Winning Peak Season with Expert Strategies from a 3PL Owner

Mark Taylor [00:00:02]:

On the three Pl side to be successful is you just have to constantly be talking to your team members and letting them know like we are an extension of our customer. And if they don't succeed, we don't succeed. So you have to treat their business as if it's our own because it is.

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Glenn Gooding [00:00:27]:

Welcome to Parcel Perspectives, the podcast dedicated to small parcel shows shippers. I'm Glenn Gooding, and each episode we dive into insights best practices and strategies to help you navigate this complex, costly market. Join me as we explore ways to strengthen your long term partnerships with your chosen carriers and stay competitively aligned.

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Glenn Gooding [00:00:54]:

Hey, welcome to another episode of Parcel Perspectives. I'm Glenn Gooding. I got a treat for you guys today. I brought a guest on Mark Taylor. Mark Taylor is CEO and founder of a very successful three Pl operation called Warehouse Republic. I'm going to give him some time to introduce himself, but welcome, Mark.

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Mark Taylor [00:01:14]:

Hey, Glenn. How are you doing, man?

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Glenn Gooding [00:01:16]:

I'm doing well, my man. Losing a little sleep over peak season, but doing well.

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Mark Taylor [00:01:20]:

I think a lot of people are right now. Yeah, yeah.

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Glenn Gooding [00:01:23]:

And the reason I'm losing a little sleep is that's kind of the topic for today, right? It's peak season surges, and then how do you capitalize on that? How do you win in peak season, retain customers and maintain consistent growth? I thought that'd be a meaty enough topic for us to spend a little time on. What do you think?

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Mark Taylor [00:01:40]:

Absolutely. I think you're right. It's one of those things where it's like we always look forward to Q one, Q two, because that's the best opportunity to acquire new customers from other three Pls that have really stepped in it.

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Glenn Gooding [00:01:51]:

You bet. I love the attitude. Love the attitude. So we're going to go with the glass half full approach to peak season today, listeners. And, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, you're a supply chain geek. I promise you that. And so when you hear peak season, you break into a cold sweat, I'm sure, like I did over my time. But Mark, tell me a little bit about yourself.

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Glenn Gooding [00:02:12]:

How did you wind up being founder and CEO of Warehouse Republic and get where you're at today?

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Mark Taylor [00:02:19]:

Well, I mean, there's a long story and there's a brief story and we'll go over the brief story.

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Glenn Gooding [00:02:23]:

Sure.

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Mark Taylor [00:02:23]:

Back in, I guess it was around 2014, late 2014, I was looking at opportunities to exit the corporate world I'd always had, you know, ever since I was a kid, had that entrepreneurial itch. And I fortunately keep friends that are way smarter than I am around me. And I said, hey, what would you guys do if you wanted to experiment with $5,000? And to a man, everybody said FBA businesses.

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Glenn Gooding [00:02:49]:

Good thing I wasn't your friend because I would have said go to Vegas.

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Mark Taylor [00:02:54]:

Anyway. Yeah, I mean if we're trading jabs and we're already good friends here, I mean, I'd say, well, you know, maybe my smarter friends, I don't know.

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Glenn Gooding [00:03:02]:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's why you surround yourself by smarter friends, not dumber friends like me.

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Mark Taylor [00:03:07]:

Yeah, I doubt you're dumber, but we'll go with it anyway. They all said, you know, go and spend a little bit of money, import some products, go into the world's yellow page on Alibaba. Theres a lot of methodology out there to determine what products might be a good fit. And we kind of went down the FBA rabbit hole and started a couple different companies selling just random home goods, exercise, sports and exercise equipment. And after a season, we came to this realization that there was an underserved market in wine glasses that were etched, just kind of novelty. We took a chance on two skus and one of, you know, imported basically a half a container of each, which is about 7000 units, I think is what it is.

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Glenn Gooding [00:03:49]:

Oh, that is the equivalent of going to Vegas, right there it is.

