S4E2: Shae Inglis - Solving Complex Problems

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Welcome back to Commerce Famous episode two season four, and we have a special treat. I think I'd have to look back and confirm it, but this is our first Canadian. So please welcome Shay Inglis. Shay, welcome to the pod. Thank you.

I'll, I'll I'll try to turn up the Canadian accent. That would be great. I need I need four aboots before we, we're done with the pod. And I'll throw some a's in there too. That'd be amazing.

Fabulous. Well, why don't we start off with a little bit of an intro, on on you and your company, Acro, who's a partner of Shopware. Would love it maybe just a couple of minutes about you and your background, and then we'll bust into, the conversation around complex commerce, specifically b two b. How far into the background do you wanna go? You know, you were born at a very young age.

I'd start there. Probably probably the origin story for ACRO is a a great place to start. You know, the first the first part of the story is that we actually failed and fell on our face the first time, and that was in '97. And, it was a bad partnership. It, we had picked up a guy that was a borderline crook, as a partner to to sell market and do the administration.

We were the tech folk. Yeah. He was he was draining the bank account. He was trading websites for for rifles and hunting trips and and, and then also emptying the the company of cash on a daily basis with the bank card. So it wasn't a it wasn't a good start to, entrepreneurship for us, and that lasted about seven or eight months.

And, we all went back to looking to beg for our our jobs back, for the jobs that we left. And, two two individuals stepped in who knew what we were doing and offered us, to keep us keep us all together and become equal partners with us to to kick off ACRO in 1998. And, they gave us a few months working capital. I think it was three or four months working capital. They set us up in a nice little shop, and, we never borrowed a cent after that.

We were actually able to make, great success there rolling into the 2 thousands, with the with the .com boom and bust, and got to experience many, many hardships, throughout our our history, but managed to essentially grow the business from basically what was for small technical entrepreneurs in their young twenties to to what we've built up into in terms of almost a 100 person agency, today, focusing very, very specifically into the b to b manufacturing, distribution, wholesale market, providing them ecommerce. So there's a lot of steps in between there, but that is essentially the the quick and the quick and dirty. Fabulous. Well, you know, we've only relatively recently met and couldn't be more impressed with the team and the culture you've built at ACRO. And what I liked I think the most is how focused you are on your ICP.

And you kinda just talked a little bit about it. We we learn every day when we meet and talk to you guys, about the world you play in, and we obviously coexist. But talk a little bit about the relationship between ERP vendors, agencies, partners, and some of the mindset that that is around that ecosystem. Maybe talk a little bit about that. So we I guess, I'll I'll back up a little bit because we we started in, commerce.

We we actually built our own ecommerce platform at one point in time, a proprietary system. If we go way back, it's it's, everything that we've done has come out of necessities of what we've seen and and kinda grab it on to the next kind of phase of how things have evolved. And we recognized early on by building our own ecommerce platform that, it was too set in nature to to appease every single use case. And, I mean, it was general retail. Ecommerce is quite simple.

When when you get into b two b, it's like a it's like a fingerprint. Every single business use case is slightly different, and no one platform seemed to fit it. And so what we've found is we had, you know, fifty, sixty different instances of of the platform and and trying to support that because the use cases were so so, diverse. And so we abandoned that and actually moved into open source. And one of the platforms that we we we looked at Magento.

We didn't like necessarily the path that it ended up taking, and we fell in love with Drupal and the Drupal Commerce module, which was, called Ubercart at the time, and then eventually changed over to Drupal Commerce. And we loved it so much that we actually became the biggest contributor to Drupal Commerce, in the world. We actually were very still to this day, very well known for Drupal Commerce in our, contributions to it. It actually pushed us up to be a top three, provider in that community for for several years. And we were using it to solve very, very specific b two b use cases.

Oftentimes, people would come to us when they've tried a proprietary system, and, and they were like, you know, they were they were failing in terms of what its capabilities were. They were having to sacrifice way too much of their their business, their actual true business and how they operate and and serve their customers. And so we were able to overcome every single problem that ever crossed our plate because we were able to to leverage open source and and do what we needed to do in terms of integrations or custom workflows, using that that platform. And then Shopify, BigCommerce, those types of companies came along, and they started serving that, market and and headed into that market. And we realized at that point that we were going to have to work with them because they were winning market share.

