The Perfect Warehouse Could Save You TIME, MONEY and MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER

well hello i have no idea what happened there why that went blank but there it did hi my name is matt edmondson welcome to
those of you who are joining us on the live stream so what we do here is we do
a live recording of the ecommerce podcast we've got today's guest all lined up he is good and raring to go
justin smith looking forward to this conversation uh he's such a cool guy and we're going to get into a whole
bunch of stuff to do with e-commerce and warehousing all that kind of good stuff that is all coming up yes it is now
just to give you the heads up because this is the live recording all of this intro bit is cut off the audio version
of the podcast uh i'm going to play the intro music to the podcast in a second
i'm going to introduce the podcast properly not like this hopefully there won't be a
blank screen for example when the music stops it should all work seamlessly as
they say so yeah so this is the e-commerce podcast my name is madness and this is a live
recording if you have any questions or comments for the guests as we go through do write them in the comments
say hi do all of those cool things um and if we get chance we will get through to your questions as we go through the
podcast hopefully that all makes sense so here we go this is
this episode number ecommerce podcast let's do this
welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for
building your business online
[Music] well hello and welcome to the ecommerce
Welcome
podcast with me your host matt edmondson it's great to see you now whether you are just starting out or whether like me
you're a bit of a dinosaur in the e-commerce world and been around for a while our goal here is super simple it's
just to help you grow your e-commerce and digital business yes it is every
week i get to talk to amazing people from the world of e-commerce and ask them all kinds of amazing questions well
i think they're amazing they're the kind of questions that i think you would ask if you got to
sit down with them and have a cup of coffee with them jeremy how do we do this and how does it help us grow our
own online businesses because like q i am an e-commerce entrepreneur i just want to just want to do what i do better
and i want to learn and i want to grow i really like digging into their story and learning the principles
from them that i can just to help me grow online so wherever you on your ecommerce journey hopefully
you get some great value out of this show and if you do enjoy this episode i would
appreciate it obviously if you like comment share if you're watching on youtube or facebook
or subscribe if you're listening to the audio podcast wherever you get your audio podcast from share it out invite
people to the show because it's all good stuff and this week is no exception welcome to
shall i say drumroll please welcome to season seven can you believe we are on
season seven already of the ecommerce podcast we had a slight break over the summer uh which let me tell you
was it was supposed if you're like me you have plans for the summer and for me
those plans involved rest and relaxation
and they are still to happen let me tell you uh we had a very busy summer as you
will probably hear throughout the coming shows in the coming episodes we have sold jersey beauty company it has been
purchased by an amazing company uh they they own now the the jersey beauty
company website they've taken that on god bless them in what they're doing
they've got some amazing plans i'm super excited to see what they do with it but that's the project that took up summer
we're selling part of our part of our e-commerce trade to another company so
hopefully next week i'll get a little bit of r r but all of that aside we are in season seven yes we are season seven
this is episode one of season seven and on this week's podcast we talk about
the perfect warehouse and how it could save you time money and make your life easier that's right we are getting into
all things to do with warehouse now if you are like me
and some of you are and some of you aren't i get that it doesn't always sound like the most
interesting of topics but trust me if you are running an ecommerce business this is such an important thing to get
your head around uh it's such a an important part of any e-commerce
business um warehouse automation can be a critical piece to the puzzle you know it can help
save you time money make your life easier and we have learned this the hard way let me tell you so i am joined this week
and i'm super excited because we have just gone and signed a new lease on a warehouse so i've got a whole bunch of questions uh we are joined by justin
smith who is the senior vice president at lee associates to discuss the current state of the warehousing market
and understand how better informed decisions make for a strategic warehouse
yes we are so if you're watching on the live stream like i say please feel free to throw in your questions and comments
grab your notebooks because you're going to want to take notes uh all of the notes from today's show will be
available as a free download on our website just head on over to ecommercepodcast.net
forward slash to download them okay so you'll be
able to get all of those for free we'll put all the links and stuff up at the end of it but if you're listening and you can make notes i have my notebook
here at the ready with a good blank page there uh i need to get my pen out actually
there we go so i've now got my pen so if you're like me i'm an avid note taker and today will be no exception so let me
introduce to you today's guest shall i and then we'll bring them onto the show now justin smith as i said senior vice
president with lee associates has guided hundreds let me say that again hundreds
of ceos people like you and me through finding more than million square feet
i have no idea what that is in square meters by the way but million square feet of property
worth more than million dollars he's worked with multiple fortune
companies public companies large companies large private companies and also companies like mine that are just
starting out or maybe a new sort of venture as it were if there's a way to make industrial real
estate trends and logistics fun he's our guy right he's totally the guy
to do it he makes it accessible and all that kind of stuff which is good because like i say it's easy i think just to go
it's warehousing let's just put that over there it's not as sexy as the marketing it's not as sexy as the
website but it is super super important let me tell you we can i just tell you a story when we
moved our warehouse to liverpool from jersey uh we instituted a few simple things in
