On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Chris Timmer. Chris is the Chief Executive Officer of Linnworks, and an industry veteran with three decades of leadership experience spanning sales, marketing and operations in supply chain management and software. We talk about integrating business processes with marketplaces, balancing vision with practical financial tracking, evolving with customers as they scale globally, and so much more!
Chris Timmer is the Chief Executive Officer of Linnworks. As a respected CEO and industry veteran, Chris brings three decades of leadership experience spanning sales, marketing and operations in supply chain management and software.
He is responsible for leading the company’s overall operations, with direct oversight of sales, marketing, professional services, research, development and strategy.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Chris Timmer
As a young company or a smaller company, I need to watch my cost and I need to be able to scale. So what do I automate that makes things easier for me? So I don't have to go through the learning curve of what each channel and marketplace needs. And then I have to build my own processes around that, if I have a platform that allows me to scale.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show an industry veteran with three decades of leadership experience spanning sales, marketing, and operations, specifically in supply chain management and software. We've got the chief executive officer of Linnworks, Chris Timmer. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Chris Timmer
Thanks, Chase. Appreciate being here.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to do it. And I'm excited that I got through your intro without goofing. That was a tongue twister there for a second.
Chris Timmer
Well, 3 decades of experience, you end up having a lot you have to talk about.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it's always interesting to try to come up with those sufficient one-liner intros for things like this or whatever. I wrote mine probably 3 years ago and I probably need to update it now that I'm actually thinking about it.
So for people that are unfamiliar though, can you quickly let us know: what is Linnworks? What's the software trying to solve for people?
Chris Timmer
So we're a software platform that sits in the Ecommerce space. Basically, what Linnworks does is we provide order management, inventory management, warehouse management, forecasting, listings management, and business intelligence around what we call commerce operations.
So we sit in between the marketplaces and those things that people buy from, from an Ecommerce perspective, and then the finance systems that people use to execute or run their business from a financial perspective.
We do all that backend commerce, Ecommerce operations component of the process to get things out the door to manage inventories. Things like that. And we do that through a SaaS-based platform.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Well, let's just dive in here. I've already got a bunch of questions that I want to ask you.
And I know that a lot of our audience out there, they run their business on Shopify or something similar? And why doesn't Shopify just take care of this for me?
Chris Timmer
Yeah, that's a great question. Shopify is a great platform.
But really, the focus of that type of application is that, “Hey, I've got a website where I'm selling something online. And I want to execute from that perspective.”
Once you start expanding beyond... There are other opportunities for people to sell products online. You've got your dedicated website, but also you have marketplaces like an Amazon or an Etsy or an eBay or yada, yada, yada. There's hundreds of these platforms out there, these Ecommerce marketplaces.
We're connected… A platform like ours is connected, interconnected with all these marketplaces, allowing you to easily scale your business or to sell products in other areas other than just your website.
Once you start doing that, then you need a platform like this. So Shopify really doesn't address that issue.
You need to get a platform that's more interconnected so you have the integrations to the marketplaces, you've got the business processes that are aligned with what that marketplace expects, as well as the ability to interact and transact those orders and align inventories effectively within your selling through those channels.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now this sounds like a problem that maybe doesn't exist too much for a smaller brand.
Is there a threshold per se where it becomes more apparent that you need a better solution?
Chris Timmer
It's interesting. So this is what's been actually fun about being in this marketplace. So the customers we usually serve are obviously those that are looking to sell products online. And as they're selling products online, you have startups, you have people that have found a niche.
“I've got one product that I've come up with, I want to sell it on a marketplace,” or “I create a website for myself. But then I start to understand where my customers are.” And I think that's where the strategy of multiple channels comes into play. So what do I want to grow? What do I want to get to? And how do I want to address that marketplace?
So for instance, eBay. eBay is huge in automotive. Absolutely huge in automotive. They've got that eBay automotive component of their business and they grow significantly.
