Transcript
Peter:
There's nothing more compelling than reports directly from the front lines. Our guest today, Tim Madigan led the team at P & G that launched e-commerce on Walmart.com. He created the US and global commerce teams at SC Johnson and Tyson. Now he's in meshed and bringing two new DTC companies to market and being a consultant along the way. So Rob and I got to dig into all of that and the lessons learned along the way. So first of all, one, thank you so much for joining Rob and me today. And we have to jump right into something you're working on right now, lobster e-commerce. So now that's an unexpected combination category. Just tell us what you're up to there.
Tim:
Yeah, sure. So Mark Morales, the owner he's been out of about 10 years. Um, and actually when I was at Tyson foods early on, when I got there button again, I was at Tyson about four years ago, I started on a job there. It was early in the ecom food thing, and one of the sort of hypotheses I had, was that direct to consumer is going to come to food. Omaha, and some of those guys that are already proving it out, but I thought it was going to be a bigger thing. You start to see nothing emerging at the time. So I really thought at the time I wanted to get Tyson into the direct to consumer space as well. And I thought the easier way to do that was by acquiring a company that would help get the company going quicker, bring in the capability, bringing in some of the talent and, you know, get going. Tyson decided to take a pass, but Mark and I met through that process and we stayed in touch over the last four years. And so in, fall, when I left Tyson Mark and I started talking, he said, well, why don't you just come and work with me? You, we, you know, we obviously kind of get what's going on in this space and let's, let's figure it out together. So the last six to nine months we've been working together thinking about what are the different opportunities in this space. And as you can imagine, shipping live lobsters across the country is probably a torture test for e-commerce. I mean, it's really challenging from a logistics standpoint, you can imagine the cost endpoint finding those consumers. So it's, it's pretty advanced stuff that he's figured out how to do. Um, and so it's a lot of fun playing in that sandbox. What else can we do with this stuff? And so we're building on that, you know, that live lobster idea and thinking about what else can we put through that channel? He's got an amazing engine around fulfillment and marketing. What else can we do in the seafood space? And we're talking about things like ready to eat meals that you might see in the grocery store previously, but now, especially in today's environment, consumers are looking for alternatives and how can we offer that, those kinds ideas I make seafood, which can be a bit scary and a little bit unapproachable for some consumers, a little bit more approachable, a little bit easier to get to. So we're broadening the range of things that we can do through, uh, through seafood, through direct to consumer.
Rob:
This would be such a boom for the main lobstermen who have gotten so crushed this year with Kobe and a drop in tourism and all that sort of stuff. But I got a wonder if to start out with lobsters, lobsters are alive and they're pretty durable. Um, so as long as you keep their environment moist and cool enough, they can survive shipping. If you broaden that out to other seafood, that's, that's hard, right. Is there a way to do it where it's not frozen or do you have to flash freeze it in order to get the seafood anywhere in the country?
Tim:
Yeah. You typically do go frozen for beyond that live lobster experience. And Oh, by the way, it's really only in the top five or 10% of lobster servers that you catch from a quality standpoint that are durable enough to be shipped live. So they've got to actually be pretty, pretty good quality lobsters. Um, so that's another element that makes that so much more expensive is because you are picking the cream of the crop to go live. The rest you will take as, you know, meat for, you know, lobster Mac and cheese or freeze them because they don't, you know, they don't have to have been quite as durable. But to answer your question, I think you go beyond that. Um, you know, beyond that experience really is what it's about for the live lobster. You get a frozen product, it's actually, it lasts longer. It gives you more options in terms of what you can do with it. And when you, when you are going to engage with it versus a live lobster Oh point, and that is, you're going to get this cool thing, put it on the floor, have your dog mess with it and get that on Instagram. And then, then you're going to cook it up, hanging out. And so it's this whole fun, cool afternoon evening experience that you do.
