May 8, 2025 • 32 mins
With economic turbulence, rising tariffs, and global supply chain disruptions reshaping industries, agility is no longer optional: it's the ultimate competitive advantage. Startups are finding new ways to adapt faster, operate leaner, and outmaneuver even the biggest players.
This week, host Ellen Wood is joined by Adam Callinan, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Pentane, to dive into how smaller companies are reengineering supply chains for speed, resilience, and profitability. Adam shares lessons learned from scaling Bottlekeeper to millions in sales with no employees and explores why solving operational challenges with automation—not headcount—is key to thriving in today’s volatile landscape.
In this episode:
This week, host Ellen Wood is joined by Adam Callinan, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Pentane, to dive into how smaller companies are reengineering supply chains for speed, resilience, and profitability. Adam shares lessons learned from scaling Bottlekeeper to millions in sales with no employees and explores why solving operational challenges with automation—not headcount—is key to thriving in today’s volatile landscape.
In this episode:
- Why startups are winning the speed race in supply chain and logistics
- The hidden risks of solving supply chain problems by adding headcount
- How better financial visibility transforms supply chain decision-making
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meeboch podcast.
This is a show for logistics professionals looking to learn
more about the latest innovations in supply chain. Each episode
will feature a conversation on topics such as mitigating supply
chain disruption and reducing risk, current automation trends, sustainability initiatives,
and more. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. In an
era where economic headwinds, tariffs, supply chain constraints, and rising
costs are reshaping how companies operate. One thing has become
clear agility wins, but what does that really look like
(00:53):
in practice? Today we're talking with Adam Callanan, serial entrepreneur
and CEO Pentaine about the real world strategies startups are
using to out maneuver enterprises and why profitability isn't optional anymore.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Welcome Adam, Hi Ellen, thanks for having me excited to
be here.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
So tell us a little bit about your your initial startup, Bottlekeeper.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Bottle Keeper was a classic scratch your own itch product company.
And it was not my itch to be scratched. It
was my cousins. My cousin Matt was drinking a beer
out of a red party cup on the beach in
twenty twelve, and he's a bit of a maniac and
requires that a when he has a beer, that it's
(01:39):
out of a corona bottle bottle out of a very specific temperature,
and so this warm, you know, in five minutes problem
was a problem. And he looks around and he sees
people drinking, you know, out of water bottles, just stainless
steerwater bottles, and has this idea of taking one of
those bottles, cutting it in half, stuffing it with neoprene
or like wetsuit material so that his perfectly chilled corona
(02:01):
bottle could fit inside of this thing, and invented this product,
this sort of super coozy that keeps a beer lock
colder for way longer than you needed to and protects
the glass and makes it, you know, where it's not
going to explode on your foot in places where we
have bare feet. And at that time, I had just
sold out of a medical tech company that I was
(02:22):
a partner in, so we decided to come together, turning
a very long story into a very short story. We
tested some things. I was not convinced that this would
be a real product that people would actually pay money
for it. I thought it was cool and interesting and
it would end up on a shelf at Spencer's Gifts,
which you know for bachelor parties, which is not is
not a company that seemed like a company to me,
So we did a lot of testing. We were both
(02:43):
very scientifically minded. We both have crazy Zionce degrees, so
the scientific method is a very valuable tool when you
get into into the startup and business world. So we
put a bunch of tests in place over the series
of months to see if we could get interest and
if we could get people that weren't our mom and
dads and aunts and uncles to swipe credit cards and
buy the product at a real price before we spent
(03:05):
any time or money on it. And we did that
with crowdfunding. It's the perfect place to do that. Go
and test concepts and make sure you have a thing
before you go and invest in the thing. And that
worked really well. I was like, holy cow, this is okay.
People actually well I wanted. So we sold a bunch
of them, and before we even spent any time or
money making it is then we had to go figure
out to make it, which is a whole other deal.
(03:27):
But yeah, we created this product. My company. Before that,
we had a lot of people in a lot of states,
and it was big and heavy, and I vowed to
not do that again. So I was very adamant with
Matt that we build the company in a way that
had no employees, and we did that very successfully. For
we kicked that company off in twenty thirteen and twenty sixteen,
we did eight million in sales, all direct consumer, with
(03:47):
no employees, no investors, super lean, It was super profitable.
We grew from there and tens of millions ended up
on Shark Tank when we were way too big to
be on Shark Tank. Super fun though, and got acquired
in twenty twenty one by private equity group called win
Point Partners and Arctic out Doors and there were still
there was only four team members. So that was really
really really lean, really profitable, super fun awesome.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
So what are small startups doing today that enterprise level
companies simply can't or won't do fast enough? Because when
you've when you're talking about that small startup company and
you said it a couple of times. It was super
lean and super agile. That's not something that big enterprise
company can do. But is that a differentiator? Is that
(04:34):
a plus or is it a minus?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
It is the differentiator. It is the number one value
point that exists in early stage businesses is your capacity
to break things and move fast and change them quickly.
Where there aren't real consequences like you're not you're not.
You get to try things super fast and change your
(04:58):
mind and ideally again we're listening to the data that
is telling us that the answers to the questions. That's
where where early stage companies do get in trouble is
they end up using emotion to make decisions and not
numbers in math and science to make decisions. But it
is number It is the you know, the huge lever
that early stage businesses have as the capacity to move
(05:19):
extremely fast, make decisions quickly. It's okay, if it breaks,
we know what's going to break. We expect it to break.
It's actually part of the plan is that it breaks
and you learn from those breaks and move and over
time that develops into something.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Okay and I can agree with that, because I've worked
in large companies, large corporations, I've worked in smaller private companies,
and the smaller the team, the more quickly things can
get done and the more quickly you can react to
a change. Unfortunately, we do have, you know, enterprise level
companies out there that are now really having to make
(05:55):
these adaptive changes on the fly, and it's very very
difficult for them. Like when resources are limited, costs arising,
this is what we're seeing in the economy today. Those
startups can adapt so much faster than those larger competitors.
So what are some creative ways that you've seen either
your company or smaller companies completely rewire and redo their
(06:20):
supply chains or other cost structures that could inspire some
of those larger firms or be a key learning for
even larger companies. You know.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
One of the areas that I imagine this to be true
in larger scale companies as well, and actually got to
see that firsthand when we did get acquired and then
became part of a much larger company. You know, one
of the areas that early stage, mid stage brands get
into trouble is have a tendency to solve problems with payroll.
(06:50):
And what I mean is that you have what you
think as an opportunity or a thing that needs to
be fixed or a process that has broken, and we
have a tendency to go and hire people that have
some domain expertise in that thing to solve that problem.
