Had the pleasure of diving into an engaging interview with Alan Gormley, a thought leader in the e-commerce space. Here’s a quick rundown:
Ever felt overwhelmed walking into a store? Alan gets it.
Physical vs. online retail? The distinction’s becoming fuzzier.
Post-pandemic, the long-touted ‘omni-channel’ is now our reality.
Foreign ERS Talk podcast from temi temi is an international software development company that designs builds and delivers software for sustainable businesses and promising startups my name is Chris and today’s guest is someone who’s a real knack for entrepreneurship acquiring in-depth knowledge about AI e-commerce and Retail throughout his career so far
Alan Gormley welcome to the podcast how are you today I’m great Chris thanks very much it’s lovely to be here perfect so we’ve got some quick five questions that we always ask everyone the first one for you is what makes a good boss in your opinion everybody who works for me will disagree
With what I’m about to say but I think the main thing is get out of their way and I always say I had a great boss 30 years ago I work in in Croydon naturally and uh he said my job is to protect you from everyone above above you and
Protect them from you so I think that’s actually um summed it up very nicely for me stay out of the way but make sure everybody’s happy okay just put trust in them and let them do their job yeah yeah yeah find good people let them at us and
Try and stay out of the way as much as possible and let them let them do with the details uh and then it’s all down to trust and what do you do to unwind after a busy day I don’t unwind what I actually know what I love doing
Is kite surfing so kite surfing is my absolute passion and I live in Dublin just by sea so uh it’s great so when I do get a chance I’m like five minutes see and I just got crazy underwater and I have an extremely good time okay brilliant very extreme way to
Unwind but I like it um what did you and finally what did you want to be growing up that’s interesting that when you say that to me the first thing came into my head I want to be an astronaut I remember wanting to be an astronaut and
Now the idea of getting into something that has been engineered by somebody I don’t know no way would I ever do it but uh yeah uh but that was always my passion and I still watch every space thing that’s thrown at me I love it I go
Through Netflix for anything do the moon or whatever else anytime soon then and uh no I don’t think so no I don’t think so but I do recommend 13 minutes to the Moon as one of the best podcasts ever made if you haven’t um listen to it
Okay I’ll check that what’s that about that it’s just it’s talking about um yeah it’s basically talking about the last 13 minutes before they first landed on the moon and it’s just the geekiest thing you’ve ever come across in your life but uh it’s grateful intriguing all right I love a good podcast
So just to you know start things off have you always been interested in the world of business is that something that you you knew from the age of 16 when you stopped thinking about you know whatever just being a kid and so on did you think about what a business or did um
No not really I actually started out in the technology side so everything for me was technology I did computer systems at College uh back in the day I was technical for the first more or less 10 years of my career and then I um started working for a software vendor and I got
Much more into the business side of it and I got it took me a while but I got very interested in that because I started to see that the application was um the application was where actually most of the problems were rather than the technology it was how people
Received the applications and how they were implemented and um I think I got I kind of then went through a thing over a few years where I started to realize that uh there were things going through my head that could make it better and you
Can only do that if you want to set up a business it’s very difficult to do that in an existing business so yes it was a fairly gradual thing for me um coming from the technical side and it’s kind of interesting because uh my co-founder was saying he has some
Business experience so we’re both very rounded but I think having both sides is kind of interesting and so that you know I think it’s really interesting that you were involved in uh computers from what technology let’s say because because that was during the 90s right and I feel like
Even very recently up to you know very 10 years ago and so on I never really had the sort of advice from anyone that was okay go into computers you know that’s a good thing to do so how did you did you go into that like what where was
That coming from just you naturally found yourself in it or computer well it’s always interesting yeah it’s just always interested in in computers um and um to the college and then I really I loved it absolutely loved it um and I think Computing is really interesting because when you do
Computing you learn to break problems down into the constituent Parts everything’s about taking big problems and making them into small problems it’s a very interesting way of thinking and you start to view the world that way and you get quite Analytical in the way you view the world um
So yeah so that’s kind of how I got into it and I was green screen days and all that sort of stuff I’m probably the last of the people who’ve not ever going to interview who will talk about green screens but they still do exist um so yeah it’s kind of there just
