Colin Bodell: An ecommerce veteran on the unprecedented acceleration of ecommerce under Covid-19

Jay: Colin, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I know you’re very busy and it really means a lot. I know our listeners are going to get a ton out of this. So why don’t we start with - you have a very rich history in ecommerce, when I read your bio you were at Amazon for seven years, American Eagle, Groupon, and now Shopify Plus, can you give us a quick background on your story and how you ended up at Shopify Plus?

Colin: Yeah. Well, thanks for inviting me along, Jay. My career has been perhaps in two segments. The first half was Compiler, Backend Development, Business Process Modeling tools in the SAP space, Open-Source Technology, and a lot of language development tools. And then as you said, seven years at Amazon, which was a tremendous learning experience. Following that I was the CTO of a number of ecommerce companies and commerce companies. When the opportunity came up to join Shopify, it was like, look, I had experience with Amazon, the brand, but what really intrigued me about Shopify was the direct consumer story. I got a taste of that when I was at Groupon as well, you know really acting as the agency for the marketing channel for small mom and pop high street shops. And, really there’s nobody in their corner because they have to battle against the big guys all the time, and it’s really hard.

I got to know a lot of them personally and I felt for them. And when the Shopify opportunity came up, it’s like, wow, great chance for me to take a bunch of that ecommerce/commerce background and apply it to the democratization of commerce. So it was a no-brainer. It was a very easy decision to say yes to Shopify. And that was, gosh, 11 months and a few days ago, it feels like a lifetime sometimes, at other times it feels like it was just yesterday

Jay:Coming up on your one year anniversary.

Colin: Absolutely.

Jay: So that leads me to my next question, which, when I look at your work history, the thing that really stands out in your bio is, of course, the length of time spent at Amazon. And now the fact that you’re at Shopify Plus, which from the outside, they’re seemingly two very different companies with very different worldviews. So can you talk about that transition and why the switch to Shopify, and actually, is that an accurate observation that they have very different worldviews?

Colin: Yeah, I think the world views are different. I mean, Amazon shows up as a marketplace and the Amazon brand is what dominates. With Shopify the brand that dominates is the brands of all of our merchants. And in fact, even a year ago, when I was first talking to the company, I talked to friends and family about joining this kind of wacky Canadian company, nobody had either heard of the company or really knew much about it, which I think is a testament to the fact that Shopify values the brand recognition - it’s marchants not us to be at the forefront and in everybody’s face it’s up to those individual brands to be there. One thing that really does stand out for me is that both companies are staffed with tremendously bright people, the brightest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with in my career, and I’ve worked with many fine people over the last 35 years or so. But really where the bar is set for performance, engagement and really being thoughtful about the customer base, the merchant base that we’re supporting, is very high in both companies. But yeah, it’s a different worldview and none is either valid or less valid than the other. But particularly I’m enjoying the Shopify worldview. Maybe I’ve got a deep creek of fairness through me, but really, I want to root for the underdog and I’m thoroughly enjoying that.

Jay: Well, you certainly would get that with your time at Groupon. I can understand, that’s a complete shift. I guess a question that than I would want to ask is, I would agree with the sentiment, Shopify helps protect the brand’s individuality and their brand comes through. Recently there’s been some launches on Plus with Shopify fulfillment and Shop App and Shop Pay, so there are some consumer-facing aspects of Shopify. My wife, she knows, when she’s on a Shopify store, she loves Shopify payments and uses it. Where does Shopify draw the line? The question could be posed, “why doesn’t Shopify have a search that you can search all million stores.” And I don’t think that’s something Shopify would ever do. But is there a line where you say, okay, yes, we do this, this we don’t. And how do you think about that?

Colin:Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s how we think about it. And we’re prepared to change our mind, change our thoughts, change our opinions based on the information that we get. We don’t do what our merchants ask us to do or tell us to do, because we don’t think that’s in the best service for them. We’ve gotten plenty of people across the breadth of the company that have tremendously broad and deep expertise and experience in commerce. And of course we’re working on tactical benefits to our merchant base, but we’re also thinking in a way beyond that as to the problems and the opportunities that they will pursue as they mature in their respective business.

