Resilience in the Face of Market Changes with Robin Lieberman of MF Supply

Full Transcript

Aaron Sheehan: Welcome to B2B Commerce UnCut: A Journey Through Change. On this podcast, we have honest, hard-hitting conversations with thought leaders, distributors, and innovators in digital commerce and transformation. We explore not only the success but also the challenges that manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers can face in achieving successful digital transformation for their companies.

This episode is brought to you by OroCommerce, a leading innovator and provider of customer-driven, powerful, and connected open-source software for B2B digital transformation. OroCommerce seeks to build long-term, trustful relationships with its customers, integrators, developers, and technology partners by empowering people with the best tools to digitalize their business. Find out more at oroinc.com.

And here’s your host, Aaron Sheehan.

Welcome back to the B2B Commerce UnCut podcast sponsored by OroCommerce. I am your host, as always, Aaron Sheehan, Director of Product Marketing here at OroCommerce. And with us today, very excited to have her as the guest, is Robin Lieberman, who is the president at MF Supply, which is a supply chain partner and distributor serving manufacturers located in, I believe, scenic New Jersey. Is that right, Robin?

Robin Lieberman: That’s right. Yes, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Aaron Sheehan: Perfect, and I will say at the outset, in the interest of transparency, that MF Supply is not an OroCommerce customer. They use different technology. That’s totally fine. When we were talking a few weeks ago in the, sort of, virtual green room before the recording, your story was really interesting. And I thought that the journey that you and MF Supply have been on is super interesting and worth maybe exploring for our listeners. Like I said, full transparency, there’s no commercial relationship between OroCommerce and MF Supply at this time, maybe later, but not right now. So, let me turn it over to you, Robin. And thanks again for coming on. I appreciate it. I think you’ve got maybe some weather coming in right now.

Robin Lieberman: Yes, yes. A little bit of weather here in New Jersey. I’m looking at the George Washington Bridge, and it’s a little bit of a rain show. But thanks for having me today. Yeah, I’ll give you a little bit of background. So, basically, I’ve been the president of MF Supply for 15 years. And I bought the company from two guys who had been in business since 1972. And the business was failing.

And what actually happened was interesting. I had done a lot of different things. I had been running call centers in the catalog and travel industry, I worked a little bit in finance, I was a little bit in HR services, always in kind of an operational and marketing role. And I got divorced. And I decided I wanted to control my own future. And I started to look at businesses through business brokers, initially with a colleague, and later on my own. My father did own men’s clothing stores.

So, I had that entrepreneurial, kind of, the taste of it from his experience, and we looked at, I don’t know, over 50 businesses over the course of six months, and found MF Supply. And I’ll never forget, I walked out and I’m like, “That’s not for me.” And then I started to reflect on it. And I thought this is an interesting little business. It’s B2B. It’s serving manufacturers. They have no automation. They’re not marketing at all. They have been profitable in the past, although they weren’t profitable anymore. It ran with very few people, and something about it just seemed like the right thing at the time, and I jumped in, and I bought the business and kept one of the owners on, so he really worked with me and trained me on everything for three years. And the time was the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. I don’t know if you remember, all the banks were failing.

Aaron Sheehan: I do!

Robin Lieberman: The auto industry was failing. It was insane. So, we almost failed, and it took a bit of time to get profitable, and I almost went bankrupt. A lot of entrepreneurs have that kind of a story, I’m sure. Maybe they didn’t buy it, but they flirted with financial ruin in trying to grow their business. In any case, we turned it around and became successful. We were on a steady path of growth. I brought in a lot of my own people, and, basically, what happened is an interesting journey.

So it was incremental growth, as we put automation and marketing in place. We invested in a small website. We started to offer eCommerce with some of our vendor partners. We reached out to local manufacturers to reengage with them or engage with companies who used fasteners locally. And things were going well. We were on a good trajectory, growing 15 to 20% a year, and then COVID happened. And so, I had joined that… followed an organization called Entrepreneurs Organization.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but, basically, it’s a global organization, not for profit. And it’s basically a community of entrepreneurs, business owners, and I’m still a member. And what they do is help with education. I’m in a group, it’s called a forum. We meet every month. We talk about our business, like a board of directors for people who are owners in your company. And as things started to shut down, suddenly, there were global webinars from companies in Italy, and China, and Canada, and all over the world, talking about… that were before us with COVID. And they were talking about how the government was mandating that factories could stay open if they needed masks.

