On this episode Charlie Cole, FTD CEO joins the podcast to share notes on transforming a legacy company from the ground up, creating your own story for accelerating career growth, creating context for workplace excellence and tells us the smartest thing he did at FTD. Charlie also talks about the remarkable value of working with technology suppliers to understand table stakes versus differentiators in your marketing tech stack.
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by CommX.
On this episode Charlie Cole, FTD CEO joins the podcast to share notes on transforming a legacy company from the ground up, creating your own story for accelerating career growth, creating context for workplace excellence and tells us the smartest thing he did at FTD. Charlie also talks about the remarkable value of working with technology suppliers to understand table stakes versus differentiators in your marketing tech stack.
About Charlie
Charlie Cole is Chief Executive Officer of FTD, the modern florist collective, where he oversees people and operations. Charlie brings extensive digital and retail leadership experience to the 110-year-old brand, which he joined in March 2020. Before joining FTD, Charlie served as the first Global Chief eCommerce Officer for Samsonite while simultaneously serving as Chief Digital Officer for Tumi. Earlier in his career, he held executive positions and led digital transformations at Assembled Brands, Schiff Nutrition and Lucky Brand Jeans. Charlie holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of Washington.
ABOUT US:
Scott Silverman
An ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org’s scholarship fund.
Veronika Sonsev
Veronika Sonsev is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. She also leads the retail practice for Chameleon Collective and is a contributor for Forbes on how to grow retail and ecommerce in the age of Amazon. Having spent the last 10+ years working with some of the largest retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, Veronika has intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail and ecommerce today. She is also an advocate for women in business and founded the global non-profit mBolden, which is now part of SheRunsit.
Michael LeBlanc is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois. You can learn more about Michael here or on LinkedIn.
Michael LeBlanc 00:05
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast. I'm your host Michael LeBlanc. This podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by CommX.
Michael LeBlanc 00:10
On this episode Charlie Cole, FTD, CEO joins the podcast to share notes on transforming a legacy company from the ground up. Creating your own story for accelerating career growth, creating context for workplace excellence, and tells us the smartest thing you did at FTD. Charlie also talks about the remarkable value of working with technology suppliers to understand table stakes versus differentiators in your marketing tech stack.
Charlie Cole 00:38
I have gone from .com startups, advertising agency to fashion and now I'm going to work for Tarang in CPG. And I also went from a public company to a private equity backed based company. And so, I was thrown into a very, very unknown waters for me. And I probably learned more in those first three months than any other job I've ever had. Because it was all foreign.
Scott Silverman 01:01
Charlie Cole, welcome to Conversations with CommerceNext. It's great to have you on a, on an episode, we are a big fan. Thank you so much for being an important member of our community, being on an advisory board, speaker a number of times, always learning something, I think our audience gets a ton of value from hearing your point of view. So, we're excited to sit down and talk to you. Today's conversation is going to be a bit of a sequel to the talk you gave at CommerceNext back in June. And for all our listeners, I encourage you to listen to that talk. It can be found on YouTube, and we'll also include a link in the show notes. But, but Charlie, how are you today?
Charlie Cole 01:44
I'm great. I'm great. All Things Considered. Things have been going really well since I've seen you last at CommerceNext. So, it's nice to see you and Michael again.
Scott Silverman 01:51
Good. And yes, I'm here with Michael LeBlanc, my podcasting co-host. How are you today, Michael?
Michael LeBlanc 01:58
I'm very good. Thank you. Charlie, great to have you on the mic again, not our first time and hopefully it won't be our last. Now where am I, where are we finding you today?
Charlie Cole 02:06
I'm in the home office in Seattle, Washington. So, home sweet home, I suppose they say.
Scott Silverman 02:11
Alright, well, Charlie, I think a lot of folks know you. But I think it will still be good to hear a quick recap on your career journey that has led you to being the CEO of FTD. So, maybe you could tell us a little bit about that.
Charlie Cole 02:24
Yeah. So, in my journey it, it is sort of simple at its core and a little bit complicated when, when you get underneath the, the titles and all those veneers. So, I'm a digital mark-, well, I'm an analyst turned digital marketer turned eCommerce executive. And I think the fabric for all three of those things is a relatively extreme focus on the analytics and optimization down to the most microcosmic level that you can possibly think of. I think that's a good application, regardless of what aspect of eCommerce you're talking about. And I've had a variety of roles, everything from amino acid level entrepreneurship to private equity executive, to public executive when I was at Samsonite.