You know, it’s the story of Thomas Ford who went to folks in his day and said, “you know what you need?”, of course, they said, “we want a faster horse”. You can get some degree of value out of that. But honestly, when you ask questions about what people want, the context they use, they will apply what they know today. And it’s our job to be thinking much further down the line about things that they’ve not even contemplated. However when they’re ready to contemplate them or when we’re ready to introduce it to them, they’re going to bring deep and significant value to their businesses.

Jay: It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the next year. It’s something I think that I believe is Shopify strength, I imagine this is kind of the decision criteria inside Shopify’s doors, it’s something to the extent of when you can leverage the platform in the sense that there’s millions of stores, when you can leverage that to the merchants benefit, it makes sense. You can negotiate better rates with your payments. You can have Shopify fulfillment, but where it’s to the detriment of the brand, where having a universal search, where you can search all thousand stores well, that’s not good for every brand that then it just becomes a marketplace. But there are a lot of advantages to having a million plus stores on one platform. And I think there’s a way that you can do that and keep the brand identity. And it seems like Shopify is doing a good job with that. And it’s using that to bring value to the merchants.

Colin: Yeah. You’ve always got to be listening and you’ve always got to be hearing. There are plenty of very interesting signals and they’re not based on the volume about one particular problem or one particular opportunity. The nuggets of truth could be way down the list and it’s being ever and continually diligent in listening, hearing, reflecting and engaging with our merchants. And that’s one of the things that I was thrilled to find, even through my drama interview process with the company and then coming on board, how many merchants and partner relationship and engagement we have. And I really enjoy that. I have partners and merchants thanked me for my time. My response is generally, “Oh no, thank you for your time because you’re helping me keep my brain fresh as to where those challenges and opportunities are.”_ _And then my job is to work with the team to go and solve as many of them as I, as I possibly can.

Jay: Where do you see Shopify Plus in the matrix of e-commerce options for brands?

Colin: You know it’s about a reinvention of what Enterprise Commerce means to those largest brands. We want to empower brands to get to market quickly, no more importantly than at this time. We’re talking now, it’s the beginning of October, 2020, and nobody could have imagined how difficult and challenging this year was going to be in so many different attributes and factors. But one thing has been very clear, that the demand to be able for our brands, for our merchants to meet the needs of their customers in different ways than perhaps they originally contemplated. And to do that very fast, we’ve been able to live up to that. And it has caused, you know, significant acceleration in terms of engagement and support and assistance. And from time to time, making stuff up on the fly, but doing it in a way that help our merchants and help us learn, and then we can double down on that in the future.

And there’s a range of brands they’re on, plus, there are very well-known and respected household names. We did a deal with Hinds in the UK. Hinds over at least a hundred years of their business have always distributed through stores and through warehouses. They’ve not been a direct-to-consumer company, the fact that they, such an august and well-known and well-respected brand, were willing to place their trust and confidence in us to do some direct-to-consumer experiments, as they were struggling and engaging with the change of the market dynamics with COVID, I think is great. Others, such as Peloton and Tremendous Success, Jimmy (inaudible 08:58) as well, Staples, up in Canada. Giving them the tools that they need to deliver a seamless commerce experience is no longer a “nice to have”_ _it is a business imperative. And I don’t think we’re going to go back to the old world, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I think a lot of the experiences and experiments that have been wrong have validated that great businesses can be conducted exclusively in an e-commerce realm, in a direct consumer realm to meet the challenges that we’re all experiencing.

Jay: Yeah, because if you go back over a hundred plus years ago, essentially everyone was direct-to-consumer. It was the farmer’s markets. It was the local stores. And that’s where distributors came in and got between those brands and their customers with lucrative offers of large POS. And, and so was born the box stores and everything else. And now the internet and technology has given the power back to those brands to have the relationship directly with the customer. So do you believe that they are here to stay? That was a test and it’s not going back, this is the new model.