And I joined with some of the distributors in Canada and the United States, and we started to bring in masks, and put them on our website, to help essential businesses stay open and us to stay open.

Aaron Sheehan: Absolutely.

Robin Lieberman: Because manufacturing was an essential business. And as soon as it went live, the orders started to come, because we had eCommerce. And we had made some of those investments. Although, it was literally 10, 20, 30,000 dollars a year for two or three years. It was not significant. And suddenly, in two weeks, we did half a million dollars. And things started to blow up for us in a good way. Obviously, it was a terrible time, but we were able to help a lot of people stay open. And then, it also wasn’t just government agencies, national labs, our customers. We did a little retail also. It became the big product line for us. And I think because we were first to market, and our eCommerce was so easy, and nobody else had access, that was like almost like a case study, you know, when it blew up powerlessness?

Aaron Sheehan: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Robin Lieberman: I’m not the only one. I know that we sold other ancillary products, as customers and governments started to, like, city, states, etc. started to say, “Oh, we need gloves. Oh, we need hand sanitizer.” And we started to do more sourcing, which we’re already experts at, put things on our website, have the on and offline kind of hybrid model. And from there, what happened is interesting. We got a lot of authority as a website and as a provider of fasteners and other things. And it, our business started to grow more exponentially. And so, we went from having four to five people to having 10 to 12 people, and we’re still growing now.

Aaron Sheehan: Aw! That’s an awesome success story. There’s a couple of things. And there’s a bunch that actually stands out to me. I think, first, in your personal story talking about your father, my dad also started in retail. I grew up as a kid stocking shelves, ringing up customers and doing all of that. And I think sometimes about what a good foundation that is to get into business, starting in that one-to-one, it’s you serving your customer or learning a little bit about how a business works. But that is the most almost pure niche of customer service, is like you’re across the counter, working with somebody. I think you learn so many lessons about people and customer service and how business works.

Because everything you do on a larger scale, everything all of our customers do, everything I’ve ever done, is simply a larger version of that looking somebody in the eye and helping them find something or handling the cash or doing the operation stuff behind the scenes that nobody sees. With doing inventory and all the rest of it. And I think it’s such a good foundation for business, to start in retail. And I love that that’s, you know, you’ve mentioned that and called that out. It’s good. Yeah, I’m sure the lessons you learned, like, never leaves you, right? I know, I still think back to some of the things, some of the fun experiences.

The other thing that came to mind that whole story from the financial collapse in 2008, which I do remember pretty well. I bet all our listeners do too. I’m guessing average age for an OroCommerce cast listener is probably between 40 and 60. So I think everybody remembers, right? Yeah, I know, what a great time. The word resilience really comes to mind. And it comes to mind because it’s actually OroCommerce’s, if you’ve heard of, if anybody listening has gotten an impression of OroCommerce in the last few months, you’ve heard, resilience is actually in our mission statement, is a big piece of it.

And your story is exactly why we put it there. Because this industry, it’s lovely to be real. It’s low margin, often it’s difficult. Supply chain can be fragile. Customer relationships are absolutely critical. But your customers have their own pressures dictating where they buy and how they buy and what they need. And your schedule is not their schedule. Their schedule is your schedule, right? And that, it’s the resilience in their supply, that story of anything hit the bottom, but it sounded like you can see the bottom or somebody can see the bottom at one point at MF Supply and being able to drag it back up, kicking and screaming, into a successful business. Like, that’s resilience.

That’s continuing on even in the face of well, financial meltdown, and then a global pandemic, and all the supply chain stuff that happened. So, I really appreciate that. So, I want to talk, then, a little bit about… You gave us a good background, I think, on you and on MF Supply. How do you view… First off, maybe, for our listeners, what specifically do you sell?

Robin Lieberman: Sure. So, we’re an industrial distributor, specializing in fasteners and hardware. And we are a full-service stocking distributor of all kinds of parts, inch, metric, custom items; with name brands, we’re an authorized distributor of certain brands. The way I think about our customers and the products that we provide are twofold. One is for many customers, especially the legacy customers, were one source solution. For companies, they might be machine shops, they could be OEMs. They make everything from lighting systems to furniture to missiles, and rockets and dampers and things involved in the HVAC industry, instrument panels, a lot of different types of customers.