Peter:
Yeah, no, that's exactly what happened here. We had friends here, uh, on the Cape for, for dinner and they got some lobsters and they had two kids and the daughter, I think she's probably for, um, you know, sort of picked out her lobster and then the dad threw it on the grill live and she started crying. They thought it was because the lobster was dying, but it turned out. She just wanted to make sure she got that lobster. So I don't know what future that pretends for, but it's truly a family experience,
Tim:
You know, and what's really remarkable. I remember growing up, I'm from Connecticut, New England and we would spend our summers in Rhode Island. And to me that was always a really special evening. We do that maybe two or three of the two weeks, two or three nights of the two weeks were there. We would go down to the docks and get the LiveWell officers and then bring them home and have this really special dinner. And some for me, that's really what this is about is this really great experience. Um, and, and so cool that you're able to do this regardless of what part of the country you're in now.
Peter:
Your marketing play there, is that largely sort of the Instagram Facebook, uh, is it in sort of a showing the experience kind of player and to whatever degree you want to talk about it.
Tim:
Surprisingly, while there is, we do have a social presence that hasn't been a traditional focus, Mark's done a really great job of kind of organically building a list of people who just found him. He did a little bit of performance marketing early on, and then it was more word of mouth than any thing just grew this company over the last like eight years or so now what we're trying to do is add in some of that additional, um, you know, social sophistication and, you know, kind of bringing in some of the influencers, um, and we're really dialing up on the performance marketing. And what's crazy is you can appreciate what COVID, this, this category has just exploded. And the business is like six X what it was a year ago, uh, because consumers can't go to the restaurant anymore. They have that experience. And that's typically where, you know, a large majority of lobster experience was away from home. Um, and so now, you know, people want to have that fun experience and kind of mix it up a little bit and, you know, invite, invite the family over. And, um, this is a great way to do this, a great experience. We're able to bring that family together around something special.
Rob:
Yeah. I feel like, I mean, if you can make live lobster direct to consumer work, you can make anything direct to consumer work. It's incredible. Yeah. So I want to, I want to go back a few years here. You started Tyson a little over four years ago, and at that point, especially, it was not obvious. A lot of these things would work and certainly online grocery penetration, however you measure it, you know, clicking, collecting, delivery, whatever just was not very high. Um, obviously you spent time early on thinking about it and right now with COVID, it looks very precious, but it wasn't at all obvious that it was worth spending the time back then. So can you walk us through the beginning? Like you walk in the doors at Tyson, you believe that direct to consumer is going to be a thing you believe that click and collect is going to be a thing. What was that like to go into an environment like that in a category that had a lot of, a lot of skepticism?
Tim:
Yeah, well, uh, to answer that, let me take another step back when I was at SC Johnson, uh, which was very much more that center of the store stuff P and G days, but it was most of my career. Um, I had the opportunity to go take a global role for e-commerce within se Johnson. So I started spending a lot of time in the UK and, you know, uh, mainland Europe and China, where grocery was a thing, it was pretty clear that those categories had already tipped. And the UK eight to 10% of business. Again, this is like five, six years ago. Groceries were being done online, you know, mainland Europe and France had it happened within two years. Those businesses started tipping, China, forget about 10, 15%. So having this almost like a glimpse of the future, like you couldn't, but expect that to happen here. It was just a matter of time. And so, you know, Tyson, the leadership at Tyson said when Walmart and Amazon and Kroger started to get into this space and say, we're going to open up some of these grocery first formats. We want you to be a partner. We want you to be a leader. Tyson actually was the one that answered the bell. I can't really take credit for it. And they said, this we're going to go and invest in this. This is, we know our retailers are telling us this is going to be important. We want to be considered a thought leader. And so we're going to, we want to go after this. Now we don't know what that means. So let's bring in some talent that can help us create that vision strategy and the team. And that was where I got to play a role. And so having had the opportunity to see and believe in what was coming and then to go partner, be part of a company that had the scale and that sort of leadership mentality to invest in being a leader in the space. That was a really powerful and interesting combination for me. That's what really, that's what made me make the move to Tyson and why I felt like it was going to be such a great match.