Before it starts to get really exciting like when you think about Windows 95 and stuff like that everybody suddenly started having a computer but um yeah it was interesting times and yeah everything I could imagine yes in terms of um because you study the University of Limerick right and you
Know during during that time I’m just interested because again like you said it’s it’s stuff that was you know at the viewer you were not at the Forefront but you know in the early stages of um computers and technology and so on in that sense yeah is there anything you
Learned during that time during those studies that you still use today or is it everything moved on oh yeah yeah no no no no everything is the same nothing’s changed so what’s really interesting for me and sorry this is I’ve got to geek out for a second
What’s really interesting for me is that at the end of the day it’s still a raw machine underneath the covers and everything has to work on top of that wrong machine so some of the basics that you learn every day you see people make mistakes around it and so I’ve I’ve
Talked to people who’ve been programming for years and they don’t know the difference between main memory and and swapping out to disk which that makes sense to you it makes sense to you if it doesn’t make sense to you there’s a big difference and it causes issues if you
Don’t understand those things and how people view the machine and all that good stuff so that’s Basics is still there but everything else has changed the fact that it’s cloudy and you can scale like you know we used to have to build machine you you bought a machine and then
That was it yeah for the next two years if you needed more capacity tough you didn’t get it uh whereas now you’re just up and down whenever you want so the basics are the same but at the same time um uh there’s an awful lot of new stuff
And a lot of stuff that’s taken care of so one of the things that’s really interesting for me though that happened 10 or 15 years ago whenever it happened was when apps came along on the phone and the and everything okay apps were great because you suddenly had this
Ecosystem and you could do everything on your floor brilliant but what really was interesting is it simplified every other application so if you take something like slack today slack is a very very simple application if that was built in the 90s I can guarantee you would be bloated to
A point of death like you could just wouldn’t be able to use it because it was at feature after feature so I think we’ve come through an evolution where it was like you got to simplify everything because now this is for everyone and also it has to work at a phone so I
Think we’ve made huge progress been by being forced to simplify and I think that’s made its way into other applications as well so I always when I started chat box I always thought of it as our jobs to make complex simple um and that was a huge pivot point for
Me before that it was the opposite it was some of these some of the business systems were just difficult to use not there’s no way I think there are there’s definitely some still some apps or some things for me who’s you know a novice in this area
Um some of them are quite difficult to use so it’s interesting you know what you’re doing with shopbox and I suppose we’ll come on to that later um just want to jump into your your first job then so you were a Financial Solutions developer in Slough in the UK
So how did this come about the jump I was the world’s worst graduate job Seeker because I went to one of the most beautiful cities in the world which I was in last week for the first time in about 20 years Edinburgh such a beautiful city
And I couldn’t find a job because I was doing all the wrong things even though there were plenty of jobs there and but I found a job in a company in Slough company at the time was called autofile and they were um they were bought by another company
But they were the largest privately owned software company in the UK at the time I’m doing travel software for tour operators and I was on the financial um side of it but uh I loved it it was a fantastic job because they threw you in the deep end
They only had a deep end and I really I’m a big fan of that um you know it was really our entire team was formed on the day all of us joined but we took over another system we had to learn it as fast as possible
And get at work and we were all graduates I was brilliant place to learn um and they they just they expected us to work very hard so we worked ridiculous hours but we did an awful lot of fun doing it um so it’s a great place as a first job
Because you really learned every aspect and you were given a lot of responsibility very early in your life which is great fun are you someone who are you someone who values then um practical sort of experience over Theory I like both I think you so the
One of the things we mentioned at Jasper University earlier on cool things for me is if you don’t know the basics you never get great you got to know the basics and that’s the same in everything in life like you look at Great musicians they’re great musicians because practice forever
Um and then it becomes natural to them I think it’s the same thing in what we do you you have to practice practice because Terry only takes you so far and you only learn and you only you only become malleable and can know how to flex properly when you’ve been through it