And they have a self-managed inventory process where they don’t have someone coming in to stock their bins. Some of them use the same thing over and over again, monthly, quarterly. Some of them use things project-by-project, but all of them use about 100 or fewer fasteners that they buy from us. They might buy other specialty things elsewhere. And we act as an extension of their purchasing department for their socket caps, for sheet metal screws, for regular Nuts Bolts.

And then for a lot of military ports that are certified for some self-clinching type. We’re a distributor for captives are some of the self-clinching needs that the sheet metal shops have. Lots of different types of hardware, most of it smaller, we do a little construction, but most of it like a quarter-inch diameter or smaller. And for many of them, we’re like an extension of purchasing, we’re dealer sourcing, we provide them with their standard parts, we keep the history of their record. So, you know, everything that they buy. We might have their estimated annual usage and help them with that. We have older part numbers, and we might provide samples or have custom parts made for them. That is one big part of our business. And we stocked a lot of that in our New Jersey distribution center.

The other part of our business, which is I’d say more in the past 10 years, and especially since we started with eCommerce is precision manufacturing and defense-related customers. And for these types of customers, who are in the defense supply chain or maybe precision, meaning it could be medical other instrumentations, those customers make everything from satellites to missiles to planes, and instrument panels within planes, submarines. It might be for the Navy, it might be for another branch of government.

Sometimes it’s for SpaceX or NASA. Sometimes it’s direct to them, and sometimes it’s through another company. And, basically, what we do for them is, I’d say that we find and are able to source and ship things quickly, that maybe aren’t in the regular supply chain, that have a long lead time, that they don’t have an obvious source for, or they have to shop for. Like, they have to get a few quotes. And those products are really military and specific niches, mostly stainless steel and specialty materials. Some of those are on our website, some of them aren’t, but that’s how we do get found for those things. Word-of-mouth for sure, but mostly, we’re offering our catalog online. And people are finding us either through paid or organic ways.

Aaron Sheehan: Right. I think that’s relatively common, and it’s interesting that you said something in there about your customers. Basically, you’re almost like their purchasing department or an extension of their purchasing and sourcing department. I’m always curious, how do you say to your customers view MF Supply, and how they might view, like, a competitor or another source for those things? What sets you apart from other people who are selling what you’re selling? How do your customers see you as part of their team? It sounds like, and that’s a big distinguishing piece.

Robin Lieberman: Yeah, for many they do, and we have a little Wordle blurb because when we surveyed them, we got, the same thing we hear over and over again, which is, you’re so easy to do business with, and you’re able to find things that nobody else can, fast and at a reasonable price. I think, when you think about being easy, we don’t have any voicemail phone trees: you call us, we answer. We have chat on our website, we answer. You email us, you’re getting a response — same day or next day with quotes, sometimes even faster. In terms of being super easy to do business with, we’re flexible and like only a small business can be right?

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah!

Robin Lieberman: They need procurement terms, they need us to fill out all these forms by two o’clock so they can place their order. We can do all that. That is the feedback that we get. The other thing that a lot of people come to us for, where we have a real niche and an expertise, is that we’re able to find cost-effective alternatives to brand-name fasteners, that might be expensive, or have a long lead time.

We go directly to a lot of factories that might make the fasteners for the brand name, or supply them under an alternative part. And we can certify them, by the print, by the part number, etc. And that is an area where we help a lot of people because I think, in the industry of manufacturing, most manufacturers, everyone involved in the buy, they almost feel like, “Oh, I’ll wait till the end to buy the fasteners because those are always available.” And that is not the case. So, there are lead times, and especially, people now are maybe more used to longer lead times after the supply chain disruption through COVID and continuing on till now. But they weren’t, for a long time, they just expect everything to be available when they’re ready to make it, and that’s not the case.

So we can solve that problem for a lot of organizations. They need this item, with these specs, from this manufacturer. But it’s 52 weeks or 27 weeks out. And we’re able to cross it with a functional equivalent, certify it with a certificate of conformance and supply it to them faster and often less expensive. So they can make things and be competitive, have better lead times maybe than other people who are bidding on those jobs, or make their deliveries or deadlines. That’s a big problem that we solve, often. And so those are some of the main things that we do, the sourcing expertise, the functional equivalent supplying, and then also this service.

