Transcript:
Devin Barker: 0:00
As a 3PL owner, I can't tell you what something that's more infuriating than one of our e-commerce brands is like oh yeah, we added all these products. They'll arrive like tomorrow, by the way I need to add like a $500 penalty every time they do that. Actually, even sometimes they'll just like randomly change the SKU. I think. Why did you change the SKU? Because SKUs are the connectors to everything and if you change the SKU it breaks the entire system.
Jared Ward: 0:38
Alright, welcome to Opsun Filtered. Our special guest today is Devin Barker. What's up, devin? How's it going, man?
Devin Barker: 0:46
Going good. Thanks for having me.
Jared Ward: 0:47
Yeah, of course. So Devin Devin is. He is the founder of a 3PL, one of the clients of Luminous. It's a revamped fulfillment. So can you give us a quick intro and your background? How did you get into the 3PL business and how did our paths intertwine? I'm sure we're going to dive into that a little bit more.
Devin Barker: 1:11
How about I start with the infamous Jared Ward?
Jared Ward: 1:14
and now we intertwine. Alright, let's do that.
Devin Barker: 1:18
So we started out. We served Mormon missions in Hong Kong, china.
Jared Ward: 1:23
Mormon missions.
Devin Barker: 1:24
And the Church of Jesus Christ.
Jared Ward: 1:26
That was the Luminati missions.
Devin Barker: 1:30
Jehovah Witness, Luminati Catholic Mormon. That's right, All included. Yeah, we spent some time speaking Chinese together, so we could just switch this podcast to.
Jared Ward: 1:42
Chinese, we could.
Devin Barker: 1:43
Home hole.
Jared Ward: 1:45
Ha.
Devin Barker: 1:47
Except for you know Mandarin too well now.
Jared Ward: 1:50
Yeah, my Mandarin is better than my Cantonese at this point, but when I go back to Hong Kong, it just like it just comes right back, Literally like after two days.
Devin Barker: 1:58
It's just like back to so I just went to Hong Kong and it literally did not come back. Some people have gifts, some people don't. It's dude, it's the haircut.
Jared Ward: 2:08
You got to cut your hair with like those thinning shears that they do in Hong Kong. Let's give a little backstory of Jared Ward.
Devin Barker: 2:16
All right, here's a good story. Real quick, jared kept gifts to Devon or Elder Barker, you need to get a haircut. He looked awful. I was like, all right, so we go to the Chinese barber and they get these thinning scissors and they just start going at the end.
Jared Ward: 2:31
That's common with Asian haircuts. They these, they have these. I know we have thinning shears here in America, but they have like crazy thinning shears like work.
Devin Barker: 2:41
The whole entire haircut is thinning shears.
Jared Ward: 2:44
They cut your hair so thin that you can just like do whatever you want with it, like with the gel, because you have like crazy and then it comes with a wispy like a newborn baby. So as a white boy. With those thinning shears, you literally look like a maniac.
Devin Barker: 3:02
And that's what I looked like.
Jared Ward: 3:04
You did. You did look like a maniac, but remember, we did that haircut and you were like just one thing, like don't let them use those thinning shears.
Devin Barker: 3:15
And I was getting hair cut, sitting on the side laughing. I was sitting on the side.
Jared Ward: 3:20
And the hair cutters starts bringing up those thinning shears and in like, in bad, because at the time this is like your second. Hold on, You're like hmm, hmm, say go, he got. When I saw you trying to like tell him don't use those scissors, I was just dying laughing. Help me, help me. And he just went to town.
Devin Barker: 3:45
In full disclosure I was the brand new missionary. Jared was the almost going home. His Chinese was fabulous. And then, and then put that on top of, I wasn't caught up with the style, so I had, like these parachute pants that I was wearing. Oh yeah, I like to think that my wife gave me a makeover, so I'm doing better.
