Boldr's President and COO, Mari Parker and Nick Petros, President of PinchForth, Inc. highlight ethical business practices from paying a living wage in outsourcing to how inconvenience stores can teach us something.
Tune in to learn more about the innovative ways Boldr is setting new benchmarks in the outsourcing industry. Whether you are a business leader looking to outsource responsibly or an advocate for ethical business practices, this conversation is packed with valuable insights and practical advice for you.
Listen to the full podcast by clicking the player below, or you can follow the full transcript of the conversation. Join us as we explore the transformative potential of ethical outsourcing.
The Bad Ideas podcast is a space where business leaders dissect and revamp comically bad business ideas. Their mission is to use a simple, entertaining concept to let you inside the 'idea' room and listen into the type of creative thinking that sometimes leads to really big wins.
Nick: We're back for another episode of the Bad Ideas Podcast with Mari Parker, COO at Boldr. What can you tell us about Boldr?
Mari: That's right, we are your ethical outsourcing partner. We're the largest B Corp-certified global outsourcing company or BPO – this is what we're typically known as. We prefer to talk about helping companies build their teams, because I really feel like in the outsourcing industry it's easy to get pigeonholed, and a lot of companies thrive on specializing in a certain area, and we're really leaning into the fact that talent is equally distributed in the world, but opportunity is not, and the markets that we operate in, we've cracked the nut on how to find talent there so we can find talent in any area of a business, and we can help distribute opportunities in a way that's really economically beneficial to all parties.
We invest in the communities, and the communities that we specialize in are the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, and Canada.
Nick: All amazing places. I think South Africa right now is a very interesting labor market, and there are some unbelievably talented people there who just don't have access to jobs like we do here in the West.
Mari: That's exactly it. South Africa is pretty unique, and I'm gonna lie about the percentage now, but I know it's north of 30% official unemployment rate. So there's an unemployment crisis, which really does lend to incredible talent being available. We've got a lot of our management, a lot of our leadership team is actually based in South Africa at this point.
Nick: There you go! Well for everyone who isn't running a 1500-person company: Outsourcing, just as I understand it –I'm going to step all over my feet explaining this–, there are three or four different ways you can hire. You can hire directly, you can hire fractionally, through a recruiter that takes a margin on top of it, or –as I understand it– you can work with a BPO firm that can help hire, train, and place. There are all kinds of dimensionality within the BPO space; some displace people, and some give you someone to directly manage. I think you guys are unique because you have your own process development system, so you understand the processes that you're placing –or was this five years ago?
Mari: A little bit. We have two core service offerings. I think it’s also unique because you'll typically find either an Employer of Record Model or you'll find a Managed Outsourcing Model. We do both, so we have that flexibility for potential clients or clients.
Nick: I think the funny thing about the space is companies need to be a little more mature, a little older, to realize that businesses like yours exist, but to a small, growing company. I mean, even just the managed service to help install some process without hiring or taking out a loan or raising money to hire, it's such a massive lift, and the productivity boost you get on top of it's just gravy. It's a really amazing space.
Mari: It can be very powerful. I've had the pleasure of meeting in person with a couple of clients just last week, and the one individual went on and on and on about how she couldn't live with you know these team members that support her. But what I love about these anecdotal conversations with our clients is to get that juicy bit of how it's impacted her as an individual, and then her quality of life and the stress. It's like what you mentioned, the lift that you have when it's all on you. When you have a partner, and you can spread the work in a way that you just like “If something happens to me today, things are going to keep going, things are okay, I've got help and support”. It's pretty powerful.
Nick: We were talking about this before the podcast: That you're the Chief Operating Officer and about the mission of bad ideas, and how the people who make the work are the ones who create the real value, and you're the boss of that. Tell us about what the day-to-day occupies for a COO at a company your size.
Mari: It’s a lot. I think the COO role is unique in that. I don't think any two COOs have the same job. So it really depends on your company, how it's structured, and what the C suite looks like. So today for Boldr, it's just our C suite David, our CEO and founder, and myself. We've kind of just divided and conquered. He handles most of the revenue generating and front end of the house, and I'm the back end and operation side of it. It's a lot of context switching, and when you're leading through leaders and leading through senior leadership, there's a lot of guiding and coaching that is not a lot of the doing of work, but it's keeping track of what is IT doing that's impacting Finance, that's impacting HR, and just keeping that whole picture together, and making sure that the individuals that are leading those different departments on working in silos, and that they're actually working together as a team.