And we were gonna have to find a way to use these platforms in such a way that, it it was going to work as best as possible for the customer. And that's when kind of the composable scene, the the whole headless build came into into the equation. And so we ended up building a a, a headless accelerator that tied into all these platforms, and essentially became the head to to ecommerce, for many of the the mainstream SaaS platforms and then connecting that to to the ERP and behind the scenes. So we've always kinda stayed in the lane of of b two b. It's always been the most complicated, market to serve.

There wasn't a lot of companies that were serving it. And so that's what pushed us into that space. When we when we realized that there was, the stack that really mattered was around ERP and OMS, we were then starting to figure out, well, let's let's start partnering with those companies. And we started looking at ERP providers that were that were in, more open to partnership, which I'm sure we'll get into. But, recognizing that the VAR group was really that the people who sold the ERP were the companies that we need to to to work with.

And that's how we ended up starting to to massage and figure out how to how to work together nicely with the VAR group. That was a very roundabout way of getting to the answer to your question. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com.

Oh, I like it. You know, this is like this is like politics. You don't answer the question you're asked. You answer the question you want to have been asked. So good job, a pivot to that.

Yeah. No, but I think I think you're on the right theme. In b to b, you know, a lot of e commerce platforms, kind of go to market and talk about the consumerization of b to b. And what they're really saying is those companies are not going to modify their core product. They're hoping the market comes to them.

And I think your comment around the fingerprint is a really good example. These are businesses that you guys work with, are businesses that are not going to change their business processes to fit inside of a box. They need the platform to adjust to the way that they want to do business. There's there's areas where they're very rigid in the way they have to work as an ERP as an example, but there's places they need flexibility and agility, and that really becomes the ecom platform in my mind. And, you know, so I'd love you to respond to that, and then I'll follow on around kind of the role of the ERPs in ours.

So to get a little bit into the technical weeds, the reality is is that a commerce platform isn't an ERP, and ERP isn't isn't a commerce platform. And you need both of them in the ecosystem to work correctly because there's information that has to come from both. And for the most part, the ecommerce side is serving up that user experience. So every platform has their has their front end. The problem that we've seen and that we are continually trying to overcome is how do you get the the real important data out of the ERP, such as, say, the pricing rules, the workflows, the inventory, real time inventory.

How do you get that into the ecommerce platform? Now there there are integrations between these platforms for the most part, and the the most simple aspects of what commerce can understand is easily pulled across. But in b two b, as we know, there's a lot more complexity in that ERP system that is necessary for the customer experience that simply can't be pulled into a front end that doesn't understand what that is. Right? And so how do you how do you overcome that?

And that's really where our focus in Firepower has been is how do you how do we make that happen? And the best way that we came up with was by separating the user interface, the front end, and and and keeping that completely separate, which a lot, you know, a lot of companies have have seen that. But when we started it, it wasn't a thing. When we realized that that that was a problem, it was barely understood exactly what that stack looked like. And we had been doing it for so long using open source that it was very, very natural for us to move in that direction.

Speak a little bit about the process. You know, there's a there's a lot of agencies and integrators in the world, and the great ones have unique processes, unique IP, unique integrations and relationships. Speak a little bit about where Acro sits and how you're differentiated. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the discovery process as well? Whatever you're comfortable sharing, by the way.

Well, I think that I honestly, I think the big key thing is understanding that the, the VAR group that work with a very traditional kind of closed ecosystem with the ERP, who kind of own the the space in B 2 B. Like, if you were a VAR selling ERP into into manufacturing, that was pretty much the only platform from a user experience, I guess, if you even want to classify that as, that that was being dealt with. And if an ERP needed a piece of tech, like, when when they expanded into ecommerce, they would buy that tech and incorporate in their in their, practice. And so the VAR would would deal with that as well. It was very closed off to partners, like, in terms of how things are are built today where everybody's a partner with everybody and everybody's trying to get their data to map to each other.