Charlie Cole 02:41
And so, one of the things that I attribute a lot of the success in my career to is even though I've had a relatively tight focus in the world of digital, and eCommerce, I had a lot of different types of roles. And so, all those things, I graduated in March of 2020, I joined FTD, where we just celebrated our 100 and 12th birthday. And to be a CEO of a company that was emerging from bankruptcy that has 112 years of history behind it at this point. It's been unlike anything I've done in my career. But I would say it's been the most challenging and most rewarding, and it's been my experience, those two things tend to go hand in hand.
Scott Silverman 03:33
So, so, Charlie, you, you gave a great talk on digital transformation, as I mentioned back in June at the CommerceNext Conference, and actually it was, it was intended to be more about digital transformation. But you went well beyond that and talked about transformation to the entire company. And part of the way that you teed that up was saying that you couldn't believe how broken the company was when you got there. And I certainly, you, I would imagine that you asked a lot of questions before you arrived. But I know a lot of people are always looking at new opportunities. And that's why I wanted to get a little bit into this topic. And to understand like a), how big was the gap in the brokenness, so to speak, between what you thought it was going to be and what you learned after you got there and looked under the hood a little bit? And are there any questions that you wish you would have asked that before you joined that you didn't?
Charlie Cole 04:27
You know, what's crazy about it is that Nexus, Nexus Capital Management is the private equity firm that bought FTD out of bankruptcy. And I don't think I'd be speaking out of turn Scott, to say that I think they were surprised as we learned more and more about the business, not just that it was broken because I think a little bit of mou-, of, of sort of things that aren't working right is somewhat inferred when a company goes bankrupt. I think that no one ever uses the words bankruptcy and success, you know, in synon-, in a synonymous nature.
Charlie Cole 04:35
And so, you expected a certain amount of sort of breakage, so to speak. But I think as we learned more and more about the business, it wasn't just the extent of the damage, but where the damage actually was. Because when, when they hired me, and when I accepted the job, you look at my resume, they hired me because they see someone who has experience in eCommerce. And at the central aspect of FTD. There's two eCommerce marketplaces, one being ftd.com, one being proflowers.com. And the assumption was, like, hey, you make those things work, and, and everything will kind of take care of itself.
Charlie Cole 04:41
And when I went to the interview loop, that was really where my lens was relatively myopic. Scott, just to be brutally honest, where I'm an eCommerce guy, they approached me to fix an eCommerce problem. So, I'm going to look at eCommerce, eCommerce, eCommerce, eCommerce. And so, the questions I asked were really along that lens. And so, to address your question directly. Are there questions, do I, that I wished I would have asked? Yeah, but only because I think I would have moved that much quicker when I got the job itself, and specifically, understanding the pain points of our members of our florists at this point in time. That was an area where I was so front-end based, I was so traffic generation and demand generation and experience optimization. I was so, like, all those things we hear about when really, our core problems were from our relationship with our most important partners, which were our member florists, full stop.
Charlie Cole 05:51
And so, I'm kind of of two minds on this answer. One, do I wish I would have asked those questions? Yeah, I do. But two, even when our private equity guys who bought the company were looking at it, that's not where they zeroed in either. They saw this eCommerce opportunity. But I think the real kind of analogy here for every company on Earth is that if you pardon the banality like you're only as good as your weakest link, eCommerce learned this the hard way over the last two years in the context of supply chain.
And so, a lot of companies will talk about how their problems weren't a functional website, or CRM strategy or analytics, their problems where they couldn't get stuff from overseas to the United States in a cost-effective way. In a lot of ways, our florists are our supply, supply chain. And so, yeah, I wish I would of understand that a little bit more, not because we ultimately ended up missing something, it's just because when I got here, my focus would have been much, much, much, much, much faster, I would have had a little bit more context more than anything. You know, I think what people really liked about your talk back in June is the leadership lessons that you provided. And I think it'll be really helpful for folks too, especially those who are younger in their careers, they're moving up the ranks too, to hear from you like, what were some of the best sources for leadership learning over your career? Was it some particular experiences with some mentors? Is it some combination of that, you know, putting yourself in an uncomfortable position? You know, just like what can people learn about how you got to embrace some of these, these leadership qualities that and, and lessons that you were able to talk about? So yes, yes and yes, would be my straight answer.
