Let’s Talk Supply Chain Podcast features Erik Kiser in a discussion about EDI challenges and how Orderful’s API for EDI can solve them

Let’s Talk Supply Chain (LTSC), a supply chain podcast hosted by Sarah Barnes-Humphrey featured Erik Kiser, Orderful founder and CEO in a conversation about EDI. They discuss the supply chain challenges companies face with EDl and how Orderful’s API for EDI can integrate data efficiently – decreasing trading partner onboarding times by 90%. Watch the podcast or read the interview below.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey, Let’s Talk Supply Chain founder

Let’s Talk Supply Chain. So welcome to the show, Erik.

Erik Kiser, Orderful founder and CEO

Hey, thanks, Sarah. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, I’m really excited to have you here today. You and I met at the Manifest conference probably about six months ago, and I just got really excited about what you guys are doing over at Orderful. You know, we talk a lot about new technology and software on the show. And integration is such an important part of that, right? These days, the speed of onboarding, costs and future proofing so that everything isn’t out of date in six months since the last time we saw each other… those are really key things that businesses really need to think about. Because time and budgets are squeezed right now, right? So I’m really looking forward to discovering how you’re changing the game, and really leveling up the supply chain. So let’s dive right in. I’m really interested in starting with the Orderful story, because you said that it all began by experiencing the tension between small suppliers and giant buyers. And I can really, really relate to that. I mean, I had a similar mission in the shipping industry when I founded my own tech brand. So take us on that journey. What were you doing? What were you seeing? How did it lead you to founding Orderful?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, it certainly has been a journey. I started off my career with a degree in informatics, from Indiana. Informatics is essentially combining computer science with another study, in my case, my cognate, or my focus was entrepreneurship or business. So naturally, my first job out of school was to be a consultant.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

So I moved to Chicago as a consultant. And by coincidence or chance, I was thrown into these projects where I was building integrations for manufacturers, connecting them with their supply chains. And the first project I was on, I was at a meat manufacturer and I was being asked to integrate with Walmart, Safeway, and Costco. The work I was being asked to do was so archaic. I was blown away that this company was willing to pay my company $300 an hour for me to do this kind of work.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

Which was building flat files, to send this data, to send invoices or receive purchase orders from this meat manufacturer’s trading partners over FTP servers. I just learned about APIs and micro services, web services, all that stuff and I was being asked to build flat file data integrations and I was just kind of shook by it.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

So that was my introduction to the problem. I was a consultant and started to recognize that the industry was large, and every company that has a supply chain has to integrate data with their supply chain. I saw a big opportunity there. So I’ll fast forward three years out of school, I ended up starting my own consulting firm. I grew that company to about 50 people and all we did was EDI integration. We worked with larger mid market manufacturers – companies like Rip Curl, Jelly Belly and Redwing Shoe Company.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice.

Erik Kiser

So I saw what the larger enterprise integration environment looked like for manufacturers. But I started to recognize that the problems still existed at a larger scale, even with those types of brands. And I also recognized that the problem didn’t only exist for the brand, but it also existed for their trading partners, whether they were giants like Walmart, Costco, and Amazon. That brought me to this moment where I realized I could build a software platform that could bring both parties together. So there was tension between the David which would be, the Red Wing Shoe Company and the Goliath that would be like an REI or a Walmart. Red Wing had to essentially just do whatever their trading partners requested of them, they had to do business the way that their trading partners wanted to do business. And that was quite hard for a shoe manufacturer, right? They’re very good at making boots and probably make the best work boots in the world. However, they’re not a technology shop, they’re not a software company. So actually getting the work done to integrate with a Walmart or Amazon was quite difficult. So that was the problem I saw. The larger retailers and larger buyers have massive teams of people, whereas the manufacturers have maybe one or two people that can do the work. So, it’s a delicate trade of getting the job done and trying to figure out what priorities are for each company. That led me to build Orderful, which is a platform that can bring both parties together in one place.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

And we’re going to talk a lot more about what you’re doing at Orderful, because it’s so needed, right? You’re talking about the David and Goliath. And it really is that type of scenario. When you’ve got a small company who’s got limited resources that wants to do business with like a Walmart or an Amazon. And really that integration piece is sort of life changing, right? It’s that vital piece that they really need to be able to exchange the data and do business, the way that Goliath wants to do business.