Mari: I've always been pretty inspired by Patrick Lencioni. He's got so many good books –and I hope I pronounced his name right– but the one “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, there's a scene in that book –I think it's the cutest thing because it's like a little telenovela, it's super easy to read, and all the drama– and I love where this fictional CEO sits around the table with her leadership team, and she's like “who's your first team?” and the instinct of a leader of a division like that would be the people reporting to them, but coming to the realization that it's the people around the table and it's actually your peers. So I think a lot of the work for me is making sure that they're operating as a team and that you're not just like, focusing on your silos and getting a and getting lost in your day-to-day work. There's a lot of that keeping track of our performance, OKRs, and then there's the receivables and payables and just making sure that everything is ticking along.
Nick: I think it's true that every COO has kind of a different role, because every company has its own kind of process system. What I think is most special about the COO role is when you're kind of building the way that all these different departments work in concert and conducting it at the same time. That's one of the big things that I learned about business by kind of falling into it backward, was that it isn't about having this big, crazy idea, it's about how the idea is built, and learning about roles like yours. People exist who manage 50,000 tethers at the same time effectively and understand how to make all those things play nicely, which, in spite of the hundreds of books I've read, I still haven't figured out yet –so much respect.
Mari: I don't think anybody's figured it out.
Nick: Thank you for walking us through all that, it's an amazing company, and cool for everyone to kind of understand where your perspective is coming from.
Nick: Now we're gonna look at a really bad idea, one that we probably wouldn't want to build, and then talk about why it's bad, and when we run out of bad stuff, we'll talk about how to make it good. Does that sound good?
Mari: Sounds great.
Nick: Let's see what we have today –sweaty palms. So the bad idea is “Inconvenience Stores”: Why make shopping easy when it can be inconvenient? Our stores specialize in stocking hard-to-find items, and none of what you'd expect to see in a shop on the corner.
Mari: Hard to find and none of what you can see?
Nick: None of what you'd expect to find. It's like the opposite of a 7-Eleven. So the things that you run to the store to typically get are not there, and things that you wouldn't find –I'm assuming– in a Stop&Shop or 7-Eleven are there.
Mari: So there's tires or something you don’t think you need.
Nick: When you go to the gas station, you need something for your car, you need something for your bath because it's 3 in the morning and you didn't stock up, and nothing else is open, and they always seem to be short of everything that you need.
Mari: 100%. I ran to 7-Eleven recently because I couldn't find –silly story– a wine bottle opener, which is a very urgent matter on a Friday night. And you think they would have that, but no.
Nick: I mean, it seems like the opposite, right? It's inconvenient. They only have the things that you can't find anywhere else. So I imagine, on the one hand, they think that they're going to attract a lot of people who couldn't find something somewhere else, like “Let's go to the inconvenience store, they might have it”, but at the same time, you're losing all of your upsells because convenience stores most of the margins made in the candy when you're checking out.
Mari: I could totally picture the idea of “There's just one thing that's hard for me to find. I'm going to create a store where it's easy to find that thing”, but if you only need it once a year, that's why it's hard to find. You're not going to browse around and be like, hey, I really needed spark plugs now that I see one.
Nick: What else is in this store that I don't regularly need, but now that I'm here, I'll shop for –who knows.
Mari: I might as well get a bookshelf –I don't know, we’re surrounded by things we only buy.
Nick: The fact that we can't even think of them is kind of like a doomsday for the marketing of this store. It's just not going to work. The other problem that comes to mind for me is just inventory management. Because if you're selling things that are kind of unique, how do you know what to stock and supply? I find that particularly interesting as I'm talking to you, and most people don't really think about human labor as supply, when really it's the most valuable supply there is. Imagine you guys have kind of built a way to figure out how to calibrate to demand, you're not hiring like crazy, and then downsizing.
Mari: That's exactly right. In my previous life, before Boldr, I spent 16 years with my career in logistics. Supply chain management would be really, really difficult.