Charlie Cole 06:23
So, mentorship, uncomfortable situations, experiences, but I'll go into a little bit more specifics. So, I count myself really fortunate to have three people that I think I learned the most from. And interestingly, Scott, I don't think coincidentally, they are three very different types of leaders. And so, Tarang Amin is currently the CEO of e.l.f. Cosmetics. He came from the CPG world. And so, he used to be the global head of Clorox, and I encountered Tarang when, when I became the head of digital for Schiff Nutrition, and he was a, a, a private equity-based CEO under TPG Growth. And Tarang taught me more than anyone about the marriage between creativity, creative, creative marketing, and analytical marketing. And I think that that's something very inherent to CPG based executives but trying to do it to an extent that I've never seen, I've never seen duplicated, that was number one.
Charlie Cole 07:01
The second would be Jerome Griffith. Jerome's currently the CEO at Lands' End, I encountered Jerome when he was the CEO at Tumi, and I was the Chief Digital Officer at Tumi. Jerome has, I think, I started this conversation, Scott by saying that if you strip off all of my titles and all that stuff that I'm an analyst, Jerome's, a merchant, right. So, Jerome really taught me the value of how important your product is. And that might sound obvious, but I think if you look back at the early 2000s and even the early 2010s, there were companies that could succeed just because they were better at Facebook advertising than you, or better at Google advertising than you. And if you really, if you pardon the, the I hate the term but like they kind of hacked their growth and it didn't really matter if their product was great. It just has to be good enough. I think that's not true anymore. I think to succeed in, in the ecosystem that we work in today. You have to have an exceptional product. And yes, you have to be just as good as digital marketing and all that stuff, but you probably have to be exceptional.
Charlie Cole 07:37
And so, Jerome really taught me kind of that focus. And then third is a bit of a, of a departure from the first two, a gentleman by the name of Dan Levitan. Dan is the managing partner of a venture capital firm in Seattle called Maveron, and Dan, because he came to the world through an investment lens, he's a venture capitalist. That's what he is, he comes from investment banking. He taught me a lot about how folks are thinking about businesses in more of an investment mindse-, mindset, or how they are thinking about unlocking value, which I think is a really powerful thing to understand for any leader.
Charlie Cole 7:53
It's not just, I do a good job, I get rewarded. I think it's really important that leaders understand what we're actually playing for here. Because if you're in a publicly traded company, versus a venture backed company, versus a private equity company, and even within private equity, a bankruptcy turnaround versus a growth equity company, the lens of success from the people that are ultimately holding the budget is very different. And your progress in what you're able to accomplish is going to be either reinforced or limited by that lens, full stop. And so, seeing businesses through an investment lens taught me a lot about how investors think about the business.
Charlie Cole 08:24
And so, those were the three mentors. And again, all three brought very different things to the table. And I'll double down on the Schiff Nutrition piece, as an experience that I learned the most about leadership, because I want to be careful how I say this, because I don't mean to insult anyone else's career arc. But I think that if you are only one type of an employee, like so say you do nothing but work for advertising agencies, your whole life, or nothing but luxury fashion, or nothing but CPG or nothing but venture backed tech startups, if you only work for that business sector and stage, I think by definition, you get a slightly more myopic leadership lens.
Charlie Cole 08:49
Even if you have different personalities. The reality is the companies are somewhat similar. Therefore, the goals are somewhat similar, therefore how you're coached and what you learn is somewhat similar. I have gone from .com startups to advertising agencies to fashion and now I'm going to work for Tarang at CPG. And I also went from a public company to a private equity backed based company. So, I was thrown into a very, very unknown waters for me. And I probably learned more in those first three months than in any other job I ever had. Because it was all foreign.
Charlie Cole 09:29
And so, I think that's another area of leadership where you have to ask yourself in your own career development, how diverse of a background have you had, in your leadership? Do you? Have you only been taught one way? Or do you feel like you've learned a lot from a variety of different people? So, experientially, I would say that. And then finally, like, when I really think about the, the thing that I've learned the most about leadership, it's this job. And it is kind of not close. Because I referenced bankruptcy turnaround, I referenced 112 years of heritage.
Charlie Cole 10:01
And I alluded to the fact that I started in March of 2020, where everybody was just knocked off their center, because of COVID-19. And when you get the unease of a company coming out of bankruptcy, and you get the unease of a global pandemic, it just gives you a different view into how you need to manage humans, and how you need to think about what truly is motivating people to basically throw their heart and soul into kind of turning around of this life force of a 112-year-old company. And so, I guess my, my short piece of advice on top of all this is, and, and it's not meant to sound like a throwaway when I truly mean it is you can learn something from every single time you either lead or expose yourself to leadership. And I would say on the last point, good or bad, because I've seen a lot of leaders, and I've worked for a lot of people that I was like, I wouldn't do it this way. If you just kind of put like a checkmark on that moment and keep on revisiting it. Maybe you'll continue to think that you would lead a different way if you were given the opportunity. Or maybe you'll go back in time and realize that you were the one that was wrong, and that that leader was doing what they were doing for a specific reason. And so, I guess I would say never get married to a point in time in a leadership style in a point in time and continue to be super curious about the right way to optimize one personal leadership style.