Erik Kiser

That’s right.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

It’s so important to competitive advantage, success of a company, so much tied to it. But before we talk about what Orderful does, let’s explore some of those challenges you just touched on a little bit more? What are the challenges that companies face as they trade that data? And why can’t most EDI providers on the market adequately address these challenges? Why isn’t offering custom software enough?

Erik Kiser

That’s exactly where I came from, building the custom software. And the challenges that a manufacturer has is that you are really good at building your product, but not great at integrating or building software. Maybe you don’t have ERP specialists on site, likely don’t have API developers on site. Whereas the big retailers all have access to very large budgets, technology teams, and they kind of are forcing their supply chains to integrate with them. The biggest problem is not the technology itself, it’s not actually building the flat file and sending it over to the FTP server or the AS2 server. The biggest problem is actually getting two companies to collaborate to get the job done.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, speak the same language, right?

Erik Kiser

That’s right and do it in a timely manner. The biggest challenge is getting a new partner onboarded. And that problem exists both for the buyer and the seller. The way we look at the market at Orderful is we look at the companies that set the requirements, we call them leaders. A leader can have many followers and the followers are the companies that adhere to requirements.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

This carries on not only in retail, but also in logistics. And we see this with shippers and carriers as well. But the big challenge is that a shipper, or a retailer has all these resources, and a carrier or manufacturer doesn’t have the same amount of resources and they’re both trying to get the same job done, prioritize and do the work at the same time. And traditionally, neither of them have visibility into the same information, right?

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

They have their own systems, they have their own way of classifying items, and they have their own way of pricing. And what you’re trying to do with this integration is merge the two. Traditionally, that’s a very hard task and it’s very manual. It’s done over email and over phone and there’s very little visibility into these transactions and what’s actually going on between the two.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Absolutely. So let’s get right down into it then what is it that Orderful does? How do you help your customers?

Erik Kiser

We’re an API platform for EDI. What we’ve done is we’ve built a pre-connected network of what we call leaders. So these are shippers and retailers. We have about 2,500 leaders connected to Orderful. What that means is we take their requirements and we publish them into our product and we also publish their communication channels so whether they’re trading with an AS2, FTP, or a VAN, all of that information is already in our platform. What that does is it gives the follower one endpoint to connect to us and then immediately have access to trade with all of these different leaders.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

OK.

Erik Kiser

The value is that both sides can actually log in and see what’s going on with these transactions. So in a lot of cases, our customers are the followers, it could be carriers or manufacturers. They connect to our platform and then they can see all their leader requirements, and can consolidate them all into one subset, or master set of requirements and have one integration to trade with their whole supply chain. The other way that we work with customers is we represent the leader, and the leader can connect to us. And then what they get to do is onboard their followers to our platform.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

So in that case, both sides are coming together to do business on Orderful and trade together. It provides ultimate visibility into these transactions, a self-service onboarding experience for followers, clarity around what’s actually happening with EDI, and the traditional middleware, the black box goes away, and both sides can see what’s going on.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, and I can see how important it is for retailers to know that you’re out there, right? If I’m a small to medium sized retailer, and I’ve gone to have a meeting with Walmart, and they’re like, yes, we want to do it. And now you have to do all these things to do business with us. And they’re kind of like, oh, I don’t know how to do that, we don’t have a tech team, you know, we might have to lose the sale, because we’re just not sure how to do it and what to do. And so you would come in and be that middle person for them and kind of take that whole tech side off of their plate and just be like, hey, we’ve got this all in our system, join our system, and we can bring the two of you together.