The challenge is that when that's the first line of
defense against solving that problem, is that every nickel that
(07:14):
you spend on adding that into the business adds lead
weight to that company. I don't care how big the
company is, big, small, it doesn't matter. It adds weight
to the business. And if that if that weight is
also not producing, if it's not productive weight, it's really
difficult to recognize how how the revenue in the business
and how the revenue performance in the business needs to
(07:35):
change in order to pay for that new weight, in
order to cover the cost of that new weight. So
in an early stage company, when it's generating a million
dollars a year or one hundred thousand dollars year, worth
even ten million dollars a year, like little bits of
weight are really really impactful on the business. They are
they really drag the business down, you know, as you
get into and that's just a purely financial challenge at
(07:57):
Bottle Keeper. One of the things that we did really
well is we first solved those problems with tech and
got really really creative with automation. And this is in
the mid you know, twenty tens. Now in the world
of AI, like, that's a whole different bag of tricks
that that we're just at the very tip of. That's
really interesting, but we solved. That's how we got to
(08:18):
eight million in sales with no employees. Like I put
a guardrail on the company that we are not going
to hire a person until it becomes absolutely critical. So
we said no to a lot of opportunity like retail expansion,
like you know, all sorts of stuff we said no
to because it violated that principle, and that allowed us
to stay really really focused on the one thing that
we wanted to do was this one product to a
(08:39):
one type of D two C customer, and we just
got really good at that, and I automated everything the
customer didn't know what a lot of the time, because
it can still be personal. It has to be personal,
especially now in the world of AI. Authenticity really matters. Yeah,
sol solving problems with people and humans is can be
really really damaging to a company particular if you don't
(09:01):
know how you're going to pay for it well.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And I think that that's something that a lot of
companies are facing, especially in their supply chains right now anyway.
I mean, we're we're still in trade show season right
now in the logistics and supply chain industry, and it's
all about, you know, automation and how can we automate
these processes. The labor pool is shrinking and people aren't
looking for these types of jobs. We can't we can't
(09:24):
hire enough people. There just isn't enough to get the
work done, and so automation has to step in or
it's too expensive to have the people. To your point,
and the automation is going to you know, eventually pay
for itself. Do you find that then, those limitations that
you put on your business of not expanding into you know,
(09:46):
additional products or not going into that retail sector, did
you ever question that decision of you know, am I
still really on the right track or were you just
convinced and absolutely certain that was the way you wanted
to run your business because no one else has to
say it's your business.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
You're absolutely right. I question things constantly. I mean I literally,
I don't know if you could see this. I literally
have a sign here this says question everything in my office.
It's been in my office for fifteen years, in various offices.
The reason for that is because I can only make
as the operator of the business, all of us, anybody
that's operating a business, operating a role in a business,
You can only make a decision based on the information
(10:25):
that's available to you. Then, so it's critical that we
are constantly looking at the decisions that we're making and
the data that we have available in real time to
ensure that they are still valid, and constantly pushing and
prodding and poking those So I questioned it all the time.
I didn't, you know? And then there was a point
at which that question became nope, Now I am bottlenecking
(10:46):
the company by my lack of will or desire to
build a team, to hire a team. And so I
took a dry erase board and I literally wrote on
this dry race Bard. It was the end of that
two thousand and eight twenty sixteen eight million dollar year.
I drove on a dry erase word all the things
I was doing in the company that I was responsible
for and started circling the things that I should not
(11:08):
be doing, like I should not be running customer service.
I should not be spending I mean at that point
we were spending two million dollars a year on paid ads.
I should not be managing that. There's these things that
there are other people that have deep domain expertise in
and bringing them in adds revenue to the business or
it allows me to go and focus on the things
that can add revenue to the business. So we did
(11:30):
that and it was like, I need to not do that.
Hired hired a director of customer service. She started in
January of two thousand and seventeen, and it was game
changing because it a lot. It freed up my time
to go and do that. But you know, we had
to get to the point where the wheels were sort
of falling off the wagon to get there.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Well, and not just that the wheels were falling off
the wagon, but you had the momentum to push you
through it. It wasn't an early in the in the
business where you were not certain if this was going
this was a move that was going to pay off,
if this was an investment that is going to have
a return, so you waited until, like you said, there
was there was no other option, but also that was
(12:08):
one of the biggest years and it was the time
to do it. Did you really focus on only staying
lean within your organization? Did you utilize outside, you know,
outsourced help. You were talking about the Facebook ads or
the online advertising, and there are plenty of companies out
(12:29):
there that really focus on that, and that can certainly
be a way to take advantage of those those deep
skill sets and have someone that is just a contracted
employee for that one role. Or do you feel that
it's better to have someone as part of the company
that has really a stake in the game.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I think it entirely depends on the situation, which I
know is a terrible answer to that question. It's not
for us, yeah, I mean, you know, every situation is
different for us. At the beginning, we I literally did everything. Matt.
We split the company in half. He was responsible for
our manufacturing or inventory, you know, our books. I was
responsible for everything on the front end of the business.
(13:10):
So I built a website, I wrote the copy, I
wrote the emails, I took the picture, shot the videos,
spent the money on bade media, did the customer service
like I did literally everything. Now that's not typical. I
fully appreciate that, but what it did is it forced
me to learn how to do those roles, so that
by the time I went and decided that email marketing
(13:31):
I should not be doing that and I hired a
contractor through a marketing agency to help take over that
part of the business. By the time we did that,
I knew exactly what that person needed to be doing.
I knew what success looked like in that role because
I ran it. I played that game, and that played
throughout the history of the company. Like when we went
and you know, hired a full marketing person, I knew
(13:55):
exactly what I needed that person to do customer service.
When we hired a director of customer service, I knew
what good look like in that position, and I knew
what bringing somebody into it that I wanted to elevate
that position. I had a baseline for what that meant
because I ran that role. So there was a lot
of value in understanding the way that the things work.
When they broke, I knew how to fix them because
I built them. Whether or not you choose to use
(14:18):
a third party provider is a really important and risky
decision to make really early on when you're really in
the startup, like figuring out your model, figuring out your revenue.
And a good example of that happened at Bottle Keeper
at the very beginning of the company. We did the
crowdfunding thing. We sold a bunch of product, We went
right into a third party fulfillment provider, into a three
(14:39):
pl but we were literally a startup. We were doing
like a thousand dollars a month in sales that company.