Michael LeBlanc 14:15
If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure and hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss another great episode. We'll be right back with our interview with FTD, CEO Charlie Cole, right after this message.
Michael LeBlanc 14:27
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Scott Silverman 15:01
I want to go back to the, to the three mentors becau-, the, because did you look for them with, like a specific intention? Were you, or did or was it more like it just kind of happened? Or how did that like, how did that go? Were you looking for mentors? Did they find you? Did you specifically try to find them, you know, one person that has the financial background in the acquisition, and you know, the VC background, one person, you know, CPG, and, and so on?
Charlie Cole 15:34
No, I would love to take more credit for the specificity of it all. But it was really just cri-, crimes of opportunity, Scott, where I encountered these folks through, I worked for all of them, they were all my bosses at some point in time. And then the one thing I was very intentional about, when we stopped working together, which, in Tarang's case. It was because our company was acquired, in Jerome's case was because our company was acquired. And in Dan's case, it was because I went and did something else. I was really in touch while keeping in contact with them. And that's where I think my effort kind of matched my frankly, my good luck.
Charlie Cole 15:45
So, I think mentorship is, it is, something that you can be very, very specific about. But I think probably the more important aspect of okay, I am meeting this person, I'm at this stage of my career, I'm going to have to talk to him or her more than once. Like, I'm going to have to keep on going back to them. And so, I think you'll find that you can be very opportunistic, which I was, or you can be that much more intentional. But it's really this question of what are the other lessons in your career that these people can help you with?
Charlie Cole 16:02
And so, Jerome's case, for example. He was a couple of different things, like he was much more of a merchant, which is not my strength, right? So, when I go to a new company, I can ask him, like, how would you think about the product in this sector? Versus Tarang, I just think he's one of most brilliant creative marketers that I've ever seen. I was like, hey, how did you think about your brand when you took it over at e.l.f.? So, I think that different people are going to teach you different things. And it's about kind of deciding who's going to keep on being a valuable resource to you and your career. And that's where I got a lot more intentional, while kind of establishing that relationship.
Michael LeBlanc 17:13
I want to pull on one thread that you've been talking about from a career strategy perspective. So, you know, I dry I draw an analogy to elite athletes, right? You, you learn and grow. And from a little kid, you play soccer, or you play football, and that's your sport, and you're an expert in it. You describe a career strategy or career path that you're moving from different places to different places. You know, sometimes I hear, for example, it's hard to get hired into a startup, if you've never worked in a startup, because you've got CPG experience. And sometimes that's looked at either positively or negatively. How do you balance that, that inherent, I think there's an inherent risk to that, like if you move to different places is it harder to get the next job, if you've never done that job before? Spoken differently, sometimes it's easier to go from one startup to another because you're clearly a startup person. Talk about that for a little bit.
Charlie Cole 18:03
Yeah. And I'd like to just add a little bit of efficacy to the, the risk that you just alluded to, Michael, which is I, I, I think that you need to appreciate the dynamics behind, let's just call, I'm going to speak relatively arbitrarily, but like VP and up jobs, most VP and up jobs, have a recruiter involved. Not all, but maybe you call it 50% or maybe it's 70. But I'm going to call it most ish. I actually know the statistic but most-ish. Those recruiters basically have a conversation with, tell us what you're looking for.
Michael LeBlanc 18:40
Right.
Charlie Cole 18:41
And you create the somewhat nebulous persona. But I think it's fair to say, and this is not to speak specifically of any company. If you're going to work for an eCommerce fashion company, someone who has eCommerce fashion experience is going to move to the top of a recruiter's pile, faster than someone who worked at a lawnmower company, even though they might have both worked in eCommerce. And so, I think there's a lot of efficacy, to what you said, even though it's almost like a dirty, dark secret of recruiting, which is, hey, our job isn't actually to give you the best candidate, our job is to give you the person that you're most likely to hire.
Michael LeBlanc 18:52
Right.
Charlie Cole 18:53
And that's where that persona, work comes in.
Michael LeBlanc 18:58
Right.