Colin: I think you hit the nail on the head. I think D2C is the model. There are very successful companies that have driven costs to the floor, but at the expense of that postmodern relationship. Like if you lived in a little village in the middle of England where I grew up, but several hundred years ago, you’d go down to your local village and you’d go meet the butcher and the baker and the fishmonger, and you’d make your purchase. You had a relationship and there was not just the commerce relationship, but there was also the social and the personal relationship. And when you have a good relationship with the fishmonger and he, or she, knew that you were going to come in each Friday to buy fish and they learn what you liked, then that would influence how they would go out and in which fishing hole they would go. Also the volume of fish they intend to catch.

And that’s very early days of personalization and recommendations. So we may have as an industry, sort of cast them in a different light today, but the reality is people value, I believe strongly they value that low friction ease of satisfying the needs, but there’s also tremendously high value in those personalized and close relationships. I think that’s something as humans that we crave. So yeah, there is a time and a place for the race to the floor in terms of cost, but there’s also a very good time and a place for those familiar, recognized effective brands to stand up and to be bullish and to be loud and to not only build new relationships but extend the ones they already have.

Jay: I think that one of the biggest opportunities that might not be so clear with D to C is the data play. Because you have that direct relationship with your customer, you have the data on that customer, you know that customer intimately, whereas if you just sold all your products to a distributor, you won’t know how happy that customer is, you have no relationship. So the data is really key.

Colin: Well, and just on that point, you are spot on. Because the larger marketplace aggregates, those data are insanely important and valuable, but they know that if they share all of those data with individual merchants that sell in their marketplace, then they lose a degree of control and power. So they want to keep those data close to themselves. Where at the other end of the spectrum, we believe that those data belong to the individual merchants, and it is to their benefit to consume those data, to extract actionable insights from those data and apply it then to the improvement and the betterment of their business and the relationship with their customers. So there’s a sort of philosophical difference there, and it’s grounded in commerce and business. There are logical dollar reasons to do this, but I believe the democratization of both commerce and the data that surrounds that is insanely important.

Jay: Given your product background, what are some of the big challenges you see in ecommerce as an industry, as it relates to product?

Colin: Well, I’ll be a broken record on the fact that I think data is a huge aspect for that, and not just data. When I’ve worked at large companies in the past, I would have a data science team, and they could get in and could write sequel and they had ML and AI-based systems, and they could mine an awful amount of knowledge and actionable insights from those data. Most merchants don’t have that power, they don’t have that privilege. And that’s why I think it’s important that Shopify are in their corner, taking those data, turning them into actionable insights, making strong recommendations, not just to how to make the technology better, but how to help them grow their business. And that’s why, you know, I love conversations with merchants. Yes, we’ll talk about the features and the capabilities about Shopify Plus, but it also sort of mutually buys us the right to have interesting discussions and to share our experiences in different vertical lines of business.

I was at American Outfitters for awhile. So I’ve gotten a passing set of experiences with vertical retail apparel, and I’ve engaged with a number of Shopify merchants that we’ve been able to leverage. Some of that background and experience to help them brainstorm some business initiatives way distant from the technology that we licensed to them, but nevertheless of extremely high value. So I think that the data one is huge. The other one is just speed to market and the ability to react. And let me, if you can indulge me, let me tell you a quick story in that regard. A few years ago, a company I was working with, CMO, came to me and said, “Hey, we’re launching a new brand or sub-brand and we want to do a pop-up store, you know, pop-up website that is still associated with our primary brands, but it’s going to have potentially a different voice.”