We were not a priority to that company. How could
we be? We were literally nobody. A third of our
like twenty five percent of our product vanished overnight where
to go. Nobody knows. Twenty five percent of our product
got shipped to the wrong people. So then we had
to take twenty five percent of our product reship to
(15:00):
the right people. I mean it literally like on day one,
this is in January of twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen,
we had just shipped our first orders and we were
almost out of money because all of our product basically
just vanished. Like that's dangerous, so early on, doing that
stuff yourself when you can control it is the advice
that I give through super early stage startups, and then
(15:22):
go into that three pl when you have a little
bit of scale. Don't pick the biggest one in the
country where you're a teeny tiny fish. Pick one that
you fit in the middle of their pond. So I
think there's a time and a place to do that,
to do all of those things, whether they're internal or external.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, wherever in the life cycle of the business, it's
going to come up. Well. And when you left or
when you sold Bottle Keeper, then you started another company,
and this one is a little a lot different. It's
certainly not Bottles, So I imagine this one was a
(15:58):
little bit more of your thought process of your cousins,
but it was from what I've read, it was trying
to understand where the money's going within a business and
really following those pennies. We're in a volatile landscape right now.
The political scene is rife with contention. It's a global
(16:18):
issue with the tariffs, and so many businesses, small businesses
and large enterprises are struggling to figure out how they're
going to maneuver and completely adapt their their supply chain,
their structure, their production, their distribution to work within these
constraints and maintain profitability, so super volatile. What financial blind
(16:44):
spots are out there that small businesses or even a
CFO at a major firm might be looking for.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Two different problems. I think we should talk through this
because maybe I'm wrong. Okay, in the early stage, Let's
say sub fifty million in revenue, Okay, in that business.
You know, in the ten million dollar year company, that
business is already at a financial deficit in the fact
that they don't generally know. There's like two silos that
(17:12):
exist inside of a company. You have the how you
spend money, how the business spends money silo generally controlled
by a CFO in bigger companies, and you have the
how the business makes money silo generally controlled by a
CMO CRO in bigger businesses. In smaller companies, a lot
of times that's like the same three people. The language
that the CFO speaks is different than the language that
(17:33):
the CMO speaks. Yet what the CMO does and the
decisions that they make and how they define their budgets
are completely dependent on the information in the CFO role.
But they don't look at the things the same because
they don't understand each other's roles fully. So when you
when you pull that down to early stage companies, they
have no idea of that. They don't even know that
(17:54):
that's a problem. So it's like they go and they hire.
They don't know how the revenue needs to respond or
how they turn on their ad spends need to respond
to pay for that person, and so they just kind
of look three months from now, they look backwards at
their p and ls which are now not relevant because
they were from six weeks ago, and go, shoot, we
lost money, how did that happen? And so then add
into that tariffs and like moving gross margins. I mean
(18:19):
that's that is they know what's going to be a problem,
but they don't know how to get to the solution.
Penttain is a software product that was built from my
experience at bottle Keeper doing all of that stuff for them,
So it tells them the answers to those questions. As
you get much much bigger, you know, a lot of
times these decisions aren't just made by a singular CFO
and a CML, like you have teams of people in
(18:40):
these organizations, which just adds a whole other level of complexity.
So I think I think it's it's equally important that
that there is some connection between the information on that
marketing side, how they how they make money side, and
the CFO side how they spend money, because how the
CFO defines ad budget may not be real based on
(19:02):
an expense they see on a book may not be realistic,
may not be realistic for the CMO to be successful.
And that's not because the CMO is bad at their job.
It's because literally they don't have enough fuel to fuel
the engine that is the business because they don't have
the right information from the CFO.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Now I can relate to that, I can relate to
that big a marketing manager myself. It's all about the
return on investment and making sure that the CFO is
happy with the amount that we're spending. And sometimes, you know,
when you go into you know, online advertising, you have
to spend money to make money. And I get that
a lot of times that the CFO doesn't feel that way,
(19:41):
especially in a small company when they're literally counting pennies,
not dollars, not millions of dollars, but pennies. Just to
make sure that everything, you know, balances, there's profit at
the end of the day. So it's it's understandable that
there would be that. I don't know that it's necessarily
a miscommunication, but a misunderstanding of of the different effects
(20:02):
that money has on those roles that the investment has
on those roles. Because you know, the marketing is an investment,
you do have to have sales because if you're marketing
your product and you're not selling it, then you're going
to go out of business very fast. But at the
same time, if you have a great product and you're
not marketing it effectively, you're also not going to sell it.
(20:23):
So there is definitely a balance there where the two
as you said, the silos need to have that bridge
to make that communication happen so that both sides are
working toward the same goal, which is profitability. I mean,
everybody in the business has to be concerned about that.
It goes from you know, the CEO down to the
(20:45):
person who cleans the office at the end of the night.
Everything goes into that business's profitability. So whether people are
running a business in Berlin, Bangalore or Boston, what universal
t have you seen emerged for some of these founders
trying to build a profitable company when times are unpredictable
(21:07):
like they are right now.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
You know, maybe it's the nerd in me. Profitability is
a math problem. I mean, bottom line, it is now
what you just mentioned, which is really important, not all
of it. Not Running a business is not just a
math problem. There's a lot involved in running a business,
big or small. Right, There's the combination of art and
science that lives throughout that whole massive puzzle that is
(21:30):
made of a thousand pieces. Pieces aren't all weighted the same.
But that's what operating a business is like, big or small.
So there are components to that that are the creative
parts that are much more art than science obviously, but
at the end of the day, if we distill it
down math, the profitability inside of a business is just
purely a math problem. And at the risk of sounding flippant,
(21:51):
at the if you were losing money, the reason you
were losing money is because you are spending more than
you're making. It's quite literally that simple. And now the
next verse of that is you're spending on fixed expenses
more than the contribution margin that the business is earning.
And if you know what contribution margin is, you know
what is inside of pretty much every business on the
planet is the answer to the question is it working
(22:12):
or not. Growing contribution margin dollars over time means whatever
you are doing is working. And as long as you're
not growing your fixed expenses at the same rate as
your contribution margin, that equals net profit, you were making
more net profit. So I think helping you know at
the higher stage, a CFO at a big company knows
exactly what I just said. A CEO founder of a
(22:34):
three million dollar a business, three million dollar per year business,
I just spoke French to him or her like, they
don't understand that, and that's okay. That's again, that's like
the whole part of this of Pentana as a product
is to simplify that. That is the common truth to
me inside of business is that most of the problems
(22:55):
that come up and arise within profitability can be solved
with math. As long as we set a destination, we
pick that endpoint, we say we want to get to
break even, we want to generate a ten percent net
margin or a twenty two percent or whatever that is.
We can use math and some really simple conditional logic
to work back from that and define a mathematically driven
(23:15):
plan that doesn't rely on like slinging spaghetti against the wall,
which is what an awful lot of companies do, and
just hope that it works, which is not obviously not
a great strategy.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, hoping is not a plan. No, witching is not
a plan, not even praying as a plan. But so
you're talking about, you know, your math acumen. What is
what would be your most interesting or most successful customer
story with pen pain and the platform, Like, where have
(23:47):
you been able to really drive profitability for a business?