Jared Ward: 4:06
Oh, dude, you're looking great. Thank you, you're looking great nowadays. Oh, I still remember. This is like burned into my head. After that haircut, we go back to the apartment and you jumped in front of me and you messed up your hair and you're like let's go.
Devin Barker: 4:26
You know that was probably the only moment during that time we were together that I was happy. I was so miserable. Thanks for that Weeks. Things turned around. It got better though, but big, big part in the year we had a lot more fun.
Jared Ward: 4:39
Yeah, that was a blast Okay, so how does that parlay into your experience with ops at like e-commerce companies?
Devin Barker: 4:47
Yeah, they got back and you did a bunch of things, you went to mission belt.
Jared Ward: 4:50
Eventually you started your own 3PL. Yeah, so it actually started.
Devin Barker: 4:52
Before mission belt, I worked for a company called Circus Tricks. They own trampling parks all over the world. I think they have 400, 500 plus. They own another big brand of Skyzone. They own that.
Devin Barker: 5:03
I went to work for them. I got a degree in marketing, so I worked for Circus Tricks in that area and we had a promotion where we were going to give out free socks for any gift car that was purchased. And so, talking with my boss, we both said, hey, if we could ship this out, if we had some kind of shipable e-commerce product, we would do a lot better with this campaign. So I was a campaign manager. I was in charge of finding some 3PL. Because of some of the aspects of the campaign, it made it much more difficult to actually find a 3PL that bring us on. But I knew we would be doing two 300 orders a day, and so it was basically talking to my father just about this whole thing, trying to find a solution, and we just said, hey, let's try it out. So we set up our basement, we figured everything out, found some program called ShipStation oh, I've never heard of it.
Jared Ward: 5:53
Somehow connected a bit.
Devin Barker: 5:55
Seven ShipStation accounts later, yeah no all right, somehow connected a big commerce site and with me. When we talk about skills and this is kind of like a skills and this has kind of led my whole entire career. If I had some kind of super power. It's how to figure stuff out, to know that I have a problem, I need to just research how to figure it out or just even tinker with it until it works. And so it was kind of my alleyway. We had an e-commerce store, we had ShipStation, we bought some labels, we set it all up, had the product at our house and we got that going and that was the start of 3PL Nice. I had some agreeing with my parents. I said you know, I don't want to beat a conflict of interest, so you guys keep all the money.
Devin Barker: 6:41
And then give me some nice Christmas presents, oh man, and that was the start. So from there we had some different stops that helped me learn more, and maybe that's what you're kind of asking about mission vote.
Jared Ward: 6:56
Yeah, OK. So just to recap, that was your first client. Still a client.
Devin Barker: 7:03
Oh, they're still a client. No, they still are. This is the first year. They're not really doing anything, but they do pay us for storage.
Jared Ward: 7:09
So a business like we need storage, we need you to do this. It's like, oh well, we could do it yeah. And then, starting it out, it was setting up a ShipStation account, setting up your, or you just use the carrier rates on ShipStation, right, yeah, ok, so it wasn't known.
Devin Barker: 7:25
And it was USPS first class we used and, honestly, at that moment everything was brand new. I mean, we understood the concept of shipping, we understood the concept of e-commerce and stuff, but even it was six years ago, seven years ago now, and the idea of being able to set all that stuff up yourself and just ship it out, even right now, that's a pretty foreign concept to everybody. People don't realize how easy it is now. Yeah, being able to ship out your product is not a hard thing to accomplish.
Jared Ward: 8:03
I say this all the time, but e-commerce always attracts a certain type of individual. It's the people who can just dive in and figure stuff out. So if there's a shipping issue, then you have to find a payback or scriptmonitor to ship it out. Hello, someone, just Lambda, someone called customer up here. What? What has been the most difficult thing about setting up a 3PL for you? I know we're going to dive into like a bunch of different lessons that you've learned along the way, but if you had to say the number one most difficult thing in your early days, what has it been?
