The Power of Relationships in Innovation

Margaret Kelsey (00:08)

Welcome to the Kodaris Community Show with your hosts, Tony and Margaret and the occasional friends stopping by. This is the podcast where we explore how innovation and technology is reshaping distribution and the supply chain as a whole. Discover how technology is making companies more efficient and profitable, making their customers happier, and is paving the way for our future. Join us for insights from industry experts, interviews with innovators, and actionable ideas to stay ahead in our rapidly evolving world.

Today, we're joined by Munawar Quraishi, President of Safety Express. Here's our conversation.

Margaret (00:51)

So we'll start from the beginning. How do you two know each other?

Munawar Quraishi (00:55)

Do you want me to start, Tony? Do you want to start? Yeah, think we met, I want to say somewhere around 2020, maybe 2019-ish. I think we had already had our ERP approved, our whole kind of digital journey into the cloud approved at HD Supply.

Tony Zakula (00:57)

No, you go ahead. Yeah.

Munawar Quraishi (01:17)

And we were struggling at that time. I think we knew that the ERP was going to be an easy transition for us, but we had a legacy e-commerce platform. And it was like, we were on the Infor storefront and it was like… a very old version of it. In order for us to go to the new ERP we had to take kind of a couple of steps but we were looking at–and for the life of me can't remember the name of the e-commerce tools that they had sold us–and just nothing was going to work for us. It was a B2C tool and it just everything was saying you got to stop and figure this out. We met a couple of guys, who kind of put us onto a solution that they had and then he introduced us to Tony and right there I think the moment that I'm gonna say it's like love at first sight. We've had a, what do they call that–a bromance–for a long time.

Margaret (02:19)

But you're not not saying it.

Tony Zakula (02:21)

You

Yeah.

Munawar Quraishi (02:27)

But I think like, that conversation was, we had a problem and Tony's solution at Kodaris had been solving what we needed for a long time with GMS. And I would be like, hey, so we need this, this, and this. Yeah, we do that. Okay, well, what about this, the future state? Yeah, we do that. We can do that. We can do that.

And it was like... the thing I think that really got me was when he said, hey, we're the company that takes what you want and builds it throughout our platform for every customer to have, because we know that we're going to learn from what's going on in the field and be able to apply it. And so for me, that conversation was really about not, hey, we're to do everything for everyone everywhere. It was, we understand, you understand what you do really, really well. And we want to take that learning and apply it, but also take a level of technology experience that we have at Kodaris and apply it and allow you to see it in a way that you don't typically think to see it.

And so I really like the idea of being able to put the right customizations in front of us and for our customer the way our customers want to see it and taking both sides of the equation–kind of the engineering side and the customer side–and be able to apply them together. Not just one side, hey we do it this way, that's it, this is what you're going to get. It was really a good conversation and I think that for me was what made this relationship really good. We were really conversing about building a ship that gets us to where we need to get to as opposed to, hey we're going to build a ship for you, just get on and go.

Tony Zakula (04:20)

Yeah, I think being introduced early on, I think the first thing that I saw: one, I'm dreaming the future. I love to work with people who are innovative, thinking about the future as I recommend and say, 'Hey, what if we did it this way?' Rather than what you're asking me. Lots of times people are not open to that.

And let's face it. You get into a potential sale with a big brand name and lots of times there's RFP people are lining things up feature to feature instead of having a conversation about we're deciding the future. I think even for Kodaris, we didn't necessarily do business with everyone. And I turned some people off early on because I said, 'why would you do it that way?' And this goes back to what we talked about.

You know, this is the future, this is the way it's going. I think one, just the innovation and the big picture thinking whenever and I, yes, since day one kind of hit it off really well that it's big picture innovation. It's where we're going, not where we are today or the capabilities we have today.

And then, you know, saying, he said something very unique to me, which I knew drove me, you know, some companies will sell you something and then you get into it and then you're kind of let down that, well, you believe the sales and marketing and now wasn't a delivery. I think for, Munawar made a comment to me about, I do business based on relationship. I think it was a second or third conversation. You have to have the feature set, but the relationship is everything for me to do business.

And I think that, you know, to Kodaris employees, that drives us even more to deliver, please the customer. Not that we don't deliver, but it's when somebody is betting their future on us, which we feel every customer is. To me personally, and to our team, it becomes, we can't let them down. From hell or high water, we can't let them down. And, and that was something that was exciting to me to partner with somebody who understood that had had that vision.

