How to Unlock Your Most Valuable Asset
with Joe McIntyre of Twelve48

Evan: Hey everyone, this is Evan from OneTrack and you are listening to Warehouse Visionaries, where I sit down with the leaders shaping the future of warehousing logistics to talk about how they're doing it so the rest of us can too. Today, I'm talking to Joe McIntyre. He's the founder of Twelve48, a warehousing and fulfillment consulting practice. And we're talking all about how 3PLs and shippers can dig deeper into their processes, set the right foundation for operational excellence and unlock their most valuable asset, which spoiler alert, it's their people. So Joe, I'm really excited about today's conversation and thank you for joining me today.

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Joe: Yeah, and I'm really excited about the conversation as well. And I appreciate you asking me to be part of part of the conversation with you.

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Evan: Yeah, absolutely. So I think you have a really interesting background that gives you a unique perspective on just the industry in general. So before we dive into all the nuances here, give me the elevator pitch on Joe. What's your background like? What are you up to these days with Twelve48?

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Joe: Yeah, definitely. Like most people, I stumbled my way into supply chain and then stumbled my way into warehouse operations. I've spent over the last 12, 13 years in different areas of logistics, supply chain and operations.

 

And what I like to tell people is that's kind of shaped me into having a very general perspective of what is going on in the industry, which is more helpful than people may think. And so while I may not necessarily always be a master of an individual thing, I do know a lot about a little and how they all interact. And what I've found is over time, that is usually where things start to go wrong within someone's supply chain, as the different silos don't interact correctly with each other.

 

So, I started out my career in transportation with systems strategy and support. Loved that, wanted to get some more experience in operations. So I went and helped launch a warehouse for a company that was expanding into the U. S. That was baptism by fire into leading people and operations and operating within the four walls. Took a brief detour into HR, which I actually think ended up being one of the biggest blessings for my operations career and how I approach leadership within operations, specifically within warehousing environment. How to make the most out of each day, each shift and really how to understand our greatest resource, which is our people. With that, I went back to operations and led some final mile operations. And then I went back into strategy on the supply chain side to build that out. So I've been on both sides of the relationship for a warehouse, right? I've been on the shipper side. I've been on the operation side. I've been on the transportation side. I've been on the fulfillment side. I've spent time working within warehousing. I've spent time strategizing what we should do with warehousing, and it's given me a unique perspective all around.

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And then with Twelve48, I decided how can I help some other people who have gotten in the arena themselves, take their brand or their fulfillment operation or their company to the next level because I was very fortunate to learn a lot and fail a lot on someone else's dime. And if I can help somebody avoid that, I would love to see somebody else succeed.

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And when I think about scaling brands or even brands that are are past the scaling phase and the 3PLs that support them, whether it be transportation, logistics or fulfillment. The people part is the part that everyone understands is super important, but doesn't necessarily always understand how to leverage the most for what they're doing. And with that comes communication and that's not just people within their own operation. It's people with their partners and whatever that may look like. So I'm trying to help people bridge the gap there on how to get the most out of their operations and most other people.

 

Evan: There's a lot of things I want to dig into there because I think you touched a lot and you have a really interesting background. But let's start things off with a hot take. I think that's always fun to kick off a conversation like this. So what is one either misconception or maybe it's a commonly held belief that you hear about the industry all the time that you fundamentally disagree with and you want to set the record straight?

 

Joe: I'm going to caveat my answer because I actually think the take is correct, but I think the use of the take is often lazy. Everyone talks about labor right now and everyone talks about how hard it is to hire, how hard it is to find good labor, how the labor pool is shrinking. I will agree that data will say that is correct, but I believe that within the logistics and operations space, that is a lazy take because there are a lot of things that you can do as an operation and as a company and as a leader to expand your labor pool and adapt with what's going on. The labor pool is changing.

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The problem is that people within operations and logistics, by and large, are choosing not to change with it. And part of that is a cost barrier. Part of that is things are changing and change is hard, but I will always push back on someone who says that that is the core problem of what is going on with their operation.

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Oh, we can't grow because we just can't find people, right? Then get creative. And there are lots of ways you can get creative. That is always where I will push first.

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Evan: On your website and you talk about this all the time on LinkedIn, you say the employee experiences equals the customer experience. I think that's a really interesting phrase that dovetails nicely into the whole labor pool discussion. So break that down for me. And why do you say that the employee experience equals the customer experience?

 

Joe: Yeah, so a lot of my clientele now is, or a lot of the people that I work with are fulfillment providers. And a lot of their core ICP is direct to consumer brands, or a company that is doing direct to consumer work. And in that environment, the fulfillment piece is often looked at as a cost, just the necessary thing that needs to get done. But what it's not often seen as is the critical link with the customer.

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It is the only point in an eCommerce transaction where there is physical connection happening between the brand and the consumer. The consumer has already paid the brand. The brand already has that consumer's money. The consumer has not yet gotten the product yet. That does not happen in traditional retail.