Devin Barker: 8:32
The 3PL industry is really interesting. Right now it's getting harder and harder to get into the industry and the reason I say that is because you need. You need some capital just to get a warehouse. And if you don't have a warehouse, maybe you can convince people to let you fulfill from your basement, which we have at times and we could probably love it.
Devin Barker: 8:55
We can get more into that, because that's that's really our bootstrap mentality. We've done this whole entire thing with never taking investments or loans or help from anybody else, and a lot of people would say like, well, you're dumb for doing that. But you know what? Everyone has stomachs for different things, and I have a stomach for being risky and starting a business, but I'm still not to the point where I can put my house up, getting a, getting a heat lock or something and possibly losing my house and and, and I'm building more of that. You know that stomach, I guess, as as as I was saying, as I was saying, and we'll get there, you know later, but as far as being more willing to rip man, I can't, can't speak.
Jared Ward: 9:47
It's all good, that first moment I'll start over.
Devin Barker: 9:52
So everyone can take different levels of risk. I'm not a super high risk level taker, so I like to. I like to bootstrap things and I'm totally fine with that. And we figured out how to bootstrap this whole entire 3PL business from our basement and then also figuring out places where we can sublease for super cheap to be able to build.
Jared Ward: 10:10
One of the reasons why I have you on is you've been able to successfully scale a small 3PL where it's it's I don't want to say lifestyle business because like it's super hard work, but you're unapologetically a um, a small, medium-sized 3PL that makes. That makes decent money, like it's it's you and your wife's income, and you guys do well.
Devin Barker: 10:34
And.
Jared Ward: 10:35
I think it's because how you're so unapologetic about where you're at, you're not. It's not smoking mirrors like here at my massive warehouse, like walk me through that Cause you. You attracted clients early on. I know there was a social media strategy there or it was actually just Google, um, it was sorry. A Google strategy, google maps, having having reviews on Google, um, which a lot of 3PLs they they overlook that Um, and then on top.
Jared Ward: 11:07
but after that walk me through the strategy on slowly growing and why you chose to start in your basement and in your garage and slowly get to an actual warehouse.
Devin Barker: 11:20
Yeah for sure. So, um, the other aspect of trying to grow a 3PL and actually attract clients is you got to give them good rates and like like pick back and ship rates and then also shipping rates, and that's the other side. That's really hard to attract before you have large volume. So, starting now as a small 3PL, we got to figure out say, okay, we don't have a lot of space, we don't have super attractive rates and nobody really knows about us. So step one is we can build a website and at least people can look us up. And then also we can do a Google listing, because oftentimes, say, in Salt Lake or Utah County, if you're looking for something, if you're actually looking for a 3PL and you want it close to your office, you're going to search 3PL near me and what's going to pop up?
Devin Barker: 12:08
It's going to pop up both 3PLs in Utah County and, luckily for us, in Orem and Provo there's not really any 3PLs on Google Maps, on Google Maps at least. Right, yeah, and so we recognize. Okay, that's cool. Then also, in all of Utah, nobody really has reviews. They just don't think that's a thing, and so it's sweet. Okay, there's a lot of people that we work with in the industry. We're not just going to talk to just every random person on the street and give us a review, but obviously there's people we've worked with.
Jared Ward: 12:39
And how many leads do you think have come in just through having a presence on Google Like?
Devin Barker: 12:45
at least 95 percent. Just Google Maps. Just Google Maps is at least 95 percent. We've done a lot of even just advertising and stuff, but and we probably could be more sophisticated with our advertising but Google Maps has done everything. We're talking to a potential client right now that we're pretty far down the discussion of potentially bringing them on, and they do 500 a day and their offices are in Linden, so 500 orders a day, we're close by. And then the other thing is when people do actually reach out to us, I pitch hey, it's a great thing that we're a small 3PL, because if you're going with a massive 3PL and you're just, you're lost.