Munawar Quraishi (06:39)

Yeah. You know, it's funny, not a lot of your customers get to go to your, I'm gonna call your customer counsel, ARIS. But if you are fortunate enough to see what happens there, you see like, this isn't just like Tony just saying a bunch of words for a podcast that he's trying to sell to everybody.

This is not it's not like that. This is like truly authentic like that's and I think for me that's what was the big deal was that it wasn't just words, like every word you say I actually can see in every conversation and every action that you and the organization takes. And I think that's kind of the big difference between what you do today and what your organization is doing compared to what we see in the marketplace, where it's just like a bunch of sales speak and you know and then the action might be a little different or modified from that so.

Margaret (07:45)

I appreciate you leaving marketing out of that, that time. Tony isn't so kind to me. He lumps me in with marketing and sales speak.

Tony Zakula (07:48)

Yeah, well, that's why Margaret’s number three or four marketer, but she's going to last. I have full confidence she's going to last.

Margaret (08:00)

And I have that recorded now, which is perfect for me.

But it really sounds like this type of partnership does not come around. Tony, were saying not even every customer can be this kind of partner. So both of you, what do you think it is that makes a partnership actually work?

Because it feels like there is–I will admit to it–in the marketplace, there's a lot of people that will refer to customers as partners and talk about collaboration and caring about, you know, even your customers' customers' needs and building that first. But what is underneath that in terms of actions or in terms of values that actually can stand up an effective partnership?

Munawar Quraishi (08:55)

Yeah, I think from my perspective, really clear expectations. And it's not even like, you do this, we do this, it's a legal agreement.

No, it's like, hey, we agree, we're not gonna lie to each other. If I'm BSing myself, you be honest with me and you tell me, you know what? You're not telling yourself, you don't look nice in that shirt, Munawar, that's not your color. You know what I mean?

It literally has to be like that because there's so many things, I have so many wants in what I wanna see and all that stuff. But reality today, and reality 10 years from now are two different things and I get that. I need reality today that can build into that. And I think not, you know, that, that, hey, look, that's the BS meter's going off. And I think Tony would say like, okay, like you can do that, but, and not let us go on a tangent that's going to take us way off somewhere else, according to what we agreed to, scope creep, all that stuff.

And I think that to me is super, super important through the process, clear expectations. And I think I’ve got our values behind me. I think having very similar values around integrity, ethics, teamwork, collaborate, all those things have to really line up. In our organization we call them our four pillars. We took these nine and we broke them down into four pillars: do the right thing, build strong relationships, make evidence-based decisions, and grow every day.

And so for me, if those four things align, and that's kind of how I look at my relationships, are based off that. If someone is going to apply those things to me when we speak and have conversations so that I am not going to put myself, or I can reduce the risk of every decision I make so I can keep moving forward, is I think what was really important from my perspective.

Tony Zakula (11:10)

Yeah, I hear so many stories or things. I say the first one, Munawar and I spoke together at an Infor event. I remember we spoke about projects, project management, doing a project together. And I remember a lady from the audience asking, well, what do you tell your customers when the technology won't work because they have bad data?

Like, how do you handle working through that with the customer? And I looked at Munawar and said, 'How else would you handle it? I tell him they have crappy data. They need to fix it.' I don't understand what the question is. [laughs]

Margaret (11:47)

I could see you getting confused at that. You're like, what's the question? How do you tell him? I guess I would do it probably over a zoom call, but like…

Tony Zakula (11:58)

So, you know, and I think one other example is, I have this rule, if a customer asks me to do something that I think is dumb. They're going to have to email, put it in writing. They have to tell me three times and put it in writing so that I have something to point back to, because when it doesn't work and they paid for it, they're going to be unhappy.

And then I'm going to be like, you forced me to do this, right? Doesn't happen often. It has happened once or twice, but I think that goes back to, just the fact of being honest if I don't think that's right. We should be very honest about expectations and about what's going to happen if we do this. If I come with a technology idea and Munawar says that will never work in business and here's why. That's education for us, innovation.

OK, I get it, let's pivot. What if we did it this way? Right. Would that make sense? Because if you're going to be partners for the long-term in relationships, to Munawar’s point, he could have worn a nicer shirt today, but he didn’t. So if I tell them that, then next time we'll get a better result. But if we're constantly making each other better in that partnership, then then we're going to be together for the long-term.