 

And then in that environment, by and large, the company is not controlling their own fulfillment. They're using an outsourced third party fulfillment provider. So you are now also at the mercy of your partner for what's going on. And so then by default, you are at the mercy of that employee that is picking that product to put in that package to send to that customer.

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To do it in a way that is in line with your brand, in line with what you have designed all of your marketing and all of your ethos around to be your customer experience. And if you are working with a fulfillment provider that could care less about their employees and are willing to just turn over, turn over, turn over, there are a lot of knock on effects for how that impacts your customer experience.

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The same can be said for someone who does their own fulfillment, right? A brand that owns their own or a company that owns their own in house fulfillment does their own DTC ordering. The same thing is true. Yes, you have more control over what that looks like, but you still are at the mercy of that employee and the experience that they are having to deliver a great customer experience.

If you have employees feel undervalued, are disgruntled, are working in an environment in which it is clear that leadership team does not hold themselves to the highest standards or not, that's going to trickle down naturally into what's going on. I am going to care less about what I'm doing.

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I'm not going to catch that the packaging was dented before I put it in the box. I'm not going to catch that, hey, it says it should be widget A, I know this isn't widget A, but hey, that was whoever did put away his problem, right? We're not a team. I'm an individual. So whatever. Slap it, send it and now three four or five days later that gets to the person who's purchased it. And they don't care that Joe who is angry at the warehouse packed it wrong.

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They just know that the brand didn't do what they were supposed to. And I paid them a lot of money to give it to me and a timeline that I expected. And we can go deeper and deeper and deeper into that. There are a lot of knock on effects of that, right? If you have a poor employee experience, you likely also have high turnover.

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If you have high turnover, you likely have low productivity. If you have low productivity, your margins are compressed. And at some point in time, you are likely going to need to raise prices. Raise prices for a consumer, not a great customer experience. Right? If you have high turnover in your warehouse, you also have employees who are in a ramping phase all the time.

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They don't understand the processes fully. They don't know the products in and out. They are not able to work at, you know, a speed that is, you know, that was expected when an RFP was put out and pricing was given. Now you are getting exceptions. Now you are getting different errors, right? On time and full is tough.

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Getting packages out on time is tough. There are a lot of these knock on effects that then start to impact the customer experience also. Now, if you flip it and look at it from a positive, if you have a really good employee experience, you have high retention, you have high performing people, their productivity is going up naturally, because that is just what is going to happen in an environment like that.

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Well, you now have higher margins, so now you are much more willing to take on different work for your customer. Your value added services can become much more competitive. You also have far less exceptions and far less errors, which means more profitability, more money back to the bottom line for the brand that's there.

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You are getting things out correctly and on time. You probably have people who are very bought into what is going on, right? So now all of a sudden you get without asking, a packer that is just a handwritten note. Thanks for the order. Right. And no one asked for that, but they're doing that because they just love what they're doing.

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And now you start to have this experience. And so what I talk about a lot when I'm working with brands or with fulfillment providers, which is if one of your core things that you're going to talk about, like everyone wants to is customer experience, customer experience, customer experience.

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You have to walk the walk also. Your employees are your customers for the fulfillment provider. Your shipper is your customer for the fulfillment provider. Their experience needs to be good for them to deliver a good experience on to brand. And so that's kind of where that has all come from.

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I wish I could remember where I came up with it. It just hit one day, but I think there's an ethos behind it that's really important. And when you have an operation that operates with that mindset, you get a lot of benefit in your PNL that doesn't show up on a line item. It just starts to naturally, you're just looking in month over month, over month, things are just improving. And there isn't one specific line that accounts for that, right? The whole system starts to operate.

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Evan: Yeah. I was talking to a 3PL leader and he said that any 3PL out there can get the same warehouses, the same forklifts, the same everything the same system, same technology, but what you can't copy is the people. You invest in the people. Everyone talks about the employee experience and people leaving for a dollar more down the road, but that doesn't happen if you have the right culture in the building. I think naturally you're always going to have some people who are kind of headhunters are just out there looking for the most money.

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But I think by and large, people want to feel like they're part of a team bigger than something bigger than themselves, bigger than, than what they're doing. So I think if you can create that experience, that's what really matters. And to your point is all those like trickle down effects from that, that impact the bottom line.

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Joe: Yeah. And I think the word you use is important, right? It's an investment. Part of the employee experience is compensation. People want to feel fairly compensated for what they're doing. What you see often is people who are asking for more money, right? And the response is, well, why would I give you more money? You're not doing what we need to do. And it's this death spiral of a disconnect between what the team values and what's there. Someone probably is willing to take a couple cents an hour less to know that very rarely are they going to be mandated over time.