Devin Barker: 13:26
with their other 200 clients they hate it and customer service is so hard to come by and they know if they can be working with the top guy in the company, they're going to get changes made so much quicker than say some big 3PL say, OK, we're going to. We're going to take a week or two weeks to really implement this change and I can't speak for all 3PLs, but most of our clients have come from other 3PLs.
Jared Ward: 13:53
How did you have it?
Devin Barker: 13:54
Left us because they love that we take care of them.
Jared Ward: 13:57
I think that's that's such a good point. First off, tons of lessons there, like if you're in a, if you're in a crowded industry, there's always a way that you can stand out. There's you stood out through through just having a good Google presence. If somebody Googles you, you pop up and you have good reviews, so that we had to learn what a 3PL was, because we really went into this.
Devin Barker: 14:16
I didn't work for a 3PL before and like I didn't know how these things operated, but when I get on a call now with a potential client, oh it's. They know that, I know what's going on and and so being a novice is much harder having a small 3PL. But now that we've been in five, six years it's not even an issue, and we don't even talk about where our house size yeah, how did you?
Jared Ward: 14:40
how did you evolve Like, how did you learn that lesson of just being straightforward and like, hey, look us being small that's actually to your benefit. How did you learn that? Because I think most people, even in software business, in in all types of businesses, they sometimes they never learn that where you have to act like yeah, we're kind of a big deal, and like everything is smoke and mirrors to make you look bigger than you are, how did you learn that lesson?
Devin Barker: 15:07
You know, I think I have to go back to like junior high or high school and having, say, like some bad haircut and someone and you look so dumb, and in realizing, ok, a lesson of confidence is you just own who you are and you love yourself for it, and people respect you and they want to be a part of it. Sometimes they don't want to be a part of it, but they respect you and they they can trust you with your opinions. And so it got that way with our business, where, where I quickly realized we just need to own who we are and just be unapologetic. Unapologetic about it Because we did figure out from the start how to sub lease some space in a warehouse and we would keep overflow storage there, but we literally fulfill everything from our basement.
Devin Barker: 16:01
We are not in our basement anymore. So that's, that's a good step, yeah, direction. But. But sometimes we tell clients like, like, we have two different sites where we'd fulfill, and every time I bring it up that yeah, we have some product actually will fulfill in the basement, it's more convenient. They're actually like yeah, it's cool, it's fine Products, more safe because, like you're, always around it, and so they like even more.
Devin Barker: 16:29
And that's in and that's how we started it and it's it's been good. Never since that's cool.
Jared Ward: 16:35
That's cool. When, when did the three po hit a point where it's it's like oh wow, this, this can actually be a business for me where you can quit your job. How long has it been since you officially quit your job and this is your main thing?
Devin Barker: 16:54
That's a great question because it's not been smooth sailing from the start. From the very beginning we worked with Circus Tricks and they had their camp pain going and it was going well. Then I moved to another job and this is still part-time 3PL. On the side. I moved to another job, mission Bell, and that's where I learned much more of supply chain side and operations. As far as warehouse goes, I did have some experience there, which was good, but then we were thinking like, hey, we got to dive in, we got to figure something out how to just make this full-time. We found a couple clients weren't really the best clients in the world. It's also something we had to figure out is what is a good client? Because without knowing what a good client is, you're going to drive your business to the ground.
Jared Ward: 17:40
So I want to hear give me a story about a client that you took on and it was a bad choice, it was a bad client. You don't have to name the name, but the principle of what happened.
Devin Barker: 17:52
Sure, we brought on a company, the Nameless Company.
Jared Ward: 17:59
I love that company.
Devin Barker: 18:01
And it was in the very beginning and it was the whole idea that if you want to really get going in this industry, you got to take on whatever you can just to make money. It's so dangerous to do that because you handcuff yourself to this terrible client. They drag you down Right. So we brought them on and they had 350 SKUs and they were all metal fittings that went in flow control units. And trying to manage 350 SKUs.