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Mark Taylor [00:03:52]:

It was. And we didn't have sophisticated marketing to tell us that this will be a hit. And so one of the skus did great and the other sku did not do well. And so very quickly found ourselves in this world of hurt, where we began many months later, getting charged long term storage fees and all this sort of stuff through the FDA network. And so we very quickly determined after only a couple of years that we needed to do the supply chain piece. We needed to take as much control of the supply chain piece as possible. And that's hard to do when you're a very small ecommerce company. At the time, there were people working with FBA companies, but you had to have more scale than what we had.

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Mark Taylor [00:04:32]:

And so we started doing it for ourselves. And then after a season, it worked really well. And about 2018, I said, look, I think there's something here for other small sellers like ourselves who are only doing four, five, six containers a year, maybe smaller. And we looked at it like Amazon had set the price for not only the storage, but the services that were included in that storage. And so we went down this all inclusive pricing model and we've since changed. That's a different conversation. But you realize when you try to reinvent the wheel on a pricing strategy and three pl, it's like there's a reason it's there.

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Glenn Gooding [00:05:06]:

Yeah, usually, yes.

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Mark Taylor [00:05:08]:

But to kind of cap it off, since 2018, we ran an ad on Reddit and said beat long term storage fees. And before you knew it, we had some customers, and we've just kind of grown from there. In May of, I think around May 6, 2018, I moved out to Riverside for a little bit and lived in the warehouse, slept on an air mattress, unloaded our first container by myself in the June summer in true entrepreneurial fashion.

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Glenn Gooding [00:05:34]:

Good for you.

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Mark Taylor [00:05:35]:

Thank you.

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Glenn Gooding [00:05:36]:

I guess to start out, what are some of the things that an e commerce business should prepare their warehouses for, for the increased demand?

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Mark Taylor [00:05:48]:

Absolutely. You'll find with a lot of three pls in our contract included. Like, we have clauses written in there to where it's like if your customer, if our customer is expecting a large sale, they really, really need to proactively communicate that to us. There's a lot of reasons. I mean, firstly, in this business, you can scale labor up and down relatively quickly. The issue, though, is the type of labor. So it's like, if you're wanting to do sophisticated picking labor, that's somebody that really needs to be homegrown over a period of weeks, if not months.

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Glenn Gooding [00:06:18]:

Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. Mark? Yep.

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Mark Taylor [00:06:21]:

If you're talking about just, we have a lot of containers coming in that's going to need palletizing. Well, that's a little bit easier to scale up for. But let's focus in on brands right now. If a brand, let's say they believe with every piece of data they have, no matter how good or bad, whatever that may be, that they believe we're going to see a 200% increase, well, then we now need to go and make sure that we've got the picking labor. We might want to proactively set up pick lines specific to that customer. We might want to preform boxes, depending on the scenario. All of that takes time, space, and resource. And I cannot stress the importance that not only are we expecting this, but there is no worse thing to say for us not to be expecting it and be able to do it on labor, but all of a sudden, we've got a six week lead time with boxes from our box manufacturer, and so we have to default to paying for a higher price box using Uline or somebody else like that.

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Glenn Gooding [00:07:20]:

Yeah. So if I hear you right, I just want to make sure this really demand forecasting has to be spot on. Right. You have to be given Runway time to plan.

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Mark Taylor [00:07:30]:

Yes.

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Glenn Gooding [00:07:31]:

Right. And there's a lot of considerations in the planning. Right. As you're talking about here, staffing knowledge units of the staffing requirements. Right. When you're going to need them. Pre kitting activities and planning on that space. Right.

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Glenn Gooding [00:07:49]:

Warehouse layout to accommodate what skus we think are going to be moving out the door.

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Mark Taylor [00:07:55]:

Yes, you're absolutely right.

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Glenn Gooding [00:07:57]:

So we've talked about, I guess the planning side a bit with regard to kind of the operational piece, the staffing and the warehouse layout and the PICC line and those things. Anything on the technology side, mark, that you have to consider when you're planning for peak season? Is there any considerations if suddenly client is looking at 200% growth at that point, what do you have to have in place from a technology perspective? Anything at all or are you kind of plug and play good to go?

