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Field Agent has reimagined B2B retail solutions to help CPG and retail professionals solve common challenges at-retail.
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Gregg Oldring: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin Horek and his fellow learner. Co-founders listen in his groundbreaking leaders, discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Rick west, he's the CEO and co-founder at field agent John and Greg. What are you looking forward to learning from Rick today?
Jon Larson: Oh, I'm interested David. He has a really interesting company. They do. I guess it's what I think of as mystery shopping, but what intrigues me is that they started in 2010 and they seem to have really leveraged mostly the phone, the iPhone. That was really early on in the iPhone, after it was released. I'm, I'll be interested to hear that.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, that's that was pretty prescient, obviously. So, Rick's clearly a pretty sharp guy and I think it's really interesting too, because looking at his career arche, we started off in a place that seems pretty comfortable. The most people, and started like Procter and gamble. He'll tell this story, but P and G start at P and PNG, you'd think that's a pretty nice place to stay safe and have a whole career at. I'm fascinated to find out, what drove the change and how the, how we shaped along that way. So I'm excited for that.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. All right. I'm with the show, Rick, great to chat with you again,
Rick West: Kevin man, as always, I've been looking forward to this, I can't wait to kind of dig into a few things today.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm excited that we, you haven't talked in a couple of years, so I'm curious to get kind of your thoughts on a number of things, kind of see where field agents kind of gone throughout the pandemic, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.
Rick West: Yeah. I'm probably one of the unique guys. I'm sure everyone tells you this, Kevin, but I tell people that you are, I'm a combination of hillbilly LG and Friday night lights. If you're a movie or a TV fan, you get both of those. But I grew up in Appalachia. My dad was a railroader, my grandparents, grandfather has one with a black Smith and did some coal mining work. The other was a railroader my brother's a coal miner. I, my roots come from that Appalachia upbringing, but as I grew up and kind of navigated through life, ended up working for this little company called Procter and gamble, which is crazy how I got there. Okay. Did the corporate world thing for about 17 years in the U S worked three years in Asia, of time in Hong and of time in Thailand. From that really started to understand what the corporate world looked like.
Rick West: My roots always took me back to this, just get it done, solve problem, kind of Appalachian background that I had and started this entrepreneurial thing back in 2001. The, but the roots are there that they run deep and long.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. You went to university, what did you take and why obviously that before Proctor and gamble, correct?
Rick West: Yeah. Yeah. The interesting part is, especially for your listeners on there today, I described what I did was I started out in pre-business and pre-business Smith that I thought I was going to be an engineer.
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: That lasted for about, a year and a half. I realized when I got to calc three and the Z dimension and physics, I am so out of my league, I mean, in between classes, the guys that knew what they were talking about the next, thesis and theory and where they were going to calculations. I was just trying to figure out where to meet my girlfriend and what our next class is going to be. I, I tell you that story is that I ended up in business and I found my sweet spot and my major was personnel and industrial relations today. That would be like an organizational effect of this type of role or major, and really got into team dynamics. What made people tick? I submit that is who I am. Again, I was smart enough and math smart enough and all the other things, but I was never going to be an engineer.
Rick West: Once I got into theory and understanding people really got excited about the management aspect of things. That was my major in front from that P and G was looking for people to manage teams. It was really, it didn't matter whether you're on the finance team or supply chain or sales team, it was all about managing people. I had a ton of experience doing that from my internships and through being an RA. I just had a lot of people skills. That's how I got hired, which even to this day is kind of surprising. I had got hired, but looking back on it, I can see why they were going after a person like me.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Walk us through your career up until coming up with field agent, because you've been doing that for well over a decade now.
Rick West: Yeah, yeah. If you're coming from the corporate world, I want to encourage you that you don't have to leave the corporate world after about a year or so. What I learned coming in again, I was a 22, 23 year old thinking. I knew everything about the world, but what I appreciate, especially now looking back on my time that the fundamental core practices of understanding processes and systems and working within a hierarchy and getting things done P and G did a fantastic job teaching me how to do that. Now I started out supply chain today. It's a cool word. 10 years ago, 15, you've been like supply chain hoop. Everyone thinks supply chains cool now, but I started out supply chain. I had experience on the manufacturing side experience within distribution. I had assignments and replenishment. I had assignments within understanding the financial aspect of things.