Jared Ward: 18:41
On ShipStation.
Devin Barker: 18:43
On ShipStation no warehouse management software. I guess you could consider ShipStation a warehouse management, but no, slightly.
Devin Barker: 18:53
And the amount of time that it was taking out of our schedules just to try and fulfill their orders. It sucked. And to give a little bit more insight to that is you have to restock 350 SKUs when you receive new inventory. You have to count 350 SKUs and now we have a client right now that they're doing about 500 a day. They only have one SKU. It is beautiful. That is how you build a 3PL. Yeah, we eventually were able to shed the clients that we didn't want. We got to a point we tried to scale a little bit, a little quicker. We got into some weird real estate warehouse issues where we signed a contract and then they said, nope, it needs to be a higher rate. If you don't pay it, then come see us.
Devin Barker: 19:49
And there's another one too, that even you were involved in at one point that it was just a tricky scenario and, honestly, warehouse space was going quick.
Jared Ward: 19:58
Yeah.
Devin Barker: 19:59
And so we actually scaled back and we went back into the basement again. We had another place. We were sub-leasing.
Jared Ward: 20:07
So that was a big lesson for you right there. So was that the turning point where it was like we're not taking on bad clients, we're not doing any smoke and mirrors, we're not growing faster than we need to. I'm going to just unapologetically be who we are and be picky with my clients. Was that sort of the?
Devin Barker: 20:29
Yeah, we decided if we're ever going to be successful at what we're doing and make a decent amount of money in this company, we have to be so picky, so picky. And so now we have all these ratios and I won't give specific. But how much order volume to how many pallets of storage do you have? How many SKUs versus order volume do you have all these different measurements to tell if a client is actually going to be a good one or not? And without those you're just going in blind. It's really hard to know. But if you can stick to what you have determined will make you a successful 3PL, then you'll be fine.
Jared Ward: 21:08
I think this is also a good opportunity for brands to understand if we have operators listening that these are the types of things because when you partner with somebody, be it a 3PL or a supply chain company or somebody, to do your I don't know to negotiate your rate, I don't know whatever it's not always or like with Luminous for a software company, it's hardly ever like oh, this company sucks, it's just Absolutely Before.
Jared Ward: 21:38
Yeah, it's not a good fit, and it's just understanding each other's attributes, like who you service and then the identity of the brand. So I think some takeaways there for me is if you're a brand and you have 700 SKUs and you have complex purchasing and you have to run a bill of materials and you have to assemble things like understand that the 3PL, quoting you like that's, it's complex and you have to find somebody who specializes in that.
Devin Barker: 22:13
I tell that to a lot of startups when they say, hey, what can I do to join your 3PL? The number one lead I get is from startup businesses that don't have any volume yet and they just have no idea that. No, there has to be order volume for us to make any money. The storage cost alone is not going to be enough to keep us profitable. But then when people ask me for advice say, hey, how do I get into a 3PL, I always just say, hey, watch out from too many SKUs. The more SKUs you get, 3pls are going to say, maybe not yeah, but order volume is king. If you have a ton of order volume, then you'll be able to figure something out. Nice, okay.
Jared Ward: 22:56
Well, that's been. Those are total. Those are awesome tidbits and it's really good advice for anybody who's trying to start a 3PL. And then perspective of the brands and 3PLs and how you work together. I'm curious. I want to ask about the evolution of your technology. So I'm a big obviously like this is a big part of the podcast I always dive into the technology decisions. I'm really curious with what decisions you made early on and why. Like what led you to those. What were your thoughts? Like what led you to those? What worked, what didn't. So let's start off. When you first started 3PL, you got ShipStation. Why did you get it and what's your experience on ShipStation so far?