Charlie Cole 18:59
And so, to and just speak for myself, we recently hired via a recruiter in February, a CFO. And one of the things that was most important to me, is that I had somebody who had been at the growth stage of a digital company and somebody who's also encountered a digital company at their downswing because he needs to understand the history of our company. And Meno is our CFO, and he came from Groupon, (inaudible) was there for the meteoric days and was there for the reset. And it was, so we were looking for someone as well, but I kind of didn't care if he was working flowers, to each their own, right. And so, we all look for personas.
Charlie Cole 19:30
Now to go back to your question directly. I think there is risk reward in shifting between verticals, as long as there is an inherent story to it. So, Michael, the, the thing that I have going for me and I intentionally sought out was exits, right. And so, by moving from one thing to another, when I was at Schiff Nutrition, we had one of the most successful exits in the BMS space of all time. When I was at Integrated Media Solutions, we had an exit. When I was at Tumi, we had an exit, here at FTD, as part of a private equity story, ultimately, private (crossover talk) equity makes their money in exits,
Michael LeBlanc 20:32
Sure.
Charlie Cole 20:33
Right. And so, even though it's, it's somewhat all over the place, there's something to be said for a fabric in your career. And so that fabric might be oh, my gosh, my personal passion is luxury fashion. That's all I want to do.
Michael LeBlanc 20:53
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 20:54
That's cool, right? I think it's more important that when you have a conversation with a recruiter, or with a gatekeeper for a job, you can tell that story in an authentic way. And so, whether you are very, very singularly focused on luxury fashion, or you really have only ever wanted to work in lawn mowers, or you can say, you know what, early-stage VC, I don't care if I'm selling dog food, or if I'm selling blenders, I just love the growth stage,
Michael LeBlanc 20:45
Right.
Charlie Cole 20:46
And I think that's where it's very important that you have a story in a fabric, because I think that shows what you really are all about and where you think your strengths and weaknesses are. And that's a place that for me, I've learned, I'm a better growth leader than I am an entrepreneur. And I've learned that really what I'm best at is kind of producing financial results over anything. And strangely, you know, my personal passions are my kids, my yellow lab, red wine, and sports, and I've never worked in any of them. So go figure,
Michael LeBlanc 21:43
Well, let's continue this whole fabric theme we still have, we seem to have going. Interwoven in your descriptions and taking you back to the first couple of days at FTD. You have a bias for action and a bias for growth. As you said, that's kind of a central theme in everything you do. When you arrive at a place like FTD, where things are broken, and some things need to be fixed and others do not. And whoops, there's a bit of a surprise, there's bound to be. Talk about communicating all the way up to Nexus, who themselves don't like surprises, I'm sure all the way down through the, you know, the employees, you're saying, great, we got this new, this new person in place, things are going to start happening when sometimes things don't always happen because you, as you said, you need to fix some core stuff. Talk about your communication strategy around that.
Charlie Cole 22:30
Well, I would say, and this is one person's opinion that the Nexus communication was super easy, because we laid so much groundwork in the interview process that we had already kind of taken a lot of the surprises out that we had already talked about goals and timelines and expectations and all that sort of thing. And then when you showed up to FTD, I had talked to three employees. And so, you're just this foreign entity that they've never seen, which I very much like to say the things that people don't talk about, but we all know, there is a stigma that comes with you. Are the first post-bankruptcy CEO. And oh, yeah, it's private equity backed, that comes with inherent stigmas from everybody. And you have to just kind of be aware of those things like the day that Steve Jobs left, and Tim Cook became the CEO, every Apple employee knew there would be change,
Michael LeBlanc 22:59
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 23:00
And created a stigma and what that change was going to be, you know, and (inaudible) it doesn't mean they're right, by the way, but you just have to appreciate the fact that there is a stigma. And so, for me, my communication with Nexus, there was a groundwork laid, there was not any groundwork laid with this, this new group of people that I'd never met before.
Charlie Cole 23:32
And to your point, Michael, then you sprinkle COVID on COVID-19 a bit and all of us, well, I won't speak for any of us. I was scared. I didn't know what was next. I didn't know what was going to happen in the economy. I didn't know what was never my family. I didn't know what was going to happen with my fam-, like my parents and my kids and I wouldn't be able to go to daycare. Now what? And so, that level of uncertainty and in my case, fear led me to be that much more intentional about my communication. And let me tell you what I mean by that. I went from relocating from Seattle, Washington to outside of Chicago, Illinois actually based in Downers Grove. I had signed an offer letter, I was talking to real estate agents, I'm moving, that's the plan. And now, no, you're locked in your house. And so, I had this plan in my head of just I had actually talked to Alyssa, my wife and been like, hey, I'm going to have some long days in the office like the first three or four months, (crossover talk),
Michael LeBlanc 24:43
First 90 plan, right? You got the first 90-day plan in your head, right?