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Mark Taylor [00:08:28]:

It really depends. So, you know, if a client comes and let's say they're doing 100 units a day and they're introducing a new SKU and they think they're going to do 300 units a day. Okay, well I think this is very interesting because if that SKU is of a different size, there might be a potential for us to go and establish a new carrier account on behalf of that customer.

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Glenn Gooding [00:08:51]:

Okay.

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Mark Taylor [00:08:52]:

I don't know how many people out there have gotten to work directly with some of the larger carriers, but it's like sometimes those new account numbers can actually take a bit of time to get established.

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Glenn Gooding [00:09:01]:

Bit of a bureaucracy. Right.

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Mark Taylor [00:09:03]:

Let me just use this as an example. We partner with idrive Logistics, which has been a fantastic partnership, whereas we used to do ups and USP's primarily. Now what we're able to do is we're able to go among five or six different carriers and really pinpoint which carrier is going to provide the best rates for the sweet spot of our clients package.

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Glenn Gooding [00:09:26]:

That's an interesting point. I cut you off again, so I'm going to shut up for a minute. What else do you got to say for a second, Mark, before I node.

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Mark Taylor [00:09:32]:

DHL ecomm is one of our partners, for instance. Yeah, but let's say that we get a client in there that says, look, we've got less than a pound. Or it's like, you know, we've got this little twelve ounce item that we're going to sell thousands of and it's going to be the easiest pick, it's going to be that holy grail. Thousand units a day, single skew picks one in two quantities, you know, that kind of thing.

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Glenn Gooding [00:09:51]:

But you could take some more on, like me, one of your dumb friends, drop them in there and they could perform.

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Mark Taylor [00:09:56]:

Right. But let's say you don't have that DHL ecom account set up.

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Glenn Gooding [00:10:00]:

Yeah.

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Mark Taylor [00:10:01]:

If you drop it on me and you say, here you go, we're dropping two pallets of these tiny little items and we're going to ship through it, you're going to lose weeks, if not months, getting that DHL account set up, which in the interim could save you anywhere from fifty cents to a couple dollars per shipment, depending on, I mean, a couple dollars may be a bit much, but let's just say fifty cents to a dollar per shipment.

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Glenn Gooding [00:10:26]:

Fifty cents. Fifty cents is, that's a big deal in the e commerce space. That can definitely push you from red to black quickly.

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Mark Taylor [00:10:36]:

It most certainly can. And then the other thing I would say to that is in high volume situations, USP's, for instance, will provide boxes. And that's another little cost savings right there. If you go from not having the volume to really justify that twelve or 20 pallet order that they want you to place and track all USP's, you've missed out on a really big opportunity for cost savings for your customer.

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Glenn Gooding [00:11:02]:

Great. So I want to drill into, you said aligning the packages and the customer expectation with the right shipping options is what I kind of heard you say there. I want to drill in that. So in this equation, fast and reliable shipping is definitely a key factor in peak season, right?

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Mark Taylor [00:11:20]:

Yes, absolutely. It is, you know, the first and I mean, I don't, this is not throwing anybody under the bus. This is just based on how, you know, their volume and everything like that. USP's is seemingly the one that starts to slip the first. And that's because so many people try to take advantage of the ground advantage program, which is, you know, basically USP's first class or ground advantage is what they call the problem. And, you know, also USP's contracts with a bunch of other larger carriers to handle the last mile portion of it. And so in peak season, especially with how much e commerce grown year over year, their demand forecasting is, it's very challenging for them because they're dealing kind of with the same situations that we're dealing with. And, you know, if you pay attention to their trucks, I mean, they have a somewhat aging fleet of delivery vehicles.

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Mark Taylor [00:12:09]:

And so as those, you know, you have little hiccups here and there, but it compounds, it's this butterfly effect in the system that then starts, let's say, one major hub in Southern California, which services a bunch, a bunch of people, that one starts backing up, then it starts to send shockwaves through the rest of the system.