And I used to use the term, you know, our customers become like family to us. And you can say that, but when you've been together for 10 years with my team, we get frustrated sometimes with customers. I always say, not everybody loves their family all the time, but we all get along. Nobody's going anywhere. So let's work through it. Let's come, come to terms with it. Let's talk through it. But I think that goes to the power of a relationship.

It's not a vendor customer. Our businesses are tied together. We're working through this. We're delivering the future. It's not always going to be perfect. We're going to make mistakes and in our shared values, it's, own your mistakes, make it right. It's just just what you need to do because nobody's going to be perfect forever, especially in technology. It's not going to happen.

Munawar Quraishi (14:26)

You know, one thought that just came to my head is that, if you are truly invested in my success, you will tell me the truth. I don't have to take it. I don't have to agree with it. It's just an opinion. Like, hey, you know, my shirt's ugly. It's an opinion. I like it. Thank you.

But it's a great example, because hey, he has very different style than I do. Even if it's a little different. But the point is, it's an opinion. I don't have to agree, but it's not personal. My ego says it's personal.

Like the bad data example, you have bad data, okay, like I didn't do it. Someone else did it, that's fine, let's fix the data. The sooner I get over my feelings, the faster the data gets fixed, the faster it's good information going in. So, your point's spot on. Like, tell me I got a booger in my nose, please. I don't want to walk around with that all day.

Margaret (15:23)

Yeah. And do you think it's–this might be a kind of a side quest that we go on that we don't need to go too far down–but do you think it's this kind of like, there's so many people pleasers out there, or do you think people need to do the sales and marketing dance to actually get, to grow their business and do the fluff and promise the world and not to live one level deeper? Why do you think that everyone doesn't operate with that level of candor?

Tony Zakula (15:54)

I'm going to take that one first, because I think it's partially, and we never know this with his business, but in the tech industry, it's how much value are we going to extract from our customers? Like if we're delivering value, how much value are we going to extract? How much can we hit for sales this quarter? What do we need to do?

Because look, we all are businesses, so we need money and profit. But are we driving that money and profit by extracting more or providing more value? And I tell my team all the time, and look, this concept's not Tony, it’s Jeff Bezos. This is hugely successful businesses. Deliver value to the customer and they'll continue to come back. You'll get more wallet share.

When your focus is on delivering value, and making that value right, and increasing that value, customers will buy more from you. Right? So I think it's the wrong focus in a lot of the tech industry, VC focused companies, private equity. It's all about the investors, not about the customers.

So when you have that center of gravity that everything's about the customer–that doesn't mean you can't have investment–but as a leader, if you're most concerned about the customers, then your team is going to be most concerned. Your metrics are around that. Everything's about the customer. Your values are going to be aligned with the customer because they always want more value for their money, right?

Munawar Quraishi (17:38)

Yeah, you know, I think my, I'm gonna say my expertise is actually around leadership and people development. And so I kind of always think about this, going back to that. And that's like, if I'm coaching somebody, my job is to give them feedback to make them become better.

Never in anyone's history, even as parents, we don't give our kids heck because we want them to be worse and make them feel bad. We give them heck because we want them to be better. We don't yell at them and that's probably the best way to do it because we think, I'm frustrated, all that stuff.

And I'll tell you a funny story about that that kind of drove this lesson for me. So my son was like 12 years old. This is kind of the beginning of COVID. I can't even remember what he did. And I got really upset with him and I yelled at him. My guy was like, I lost it. And I said, 'go up to your

room, I don't want to see you, don't come back down.' And he went up and I think two hours later he comes back down and he says, you know dad, when you yell at me, I stop listening. And so the point there was, I'm going to coach him and I lost the effectiveness of the coaching.

And so I use that extreme example in this because I think when we were kids, this is what happened. Our parents got mad at us. They hurt our feelings. They were giving us feedback. And so now as adults, when we go in, we go and say, 'hey, I don't want to be totally honest because if I do and that person gets upset, I'm going to lose the piece of business.' And as a vendor, you know, we sell to people as well.

And so we're afraid that we're going to offend somebody because they're so emotionally tied to whatever they were doing. And in life people have to be right or they have to be wrong as opposed to saying there's only degrees of right no degrees of wrong. Okay?