So if I'm selling auto parts or aftermarket parts or something like that, I may have my own website, but the idiosyncrasies of that customer base, that consumer, I know I can go to eBay Automotive and I can sell there as well as my website. And I can probably address more demand for my products.
So as customers continue to grow their businesses, whether you're the entrepreneur that's got a million dollars in annual revenue versus an enterprise customer that has billions of dollars of revenue, these marketplaces serve you in a certain way. So your strategy tends to play towards where I am finding those customers? And what are the personas that I'm looking for? And what are the demographics of that particular marketplace? With all these marketplaces that are out there today, you have to kind of pick and choose.
Now, the interesting thing about our business is that we've got these small players, we've got these small customers that are just the entrepreneurs that are growing their business.
And then we've got the mid market players that are really taking a strategic look at what they're doing and saying, “Okay, where do I sit?” “How do I manage on this platform and allow myself to grow and continue to drive efficiency?”
And then you've got the enterprise, the large customers that are saying, “How do I tap into this Ecommerce space? Because I'm this big brand.”
So we have large brands that use our platform. We have small customers that use our platform. They all have little different strategies around what Ecommerce means to them. And so it's our job to continue to build these capabilities on the back end, to be able to address all of those issues across all of those marketplaces.
So when you ask the question, ‘What is this strategy?” We typically find that most of our customers are at least three, if not five to six marketplaces and different channels that they're selling their products above and beyond their platform or their website themselves.
And so it really does become a very interesting aspect of the strategies based on the maturity of the business and where they want to go and what they're actually selling, whether it's electronics or apparel or automotive parts. There's all these different strategies and different marketplaces that make more sense for you.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I think that we should maybe highlight those different sizes and talk a little bit more in depth.
And I really want to talk about the startups because there's probably a bunch of those listening out there right now.
And I think there's a big fallacy out there that these startups believe that if they... Obviously Amazon's an 800-pound gorilla. If they build their business on borrowed land, you know what I mean? They're not going to ever be as successful as they could be, and that it's not going to give them useful information.
And I want to ask a non-loaded question, what are your thoughts on that as far as getting MVPs out there, getting initial feedback, finding your first customers, maybe you don't have their email, but you're still getting information?
What are the advantages of a startup going into these marketplaces versus trying to figure out how to build their own flywheel?
Chris Timmer
Yeah, I think if I'm an entrepreneur, and I talk to a lot of them, we have a lot of customers that have come up with this great idea about doing something. And then you try to get it to market. And when you get it to market from an Ecomm perspective, number one is you build your own website.
But where do I get these customers? How do I get access to additional customers that have that demand?
So I think in those early stages, those first few years that you're kind of building your business, it does make sense to get involved in some of the marketplaces. Again, do your due diligence and understanding kind of where the buying structures are.
Amazon provides you a lot of that, right? Because you've got a very diverse group of customers, from Amazon, you can start to determine what your buying persona is and the idiosyncrasies of where people are buying.
But then interview and look at some of these other marketplaces that actually can specifically speak to you. Like Etsy. You look at Etsy, right? Etsy has always come off as the crafty type of thing. But if you look at the persona of a customer that's buying on Etsy, and where they want to go, and if that's their comfort level, selling to them in that regard, it makes a lot of sense, if it aligns with what your product lines up.
So I think it really kind of builds off of like, “What's my value proposition regarding a product the idea created or ideated, or am I reselling products already?” That's where the Amazon strategy comes into play.
You see a lot of people that say, “Hey, I can buy and sell on Amazon and it becomes like a business for me.” Those probably aren't the entrepreneurs that are actually building off of an ideation or a product that they're going to continue to scale.
What I love about our business is we deal with a lot of these entrepreneurs that have come from, “Hey, I had an idea. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to pull, I'm going to lift myself up by my bootstraps and kind of create this business model for myself.”
And then they move into that mid-market and then they move a little bit higher. And to see them continue to evolve is very satisfying and quite exciting. It's really indicative of the global enterprise management of business is, “How do I scale?” whether it's a cross border. “How do I sell in new marketplaces?”