Rob:
There's a, there's a truism in technical innovation, which is that, um, it's actually really dangerous to be too early. So in the nineties, the most spectacular.com um, burst was a web van, right? They weighed hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and ran right into a wall. And then the company was gone. Um, Instacart is basically webbed 2.0 and Instacart's crushing it now. And then for smartphones, people have been trying smartphones for a while. There was a new documentary out there called general magic about a company called general magic. That really invented a lot of the really smartphone technology. Like almost everything that you saw in an iPhone launch was in the general magic research devices back in the day, but it was too early. Right. And so it hit a wall so there's a risk in being too far ahead of the pack and having your neck out there, um, what gave Tyson and you confidence that, that this was a good thing to do now. I mean, people have been arguing like [inaudible] us. We could go another 10 years before hitting UK online grocery penetration. So what your, why was four years ago? Good time to start to start thinking.
Tim:
That's an interesting question. There's not obviously a single answer there, but I think it's a combination of things. One is, you know, I learned at P&G it was a mantra. Consumer is the boss. And so it's following what the consumer is going to do. And having, you know, now about 10 years ago, being at Proctor and gamble at the time diapers moved online, there was a lot of that same thing. Why are people going to buy diapers? Nobody's gonna buy diapers online. Here we are. 40% of diapers are being sold online, but I went through that experience, literally PNG at about 12 or 14 categories at the time, every single category moved online after that, the same, like it's not going to happen. Nobody's going to buy razors on time. We are dollar shave club, Billy, you know what I mean? It's like every single one of these categories, so forever to tip. And there is just this mental block around, well, this one's different. And so you knew food was going to happen. It was just a matter of the timing. And when, you know, one of the benefits we had Tyson was being in on some of those discussions with Amazon and with Walmart, knowing the investment that's coming. So knowing Walmart's about to light up 3000 of their stores over the next 18 months, and that's going to be an online grocery. I mean, that's a huge investment. Um, and you know, they're, they're pretty smart. I mean, you can say what you will buy at Walmart. They're there. Uh, when they get aggressive after something, they can really make a huge impact. Um, and so that's what they were clearly doing. Amazon fresh was in the, in the point of now we're going to start opening up new markets. And so we took a long time to look at this market, get things right, but now we're going to start scaling Kroger, then click the list. So you just saw this combination of things. Instacart was already starting to scale across more. So this, you knew it was coming. You could feel it, you could taste it. Uh, and so it was just a matter of how fast consumer adoption was going to happen. And so that was really the, the, my job at Tyson was to help be measured in our expectations and investment. Um, you know, we're going to have to put in some, uh, investment in infrastructure now. So that's, that's, you know, you're going to have to save that, but we're not going to go too crazy in that we want to build something that is scalable, same thing with investment with the team. We're not going to drop a hundred people in here. Like some other companies have, have gone way too far and said, we're going to create this huge eCommerce business unit and bring a hundred people in. We know, Oh, it's coming. And the problem is that it sinks under its own weight and that, and, you know, it's sort of self fulfilling, that thing then gets dissolved and destroyed. And then they're back at ground zero. So we took a very different approach in that we were looking at how do we scale and create something on a scale
Peter:
And how did the rest of the organization take on, you know, go along with that. Cause it's great. You had the leadership at the top, but then there's a traditional Tyson organization that exists there. That's been doing their things their way for a long time and been very successful at it. So how would, how did you kind of navigate all that?