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Very rarely are they going to have a schedule that is drastically different? Very rarely are they going to be begged to stay over because somebody planned incorrectly, something went wrong. So if you're investing in things like leadership development or tools to help planning or tools for visibility, that naturally starts to stabilize your operation. And now you're going to have a large portion of people who are going to be on time more often. Who are not going to call out because they know that when the schedule comes out and it says they're working, right? And this is obviously for people who don't work on set schedules.

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But if you're working for a company who is working a little bit more dynamically, when the schedule says it's Monday through Thursday, 10 hour shifts starting at 6 AM and ending at whatever 10 hours is after 6 AM, like 4 PM, whatever, right. Math. If they know that's what it is and that's what it's going to be, and they can plan their life around it.

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They're willing to take a little less money to do that because you have not made their life more difficult. So for them, the value is there. When people ask for more money or they say compensations the reason they're leaving, like, maybe this is what I should use this as my hot take. They are crying out that they don't feel valued for what's being asked of them.

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So what is making them feel like there is a disconnect that's happening? And to your point, it very well could just be somebody who opened up down the street and they needed people. They're going to pay more money, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for the ecosystem. Is it sustainable? No, but having some turnover and some churn is not a bad thing.

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Having a really strong core, whether that's process, people, leadership, whatever it may be, is very important. And then having some fresh eyes, fresh people, people who are coming from a different operation that can say like, Hey, why do we do it this way? And actually be heard. Like, that's not a bad thing.

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Evan: So what are some of those ways that you think an operation can invest in that employee experience? I mean, I think a lot of times for me, I think about investing in leadership because oftentimes you have people get put into leadership roles within warehousing and logistics that maybe they didn't have leadership on their radar. And I think being a good leader and being a good individual contributor are two very different skillsets. So what are some ways that you think about or have you seen to be really effective when it comes to helping logistics companies like train and set expectations for their supervisors, their ops managers, those people who are managing the front lines every day and managing those operations?

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Joe: There needs to be a lot of intention behind what is being done from roles, responsibilities, accountability. A warehouse manager in facility A versus a warehouse manager in facility B from a different company a mile down the road. Yes, they have the same title, but their scope, their responsibilities, what's expected of them, the way that their company is set up is going to be vastly, vastly different.

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So understanding what each role looks like in your specific company is highly important. And having a job description and a responsibilities matrix that is clear is important also, right? Otherwise there is a mismatch in expectations when somebody new comes into your leadership team. And that can upset the apple cart really quickly.

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There's something that you mentioned that is a very hot topic for me about like, hey, how do we develop leadership effectively? There are, I don't want to paint with a broad brush, there are logistics companies, there are fulfillment companies out here that do this really, really well.

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But there's also 22,000 3PLs in the US, right? Like, and a lot of them are single building shops where people are getting boxes across the building, fulfilling the orders. And that's good enough. And that's great, right? Kudos to them. They are a very important part of the ecosystem. But if you are someone who is trying to scale your fulfillment business larger, investing in that leadership team is super important.

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And what needs to be done can't be defined until you know explicitly who you are and what you're asking for from your team. So the two most important hires or promotion just roles to fill right is who is the leader of your warehouse, whether that's a GM, director of ops, whatever you title your warehouse manager. Whoever is in charge, what are they actually in charge of?

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And what are you expecting of them? Too many warehouses you walk into and the warehouse manager is elbows deep packing orders every single day. This is not me saying that they should never do that. There's a lot of value in being in the operation, understanding what's going on, but that shouldn't be the core of their job.

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If their job is to oversee that facility, there are a lot of other pieces that are very important from a strategic standpoint to make sure that you are good a week down the road, four weeks down the road, three months down the road when peak comes around, right? And that job description looks a lot different than a warehouse manager at the Amazon facility next door that has three levels of people above operations manager that are doing that. And so understanding what does warehouse manager mean for you and not hire someone based on them having a warehouse manager role before. But based on that they fit the job description and can do what we need to do, it's super important.

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You asked about training. Well, how do you promote and move within? In warehousing, there is a large disconnect between your hourly worker and that job description. And your first line managerial position and what is expected of them. Can people make that gap and make that jump? Yes, but once they get there, what tools are you providing to help them change?

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It's no longer individual output. Now it's, there is a plan. Are we executing it correctly? How are you moving labor around within the warehouse to meet different goals? How are you interacting with people ? And so what I make sure when I'm talking with people who are promoting, hiring, whatever, is, okay, this person works for you now, if they applied outside to this role, would you hire them?

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If the answer is no, then you should not be promoting them. If the answer is no, you then also need to ask the question of, and why wouldn't we hire them ? Where's the deficit? And then it comes to, are we okay with them moving to this role, giving them a plan and having them grow into it. And there's a lot of scenarios where that's absolutely fine. Or is it, hey, we know you're interested in this role. We don't believe you're ready for it yet because of X, Y, and Z. Here is what we are going to do for you so that when this opportunity comes up again, you are ready to take it, whether that's here or somewhere else. That last sentence, goes miles with other people?