that warehouse we started saving tens of thousands of pounds which is or something like that
every month just because we were we were a bit smarter in how we did the delivery so
you're really going to want to pay attention right he's got tons and tons of experience and industry knowledge he is also
uh the author of the new best-selling book industrial intelligence the executive's
guide for making informed commercial real estate decisions yes
so we've got his book we've got our notebooks we're going to dive into all of this uh in today's episode so without
further ado let me push this button on my screen here justin welcome to the
show it's great to have you thank you for having me matt i'm looking forward to it ah it's great it's great
Meet Matt
whereabouts in the world are you sunny southern california oh wow wow
you're almost almost not quite but almost halfway around the world from where we are right now and the uh the
connection seems really good it's instant which is i'm always amazed with this and technology how it just all
works beautifully the world keeps moving faster and more in touch
yeah yeah it's crazy isn't it it's crazy so um you've you've obviously you've got
some great experience right and it says on the back of the book that you've um
you've helped your clients close more than real estate transactions worth roughly half a billion dollars in
consideration that that's a lot of experience is this something that you've therefore always
done or is that like a week's work of work for you i i is that what's what's involved with that
the last two years feel like a career's worth of work
this is true yeah years so for me right out of undergrad so i graduated from the
university and started here as the lowest possible assistant role
and i've been with lee and associates the whole time so same firm and just slowly have worked my way up and now i'm
fortunate to be building a team and building more resources and capabilities around me and spearheading more of the
larger projects and that's been a blessing to continue to elevate who we work with and
the types of assignments we're working on together wow so years with the same company now this
Why Matt stayed years with the same company
is this let's talk about that for a little bit because you know what this is not something that we talk about regularly on the on the
podcast but i was i was actually before this podcast i was on another podcast i was a guest on somebody else's podcast
literally directly before this and one of the topics that came up was how
if you're of a certain generation you sort of you'd get a job and you would stay in that job for for you know you'd
make a career whereas now it the the common norm is you're in a job two or three years before moving on so what why
have you decided to stay years with the same company i don't know if that's being a dinosaur
or because it's so great over here it's amazing because you would think it
would be the opposite where everybody you would have that five-year stint and i found the firm the way that it's set
up is very similar to a law firm where you can become a partner and when you're
a partner you have a say in the administration how the firm is run
on the future hiring and on the staff and then on how you choose to build your
book of business so i've found the firm itself gives you everything that you need to be successful but then
it stays out of your way where you then have the autonomy to build a book of
business and adapt it as time goes by so if you decide that you want to focus
only on e-commerce because that's what's growing you can pivot and adjust and
work on that kind of business solely or if your interest lies in life science
and laboratories and medicine you can work with those types of companies so i've found the flexibility
has is such that you can have the autonomy and the freedom to really work on what excites you and to work on
what's growing in the market so if you have all that you don't need to go anywhere as a firm right you can
really just start thinking about who are the people you want to be working with and really focusing your time there and
so i'm very grateful to have that freedom and opportunity to be able to then really think of who's out there
doing dynamic work and working on exciting projects or products and then be able to connect with them so at that
point you really have no reason to leave or to want to transition
that's i think the key word there that you mentioned is autonomy isn't it it's that
Giving staff autonomy
giving giving staff autonomy no giving them no reason to leave and i think it's one of
the one of the things that uh i would say we've done well uh in our own business is a lot of the
guys with us have been with us a long time they kind of stay with us and i i like what you said there about autonomy
because i feel like you can sometimes you you want people to come and go we all know those people right
but but actually good people great people you want them to come and stay
and i think uh i think that's really interesting in what you're saying there and actually if you're listening and you're building a team there's a lot of
wisdom there and actually what justin just said just in the i know this is nothing to do with warehousing but i just for me it's a fascinating thing
like how do you build team how do you get good people to stay how do you empower them to go and do what you know
that they can do release them into to being what they can be um so years down the line they're
still doing great work why would you not do that teamwork how do we keep improving
teamwork and i feel like that's a never-ending journey that pays dividends right if you continue to improve on that
that's a it's such a topic that i i didn't know that i needed to really be
focused on on the daily and as the years have gone by it's been great to recognize that and to really emphasize
that it's um yeah building those capabilities around you right that's the power of the
team yeah no wonderful let's um let's move tax slightly i want to just come to
Writing a book
your um book i'm always intrigued justin i'm not gonna lie by people who have the
tenacity to sit down and write a book right because it it it sounds to me like
it's a bit of a labor of love jeremy and in terms of you you it's not something you're going to do on a wednesday afternoon how long did it take you to
actually sit down and write this you know it's uh shorter than one
might expect however editing editing would be ten times what you
would expect okay so writing
the journey is so great i worked with a company called scribe media and tucker
max and i feel like where you start after you've
framed out your avatar and your concepts is stream of consciousness