And so I think, to me, what happens to people is that when I'm giving someone feedback, I'm worried about if I'm going to hurt their feelings. But if I kind of reframe that and go, hey, I'm not here to hurt their feelings. I'm here to help them. I want to have a dialogue and see how we can go through this process. I think that's the one piece that I think it's missing. This is why people are afraid to be truly honest. It's kind of like, if I tell my wife that dress doesn't look good on her, like that's it, I'm done, right?

As opposed to saying, 'You know what, I like that dress and it's gonna be we're gonna have a great night tonight.' You know what I mean? What's the right thing to say? And there's a way to do it, but it's a hard conversation to have and I think this is how the coaching goes. And to me it's about degrees of right and having a conversation to get to where you need to get to and being open to it.

Margaret (20:24)

I haven't heard that before, that there's no degrees of wrong, there's just degrees of right. I think I'm getting it in my brain, but can you explain what that means to you?

Munawar Quraishi (20:33)

I'll give you another example. There's people who are Muslim, they believe in Allah, and there's people who are Christian, and they believe in God. Who's right? They're both right. Like, to me, they're both right. Now, one believes their version of it versus the other, and the history may be different, but the gods are one god. And I know we shouldn't get into religion on here, we can cut this out, but my point is, it's like, who's right? They're both right.

Now, if I believe in one version of it, my version's my right and that person's version's their right. Now, imagine if we just said, let's have a dialogue. Let's talk about it. If we were just open to that conversation, imagine, I bet you they would come somewhere in the middle and go, hey, you know what? Actually, we're both right. We just see it from one side of the boulder versus the other side of the boulder. That's kind of how I see that.

I know that's an extreme example, but I think that's how the reality plays out.

Tony Zakula (21:31)

I think it also comes back to that point of ego and you have to be right or wrong, right? I think, but I think it's also, if you have a natural curiosity to learn about people, learn about their businesses, and you're secure enough to say, 'Oh, that's interesting.'

You have to be secure enough to want to learn about you. I want to understand you. I want to understand how you look at the world. But then also the other person has to be secure enough and say, I could say 'Munawar, well, I don't really believe like you do. I get it. I can accept that we're different and we think about things differently, but you know, it's okay.'

But I'd learn something, and I may look at the world a little differently based on how you look at it. I think too often people are just too insecure or closed minded to say, just because I learn about something doesn't mean that I'm going to believe that way. But I might learn something and you're okay if you believe that way and I'm going to believe the way I believe, but it was interesting to dialogue and get different viewpoints. And I think too many times people just aren't secure enough to do that in their own mind or self comfortably.

But as far as teaching, I agree with Munawar that it can be like, ‘Well, did you ever think about it this way?’ Doesn't mean you have to do it, but think about it. And I do that with my kids a lot–think about where you're at and what this is over here, what this is over here, what this future is, and just think about that. And it's powerful if you can step back and look a little big picture at the world around you.

Margaret (23:23)

Yeah. And Tony, I know that you and I have talked about this, particularly when we're talking about the Kodaris story or about just how it was built with this idea of: distributors are their own business experts and Kodaris is the technology expert. And in a good partnership, you need the other person, right? Like, Kodaris needs distributors to talk about their business challenges and explain how things are done today versus how, you know, how maybe they would want for them to be done versus what their customers need.

And we've talked about that too, like internally of when to challenge a customer or how to say no to them. If we're so customer focused and we want them to be so happy all of the time, but yet sometimes we need to say no to them if we're not going to do that or there's a better way or, you know, actually we're going to build the technology in this way. That has been something that we've talked about that's difficult to kind of coach people on internally, when can you push back and when can you say no. But it kind of comes down to like, I imagine there's two expertises and then there's a natural curiosity between the two people in this business relationship to learn more about the other so that the partnership can actually thrive.

And that's not a question, I'm just gonna launch you guys into responding to that.

Munawar Quraishi (24:52)

Well, you know, what's interesting about that, Margaret, is, if I'm not curious about what you're saying, how do I expect you to be curious about what I'm saying? So let's just go with the whole “no” philosophy. You say something to me, I'm like, no, that's not the way it's gonna work.

I didn't even listen to you, right? Like right away I'm like, okay, well, tell me more. Instead, I should be like, okay, tell me more. Okay, tell me a little more. Let's get deeper. Let's go deeper and deeper. More questions, open-ended questions to figure out the reasoning and then go down the road of, well, hold on. Let me ask you this question. Have you thought about this? This perspective?