We're a global company, we're selling in basically three to four different geographies at this point. And it's allowing our customers to tap into that. They get data from us, they get information from us, they see what channels we're connected with.
“How do I test that channel?” We can partner with them to kind of help figure that out and allow them to grow their businesses effectively.
We want to make every entrepreneur that steps into our business, we want to make every entrepreneur the most successful business that they can possibly be. And we see that in a lot of our customers.
We've got a very large, now it's a large, sunglasses retailer that started as an Ecommerce startup. Two guys in their house with inventory on a pad of paper. They moved into selling online. They continued to build their business.
And at this point now, they're actually putting brick and mortar in place around the US to support building their brand, their online brand, which actually is creating new different strategies on go-to-market as a truly an Ecommerce retailer.
And so to see these customers, these beautiful companies continue to grow into a really successful brand that people know now is just really rewarding to even be in the back end of that, helping them do that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I think that it goes without saying, at that startup phase, there's no gods but revenue. It's like you need to make sales to get through that scrappy 0-1 phase.
But then, when you get into that scaling phase and testing more marketplaces seems like a really good idea, I guess to ask a direct question, I could sign up for all these marketplaces on my own, right? I don't necessarily need middleware?
Chris Timmer
Oh, you don't need middleware. But what you do need is the ability to connect into these channels and allow yourself to fulfill your orders, take your orders, fulfill your orders, understand where your inventories are. It becomes a scaling mechanism.
So as an entrepreneur, I wear 15 different hats. I'm chief sales guy, I'm chief financial officer, I'm chief customer service officer. As I grow my organization and I get larger and larger, then I start to get more mature and more professionalized as an organization.
But still as a young company or a smaller company, I need to watch my costs and I need to be able to scale. So what do I automate that makes things easier for me? So I don't have to go through the learning curve of what each channel and marketplace needs and then have to build my own processes around that if I have a platform that allows me to scale operationally so I can support my selling?
It makes it far easier for us, and for me, and it makes me optimize my costs more and optimize my process and eliminate errors that may occur from a manual component of managing your business.
We see a lot of customers that still do stuff on pads of paper and spreadsheets. And anytime you have manual entry like that as you're maturing as an organization, you need to be able to scale that.
The biggest challenge we see in a lot of these is that I've got one person that does this and they know it. It's very difficult to have five people do what you're doing when you start to get mass that flows through your supply chain.
That's where these platforms like ours provide you the ability to look at each one of these marketplaces as you're choosing to scale your business and then build your workflow. So that's standardized and optimized, but you're still addressing the needs that the marketplace has because all of them typically have some little idiosyncrasies that they like to play.
So part of it is to even the management and the integrations, the updates that we do from that perspective, all feed into taking that platform to allow you to be more efficient and effective.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
I mean, just the efficiency of it. I'm assuming that signing up for these marketplaces… I've done it before manually for clients, for myself back when I was selling books and things like that. There's a learning curve for each of them. They all want to do it a different way, start at a different point, and then you can get it all figured out.
I'm assuming it's a lot more streamlined with an application like Linnworks, where it's just like, click the logo and it'll ask you for any additional information that you don't already have stored in the system.
Chris Timmer
Exactly. Exactly. The automated process of getting the marketplace up and running instead of the speed to market, right? That’s a big component. It may take me two or three months to do it. If I’m signing up, I'm trying to do it now, I can click a button, this is the marketplace I want to enable.
I enable that marketplace, it tells me what I need to do, and I’m able to execute my business I was selling in where it’s normally sold. So I don’t change what I have to do, it allows that process to evolve with that particular marketplace.
Chase Clymer
Now, you've talked a lot about how there are certain customers in certain marketplaces. Does the software make suggestions like, “Hey, you might do good here,”?
Chris Timmer
There are components of our software that allow you to do analytics on where that is. We also have services that we provide that allow our customers to say, “Hey, can we schedule some time to look at the marketplaces and see where we should be going?”