Many times before um and we all know like we’ve all you know gone in for the first job interview and we’ve made we we think we know what we’re saying and you just stumble in the first one and then by the third one you’re starting to see the flow come
Through and when the flow come through comes through suddenly you you’re starting uh to hit a different a different level so I think everything’s about practice there’s a great um I can’t remember the name of the theory but it says 10 of learning is classroom
20 is mentoring and 70 is practice and I think that’s that’s probably a good balance so as as you’re now um you know heading a business yourself is there any parallels that you see with your first few months or years in that role is anything you you see when you have
The new recruits come do you sort of help them in any way to filter them into the company or do you give them the same experience that okay here’s this this project it might be a bit hard but you know good luck is it something you still
Do or or has it changed your style yeah not quite good look but but more at that end more at the end of we’re bringing in people who are intelligent people they can figure stuff out themselves they’re going to make the odd mistake that’s fine um
Put them side by side with somebody but give them responsibility very quickly um I think I think that works I think people people take to that very well and I think the big difficulty you have as uh we have as we’re growing and I think every company
Has this is you’re so Hands-On on everything at the start that when you bring people in to do it you have to figure out how far back you need to step from it uh that’s always difficulty and and that’s something that we’re constantly having to reassess is you
Know am I am I too involved here maybe I should never be turning up for this stuff maybe I should only be called in when there’s a a particular decision that needs to be made so um yeah but you know we the first customer success person we brought in
The first Friday they were on customer calls we said I have never been on customer calls on First Friday I said how did it feel he said pretty good went great let’s do that then so you know it’s um I think there isn’t a lot of induction needed her product the whole
Part of our product is it’s very simple as most a lot of products are these days but also the at the back end is hard front end is simple but um everybody is fitting into a well-defined structure you know people we bring in customer sex that they know what customer success is
About sdrs know what sdrs are our sdrs are there to do and that’s the skill that breaks so we don’t expect to mollycodile them too much so just going back to before your your next step which was you went from Slough uh to London which um not too far but I would definitely
Say it’s an upgrade um also being from the the southwest side London I think is uh very nice place to live compared to Slough but yeah what did you so you were a senior data warehouse developer what did this role involve was it very different from
The previous one oh yeah yeah so that’s really interesting I am I went from an application developer into Data warehousing and I had a great guy I was working for Mark Mark I mean he’s already implemented two or three warehouses and there weren’t many of them around in those days like there was
It was really at the starting of very large companies had them but most companies weren’t touching them and they were just starting to get interested and Mark said something that worked really well for me he said I’m about to break every rule that you’ve been brought up
On so just take the pain for three months so don’t question everything because we get no work done because everything you’ve learned is wrong in this new world so just accept do and in three months time we’ll sit down and then we’ll see where we are about two
And two months saying I was like I’m starting to get it I understand exactly why you’re doing some of what you’re doing but just that that thing of just trust me I’m an expert I’ve done it three times trust me and watch and learn and it’s Gonna Hurt You’re Gonna Want to
Change things that I do but don’t just just pay attention for a little while and then you’ll become very good at what you do and it was great because we did literally you in warehousing everything that’s important in application development is less important in data warehousing and the things that you
Don’t think about very much over here become fundamentally important here to make it really easy to use so it was a great it was a really uh um it was working for a really good person who really knew how to set the line and and explain to the team what was going on
Yeah in that sense just in terms of you know get having that sort of Mentor let’s say or someone who’s um you know who has been involved in the business and so give you some advice I just wanted in general is there is there any um CEO or co-founder or entrepreneur that
You would like to swap for a day with just to kind of learn something new or experience a new industry just curious whether there’s anyone that you sort of admire or look up to I there’s loads of people like constantly sucking in information from everywhere but I tell
You one that I find fascinating is Salesforce I think is a fascinating company and there’s a couple of reasons number one Salesforce took on siebel who most people won’t remember anymore but siebel was big and heavy uh it was you know two-year development to get the dancing working I didn’t like