Devin Barker: 23:44
What worked and what didn't so ShipStation straight up was just Google search how to print labels right, and maybe it was more researching big commerce and what connections or partnerships they had. I started a ShipStation account just to see what would work and I think the reason I went with ShipStation. I got onto a couple other accounts as well, but at ShipStation was the first one where I figured out how to connect the store and press print and labels started coming out. And if anybody any e-commerce or 3PL owner, if they've tried this.
Devin Barker: 24:23
They know, the first time labels start printing out, it's like, oh my gosh, this is so great.
Jared Ward: 24:31
So in tech it's called an aha moment or it's time to value and those are actual KPIs. It's something I always say about ShipStation and why I recommend ShipStation for a lot of e-commerce companies. So many people in tech who are really arrogant about their tech decisions. They always shit on ShipStation. Yeah, they do. Dude, it sucks, shipstation man. It's so slow and it's like okay, what do you use ShipStation for? You go in, link your channels, print out a label. It can do more than that, but like the time to. I always say that like ShipStation has been the behemoth and the market leader for a reason. You can go in, link up your channels and get the value of aggregating order data from multiple channels and printing out a shipping label. It's like, oh yes, this works, aha.
Devin Barker: 25:23
Yeah.
Jared Ward: 25:24
So where did ShipStation start breaking as a tool for you?
Devin Barker: 25:30
The area to start breaking the most was inventory management, warehouse management, and they maybe, by design, they don't make it any better, but the only thing it can really do is here's your product and here's how much inventory you have. And, yeah, they've added a couple more features. But there's a lot of different areas from we need to bundle certain products, we need to know how to handle certain discounts, we need to be able to attach a value to this product, we need to just a whole lot of little nitty gritty things, and I've seen ShipStation try to address it in certain ways, but that's not what they do. They print out labels. That's, in my opinion, that's what they do and they do a pretty good job at it, and they do it for a cheap price too.
Jared Ward: 26:23
The thing is that makes sense though, because I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of consolidations in the tech industry for shipping, shipping technology. So, Octane, they acquired ShipStation and they acquired all of these shipping platforms. So that's typical. It happens when somebody gets acquired they're roadmap stalls, like I mean, it doesn't stall like they're trying to work on it, but they lose the touch of somebody who's in the warehouse and really developing the product and I think that's what you see with a lot of companies that get acquired.
Devin Barker: 26:56
That next step they're just trying to sell the company again to gain a profit. You know. And so that long roadmap of making this the absolute best product it could ever be. It just gets there's a huge red light and everyone stops. And they do try to add small features here and there, but it doesn't really become or reach its potential.
Jared Ward: 27:17
Yeah, so okay, that's interesting. So you started out ShipStation. They offered you rates, you're able to print out a shipping label, get the orders coming through as your inventory management needs started to grow. That's when it was like, oh, I need to look somewhere else. What systems did you look at when you're starting to branch out on the inventory management? Obviously spoiler alert he uses Luminous.
Jared Ward: 27:46
I'm not trying to be all mysterious and I still have a filter, but yeah, I quote what did you run a process? Did you look at a couple different ones? What did you find?
Devin Barker: 27:58
We, so we tried. I love any company that will give a free trial, because the main reason why is I just need to know if it's good enough for our operation, and many times you'll see on these websites they'll show comparisons if you get the basic plan or the pro plan or the enterprise plan and here's all the different features that you can have. I'm actually a guy who doesn't like to get on a phone call or on a Zoom meeting and walk through a product. Please no, and I'm so grateful there are people who do enjoy that, but that if I ever see a Zoom meeting I'm like man, I don't want to. I just wanna be able to figure it out on my own.
Devin Barker: 28:42
That's what we did with your product, which I'm really grateful. I said I just wanna dive in. If I have any questions I'll let you know, and so we started doing that with a few different products. There's, I wanna say, like skew vaults 3PL Central was another one that we looked at and there's just from different price points or flexibility connections 3PL Central, now extensive, by the way, another person who got acquired and the roadmap is gonna stall.