Erik Kiser

That’s right. Typically, for brands that starts with a 3PL integration, right? First a brand matures from direct to consumer, maybe they need to sell through a 3PL or use a 3PL to ship or pick and pack the products.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

So usually their first EDI integration is with a 3PL provider.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

And then what they do is they mature into kind of a wholesale channel and they’re maturing into larger retail. And yeah, exactly it becomes an operational need. Right? It’s not a question of can you trade EDI? Or can you integrate data with us? It’s when can you do this because it’s demanded by the buyer. The leader requires it.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Well and think about time, right? How much time you would save to really be able to work with somebody like you to get it up and running, versus trying to tackle it all yourself and figure it all out yourself. What about real time? How real time is the information being exchanged since you are the third party in the middle? How does that work? Is it real time? Is there a little bit of a lag? What does that look like?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, the time we help people save is pretty dramatic. It’s about 90% of what a traditional EDI onboarding would look like.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Wow.

Erik Kiser

And the way we do that is we consolidate all the requirements, so that when a company hits our API, they get real time feedback to show them what data is going to be accepted and what is not going to be accepted by a trading partner.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

And traditionally, all that’s done over email and phone. As far as real time goes, we are an API hub where you can push and pull from our product. And so what that means is when somebody makes an API call to Orderful, we automatically create an EDI transaction for them. We will automatically validate their data and then send it to their partner. So all of that data processing is happening in real time and it’s happening over web services. We use AWS to send and receive all of our data.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice. And I can only imagine, if traditionally you’re doing it by email, the miscommunication that can kind of happen. Right?

Erik Kiser

It’s wild. Yeah.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

I’m sure that there’s a lot of mistakes that do happen just because of that communication. Or if there’s issues that are happening between the two parties, does your platform help resolve that a lot quicker than if they were doing it sort of outside of your platform? Run me through sort of those types of scenarios.

Erik Kiser

Correct. I’m not gonna name the enterprise but we were sitting in a large meeting room with a very large manufacturer and their EDI team. We asked the question, “How do you guys validate your EDI data?”

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

“How do you know what’s going to be accepted by your system or accepted by your partners?” And a woman spoke up in the room, she said, “Well, I just look at the transactions, or you eyeball it.” We dug into it and she got to the fact that she just visually looks at the transaction because she knows what looks right. And then if she sees something wrong, she’ll email the partner back that this data field is incorrect or invalid. And that was eye opening to us. It’s kind of why we built the platform. But what we do is we will automatically validate data, so we act as a validation hub. So when somebody posts a transaction to Orderful, we immediately can tell that user what’s wrong with their transaction.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

OK.

Erik Kiser

And the value in that is you get real time feedback from our platform. So instead of a developer sending a transaction or a file over email and getting validation a few days later, and then sending another one and getting more validation a few days later, the process taking five to 10 weeks to cover, a developer can now hit our API, get real time feedback, and solve their problems immediately. And they don’t have to wait on a trading partner to email them back any validation errors. So that feedback loop is tightly closed with our product.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

We even took it a step further. In our product, we have what we call a rules engine. So where a company sends an invalid transaction, they can go into our UI, see where all the problems are with that transaction, and then write a rule. And that rule would enable them to solve their problem in our UI, instead of having to write code to solve the problem. It’s an Excel-like feature, where you can write an if statement, or you can simply set values or replace values. But essentially, solve all of your validation problems in one place.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

That is priceless. I mean, I can just imagine how much time you’re saving just going back and forth over one mistake, or maybe a spelling mistake, or something so trivial that can cause ripple effects down the supply chain, and probably last for a long time, when you can really just solve it in that moment. Now, I want to ask you about the data. So the pandemic has led to a lot of changes over the last couple of years. And it’s opened us up to a lot of really interesting conversations. Do you think it’s changed the way businesses think about the data? You know, how they relate to it, move it around in their networks? What have you seen from your perspectives? What are your clients talking about?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, certainly in the logistics industry. We’re working with a lot of shippers onboarding carriers. And in this case, we represent the leader in their onboarding all the carriers, who are followers. And data is extremely important to them. For them to be able to forecast how much shipments are going to cost or to understand what’s coming to them in a shipment is extremely important for them to have access to this data. We’ve seen with the pandemic a rise in our customer type geared more towards logistics than retail.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