“It’s going to be a little bit more quirky. It’s going to engage and relate to customers a little differently. How long will it take you to set that up for us?” And I said, “well, you know, we can do that, never”. And maybe that was a little tongue in cheek, but what I really meant with that is the ecommerce platform that we are then licensed to, and I had in place for a number of years, for me to go in and do something so quote, unquote, “seemingly straightforward,” was actually a task worthy of hercules. There’s so much complexity to dig into, to do something that was even vaguely simple. And this is before I really knew much about Shopify, but I said, you know, this company Shopify, they do this kind of thing. You can set up a store pretty quickly. How about we actually use Shopify just to do your one brand and in a short amount of time, I can integrate it with all of our complex back office systems, ERP systems, CRM, SFA systems, every three letter acronym, you can throw at it, but I can get you a store up and running.

We can gather the data, we can do a bit of manual loading reconciliation of data and information coming out, but we can get you up in the timeframe you need. Because I’m thinking, you know, a couple of months, and I said “by when do you need to launch this?” And she said, “by next Friday”. I said, “okay, we’ll give it a sporting chance”. So I threw a couple of engineers on it that didn’t know the first thing about Shopify, and within a week they had a pop-up store up and functioning. It Certainly wasn’t all singing all dancing, but it was 90 to 95% of the way there. It was more than above the threshold that would meet the needs of the business.

I’m a huge fan of there’s a time to think, and then there’s a time to act because you can’t be all-knowing. And there’s a time to get stuff in the market, get feedback, and fill in the gaps about the thought process that’s absent. So we launched it, we got a ton of feedback, and could then take that information to use to refine those individual instances. And it was amazing. My engineering team, that had been used to using the big brand name ecommerce platform, were looking at us like we were absolutely insane. How could you possibly do this in a week? Something that we know would take us nine months. And the reality is it’s doable. You’ve just got to have a different mindset to do it. And you’ve got to be willing to be flexible and you’ve got to be willing to hustle a little bit, but if you do it with the right mindset of being in service to the business, and you’re determined to get the right outcome, then you can do things insanely fast.

Because the world changes very rapidly as we’ve seen this year. I love the fact that the world has the capacity and the capability to change rapidly. And I think it’s our job to make sure that we’re supporting our merchants to take advantage of opportunities positive or negative when they come along.

Jay: So in your opinion, and you might’ve answered the first half of this question just now, in your opinion what would you say something Shopify Plus gets right regarding products, and conversely, what is something that is a big product opportunity for Plus?

Colin: Yeah, I think, what we get right is a breadth and depth of capabilities. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “One size fits all,” but I think we have a breadth and depth of capabilities that allow our merchants to realize their business needs. It’s not about the technology. Yes, we’re technologists. It’s about what our merchants need for them to make their business successful. And the fact that we listen and that we hear, and we can meet them in the right place, that we talk about problems and opportunities. We don’t talk about features. Oh sure, we pop out features at the end of it. But we are complicit in understanding and being partially responsible for the growth of their business. And I think that’s huge. And then where are the areas and opportunities for us to grow? I mean, they’re Legion, we’re at the beginning of this journey.

I mean, and the world is at the beginning of this journey, the penetration12 months ago of ecommerce in the world of all commerce was like 17%, plus or minus a couple of points, you know, whichever study you look at. That’s rocketed over the last few months through necessity, and it isn’t going to go back, but that’s still only very low two-digit numbers. So at the opportunities allegiance and it’s going to come about because we listen, we hear, we engage, we’re respectful and we don’t lose sight of the fact that we’re here to help our merchants grow their business. Again, it’s not about us, it’s not about our ego. It’s about helping our merchants. And as long as we stay, absolutely, unswervingly focused to that, then that is a path that I know, and so the core of my bones will lead to success.

Jay: Do you think that’s going to stay? The new ecommerce has kind of fast-forwarded 10 years in the last six months. Do you think that’ll bounce back if there’s a vaccine tomorrow, or do you think habits have changed now?