It but just in case anybody had said the ambiguity there uh is extremely expensive and Salesforce realized that they couldn’t go after the big siebel installation what they could do is they could go after the mid-tier and really own it and then at some point other
First people I really saw do this well at some point bigger companies went why are we paying 50 million for something we can buy for five million well it’s not good enough said well is it not because there’s people over here who are running it so maybe we should consider
It so certainly they started to move up the value Chain by proving themselves and just gradually chipping away and suddenly and you can see that with people like Shopify now Shopify are starting to move up the into much larger retailers uh because they’ve proven themselves at a certain level and end up
Managed so I think that’s a really really interesting one the other reason I really like and sales forces most people don’t remember this but Salesforce are the people who introduce the concept of cloud they were the first people who talked about no software installed on your premises you just switch it on
Through a browser everyone was talking about it but they were the first ones who really did it I’m sure there was somebody smaller who really who did it but Salesforce were the first people I saw did it and I thought that’s a very brave thing that was a very brave thing
To do back in the day so I’m very I really admire um where they’ve come from um now they’re a big company and they have all the usual backers that comes with but uh but I think they came from a really interesting place but there’s loads of companies out there that are
Are doing interesting stuff we’re we’re um we’re very active in uh working with other technology companies so um there’s guys out here sitting behind me um uh store hero who do some really cool stuff around really understanding profitability of e-commerce because people work with in the UK do things
Like you know it’s a company called Penny Black who do things like um they do personalization of the parcel that gets delivered and it’s really really it’s really interesting the way they’ve approached the problem so I think there’s so much interesting stuff happening in our industry right now
We’re constantly talking to everyone and trying to figure out what everyone’s doing because we all fit very well together it’s a great place to be yeah Salesforce if you want to take the those ones the other one I always got back to is Netflix because Netflix have reinvented themselves three types now
And they’ve knocked out of the ballpark every time so you can’t really argue against somebody who’s really had to do that multiple times and just completely owned the U industry for years before anybody could start to catch up yeah I think that was looking back yeah Netflix for me was
Big move I didn’t even you know I was still I think renting DVDs from my local shop and then this now almost Netflix and I was like oh great you can stream online you know but now they start they started from DVDs yeah that’s true yeah they were delivered with their posting
Right there yeah yeah so they invented that industry then they said okay we’re gonna move everything online and being brave enough to be able to trash your own business model knowing that there was a better one coming down the line and that’s cheery stuff but uh yeah talking talking of giant companies your
Your next step was with SAS yeah you moved back to Ireland and you joined SAS so I’m just curious what was it like going to a company with a global reach you know how did you enjoy working for such a big company um loved it great company to work for
Their technology was light years ahead of everybody else uh when it came when it came to relay really serious stuff um not all the technology but with hundreds of products and really really inventive company really wanted to try something different every time but one thing that they were very good at was
They had a local presence in every country so even from I think the smallest country in Europe is Latvia at the time our Estonia sorry Estonia is 1.4 million people they still had an office in Estonia rather than run it out of Finland or whatever and I really admired
That the fact that they put people on the ground the other thing they did as an American company which is quite Brave is they set up the European headquarters in Germany because they they didn’t want to become an english-speak country company worldwide even though we were but they wanted local culture so they
Said if if we set up in the UK it’s going to be more difficult for the Italians and the French and the Spanish and whatever else because if we set it up in Germany kind of everybody’s on a More Level Playing Field so there were really interesting company from that
Perspective and um yeah I really enjoyed working there it was a very challenging place to work but it was it was really interesting learned an awful lot as I say the tech was some of the tech was just astounding and with light years ahead of everybody else I imagine this well
Based on my research of SAS this is where you became aware of AI and consumers and you started to bridge uh the two together right yeah so I ran initiative across Europe called uh we call it customer intelligence setting and we might have had another name for
It before that basically it was about everything to do with understanding customers through data and then doing things like marketing automation so stuff we’re still talking about doing better today like um one-to-one email marketing and one-to-one text marketing and all that sort of stuff I was responsible for all of that and