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Because you are saying I am taking an interest and I value your development as a person, not self serving for my company. If it serves us both, awesome. If not, I'm okay taking the benefit in the interim, while you are developing and then seeing you go on to bigger and better things.

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And I think that's a part where when you look at companies that do really well and get it right, not just within fulfillment, like that's the approach they take. And when you see the companies that kind of meddle and just never really get out of where they're at, that's where they just have constant churn.

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Because people don't feel valued. Then they leave. They go somewhere else. And they may not do very well there because they get to step up, but they also don't get the development that naturally is a reflection back on you as a company. Well, they came from company X, Y, Z. Like, what are they doing over there?

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Like there is some value to that investment. But it takes time and it takes leadership within the company in general to say this is something that is valuable to us. And we know that there is benefit and an ROI in us doing this. From a like explicit standpoint of like, what can you do. There are lots of things out there. I live in North Carolina, there is a local HR company, HR consulting firm that does these types of classes for small businesses or for other companies. You don't have to run it in house yourself, you can make a small investment for someone to go and get that exposure. You can work with them on a plan of, hey, this is how we'll help you get exposure.

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Because we're going to start bringing you in on these planning meetings once a week on Tuesdays. Yes, you're giving up 15, 20 minutes of their time, or you're paying them an extra 30 minutes to stay after shift, but that's an investment into them, and that's to help them get to where it's going. There's also just like a lot of tools out there that can help with a lot of these things.

Getting people exposed to how their role impacts other roles is one of the most important things because that's where people don't understand. When you're a first time manager or you're an hourly employee that's working within the warehouse, you're very much incentivized to get your job done versus set the team up to succeed and that's not always everybody

optimizing what they're doing individually, right?

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Evan: I always think about it because from OneTrack's perspective, we bring visibility and data so you can actually see the why behind things. So I think a lot of it comes from scrutinizing processes, not scrutinizing people. And that helps to bring that culture of accountability, actually looking at the root cause of, well, the KPI might be behind, but why is the KPI behind? Is it because the person's doing it bad? Or is it because maybe the warehouse isn't set up correctly?

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Maybe the put away was done incorrectly, not to process. Then the, you know, the picker wasn't able to hit their, their KPI, maybe a safety incident happened because we're not doing our job as a leadership team. And I think you can't make those decisions without visibility into that. But I also think there's a skillset and a mindset shift of training people to look behind just the number behind the spreadsheet and actually thinking about, okay, what are all the inputs that go into this KPI or this thing being behind? I think that's a key leadership skill that supervisors and ops managers, warehouse managers may not, that might not be like a muscle instinct for them. They have to kind of learn to do that. But I think once you get that right that can do wonders for culture and accountability in a building in the long term.

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Joe: Yeah, I agree 100% because when a leadership team is data informed, not data blind or not data prisoners, but data informed, that becomes the starting point of what's going on. I'm looking at my units per hour in shift and we are not hitting in this work path. Right? The first step is, hey, I'm looking at the last three hours, here are the three numbers, person responsible for this, give me some context what's going on. And then the next question should be, okay, you know what's going on, so what have you been doing or why haven't you said something? And then it starts to go down, okay, where is the breakdown process? Okay, cool, we got it, what's the plan to fix it? Let's fix it. And then at the end of the shift, when you're out of the weeds and you're out of what's going on and you're removed from the tension of the situation, being able to say like, all right, cool, we got it done. We had to move things around. It didn't go exactly how we thought.

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How do we not have that happen again? What's the root cause? What's going on? Do we know why? And then the last question being what help do you need in the future goes a long way because now you're starting like you said to get to that accountability point, now we've had a learning opportunity for that person or for that team to say, hey, something went wrong. You guys didn't catch it. Or you guys didn't raise the flag to say, hey, we're struggling or there's upstream issues. Here's how we avoid that in the future so that you guys can help what's going on. What are we going to do about it to make sure that we're good to go down the road?

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And also here are my expectations about what that looks like. Do you have what you need to do all this? Yes. And then when it goes wrong again, cause it will it's operations. It's not an if it's when, right. When something goes wrong again, now it's all right, this is different. Why? Okay, cool. Now we're improving incrementally.

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Or. Hey, this is the same conversation we had a week ago. It has happened again. You agreed to these things. Data says we have not done that. Why? Common theme is why. Okay, got it. That was a blind spot we didn't take account for. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. Good to go. Right? Oh, you weren't here that week.

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That didn't get passed on to you. We had a breakdown in communication. Now we know. Or it's, what else could we have done for you? We set the expectations, we gave you the tools, you knew you were supposed to do X, Y, and Z, you didn't do X, Y, and Z. That's not my feeling, that's the facts of the data we have here, so now we have to have a performance conversation about that.