Rick West: That was a, a very broad aspect of how to run a company. I left the corporate world, I really had really pretty vast experience at understanding how a company worked now at a very macro level obviously, but really understood it. So I did a ton of assignments. My assignment in the U S was kind of that supply chain. I did customer facing work in Florida, but when I left the U S and went to Asia, that's when I really started to get into kind of an entrepreneurial side of things with Proctor and gamble was living in Hong Kong. I had territory from think of the Philippines, Japan, Korea, all the way down to New Zealand, working with multinationals, coming into countries that really didn't understand how to work with large retailers. It was kind of the wild west again. I mean, I'm literally working with distributors in China, helping them understand what a barcode is.
Rick West: Those are the days there was one Walmart in China and there's, hundreds. There was, MACRA was just coming in car four was just coming in. And so it was really exciting. It felt like you were in this entrepreneur, working with this massive company a couple of years doing that. With the Thailand do the same thing with, but was more country focused, still had the Ozzie on is my territory. Again, really becoming more of an entrepreneur because you had the freedom to make decisions that wasn't under this massive corporate infrastructure. What I learned at that time, which takes me back to getting into the entrepreneurial side of things, Kevin, is that I was going to come back to the corporate headquarters for PNG, or they were looking for a couple thousand people to take separation packages because they were downsizing and they needed volunteers. Through my wife who also worked for G at the time, a couple of friends that were here in the states, we decided to take corporate packages and we use that as seed money or angel money to do a startup.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Before we dive into that, I'm curious, is there anything that you learned or realized about America while living abroad?
Rick West: Yeah, you're talking about business-wise culturally, get me a little, give me a language.
Kevin Horek: I, I be curious actually on both business and cultural wise.
Rick West: Yeah. Th the culture part, and I'll get it to kind of, we'll use Thailand as an example.
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: The amazing warm country, you know, engaging. It was fantastic. The work that we could go back to Thailand tomorrow, but here is a little cultural nuance. There's no word in the Thai language for no. Okay. The word is my child not, yes. My child, my child, not. Yes. Regardless of the country, because of that, that Asian aspect of karma and how things kind of worked in, you got a lot of maybes. It can make from the U S it was more of, get this done. Can you do this here's expectation? So I'll give you an example. Once I was had a laptop issue and I took it down to the it department, and I said, Hey, I need this fixed. I was going home that evening. Can I have it fixed the next day? Oh yeah. Maybe you come back tomorrow morning. I said, great.
Rick West: Get there tomorrow morning. The laptops will sit on the guy's desk. And he called in sick. The guy from the Philippines is just laughing at me. I said, well, why are you laughing? He said, well, this guy is scared to death to come back to work because he doesn't know how to fix it. He told them maybe he couldn't tell, he wanted to save face. I said, well, what am I going to do? He said, well, we're going to take it over here to the guys in the Philippines. This guy's going to fix it for you. Cause we don't fix it. This guy's never going to come back to work. So culturally wanted to do everything right. Really struggled with that Western culture that capitalist, Hey, let's get stuff done at any cost. You had to learn to work through that. Now again, we could argue why that's right or wrong.
Rick West: I'll tell you as an amazing culture. Because of all those positives, it made it a great place to work yet. At the same time, we had to help them understand that maybe it's not a good word to use. That's a cultural kind of thing that kind of tied into the business, the other business side of thing, which is kind of interesting. And again, I was there late nineties. They were so far ahead in technology related to wireless cell phones that were literally decades ahead of the U S, which was a landline society. Sure. I'm going to India and we're just popping up satellites right. Left down these small distributor ships and we're just popping them up. I'm like, how are we doing the infrastructure? It's all simple. We've got a cell phone over here. We've got this little wireless thing. We spun this up and I'm like, well, how do you run the line?