Devin Barker: 29:11
They got acquired by Extensive, I think. Extensive, okay, yeah, because they were connected to anyways. But so I just I knew that you were doing something with inventory and I reached out to you and I basically said hey, this is what we have, can you help out?
Jared Ward: 29:34
And he probably smiled at me and said oh yeah, I think the what were the main things that you're like okay, I need it Cause I remember you had a list of like three or four. It's like I needed to do this. It was like an inventory portal, like link up with multiple ship station accounts and just like basic inventory management that you can like, grow into, like what were the things Was?
Devin Barker: 29:59
that it. Well, the biggest thing that we were concerned about is we wanna be a 3PL that has full transparency to our customers, so we want them to be able to see at all times where their inventory is. At Now, a lot of people think, oh, that's, yeah, it's not too bad, that's pretty simple. But when you start to grow and you have more and more clients and they all wanna see the inventory, then also, you don't have a portal for every individual client. You're not gonna let one client see your inventory for all your different clients.
Devin Barker: 30:26
That starts to become, you know, confidentiality issues almost within business, right, and so we had to one. I think that was number one. We had to get a portal for these clients where they could understand where their inventory levels are, and we didn't have to continue to like email them once a week saying here's your inventory levels. That's just an extra process that we didn't want to do and, to be quite honest, everything that we have been doing is all about improving efficiency, because if you don't run it in efficient 3PL, your life is going to suck. It's going to be terrible. But if you can run a super efficient 3PL, your operation is just unbelievably tight. You're going to feel great, and if you have clients that have low-skills, high-order volume, it's going to be such an easier business to run. And so, when it comes to a WMS talking about luminous and stuff that just took out additional steps that we didn't need to do and that gave me extra time to go home and spend it with my family Right, that's just less time I had to stay at work.
Jared Ward: 31:41
Yeah, I think one of the coolest things that we inadvertently built into luminous is so we're big fans of order management systems in the market. We think you can integrate with channels and print out labels really well. So one of the good things about luminous is you can link up multiple ShipStation accounts, which is why we're a good fit for smaller 3PLs, because that's normally the path for 3PLs like one ShipStation account and then as soon as they get another client who needs to track billing separately or separately, it's like another ShipStation account and they want to be able to keep that.
Devin Barker: 32:18
When you talked about 10 ShipStation accounts, we've been there, I get it. And then all of a sudden you're looking and you're like, oh man, we're paying. How much money for 10 ShipStation accounts. It's consolidate.
Jared Ward: 32:30
So for us we allow 3PLs to. You can link up multiple ShipStation accounts and slowly get it down to one, or just go straight on to luminous or not, and then for inventory, as you know, you can go as complex or as simple as you want, like, I think, do you have it on auto deduction right now, where everything just automatically deducts when it's marked as shipped?
Devin Barker: 32:56
Yeah, I think so. The purgatory function we love, and maybe you can explain purgatory what that's all about.
Jared Ward: 33:04
Well, it just. It cleans the data. It makes sure so for brands or 3PLs when an order comes in. A big issue is if, say, you had a sale and you know you added a new SKU on Shopify but you didn't communicate that to your WMAS or to your 3PL. It's coming through like mismatched and that's a big issue. So purgatory just it catches those types of errors and makes sure that everything is mapped and cleaned.
Devin Barker: 33:33
As a 3PL owner, I can't tell you what something that's more infuriating than one of our e-commerce brands is like oh yeah, we added all these products. They'll arrive like tomorrow, by the way. I need, I need it.
Devin Barker: 33:47
I need to add like a $500 penalty every time they do that, but because of that, actually, even sometimes they'll just like randomly change the SKU. I think, why did you change the SKU? Because SKUs are the, they're like the connectors to everything, and if you change the SKU it breaks the entire system, and so purgatory allows us to make sure, oh, something's been changed. As long as we're checking that frequently, our systems won't break.