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And then that is not emotionally driven anymore, there's naturally going to be some emotion there, but it's not saying, hey, I don't feel like you heard what I said, and I don't feel like you chose to do what's going on. It's, we sat down and we agreed that this is what's going to happen when we looked at the analysis that you did.

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We ran into the same situation, and you chose not to do what we talked about. Like, that impacted us in this manner. If we're going to be a team and we're going to get it, like, we can't, can't operate that way. Right? Like that's a much different conversation to have, and you can quickly get to the point then of, is the person that's here qualified ?

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Did we make a bad hire? Did we not train them effectively? How do we improve ourselves going forward? And it may just be that that person is not a fit for this role, and that's okay. And so then it's the human piece of, and how do we help them get to where they need to be either with us, or how do we help support them by letting them know that this is not going to work? And we appreciate what you've done, but how can we help you go find something else to do?

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Evan: It's that feedback loop, right? It's all the coaching that goes into that work. You have to be able to look behind the obvious sometimes and I mean, there's hundreds of thousands, millions of square feet in some space. It's really hard to like, keep eyes on what's going on. One, there are tools out there that can help you do that. Two, open a feedback loop with your people. Like, do a lap around, talk to the people. Then, really scrutinize the why. So you can have that more data-driven conversation. It takes the emotion out of it. It's, we agree that this is the thing we need to solve for.

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Joe: But you can only do that, like you said, when you have visibility. One, you have visibility information. And two, you trust what that information is, right? That's another part. The information needs to be good, trustworthy data.

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My first role in operations was in a warehouse that was a million square feet. It was a stand up. It was an expansion into a new country. It was new systems. It was new processes. The data wasn't readily accessible. The structure for what to look at wasn't there. And then therefore every conversation was led with feeling versus info. And that's a losing battle. Correct. And that was a struggle, right? I posted something about this on LinkedIn the other day where it's like, failed up in terms of scope and responsibility and then was more successful at what I did.

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And that was not a knock at this company that I'm talking about where I came in and I didn't know what I didn't know. And I didn't have tools or structure around me to help me be effective in leading people. I failed by my standards, right? Like I moved on to a different opportunity.

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I moved out of the warehouse. I didn't feel like I achieved what I could have achieved there. We achieved a lot. We made a lot of progress, but then I went on to Amazon where I had access to every single piece of information, every single tool available. To the point where it's like you could really get lost in the sauce on it.

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But I was far more successful where instead of just leading a department, I was leading an entire building. I had headcount that was three times larger than it was before. The volume was way crazier and the expectations were much higher, but I had the structure there and I had the ability to go into every conversation with here is what happened.

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Here is why. Because of that, and I knew those things, this is what our team has decided we are going to do about it, and we are going to measure against that. My expectation is, in four days, we will be back to where we need to be. In 24 hours, we will be back to where we need to be. And if not, then we do this process again, and then we either go down Corrective action route because someone has willingly chosen not to do what we agreed to, or we've learned more information and we've incrementally got better, right?

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And so that's where things really started to click for me on the I did this didn't know that I didn't think I was doing well at it. But in hindsight, I knew I wasn't doing went to HR and understood the people side of it. And then I came to a place where I had visibility, had data, had the ability to dig deep and back to the first thing we talked about was in a structure in which people's roles and responsibilities were explicitly clear, right? As the site leader, I was responsible for making sure that our team was executing the day. I was setting us up to succeed 21 days out, 13 weeks out. So do I have the right people? Are we planning to ramp up our capacity? How are we managing the business of the building?

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No one expected me to be on the floor, right? Place I was at before, it was all hands on deck because we just needed to get stuff out. My ops managers knew what their expectations were. The area managers knew what their expectations were.

And then we worked to say, hey, spend some time with us to learn about this piece. Or do coverage for that and then we could start to develop. There was not like, yes, Amazon is large. Yes, they have resources. Our training and development for leadership was nothing out of the ordinary. It was, I know what my role is. I'm the next role up the line from you. You are showing promise. How do we start to get you involved with what's going on? And then it's also, do you align with our values? Do you align with what's going on? If you don't, you very quickly need to get out so that doesn't spread amongst the rest of the team.

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And there are things that can be taken there, right? That's not me saying Amazon said that. There are opportunities there as well. There are well documented things that don't go well there, right? But there are a lot of mindsets and approaches that can be translated to somebody who has two facilities and 50,000 square feet, right? Somebody who is eight facilities, a mid-market player and growing, right? There are mindsets there that can come, but a lot of it has to do with the people and getting to root causes of what's happened. And on both of those things, data and visibility is super important.

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Evan: So there's a couple of things there that you mentioned I want to dig into. You talked about labor forecasting and a little bit on peak season. I think that's really interesting because we've had the back to school rush. We're about to go into holiday season. Black Friday. This gauntlet of logistics. So what are a couple of things and obviously at a high level that you would give advice to it for 3PL, shippers going into peak season? And then that relationship between shippers and 3PLs. What are the things that shippers need to be doing, asking the right questions to make sure they get the right 3PL partner and on the 3PL side, what can they be doing to communicate better, to set the right expectations, to just nail that partnership?