Can you tell us about a particular client or a situation.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, I'll give you an example, and it's an interesting
one because it's the solution is counterintuitive, which is why
again math is becomes important when we're making decisions about
this stuff. There was a business that is a consumer
product company selling a really high end travel bag. The
founder brilliant product designer and this is the way these
things happened, created a product, people started buying it, and
(24:18):
he's like great of CEO and he's the CEO of company.
But he doesn't have a heavy financial background. It's not
his expertise. And that's okay. Most startup founders, you know,
early stage founders don't. That's why they eventually go and
hire those people. They got to a point they were
doing two million dollars a year and they were completely
upside down. They were losing one hundred thousand dollars a
month a month and a two million dollar year business. Obviously,
(24:41):
that's not good. You only have a couple of months,
you know, unless you have deep, deep piggybank pockets and
you love spending it, you only have a couple of
months of life at that rate. So what we did,
we got them into Pentane and what it told them
was two things. Technically, it told them that their fixed
expense base for the sized company they were was really high.
(25:03):
Important note number one. The more important note is it
told them that they were underspending on their advertising. But
they effectively they needed to increase their ad budget by
three hundred percent. That's a crazy thing. Like you see
that as the founder who's losing money, losing money, and
you're telling me, I got it, I got a three
x my AD spend. No way. The problem in a
(25:25):
business in that business, and it's a little bit different
in every business, but the problem in that business is
that they had their return on AdSpend, their ROI was nine.
That's crazy, like amazingly high. But the business wasn't driving
enough revenue to drive enough contribution margin to pay for
their fixed expenses. So the combination of not enough revenue
and two high fixed expenses created this like perfect storm
(25:47):
of debt spiral. And so they got in the system.
They got to see, if we increase our AD budget
by three hundred percent, which is insane, their return on
ads spend needed to get to break even will come
down to like three point five, which is much more reasonable,
particularly because their products were expensive. And because they got
to see that and we got to then they didn't
just increase that three hundred percent overnight like that happened
(26:07):
over the course of a month, and they got to
see that happened in a controlled fashion. It completely changed
the company. Three months later they were profitable. Now a
year and a half later, they're up seven hundred percent
and profitable because it just clarified this like mess inside
the company that they didn't they didn't know was there,
they didn't know how to solve it. The founder of
(26:28):
that company says that before the before I mean pentane,
before the mouth inside of pentanine, he felt like he
was walking through the forest at night, hammering, just bumping
into trees NonStop again. Yeah, yeah, and Pentane turned on
the lights. It didn't make it so the trees aren't there,
but it gave him the ability to see them coming
so they could plan and strategize around them.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I think that that is a huge, huge asset for
small businesses, for startups. Does it also provide insight for
some of those medium sized businesses that are making that
you know, one hundred million?
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Yeah, you know, that's a funny question. I've had a
lot more discussions around that recently. I was always under
an incorrect, possibly incorrect assumption that once you got to
the point you got above fifty million in revenue ish,
you generally have like a full suite of really talented people,
you know, doing CMO things, doing cro things, doing CFO things,
(27:23):
and that that would sort of inherently solve the problem.
And I have I am learning that the problem still
exists even in much larger firms like that, where you
have this you know, you have this vacuum of data
that doesn't cross in between sort of the financial side
and the customer acquisition side of the business. We are
focused on the smaller brand as a company just because
(27:46):
it's where I think we can be the most helpful.
And as we get bigger, we tend to see companies
that want really custom things, which we can do, but
they take money and time and whatever. But I do
think that it is a problem that is a lot
more pervasive than I had originally assumed, even in larger
companies like that.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well, that would be amazing if the tool also helps
illuminate those issues within the financial structures of the business
in order to help them achieve that profitability, especially now
that we're we're facing a situation, especially here in the US,
where you know, we're going to have to encourage those
entrepreneurs to do something. We're the political situation is just
(28:28):
making it perfect, the perfect breeding ground for these small
businesses to start up, to get off the ground, because
that's that's what the current administration wants. They want to
bring that ingenuity, that that innovation back to the US shores.
And that's great, but we are a global economy, and
(28:48):
you know, while the enterprise level businesses are having to
adjust things and they have that bandwidth, they have that space,
they have that size, you know, behind them, they're still
trying to be profitable too. I mean, that's that's an
issue for them as well. But it's one of those
things where you know, you kind of think of, you know,
rich people don't have problems. You know, big businesses don't
(29:08):
have problems. Well, of course they do. They're just different,
they're different size, but they're still problems. And I think
with the the interest in building up the infrastructure of
you know, smaller businesses and bringing a lot of that
production onto US shores is going to I have a
feeling you're going to be really busy in the next
(29:28):
few years helping these startups because there's they're trying to
solve a problem which is caused by you know, the
tariffs and trade agreements that they had no control over,
and now we're just trying to have product, we're trying
to have you know, commerce. And to your point, these
people don't know they're they're the innovator. They thought up
a solution to a problem and a business case to
(29:51):
make it happen. But they're not a CEO or a CFO.
They don't understand what it is that it's going to
take to make that business profitable and long lasting. They're
just trying to get through this year.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, it's a real it's a real challenge. I mean,
the math inside of Pentain is the same whether it's
for Exonmobile or the dry cleaner down the street. So
it is very universal that challenge of early stage business
is trying to navigate that. I mean, this is actually
a perfect example of the benefit of being a smaller company.
In Pentain. We know that that's a challenge. So I
(30:25):
can snap my fingers and have our development team create
a tool inside of our guidance system that accounts for tariffs,
so they can go in and say, what happens to
my company if I add twenty seven percent to my
cost of goods to adjust my micross margin and see
how that impacts how they have to acquire customers and
what they can afford to spend, and how their conversion
rates on their websites needs to change, and all these
(30:46):
things where it might take a big legacy SaaS company
six months to do it or a year to do
something like that. I mean, we can do that in
four days. We can move fast, break things move quickly.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Where can our listeners find more information about this this
tool that you have that can help illuminate some of
those those issues or even just you know, completely missed
opportunities within their their financial situation.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
With your business, Yeah, you can find Pentain at pentain
dot com, p E n t A n e dot
com me on LinkedIn. That's about the only place I
spending any time right now.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
So all right, Well, make sure to put those two
links in the in the description here for all of
our listeners to be able to reach out to you
if this sounds like something that would help them in
their current role at their current job or with their company,
or if they have an idea that they want to
try to get off the ground. You know, you might
(31:43):
get a whole lot of interest in people just saying, Hey,
you've been there, done that. How can I make this work?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I'm happy to help.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
In a world where everything feels uncertain, from logistics to legislation,
the companies that survive aren't necessarily the biggest. They're the
ones that the fastest, understand their numbers and make the
smart bets early. Thank you Adam for showing us what
this looks like in real life. If any of our
listeners have a suggestion for a topic or would like
to be a guest on the show, we'd love to
(32:12):
hear from you. You can contact us at podcast at
meebok dot com at any time. As always, thanks for
listening to Speaking of Supply Chain. If you've enjoyed our show,
please rate and review us on whatever podcast platform you prevert.