That wasn't really a thing when we started. So that was our, like, trying to weave our way into that world has been our differentiator for a long time, and we're only now starting to see other companies and agencies that are recognizing that, as a thing that needs to happen in order to be successful is you need to have the relationships with the VARs, and you have you have to be trusted by them. They're not used in their necessarily sharing budget with an agency or anyone else. So that that is that is a huge hurdle to overcome. Maybe it's just been a huge hurdle for us, but it it when I used to talk to agencies, I'm talking, like, six, seven years ago, they did not want to touch ERP in any form or fashion.

It was just like, we're in our lane in ecommerce. We're not gonna touch anything related to to ERP. That's way too hard. It's way too complicated. It's not not our thing then.

And I had a lot of people that were just, like, shaking their head when I would tell them what we're trying to do. So that that was probably our biggest differentiator. We're also very, very new to to to composable and headless, and overcoming the the shortcomings of the direct integrations that existed between ERP and commerce. So, that was a differentiator for a long time. Now there's a lot of companies that are are are doing it that way.

But I think it's the whole piece of all the things, all of our learnings that we've brought together, understanding the ecosystem, under understanding the tech stack, understanding the relationships. I think that's the differentiator that we bring from that perspective. Discovery has also been a big one. We've always because we've solved some of the most complex b two b problems on the planet, our discovery step has been, you know, something that's evolved over the last twenty eight years in business out of necessity to to make sure that we're not missing anything. What makes it unique in this day and age?

I think that that's a tough one to pick out the individual items. But, again, I think it's the combination of the knowledge, the relationships, and and the tech stack. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I've seen just in our in our interactions is there's a little bit of a for us, by us. You seem to be on the same side of the table as the merchants.

You kinda you kinda understand their pain at a level that they understand it, which is really important. And, you know, when when we were engaging with your team, there were some pretty bold statements that, like, you guys won't take on a project that doesn't go through a discovery. And that's because I think you guys have a, you're not as coin operated maybe, in a way that that you want to make sure success, and you're just not willing to shortcut it. Is that a fair statement? For sure.

I mean, we've everything comes from being burnt once, right, or disappointing a customer. So that's that's where these things these experiences, evolve. And so, again, we we had it, we built it out of necessity, and we just continually improved it because every time you find an edge case, you you make sure you build down to the process, so that doesn't ever happen again. One thing that I found and the reason why we have some great synergy with Shopware is they absolutely believe in discovery. So, and that's rare.

There's there's this push right now, especially in the last couple years, where platforms are overpromising just to get action and just to get the, just to get the sign up, right, to get the activation. And it's it's unfortunate, but we oftentimes hear almost every time overpromising on on the part of a platform being able to do something that it can't. And a customer can get sucked up into that because these platforms are massive. They look like they know what they're talking about, and the reality is is not the right questions have been asked. And that discovery is the only way that you can be certain and and unearth, all the little intricacies that are actually gonna make a big, big difference at the end of that project.

The most of these guys move down that path. They get to the end of their project, and they find out that, there's a lot of stuff that has to be cut or scrapped because it's just not possible. And we never wanna be in that position. We will never take a project, where somebody is, overpromised something. We're always gonna do the right thing.

We're always gonna make sure that the client fully understands the investment they're making and what they're gonna get at the end of the day. And discovery is the only way to do that. I think to, to oversimplify it, you'd rather take your medicine and pain and have honest conversations early than later, because earlier can result in a happy customer later results in a churned customer. And that is the most expensive thing in business. Well, I mean, as as you know, that there are platforms out there that won't even bring us into the equation because we're gonna slow down the sales cycle with with our proper discovery.

And that that's just not in our in our line of of core values. We just we can't move in that direction. That's that's not a partner for us. Right on. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's there's 20 vendors on the Gartner Magic Quadrature. And best I can tell, only four of them are gaining market share, which means 16 roughly, you know, are losing share, meaning they're growing slower than the market or retracting. Mhmm. And so there's a there's a level of desperation to try and keep or add new customers that results in some bad outcomes. So happy to not be in that 16 list and happy to ensure that discovery is required so that we win happy customers together.

