up like 50 or a hundred or 200 orders. One random customer that has repeat will get certain will get overnight coverage. Right? So it's like, you just like do little things like that. Like it's not there's no one silver bullet for a moment. I'd say like we're pretty good at just like continuously improving the service and finding little things to build on each other and just compound over time. I will say to like I've only worked for a little bit, you know, indirectly. I would call it Kyle obviously does a little bit more than I do for this side of things. For anyone listening, just a voucher for Connor and what he's building. It's been kind of remark. I'll be honest. It's been it's been like remarkable to be on email threads and calls with you guys. You guys just give a shit. That's like the that sounds so obvious. You'd think that that would be something that everyone would would have. Yeah. I'm it's been, you know, I've been doing nobles our fifth year. It's been remarkable how many calls I've been on with three P.L.s where that's just absolutely not the vibe. And then there's been issues and you guys have solved things. And then there's been, you know, especially when it just comes like starting up, there's a million different things that are not going to work perfectly. And you guys have handled all of them and figured them out. And also you guys are just available. Like I think that's in the service space. There's there's something to be said about just being receptive and available and getting back to people that has it's just like lost right now. And that's something Kyle and I are trying to do too. And you guys are an absolute gold star for that. So just wanted to make sure I said that on the podcast like, you know, already, I would say if I were to sell something in this space, like I would be calling you be like, all right, Connor, I'm working with you. So that's an important piece. I think as we wrap up, Connor, what would be if there's people listening today, what's the best way for them to learn more about sphere or even to get a hold of you or the team and learn if maybe what you guys are doing is a better solution than what they have today. Yeah, there's not a lot of places to find us. But if you email me, it's Connor one end like the Gregor at sphere trading dot CO. And that's like the best way to find us. We're not really published widely. We're not on Twitter anything. So you can find me there. That's basically it. You guys are just doing work, which I love. Yeah, it sounds good. I'll add all that to the show notes. Some of the last questions Connor that I always love to ask every year that comes on here. This one is you've actually dropped a few in here already. So that's cool, but a source of knowledge. So for one listening today, is there anything you've read recently, whether it's a, you know, a book, an article, a podcast, anything that you think was, hey, this is like memorable. It just comes in your mind immediately that you think is worth sharing today. Yeah, I mean, like a million things. I think that like personally, I have this like thing where I think most entrepreneurs don't read enough. Like I was never a good student. Like I had to get into read. I just learned to like read literally. Yeah. But I just think it's like if you want to be really good at this, if this is your sport, like to like pull the athlete analogy, then like you just, it's a prerequisite. You just got to like read a lot because like a lot of the stuff repeats and like you can kind of just copy a lot of ideas and like tend to work. So maybe to pull a thread of things we've spoken about from a service perspective, like delivering happiness by Tony Shay and Mike Ovis and spoke who is Mike Ovis, the CNA founder. Those are two like really fucking amazing books that like I personally have stolen a lot of ideas from in terms of just like, okay, really world class service business. Also when McKenzie comes to town is not a great book that McKenzie and yeah, there's a lot more. But like those are the ones that I like think about from like relevant to this. Yeah, no, those are great. I will add all those to the links as well. And then last question, Connards, my favorite one. You're running your own business. You're building something pretty special here. What are the tools that you put around you to map out long term goals, goals for this year all the way down to like the shit Connards has to get done today? Are you a pen and paper guy? Do you have a planner? Are you using apps? Like what are the tools that you surround yourself? Yeah, I mean, we have a plug wear hands here which is our WMS, wearhands.com. Pretty much is a lifesaver and like we lean on it for like most like warehouse operations things and that's like majority of the tasks that we have. You know, and then like, I don't know, when firefight and so like emails just coming throughout the day. And so just like blocking and tackling on that stuff is just like pretty critical. But yeah, for goals perspective, I try to write like a quarterly update. I don't know if that's like a good resource or like helpful to drop your relevant, but like I spend probably a week every quarter writing an update of what we did and what I want to accomplish the next quarter and then how that like folds into our year goal. So I think that's a good practice and just like it's a good like here are the things that we should be thinking about every day as we like fire fight about the day. I might steal that one from you. That's a really, really good one. How do you, how do you like, how do you pull all that information down at the end of the quarter during that week? Like are you tracking it, writing it down? Is there something where you're like, you're going back and reviewing something? I spent a week writing them. I think monthly updates are too frequent to spend serious time on them. I think quarterly is probably good cadence where like you get recurring updates that mark against your annual goals, but you also can spend serious time on them like is it's quarterly. And so I try to spend like the first two days of the week that I write it like you know, of the a lot of time that I spend writing it. Just sort of like recapping what went down over the month and then just sort of like big list and then trim it down to like what is the important stuff. And then then I like use that as like my, my, my, my, my, my, my template to go in like actually like crap didn't write it. Love it, man. Okay. Well, Connor, thanks for the time, man. I know you're obviously a busy man. You got a lot going on behind you. I appreciate it. It was really fun getting here more your story today. And for anyone listening, obviously, we'll, we'll add the communication to the show notes and hopefully this turns into some more business for you guys. Anyway, man, thanks a lot of the time today. Really appreciate it. Sweet. Thanks, man. [BLANK_AUDIO]