Jared Ward: 34:16
Have you seen our new channel mappings page where it compiles all of the SKUs of the channels you're mapped to or that you're connected to, and it shows you if something's mismatched? Have you? Seen that I haven't seen that.
Devin Barker: 34:29
It's a new one, so we're building out tons of features to solve that though.
Jared Ward: 34:33
So that's the first one, and you can automatically generate a SKU, and it auto popgates everything from Shopify or from the channel, but eventually we're going to get to the point where you can like bulk pull it If a client does tell you that. The next feature is like like you can find all of those in luminous, and you can just bulk create all of the SKUs so like let me pay some boy to egg their house.
Jared Ward: 34:57
Exactly yeah. What's the future of revamped? What are you guys, what's your, what are you hoping for? We're really excited.
Devin Barker: 35:10
So we kind of like you talked about.
Jared Ward: 35:17
Sorry. Okay, we'll have to wrap this up in the next like four minutes. I think that's a good question to wrap it up, yeah.
Devin Barker: 35:28
I'm so tired. It's been such a long day. We shipped out new record yesterday 3600 orders.
Jared Ward: 35:34
Dude that's sick.
Devin Barker: 35:35
It was a good day.
Jared Ward: 35:40
I'm not going to tell Brendan, Sorry. We're going to jazz game with a VC. That's awesome.
Devin Barker: 35:49
I got to take you to jazz game. We have inlaws. We have some pretty good tickets.
Jared Ward: 35:57
Okay, all right. Yeah, we're good, okay, so. So what is what's next for revamped? What are you guys doing? What's the goal?
Devin Barker: 36:06
So what you talked about. We were very patient, unapologetic, how we started right and it took us a while to figure out, like, build our foundation, understand who we're looking for and then also try to just gather some capital and, honestly, it's really just saving up our own bank account to be to a spot where now we have this awesome foundation. That next year is really the year of major growth.
Jared Ward: 36:32
And we're really excited about it.
Devin Barker: 36:33
We finally got to a point where we're shipping. Most we've done is a few thousand orders on a Monday, and anybody understand shipping knows that's like the weekend added up together, right yeah, but it just allows us to go into next year. Okay, now we can. Now we can put our foot on the gas and just blow up and in three PLS, how you grow is you fill up your warehouse and then just go get another one and just just build another one, and so we just finally feel like we have this amazing foundation just to be able to get higher and higher volume, and I think I'll be happy once we're consistently at 5000 orders a day.
Jared Ward: 37:15
And then once.
Devin Barker: 37:15
I'm satisfied with that. We're going to 10,000.
Jared Ward: 37:19
Nice. Well, I'm really happy that you're, I'm really happy that you're one of our clients at Luminous and, like I always tell you, I'm really happy that you can, as you grow, you can start using more of the system, like you can use the pick and pack, and maybe one day we can have your billing automated and expand all those features. So that'll that'll be really fun. Yeah, okay, that's the last one. So so where can everybody find you? Do you guys have social media? Or on Google, google Maps, google Maps 3PL near me.
Devin Barker: 38:02
The easiest way is to search revamp, fulfillment and you'll find us on Google. We'll just have some easy ways to contact us and we go over pricing with you. Reach out to us and, yeah, hopefully we can figure something out.
Jared Ward: 38:15
Yeah, we're going to. We'll be recommending any of our clients who want a 3PL, just because I know you're super trust for the guy and that's the last thing.
Devin Barker: 38:24
That's the right way. The customer we are so client focused, and and that's where a lot of people get go wrong with finding a 3PL is they're not client focused and they just don't get taken care of well enough, and so that's what we decided from early on. We just have to be client focused and love them and not ignore them and always stay ahead of problems, because if you do that, they'll love you.
Jared Ward: 38:46
Nice. Yeah, well, as always, devin it's. It's great catching up with you and we'll chat later, Peace.
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