Someone said, you guys should put an easy button on your website because you’re just so easy to do business with and we can use your website. We have a lot of filters, so it’s easy. Smaller companies like ours, we have 12 people, right? 10 full-time people two part-time people. Like, to have that type of capability on your website, where you can filter things, like the big guys. That’s an area where we’ve invested, and it makes it easy for people to find what they need, the way they want to find it.

Aaron Sheehan: The way they want to find it, right? And as you were talking, I was thinking about facets to this because at one level, the easy button, the or the way that I think a lot of buyers are becoming trained, is to go to a marketplace. Amazon’s moved into the business space. There are a lot of verticals, specific marketplaces, in this space, where distributors and even manufacturers fill. And it tends to be, kind of, a race to the bottom, in terms of price. But what you lose in that transaction is, it’s easy to procure, but what it isn’t, is there’s usually not much customer service because you have this three-way relationship between the marketplace vendor and then the actual seller, and then the customer and getting… What you’re talking about is that extension of your customer’s business operations.

And at some level, the whole purpose of distribution of companies like MF Supply, and others, is to think ahead so they don’t have to. You stock the stuff in advance, at some level, so that your buyers don’t. So that, when it is the last minute, and they do need something by two o’clock, and it’s a rush order. You’ve got it, and they’re not starting over from scratch. It’s not an experience you’re necessarily going to get going to the marketplace and seeing what’s available because they may not have it, and they certainly won’t be able to do anything to spec or help you with the procurement process. Do you guys sell on any marketplaces, or have you explored that? Is that a channel? Or do you think that is too counter to everything that you just described as being part of what sets you apart?

Robin Lieberman: Aaron, it’s a great question. And I’ve spent a lot of time and energy talking to many people about marketplaces, and we did just join a fastener vertical-specific marketplace, the base-supply marketplace. I think marketplaces are inevitable, and they do provide a service, in some ways, to customers, for sure. I think, in a technical industry, like the fastener industry, people are talking about price, you talk about a race to the bottom. Do you know what these fasteners are doing? These are workhorses. They are holding up and holding together, everything around us. It’s unbelievable.

So if you don’t get the right part, whether you get a different material, a different plating, it’s not corrosion resistant as it should be. It has a different weight, like, anything that’s different than it should be. It can really wreak havoc and cause a lot of problems in terms of the manufacturing process. And so, I think that… my thoughts on marketplaces are… And I’ve seen Amazon, you know, if you look back a few years ago, or even months ago. They have developed their filters, a lot. They are really developing them. So they’ve made a big investment in these. My thought is that if you have a universal port number, then it’s easier to shop for these things. If you have a description-based product or any things in your port that are special — platings, special materials, special certification, one feature that’s different than the average normal feature — I just think you’re really going to get yourself in trouble if you’re going to marketplaces for any of this type of stuff. And I think that even though they are commodities, they are special commodities, you know.

You can buy the wrong stainless steel, you can buy the wrong drive, you can… It says roundhead, but you need a panhead. It’s really technical. It concerns me about marketplaces, at the same time, I’m in marketplaces. I think the way that BAE works is it’s a lot of work for very low return, and they take a big cut, and it’s a low-margin industry. So it’s got to be volume play.

Aaron Sheehan: That’s exactly right. We see that too. We offer marketplace functionality through our platform, and our customers sell on marketplaces. A lot of our customers are running a marketplace on OroCommerce, but because we’re B2B focused, it’s usually, it is something like, it’s chemicals for a specific industry, or it’s very specific to a particular niche.

Robin Lieberman: Like a vertical.

Aaron Sheehan: It’s a vertical. Yeah, exactly. It’s a vertical marketplace because you need that rich product information to make the right decision because everything you’re buying is being used in the core operations of the business. So that makes a lot of sense. And I will say, I appreciated your comments about how important and critical fasteners are, and I just want to call out for legal reasons. Robin is not saying that cheap fasteners caused a boat to hit the Baltimore Bridge. We’re not making the claim. It definitely wasn’t something in the power plant, where somebody didn’t buy the right corrosion-resistant fastener and caused, like, a leak. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong on a ship.

Robin Lieberman: That’s very funny. And then, also, I’d really like to hear more about, at some point, about the marketplaces that your customer… that’s interesting to me. There’s only one fastener marketplace now, there’s one, and they’ve got a long way to go. But that’s an interesting thing, right? In the B2B world, the marketplace play. It’s inevitable. And they’re gonna grow. But I’m interested more in that.