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Joe: Let's focus on the 3PL on the fulfillment side first. There are two parts that are super important from a planning perspective. One is in your control and one is in control of the brands and that'll feed into kind of how can brands set themselves up for success.

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You need to understand what your capacity maxes are. You're going to have a physical capacity constraint. There's only so much space in your building. You're going to have a throughput capacity constraint, whether that's mechanical if you're running conveyors, your conveyors can only run so fast. Or you can only have so many people. Like yeah, if you had unlimited hiring, you could hire everyone. But do they have a place to park? Do they have a place to sit? Do they have a place on break time to go to to eat? Like, there are constraints that you need to think through. So you need to understand what your max is so that when you then go to plan and your shippers come back and are giving you far more volume than that, you are able to say, yeah, that's not gonna work. Or okay, here's what I need to do to do that. So understanding and I talk about the basics a lot. Understanding the basics. At max capacity, everything going right, what can I do physically? What can I do from a human capital standpoint?

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You don't have unlimited hiring abilities. What can I do from a profitability standpoint? That's your base, right? Like that's the box that you're working within. Now, how do you get creative within that? Okay, if our throughput is 200 units an hour, and we run a 10 hour shift, we're doing 20,000 units, whatever that math is, a day. If we were to adjust that equation, either add hours or work faster, what are those two look like and what can we realistically get to? And what were two months out, three months, three months out, right? So what am I doing over the next three months to get myself there effectively? Working faster now or working up your throughput now is the best way to get there because you're not hiring extra headcount. But then slowly starting to go there. Now that's all dependent on the brands doing their part, right?

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Here's another one that maybe I should have used as my hot-take.

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Traditionally, 3PLs see themselves as a service provider and take the approach of the customer is always right. 3PLs are the expert in fulfillment and most brands are going to them to do their fulfillment, but subconsciously are treating them as outsourced operations. And subject matter experts. There are a lot of brands that do this very well and don't need handholding.

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There are a lot of 3PLs who can benefit from taking control of that conversation and saying, we will be meeting with you and you will tell us what your forecasts are, even if they're 50% correct. That's way better than me sitting in a building being like, I don't know, maybe 2x. Last year they did this, but this year they're behind. So I don't know, like, just put a number on paper, right? Getting some kind of communication flow going is important, and I would encourage 3PLs, and the 3PLs I see that work really effectively are the ones that push that to their brands. Help shepherd their brands too, right? You also have a lot of information.

You know what their order history is. So you can help guide them to, hey, you told us that your peak season is going to be 25,000 units over the course of four weeks. Can you explain to me why? Because you haven't done 25,000 units in the last two years you've been with us. I want to make sure that if you're doing that, I can service it, but that means I am going to need to make investments on my side, so I want to make sure that we're good.

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And now that starts to drive the partnership standpoint. From a brand perspective, now it's the flip side of that. You know what you should know, that was very assumptuous, you should know what your demand is going to be, because you then will need to be ordering for that, and you're trying to get ahead of Chinese New Year, and you're trying to get ahead of shipping, and you're trying to make sure everything's good to go for Q1.

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So you generally should have some sense of what that is. That information should be shared with your fulfillment. Because it's very easy to say, hey, put on the blinders. Evan is my fulfillment partner. This is a one to one relationship, but Evan has that one to one relationship with 40 other people. And so you are kind of at the mercy of how good or bad they are at their operations also in giving that because if I tell Evan I have nothing coming in and then I have 10,000 units show up, he wasn't planning for that.

He's going to probably deprioritize me for someone who told him correctly what was going on. And now we get back to that experience for the customer, and it's just going to put tension on the relationship. So the more that the 3PL takes that into their own control, the better. The more the shippers are willing to say, hey, I am aware that my success is highly dependent on you. Let me give you the tools to succeed. The better that gets. And I think more people are coming around on understanding that versus just their my fulfillment provider. I pay them to execute it. They'll execute it. Those are high level, but I think they're super tactical from a 3PL standpoint, you should have a peak planning doc and it should have every single little thing, right?

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I hate it when I had to do it for my building down here in North Carolina. I never touched it during peak season, which was a good thing because nothing went wrong. Or what went wrong was not like the end of the world. But going through the exercise of doing that got us to a different level of focus and attention beforehand so that we didn't waste a ton of time when something went wrong during. Because we naturally already thought through it and knew what was going on and that included stuff I didn't think was necessary, like do we have enough parking spaces? At that time it was during COVID so we needed to make sure we had enough space for breaks like yeah I could hire 200 people but can I hold 200 people in this like maybe I can't right.

 

Or I live in North Carolina. I'm probably not getting snow. But what if in the off chance we get freezing rain and it ices our parking lot? Do we know who the person is that we need to call at two in the morning to come and de ice our parking lot so we can get trucks on the door, get trucks out the door, get people into the building safely?