Um there were that was one of the kind of five major areas there’s lots of things like fraud and credit scoring and and I moved on but um the yeah it was a really interesting time because it was still we were still working out an awful
Lot of what would work and what wouldn’t work and um the some of the stuff that’s we were working on people are still struggling with today so I’m still talking to people about one-to-one email and as I say to people can’t believe I’m still in this conversation 25 years later can we
Not move on to something else but with with in that moment were you using AI to analyze the behavior of consumers so we were doing we were doing a lot of predictive um many different aspects to AI so everything from Predictive Analytics trying to figure out what is the next
Thing for a customer to who’s likely to do to things like forecasting where you take time series data and say can we can we predict how much of something we’ll sell this week so we can make sure we have enough of them so um things like price optimization so you
Got AI That’s trying to figure out where how how far you can stretch price in either direction um when to do markdowns like just everything to do with how you take data and allow it to optimize um your processes um yeah so it’s very very wide field and
Was it was it because going back also to like your studies and that kind of thing I imagine when you told people you’re gonna work in Tech they were a little bit skeptical because it wasn’t a thing and I imagine the same with AI when you were using it 10 years ago
Because it’s only something that’s become popular the last well for the for the average Joe the last year I would say that people know about it so yeah you mentioned it was it hard to be like okay well we’re not sure about that we prefer experience from humans uh that
Was a huge uphill battle so I would say like you know I’ll be 23 years in AI 20 very very lonely years and now three years everyone’s come to the party and you’re all welcome by the way because we was very lonely um yeah it was tough because people don’t trust the machine
And it but it’s the same as anything but then people start getting used to it and it’s like well it seems to be making good decisions so why wouldn’t we allow it to do more so I think um and there’s always that thing of um what I know better but I think the
Thing that we’ve probably come to within AI especially in the last year is the realization that actually this is a tool that helps people and it takes away the George work and it makes it allows us to scale stuff that’s very very difficult to scale otherwise rather than I don’t
See it as it’s gonna do what people do at the same level I think we’ll just move on to other stuff so um yeah and I think that’s always been the case for AI like we always did marketing you know we always try to help customers but you can’t do it at scale
When you don’t have something that can follow a customer at scale and and really help them and now we can so we can it’s ironic I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and it’s only cards away has got up on stage said you know
What we do with AI is we bring the human element back to e-commerce well when yeah e-commerce has been the same experience for everyone it’s like a piece of what it never changed for 25 years every time you turned up to the same store it was exactly the same no
Matter what you told it about yourself whereas now we can actually act the way a human does in a store so the irony is that AI is bringing Humanity to e-commerce I’m not sure everyone will agree but you try this yeah yeah I think that’s what it’s allowing people to like
If you think about it forgetting about retelling where I work but even if you think about um a lot of public sector an awful lot of is so rule-based everyone gets treated the same and everyone shouldn’t be treated the same because every like everybody’s a bit different in this different
Circumstances and and some of the humanity gets lost because we apply rules and actually if you take some of the rules out we can bring some of the humanity back and say there’s a bit of subtlety here there are type people who need more time other people who need less time
Um and and if we can work that out automatically it becomes much easier to treat people in a nicer way you know so I see it working across the board now well yeah that sort of leads me into shot box because what I saw on the website it says redefining the online
Shopping experience so I think you’re kind of just touching on that in terms of you know changing yeah making it more personal but are there any other things that’s changing or maybe you can elaborate a bit more yeah well I’d I’d give you some of the thinking we put
Into it so when I when I started looking at the whole area this is way back when I was still in SAS what I realized was that we’ve been doing personalization for a long time and none of it really works none of it really doesn’t it kind
Of does but it does it too late it’s it’s nearly like you you walked around a shop for 25 minutes and then you get to the till and they start screaming things at you to try and get more stuff into your basket and go okay that’s not
Really what this is meant to be about that’s not an experience or it’s a pretty bad experience so looked at and went there’s some fundamentals here that people aren’t thinking about we need to start thinking about some of the fundamentals and the First Fundamental business when somebody walks into your