Aaron Sheehan: Well, I will do it. Since you’ve really set it up for me to do a plug of one of our customers, I will. Because I’d be really bad at my job if I didn’t. But we have, for instance, there’s a company called PartsBase. It’s the world’s top provider of aviation parts, and they sell… Okay, well, PartsBase is an OroCommerce customer.

Robin Lieberman: Oh, Okay. I’m familiar with them.

Aaron Sheehan: See. And it’s a small world. And I will say that the ops, the operation that they’re running is very complicated. That procurement process is, where you sell to defense, that’s a complicated procurement process. We have other customers as well, but if you’re interested, if you guys are interested in listening, if you can go to oroinc.com. Go to our case study page, you’ll see PartsBase, basically, the second or third, maybe, case study on there, but we love them. And I believe they love us. I want to talk to you a little bit about eCommerce, and you talked about it, actually, at the front of the podcast. I want to get a little bit more detailed because it sounds like you’ve made a statement, that you were well-positioned for COVID because you were already online, or for the post-COVID period because people already knew how to find you.

And you made the comment about pay. Obviously, people find you via paid, people find you via organic. For all the distributors out there listening, if your parts that you sell are not on publicly-accessible web pages. Google cannot find you, and if Google cannot find you neither can anyone else. So maybe talk a little bit about… It sounds like you’ve built recognition and authority from investing in the Internet and putting your catalog online, before maybe some of your competitors did. I’d be really interested in hearing what spurred you to do that. And then, practically speaking, what steps did you take to go about getting your catalog and putting it online? And was that primarily for, like, visibility purposes, and then it leads to an RFQ, call was for a quote, or is it fully transactional? Or did it evolve over time? And that’s a lot of questions, so take that in any order, or any spin that you want.

Robin Lieberman: Yeah. So I actually have to think back on that. So what happened was, it’s a funny kind of story. So I was working with someone that the SBA, the local SBA, who had an industrial distribution business and was retired, and I was talking to him about growing my business. And I had been visiting new customers locally, and new prospects locally. It was a slow road to grow the business, and we had, like, a website with a bunch of things on there, we were getting found occasionally. Just a catalog.

And, we’re just talking about it, and I was starting to shop a lot online for fasteners myself, through the sourcing that we do. And it just seemed, when he said to me, “Well, if that’s what you’re doing, it’s happening. Why don’t you do it sooner rather than later?” And I said, “Yeah, sooner rather than later.” It was just like that. And I went full force, started investigating all of the major players at the time. We decided on Volusion, but Shopify was one of the considerations, BigCommerce, Magento.

They were all there, then, 70 years ago when they started. And, at the same time, I had a local kid, who was helping me with everything to do with IT and marketing. And he had worked at an auto parts distributor. So he was so technical. And he also had this great… He was technical with the parts and understanding distribution, and he was technical with creating products. He understood all of that. And so, together, we decided… I had already put some of the things online for one of my vendor partners that shared with me their catalog. So I’d done that myself, like an Excel spreadsheet. Hell, frankly, it took, I was spending hours just importing, exporting and massaging the data. And it was like, a six-month project, but I did get, I managed to get 5000 things online, and some of them start to sell occasionally.

And then he and I just devised a way to curate the products that some of our vendors had given us all the data for because you need a lot of data if you’re gonna sell in commerce. You need the weight, you can’t do it without the weight. You’re going to charge for shipping. In our industry, the buyer pays for shipping. So that’s the way that works. So we went through, and we just would meet, and we were coming up with charts. And the bottom line is, together, the two of us, over a year, it took a long time.

We managed to get, like, 20,000 products online, and things started to sell. As we start to advertise, and we did. Yeah. And we started to do paid search, ourselves. I was taking classes, I was online, myself, doing everything. And then we started to, you know, we worked with a few different companies to help us. We start to outsource some things, but still organic has been the best, from the beginning to now, the best channel, like, the best lead generator, for us. What I think we did, that was different than a lot of other people, is as we put things online, we always made it both RFQ and add-to-cart. And that, I think, was a huge decision. That wasn’t what people were doing, Seven/eight years ago, that’s not what was happening.