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Glenn Gooding [00:12:28]:

Yeah, that's a good point. What strategies do you recommend for an e commerce brand to ensure that the delivery process remains smooth in this demand period? And suddenly, in the example you threw out, USP's started to choke on volume, right? Yep. What options are there? How do you ensure that you maintain good client experience? Customer experience.

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Mark Taylor [00:12:54]:

Absolutely. So this is when you start to have those very proactive conversations with your customer that says, okay, we're going to ship using this service because that's what makes the most sense financially. But there is going to be a breaking point. What is that? Is that two day shipping, three day shipping, ten day shipping? When does it make sense for you to pay a little bit more using ups or FedEx or even an expedited service? If you really have back to that perishable example, almost everything is going to be shipping expedited in that situation. But at what point does it really break over for you to say, no, we're going to pay more for shipping to ensure that it gets there on time? Then once you've developed that plan a, plan b, plan c. Now you and your customer have got this playbook that says, hey, it just becomes a quick email, hey, that thing that we planned for happened. Now we're going to switch carriers because this is what makes sense based on the original parameters that you and I discussed.

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Glenn Gooding [00:13:50]:

Good. So kind of some scenario planning, considering what the possible options are going to be, what the possible scenarios will be, and there's no surprises, right?

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Mark Taylor [00:14:00]:

That's correct.

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Glenn Gooding [00:14:00]:

Good. So I would contend that the fourth quarter, the holiday shopping season, is a phenomenal opportunity for e commerce brands in that they get more traffic driven to their website than any other time.

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Mark Taylor [00:14:18]:

Yes.

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Glenn Gooding [00:14:19]:

And much of them are a first time customer. So given that, and given that it's happening in the time where it's most likely to get messed up. Right. How important is customer service during peak season?

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Mark Taylor [00:14:36]:

I mean, with a setup like that, I see a softball coming at me 5 miles an hour. Guess what? It is very important, Glenn.

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Glenn Gooding [00:14:44]:

Yeah. Outside of knocking the COVID off that softball there, what are some examples of things that you're doing or you would recommend doing e commerce brand to maximize that customer service experience? Because invariably things are going to go wrong, right?

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Mark Taylor [00:15:05]:

Certainly. And once again comes back to figuring out that game time strategy. There are ways like if somebody is a first time buyer off your shopify, that's a lot more high stakes, in my opinion, than it is if they're a first time buyer from Amazon. Amazon has basically taken the service bands to really normalize a lot of it. But if somebody's got their own personal shopify store and somebody knows that they're buying from this smaller, independent brand, I find a lot of people are willing to pay that premium, but they also want a premium experience. And that experience may not be that you're going to get it. You place it by 03:00 p.m. and it's going to show up on your door between 04:00 a.m.

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Mark Taylor [00:15:46]:

and 08:00 a.m. that may not be the premium experience they're looking for, but they want that proactive communication. They want that expectation set. I think one of the easiest and most successful strategies I see customers do is when they say just that simple, place your orders by this date to receive it before Christmas. And that's our guarantee. And if it goes beyond that and the smarter brands will even say, they won't even say it'll get there by Christmas, it'll just say, place it by this window so it ships out and then it's on the carrier at that point.

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Glenn Gooding [00:16:17]:

That's the challenge in the e commerce business as well, right. You could have the coolest brand on the planet, right. You're drawing traffic. But at the end of the day, the customer kind of gauges the whole experience based off of how the carrier, whichever one it is, delivered that package to them. Was it in a shambles on the doorstep? Did it arrive three days late? Did it make it? All those types of things. I'm wondering, as you describe this, and I subscribe to everything you're saying makes great sense. What role in the customer experience side does the three Pl play in that environment?

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Mark Taylor [00:16:54]:

In the direct to consumer world, the three Pl is the last person that touches that box before it goes to the customer. At the very least, you know, you want boxes formed where they're not like, you know, the flaps aren't crooked.

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Glenn Gooding [00:17:06]:

Yep.

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Mark Taylor [00:17:07]:

They're not like looking funky.