Nick: How do you stock something that people “might need”?
Mari: We'd never know if you need it again. That would be super complicated.
Nick: That brings up an even bigger problem. If something isn't needed all the time, is it just by default impossible to get? Or really inconvenient to get? Is it doomed to be something that's specialized, because it's not something you need frequently? That seems like a big business problem, but I don't know how you solve it.
Mari: I don't know either. It would naturally make it not a low price point item, if you think about that.
Nick: Everything would be super expensive.
Mari: It’s not something that is a frivolous purchase that you get. It’s not convenient, no impulse buys, or highly improbable –going back to your note earlier about the impulse purchase being where you actually make the money out of these situations.
Nick: Basically, we're decreasing the value per customer, and we're significantly increasing the cost of inventory and sales. This is a bad idea, but we're also highlighting. I mean, this is a huge gap, right? We're kind of in this mass production economy, and we have an episode we recorded a week or two ago with the Vice President of Technology for Amazon Logistics. We spent that entire show talking about how they're bringing everything to immediate and how they're building storage and logistics systems to make sure you get everything right away. But they're making these same decisions: “This is not going to sell beyond a volume of X, so I can't store or ship that much of it”. They're conditioning us to be so used to getting everything right away and finding everything right away. That stuff like this –I mean, does it disappear? Are we paying like $200 for a wine opener on Friday night because we can't find it?
Mari: They spread and can’t get them within one-hour delivery.
Nick: You're getting an airlifted wine opener. Where does it go? That is a big problem, but how do you economically solve that? If inconvenient stores find out the right approach.
Mari: Don't think inconvenience stores is the right approach, but I think the reality of what happens is that somebody who's willing to specialize and just be like “this is the store where you can find this one random thing”, and you're gonna go narrow but deep, instead of the Amazon model that is broad and everything you can have. There are these ones that really specialize. And it makes me think of like –there's a South African product, called biltong. I grew up in South Africa, I don't know if I mentioned that before.
Nick: Oh wow. I brought up South Africa without knowing that, so forgive me if we went straight there.
Mari: No, that's fine! That's where I grew up. And so we grew up with biltong. It's basically beef jerky, but it's made in a different process, and we eat it the way Americans will eat nachos or, like, cheese and crackers or whatever. It's just always like a snack, a very common snack, but in the US, it's really difficult to find. And there's this one little store in –I think– San Diego somewhere, where this guy specializes in it, but he doesn't have a website, he has no e-commerce, you have to call him to place your order manually and go and get it, but that's his jam. So it's inconvenient, but I guess that's the solution: You figure out how to do it yourself or somebody’s gotta go deep in order to specialize in this one thing for it to be remotely economical from a business perspective.
Nick: Here comes an ad-libbed bad business idea to attempt to solve this problem, because I hate niching down. Niching down freaks me out because then you're limiting your consumer base. And I feel like you always need to have a massive consumer base to be able to have a ceiling, or be able to pivot if you need to, which I know is not true –it's just a personal paranoia. But the bad idea here is maybe you take advantage of the Amazons and the Walmarts by building some sort of algorithm that keeps track of what they're not stocking in store, so that's what controls your demand. So it's algorithmic-based, and you can make sure that your store always has what they don't.
Mari: I love that. It’s like “The not Amazon Store”.
Nick: “The Anti-Amazon Store”. I imagine Walmart's doing that literally right now in some capacity. But that wouldn't be super crazy if you could figure out what top items the major stores and retailers are not carrying in real-time, and you could find ways to stock those. I imagine in logistics, you got to do some sort of hedging against sales: like you buy against what you think the demand is going to be.
Mari: Absolutely. And it's usually based on historical trends. So you need to have some data, some track records there. That's an interesting thought. I mean, I want to assume that they don't stock those because they're not popular.
Nick: Like they know what they're doing?
Mari: Like you said. I mean, why doesn't it have to be like, all or nothing, right? And why do you have to build something that's going to operate at the scale of an Amazon or Walmart? And if you can find content in the –I don't know– “mediocrities” –that probably must be the vilified word–. but in the mediocrity of like: “Hey, there's market share there”. And can you have enough variety in that it's actually like a viable business? I don't know if it'll be a massive business, but it could be viable.