Charlie Cole 24:47
Yeah, and I'm going to just need it. I'm just going to need to be an office rat to make sure I'm available for everybody. Well, now we're all trapped behind a camera and a Zoom. And so, that you can throw that plan out the window. And I just kind of out of desperation, made a new plan. And my new plan was okay, I'm going to set aside three hours a day, 12–15-minute meetings, and I'm just going to meet people, I'm going to have 12-15 minute meetings every day. So, if I do that for six weeks, I can meet 360 people, that's a pretty good start. And I'll be, I'm okay admitting, Michael, that I did that out of desperation.
Charlie Cole 25:27
And I will also tell you, even in a scenario where I am back in an office with everybody, I am going to do that again in every job I ever go to, ever again. It was the smartest thing I did at FTD. Because now, when you are behind a Zoom camera, or behind a Team's message, or behind an email, and by the way, this exists in a lot of companies. It's also true in international companies,
Michael LeBlanc 25:36
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 25:37
Where I'm, over here in Seattle, and my partner is over in Belgium, context matters, and attitude matters and I want to understand how someone works and their mannerisms, and their tone of voice and their speech patterns and all these sorts of things. In 15 minutes, in that context, any person who watches this is going to know that much more about me and Michael, and Scott. Because they've seen how we work and we seem kind of have our, our speech cadence and our tone of voice and our mannerisms that really matters. And that context will be on every single email you send from that moment forward.
Charlie Cole 26:11
And so, I think that COVID-19 exacerbated my need for communication, to make people feel like they were a co-worker, and not just some nameless, faceless person, (inaudible) I've never met. But I think more importantly that level of intentional communication up first, is an absolute annuity to any relationship at any company. Because for me, the number one value that matters to me at a company in any culture, that I want to be a part of whether I'm running it, or whether I'm not, is transparent communication. And I'm not sure it's plausible for you to get transparent communication if you've never met somebody, at least in some sort of active communication way. And so, I think that active communication was the most important aspect of coming to FTD. And, you know, Nexus, we had a relationship, I'd actually sat down and had dinner with them before because it was before the pandemic.
Michael LeBlanc 26:34
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 26:35
But so, I think we have that great cadence. And I would say one, that one thing about the Nexus side, and this might scare some people, and you might disagree with us, one of my personal values, when it comes to interviewing with somebody else, if I'm gonna take a job is to be almost like a distilled version of myself, right? It's super easy to like, show up and slow down my speech and be very critical. And if I want to, I can do that, and I can wear a suit. And I can do all those things. Because I've read books, and that's what you're supposed to do in interviews. No, instead, what I do is this, what I do is I talk to them exactly when I'm talking to you, if it's a video interview, I'm going to be dressed the exact same, I'm with you. Because the last thing you want on Earth is like a month in, your boss is like, this is not the person I hired. And but, I think too often,
Michael LeBlanc 27:09
Yeah, yeah.
Charlie Cole 27:10
People fall victim to that; people try to wear the hat they think the person wants. Nah, man, like, you're good enough, like whoever you are, you're good enough for a job. Don't change who you are. And I think that goes back to the same principle, Mike, Michael, which is transparent communication, what you see is what you get, I'm going to talk to you like this for the rest of our lives together Nexus, what do you think? And if they reciprocate, like that's how a relationship should really start. Fantastic. And let's, let's skip a beat and, and take, do a bit of tactical stuff.
Michael LeBlanc 28:38
A couple of quick questions, and I'll pass the mic back to Scott, you had to make some decisions. The team had to make some big priorities when you were at, when you landed at FTD. I'm a little bit curious about the process you went through, like I've been through a process where you have (inaudible) importance on one side of the axis and the other side of the axis is difficult, right? So, if there's something really important and it's easy to fix, let's do that first. Is that, is that a little bit of how you took, you know, got your arms around the challenge and, and you know, ERP and international websites and all the stuff you had to do. Talk a little bit about that process, because I think it's also illustrative of your, of your style, and, and strategy.
Charlie Cole 29:16
I thought we nailed our process at the time, I really did it. And to be fair, so did my peers, and so did our Board of Directors. And what we did is we basically created a laundry list of all the stuff we needed to fix. And then we grouped them in themes. And then we arranged those themes, as it were to short term revenue, even to impact long term value creation. And we bounced those off our Board of Directors and we aligned on these seven themes. And we're like, this is it like, this is the seven things we're focusing on for the first year and we got done with it. And I was like, man, like we nailed this (inaudible) shadowing, by the way, if you can't pick up my, my sarcasm. With the benefit of hindsight, I learned that seven things is way too much.