Store for the first time you should make it really easy for them to stay in there and actually we don’t we make it really hard for them to stay in there because we land them into one place and we give them nowhere to go from there you would
Never do that in a physical store so we actually spend more time thinking about physical stores and e-commerce because I think physical retail works because we spent 150 years figuring it out but when we moved online we decided as long as you can show the product that’s fine
They will buy but the fact of the matter is people then become transactional they’re never they never see anything that excites them they never see anything that they stumble across that they wouldn’t have thought about before and they suddenly decide to buy okay which you do all the time when you’re in
In a High Street store so we looked at and said okay so we need to start changing the shopping experience enough that it doesn’t get in people’s way it’s not too much that it gets in people’s way but enough that it starts to help them through the shopping journey in a
Different way where they feel much more comfortable it was really interesting there’s one one of our um reach each other’s kid Locker I was just showing somebody a demo of it on um the uh about three weeks ago and um he was the first person that came
Across where he said actually I’m on that that side all the time oh great okay so what do you think aside he said I love kid lock so why so because I know there’s always stuff there for me there’s always something there and then okay so they were taking 25 000 products
And we’re always finding stuff for you okay so we’re always leading you on to other stuff you weren’t thinking about so that’s the experience he actually said it’s nice to be there so nice to me is a really good word when you’re shopping because when I feel good about
It I’m going to keep doing it so that’s kind of the difference we wanted to bring in there’s too much Hard Sell in retail um in e-commerce and we wanted to bring that subtlety back so we’ve introduced elements that just make it more of a service thing for customers and that’s
Where we see the value is when you help customers they buy more stuff off you it’s really that simple that’s why we have shop assistant yeah I think this is very true I you know there’s some some websites I’ve been on where it’s just so dense with products and I don’t really
Know what I’m looking for I’m just kind of browsing but I don’t know where to start should I start with the color of the T-shirt or the the type of clothing or whatever it could be so yeah definitely be enhanced for sure um yeah like if you think about it
Um if you think about it at a typical store it’s design a physical store it’s designed that you can see a lot of things very very quickly and you can get inspired a little bit you can get drawn in and often say to retailers who knows what product customer wants and they go
Ah I guess this is a trick question it’s the customer isn’t it no nine times out of ten we still don’t know what we want okay most shopping we’re actually looking we’re just generally looking for stuff like a shopping experience can stop start with somebody saying that’s
Been a really crappy week I’m going to spend 100 quid and make myself feel better on what I have no idea but I’ve got to walk around on Friday evening go to base there’s nothing wrong with that shopping experience but but Rich As Old they only came in because they know they
Want something no you’re not you’re not really thinking about the way physical retailers think about it I think that’s changing e-commerce retailers are thinking about that much more but I think the the standard approach has been stacking high and hope they find it uh but I think we’re definitely moving away
From that thank God have you have you noticed a huge change or when when did you notice a huge change in consumer habits and was it globally or was it something you just saw when you were in the UK or in Ireland what what did you notice with behavior of consumers maybe
On the High Street versus e-commerce um I think look the obvious one is covered covert changed everything and I think the thing for me about code is everyone came out of covert without any channel so we’ve been talking about Omni channel for 20 years but everything came
Out of covert going actually it’s our it’s Omni Channel and one of the things I started to say to retailers was your physical store is your competitive Advantage because the online guys can’t do that so what but the trick is not to force everyone into physical storage to
Combine the two things really well um but I think I think the UK is really interesting because it’s the by far the largest e-commerce um Market in Europe and it’s it’s ahead of the rest it is definitely ahead of the rest you can see it when you’re on
The ground in the UK see the way um stores are set up and the behavior of the e-commerce people is a bit different to everybody else they’re they’re always looking for the next thing um so but I think that’s been happening a long time in the UK I think the UK has
Naturally been like that but but definitely since covet the whole thing has changed it does mean it’s a it’s a lot less predictable right now than than it has been you know people who didn’t double down properly in e-commerce are feeling the effects of that people who