Oh, now it's not about saying no, it's about getting to the best right for our situation today. Because we know the way technology changes, in 10 years from now, or even five weeks from now, the “right” could be different. It could be a pivot, or it could be a 180 pivot. Like, who knows, right?

Margaret (25:50)

We used to be able to use that timeline of like 10 years from now, imagine! Now it's like, tomorrow, imagine what might be possible.

Munawar Quraishi (25:53)

Yeah, 10 years ago was totally different, right? But yeah, like that to me, when I think about these things, I think if you ask the right questions you'll go down the right road and get to where you want to get.

Tony Zakula (26:10)

Yeah, internally at Kodaris, and we are very focused on customers, but we do talk about how we're so focused on customers. We train and train and train on that. But it doesn't mean we do whatever the customer wants us to do. Because the first question, and when my account managers come back or say, customer wants to do X. And really, why? What's the story?

What are they trying to get done? Why are they trying to do it that way? And then it's like, well, I don't see that. We need to have a call. I need to understand more of why they're doing what they're trying to do. Because many times, once you start asking the why questions, and then you say, but what if you did it this way or why would you do it that way when there's this other way? Lots of times the customer is like, oh, I get it. Right.

And I think, early on in distribution, I started in distribution, I didn't know anything about distributors 11 years ago. For our largest customer, they said, oh, go to this department and ask how this works. And then I'd go learn. Then I'd say, ‘well, what about this?’ And they'd say, ‘oh, you got to go to that other department and ask.’ And then I go over there and they'd say, ‘no, no, that guy is wrong. This is how we do this.’ And I had to start to piece together this picture of how operations ran. And everybody had a little different perspective of what was important, why it was important.

And then I went and visited their customers. And then I mastered the drywall industry. And then I went to MRO and it's like, no, no, we don't do anything like that. His team said we do it like this. And I'm like, oh, well, why do you do it like that? It's maybe 80% the same across distribution, you're bringing inventory in and you're shipping it out. But there's nuances to everything. So that constant learning about your customers.

But then, the cool thing that we get to do that our customers don't, is we see across industries. So we say, ‘did you know in MRO they do it this way? In the construction industry, maybe you want to change how you do it there because they're doing this. Is that a better idea? Because you could also do this’. And the best customers they’re like, ‘We love when you push back on us. We love the questions because we're trying to make our business better.’ Right?

So it's almost, it's not a no, but it's like...they've done that for 20 years. I'm going to dig in with them to really figure out if this is really what they want because there's so many better ways to do that. To Munawar’s point early on, the best relationship is built on ‘he's trying to make us better.’ We might not be able to get there today, so maybe we need this piece today because that's all we can do today. But that's where we want to go.

That's compassion, that's caring, that's trying to help them achieve their success. Not us selling more product because lots of times we're turning down services and saying, no, we shouldn't build that for you because that's not going to work well. But I know that relationship is going to last another 10 years as long as we're both doing that. So it comes back, right?

Margaret (29:30)

Yeah, the thing that comes to my mind, if I was going to sum that up, is that curiosity gives you access to more information and more information helps you provide a better decision or come to a better decision, which is the inherent long game of a relationship, right? But that curiosity and the lack of ego to be on the receiving end of curiosity is kind of that foundational layer in order for relationships and partnerships to build.

Munawar Quraishi (30:06)

Yeah, if you think about all the thoughts, I want to say probably hundreds of thousands of thoughts that we have in our head. We get stuck on one being, you know, we're going to die on this scale. It does, it really, at the end of the day, it has no meaning whether you go this way or that way. But to your point around that curiosity piece, I think that the more curious you are, you actually make decisions faster and better because you can consume that information and see all the angles.

Because most people have difficulty making decisions because they don't know all the risks, so they fear making a decision. But when you're open and you're curious, like, okay, I've seen everything, I've had a good conversation, I can make the best decision for this moment. And I think that is really what curiosity drives.

Tony Zakula (30:57)

Yeah, I agree. Think curiosity and then when you've learned enough high level, you start to make gut level decisions because you've seen enough facts, even if you don't know for sure, you're going to make a small bet and then move it along.

Margaret (31:14)

I know that we had in here something around getting a little bit deeper into the features we built for go live. Do we want to touch on that or do we want to keep this fairly level in terms of relationship and business and partnerships?