Nick: When did you guys know that Boldr was going to be big? Was there an inflection point where you said “Hey, this is just going to go”?
Mari: The industry we're in has been around for a long time, and it's got a proven track record. So we have enough other companies to look at to be like, “Hey, this is the trend”. And we can understand cycles and so forth. So I think there was enough of “It's not a crazy idea”. So it's not a proof of concept “Is this going to figure out?”. It’s a well-known enough industry at the point where we started, and that made it easier. Whether our model was going to scale the way that we're doing it, and if people would care that we're doing this ethically, was a different question. And I'd say 2020 was insane for us, we grew like crazy. 2020–2021, we had just a pipeline of business that showed the counter-cyclical behavior of our industry as well. It’s kind of reassuring in a way. So when the US is under economic pressure, we tend to thrive, because there's pressure on finding more economic ways of staffing your team or scaling –for sure. And just going through one of those cycles has been reassuring. The next one is AI, so there's a big question mark over it again. I know we're viable, I know we can do it. I think that any business there is at this point, there are revenue points to get from 3 to 5 million in top-line revenue. There's this black hole, and that's really hard. And then once you're through that, and you kind of grow into the infrastructure that you built, then you can go into that next wave, and each one of those you make it through, is like, “Okay, we can do this. We got this”.
Nick: And there you go. I mean, it's always fascinating to hear. I mean, especially since you guys have been through it so recently, we were just talking about medium-sized businesses, like deciding if you want to be there. But I guess, for you guys, the business took you there and the market took you there. It wasn't like, I'm sure there's always a vision and a dream that we could be X, but you really start doing it when the market allows you to, and the market asked you to.
Mari: Absolutely. When David started the company, he had a clear goal to grow this pretty quickly. And we still have a goal that we want to get to, you know, $100 million in revenue. There are reasons for that, we do have a clear goal and strategy, and we are flowing with the market as best we can, and trying to adapt with these external circumstances, like AI and COVID. Everything influences you in a different way, and you just got to be flexible through it.
Nick: And in just my limited experience hiring overseas, certain areas with major BPO presence, like the Philippines, for example, the team members we hire from there are just naturally better than at process, because they understand it. I think that's where AI is going a little crazy here in the West, because everybody's a pure innovator. So people who can apply structure and understand how training needs to be used, I think that’ll dovetail in a complementary way for you guys.
Mari: Thank you, I'll take it. I definitely anticipate a shift to happen. There's a lot of work that has been easy to put in a lower-cost region that is definitely right for automation, and it makes a ton of sense. So there is the repetitive work that makes sense from a business perspective, it makes sense from an economic perspective. There are a lot of reasons to automate it. The trickle-down effect that I'm curious to see how it's going to play out is: What does this do for entry-level jobs in the economy? So these are the kind of things that's really easy without a college degree, you want to get it into the workforce, and this is super easy. You don't need much of a qualification, you just need to be able to follow the process. And I'm curious, what is that role going to be in the future. If it's not macro-enabled customer support or data entry type of work because of AI.
Nick: It's going to be babysitting and AI, I think that’s what’s going to happen.
Mari: That’s exactly it. But what does babysitting AI look like? And what qualifications do you need, right? Is that an entry-level role? I think, is the big question.
Nick: So maybe this is our solve, right? We'll make inconvenience stores impact. Well, we'll have to. So it'll be AI-driven logistics, and we'll make all the jobs supervising purchasing entry-level. There'll just be a red light, green light. If the number is higher than this, we don't buy it. If it's red, we do.
Mari: I love it.
Nick: Do we think there are legs to convenience stores? If it is something that could be responsibly stock what the big stores don't, so you have another place to go?
Mari: I think it may be. I'm curious. I'm definitely curious. I don't know if I'm going to take my pocketbook out in advance, but I’m curious.
Nick: All right, all right. So this, this one gets a 50/50. Thank you so much for hopping on and doing some brainstorming with us. I hope you had fun. We had great fun learning from you and learning about what you guys were doing.
Mari: Absolutely thank you, Nick. Appreciate it.
Watch the full Bad Ideas Podcast on their Youtube channel.