Colin: I think those habits are locked in place. There’s common wisdom that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit and help through them. We are six months in already, that’s the only thing the world has not had the option. So, no, I think we’re now living in 2030, whether we want to or not. And I think it’s done a couple of things. One it’s allowed or pushed people and especially push merchants that even if they were contemplating things where we’re a little nervous or concerned about, those barriers have dropped and that they’ve had to do it through necessity. I’ve talked to a lot of them that they were nervous going into this big change, things that they were contemplating doing over a three, six, nine, 12 month period, that they’ve had to do in some cases in a few weeks time. They bit the bullet, they did it, and they came out of it with, “well you know, it wasn’t the easiest experience, but we’ve learned a lot about how to move with great agility and how to trust the relationships and the partners, not just folks with Shopify, but our huge ecosystem of partners, our app developers, and our agencies, and implementation partners.”

“We’ve learned through necessity that they are very highly trusted. We can build relationships with them that now it emboldens us to do more faster,” which I think is great. So, no, there’s no going back or put the genie back in the bottle, even if you wanted to. But I also think now with as many more thousands, tens of thousands of businesses that may have been caught on their back foot earlier on in the year, that have now learned and learning to actually lean over the tip of their skis and go faster, they want more. And that’s terribly exciting.

Jay: So speaking of COVID, are there any stores that you’ve seen that have been particularly inspirational or innovative during this time that just really inspired you?

Colin: Yeah, it’s a legion. I mean, let me just talk about that briefly from a couple of perspectives. So BOPUS, click and collect, as somebody told me, they call it in Australia, but buy-online-and-pickup-in-store, huge rocket in that, because again of that necessity. People buying online, unwilling, unable to wait for two day delivery want to pick up that afternoon, can get in their car, show up outside the store, somebody who’s expecting them, pops out, puts the box through the window, they roll the window up quickly and then drive away. So that’s been huge. One example that comes to mind is Parachute Home. So home furnishings, decor, bedding, bath linens, things like that. They launched a feature during the early days of the pandemic that allowed their customers to get a complimentary home styling advice from stylists in the company.

So normally, you know, you’d come into a store and you’d sit down and have those conversations. You know, they pivot very, very rapidly to schedule free one-on-one video or phone consultation at a day in a time that’s convenient to them. And I mean, what a huge benefit, and maybe Parachute or others would have got there eventually, but they kind of have to do it because people couldn’t come into a store and came out of it, realizing, “wow, we may not have fully of internalize the value or the need for this ahead of time, but the need is sure as heck here now.” And now that people have engaged and have the benefit of that and have found it really efficient and really effective. Word of mouth is spreading like crazy and more and more people are signing up for that service, so it helped them realize that. I’m sure they understood that there was a business opportunity there. They haven’t yet pulled the trigger, they did it through necessity and now it’s emboldened them to go on and do more.

Jay: And I would be willing to guarantee when COVID is over, they’ll still offer that service.

Colin: I would be surprised if they did not.

Jay: And I’m noticing the same things too. The businesses are adding new models and I don’t think it’s temporary. I think they’re here to stay. I was just talking earlier today on a different podcast about the fact that we see ice cream stores who would have closed, but are now offering ice cream subscriptions and things like that to stay in business. And now that they can open back up, that’s just another revenue stream for them.

Colin: It’s a little sad to say, but it’s been, I think COVID has been a beneficial forcing function. There are always those early adopters. You think of Goodmore and Crossing the Chasm and things like that, there’s always those early adopters that will lean over their skis and do innovative things. But getting across the chasm and getting to that large set of doctors can be challenging. I think this has been a forcing function to push people over the chasm faster than they ever would have expected, but it’s not been an unpleasant experience. It may not have been the most pleasant experience, but I think it’s been a good forcing function. And I think we’ll look back clearly, it’s been such a disruptive time for history, but I think for commerce, we’ll look back in a few years time and say, yeah, it was a bad time, it was also the worst of times, it was the best of times. Never thought I’d quote Dickens in a podcast - but it’s bad times, but I think an awful lot of good has come out of it and it’s sustainable good with good longevity.

Jay: Absolutely. And you can think about every area of society it has forced. Whether that’s how we do school, how we do work, how we do play, how we appreciate family time, it’s literally all this. There’s a ton of good that has come from it for sure. I fully believe that. What does the future hold for Shopify Plus, what are you most excited about?