We're on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify, and be
sure to go to you in next time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
You've been listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meboch podcast,
keep connected with us by subscribing to the show in
your favorite podcast player. If you like what you've heard,
please rate the show that helps us to keep delivering
the latest in supply chain information. Thanks for listening, until
next time,
You're listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meeboch podcast.
This is a show for logistics professionals looking to learn
more about the latest innovations in supply chain. Each episode
will feature a conversation on topics such as mitigating supply
chain disruption and reducing risk, current automation trends, sustainability initiatives,
and more. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Supply Chain, where we
explore trends, current events, and innovations impacting the logistics and
supply chain industries. I'm your host, Ellen Wood. In an
era where economic headwinds, tariffs, supply chain constraints, and rising
costs are reshaping how companies operate. One thing has become
clear agility wins, but what does that really look like
(00:53):
in practice? Today we're talking with Adam Callanan, serial entrepreneur
and CEO Pentaine about the real world strategies startups are
using to out maneuver enterprises and why profitability isn't optional anymore.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Welcome Adam, Hi Ellen, thanks for having me excited to
be here.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
So tell us a little bit about your your initial startup, Bottlekeeper.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Bottle Keeper was a classic scratch your own itch product company.
And it was not my itch to be scratched. It
was my cousins. My cousin Matt was drinking a beer
out of a red party cup on the beach in
twenty twelve, and he's a bit of a maniac and
requires that a when he has a beer, that it's
(01:39):
out of a corona bottle bottle out of a very specific temperature,
and so this warm, you know, in five minutes problem
was a problem. And he looks around and he sees
people drinking, you know, out of water bottles, just stainless
steerwater bottles, and has this idea of taking one of
those bottles, cutting it in half, stuffing it with neoprene
or like wetsuit material so that his perfectly chilled corona
(02:01):
bottle could fit inside of this thing, and invented this product,
this sort of super coozy that keeps a beer lock
colder for way longer than you needed to and protects
the glass and makes it, you know, where it's not
going to explode on your foot in places where we
have bare feet. And at that time, I had just
sold out of a medical tech company that I was
(02:22):
a partner in, so we decided to come together, turning
a very long story into a very short story. We
tested some things. I was not convinced that this would
be a real product that people would actually pay money
for it. I thought it was cool and interesting and
it would end up on a shelf at Spencer's Gifts,
which you know for bachelor parties, which is not is
not a company that seemed like a company to me,
So we did a lot of testing. We were both
(02:43):
very scientifically minded. We both have crazy Zionce degrees, so
the scientific method is a very valuable tool when you
get into into the startup and business world. So we
put a bunch of tests in place over the series
of months to see if we could get interest and
if we could get people that weren't our mom and
dads and aunts and uncles to swipe credit cards and
buy the product at a real price before we spent
(03:05):
any time or money on it. And we did that
with crowdfunding. It's the perfect place to do that. Go
and test concepts and make sure you have a thing
before you go and invest in the thing. And that
worked really well. I was like, holy cow, this is okay.
People actually well I wanted. So we sold a bunch
of them, and before we even spent any time or
money making it is then we had to go figure
out to make it, which is a whole other deal.
(03:27):
But yeah, we created this product. My company. Before that,
we had a lot of people in a lot of states,
and it was big and heavy, and I vowed to
not do that again. So I was very adamant with
Matt that we build the company in a way that
had no employees, and we did that very successfully. For
we kicked that company off in twenty thirteen and twenty sixteen,
we did eight million in sales, all direct consumer, with
(03:47):
no employees, no investors, super lean, It was super profitable.
We grew from there and tens of millions ended up
on Shark Tank when we were way too big to
be on Shark Tank. Super fun though, and got acquired
in twenty twenty one by private equity group called win
Point Partners and Arctic out Doors and there were still
there was only four team members. So that was really
really really lean, really profitable, super fun awesome.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
So what are small startups doing today that enterprise level
companies simply can't or won't do fast enough? Because when
you've when you're talking about that small startup company and
you said it a couple of times. It was super
lean and super agile. That's not something that big enterprise
company can do. But is that a differentiator? Is that
(04:34):
a plus or is it a minus?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
It is the differentiator. It is the number one value
point that exists in early stage businesses is your capacity
to break things and move fast and change them quickly.
Where there aren't real consequences like you're not you're not.
You get to try things super fast and change your
(04:58):
mind and ideally again we're listening to the data that
is telling us that the answers to the questions. That's
where where early stage companies do get in trouble is
they end up using emotion to make decisions and not
numbers in math and science to make decisions. But it
is number It is the you know, the huge lever
that early stage businesses have as the capacity to move
(05:19):
extremely fast, make decisions quickly. It's okay, if it breaks,
we know what's going to break. We expect it to break.
It's actually part of the plan is that it breaks
and you learn from those breaks and move and over
time that develops into something.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Okay and I can agree with that, because I've worked
in large companies, large corporations, I've worked in smaller private companies,
and the smaller the team, the more quickly things can
get done and the more quickly you can react to
a change. Unfortunately, we do have, you know, enterprise level
companies out there that are now really having to make
(05:55):
these adaptive changes on the fly, and it's very very
difficult for them. Like when resources are limited, costs arising,
this is what we're seeing in the economy today. Those
startups can adapt so much faster than those larger competitors.
So what are some creative ways that you've seen either
your company or smaller companies completely rewire and redo their
(06:20):
supply chains or other cost structures that could inspire some
of those larger firms or be a key learning for
even larger companies. You know.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
One of the areas that I imagine this to be true
in larger scale companies as well, and actually got to
see that firsthand when we did get acquired and then
became part of a much larger company. You know, one
of the areas that early stage, mid stage brands get
into trouble is have a tendency to solve problems with payroll.
(06:50):
And what I mean is that you have what you
think as an opportunity or a thing that needs to
be fixed or a process that has broken, and we
have a tendency to go and hire people that have
some domain expertise in that thing to solve that problem.