Michael LeBlanc 29:43
Yeah,
Charlie Cole 29:44
And maybe, maybe fives, okay, but probably three is okay. Because what you end up having inevitably is what is, is called in technical circles is scope creep, where, because you're focusing on seven things, and you have seven different kinds of divergent themes in people's heads, nothing goes as quickly as it can, nothing like literally nothing. And so, I would challenge anyone to focus like crazy when they get to a new job, or right now, for that matter, if you've been at your job for 10 years, if you're trying to do too many things, you're not doing enough, or you know, and you're, you're not doing anything. And so, I think for me, there's a, there's a couple of things that are somewhat divergent here.
Charlie Cole 31:17
Number one, everybody has a plan until you're punched in the face, right? So, even though you have three things, and you feel really good about those three things, dammit, if the world doesn't keep turning, right, and so,
Michael LeBlanc 31:34
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 31:35
You had a plan and COVID-19 happened, and you had a plan, and then there was the supply chain, you had a plan and then (inaudible) heck. Michael, like the, what's happening in the southwest United States, extreme drought, that might change your (inaudible), like so do not stay married to your plan, right, do not stay married to your plan. Here's the divergent part but when you do have a plan, stay hyper-focused on it, right. Don't let yourself be like, Ooh, you know, that's a shiny thing, like by all means, look at the shiny thing, and decide whether or not it's worth changing your entire plan.
Charlie Cole 31:46
Because here's the thing, momentum is a thing. Particular-, particularly with technical initiatives, it's not like you just take the record, the record player off and put it back on and you don't skip a beat, it doesn't work like that. And so, to me, my process was very similar to what you described. But I didn't narrow in as much as humanly possible. And with the, if I was ever to do this, again, I wouldn't be that much more focused, because what you realize is, these seven things ended up taking 18 months, when I could have cranked out three in six months. And then I would have had the value of those three things for the next 12 months, and I cranked out another three to six months after that, then we'll have the value of those three for six months, and then we would have ended up at the exact same place. After the 18 months, we would have accomplished all the things except that I would have taken a combined 18 months of value from the other six things.
Charlie Cole 32:11
So, I, I, I would really encourage people to be more focused than, than we were. But again, we all felt really good about the plan when we got done with it, it just is kind of one of those areas that I wish I would have narrowed it down just a little bit.
Scott Silverman 32:29
So, I want to switch gears a little bit. And for anyone that, you know, follows you on social media, you're quite outspoken about the relationship between, I guess, buyers and sellers, retailers and solution providers. And I always think you have a really valuable point of view to share on that. And I thought I'd, I'd be, it'd be great if you could share a little bit of your thoughts of, of why do you think these relationships are important? And maybe like one thing that you think, on both the, the solution provider and the retailer side, they could do to make these dialogues and conversations more fruitful for everyone involved?
Charlie Cole 33:17
Yeah, so I really think there's blame on both sides, Scott, that has created the paradigm that you see a lot of people just complain about. And the complaint is something like this, ugh, another cold call. Okay, fine. Like, I will allow that paradigm. But, but here's why I see remarkable value. Okay, so in every company, let's just call it the retailer side. And that's a hyper simplification, but that's fine. There are certain things in your business that are going to be a differentiator, true differentiator, you are going to do something that is going to differentiate you from your competitors. And equally important, are the things that are not right. And those things that are not, there are companies on the technology side, that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to give you a best-in-class solution to that problem that you've already identified is not going to differentiate you.
Charlie Cole 33:39
One of my single favorite things that happens at retailer conferences is when a retailer gets up and talks about how their relationship with, I don't want to name a name because it'll make, let's just say someone that's truly ubiquitous. Their relationship with Google is their differentiator. No, it isn't. Google will sell you whatever. They're selling you to anyone. I don't know a single human being and maybe like Amazon or someone massive, like has an exclusive relationship with Google on something, it doesn't exist, right. And so, you don't have a differentiated relationship, how your strategy is differentiated, maybe, but it's not the relationship.