I think a lot of that’s driven by the demand of integrated data for the logistics industry that just wasn’t there.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

A lot of trucks are moving around with physical paperwork. These companies now are demanding to have actual integrated transactions because they can’t rely on just receiving a truckload at a dock at any given time. You can’t afford wasted time.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah. Especially with documentation and documentation is so important. And if it’s not handed off, I mean, that can cause all sorts of complications, but don’t get me started. But staying on what we’re talking about in regards to logistics. So we’ve talked about how you work with retailers, manufacturers, distributors, SaaS platforms. But let’s take a look at how that solution works for logistics specifically because the challenges are flying at the industry from all angles right now. Right? Everything is evolving super quickly. Providers are kind of struggling to keep up, especially I know they were kind of behind on the data side. So how does Orderful help them?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, what’s unique about us, as you know, we’re a platform that brings companies together. Traditionally, in logistics, there’s a couple of EDI providers out there. And what they do is they offer a managed service to onboard new partners.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

So for a large carrier, they may have an EDI provider that’s a managed service that’s going to onboard new trading partners for them. But then they’re trading partners also have a managed service. So traditionally, you’re working with two different consulting firms to get this job done. What’s unique about Orderful is we’re representing shippers and they’re inviting carriers to trade with them through our platform.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice.

Erik Kiser

And all of that is self service. So what that looks like is, a shipper, like Koch Industries, for example, the second largest private company in the world, they’re one of our customers that are inviting all their carriers onto Orderful. And those carriers, what they get to do is they have a UI, they get to log in, they get to self service. So whether it’s their EDI provider, like a managed service company or it’s the carrier themselves, they log into Orderful, they select the communication channel, and then they can go through all the onboarding steps and self service. And what they’re actually doing is they’re handling loads, they’re responding to loads with a 990, they are sending truck location updates with a 214. So all of the traditional EDI transactions are happening through our platform. And the benefit for these followers of the carriers is they can either trade any format of X12 or EDI that they trade today with us. Or they can integrate with our API. So they can start to move to a modern solution instead of having to continue to do this super legacy process with external data.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, and it just brings everybody together. And it brings all the documentation and the data together. It just brings everybody together in this one, collaborative environment. I don’t have my sign behind me today, but everybody knows I say, collaboration is the future of business. And that just gets me so excited thinking about how there is that kind of solution out there. Now, a lot of times when we talk about technology, people in the audience say “Yeah, but what about onboarding?” What does onboarding look like with Orderful? Is it fast? Is it easy? That’s what people want to know about.

Erik Kiser

That’s our whole focus as a product. Traditionally, EDI onboarding with a new partner takes about eight weeks to get done. What our customers are seeing in Orderful is it’s taking about five days or less. And the way we do that is we make it self service. EDI is very complicated. Every partner has their own unique requirements and may have their own communication channels. What we’ve done is we’ve taken all of that legacy information, and we’ve abstracted it into one self service software platform. So when somebody onboards, with a partner in Orderful, they go through the same steps that they would, every time, even though the partner can have different requirements.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Okay.

Erik Kiser

So once a company is up and running on our platform, adding a new trading partner is quite easy. Because they’ve done it once, it’s the same process, and they go through it again. And what we’re seeing is about a 90% reduction in onboarding times for our customers.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Wow.

Erik Kiser

What was taking about eight weeks is now taking about five days or less for companies onboard.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice. That is huge. And those are huge numbers. When you say self service, what exactly do you mean by that?

Erik Kiser

What that means is a company can connect to our API, they can get real time feedback from our product without talking to the trading partner, and they can go through testing with the partner through our product. We have what we call scenario testing. Traditionally, in EDI, you have to actually go through some testing cycles. So we publish all those requirements in our platform. And that whole process is done in our product. And then once the company finishes testing, they have valid data, they can then simply schedule go live with the partner and go live.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice, and it walks you through that, right?

Erik Kiser

That’s right.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

It’ll walk you through all that testing. So that’s what you mean by self services, I can go in, put in all my information, and then it’ll tell me what I need to do next.