Rick West: He's like, Rick, you got to get out of this Western mentality. Even while you're working in a second world country, to some degree, they were much more advanced than technology. I had to change my perspective on how we get things done. We also had to change our requirements to say, well, where's the security, the landline, et cetera. Cause we hadn't really even written policies for someone using wifi to run a distribution center because were only dealing with mainframes. That was a real technical change that we had to make some ebbs and flows work because they were so far ahead of us. Those are the kinds of things that the wild west is that you can't come in and shove in your processes and shove in, your requirements you've really kind of come in with principles and you turn those principles into realities based on the culture and infrastructure that's in front of you.
Rick West: It was a key learning for me.
Kevin Horek: I actually think that's really good advice, especially now that so many people are trying to create these global businesses and even hire people in different parts of the world, right. Trying to cram your culture down their throat in a lot of cases can very much backfire or it just doesn't translate very well.
Rick West: Yeah. I mean, you can push for so long, but eventually you've got to understand that for the most part, people want to do the right thing and you've got to, again, I'm a principle guy, so you've got to lay out the principles and kind of ebb and flow on some rules and requirements. If you do that, you're gonna end up in a really good place. If you come in with a rule-based mentality and not really understand the culture and the business processes in front of you, it can be a long road to how it could be tough.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. You take this buyout and you use that as seed money field agent, correct?
Rick West: Well, it was, we did a few startups before then, so think of the, the buyout. Again, if you're a corporate person and you've got a, a chance for a buyout, you can do the buyout and go travel Europe for three months. You can take the buyout and go hang out with your friends. Or you could take the buyout, really live a capped lifestyle, minimize your expenses. That buyout is better than Kevin showing up as angel investor saying, here's a hundred grand, 200 grand, go start this project, but here are the, here's all the ties and all the little aspects of working with Kevin. Well, I don't want to work with Kevin. I've got this lump sum coming my way. What can I do? That's how we combined our four entities. If you will coming together, use that as funding. It became, several hundred thousand dollars for us to launch a business.
Rick West: And we launched in 2001,
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: In the fall, I just transferred from Bangkok back here to Northwest Arkansas and this Walmart hub that was here. We had a ton of people that were wanting to work with Walmart, but permanently had sales and accounting people. We came in said, gosh, let's take the expertise we have with PNG and come alongside and help you with shopper marketing, shopper, research branding. Our very first client call, I'll never forget this. We were again, starving, making sure we watched every penny. We had a fruit, we had a friend in Orlando that was going to let us stay with a guy in Orlando. Were on a flight as my business partner, Henry Hall and myself, and we're flying to Orlando and we had to stop in Memphis. Cause a direct flight was too expensive of we're watching our pennies. We get to Memphis like at 8 45 in the morning and the flight attendants like, oh listen, flight's been canceled things kind of crazy.
Rick West: Not sure if you're going to make it to Orlando today. We're like, oh my gosh, the very first client, very first call. This is terrible. As we walked down the hall, so let's go grab a cup of coffee. Kevin, we walked down the hall, walked into a little cafe and we watched the second plane hit the world trade center.
Kevin Horek: Oh wow.
Rick West: Our startup was September 1st, 10 days later, nine 11 hit. For six months were really, really happy. We had some angel funding from our old company. What it forced us to do is while we have this idea of where were going, you can imagine the number of meetings engagements we had with potential clients kind of honing in our offering. That was a good thing for us to, I'd rather do more AB testing live. That was a good thing. About six, nine months later really was able to launch the shopper marketing shopper research branding company. Now you fast forward to 2009 and that's when we started the engagement in Philadelphia. I'll pause there before I get into the field agent story.
Kevin Horek: Sure. Okay. The thing that's interesting about what you just said is like a lot of people, okay. Nine 11 would happen and they would just quit. Right. How did to keep going and figure it out? Right? Because I think that in itself could have been a deal breaker for you guys.