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Glenn Gooding [00:17:09]:

Yep.

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Mark Taylor [00:17:09]:

You don't want tape matting across the seals.

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Glenn Gooding [00:17:13]:

Yep.

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Mark Taylor [00:17:13]:

So that comes back to like a training of that person that's packing it, that packer, to make sure that they're doing right. And, you know, there are lots of little tricks that are, I would say, very inexpensive custom inserts. I have a friend who owns his own company and he handwrites or someone on his team handwrites a little thank you card. I mean and its very obviously a thing. Handwritten. Thats a nice little touch.

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Glenn Gooding [00:17:37]:

You bet it is.

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Mark Taylor [00:17:38]:

I would say that if you saw my handwriting or most of the people who I work with, if you saw their handwriting, thats not a great option that youre going to want to task a three Pl with. So if you like that idea, write out a bunch of cards and send them to your three Pl as a please include this as an insert. Coupons people love stories. And then you know for the more sophisticated sellers it's a nicer experience if you've got custom printed boxing or tape or whatever, it may be cool.

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Glenn Gooding [00:18:10]:

You'd mentioned earlier and it's no surprise to me that you know you partnered with idrive and I very much appreciate that. From your perspective from your seat. How can three PL partnerships enhance the customer acquisition efforts bringing new brands into Warehouse republic?

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Mark Taylor [00:18:27]:

I'll just speak very openly in this, going back to what I said earlier about we primarily would ship off of USP's and ups and there are a number of ways it's not challenging to get commercial plus pricing through any number of, you know, whether it's eHub, easy, post indicia, whatever it may be. So every three PL that hasn't figured out how to do that is I'll consult to you and I'll show you how to do it in an afternoon. $50,000, that's it.

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Glenn Gooding [00:18:59]:

No.

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Mark Taylor [00:18:59]:

When you only offer two carriers you really are slotting yourself to. It's like it is going to be beneficial for your customer in some regard because it's likely, especially on the UPS pricing, when you really work to get those rates down you can find yourself in a good position or be at FedEx or if you have one singular partnership. But who really misses out though is your end customer. Because as I said, UPS may be great for the 15 plus pounds or twelve plus pound package, but then FedEx also wants to compete there and then USP's is great in another band and this and that. So it's like depending on your package mixed, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table for your clients. And what really helped us and why we have been over the moon with the iDrive partnership is because another thing, as a small operator I dont have the resources on hand to look at a potential customers 2000 shipments from last month, analyze their partner and then say hey if you were to come over here, we're employing primarily these five or six carriers. And you may have done 90% of your shipping on FedEx. But what we would do is we would say, yeah, FedEx is great for 30% of your shipping, but then DHL commerce, e comm is good for 50% of your shipping, USP's and then the remainder, so on and so forth.

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Mark Taylor [00:20:22]:

That is just having that in the partnership to be able to just give this pretty piece of paper that says, hey, heres what youre doing. Heres what you could be doing and were going to save you. I mean, ive seen in some cases 40% savings using a bicoastal strategy where a customers only using an east coast location or a west coast location, then go in the bicoastal strategy across five carriers.

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Glenn Gooding [00:20:48]:

Okay, so if I were to sum that up succinctly, having the right partnership, for example with idrive, in this case logistics, it provides a more diverse set of carriers. It allows you to provide more aggressive, more diverse rate solutions for your customers. Is that right?

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Mark Taylor [00:21:06]:

Absolutely. But it also, I mean, it amplifies on a, from a resource perspective. Like in terms of, like I said, the big key to that is I can't look at 2000 shipments. I don't have resources on my team to look at 2000 shipments and make the comparison.

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Glenn Gooding [00:21:20]:

And so analytic horsepower as well, in.

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Mark Taylor [00:21:22]:

Scenario, that analysis that idrive has been able to provide as a partner really has helped us.

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Glenn Gooding [00:21:28]:

Great. That makes good sense. I appreciate that. Transparency.

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Mark Taylor [00:21:32]:

Oh, sure. Absolutely.