Erik Kiser

Yep, you log into Orderful, you make a trade request, we set you up with a trading partner and we publish all the requirements for you. And then what you get as a customer is a self-serve experience walking through that.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Good, that’s beautiful. I love that. When I was doing the research for this, you’re very much about sustainability and DEI. And you want to sort of support not only the small guys, but also you know, supplier diversity. I mean, that’s a huge thing for any of the companies that you’re working with right now. So how does this help better support supplier diversity?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, it kind of levels the playing field. In EDI, about 20% of the market has an EDI provider, an EDI solution. The other 80 percent has some homegrown software.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

And what that means is 80% can’t actually build EDI integrations. So when you look at including more vendors and more suppliers, you have to offer them technology that meets them where they are. So what we’ve started with is this JSON interface. But what else we’ve done is we’ve taken it a step further, and we’ve partnered with companies like Celigo and Workato. These are iPaaSes that make it really easy for APIs to connect. What they’ve done is they’ve started to build integrations to different ERP systems. So if you’re a supplier or a carrier that can’t necessarily build software, we likely have a partner that’s already built an integration for your system that can connect to Orderful and enable you to trade EDI. So that’s certainly something we’re focused on, which is how do we service that other 80% of the market that doesn’t have the same opportunities that the top 20% have.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Love that. I love that. That is a topic after my own heart. So I’m glad that we talked about that today. So now let’s get to some of the questions around, if I am excited about your product and love listening to what you have to say today, what do I look like? Who’s your ideal client profile? When should I pick up the phone and call you? Who am I?

Erik Kiser

If you’re trading EDI, give us a call. We’d love to show you the product and get feedback. Typically, we work with companies that have established EDI environments. Companies that are maybe a little more established in their journey. But we also work with startups quite a bit. It just depends on how we work with these organizations. What we see is with startups or smaller SMBs, is they typically work with a partner that we have, like Celigo or Workato to integrate with us.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

But the larger accounts like a Koch Industries, NFI, Flocked Freight,or Emerge, all of these types of companies are actually building their own integrations to our API.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Right.

Erik Kiser

So, we can work with everyone. But we really like working with larger organizations. If you are a small organization, and you’re trying to figure out how to trade EDI, reach out to us, we have people that can help. And it’s likely that we can bring in the right partner that’s already built an integration to your system.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Love that. And so now it’s time for case study. This is my favorite question to ask. And your website really got me excited, because each of your examples has a few key stats to bring to life. I saw 31% reduction in transaction and consulting costs for one of your clients. I saw 90% reduction in onboarding what you did mention earlier. So paint us a picture of how you’ve worked with one of your customers, what was their challenge? What was the impact or the ROI of your solution?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, great. So, I’ve already mentioned them once and we have a published case study out there with them, but one of our largest accounts is Koch Industries.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

Their challenge before Orderful was they had a very large team. And what they were doing is they’re the leader onboarding followers. So they’re a shipper, really their acting as a 3PL, and they’re trying to onboard carriers for their customers to be able to communicate with these carriers through their platform. Originally, they were doing all of that through the traditional onboarding methods. So they had a team of people making phone calls, getting these carriers to start onboarding with them. And they were doing all the back and forth over email. That process for them was taking about eight weeks. When Koch got started with Orderful, they connected to our API, they were able to move a lot of those people that were doing the onboarding. They had about 20 full time people doing this work, they will move them to do more important integration work.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice.

Erik Kiser

Because essentially, what they were doing was building EDI integrations for Koch Industries. So they moved them to more important integration work. They built a small team of carrier onboarding specialists, kind of a different role. More of kind of business users using our platform instead of developers integrating their backend. And then what these folks are able to do is invite their partners on through our platform. And so instead of sending a traditional email or making a phone call, they’re clicking a button in Orderful that’s sending a trade request to the carrier. The carrier’s getting an automated email. The carrier then logs into Orderful, sets up their own communication channel and starts testing with Koch as self service. So the big benefit is instead of there being this two-sided problem of consultants or people trying to collaborate and get this job done. These carriers get to login to a platform and have a very defined onboarding process to trade with Koch. And Koch now can visualize the state of all their carriers, where they’re at in the onboarding process and see where they need to help their supply chain. The result of that was minimizing this eight-week onboarding time minimized down to about five days. And a lot of that is because the back and forth is gone.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, right.