which is interesting because you would think that's the last thing you want in a book because you want to refine it and
have it really be only the most valuable components but the stream of consciousness is what
can get it out of your brain and so i found that is the best part and that's three months for me anyways for
this topic and uh that was more or less an hour of the day
every day like going to the gym right or you know running on the streets or on the treadmill or riding your bike
so that was my new gym for three months and then uh
working with a publisher that has an editing team an editor is
paramount to your success but you can't take stream of consciousness and then shift gears to
editing right you really have to refine it yourself before it's ready for the eyes of an editor where they then know
what it is you're trying to articulate so that part probably was another three or four months
and then design publishing all the nuts and bolts of
what color paper what size book are you going hardback or
paperback are you going to do audible if you're going to do an audio book
who's going to read it how does my voice sound how confident am
i in you know my reading abilities i'm not an actor however
people who hire me expect to have me being the person that's overseeing their
work or who's executing their work so then you would think you would want to read your book if you're doing the
audio book so all of those were the third part of the journey
of the publishing so i i found it was probably months from
inception and kicking off the project to when it was live on shelves available for everybody
everywhere wow so labor of love i would say is a nice nice way to describe
the long slog that it can sometimes feel like but it's your uh business it's your
journey it's your experience so having an opportunity to connect your history
and all the lessons that you've learned and to be able to share them is that part's wonderful because it is somewhat
of a walk down memory lane as you're thinking through how you learned that something is important for people
Why write a book
yeah no that's wonderful i always admire people that that have actually gone through it having having
been down that road several times myself i appreciate that the level of commitment it takes to actually create
and write a book but what what prompted you to kind of go you know what i i want to write a book about um
it's called industrial intelligence the executive guys who make it informed commercial real estate this is what what
prompted you to do that yeah writing a book is a lot like going
to law school you don't really suggest it to people and expect them to take you
up on your advice that's a good analogy i like that if
they choose to do that under their own volition you can then go ahead and congratulate them and then give them
some tips and some heads up for things to look for um being in the same business for
years and being responsible for generating business opportunities
every day and every quarter you constantly are constantly brainstorming what are the
best ideas i have and where is the market where are people consuming content and where are they going to
learn so for me i've been humbled to be in strategic coach which
is a coaching program they're throughout the states they're in the uk
and it's a such a fantastic mastermind type of group that continues to give you
new frameworks for how you think about business in general and so it could be e-commerce it could be real estate it
could be any type of business and i just got on a kit talking with some people in my group about book
writing and some of their experiences and that was just as i started to learn more about this
scribe media that i worked with and i feel like it there was just a
moment where the stars aligned between my experience and my maturity in the
business and self-publishing and that business
maturing where it's now no longer just publishing a pdf on you know on
your website or feeling like you're putting out content that's not highly refined i feel like publishing has now
reached a spot in the market where you can now do that in a very professional manner and have it be very accessible
so all of those came together at the right time and i'm no stranger to commitment so i
i'll get it on the list i'll stew on it for a little while and if it if it continues to be a great idea and i can
find the right team to work with that was one that just in january last year got to the top of the list where i said
okay let's devote the time and the resources and let's make a go of it and what's great is
you don't end up with just a book you end up with opportunities to create new
ways to either teach firms or teach people or teach clients
and to create new avenues for them in the way that they like to learn so if that's audio or video or in other
content pieces it's really kicked off an avalanche of additional opportunities
to connect with people that you know that you don't think about that when you're sitting down at your desk and you
start punching the keys and you start racking your mind of what would be valuable for people so i'm very
grateful that there's so much opportunity in there that you
you know you're rewarded beyond just you and your work but i feel like committing to the work itself that's i mean that's
the joy to focus your mind on what you know and what you find valuable let people find valuable that you can share
so it's been a great opportunity so what's been the most i mean you've obviously
Most surprising feedback
written that content uh with a specific avatar in mind which i i think is is
fascinating and brilliant all in its own right but um out of all the content that you've put
in that book obviously people have read it they've fed back to you and stuff like that what's been the most
surprising feedback maybe that you've you've had as a result of doing the book
yeah you know it's funny i wrote it for the avatar right and the avatar is
someone not too different from you matt so my avatar was a specific client john
who works at a global company he runs a laboratory
and he's responsible for uh raw materials for products being
manufactured for the distribution to their client and for
operating all things in his business like the people the employees the legal financing and he's a very smart guy very
capable he can do what we do but he's got a big team he's got a lot
of responsibilities and he needs to have someone that can really take charge of a project for him when it
comes to the warehouse part so that part i knew that's who i wrote it for but what i was surprised to see
is all of the associates that are the junior people and firms like mine and all the global companies that are
looking to learn their craft and so i you know i didn't