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Glenn Gooding [00:21:34]:

So mark, I'm going to pin you down a little bit here. You made fun of me for that five mile an hour softball. So I'm going to try to throw a heater at your ear here, make you think on your feet.

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Mark Taylor [00:21:42]:

All right, let's go.

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Glenn Gooding [00:21:43]:

Given your foray into the three bl space and your successes, you've learned a lot of lessons. So I'm wondering if you were to prioritize things, if you were to give the number one thing right, the most important strategy for a business or a three po to succeed during peak season, what would it be?

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Mark Taylor [00:22:08]:

Okay, great. So there's two answers. The business, the brand side. First, sure. You really have to understand, like you don't want to try to be pulling a bunch of new this and the introduction of a couple skews, fine. But introduction of a bunch of skus with a lot of kidding options and this is especially if you're using a three PL, complexity is not the friend it is going to work against. A positive customer experience for your end users, the people that are buying the product and so I really encourage brands to, we can experiment a little bit, but what we're really focused on is we're focusing on making sure all your labeling, everything is very, very easy for the three Pl to scan it in, scan it to a location, scan it in, scan it to a location, and then scan it out. And when you look at smaller brands, it is shocking.

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Mark Taylor [00:22:57]:

Not only that, there's a million different ways that three pls, previous partners, future partners, are going to ask for stuff to come in, but at the end of the day, make sure that all the data is very, very clean. And that is UPCs that are on the carton at the master level are checked into the or in the WMS correctly. And so you make it as frictionless as possible to get that stuff into the system and then back out of the system. That's what I really encourage. Brand owners experiment in the off seasons. You want to do like new. Kidding. You want to do a bunch of different stuff on the fly, do that between the months of February and April.

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Glenn Gooding [00:23:31]:

Got it. So no experimentation during peak season, minimize it.

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Mark Taylor [00:23:36]:

I won't say no experimentation because we've had some very positive experiences with brands, but it was also very well communicated and everything like that.

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Glenn Gooding [00:23:44]:

Okay.

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Mark Taylor [00:23:45]:

And the other side of that is that manufacturers will sometimes mess things up and that adds complexity. But at the same time, the customers have no, they don't really have a lot of input on that. It's like nobody wants their boxes or their skus to be mismatched or anything.

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Glenn Gooding [00:24:00]:

No.

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Mark Taylor [00:24:01]:

From the three Pl side, I think proactive communication with the brands back in the summer even. I mean, it's not too late to do it now, but I mean, the earlier you can communicate, hey, what's your inbound forecast?

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Glenn Gooding [00:24:13]:

It's a little late now, let's be honest.

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Mark Taylor [00:24:15]:

It is. But if you haven't had those conversations, you should still be asking, because if you got to scale up inbound people, if you got to scale up some pick and pack people, you might still be able to at least not step in it too badly. But on the three Pl side, it's proactively having that conversation with your brand owner. Where do we tell the customer no? Because it gets back into that wild and crazy, like, oh, we're going to do this kind of kit, this sort of thing. But customers will always ask for something. They'll ask for different things. And part of working with a small business is that they want a unique experience and three pls basically establishing that line of communication with their brand owners. That say hey, these things are off the table before we start and if we're going to do them, just recognize that this is going to throw a monkey wrench into the rest of the system.

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Mark Taylor [00:25:07]:

And the other things I would say on the three Pl side to be successful is you just have to constantly be talking to your team members and letting them know like we are an extension of our customer and if they don't succeed, we don't succeed. So you have to treat their business as if it's our own because it is good.

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Glenn Gooding [00:25:27]:

So I hear a common theme, a word you've used a lot. Communication.