Well, that's why that's why we're talking today, Jason. And, yeah, that's why we're pushing forward, on our partnership. So Yeah. Awesome. Well, this isn't necessarily just about Shopware for sure, but, you know, I'm happy to hear those nice those nice comments.

Talk a little bit about you know, I I want the audience to really take away some understanding of the state of play in b two b ecommerce. There's a lot of companies who say they play here but but kinda dabble. Mhmm. You guys play here. This is your home turf.

The talk a little bit about the role of the VAR network, value added resell network as it relate relates to the ERP and the influence that they have as it relates to ecom platforms, agencies, etcetera. So we picked we picked Acumatica because they were one of the first cloud ERPs. When when everything started moving into composability, we were beginning to say, well, what what is the stack that would be ideal for our customer base? What would serve them very well? And where like, who's kinda leading this this, this new composable way of building things in terms of partnership ecosystem.

And there was only three ERPs at the time. I'm I'm you know, this we're talking about six or seven years ago now. And and Acumatica was one of them. And they they specifically built their platform for the purposes of bringing in the partnership ecosystem and really, really supporting that, the the new way of building things. They were one of the only open platforms for for doing that type of work.

And so we built a relationship with them, very quickly thereafter because they were one of the best that we that we had seen. We thought it was gonna be easy. We thought, okay. Well, we're we're gonna be a supercent integrator. They they need commerce.

So we'll we'll be the agency that provides some commerce. But the reality is even even a company like that, at the time, didn't know and understand how to merge agency and VARs together to be able to serve a customer. And that hadn't been solved at all in any capacity. And so that's what we set out to do is first make make relationships with those those VARs, the the ones that lined up with our ICP the best, the the mid market, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, anybody that was dealing in that space. We identified who those VARs were, and we begin to try to build relationships with those, with those individuals.

Because the reality is is that even a even a big platform that like Acumatica that has all these relationships built, they're building these integrations. The reality is is it was still the mindset that the VAR had to control every every lead that was coming out. So they assigned the leads out directly from, from Acumatica right to the VAR, and they had no idea how to bring agency into that equation. So it was left up to the agencies to figure that out, and and then that's what we did, is we began to build out, you know, understanding of what commerce was, where the integrations would come up short, what the different architectures that would be required to build outside of that. We built on, you know, what a all the different workflows in terms of how a prospect could be brought in, how it could be shared in terms of doing a discovery together and combining those two, those two, user experiences together.

Now a lot of these VARs only demo and activate. And a lot of these VARs don't have a discovery because they're just it's demo activate. Like, get basic basic understanding of what the customer needs, demo an actual instance of that to them, and then activate and move on. So and, again, because we we have to lean into discovery, we wanna know the bigger picture, the bigger ecosystem. We're trying to understand what the customer journey is going to be.

We're trying to understand all of that, and they've never really had to do that before. There's a few of ours that did, but but many didn't. So there's an education aspect to that. So what does that look like in terms of onboarding a customer to have this first this discovery, then we're gonna demo the pieces that make sense, and then we're gonna you know, how does that handoff happen, between companies, and how do we ensure that what's being built on commerce lines up with what's being built on the ERP? Because oftentimes, there's, you know, like, a kind of a 20% overlap of how things are gonna be, handled in terms of data, and, what the single source of truth is going to be for the customer.

So all that had to be figured out, and we had to essentially build something that didn't exist. And, I I would say only in the last couple years have we been successful in doing that. It took a long time to figure that out. Yeah. There's some secret sauce there.

I'm sure. But like, as an example, you, you talked about Acumatica, unbelievably great ERP cloud based. They sell predominantly or exclusively, maybe through value added resellers. How many of them does ACRO need to engage with to get enough opportunities for, you know, your type of work? How many would we?

Like, specific to ACRO, I would say that we each of our has their little niche. Like, every agency has their little niche. And we've within the Activematic e ecosystem, I would say that we're successful with probably four or five VAR groups Nice. Right now. We're we're obviously continuing to add more because as we have success with and and can demonstrate use cases and can show how this these two worlds can actually be merged together, of course, people are are wanting to jump on board with that.