The challenge is that when that's the first line of
defense against solving that problem, is that every nickel that
(07:14):
you spend on adding that into the business adds lead
weight to that company. I don't care how big the
company is, big, small, it doesn't matter. It adds weight
to the business. And if that if that weight is
also not producing, if it's not productive weight, it's really
difficult to recognize how how the revenue in the business
and how the revenue performance in the business needs to
(07:35):
change in order to pay for that new weight, in
order to cover the cost of that new weight. So
in an early stage company, when it's generating a million
dollars a year or one hundred thousand dollars year, worth
even ten million dollars a year, like little bits of
weight are really really impactful on the business. They are
they really drag the business down, you know, as you
get into and that's just a purely financial challenge at
(07:57):
Bottle Keeper. One of the things that we did really
well is we first solved those problems with tech and
got really really creative with automation. And this is in
the mid you know, twenty tens. Now in the world
of AI, like, that's a whole different bag of tricks
that that we're just at the very tip of. That's
really interesting, but we solved. That's how we got to
(08:18):
eight million in sales with no employees. Like I put
a guardrail on the company that we are not going
to hire a person until it becomes absolutely critical. So
we said no to a lot of opportunity like retail expansion,
like you know, all sorts of stuff we said no
to because it violated that principle, and that allowed us
to stay really really focused on the one thing that
we wanted to do was this one product to a
(08:39):
one type of D two C customer, and we just
got really good at that, and I automated everything the
customer didn't know what a lot of the time, because
it can still be personal. It has to be personal,
especially now in the world of AI. Authenticity really matters. Yeah,
sol solving problems with people and humans is can be
really really damaging to a company particular if you don't
(09:01):
know how you're going to pay for it well.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And I think that that's something that a lot of
companies are facing, especially in their supply chains right now anyway.
I mean, we're we're still in trade show season right
now in the logistics and supply chain industry, and it's
all about, you know, automation and how can we automate
these processes. The labor pool is shrinking and people aren't
looking for these types of jobs. We can't we can't
(09:24):
hire enough people. There just isn't enough to get the
work done, and so automation has to step in or
it's too expensive to have the people. To your point,
and the automation is going to you know, eventually pay
for itself. Do you find that then, those limitations that
you put on your business of not expanding into you know,
(09:46):
additional products or not going into that retail sector, did
you ever question that decision of you know, am I
still really on the right track or were you just
convinced and absolutely certain that was the way you wanted
to run your business because no one else has to
say it's your business.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
You're absolutely right. I question things constantly. I mean I literally,
I don't know if you could see this. I literally
have a sign here this says question everything in my office.
It's been in my office for fifteen years, in various offices.
The reason for that is because I can only make
as the operator of the business, all of us, anybody
that's operating a business, operating a role in a business,
You can only make a decision based on the information
(10:25):
that's available to you. Then, so it's critical that we
are constantly looking at the decisions that we're making and
the data that we have available in real time to
ensure that they are still valid, and constantly pushing and
prodding and poking those So I questioned it all the time.
I didn't, you know? And then there was a point
at which that question became nope, Now I am bottlenecking
(10:46):
the company by my lack of will or desire to
build a team, to hire a team. And so I
took a dry erase board and I literally wrote on
this dry race Bard. It was the end of that
two thousand and eight twenty sixteen eight million dollar year.
I drove on a dry erase word all the things
I was doing in the company that I was responsible
for and started circling the things that I should not
(11:08):
be doing, like I should not be running customer service.
I should not be spending I mean at that point
we were spending two million dollars a year on paid ads.
I should not be managing that. There's these things that
there are other people that have deep domain expertise in
and bringing them in adds revenue to the business or
it allows me to go and focus on the things
that can add revenue to the business. So we did
(11:30):
that and it was like, I need to not do that.
Hired hired a director of customer service. She started in
January of two thousand and seventeen, and it was game
changing because it a lot. It freed up my time
to go and do that. But you know, we had
to get to the point where the wheels were sort
of falling off the wagon to get there.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Well, and not just that the wheels were falling off
the wagon, but you had the momentum to push you
through it. It wasn't an early in the in the
business where you were not certain if this was going
this was a move that was going to pay off,
if this was an investment that is going to have
a return, so you waited until, like you said, there
was there was no other option, but also that was
(12:08):
one of the biggest years and it was the time
to do it. Did you really focus on only staying
lean within your organization? Did you utilize outside, you know,
outsourced help. You were talking about the Facebook ads or
the online advertising, and there are plenty of companies out
(12:29):
there that really focus on that, and that can certainly
be a way to take advantage of those those deep
skill sets and have someone that is just a contracted
employee for that one role. Or do you feel that
it's better to have someone as part of the company
that has really a stake in the game.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I think it entirely depends on the situation, which I
know is a terrible answer to that question. It's not
for us, yeah, I mean, you know, every situation is
different for us. At the beginning, we I literally did everything. Matt.
We split the company in half. He was responsible for
our manufacturing or inventory, you know, our books. I was
responsible for everything on the front end of the business.
(13:10):
So I built a website, I wrote the copy, I
wrote the emails, I took the picture, shot the videos,
spent the money on bade media, did the customer service
like I did literally everything. Now that's not typical. I
fully appreciate that, but what it did is it forced
me to learn how to do those roles, so that
by the time I went and decided that email marketing
(13:31):
I should not be doing that and I hired a
contractor through a marketing agency to help take over that
part of the business. By the time we did that,
I knew exactly what that person needed to be doing.
I knew what success looked like in that role because
I ran it. I played that game, and that played
throughout the history of the company. Like when we went
and you know, hired a full marketing person, I knew
(13:55):
exactly what I needed that person to do customer service.
When we hired a director of customer service, I knew
what good look like in that position, and I knew
what bringing somebody into it that I wanted to elevate
that position. I had a baseline for what that meant
because I ran that role. So there was a lot
of value in understanding the way that the things work.
When they broke, I knew how to fix them because
I built them. Whether or not you choose to use
(14:18):
a third party provider is a really important and risky
decision to make really early on when you're really in
the startup, like figuring out your model, figuring out your revenue.
And a good example of that happened at Bottle Keeper
at the very beginning of the company. We did the
crowdfunding thing. We sold a bunch of product, We went
right into a third party fulfillment provider, into a three
(14:39):
pl but we were literally a startup. We were doing
like a thousand dollars a month in sales that company.
We were not a priority to that company. How could
we be? We were literally nobody. A third of our
like twenty five percent of our product vanished overnight where
to go. Nobody knows. Twenty five percent of our product
got shipped to the wrong people. So then we had
to take twenty five percent of our product reship to
(15:00):
the right people. I mean it literally like on day one,
this is in January of twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen,
we had just shipped our first orders and we were
almost out of money because all of our product basically
just vanished. Like that's dangerous, so early on, doing that
stuff yourself when you can control it is the advice
that I give through super early stage startups, and then
(15:22):
go into that three pl when you have a little
bit of scale. Don't pick the biggest one in the
country where you're a teeny tiny fish. Pick one that
you fit in the middle of their pond. So I
think there's a time and a place to do that,
to do all of those things, whether they're internal or external.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, wherever in the life cycle of the business, it's
going to come up. Well. And when you left or
when you sold Bottle Keeper, then you started another company,
and this one is a little a lot different. It's
certainly not Bottles, So I imagine this one was a
(15:58):
little bit more of your thought process of your cousins,
but it was from what I've read, it was trying
to understand where the money's going within a business and
really following those pennies. We're in a volatile landscape right now.