Tony Zakula (31:28)

Yeah, I would say, we don't have to get feature specific, but what impressed me and actually drove us early on was I was pretty honest with Munawar that like, we don't have five big features you need, but I will build them and we'll deliver them for go live. And based on everything else we'd built and demos and stuff, obviously he had that confidence where he was crazy and believing me.

So I, and they were, they were difficult, right? Because coming from the construction industry is customer number one. And then, you know, we had a couple others in the construction industry, but going to a brand new vertical, if you will, there were definitely different needs, different major things we wanted to do, but we didn't necessarily have the time yet to do them. And we did it and I rallied the team and said, we're not going to let people down. We're going to deliver.

We have to deliver and it wasn't necessarily easy, but I knew Munawar betted on me. This was his reputation, his leadership, and it drove us, but it also drove the relationship deeper in that we were more committed than ever. And not that we're not committed to our customers, we are deeply committed, but I think when as a leader, I know there's political risks.

When you lead an organization and you say, we're going to partner with this person, they're going to deliver, we'll have some bumps along the way, but we're going to make it and the future's better, which it was, it is, it's still progressing with HD. I think what it comes down to is it deepened the relationship between me and Munawar.

Even today, at releasing 7,000 to 10,000 updates a year, there are things customers say, ‘I'm going to need this for go live.’ And we size it up. We make sure we can do it. And we say, ‘yeah, okay. We'll deliver.’ But if you deliver, that trust has just gone really deep. If you don't deliver, you've lost everything. Right?

So clear expectations about what you can deliver when, and what they should expect, and what risks there are to not getting there. And then making sure you deliver. And it was one of the hardest things for me to do, honestly, as our company grew to depend on other people to help me deliver because I couldn't control it. It took a while, but then that goes back to building the team and getting the best engineers, the best people on your team, and you can trust that we're going to deliver together.

Munawar Quraishi (34:20)

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I agree. I don't know that there's any super feature that we implemented that we needed to get from where we were exactly. So we had a website ecom platform, but I'll say this. I had a bunch of lessons from that process that I apply today right now here at Safety Express. I'm doing a technology assessment to figure out what the best way to go from our existing ERP e-commerce to the future state which will be something else in the cloud with e-comm etc.

The one thing, the biggest lesson I learned through that process was, the easy part is to select who you want to go with. The hard part is to sync up every step of the way what that's gonna be for the next X amount of years. So I'll call it infinite amount of years because you have to have a set of dollars every year to implement the force multipliers in that year that are gonna help drive so much more value than your competitors so they never get caught up. And so when I was at HD, we were known for the best website and then our competitors caught up, right?

And, I don't know, I mean I can't see what they're doing now because I'm not there. But that concept is you never ever ever let your competitors get caught up, get to where you are today, because you have that strategic advantage with technology. And so from my perspective, very similar here, we have a good website. Actually I'm not going to say it's a good website. It's an okay website. It's on an e-com platform that has no ability to really do much more than low-level integration with the e-com platform. We need to now level that up and then figure out for the next X amount of years that technology that's going to put us so far ahead of our competitor. Because at any moment our competitors can get into a conversation like this and go, okay, we're going to accelerate, leapfrog.

And so we always have to be leapfrogging and thinking about the force multipliers. And I remember when we were at in Atlanta at the ARIS conference, all I could think of was–and I think I said this out loud–you'll never ever be able to catch up to your technology that you'll be so light years ahead of everybody that no one will be ever even close to implementing. And I can't remember the number you gave me. Maybe you didn't give it a percentage, but I want to say it's probably very low in terms of being fully integrated to all your solutions. Which is great because everyone is striving to implement this piece first because it's right for our customer base versus this piece, which is right for someone else's customer base, and being able to align them and have conversations like we had that day to put the right things in front of our customers. And I think that to me is like the biggest lesson. And my wife who's a project manager, program manager, I always say like everything we do is an MVP of an MVP.

And she says, you can't say that, but I still believe you can because it's like, this is today's minimal viable product. This is tomorrow's and this is like an everyday something new once you implement it. We're constantly implementing. We are always kind of running to implement, implement, implement, and we're never stuck to where we are. And so to me, I think that's really what I learned is to be ready to take a certain chunk of dollars every year and continue to make it better and better and better so no one ever gets caught up.

