E127: The Real Cost of Chasing Growth

**Matt Bertulli** (0:00)
For people listening or watching, there's gonna be a bunch of random stuff, but this is from people in ECF, so I'm gonna shout them out for each question.

**Sean Frank** (0:09)
The next question we're talking about is gonna be product development. The reality is product development takes two years. So like, if you don't have a product development team, you are two years away from having one, right?

**Jason Panzer** (0:18)
The only good thing about tariffs is that it's given us a really good mechanism to look back at everything we do.

**Mike Beckham** (0:24)
You can take any business and be like, here's 15 reasons, it just sucks. But then there's also like four or five reasons that it's awesome.

**Sean Frank** (0:34)
What's up, Operators Podcast? We're at the full gang here today. We got Matt, Mike, Jason, we talk product, we talk development, we talk return on investment capital. It's mostly a Q&A episode, but we only get through like three or four of the questions. Pretty good app. Thank you for being here. Jason had surgery, so hopefully you're on video so you could see what that looks like. We want to thank Northbeam, PostScript, Saris Analytics, Rich Panel, and the number one sponsor for Phil. We want to thank e-commerce fuel. Our sponsors, we love them, Five Software's I pay and use for. We also have a partnership with e-com fuel. These questions came from e-com fuel. If you want to ask us questions, join e-com fuel. Duran, it's a great community. We shut down our Slack, we combine over there in e-com fuel. We're going to be here every week to guide you through Black Friday, Summer Monday. There's a bunch of cool stuff happening, but this is just a nice Q&A episode, so let's get started.

**Mike Beckham** (1:33)
Hey, guys, this is an ad for Fuffill, one of the partners of the pod, and you're going to get to hear from one of the best operators, Chad Janice, talking about his experience implementing Fuffill with Grounds. So, Chad, you mentioned that scaling operations has been a huge part of your success. How have you scaled? What partners, softwares have you used? Fuffill is a partner of the pod, I think, that you use. Tell me a little bit about your experience scaling with them.

**Chad Janice** (2:01)
Yeah, we, it's probably about six months ago, six to eight months ago, we realized that we needed an ERP.
We built the business off of Google Sheets and primarily Google Sheets, and then we had some internal engineered solutions that were helping us out. We were deciding between NetSuite and Fuffill. Frankly, when I was an investor at Summit Partners, we had encouraged, I don't think we were aware of Fuffill at the time. I mean, this is back in 2021, 2020 So all the brands that we ended up investing in, we would tell them like, hey, we're going to onboard a NetSuite. It would take a year. We had a person at our investment firm whose job was ERP implementation. Literally, he would spend a year with the brands, helping them with ERP implementation. It was a slog. We'd always come to the end a year later after we invested in this business, and they'd pop up and be like, okay, it's mostly done correctly. Here's something. But literally, all this guy did was helping brands with the ERP implementation.
We're growing so fast that wasn't an option for us. I don't know what we're doing in a year. I can't take a year to put an ERP into our systems. We were chatting with the fulfill team. We onboarded with them. I think it took less than two months. Speed was highly critical here. Our COO sat down with them. He spent most of the time onboarding and going through that process and felt really compelled with our ability to do it. It was a precursor for us to be able to do some of our own fulfillment. Historically, we've used 3PLs. We now do a lot of our fulfillment in-house. Absolutely critical part of our system. As I mentioned in the pod, we also do production in-house now, part of our manufacturing process. Fulfill is critical for all of that. Every system has little things here and there, but the speed at which the Fulfill team, when we have an issue, pops in and solves it, I can guarantee you're not getting that from another solution. They've been great partners, critical to our growth and will continue to be critical to our growth into the future.

**Mike Beckham** (4:10)
Yeah. I think you nailed it. Great partners help you go fast and they help you open up capabilities that make your business more valuable.