The political scene is rife with contention. It's a global
(16:18):
issue with the tariffs, and so many businesses, small businesses
and large enterprises are struggling to figure out how they're
going to maneuver and completely adapt their their supply chain,
their structure, their production, their distribution to work within these
constraints and maintain profitability, so super volatile. What financial blind
(16:44):
spots are out there that small businesses or even a
CFO at a major firm might be looking for.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Two different problems. I think we should talk through this
because maybe I'm wrong. Okay, in the early stage, Let's
say sub fifty million in revenue, Okay, in that business.
You know, in the ten million dollar year company, that
business is already at a financial deficit in the fact
that they don't generally know. There's like two silos that
(17:12):
exist inside of a company. You have the how you
spend money, how the business spends money silo generally controlled
by a CFO in bigger companies, and you have the
how the business makes money silo generally controlled by a
CMO CRO in bigger businesses. In smaller companies, a lot
of times that's like the same three people. The language
that the CFO speaks is different than the language that
(17:33):
the CMO speaks. Yet what the CMO does and the
decisions that they make and how they define their budgets
are completely dependent on the information in the CFO role.
But they don't look at the things the same because
they don't understand each other's roles fully. So when you
when you pull that down to early stage companies, they
have no idea of that. They don't even know that
(17:54):
that's a problem. So it's like they go and they hire.
They don't know how the revenue needs to respond or
how they turn on their ad spends need to respond
to pay for that person, and so they just kind
of look three months from now, they look backwards at
their p and ls which are now not relevant because
they were from six weeks ago, and go, shoot, we
lost money, how did that happen? And so then add
into that tariffs and like moving gross margins. I mean
(18:19):
that's that is they know what's going to be a problem,
but they don't know how to get to the solution.
Penttain is a software product that was built from my
experience at bottle Keeper doing all of that stuff for them,
So it tells them the answers to those questions. As
you get much much bigger, you know, a lot of
times these decisions aren't just made by a singular CFO
and a CML, like you have teams of people in
(18:40):
these organizations, which just adds a whole other level of complexity.
So I think I think it's it's equally important that
that there is some connection between the information on that
marketing side, how they how they make money side, and
the CFO side how they spend money, because how the
CFO defines ad budget may not be real based on
(19:02):
an expense they see on a book may not be realistic,
may not be realistic for the CMO to be successful.
And that's not because the CMO is bad at their job.
It's because literally they don't have enough fuel to fuel
the engine that is the business because they don't have
the right information from the CFO.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Now I can relate to that, I can relate to
that big a marketing manager myself. It's all about the
return on investment and making sure that the CFO is
happy with the amount that we're spending. And sometimes, you know,
when you go into you know, online advertising, you have
to spend money to make money. And I get that
a lot of times that the CFO doesn't feel that way,
(19:41):
especially in a small company when they're literally counting pennies,
not dollars, not millions of dollars, but pennies. Just to
make sure that everything, you know, balances, there's profit at
the end of the day. So it's it's understandable that
there would be that. I don't know that it's necessarily
a miscommunication, but a misunderstanding of of the different effects
(20:02):
that money has on those roles that the investment has
on those roles. Because you know, the marketing is an investment,
you do have to have sales because if you're marketing
your product and you're not selling it, then you're going
to go out of business very fast. But at the
same time, if you have a great product and you're
not marketing it effectively, you're also not going to sell it.
(20:23):
So there is definitely a balance there where the two
as you said, the silos need to have that bridge
to make that communication happen so that both sides are
working toward the same goal, which is profitability. I mean,
everybody in the business has to be concerned about that.
It goes from you know, the CEO down to the
(20:45):
person who cleans the office at the end of the night.
Everything goes into that business's profitability. So whether people are
running a business in Berlin, Bangalore or Boston, what universal
t have you seen emerged for some of these founders
trying to build a profitable company when times are unpredictable
(21:07):
like they are right now.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
You know, maybe it's the nerd in me. Profitability is
a math problem. I mean, bottom line, it is now
what you just mentioned, which is really important, not all
of it. Not Running a business is not just a
math problem. There's a lot involved in running a business,
big or small. Right, There's the combination of art and
science that lives throughout that whole massive puzzle that is
(21:30):
made of a thousand pieces. Pieces aren't all weighted the same.
But that's what operating a business is like, big or small.
So there are components to that that are the creative
parts that are much more art than science obviously, but
at the end of the day, if we distill it
down math, the profitability inside of a business is just
purely a math problem. And at the risk of sounding flippant,
(21:51):
at the if you were losing money, the reason you
were losing money is because you are spending more than
you're making. It's quite literally that simple. And now the
next verse of that is you're spending on fixed expenses
more than the contribution margin that the business is earning.
And if you know what contribution margin is, you know
what is inside of pretty much every business on the
planet is the answer to the question is it working
(22:12):
or not. Growing contribution margin dollars over time means whatever
you are doing is working. And as long as you're
not growing your fixed expenses at the same rate as
your contribution margin, that equals net profit, you were making
more net profit. So I think helping you know at
the higher stage, a CFO at a big company knows
exactly what I just said. A CEO founder of a
(22:34):
three million dollar a business, three million dollar per year business,
I just spoke French to him or her like, they
don't understand that, and that's okay. That's again, that's like
the whole part of this of Pentana as a product
is to simplify that. That is the common truth to
me inside of business is that most of the problems
(22:55):
that come up and arise within profitability can be solved
with math. As long as we set a destination, we
pick that endpoint, we say we want to get to
break even, we want to generate a ten percent net
margin or a twenty two percent or whatever that is.
We can use math and some really simple conditional logic
to work back from that and define a mathematically driven
(23:15):
plan that doesn't rely on like slinging spaghetti against the wall,
which is what an awful lot of companies do, and
just hope that it works, which is not obviously not
a great strategy.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, hoping is not a plan. No, witching is not
a plan, not even praying as a plan. But so
you're talking about, you know, your math acumen. What is
what would be your most interesting or most successful customer
story with pen pain and the platform, Like, where have
(23:47):
you been able to really drive profitability for a business?
Can you tell us about a particular client or a situation.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, I'll give you an example, and it's an interesting
one because it's the solution is counterintuitive, which is why
again math is becomes important when we're making decisions about
this stuff. There was a business that is a consumer
product company selling a really high end travel bag. The
founder brilliant product designer and this is the way these
things happened, created a product, people started buying it, and
(24:18):
he's like great of CEO and he's the CEO of company.