Tim:
Yeah, it's funny because, uh, I didn't really have it kind of as a theme in my mind at the time now doing what I do today, it absolutely is a theme. And that, uh, there's this idea of, you know, the zero to two or 3% penetration online of a category of a business that's small, it's too small. And to get the intention of the, you know, the balance of the organization and to get the leadership saying strategically it's coming. So we're going to invest. And then you have this little squad of, you know, do bitters that are going to go out there and start to build this future. And so that's, that's great. That's a way you kind of, you know, nurture this thing, make sure it doesn't get swallowed up and absorbed into the day to day of the bounce of the business. And you start to grow this sort of capability and experience internally as then the business starts to scale. Then you start to say, okay, how do I start to spread this out? And kind of in fact, the rest of the company, um, through, you know, getting sales teams to start to understand is when Walmart, you know, now it's five, six now, today COVID 15, 20% of my business going through now, the Walmart team is actually coming to me saying, Holy cow, what am I, what do I do? What's next? Well, guess what? We've built the infrastructure, the content, the fundamentals, the tool kit, the playbook, that's all ready to go. And now that we've got traction there, it's, there's at least a willing audience that we can start to penetrate. And the same thing with the brands as more and more of their business shifts online, the brand manager needs to start to think about e-commerce in a more strategic way. How do I connect my digital activity to commerce in a more seamless way, in a more direct way. And so that like those, those things start to happen much more organically as the percent of the business grows, but it's really hard to force it in when you're just a one or 2% kind of a business. So that's where I think that scale. That's why I think that approach makes so much sense. You know, nurture the small and then as it scales, in fact.
Rob:
Does the nature of the team that you're building change dramatically taking that approach? Cause I mean, there's the, there's the big swing, like Unilever buys dollar shave clubs, and they've got, they've got a lot of people now that know e-commerce or Walmart buys jets and have a lot of people that know e-commerce and those are big swing changes. What you're talking about is, is a lot more incremental and deliberate. You know, you build the team that's appropriate to the scale of the business. Um, maybe maybe a little bit larger than the scale of the business, but not so much on larger, that's going to fall under its own weight and then grow the team incrementally with success. So what's on my mind there is the talent aspect, like in the early days, you're kind of a pirate and you might want to hire athletes that are smart, natural, and good, a lot of things. And the more that the team grows, the more you're hiring specialists. So how did, how do you actually, who do you start with there in that, in that world? What type of person and how does the team materially change as the size changes the way that you're describing it?
Tim:
Yeah, it's a great question. There's a couple ways I think about it. I think the first is actually hiring the specialist first. I bring in the people onto the company, you know, those, those things really well. When I built my team, I almost alternated the hire from somebody internally. And then somebody externally as I was building out the team, because as this company grows, as you can appreciate Tyson is, you know, really big 40 billion plus, um, $40 million plus company. And so there's a lot of complexity. And so having somebody who understands the internal workings and wiring of that is really important to be part of the team, but it's also important to bring in the talent that understands e-commerce how Amazon works, you know, search marketing, you know, all of those kinds of, you know, econ specific skills. It's a lot better to bring those in and sort of start creating this bit of a hybrid team initially. So that's, I guess I would start there. I think what we look at as this scales, the goal really is you want to have a company of athletes and Walmart, the team has, for example, you don't necessarily want the team to say, okay, eCommerce is a part of my business. I'm going to have somebody over here taking care of eCommerce. You want the Walmart guys and carrying the bag with the store for 20 years now having to build out his skill sets a little bit, learn the new language, learn the new sport of econ and enable them to train for that. So you want that person to be an athlete, you know, and if today you don't have enough athletes in your core organization. It's, you know, you start to bring in those athletes, as you, as you replenished the company with the mindset of, they gotta be multi-sport. So that's, I think really that's how you grow a big company that said, you know, the dollar shave club is, as I was talking about my own store with direct to consumer Tyson, I wanted to bring in that capability. I wanted to buy that because there is a level of investment in capability and sophistication talent that is required to do DGC really well. And you can home grow up, but it takes a lot longer. And you relearn lessons versus bringing someone in who's done it before, who is doing it today.