write it for them they are not the avatar and the second one along that same vein
is investors wall street all of these types of landlords that now recognize because
of e-commerce's growth buying industrial property is now one of the sexiest asset classes that are out
there yeah and so if you have raised hundreds of millions to billions of
dollars and you're looking to invest in industrial you're probably hiring a lot of associates and analysts and they need to
learn the business too so i've had a lot of those types of managing partners say hey i'd like to share this with all my
analysts and all my underwriters as they learn the business and they understand who the customer is
and what is important to the customer so those were all things that were
came to me that were a bit surprising and in hindsight maybe predictable but
because that's not you know who i had in mind that i'm directly helping it was a little bit of
a surprise once i heard one and two and five and ten and people coming back and
having that resonate with them and be an additional way that it can help people that was uh
uh somewhat unforeseen yeah oh it's really interesting one of the things that i i i i wouldn't
How to write a book
recommend it to everybody but i've certainly recommended it to a fair few people is actually that they write a book um
that chronicles the story of their business especially if their business is is like an authentic business or
values-led business or there's something in there um in your story which could really
resonate with your customer and putting it in a book um [Music]
actually is a great way and you can distribute the book for free do i mean to your customers and and and putting it
in a book i think is a really interesting idea for a lot of e-commerce business owners so i appreciate your insight justin uh you know on the whole
book thing and um i think probably one day i should do an episode on on actually how to write a
book but no never mind let's let's get into the whole warehousing thing um because that's what we're here to
talk about so um let i guess let's put ourselves in a bit
of a scenario so the kind of stuff that you do we mentioned at the start of the show you know you you can
what was the phrase you use you're a seven out of ten in terms of that the the general sort of how to do stuff
better in in warehousing but a out of in terms of location and all that sort of stuff
so what specifically do you do on a day-to-day basis what what sort of projects do you do
yeah a great example that would be closest to what i would perceive the people
listening uh are experiencing is having a entrepreneur that has a product that
they've developed and are having manufactured somewhere and they're trying to figure out
distribution right so at the very beginning you may sell online and having
your product distributed through a third party logistics company or amazon
fulfillment right that would be the most common way i would think most people would start and what i have found is that the next
step for a lot of folks is going into what we have is co-working and so
co-working most people think of we work right in your office in my office we're on the same floor but you know we share
the same break room and we have meeting rooms what i have found is in the last five
years that concept has taken hold in warehousing so that
some companies will take down hundreds of thousands of square feet and then they'll
chop up the inside of the building so that smaller e-commerce companies can
store their product on a short-term basis and can have a flexible size that can
grow or contract as the business grows and contracts as you find success with your product or you shift to a new
product and that's very much a stepping stone where you can get out of having a
external third-party logistics company fulfill all your distribution and you can take charge of
that and start to build that capability within your own company and so that's
oftentimes the first step and people that i will work with are people who have taken that step they're in that
kind of space and now they recognize there's a premium for that space that is
a business in and of itself just like third party logistics is a business in and of itself
i gotta get out of here i'm paying too much i've got all these neighbors they're in my space i can't do you know
everything that i need to do and then that's when they find me or i find them and we start to envision what
it's going to look like when the business owner has their own space
that they don't share with anybody and then they're responsible for all of their own
inventory for all of their own employees security legal and just kind of as you pick up
the different component pieces of business and start to build that in-house
so that would be the very most entry-level person we would work with
and i would say the most typical is the small medium-sized business that has taken that step
they have their own team their products successful and they're growing and now
they're trying to figure out do i go from one building to two do i go from a small building to a big
building do i stay in one area or do i start to fulfill from multiple different ports
and different uh air cargo depending on what your product is different airports
and then do i handle all of this myself or do i now have an operations guy that handles
all this for me while i'm off discovering the next product or the next team or the next acquisition
so i've found that's probably the most prevalent is a small business owner that's already grown out of
having amazon fulfilled they've already grown into having their own space and then
now the responsibility is firmly on their shoulders they count everything
yeah now it's time to figure out okay we're growing how do we grow where do we grow who do we grow with
and that's when the fun starts because you can then envision the future of the
company and you can you have a team whether it's a small motley crew or
whether you know it's people and then you can really start to get other opinions and other expertise about
people that are great with shipping or they really understand material handling or they really know
what the company's culture is and then can all work together to make sure that the
next space we get fits not just the iphone that we're selling but fits
the whole formula and so that's where it starts becoming more fun because you can
start taking a more team approach and you can start realizing that a lot of people within your company can benefit
by the different building that you get as you're growing the company so if i'm i
Outsourcing fulfillment
and i ask this actually because it's relevant to me in the sense that as i said we've we've just signed a new
lease on a warehouse and um we do fulfillment obviously for our own e-commerce businesses but we actually do