Colin: A number of things, do we have six hours to talk right now? There’s a number of things. For me first and foremost, it’s the engagement with our merchants. Everybody’s got a unique story, a fascinating story of how they’ve been able to triumph or managed to sort of make sense of what’s been going on. But you know, off the top of my head, a few things. We made an announcement a few weeks ago that John Wexler has joined Shopify Plus as VP of our creator and influence program. And at some point, I’m sure John will educate me as to what that means. But the point being, John was General Manager of the Adidas Easy Line and was with Adidas for many, many years and built tremendously strong relationships with influencers and celebrities in the footwear space. And I think I’m thrilled that John has joined us first and foremost, but secondly is what it means.

It means that we are day by day accumulating absolutely unimpeachable world-class talent to come into Shopify and to leverage their then position in the company. To be able to speak to, in John’s case, folks in the apparel space. In the footwear space first and foremost, that’s what he knows very, very deeply. Certainly the apparel space, but then also, the value of influencers and celebs in terms of brand definition, in terms of marketing presence, in terms of communication. That, to me, is the tip of the iceberg. The fact that we can attract folks of John’s caliber, the belief that he being at Shopify gives him the largest platform to amplify his voice, his thoughts, and opinions in service to those merchants. So I think that’s tremendously good.

And then look, international is going to be important to us. Canada has been the forming ground for Shopify. North America is our home territory, but the reality is we play on a world stage, our merchants play on a world stage, Plus merchants actually play on a world stage. And we want to ensure that it is easy, it is push-button easy for them to be able to say, we’re going to go beyond the borders of, most certainly, US and Canada, predominantly one language, but Mexico as well. One or two languages, nicely formulated as of tax and legal requirements to go in across multiple countries around the world, take our brands, take our presence internationally. We trust, and we also need Shopify to be there, to be our agent, to be our channel, to be able to do that. And I think that’s huge. This year we helped launch the Australian website for Jenny Craig and Comme des Garçons, the fashion brand out of Japan.

So the fact that we can help our merchants go into territories, go into countries that they never would have even thought about beforehand, creating those opportunities for them, I think is huge. It sort of whetted our appetite to do more of that. And then the other end of the spectrum, the weird and wacky, maybe not, but vented reality, we’ve got the capability to our customers, end-user customers to view our mentored reality capabilities on their website. So we’re always paying attention to what are new emerging technologies. And although we’re staffed very heavily by technologists, it’s not technology for technology’s sake. It’s always maintaining the fundamental “What are the business problems and opportunities that our merchants are struggling with or want to pursue now and in the future and how can we meet them? Not only meeting their needs immediately and tactically, but how can we really listen to them and hear what they’re saying and making sure that when they’ve matured their business to a certain degree, we’re ready with the products and the services and the capabilities to help them go to the next level and the next level and the next level and infinite.”

Jay: It’s certainly an exciting time. You think as far as ecommerce is now when you think about it, we’re really in the infancy stages still. These are the early days as advanced as we think we are. I want to jump into our lightening round here, cause I don’t want to run out of time. I want to fire off a few quick questions before we end here. I don’t know if you’ve read these ahead of time or not, but -

Colin: I have not. So this is going to be exciting.

Jay: Okay. Are you ready? Here we go. What’s one pet peeve you have when you shop online besides when a store is not using Shopify?

Colin: Lousy search.

Jay:Yes. I would agree with that one.

Colin: Lousy search where I put in a search term and I know they’ve got what I need and they over-index into recommendations, personalization, and try and nudge other things at me, it’s like, good grief! Recognize the fact that I’m spear fishing right now, not browsing. Give me one, so that is a constant pet peeve.

Jay: I like it. What’s one ecommerce trend you’re most excited about?