Rob:
So the acquisition in that case is just buying your time. You're buying, you're buying in a future forward in a way.
Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Look, the DTC takes a long time, not only just in the infrastructure, but it takes a while to organically build that business. I mean, especially in a let's call it in a healthy way. You can dump a bunch of money in marketing. You know, you just basically lighting those dollars on fire, um, versus trying to create something that's a little bit healthier where you're creating an audience, that's going to be repeatable, have good long term value. Um, you know, you lower your cost of acquisition. So it's just, it's a healthier way to build it, but it's a longer burn. So by bringing in a company that, or a piece of business has already got that healthy cycle going, and now you're just gonna start to help amplify by pouring some more resources in that's a much, I think, a much better way to scale direct-to-consumer business.
Peter:
Yeah. We were talking to, um, John Denny the other day from buy brands. He was at the DSI exec forum. And one of the things he said, I just wrote it down. Cause we're doing Adidas, the C series right now. He said, DDC is not a hobby, it takes sustained attention. And I would think when you were talking about turning your Walmart person into an athlete across all these channels and, you know, sort of go to market methods, was that your, your team athletes going out and training, was that sort of the knowledge?
Tim:
Yeah, so that was what we started to do was we built out some roles on the team whose job was to enable the field and to work with the brand and make sure that they understood the strategies that we were trying to bring in. And then, okay, so then what does that mean? How do I actually execute? What do you actually need of me? Because you can, you can sit in any one of these econ one Oh one, there's a ton of them out there, webinars, and you just get inundated with all these words and you know, what's going on in the industry. You need someone that can just kind of boil it down to this is what it means for you is which this is what your expectation is. Here's your KPIs. Here's how to do these things. So get comfortable with this. And then as you get this and you have this sort of intellectual curiosity, great, you can scale beyond that, but at least you're not overwhelmed. You've got a starting point and you've got a clear playbook for what you're responsible for. So I found that that was really, really helpful in getting adoption of view of eCommerce within some of those bigger teams early on
Rob:
Focus is really smart. I don't think I've, I've heard of people being dedicated to that before. I like it.
Tim:
Yeah.
Peter:
We get those brand managers to then be the ones that started to adopt it. Were they also becoming your advocates within the organization to other brands and leaders, which may have been a little skeptical or
Tim:
Yeah. You know, again, you get one of these, sort of healthy competition. Look what I did look at the results, look how cool and some of the stuff is, it's pretty slick. You get that. You're gonna use cool widgets. You can, you know, develop and plug onto a, you know, I'll hold.com or a myer.com that really shows a different way to buy lunch. Me, as sexy as that sounds, I understand, but you know, helping a retailer, you know, reframe their category and consumer journey through a retailer website based on your insights. It's a pretty cool story. You know, being able to tell that across now in the organization, it starts to get this internal competition going like, okay, how can I do this with my category?
Peter:
Speaking of categories that you're trying to do interesting things with it, ain't just frozen lobsters, It's cannabis. So my natural question is what are you smoking? Tell us a little bit about this effort.
Tim:
Uh, yeah. So what was, it was interesting again, I had that period when I left Tyson and started to do some consulting work. Um, my friend Mark with the lobster company approached me. I had a separate friend who said, I am looking at, um, getting into the cannabis business and he said, I really understand the plant back and how to process it. But what I don't know is how to commercialize. And so would you be willing to help advise us on commercialization for, for the products? So I got it. I started to spend some time just understanding the industry, going to dispensaries and seeing what it was all about. And it's wild in that it feels like it's the 18 hundreds little house on the Prairie general store experience. And you walk in and it's, and it's cool in the sense that it is very experiential. Uh, you know, you can smell the flower and you're talking to the budtender, who's got all this kind of innate knowledge. It's a lot like actually wine, uh, you know, wine shopping, um, because it's about that experience. And there's a lot of opinions about, you know, this strain does this, or so it's interesting from that perspective, but what you look around and realize is the level of sophistication is really low. Um, so from a, from a, you know, my background being Proctor and gamble for 17 years, sales marketing, kind of all different functions. And now commercialization focus with an econ. You can see the opportunity of where modern train is, and this feels a lot like, you know, when I was in sort of Southeast Asia countries, more traditional trade, you know, you know, and so it's, it's about the shopkeeper and about that relationship and they're, you know, what they recommend. And so that's kind of where the industry is today. So it was really interesting to see that and to start to think about one, where is it going to where the industry is going to go, but really more importantly, what are the strategies we can employ today that will help the brand, you know, flourish a little launch in Florida, what do you have to bring to the dispensaries to be a winner?