Double Down are seem to be doing pretty well but a lot of people put their toe in the water over covered because they had no choice but they didn’t really commit it you can see them retrenching a little bit you think the standards are higher now in terms of like say
Experiences and that kind of thing because of the pandemic people just sat at home so they expect more from you know shopping online or even in physical shops as well yeah absolutely and look at the the the thing for me is delivery sorts though next day delivery
Is normal same day delivery is fairly common um not always relevant like we talked to people where they said actually same day delivery drives no increase at all in sales and it’s it’s a very expensive thing to do the and also we’re used for delivery guy turning up we’re used to
The UPS guy the UPS guy used to turn up once every two weeks for most of us but now he’s turning up every day so we’re used to that cycle of things the um yeah the quality has definitely gone up but that’s what we said like one of
The things that you got to be very careful about in e-commerce is your store is kind of the only place you want you a lot of people you want to sell on marketplaces because you want to generate an audience but it’s very difficult to really take ownership of a Marketplace because
You’re completing it all the time whereas once you get somebody inside your store you can own them own that experience for them so um I think a lot of retailers are coming around to that that view of the world now the other thing that I’ve seen hugely in the last
12 18 months is Big focus on trying to grow existing customers rather than just spend more money acquiring customers and I think that’s probably down to the well it is down to the cost of Google um it’s that simple it’s just the acquisition costs on new customers is so high
Um so that’s why I’m having the email conversation again 25 years later is people are really focused on just try and keep customers engaged because if they buy a second time the the economics change very quickly based on you know Google changing their prices and that kind of thing have more businesses
Online gone down the route of social media and I know you know people like Gary vaynerchuk are very yeah sort of big and promoting so is that something that’s also spread because he’s in the base in the US so I imagine they’re at the Forefront of this but is this something that’s sort
Of very very common now in the UK and in Europe oh yeah but I think it’s just part of the mix now like I I I don’t again I don’t see it as e-commerce versus social media versus physical I just think it’s all part of the mix and you’ve got to be
Um you got to be active everywhere um and look we’ve seen the extreme rise of tick tock I’m sure to be somebody else in two years time you might as well predict that because you’re probably gonna be right I have no idea what they’ll be
Um but um yeah I think it’s just all parts of the mix and I think it’s a good part of the mix because it allows you to keep people it allows you to keep in front of your audience when they’re not ready to buy yeah and I think that’s a difficult trick
Um like at any one time there’s a large percentage of of your customers are not actually interested in buying anything off you but you got to keep them there because scenes are going to change and they’ll come back I mean to be ready to buy and you’ve got
To be there so I think it’s really important to have all aspects um and to link them on yeah all right and this final question um what would you say to someone who wants to have a similar career as yours apart from don’t is the obvious answer there
Um I think the thing for me is um I quite like trying stuff I haven’t done before and being a bit scared so um without going crazy so I I think just throwing yourself into something that you have no knowledge of is very very difficult but I think always just always
Trying to do something a bit different so I often make a decision to do something and then worry about the consequences and go oh my God I can’t believe I just committed to that what I’ve done in front of people I have no choice so I have to do it so
Um that’s something that I’ve I’ve kind of done all the time and I just kind of like being slightly uncomfortable all the time which once you get used to it is quite good fun and now and then you need a break from it but I think it
Allows you to try loads of stuff it allows you to just try your hand at something because you have no choice and then you bring somebody in who actually knows what they’re doing who’s going to do a much better job that you’re ever going to do but you could at least have
The conversation because you’ve got some of the scars um and probably more of this car isn’t that person has because you don’t know what you’re doing but um but yeah like it’s you know the first time you have to call call the first time you have to
Stand up in front of 200 people the first time you have to just go into a room as a complete stranger and start shaking hands these are all really hard things to do none of us come doesn’t come naturally to any of us but when you
Do it you get a great thrill out of it you start to you start to get quite good at it okay so some kind of calculated risk not any risk but some sort of uh yeah research yeah just push you push the envelope a little bit all the time
She’s always slightly uncomfortable yeah nice well uh thank you very much for today Anna thanks for joining us and it’s been uh thoroughly interesting all the best with uh shopbox and um have a good day thanks very much Chris I really enjoyed it