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Mark Taylor [00:25:31]:

Yes. I mean I feel a little sheepish as much as I say it, but it's like it all comes and it's not just communication verbally, I mean it's communication. It's the way you set, you set the tone with your customer contract, the three PLS customer contract to the brand owner or brand representation. And in that it says in a lot of contracts, for instance, it'll say, hey if you're, I think I even mentioned this earlier, but if your 20 day rolling average goes beyond 120% that's what we can get to. And if were able to service you and make sure it all goes out on time then great, but no guarantees. And knowing where those contract thresholds lie is really important for a brand manager because like I said, there are brands out there that have that, hey were going to have a 500% surge and lets come up with the plan. Weve had multiple, multiple clients over the years say oh hey guess what, tomorrow were starting our 4 July sale and all of a sudden we've got, you know, hundreds of orders when they might be tracking along at like 20 to 30 a day.

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Glenn Gooding [00:26:33]:

Yeah, for sure.

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Mark Taylor [00:26:35]:

And that's something that can bungle itself up and it can take you days or weeks in some cases to unravel and like get back on track with.

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Glenn Gooding [00:26:43]:

Good.

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Mark Taylor [00:26:43]:

And going back to your original question, you know, how do you think that makes the customer feel if you didn't proactively communicate? It's going to take a week to get to you, right? Or you'd even see a tracking number for that matter.

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Glenn Gooding [00:26:54]:

You're right. Yeah, they're going to be frustrated. So I think the last strategy and lesson learned question I might have for you, is there any lessons that a business, a brand can take from lessons learned in peak season and apply them to the rest of the year to continue to grow at a steady pace? Anything in particular?

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Mark Taylor [00:27:16]:

Yes, certainly. I think post mortems are always or everybody should be doing them. What went well, what didn't go well, what do we want to add fuel to? And you can do that quarterly, you can do that after the season. And those can be conversations like, okay, what did you guys really like? What did you not like? Where did we fall down? And I honestly think for us even giving self assessments, we know that we didn't do so well on this topic and this topic, but we believe that we performed a contract here and we think we went over and above here. Good, what do you think? And have it be a conversation and it's once again communicate about it.

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Glenn Gooding [00:27:53]:

Yeah, for sure.

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Mark Taylor [00:27:54]:

There are a lot of little tricks in this industry. I mean, the money, the places to claw back savings are many. Boxes are a great example. If you are a use about 1000 boxes every couple months, then maybe it makes sense to just order them from Uline. But at a certain point or use the standard box that your three Pl may have as like the stock box. Yep, maybe that stock box is a little bit bigger for what you want to use. And so then all of a sudden when you find yourself instead of doing a couple hundred to a couple thousand every few months, now you're doing thousands a month, it then makes a lot of sense for the three Pl to go out and contract boxes specifically, you know, sized for your product and that then not only might you be able to take out some cost of the box because of the quantities you're dealing with and the fact that you're not working with an expensive provider, but you're also potentially taking money out of the shipping side as well. And there's just a lot of little opportunities and growth and scale help in this industry by leaps and bounds.

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Mark Taylor [00:28:59]:

So I would advise any listener out there who has gone from being small to now being much larger by magnitudes to be having those proactive conversations, hey, what can we do with box sizing? What can we do with this? And once again, once you've got those thousand data points, 2000 data points of shipping, that's one of the biggest places to take back savings. And I mean, and that's where I really encourage people to try to work with like an idrive or someone similar.

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Glenn Gooding [00:29:26]:

Awesome, awesome. Any mistakes, logistical mistakes that can be prevented during peak season to affect your round operations? Is there, number one, number two in your mind of like a big mistake to avoid a void or how to do that?

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Mark Taylor [00:29:43]:

Anything pop up, don't try and change too much. You really want your systems to be working the way your systems are intended to work going into peak and through peak and then that goes to the make adjustments afterwards during the chinese new year lull. That's a great time to like, you know, clean up things and make good mistakes. But it's like, if it's not detrimental, I say change as few things as possible.

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Glenn Gooding [00:30:08]:

Okay, good advice.

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Mark Taylor [00:30:09]:

Success is determined before peak season starts. Really?

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Glenn Gooding [00:30:13]:

Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. That's good advice. This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed it. I appreciate the time.

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Mark Taylor [00:30:19]:

Absolutely.

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Glenn Gooding [00:30:20]:

For our listeners. Final thoughts, perspective. If you were to leave our listeners with some key takeaways, what would those be given? Kind of our conversation we've had so far.