fulfillment for other e-commerce businesses so you know the first time that you talked about where they're starting to grow and they want to
outsource their fulfillment so we do that a little bit we do really well actually with um
small products i don't ship out sofas or anything like that that's that's not my bag but if it's small uh like a beauty
cream or something like that we're we're really good at doing that kind of stuff so um
and that was something actually i never intended to get into it's just because we were already doing it people came to us and said listen can you send
our stuff out as well because it you know the whole logistics thing scares them so we've just gone and signed a new
lease on a new warehouse we're going to um our bigger premises um and
what fascinates me is listening to you talk is i can identify with all the the three stages that you you know you
talked about and you've got the guy starting out with third party logistics to the guy that's actually now
everything is his he's taking the warehouse and it starts to be a bit more fun what are some of the key questions
that you think that guy needs to be asking himself like he's
taken on this warehouse he's taking the whole enchilada on for himself
what are some of the key questions that need to be asked in that
yeah i usually start with time right time is such a big component piece
of all of this and so time is how much time do we have before our contract is up wherever we
are and that could be days or weeks if you're scrambling and have a mad dash
it's usually months uh if you have the visibility it's a
year to a year and a half and then time is also how
stable is your business how far out in the future can you plan for
and how much time can you commit to the next space
and if that's months or years or forever right like uh
like you purchasing the property right that's different for everybody and
as the business matures usually you get longer time horizons and
more clarity and more ability to predict and to forecast but i found that time is
such a challenge because there's some rigidity in how long people
will give you space for where co-working you can do that month to month
small space for a hundred pallets you can do for a year
space for thousands of pallets and tens of thousands of pallets right that's for five years or maybe
even years so can you imagine committing to years on some huge
building right you better be pretty confident in your plan or you are are
running a very robust business where you know you can continue to need that or to
use that so i start with time that's such a big thing and usually when you start with time looking back and looking
forward that usually will set the stage that will help us all understand kind of
what what we're working with the time horizon wise and that that's usually uh
my first question and after that i go to people and people is just is it just
matt or is if there's also a part of this arrangement
or is matt the ceo and cfo or do we have anybody else do we have
investors that need to have a say in all of this do we have any strategic partners sister
companies corporate offices do we have any debt like uh
agreements or facilities that are maturing soon that may play a role in how we fuel
the purchase of equipment or of inventory or of another business that
might consolidate into the next building so between time and team right those are the uh the two
and once we've talked through that that uh usually of the conversation to
just get oriented of course you've got to talk about finances and what you think you can
afford and what the market is telling you you need to afford to do what it is you
think you're trying to accomplish and between those three
then i feel like we can get real very quickly of knowing like these are
viable options and if we choose this
that is what this will look like right and you can start playing out scenarios and kind of trying on the hat to see
does it fit how do you feel about that and that usually is very illustrative for
the executive to then say okay my vision can i can envision now what this will
look like what it will cost me and how my team around me can help guide me
through this i feel good or i feel i feel like a resource i feel like that's a stretch
or i feel like that's over committing i would say those are the first few items that we'll walk through in an
introduction that are enlightening and kind of help set the tone okay so if i'm
Ideal time frame
um i mean i you know i i i i'm getting a new where the lease on our
current building was expiring and i thought it's just going to be good to move and so uh we you know we're moving
in about three months time and i think i i think our time frame was probably
about um four months once we'd found the building to get it sorted out but it we
we were looking for six months you know we were we were about a year out so if i'm if i'm sitting listening to the
podcast thinking um yeah it's interesting what you're saying what
what is an ideal i know you're gonna have people that actually need a space next week right because it just it is
what it is but if you were to say actually if you can be a bit more proactive ideally
you could do with this much time on average what what sort of time frame
should people try and have in mind if they're thinking about this stuff ahead of time
The sweet spot
yeah i would love to have one number and so i
i would say six months yeah six months half a year to a year and a half is the
sweet spot okay and just getting in your car
with someone like me and looking at buildings right that can happen in a day
right but it's a there's so many things that are part of the process
where you don't necessarily need to look at buildings a year out but a year out you may want to double
check when your contract expires a year out you may want to think
what's the lead time on those machines i'm going to buy that i'm going to grow the business with
what's the lead times on the furniture furniture surprisingly can take a long
time six to nine months sometimes longer and then the real kicker
is construction so are we gonna find a building that's just perfect and we're going to walk in
we're going to open the door turn on the lights and just money's going to be raining down from the sky as pallets are
flying out the back of the building right that's uh of the time i would say so the other
of the time we've got general contractors bids architects construction drawings
permits then the construction inspections and then you can move in
so i found construction's the big kicker of with a small space you may not need
construction with co-working space you won't need construction but once you get out of