Peter:
Um, it's, there's so many things going on in my head, but one of them certainly is the, even more, you know, we have a shared friend in Wayne Dwan who, you know, is running, uh, e-commerce that ad, uh, constellation brands. And that has a regulatory and legal framework and a rat's nest of it in this case, you know, federally, it's not even really legal. And, and then you have all of these communities and I see it here, certainly in Massachusetts, that there's just a, uh, a massive sort of layers of that, you know, that must be complex to think about how you're going to bring it to market and, and how you invest in it. Cause it's, you know, it's wild West.
Tim:
It is, it is. I mean, the rules constantly change, especially around, um, how you advertise and, you know, what's legal, what's not, so all of that is really constantly evolving. So very interesting from that standpoint, but it's the full, it's the full business model that is really challenged because the plant has to magically show up in that state somehow. And then you have to ask to grow in that. So the seeds have to show up, that is not illegal to bring seeds across state borders. So somehow you have to have seeds that exist magically in that state and you grow it, process it and can only sell it in that state. And so you, it's really lots of vertically integrated companies that, um, you know, whether it's they own the full or they have partners somewhere along the line, but it's really an interesting model. And then you've got to almost have your full business thing built within the state and talk about, you know, this need to be able to scale, um, you know, that the demand is just now rising and has only been legal here in Illinois and Michigan for less than a year. It's like eight months old. So, the consumer habits are still emerging in dispensaries and are still opening and, you know, still kind of getting up to speed. There's very little because of federal regulations, there's very little, sort of a banking infrastructure that exists that you can actually do POS systems it's pretty cash heavy. So it's just, yeah,
Peter:
Fascinating. I'm just thinking, it's almost like building a cannabis business in a box that you will take from state to stay and figure out what this box looks like once you unpack it there and it is really interesting. So it's fun.
Tim:
What we're doing is thinking about, um, the brand strategy and potentially the brand positioning and how that may have to be different in a given state, based on the consumer behavior house, how developed is it? And frankly, every state, honestly, as you start to get into it, there's, there's a lot of, um, differences amongst us, us citizens, based on the state you live in around what your attitudes are, um, across the board. So, you know, in Michigan, as an example, being from Michigan is a really big deal and, you know, having this, so you, you almost want to really be prominent in your branding around growing in Michigan, from Michigan, even though they all have to be, it's really putting that buttons front and center versus in other States, it may be something different, you know, so it's, it's really understanding those nuances and, and then positioning the brand and the messaging that way.
Rob:
So interesting about this whole arc to take a step back a second is you were in CPG II at the moment when the center aisle was starting to get interesting in terms of moving online across all the categories. And then you went over to fresh food and, and with Tyson where it was, I mean, it was early free commerce when you went over there and started making, making the investments. And now obviously it's a, it's a very big deal post COVID. Um, for anybody who's in that space. Now you're doing lobsters and cannabis, which are both very early in this. So, I mean, what's next for you? Like rocket ships?