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Mark Taylor [00:30:31]:

I think key takeaways communicate. I mean, that's the. I'd be remiss if I didn't say the thing that's been said more times than anything else. Communication is key. Proactive communication. Yeah, I would say proactive communication for good things, proactive communication for bad things. We have a saying internally, you know, take the bullets out of your customer's gun and customers are going to be upset when problems happen, but they're a lot less upset if you're proactively communicating that problem and they hear it from the horses mouth as opposed to figuring it out from one of their customers. And I think there's also this recognition that when you take that partner mentality, it's like you all are on the same team and your customer is a resource just as much as you are a resource for them.

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Mark Taylor [00:31:19]:

So turns are a big thing that we didn't really cover, but that's another way to really differentiate yourself.

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Glenn Gooding [00:31:25]:

Well, we could probably spend the whole segment on returns alone, shouldn't we?

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Mark Taylor [00:31:29]:

We certainly could, but just for, in a lot of cases, brands are getting wise to the fact that people are just saying, I'm going to return it and they don't. And so a lot of them like, hold out that refund until they verify that it's back. And if your three Pl takes two weeks to process returns that customers just kind of sitting there twiddling their thumbs like, am I ever going to get. Then they get upset, they have to go to their credit card, file a dispute, doesn't look good on the shop. It's a really big thing. So I mean, that's another thing to proactively communicate. What are the expectations around how fast returns should be processed? I think biggest takeaway is communicate, communicate, communicate. And supply chain is one of those things and logistics is one of those things that where if you don't have a knack or a proclivity toward it.

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Mark Taylor [00:32:12]:

You really want to set it and forget it. But as with most things, this is such a complex. There's so many components and so many different stakeholders trying to make things happen and working together to do it, that there are also just so many opportunities to not only improve upon it, but take savings back for the customers. And I really think if your three PL out there is not using multiple, multiple carriers, then they either have the best contract that was grandfathered in 20 years ago and nobody can touch their rates or you're not getting the best rates.

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Glenn Gooding [00:32:49]:

Good. Excellent. Well, I want to thank you again for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope our listeners get something out of that. Don't forget Mark Taylor, CEO of Warehouse Republic. We're a proud partner with them at iDrive. Again, parcel perspectives.

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Glenn Gooding [00:33:07]:

You can catch us there. And Mark, I had so much fun. I'm going to finagle away to get on and talk about some other prickly topics with you in the future.

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Mark Taylor [00:33:15]:

I'd love that. I would love that. And anybody can find me. Mark republic.com right. And if you're coming off the podcast, then just go ahead and say, listen to you chatting with Glenn. Something like that. So it won't come across as spam.

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Glenn Gooding [00:33:30]:

Or it could be I discovered that Glenn is one of your dumb friends.

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Mark Taylor [00:33:34]:

Well, something along those lines.

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Glenn Gooding [00:33:35]:

There you go.

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Mark Taylor [00:33:36]:

The other thing I will say is as peak rolls around, there are invariably probably going to be some listeners who have a oh crap. Moment. And if there's any possible way that we can help, we've got the resources and can make it happen. We can try to help you minimize your damage. God forbid you don't have any.

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Glenn Gooding [00:33:55]:

Good. Thanks again, Mark. Really appreciate it, bud.

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Mark Taylor [00:33:58]:

Hey, I appreciate that too, Glenn. Thank you.

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Glenn Gooding [00:34:05]:

Thanks for listening to Parcel Perspectives. Hosted by me, Glenn Gooding. I've been in the small parcel space for 37 years, starting with a deep and broad background, working for one of the major carriers as an operator and industrial engineer, later managing pricing at the highest level for the largest, most complex shippers in the world. Since then, I've been a national thought leader and worked to help drive strategy for clients from Fortune 50 companies to startup e commerce businesses, helping them more competitively aligned in this complex and expensive market. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and share with friends. Join us next time for more expert advice and strategies to stay ahead of the shipping game.