the first building you have where it's you on your own and you're going to building number two three or four
there's a pretty good chance you're gonna need construction and if you are that's uh
often times three to six months and
that's when your year starts to tick by a little faster and faster where
okay got it this is where we're at in our size we think we will need to do some construction where we move okay have i
double checked my contract and then you start to lay out like okay a year i feel confident that i can
achieve what i'm trying to achieve and know that i can build it how i like it so that i can envision walking in and
it's my colors and the environment that i'm giving to my customers and my employees are how i
want it to be and my flow has been set up where i know
where all my materials are in a lot of that and i've i put in equipment that i need in there in automation
and so um yeah i'd say a year is like your average
number that is the ideal amount of time that's great i i can i mean my
experience here is i think we probably started we didn't give ourselves a year but i'd say
it's probably been a good seven or eight months and that time has flown by really quickly i mean really quickly to get it all
sorted out and part of the reason for that justin is because actually finding
good space certainly in the uk certainly in liverpool which is where we're based
was a lot more difficult than i thought it was gonna be i mean it's been six years since we moved warehouse
um and it seems now the market is very different uh to what it was six years
ago certainly on industrial space suitable for e-commerce businesses is that something that you've noticed
generally yourself in the states or is that just a little quirk for us here in liverpool
Tight inventory
yeah at first you would think it's a quirk right we're on an island we're running out of land right we're going to
need to build and people don't want to build in their neighborhoods right construction and projects
but that's a global phenomenon right now for the industrial inventory to be tight
and the general background to that is e-commerce right so if you think this
e-commerce isn't a phenomenon for people who are in the business right you've been in the e-commerce for a while this
this hasn't surprised you but with the last two years that's
accelerated the amount of people that are shopping online and
for every person that shifts to online shopping that's a piece of inventory
that's not in your shopping mall that is now in your warehouse
so if in the last two years we just took every pair of shoes that you were going to buy off the shelf and put them in a
warehouse right it's not a that way it's not like we don't have stores anymore but
that's been the shift and so that shift is widespread it's in every market and
every major market you're finding available property
is not only single digits it's like three percent of the hundred percent
that is in the built environment yeah and the bell weather for whether it was
a a tight market or whether it was softening used to be ten percent
available and then it became five percent available and now it's like
three or four percent where if it becomes greater than that all of a sudden you're in the driver's seat we're
getting free rent we're asking for discounts on the rent we're making our commitment shorter
and uh that just we've it's been so long into the landlord's market where you're just
happy to be there having a space that you can call your own and so what i have
found is it's changed some of the tactics that we have to employ to then locate space that
doesn't exist so you just swim up the stream a little bit further where you're
contacting landlords about property that's full and that's already committed
and you're almost searching for inventory as soon as companies are
moving on to their next one you want to immediately know about that one that's coming available if you really want to
serve your customer and find those spaces so i found that to be something that has been a shift in our tactics and
just in the experience of people finding space and the last thing you want to be doing
is feeling like it's a mad dash where if you find something good you got to get your hands on it and you don't let it go
and you really like have to act in the moment right you want time to think and to discuss and to
contemplate and to negotiate and i've just found that hasn't gone away but it's just
compressed all those timelines and it's compressed the decision making where you've got to have put the thought into
it so that when you're out there and you're looking you know that you have the confidence you need to say yes that
can work for me i'll take it and that's uh that's a big commitment
to go shopping you know and be ready to buy right there on the spot so the more you have
crystallized your plan in your mind and discuss it with your team in advance then you've kind of armed yourself to go
shopping that's such wise advice because i was it got to the point where we'd seen a
few places we were like well should we just take that because it's available but actually that wasn't it wasn't great
i mean it would have been serviceable but it wasn't great unfortunately for us you know
thank god we we've actually found a space which i think is much better for us as a business but i think when it's scarce supply like it
is at the moment you you know you you can especially i'm grateful we also had a bit of time
to figure it out because we could have quite easily been in a rush and just accepted anything which is you know again coming back to your taking the
year type thing i'm almost thinking as well justin i'm not gonna lie as you're talking i'm
thinking there is a business to be had which goes and buys up large industrial
warehouse spaces uh and breaks them down into smaller units um
for the the e-commerce uh businesses do i mean and um i'm
almost wondering whether to whether i should contact a few investment portfolios and start getting involved in that because i think as e-commerce is
just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and these spaces are going to become more and more and more
needed i don't know if this is your expectation but as we're talking it's certainly the way i see it going
Differentiation
without a doubt and so uh i feel like we're at the infancy of that where the
concept like we are aware that there's a need in that market and
our people who are helping satiate that need but so far it seems
like all of those spaces are being gobbled up they're being completely full
and now you're just starting to see differentiation where can i do that better than they can
do that yeah and why would someone choose yours over another's and it's interesting to think
of you're trying to get away from