Aaron Sheehan: There wasn’t a lot of people doing B2B-type sales online at all. You said that was what you did. It’s different from everybody else. I just disagree actually, Robin. What you did that’s different from everybody else was you actually did it. Because I’ve been in these conversations for 10 years plus now. And even still today, much larger companies than NF Supply can struggle with, actually, they’ll talk about it, and they’ll pick it up to the board. And “Hello!” It sounds hard. The phone’s working fine. We’ll talk about it next year. We’ll talk about it next year.

And it’s, we’ll talk about it next year, and they’re still talking about it 10 years later. What you did that was different was, you did it! And I think that’s part of the value of being president of, frankly, a small company. And being able to… coming in with a vision, and coming in with the ability to drive and lead change. And that gets harder the larger the organization gets. You get more stakeholders, you’ve got a board, maybe that really doesn’t want to change anything. It worked fine for them 30 years ago, so why change it? And I think that’s really what I’m hearing and this, is a vision to leverage technology to ensure the survival and growth of the business, which is pretty important to somebody that just bought one.

Robin Lieberman: Well, I appreciate that. I would say that First of all, I have a bias towards action as a lot of small business owners do. Whereas, maybe, that’s not the case when you’re larger. And I think the second thing is, I love to shop. And I love to shop online. So it was natural for me, it was just to think like a B2C buyer. Now, I’m a b2b buyer. But I’m still thinking like a buyer. That’s where my head is in developing things. And I think it does show on our website, we thought of stuff. It’s shocking now looking back on it, we thought of stuff like, “Oh, we got to do this, we gotta do this. We got to make sure they can put their shipping in. If they need certifications, they have to ask this. Put it in the notes. Tell them this too.” Because, again, as a buyer, I’m a savvy buyer, and I love shopping, so it was natural.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, hey, clearly your customers like it too because they see you as… you’ve got a customer service differentiator with some of your competitors, and you have good relationships. So, it’s not just Robin who who loves to shop. I am super curious. So you’ve talked a little bit, I know, obviously, you said, you’ve got the website up. You’ve got an RFQ process, and you can buy online. You’ve got a lot of your products, your catalog online, and digital. Is there more to come with how you approach the internet and its technology, more broadly? You don’t have to give us any secrets, but like, where’s your where’s your head at right now because you talked about marketplace, for instance, that’s new. What else is on the horizon out there for MF Supply?

Robin Lieberman: I think, for our company, if you’re talking about our website. First, I think that we need a refresh. I know that there’s more lead magnets that we need, where people can download things to try to continue to enhance how we educate customers, and what they know about us, and make sure that we share our product knowledge, and use that to attract new customers. I think that the other big thing we really want to do is that we have this hybrid business. So customers that are not buying online, can’t log into the website and see their history. I would really like to invest in that.

Because I think the self-service model has to be there if they want it. I think that’s important. It has to be there. if they want it. Not all of them want it because, frankly, if someone is just issuing an RFQ and sending it, they don’t want to buy it line. But, if they’re not, then many do want to buy online. And so I think you have to give them the option. For our website, I think we have a lot of work to do, frankly. Offline, we just hired a new salesperson to help us go deeper within our existing customers. We talked with 1000 individual companies last year, half of them were new,

Aaron Sheehan: Oh, that’s good.

Robin Lieberman: Some of them have one or two things from us, and we’d like to help them with more things, if they’re open to that. We’d love to show people how we can help them, and the value we provide. And then, I think, another trend is we are a woman-owned business. And for companies with set-aside, that there still exist set-asides today. You know, I would like to leverage that, right now it’s not a big part of how we get customers. However, we do have some customers that’s important to, and we should be using, for example, Ariba through SAP. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that?

Aaron Sheehan: I am, yes.

Robin Lieberman: They’re doing a lot of solicitations. And so, we should be leveraging that. And we’re not doing any of that right now. So, I think, the two big things beyond enhancing, growing and developing our website are: having — through account management and sales — deeper relationships with our customers to find out other ways we can help them; and then, also, using whatever’s happening in the market, and how bigger companies are putting opportunities out there for us to, basically, engage with those opportunities when they’re the right thing for us, and when we can help.

Aaron Sheehan: It’s very [inaudible], and again, I’ll go back to a common enemy earlier. There are companies much larger than yours who are further behind in this. E-procurement is a really interesting place. Actually, we just did, a couple weeks ago, a webinar with Trading. We formally punch out to go, right? So they’re an e-procurement facilitator for companies that have eCommerce or ERPs, and they’re trying to get into Coupa and Ariba and all of those e-procurement systems. And I learned quite a bit from talking to them about the space.
Obviously, it’s been around for a long time, but it feels like there’s more adoption.