Charlie Cole 33:51
And so, I think it's so important that there's mutual respect between the kind of retailers and, and, and these technology companies, because this is where I think the relationship gets strained. Number one, technology company, you don't understand my business better than I do. So, don't talk to me like that. Like, don't ask me rhetorical questions in a sales process. Don't assume you know, my prioritization, don't assume you know, those three things that we've decided are the most important things. You are sending a tennis ball over a wall, blind, and you're just hoping it's something that I'm thinking of at that point, full stop. That's it, that's your best chance if you are going to do a cold call. And by all means, cold, call me. But then if I answer you, I don't need this right now. Shut up. Like, that's it. That's the end of our relationship for that pra, at that point. And retailers, you have to understand that there is so much R&D happening on the other side of the wall that you will never be able to afford, ever. And the only mistake you can make is not trying to learn as much as possible about it. I am not advocating for taking every cold call. I'm not, I'm not. But just this morning, literally this morning, we're taping this call on August 31, 2022. I got a proposal from my head of product. And I asked her name's Emma, I go, Emma, is this something we should build or are there great solutions already out there? And so she's going to go out and talk to folks right away. And if you happen to cold call her that tennis balls are out today, she's probably going to take the call, because she's going to learn as much as humanly possible about the sector and make a decision.
Charlie Cole 34:39
And that's where I think retailers get so stuck in their ways, right? Like, if you're, if you're thinking about an eCommerce platform, you're like, okay, it's imperative, we replatform, it's imperative. And I read this thing. And I went to this show, and the three biggest booths were Salesforce, SAP, and Shopify. So, that's going to be my aperture. I mean, come on, y'all like, I really think you need to appreciate the amount of evolution that's happened in the sector over the last 15 years, you might still pick one of those people.
Charlie Cole 35:09
But I think it's your job as a retailer to really embrace the amount of R&D that's being done by the technology sector, to make your company as good as possible. And that's where I think we get a little arrogant, and we get a little simple as retailers. So, I guess in short, technologists have got to appreciate they don't have context, to say half the stuff they do. And retailers have got to appreciate they need to find the context to understand how fast technology is moving in a specific need of theirs. And I think if we do that, we're all going to make ourselves frankly, much better, everyone's going to win, the retailers are going to be better and move faster. And the technology, SaaS based companies are going to get much clearer in the case and the cream is going to rise to the top. And I think that's really important.
Michael LeBlanc 37:59
Last question, before we wrap up, we've talked about career strategy. We've talked about, you know, the optimal kind of ideas, we talked about learning. If you and I were having this discussion, in 2027, you and I were sitting down and having this discussion, kids would be a bit older and, and life would be a little bit different. How do you imagine if at all, that your role or the role of the CEO would be different in, in five years? Do you, do you imagine a more dynamic, more agile CEO? What's, what's in your mind in terms of the future?
Charlie Cole 38:31
It, it, it's, a fun question, Michael, and one that I sort of cannot appreciate the reciprocal, because I, I wasn't in this role in 2017, right, and so maybe my answer from 2017, to 2022. But here's what I think. I think in 2022, more than any other time in the history of CEO in, CEOs need to be completely less set in their ways. Because so much is changing around us as we speak. And I don't think that if you are a CEO right now, right, and you make a draw a line in the sand and you say, on either, if you take either side of the line, I am only going to have a culture that is 24/7 in the office, or I am only going to have a culture that has 24/7 virtual, and you are not willing to move off your point. I think you're doomed to fail. Because the needs of the working public, the labor, and I'm talking about everything from delivery drivers to CTOs are changing so rapidly. So, as a CEO, I think the only mistake you can make is to be set in your ways. And that's probably always been true. But there are norms that we all appreciated for like the last 60 years,
Michael LeBlanc 40:01
Yeah.
Charlie Cole 40:02
That is being turned on their head. And so, I think that the CEO in 2027 actually needs to be even more dynamic and even more curious than they are in 2022, more than anything.
Michael LeBlanc 40:08
So, learn, unlearn, wash, rinse, repeat.
Charlie Cole 40:12
Yeah. And then question and then question your new conclusion. And then just keep doing it, right. Just keep doing it.
Michael LeBlanc 40:18
Well, fantastic advice. Listen, Charlie, always a treat to get you on the mic. Thanks so much for taking time to talk with us here at Conversations with CommerceNext. We look forward to keeping, keeping up with the next and greatest thing but for now, I wish you the best of the rest of your day and continued success. I look forward to catching up again soon.
Charlie Cole 40:38
Thanks, y'all. I can't wait to see you guys in person soon.
Michael LeBlanc 40:40
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
FTD, company, people, ceo, eCommerce, learned, career, retailers, talk, relationship, bit, Michael, private equity, important, job, business, growth, Jerome, Nexus