Erik Kiser

No longer does the carrier have to wait for Koch to respond on validation errors. The carrier can just do all their work on their own. Koch also doesn’t have to babysit their supply chain, if you will. They can just invite people and provide that kind of self service experience.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Nice, no more babysitting, and no more of hundreds of emails.

Erik Kiser

I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it kind of feels like that.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

I love that. And no more like hundreds of emails sort of clogging your email, right? Because I can only imagine being one of them coming back from vacation. Like thousands and thousands of emails that they’re saving.

Erik Kiser

It’s turned away from this big project management task to a routine self service experience where, yeah, there’s still some management of these carriers from Koch today, but it’s a lot less and the carriers can do all the work on their own time.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Well and you want to do business with us, here’s an easy platform, set yourselves up, and then we can get going. Even from a carrier perspective, I can only imagine because I was in logistics, and just a long time ago, maybe even five years ago, to onboard a client, it’s all this paperwork, it was a nightmare. It was like you want to do business with us? You need to fill this out, fill this out, fill this out, and fill this out. And I don’t want to ask them to do that anymore. And so you know, with your system, you don’t have to, and I can just see the relief, you know, for leading the industry.

Erik Kiser

And there’s a benefit for the carriers to. If the carriers are already trading EDI, they can use their existing EDI versions or their existing EDI integration, and just plug that right into Orderful.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah.

Erik Kiser

We automatically translate their version to the version that Koch needs. So it’s very quick for them. The other benefit for the carriers is once they’re connected to Orderful, they can then trade with our network. So not only can they access Koch, but they can access Amazon or Walmart or whoever else they want to trade with, all through that one connection.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Amazing. I love it. So I don’t want this conversation to end. But we’re at the end and I want to ask you. At the end of last year, you secured an extra $19 million in series B funding. I mean, congratulations, first of all.

Erik Kiser

Yeah thank you.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

That’s going to help you drive Orderful forward. So what’s next? What does the future hold for Orderful?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, EDI is super complicated. It’s taken us about four and a half or five years to build a complete product. And that series B was kind of a reward of finding product market fit, and having a complete product that big enterprises are using. So that was a landmark for us, getting that deal done last year. What’s next is we’re focused on growth. Everything to date has been focused on product and experience and customer, like the customer experience. And now while we’re going to continue to do that, we’re also going to start focusing on go-to-market and growth, something we haven’t put any focus on yet to date. So that’s what a lot of the funds are going to go towards. We also have an amazing leadership team. It’s taking years to build that as well. The journey for me has been quite wild. I’m just happy to be here. Super grateful for all the people that have taken bets and stuck it in with us throughout all of this.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, the entrepreneurship journey is wild. I mean, we talk about it, where people sort of see you at a point in time, but they don’t see everything else that sort of came along with it. And the journey of what that looked like the highs, the lows.

Erik Kiser

Yeah it’s a lot.

Sarah Barnes-Humphrey

Yeah, it is a lot. And so kudos to you, really excited to see what is next for Orderful. That was fascinating. I think that the pandemic has really helped us as an industry, just to really understand what’s important moving forward and the areas we need to focus on. But part of our problem is that our ideas don’t always match our infrastructure right? And perhaps we know that we need to be more agile, but we’re still relying on spreadsheets. We know we need to be more collaborative, but legacy systems just don’t allow us to share that data. And so there’s still that disconnect there. But it’s really refreshing just to see a company like Orderful, who are making it easy. Helping everyone including the little guys to leverage the power of a strong network with speed, ease, and at a low cost. And I really do think that models like this one are the future. If you want to find out more, you can check them out at Orderful.com. A massive thanks to Erik for joining me today and to the team at Orderful for making this episode happen.

Erik Kiser

Thank you Sarah. Thanks for having me.