Tim:
Uh, no, it's, it's, it's a chat. Oh. And this was really fun and, and figuring out, I think, um, I really always enjoy going in and trying to figure out how do we make this thing work in this environment? Um, I think the background I got at P and G for all those years really helped build that understanding of what the South big companies need to work and the kind of infrastructure that exists. But then it's like, I think he used the word pirate earlier. It's almost like, how do you create this little entity in there and grow it and let it flourish. And so I've, I've enjoyed trying to figure all that out within the company, but now it's almost like just being able to do it from scratch. You know, that's what I've really enjoyed about these two things is, you know, you don't have sort of the protection of the company you're really on your own trying to, trying to build it. So it's a different set of muscles, different set of risks.
Peter:
So I know that you're also doing, cause you know, you don't want to be bored or anything. You're also doing consulting work at the partnering group. Right. Tell me a bit, you know, what's, what's your focus there. I can imagine you just are bringing this wealth of how do you do this thing, uh, to, to your clients, but what do you find is top of mind right now? Cause I'm sure a lot of people are turning to the partnering group at this particular time saying, Holy moly, we've got to do something new here and we don't have a lot of time, Tim, what do we do?
Tim:
Yeah. Um, so I am in the digital commerce practice at TPG and, um, and yeah, and business has definitely picked up in the last, you know, six or seven months. Um, but I think it's, I think it's really good in the sense that companies are recognizing, you know, now is the time I'm not going to wait, you know, too much longer, do I see this pivot happening? Um, so we need to make the shift and what you're really seeing is sort of really to tour two types of, um, situations. The first one is a pretty well established company who's been doing that, uh, that small company, that's a small entity nourishing one, 2% approach. I've got my Amazon team and that's my eCommerce team. And, um, you know, so I had checked the box mentally that I had, e-commerce covered for a while. Now it's this 10, 15% thing has happened. And so how do I take it from this and scale it? So that's definitely one of the things we're seeing and kind of spoke a little bit to that, how I dealt with that when I was at Tyson, as we started to try to penetrate the other functions, especially commercially, that's exactly what we're talking about now around creating that broader strategy about enabling the sales teams, doing the training, all of those things. That's exactly what a lot of companies are facing on the other end of it. The other situation we're running into is especially in the food space, it was really ignored and commerce was ignored and frankly could have been, it was one, maybe 2%, especially that was what the available data that was out there from sort of panel providers was telling folks. Anyway, I'm a big believer that, um, you know, panels are about as good as we got right now, but I believe significantly under counts what's going on in this space. And so I think a lot of these food manufacturers were sort of lulled into believing. It's not a big business for me and I'm now done two or three, uh, engagements in the food space with those kinds of companies. And then I'm blown away because they had, the CEO had 2% in their head and it's like 10. And so that's, that's the kind of, um, situation that, where these guys were like, we've got, we've got to change. We can't be stuck here, but now you're not only kind of educating and shifting the CEO and top of the house, but you're also having to figure out how do you bring the rest of the organization along yeah. At a much faster rate than, then maybe they had to do as examples, Tyson. Cause you had more time. Yeah. And you know, having leadership buy in goes a long way. I mean, you know that, you know, I've been on the other end at P & G in the early days where every battle was, I was selling harder internally than I was at Walmart. Um, because it was really trying to convince the internal folks, this was a thing, this is how you invest. This is a smart move. Um, and that's sort of where a lot of these companies are today. It proves to me why, why does she care about this right now? I hear this headline, but I don't really think it is relevant for my category is again, earlier theme. Right. I'm still seeing that play out.
Peter:
So Tim, thank you for just a fascinating set of things that you're working on right now. I'm almost envious. No, actually I am envious because I really just think it's just so cool what you're working on. We definitely will keep in touch. So we'd love to have you back as, as some of these things start taking flower. Thank you.
Tim:
Absolutely, Thank you guys. We'll see you.
Peter:
That's our podcast for today. Our DTC strategy playbook series continues. Check out the latest digitalshelfinstitute.org. In the meantime, please share this episode with your colleagues and friends and cannabis lovers. We appreciate it. Thanks as always for being part of our community.