fully outsourcing your distribution and so if you've copied you're kind of
in sourcing and outsourcing some parts of it so do you want someone moving your product or do you want to be moving it
do you want someone storing your product or do you want to be storing it do you want your people at that office
or is this just for the fulfillment of your goods and so i find that's where some of the differentiation is coming
around of what do you think ecommerce entrepreneurs need and value and want to pay for or what are the
parts they don't like doing right what part isn't adding value to that business
and can you provide that and that's uh interesting to see that's uh on the cusp and people that are training
i mean generally we've been seeing them just kind of continue to grow and on upward trajectories i feel like uh
hop on in the water's warm the water
you know look into your crystal ball and look sort of five years into the future what do you see happening in this sort
of space you know if i'm if i'm sat there going you know what i'm happy with my third party logistics at the moment
i'm a small guy i'm selling on amazon or whatever it is that i'm doing um
yeah but the business is gonna you know some of these businesses will grow what do i need to start thinking about
and and also for people like me that have been around a while what do i need to start thinking about for five years in the future
yeah it's a such a fast-paced environment right so i feel like
the things that are on the horizon with warehouse automation right that's
becoming more mainstream and what what component pieces within your warehouse
can you upgrade or invest in that will increase throughput so that you can move
more products faster within the same four walls i find that's the question everybody's
trying to answer and part of that is coming from quicker delivery times and expectations
that you meet shorter deadlines from when someone buys your product to when it shows up on their door
and so yeah having a keen eye to your processes and which parts can be
automated where you can invest i think over the next five years that's a big component piece that people like
yourself and people that are running these businesses can look at to continue to invest the
business i'd say that's that's the biggest part right now and uh logistics
wise right trucking we're not into like autonomous trucks and autonomous delivery and right that's uh that's the
pie in the sky we'd all love to see or maybe uh
yeah someday right but that's not a here and now that's not five years
otherwise i will just think ownership what could it take to get your hands on
a building as an entrepreneur where you could have it for your business and then
much like you are doing some fulfillment for companies now you know can you have extra space where
you could grow that in a building that you own and that you could buy and sell companies as time goes by
and continue to maintain ownership of the building and have that be a property
investment and so that's uh depending on your time horizon and the
amount of capital you have available to invest i'd say uh in a five-year horizon everybody comes
down on those different pieces in a different era you know but thinking about ownership and just how you can improve
within your four walls and what you can automate i find that's uh that has already happened in all of the
fulfillment center and it's slowly becoming more affordable for smaller applications and coming
downstream a little bit that's really interesting that's really interesting one of the questions i have
uh that's been sent in just in because we we we send out notes to saying this won't talk about one of the questions
that came in and said how do i say i've got the warehouse how do i set up a great e-commerce warehouse what
what are some of the things that i need to think about i mean you mentioned earlier just a few minutes ago about getting stuff out the door quicker and
faster in terms of equipment but what else should i be thinking about yeah
my first call is to a material handling person and and so that's the person that
specializes in racking forklifts and just the general flow of goods
and i found that is someone that you have to have and when you have that person you can
continue to grow with them and what they will do is look and set up people's
operations all over town right and so they'll see what people are doing that's working and what isn't
they'll see this the shape of the space that you have and the height and then the sprinklers that you have
which surprisingly sprinkle sprinklers are a big deal yeah and they'll see how much space you have for your trucks and
they can design that flow and so starting with the size of the product
right you you find if you're selling um tubes of toothpaste
or if you're selling motorcycles right you're gonna have a dramatically different setup and so i have clients
that do both and so are you taking in pallets of product
and breaking them down and shipping them individually are you taking containers of product and then
sending out individual pallets to different locations or are you
distributing big items that are like this uh motorcycles where uh they come
on their own individual pallet that may or may not be able to be racked high so
i always start back with what's the product mix and then your material handling specialists will be able to
help you think through okay with that size product and this amount of volume
daily volume monthly volume how do we optimize and i find that's uh that's
where we start yeah that's critical i mean i just you know if you're listening to
the show and you're thinking about what does all that mean it means that when you have a warehouse things like um
your most popular goods for example you you have those on a shelf near where the guys are picking and packing so they don't have to walk as far to collect
them um and you you know it's just making these subtle changes isn't it in your
warehouse that that improves efficiency and it as you say gets goods out the door quicker and easier now do you scan
orders is everything barcoded and so on and so forth um a lot of really interesting questions
around this my last question for you justin if i may right uh we um
are enjoying the conversation and and this is slightly off field uh from what we've been talking about
already so what we're based in the uk okay and one of our companies we uh
supply um uh food supplements vegan and vegetarian certified food supplements so
things like omega-multivitamins and so on and so forth and it is a great business very niche
um you know we've got a phenomenal product i love what we do and it's great
a huge chunk of our ex a huge chunk of our sales are exports to the states