So we do have some copycat type agencies out there trying to do the same thing now, which is You'll have more after this podcast. But, anyway, keep going. It's great. It's great to be, imitated. It shows that we're definitely on the right path.

And so, yeah, I would say four or five, probably two or three that are really engaged in where we're really trying to go to market together. Yeah. And just unpack it a little more for me when you when you and I'm not again, don't give away trade secrets. But when you think about you guys have expertise in Acumatica. You've had expertise in, like, a company like Shopware or Shopify or BigCommerce.

How do you speak their language what the VAR cares about? Like, how how do you build up trust so they're like, yeah. Yeah. We're going to acro anytime someone says the word ecommerce, b two b portal, whatever. How do you how do you get there?

So from the from more from the ecommerce side, the ecommerce platform side? Yeah. Let's use that as the use case. Because because in my mind, there's there's everybody has their own kinda core goals. Value added resellers goals are to sell Acumatica installs as an example because that's where they make money.

How do you connect what they give a crap about to how you can help them? So every everybody was I mean, the the market was changing. Every the digitizing of the the sales processes and stuff is and and the the changing buying demographic that's happened is is kind of forcing these guys to start. They're asking for ecommerce. And, the reality is that's that's where Acumatica saw huge opportunities, again, build out that partnership ecosystem so that we can we can offer commerce.

We'll just build the integrations. And the integrations that exist between these platforms just only work for a very small use case. I I would I wouldn't say small, but there's a lot of companies that fall outside of that use case. Let's put it that way. And so when they were sold on this idea that the integration was gonna work perfectly for them, There was a lot of sour people out there that realized that it just was not going to hit the mark.

And so they'd they've gone through these builds, and the virus tried to take most of these on themselves, or they took on a they took on an agency. Unfortunately, many b to c companies, you know, as as as the market got saturated, just said, okay. Well, let's go let's go sell into b to b. And it's not even close to the same thing. It's the it's the difference between ecommerce being an ecommerce integrator and being a ERP integrator.

They are two different worlds. Then they they only share the first letter or the first two, b b two. That's the only that's the only thing that they have in common. Right? And so I I think a lot of customers ended up getting getting burnt there.

So the bar group, I think, really backed out of it again, and they were just looking for the next answer and let me know what's the next big platform and and integration here. So there there's a there's an education aspect that has to happen in terms of how these two pieces come together. And so we we do wanna be known for how we address that market very, very specifically because we we've been in that space for a long time. So it really just comes down to asking the right questions and being able to demonstrate the architecture and the setup that that makes sense for that customer. I don't know if I actually answered that question, though.

I apologize. Well, I'll ask it slightly different. I mean, if a VAR is coin operated, how do they not see you as a threat to their ability to make money, or how do they see you as an ally for them to make money? Because, ultimately, that's what they care about. Right?

They again, they don't want to share they're not used to sharing budget. They they get worried when That's what I mean. And and they don't understand that, they're two oftentimes, they're very different, sets of criteria that are that the company is asking for, and those might be two completely separate budgets. Right? Like, it's we could fall more on the marketing side, and they they could fall more on the, the system integration side.

Right? The so there there's actually probably two streams here. I I I would kind of deem user experience more on the marketing side. Right? So commerce kinda falls more on that umbrella where you might be working more with the the marketing people than the the hardcore IT infrastructure people.

So it's again, there's an education piece there. It's it's a matter of getting through a use case and and demonstrating it. You know? Start small and and show how these two entities can really come together and show them some third party stories of of exactly how this is supposed to go. And, it's been nothing but education through very various forms and fashions and big investments on our part to make that happen.

Well, this is a heck of a moat because I can tell you having spent a little bit of energy trying to crack this kind of VAR category Mhmm. It is it is it is very hard to get them to care and to get them to behave and change behavior and socially engineer the outcome you want. And the fact that ACRO has figured out a way to coexist and to work with these VARs, is a big kudos to you. And I think you've just done it over years, I think, is the answer. Sheer stubbornness, to not fail in us.

It like, I think many, many people would have given up long before that, you know, our company has given, time and energy to it. We've we've taken, and and attacked it from many, many different angles, and the VARs are on such a track, such a well beaten track. You know? The the the platform provides the leads. They do the demo, activate, move on.