Robin Lieberman: I’m writing this down. I’m writing this down.

Aaron Sheehan: I will be… I’ll send you an email afterwards.

Robin Lieberman: Okay.

Aaron Sheehan: This is good. I’m glad we’re both getting something out of the interaction here. I’ll ask you, then, sort of, one last serious question, which is, what’s a piece of advice you would give younger Robin about this whole MF Supply thing? Is there… If you could go back in time and say, “You should do this, you should not do this, or you should do this differently,” what’s one sort of lesson learned that you wish you could tell your younger self?

Robin Lieberman: I just think I should have outsourced things faster and hired more resources faster and not done it myself. You know, I have a special secret sauce to curating products, but it would have been nice to have had more resources, take it down, so I could start closer to the end zone, instead of carrying the ball almost the whole way, with developing my website and other things. I think that is the biggest thing. I could have probably grown the company faster and had a bigger staff, more customers, etc. much faster, had I invested in other resources earlier. Because one thing that is a kind of core value of mine, I really think that everyone in my organization, we want people to be their best selves. And we want them to spend the most of their time doing the things that they’re the best at, that they like the best, that they’re better at than anyone else. And I don’t think I’ve done that as much as I could’ve.

Aaron Sheehan: I understand. That’s a very common, that’s a very common lesson learned from people in leadership, I found. I can relate to that as well. That’s good advice. For everybody who’s listening to this, that’s advice for you. Delegate more. Don’t do it all yourself, and give more people the opportunity to grow and bring them into your circle and be a part of the success story. The more people you have in your orbit, helping towards that common goal, the better the organization that you’re building, and the more resilient your organization will be. Because there’ll be more people who know how to do things. It doesn’t all stovepipe to one person sitting at the big desk. I really appreciate this. This was very good. I think I had one last serious question.

Robin Lieberman: Okay.

Aaron Sheehan: So, the non-serious question, and I ask all of the guests this, is name one piece of media, could be a book, you’ve read, a TV show you’ve watched, a podcast you’ve listened to, anything in the last few months that stood out to you. Not your favorite of all time, doesn’t have to be, just something that you heard it or you saw it or you read it and you’re like, “Oh, that was good. That was interesting.” Could be anything.

Robin Lieberman: I might be boring you, but this is the theme. I’m part of a mastermind group, and we meet. It’s really interesting. Eight business owners from all over the world, the Philippines, Australia, I learned a lot from them. However, we’re reading a book. We’re reading Jim Collins, “BE 2.0” together. I’m listening to it, and it reminded me of my own advice that I just gave my younger self, which is spend my time on the things that are going to have the highest ROI for the growth of my company, and I do not take that advice. So that is something that even just talking to you today, Aaron, we all should just really, I think, be mindful of that. I think it’s the best advice because we’re, I think many small, medium-sized businesses, we’re our own worst bottleneck. It just is the case, and I really need to take my own advice.

Aaron Sheehan: I absolutely hear that. No, it was good. Was that his first book?

Robin Lieberman: He redid it.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was Good to Great and the sequel? Yeah. But I have not read beyond Entrepreneurship. Yeah. Look, Robin, this has been a real pleasure. I think we’re going to have a follow-up conversation probably after this. It sounds like I’ve got some information to give you. But I really appreciate your time and sharing the story of your story and starting MF Supply. I think the lessons that you’ve learned, the path that you’ve gone down, you did it, frankly, before a lot of people in similar space have done it. And I think it’s really good advice for anyone that’s listening in the distribution space. If you’re a white manufacturer, if you’re a supplier, this is good advice for you to make the investment, do the work it. It will pay off and benefit your business in ways that you did not anticipate, and don’t forget to delegate along the way. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Please hit subscribe. You can find this, of course, on any channel where “find podcasts” can be found. Please check out mfsupply.com, is that it?

Robin Lieberman: M-F supply.com. Mother, Father – M-F.

Aaron Sheehan: Okay, got it. Perfect. All right, go to that website and buy fasteners, and if you don’t want to buy them, you can request a quote.

Robin Lieberman: There you go.

Aaron Sheehan: And then Robin will personally return your call. Thank you so much and have a great day. Thanks for listening.

Robin Lieberman: Thank you.