Colin: Oh good grief! only one hour to talk about this? Faster. Just that ability to be able to react, to a need and challenge, and to be able to spin on a dime and do amazing things. If somebody a year ago had said to me, “oh, we’re going to have this global pandemic and everybody’s going to be spinning on a dime,” of course I wouldn’t have believed it, and having seen it in action just blows my mind every day. That’s super exciting.

Jay: Any piece of advice you can give a merchant trying to go from a hundred to a thousand and then from a thousand to a hundred-thousand orders?

Colin: Pay attention to your data. Ask it really good questions, because if you don’t, it’s garbage in garbage out. Ask it really good thoughtful questions. Take the output, the output doesn’t tell you what to do, but it will inform your decision-making process, but data is your friend. Have an amazingly great relationship with your data.

Jay: What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Colin: I get to work from home. I mean, seriously, my commute is now 30 seconds. I’ve got a great coffee machine upstairs. I get breakfast served to me when my wife thinks that that’s appropriate. But yeah, that ability to work from home. Now there’s a counterside to that, which is, I miss the immediacy of personal and corporeal relationships. But now the work from home is great. Plus I’ve lost 40 pounds because I’m not sitting on airplanes all the time eating lousy airline food. That’s got to be a benefit as well, right?

Jay: I don’t know. I’m the opposite. I think I’ve gained 20 pounds because I have the freezer right outside my door here. So I don’t know. I guess you could be in either camp. So we have a lot of merchants who are business leaders or running a business? Do you have a favorite leadership quote or advice or something that you live by that has impacted you?

Colin: Yeah, I wish I, I should have read these things through, could I pull it up? It’s a Theodore Roosevelt quote and I will now butcher it. But it’s something to do, “blessed are those people that try really hard, but then fail, check it by failure, but better that than live in those dim twilights of not trying and not failing - live in the dim twilight, those not success not failures.” Give it a try. Yeah, you’re going to fail, but yeah, you’re going to learn from it, but better be vibrant and human in that regard than sort of taking that middle road path that knows no successful failure.” So sorry. I’ve completely butchered it, but you got the sense.

Jay: I know the quote and I will find it and I’ll put it in the show notes, but I love that quote as well too. So speaking of that, my next question is what is something you’ve failed at that looks back and actually has been a positive?

Colin: If you’d said to me, what have you failed at today? I could start practicing. And that’s the response, which is, I’m not afraid to fail because that I know I learned from it. I’ve messed up stuff left right and center. A big part of my journey, and I know, I’ve been lucky to have somebody else paying for very expensive coaching for me that helps me learn about myself. So I think, maybe my failure earlier on was not knowing myself and my principles and my standards, perhaps as early in my life as I should have done. I can’t go back and change that, but I’ve had a bunch of expensive coaching and people pushing me and prodding me to be thoughtful about that, to help me be a better person. And it’s my objective that every day I’m a little bit better today than I was yesterday. And guess what, tomorrow, I’m just going to be that little bit better through experience and engagement. So it’s not quite a direct answer to your question, but you know.

Jay: I like it. Last question, besides sales and revenue, what north star key metric that merchants should pay attention to when they’re running the store?

Colin: Well, I was going to say, be prepared to fail, expect to fail and try lots of different things. Not willy nilly, not randomly be thoughtful about it. Know your entry strategy, know your exit strategy. Know when it’s time to pull the plug on a particular idea, on a particular business, on a particular career, if necessary and hold to that. I’ve had too many friends that have mortgaged their houses burned through credit cards, just because you know, one more day, one more day. There are always plenty of other ideas out there. Know your entry, know your exit, and know that there’s always another day for you to go and take the benefits of your prior learnings and go and apply it and be successful.

Jay: Yes. The only thing worse than failing fast is failing very, very slowly.

Colin: Yes. Death by a thousand cuts.

Jay: Colin, thank you so much for coming on. This was really a pleasure and I think a very insightful conversation. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate you.

Colin: It was a lot of fun, Jay, and again, I must apologize to Teddy Roosevelt.

Jay: I’m sure his family won’t listen to this. So that’s all right.