They don't want anything to interfere with that. If a customer is really adamant about adding commerce, then the first thing that they look to do is we'll do the integration. We're gonna do everything in house. Soon as you introduce any friction into that path, like, into that process, they they don't want to have anything to do with it. Like, it takes a lot of education to help them understand how we're an asset in that equation.

Right? Let's look at the bigger digital ecosystem altogether because there's a lot more to this. And it's it goes beyond commerce. I mean, these these companies are are gonna wanna get better at marketing. Right?

So we're we're talking things like CDP, and we're we're talking about, configured price quote engines on the front end. Like, there's there's a lot of pieces to this, to this ecosystem to serve up the customer digitally where they want to be served. Right? We have millennials are coming into power in terms of management positions that are that are doing the buying, that are gonna be demanding these types of experiences. And so unless a prospect is really pushing on having commerce in the in the stack when they when they go to talk about ERP, that's the only time that Avara will be open to having that conversation and and bringing in a a trusted partner there.

Got it. No. That's fantastic. I there is there's definitely we can go much, much deeper on that, but I don't know that I can ask the right questions to really unlock it. So let's let's go to, the the on the onset, I talked about the fact that you guys are located in Canada.

Can you be a little more specific? Where in Canada? Why did you pick this location? It is fairly remote. I used to have an employee there, and it took him, I don't know, two days to get anywhere.

So talk a little bit about where you're located and and why that is. I don't know if I wanna share where I am located located because I I really don't want more people that are already already, here now. But, Oh, I see. It's a little bit like any surfer you meet. They tell you it's terrible, so you don't miss those with surfing.

Exactly. Exactly. We're about four hours inland, from Vancouver, British Columbia on the West Coast, And it's a place called the Okanagan Valley, and it's it's wine country here. We we actually have just this nice little finger of warm air that comes up from, the lower states, on the West Coast that feed into this valley. And you have the best of all four seasons here.

So you have amazing outdoor recreation, snowboard and skiing. You can snowboard, ski, and go down and golf in the same day, if you hit the right time. You could even jump in the lake, maybe do a little surfing, behind a wakeboard boat. You know, if you're into camping, you're into wines, you're into just beautiful country, it it really does have it all. Yeah.

It is. I've never been. I'm still waiting for my official invitation. That's not true. No.

No. You've been invited. You're for sure coming home. Yes. I just missed.

But, it literally looks like the most beautiful place on Earth. So, for just visit. Don't move there. Just visit. It is difficult to get out.

I mean, most of it requires, like, a a quick, connection flight to either Vancouver or Calgary. Sometimes Toronto depending on where you're going. But, if that's the only headache that we have, then it's worth worth staying here. I've I've always I you know, I I've grown grown up in BC. I could've lived anywhere in the world, and I've seen, you know, a lot of the world.

And I can honestly say that it would be hard to there's there's nothing that really hits the mark for me in terms of all the things that I want and desire in life than than BC. So Fantastic. Well, I'll throw out a little no fact that you probably don't know that, you ever heard of the Jersey Shore? Yeah. Used to be on, like, MTV.

Yeah. Yeah. They're filming a a version called the Canada Shore and it's gonna be filmed in your hometown, and it comes live this year on Paramount plus. That's fine. So get ready for some tourism.

Well, you know, that's this this, this area probably doubles in population in in the summertime, and it gets fed from every every, part of Canada and The US. People feed up into this area. I'm sure that show is not gonna help much. Yeah. I'm sure.

Awesome. Well, I'd say this, and I haven't said it yet on this pod, but this whole podcast is really designed. It's called Commerce Famous because there is no hall of fame for ecommerce. And this is our chance to spotlight those people who probably would be if there was. And the work that you've done at Acro is is amazing.

We're thrilled to be a part of it. And so thank you for joining on on Commerce Famous today. We probably we'll, we'll leave it there. Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it.

Love what you guys are doing. Obviously, we're we're partnering up for a reason. And, very much looking forward to the the continued go to market that we will do together in the space to take over b two b. There we go. Thank you, Shay.

Alright, man. Take care.