right to the point where we are now looking at these figures and we're going would it make sense for us to distribute
in the us rather than distribute to the us from the uk do you see what i mean yeah i do
so there's a lot of questions that we're thinking about in our in our heads about how do we do
that i guess my question to you is not should i do that um because i i wouldn't uh i
wouldn't want to wish that on you with the very limited information that i've given you but if i was gonna do that
um if i was gonna look to distribute whereabouts in the states would be a good place for general distribution from
are there better places in the states to sort of look at or do you do that put
one on the east coast one on the west coast kind of thing what do i think about that
Locations
yeah the term for that is the supply chain network right so your network
would be your locations and so i would start with where is the product coming from so are we making
these in liverpool are we making them near shanghai right are we making them
somewhere else are we making them in mexico right and based on where they are
manufactured then you can start to think that's one end where's the customer so i
think what you're saying is the customers in the states right yeah so uh whereabouts in the states right so i'm
assuming this is more of a affluent product when you think of who your customer is and so where are all the
main centers of affluence in the states and then uh after that i generally would start with
a third party logistics company is usually where most people as they're testing this new distribution model
they'll start with others that already have the infrastructure set up and that can already handle your orders and can
already help you model where you need to be and so
starting with where it's manufactured will tell you if you're coming in from the port of long beach in los angeles
because it's coming from china or if it's coming from liverpool you're probably going through new jersey and
pennsylvania and uh uh and then if you're going to have
where your customers are which is your end point right you may end up in the center of the country and you can go
within two days to either side so i think that's uh how people will
generally start to think about it and then what you can do is leverage this third-party logistics company
and their supply chain and their modeling and their i.t and their infrastructure to start running tests
and granted this will be a higher cost right because you're paying for this
third party logistics but that will give you an opportunity with uh less risk to try out how your
volumes will change once you start distributing there and as you gain more success and more growth so that's how i
generally would think about the problem before even contemplating like a
specific city or a pacific state i think if we started with that
and we talked with a couple third-party logistics that would be uh we would get very smart very quickly on what some of
our options are and then if we want to understand running it ourselves then we would have
a baseline to measure from yeah that's very very sage advice
uh i may have more questions about this uh for you but not in the podcast because we'll be
here for the next four hours anyway uh justin listen thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed
that conversation um if people listening to the podcast want to get in touch with you reach out to you connect with you
what is the best way for them to do that yeah linkedin's great
smith lee and associates and you can find me and my firm contact information and yeah
that's uh that's easiest for everybody okay so linkedin we'll put a link to
uh your linkedin profile in the show notes as well so that'll be in there no doubt
uh justin uh thanks so much for being on the show do you have any parting words
of wisdom that you want to share before we before we close out
just gratitude i appreciate you having me and i'm sure it helps a lot of people to hear some advice from you and your
experience i appreciate you sharing it with everyone oh you're a legend thanks justin i really appreciate you being on
the show uh oh hang on there we go that's better my mouse is not working um
so uh big big thanks and uh look forward to staying in touch appreciate you being here and sharing your wisdom and
make sure you do grab justin's book thanks so much thank you matt
wasn't justin fantastic uh i i don't know about you but i i felt like i was just getting warmed up in that
conversation but i've also got one eye on the clock and i want to be respectful of everybody's time including justin's
especially justin's to be fair but as i said do make sure if you are
sort of where i am on your on the e-commerce journey or you see you're going to be getting there soon make sure you do grab a hold of um justin's book
the industrial intelligence book is well worth a read let me tell you and it's i
appreciate that justin is living in california but i found this book incredibly helpful and i live in liverpool the uk right so
some of the things translate some of them don't but the principles brilliant so make sure you do get a copy
of that book um i believe you can find it where all good books are sold uh i got this one off amazon so do check it
out and make sure you get a hold of that and also connect with him directly i guess if you've got any questions he'll
be more than happy to help you uh and steer you and point you in the right direction such a cool guy so connect
with him on linkedin as i said all of the links to everything to the book to
justin's linkedin profile will be in the show notes you can get those by heading over to
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash um and you'll you'll get that i love it
i love talking to people like justin because you always find something really helpful in what they're talking about and what
they say i i especially i'm buzzing now with the idea of should we go and get some investors and
buy some warehouses and turn them into e-commerce distribution centers i don't know watch this space
it has triggered something in my head but what about you what did you really enjoy do let us know uh what you got out
of this um and obviously uh do uh share it on uh
on the social media channels and all that good sort of good stuff give us a rating on itunes if you're about you
know listening to the podcast it just helps us connect with more folks around the world so i really would appreciate
you doing that um all that's left for me to say thanks for listening make sure you come back next
week as we get to interview some more great guests on how to grow our own
online business i think that is it for me thank you so much for listening have a fantastic week
bye for now
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