So there's data and detail that we can provide to our customers to help them understand to make those decisions more effectively on where they should reside.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I'm assuming that you've got a few horror stories of before and after where they were just doing some crazy stuff before and how software like yours came in and helped.
Does anything come to mind?
Chris Timmer
Yeah, I can go back to that example I had with the sunglasses manufacturer. I mean, literally, they had... And it's funny because they framed it in their warehouse. Basically, it's a sketch pad, right? A legal pad that they were taking inventories with. And that's how they knew what they had. Once you start scaling, you just can't do that.
Chase Clymer
How do you add inventory?
Chris Timmer
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it is interesting when you're dealing with a lot of these entrepreneurs, who are great, brilliant minds with all these kinds of unique ideas to come to market with something, right? It's taking those components of their business and saying, “Let us just handle that for you, right? Let us just handle that for you.”
Because they can get out of control and you may lose inventory, you may carry too much inventory, you may have forecasted too much. All of those components allow you to manage that cost structure as you're managing through.
I started a startup. We started a software company back in 2000. And believe me, I understand what it means to be a startup. And you got to make payroll, you got to get your first customers, you got to make sure they're supported effectively. All of those things.
Yeah, there are some horror stories, but they probably don't want me to share all of them.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. No.
There's something about your average entrepreneur where only the exciting things excite them and the numbers and tracking and anything related to a spreadsheet is so boring. And it's not exciting. But that's where your margins are. That's where your profit lives.
I think that as an entrepreneur matures, they start to care about those things a lot more.
Chris Timmer
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's where the level of sophistication that we can provide them from this platform standpoint. When you're an entrepreneur, you're looking for, “How do I solve this one problem? How do I solve this one problem?” And I choose those things to solve that one problem.
As I grow and I look at it holistically, I need data information to really look at the financials of my business and my costs. And so that's where a platform like ours allows them to get that all wrapped around themselves and say, the non-sexy stuff, the non-sales stuff, that’s what we do. We're your shoulders that you're riding on to execute this grand vision that you have from an entrepreneurial perspective.
19:45 And there's ways of working with the entrepreneurs, right? We know the entrepreneurs, we understand their business, we understand who they are as individuals. And that's really important, which is kind of another very, I would say, fun part of our business is that we pour into those businesses.
We care about the success of our customers, the growth of our customers, the profitability of our customers. And we take that as part of… that's our job. That's our job, to give you access to all these things that you can sell what you've created and to help you do that really, really efficiently and manage your costs really effectively.
And at the end of the day, if we can help somebody grow their business, it means we've done what we want to do. And that's fun. And our team embraces that mentality across everything from support to onboarding to development. Our engineers really even understand what they're doing from a perspective of developing products for our customers and what it really means to them.
So it's part of our ethos. And we love having that as something that we really get behind.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. That's an amazing mentality to have for a company and for a team.
We talked about quite a bit today. Is there anything I forgot to ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Chris Timmer
Not necessarily. I think maybe just a couple concepts that Ecommerce brings to the table that have evolved. I would say this is still an evolving market and business model to execute in.
We see some customers that have built an Ecommerce business and now they're going to brick and mortar to support their branding.
We have, right after COVID, this thing shot up like nobody's business. Everybody started buying online. And then it leveled off. So now we're starting to find what's that balance between online buying and non-online buying or brick and mortar or however else I'll access. And then it's the buying experience.
So what we see more and more is the expectations of the customers. That buying experience that they have, and your ability to fulfill orders timely, and when they need it, how they need it. That continues to evolve and take shape as this whole marketplace continues to grow. So our job and the entrepreneur's job is to really understand what those customers are looking for, how they want to get it, and then make it really easy for them to get it.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Chris.
Now if people... You got their interest piqued about the product, where should they go to check it out?
Chris Timmer
The best thing to do is go to our website, www.linnworks.com and request a demo, request some information, contact our sales organization and they can get access to the things that we can provide for them via that channel.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all of your expertise.
Chris Timmer
Great. Chase, appreciate the time. Take care.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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