But he doesn't have a heavy financial background. It's not
his expertise. And that's okay. Most startup founders, you know,
early stage founders don't. That's why they eventually go and
hire those people. They got to a point they were
doing two million dollars a year and they were completely
upside down. They were losing one hundred thousand dollars a
month a month and a two million dollar year business. Obviously,
(24:41):
that's not good. You only have a couple of months,
you know, unless you have deep, deep piggybank pockets and
you love spending it, you only have a couple of
months of life at that rate. So what we did,
we got them into Pentane and what it told them
was two things. Technically, it told them that their fixed
expense base for the sized company they were was really high.
(25:03):
Important note number one. The more important note is it
told them that they were underspending on their advertising. But
they effectively they needed to increase their ad budget by
three hundred percent. That's a crazy thing. Like you see
that as the founder who's losing money, losing money, and
you're telling me, I got it, I got a three
x my AD spend. No way. The problem in a
(25:25):
business in that business, and it's a little bit different
in every business, but the problem in that business is
that they had their return on AdSpend, their ROI was nine.
That's crazy, like amazingly high. But the business wasn't driving
enough revenue to drive enough contribution margin to pay for
their fixed expenses. So the combination of not enough revenue
and two high fixed expenses created this like perfect storm
(25:47):
of debt spiral. And so they got in the system.
They got to see, if we increase our AD budget
by three hundred percent, which is insane, their return on
ads spend needed to get to break even will come
down to like three point five, which is much more reasonable,
particularly because their products were expensive. And because they got
to see that and we got to then they didn't
just increase that three hundred percent overnight like that happened
(26:07):
over the course of a month, and they got to
see that happened in a controlled fashion. It completely changed
the company. Three months later they were profitable. Now a
year and a half later, they're up seven hundred percent
and profitable because it just clarified this like mess inside
the company that they didn't they didn't know was there,
they didn't know how to solve it. The founder of
(26:28):
that company says that before the before I mean pentane,
before the mouth inside of pentanine, he felt like he
was walking through the forest at night, hammering, just bumping
into trees NonStop again. Yeah, yeah, and Pentane turned on
the lights. It didn't make it so the trees aren't there,
but it gave him the ability to see them coming
so they could plan and strategize around them.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I think that that is a huge, huge asset for
small businesses, for startups. Does it also provide insight for
some of those medium sized businesses that are making that
you know, one hundred million?
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Yeah, you know, that's a funny question. I've had a
lot more discussions around that recently. I was always under
an incorrect, possibly incorrect assumption that once you got to
the point you got above fifty million in revenue ish,
you generally have like a full suite of really talented people,
you know, doing CMO things, doing cro things, doing CFO things,
(27:23):
and that that would sort of inherently solve the problem.
And I have I am learning that the problem still
exists even in much larger firms like that, where you
have this you know, you have this vacuum of data
that doesn't cross in between sort of the financial side
and the customer acquisition side of the business. We are
focused on the smaller brand as a company just because
(27:46):
it's where I think we can be the most helpful.
And as we get bigger, we tend to see companies
that want really custom things, which we can do, but
they take money and time and whatever. But I do
think that it is a problem that is a lot
more pervasive than I had originally assumed, even in larger
companies like that.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well, that would be amazing if the tool also helps
illuminate those issues within the financial structures of the business
in order to help them achieve that profitability, especially now
that we're we're facing a situation, especially here in the US,
where you know, we're going to have to encourage those
entrepreneurs to do something. We're the political situation is just
(28:28):
making it perfect, the perfect breeding ground for these small
businesses to start up, to get off the ground, because
that's that's what the current administration wants. They want to
bring that ingenuity, that that innovation back to the US shores.
And that's great, but we are a global economy, and
(28:48):
you know, while the enterprise level businesses are having to
adjust things and they have that bandwidth, they have that space,
they have that size, you know, behind them, they're still
trying to be profitable too. I mean, that's that's an
issue for them as well. But it's one of those
things where you know, you kind of think of, you know,
rich people don't have problems. You know, big businesses don't
(29:08):
have problems. Well, of course they do. They're just different,
they're different size, but they're still problems. And I think
with the the interest in building up the infrastructure of
you know, smaller businesses and bringing a lot of that
production onto US shores is going to I have a
feeling you're going to be really busy in the next
(29:28):
few years helping these startups because there's they're trying to
solve a problem which is caused by you know, the
tariffs and trade agreements that they had no control over,
and now we're just trying to have product, we're trying
to have you know, commerce. And to your point, these
people don't know they're they're the innovator. They thought up
a solution to a problem and a business case to
(29:51):
make it happen. But they're not a CEO or a CFO.
They don't understand what it is that it's going to
take to make that business profitable and long lasting. They're
just trying to get through this year.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, it's a real it's a real challenge. I mean,
the math inside of Pentain is the same whether it's
for Exonmobile or the dry cleaner down the street. So
it is very universal that challenge of early stage business
is trying to navigate that. I mean, this is actually
a perfect example of the benefit of being a smaller company.
In Pentain. We know that that's a challenge. So I
(30:25):
can snap my fingers and have our development team create
a tool inside of our guidance system that accounts for tariffs,
so they can go in and say, what happens to
my company if I add twenty seven percent to my
cost of goods to adjust my micross margin and see
how that impacts how they have to acquire customers and
what they can afford to spend, and how their conversion
rates on their websites needs to change, and all these
(30:46):
things where it might take a big legacy SaaS company
six months to do it or a year to do
something like that. I mean, we can do that in
four days. We can move fast, break things move quickly.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Where can our listeners find more information about this this
tool that you have that can help illuminate some of
those those issues or even just you know, completely missed
opportunities within their their financial situation.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
With your business, Yeah, you can find Pentain at pentain
dot com, p E n t A n e dot
com me on LinkedIn. That's about the only place I
spending any time right now.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
So all right, Well, make sure to put those two
links in the in the description here for all of
our listeners to be able to reach out to you
if this sounds like something that would help them in
their current role at their current job or with their company,
or if they have an idea that they want to
try to get off the ground. You know, you might
(31:43):
get a whole lot of interest in people just saying, Hey,
you've been there, done that. How can I make this work?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
I'm happy to help.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
In a world where everything feels uncertain, from logistics to legislation,
the companies that survive aren't necessarily the biggest. They're the
ones that the fastest, understand their numbers and make the
smart bets early. Thank you Adam for showing us what
this looks like in real life. If any of our
listeners have a suggestion for a topic or would like
to be a guest on the show, we'd love to
(32:12):
hear from you. You can contact us at podcast at
meebok dot com at any time. As always, thanks for
listening to Speaking of Supply Chain. If you've enjoyed our show,
please rate and review us on whatever podcast platform you prevert.
We're on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Spotify, and be
sure to go to you in next time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
You've been listening to Speaking of Supply Chain, a meboch podcast,
keep connected with us by subscribing to the show in
your favorite podcast player. If you like what you've heard,
please rate the show that helps us to keep delivering
the latest in supply chain information. Thanks for listening, until
next time,
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