Tony Zakula (38:12)

Yeah, I think that speaks to our story that Margaret's helped us put into words. As a tech technology company, your biggest fear is becoming stale, or not delivering. But we depend on our customers to bring those challenges and to work with us and they say ‘hey, we’ve gotta be market leading. We need X or we have to evolve to get this. Can you help us do that?’

And we say, sure, right? We scope it out, we build it together. And then our customers are keeping us on the cutting edge of technology because they're demanding more from us, so that we're building with our customers who are the business experts in distribution, manufacturing, whatever industry. And we're constantly learning and upgrading our technology skills and delivering that back.

And to your point of X dollars every year, I mean, that's what we see then across our customer base. You know, those X dollars are now pooling into a community and we give those features free back to everybody else, which means those things that you're talking about, like you're going to implement someday or possibly use are there when you're ready, free of charge.

But to me, that's super exciting because if that pools, 100 customers today, 200, 500, 1,000. That's as a partnership with customers, and recognizing you have the challenges. And what better way to build a product that fits the market than hand in hand with customers who are facing industry challenges.

I can't say I planned it, but it's a cool model, something that I love because I love to build stuff and I love to learn about industry challenges, how things are done, and come together with experts and figure it out. As long as Kodaris customers and Kodaris keeps that culture, then it becomes, I think, an almost unstoppable force in the market in a different way of building technology than the very focused way that most technology companies build.

Munawar Quraishi (40:34)

I agree.

Margaret (40:35)

I love it. So we have a couple minutes left. I want to make sure that we have final words if there's anything you guys want to get off your chest before we have our stop. So, Tony, I'll start with you. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? I thought that this was a really interesting conversation of high level values and decision-making and partnership and whatnot.

Tony Zakula (41:02)

Only that I would say that, I think that as Munawar has changed positions, that friendship, that relationship continues. I'm looking forward to a long future of working together. And I think as we look at how we impact the world, how we change the world–whether it's through us providing more technology for our customers, which impacts their margins, maybe they pay their employees more, maybe they deliver better to their customers. We all want to impact the world.

And I see that as great companies and great partnerships impact the world for good, maybe in ways we don't even see. That's fine. But I think doing the right thing and building sustainable partnerships across the industry is most important for me. And I think if we stay focused on that, it becomes incredibly fun and hopefully impacts companies who are also trying to do something similar in distribution or whatever they're doing.

And as we look at Kodaris in the future, we’ve formally committed to ARIS and innovation and working with our customers. So, the future is exciting and in future podcasts, we're going to talk about technical stuff and AI and stuff, but at the bedrock of that is not technology.

It's what we're creating together in the future for not only us, but our customers and families.

Munawar Quraishi (42:37)

Yeah, I'm gonna riff off that a little bit because–I think from a leadership perspective–as leaders, we think that we have to be the smartest person in the room. But you said something that was really important: there's a lot of people out there that have a lot of knowledge that you likely just don't know. And it's so important that, from my perspective as the individual leader who has to make these decisions, that I rely on the people that we're engaging in a good conversation with and paying a ton of money to have. Like, a Tony who's gonna give us information that we haven't seen before, or perspective. And there may be someone on his team that has something different, or someone on my team that has something different–to get them in the room, which leads to getting other people in the room. And you know, we talked about Jonathan earlier, ‘hey, I know Jonathan, I thought he'd be great for, now you have another perspective on how procurement can affect your product.’

And then there's someone else that tomorrow we're gonna introduce to each other and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the level of knowledge that the experts that we wanna engage with, that we hire to bring into our lives in these situations specifically, or we may not hire them, they're just a relationship. But we have to remember that.

We don't have to have all the information. We're supposed to have other people that have specialized knowledge that are gonna use us for our specialized knowledge. And I think it's so important as we end this conversation, for those leaders who are going through this process, is: you have to take that perspective, be open, bring on the people that you know are truly there to help you make decisions for your benefit. They're your coaches, et cetera, they're your mentors, bring them into that conversation to help you through this process.

I think that will, one, bring what you need to get done, the right technology for your solutions, but also make sure you're implementing it in a way that is truly effective for your business and you're getting a perspective that you just never got before so you can make the best decisions.

Margaret Kelsey (45:01)

Thank you for joining us this week on the Kodaris Community Show.

We'll see you back next time.