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There's a 99% chance we weren't ever going to need that number, but there was a chance we might. And so think through all of those things. And then be really blatant with when you're reviewing it, like be a jerk about it. It's going to hurt in the moment, but it's going to be good at the end, right? Fine tooth comb. Hey, why do you have this? Why does that say that? Why does that not say that? Go back and rewrite it. And the person's going to hate you for it. And it's going to feel bad in the moment.

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And then two weeks from now, or three weeks from now, or the day after Christmas, when you're finally through peak season, it's like, ooh, that went pretty smoothly because we knew what was going on. That's one of the biggest things that operators can do and the big players do it, middle players do some aspect of it, but the people who really can benefit from it are the smaller providers because they are also often operating with the most unsophisticated shippers.

And so they're most at risk for this volatility within their peak season.

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Evan: And I think to kind of summarize there. It's like, number one, treat it as a partnership and a proactive partnership from the beginning. So well ahead of peak season. What are your historicals? And then not just how did we do what's the historicals, but let's predict as well as possible.

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There's going to be some plus minus there, but let's predict what is the, what's the actual forecast look like? And let's figure out a game plan well ahead of time. So you're not scrambling. In the middle, do that emergency plan, right? Come up with those scenarios, think deeper and document everything. Probably more than you actually think you might need to. And then at the end, that post game, be ruthless on your process, be ruthless on your performance. Take the emotion out of it.

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Joe: Exactly. 100%. And it allows people to do what you need them to do in the moment, which is execute. But it's also important to take in the timelines to that.

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You are going to have to scale up your labor, whether through full time hiring, temp hiring, seasonal hiring, gig labor, whatever that is, you are going to have to scale that up. And if that means hiring, how long does it actually take you to hire and get somebody up to speed?

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Let's say conservatively, it takes eight weeks. Maybe you're not interviewing, let's call it six weeks. When are you starting to see your peak season? You then need to have a peak planning doc ready to go. In mid October, some point in October, you have to have that, which means you probably need to have done all of this work in September.

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When I was working the last time I did this, I was in a final mile facility. So our peak season literally was as it happened, right? Cause we were after the order was made before the two day delivery window. So our peak season was very tight, but we went through this process. The end of September and those documents were done, signed, sealed, not changing come like the first week of October. Because then we had time to make any adjustments. We were committing to stuff there that was not necessarily ready yet, so we needed the time to get to it, right? It's like, hey, our planned throughput for peak season is this.

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Well, we're 50 units an hour off of that. So in the next six weeks, we got to close that gap first. So there is some strategy and some time that needs to be there, but it is all dependent on knowing what your general volume is going to be. And that is at the mercy of the shipper. So that's the key point there to get from the shipper side. Be accurate. It just needs to be better than nothing. It

 

Evan: has to be something. Yeah. You have to go from zero to one before you can go from one to 10 and that zero to one is the hardest part to get right.

 

Joe: Exactly.

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Evan: All right. You're a very back to basics, fundamental guy, right? People and processes, which I love that perspective to operations. But there's also that third piece of the triangle that everyone seems to talk about. It's technology. So what advice would you give either to a 3PL or a shipper manufacturer to know when is the time to invest in technology? And then the flip side, what problem to invest in solving first, when you have that list of a hundred problems?

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Joe: The time to invest in technology was yesterday. The next best time to invest in technology is tomorrow. The caveat there is, you need to invest in the right technology for you. Not the best technology, not the one who's SEO works the best and came up first when you Googled it. Know what your business is, know what you need, know where you are and where you're trying to get to and find what fits that.

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There's a lot of great stuff out there. Most have way more bells and whistles that people that are trying to go, like you said, from zero to one don't need, and then you pay for that. And that becomes a burden. So know yourself and do it. And then the things to prioritize for me are what systems and technology that give you visibility.

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So we talked about that already, right? Data is great, but you need to have data that you can easily access and easily action. So does it accomplish that? Or if you're a fulfillment provider, does it give visibility to your customers, to your shippers so that they can do it?

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And then the second thing is. We talked about labor. My hot take was I will push back on it. I will admit it is harder to hire. Expectations are higher. Labor pool is smaller. So, invest in technology that helps you creatively expand your labor pool, right? Robotics. I have my different feelings on. There are things that work, things that don't for different operations. Goods to people all of a sudden opens you up to a workforce that was turned off by needing to do heavy lifting consistently over the course of eight hours. So now you've just opened up your labor pool for people that are going to show up, willing to work, capable of it, but we're turned off or incapable of, like, the traditional manual labor in a warehouse.

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Robotics can help do that. Yes, it's an investment, but you're opening up your labor pool, and you may actually hire less frequently and less often because you may get higher quality laborers now because they're people who want to work but couldn't previously. So think about things like that that sets you up in the long term, how do you improve your employee experience? How do you make life easier if you live in an area that's highly bilingual, invest in technology where it's bilingual. The work still needs to get done. It doesn't really matter which language it gets done, right? Things like that.

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Evan: What are some books or podcasts and they don't necessarily have to be about logistics and warehouse operations, but what are some books or podcasts that you'd recommend to people to read or listen to? Maybe as they're thinking about up leveling their operations.

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Joe: Yeah, I wish I had a bunch of titles of books because then that would make me sound much smarter. I don't read fairly often, podcasts, I like listening to, especially within the warehousing space or the eCommerce space. The New Warehouse podcast with Kevin Lawton. There has a really good mix of service providers, industry thought leaders, people who are in the trenches doing stuff day to day.

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But within the new warehouse ecosystem, not just the podcast, he does a lot of stuff, especially from an educational standpoint on like warehouse basics on like having webinars on things that are coming up, things that are happening, how to prepare for peak season, a little bit more of an educational twist to it.

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So I find that highly informative and just good content. eCom Logistics from the Fulfillment IQ Group is just high quality. They'll get a lot of overlap between them and The New Warehouse in terms of guests, but they approach the problems from different perspectives. So you do get different answers and different perspectives of what's going on, those two tactically I think are really, really good from leveling yourself up.

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There's a lot of newsletters that I use. Within the parcel section, Nate Skiver has a really good roundup that he does every Monday about all things eCommerce, all things final mile. You can learn a lot of perspective coming from there.

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And then if you're following me, if you're following Kevin, if you're following the group from Fulfillment IQ, you start to see other people that are in the ecosystem and you'll start to be able to narrow it down. I lived a lot on LinkedIn the last year and that's where actually I found a lot of phenomenal resources. I mean, that's where you and I connected, like there is just a lot that can be there. When I've worked within warehousing and fulfillment, I never really thought about LinkedIn because it was like, that's where people that work in a corporate job and like are finding new work. But there are a lot of really good resources and a lot of good expertise that you can find there or you can fall into.

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Evan: Got it. Well, Joe, I really appreciate you talking to me today. This has been a great conversation. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?

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Joe: Yeah, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Search Joe McIntyre. There will be a couple of us, but I'm the founder of Twelve48. Or you can email me at Joe@twelve48. co. Always happy to talk and help people out where I can.

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Evan: Perfect. And everyone listening, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Warehouse Visionaries.

Remember if you want to check out other episodes or get the full [00:46:00] episode you can find it on OneTrack.AI/Warehouse-Visionaries. And be sure to follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn to never miss an episode. And of course, do not forget to give Joe a follow as well. He's always posting really, really insightful stuff. It's how we got connected and just a lot of knowledge to share there.

Joe, thank you for joining me on today's episode.

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Joe: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun.

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Evan: This was an incredible conversation with Joe McIntyre, full of actionable ways to improve your warehouse operation. Here are my top takeaways.

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Number one, employee experience equals your customer experience. You have to invest in your culture because the employee experience has so many trickle down effects that impacts your entire business and your P&L, from retention to safety and productivity to your margins and customer satisfaction. And that doesn't just mean paying people more. Although that helps, it means nailing the fundamentals of labor planning, increasing accountability across the board and creating an open feedback loop between employees and leadership that everyone can buy into.

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Number two, scrutinize your processes, not your people. Invest time at the top to set clear expectations into what everyone's job is, who's accountable for what, and make sure the chain of command is clear. This will avoid confusion and make sure everyone knows what they should be held accountable to. Find a way to get visibility into what's actually happening so you can have better coaching conversations. This doesn't mean just digging into spreadsheets and telling people to work faster because a KPI says that.

Be data-driven, not a data prisoner. Dig into what's actually happening and why those KPIs are behind so you can figure out the root causes and come up with a plan to fix it and have better coaching conversations to improve your operation.

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And number three, peak season is a year round activity. It's not something that just comes around for a couple of months.

You need to have proactive communication and partnership between both the 3PL and the shipper to make sure you're getting forecasts early and often. Create a peak planning doc that covers every single scenario from what your throughput needs to be to hit your goals to how much labor you can realistically hire and manage in your building and even what happens if weather hits and who you need to call to get things in an emergency response plan. Document everything.

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And finally, do a post game and be ruthless when it comes to performance. Don't just be satisfied with, we made it through another season and we got things out the door. Always do a post game, ruthlessly go through your performance, your processes, figure it out where went wrong, where your bottlenecks are and how you can do better next time. And again, be proactive in communication to share that with your 3PL or with your shipper. So you know what's expected and how the partnership is growing.

 

Now, if you're looking for more ways to take your operations to the next level, join OneTrack's newsletter to get emails twice a month full of real stories and advice to solve your biggest challenges. And subscribe to OneTrack on YouTube at OneTrack-AI to never miss an episode of Warehouse Visionaries. We'll see you next time.