Rick West: Well, it could have been. Again, as people are listening to this podcast, we knew inherently because of the people we had talked to, were solving a problem and people were willing to pay us for it. Kevin, I think we talked this the last time were going through the best advice I'd ever received as a, an entrepreneur was in that two or three week period of getting started when the Dr. Steve grays came to us and he said, listen, there's 20 points I could give you. Here's number one, you are only as successful as you can invoice and collect.
Kevin Horek: Yeah.
Rick West: He said, if you can't do that, you've got an expensive hobby. Kevin, what we knew, because we had talked to enough friends in the area that we're doing this work for other CPG companies, non P and G people, they were willing to pay us for the service. So we knew we had it. And again, I'm a faith-based guy. Everything in my prayer life, I mean, everything is telling me this was the right way to go. The question is, and do you waste that six months? What am I going to go work out? Am I going to go hang out? I mean, don't waste it. It forced us post PNG altogether, the four of us and a couple other folks to really get down and hone our craft to hone in on what our product offering service offering was going to be. There's a, a great guy that's, that wrote this paper on not wasting your cancer.
Rick West: My wife's a breast cancer survivor. She was reading this and Hey, I know I've got cancer. It's going to happen. So don't waste that time. My wife also does ministry and she goes into the prison and said, Hey, you're incarcerated for 18 months. Don't waste this time. What we saw, we told each other, we've got about six to nine months. Let's not waste this time. That was the part that were going to, we knew we had a great solution to a problem, but now we had six more months to go hone it. We just had faith that would go work out and sure enough, six or so months down the road, it all started to kick back in again. Were probably more prepared Kevin than we would have been even week one or two.
Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. Walk us through what became field agent and then w what it is today and how it's evolved in the 12 plus years that you've been doing it. I want to dive in and get your thoughts around kind of the pandemic and how you've had to shift your business and how retail's had to shift.
Rick West: You bet. You bet. As the listeners are here, I want you, I'm going to take you back to the pre selfie days.
Kevin Horek: Okay?
Rick West: Now, most people look at their phone today's smartphone, and you have sweetness, massive sweeping assumptions about this fountain. It's always been that way, but it, January, 2009, iPhone three S had just come out and I get Kevin, this is crazy fast. It had a three megapixel camera. It was the rage, right? The foam, but remember had no front facing camera. No selfie had no video unless you jail broke it. The app store had only been open for programmers for about four or five months. It was still brand new territory.
Kevin Horek: Right?
Rick West: What were doing is that were sitting around a table really cool, iPhone three SS. Were Googling on that, not our computers cause the Blackberry guys couldn't Google it, but we could. So we looked really cool. We're Googling to find out if anyone was using technology on the iPhone smartphone, to be able to capture data from retail locations or homes and use the metadata to QC it back in to determine whether or not it was valid. Because at the time the problem we had as a marketing research firm, we're literally traveling all over the U S flying everywhere to either assess what we put up in stores to see if it was right or be trying to talk to people in the stores to see what they wanted. Were spending tens of thousands of dollars just to get people to go into stores, to tell us what was happening, because this from a retail standpoint, just because your local store looks like this.
Rick West: It doesn't mean the other stores, in 50 states, look that way.
Kevin Horek: Right?
Rick West: So Googling it. The business model at that time was downloaded app and hopefully click on an ad to get paid money, download it app. Hopefully they're going to click on the ad to get paid money. No one was pulling any data from the user. They were only pushing fun games and toys to them. We sat down for a few more months and said, someone's gotta be doing it by now. And they weren't. We made the decision in around may, June of 2009. We're going to be like those people, Kevin, that are sitting around at a party. They said, I invented Tik TOK. I just didn't have the time. I had the idea first year, whatever you did, it's just going to be arrogant, right? Yeah. We didn't want to be those guys. Were managing five LLCs at the time, five different companies. We had, a bunch of employees and we started working nights and weekends.
Rick West: Again, it felt like September, 2001. We worked nights and weekends brought a developer Kelly Miller. Who's one of my co-founders. In April, 2010 launched the first app in iTunes that paid you cash. Wow, everyone else was badges. Ringwood square was out there and you could go become the mayor of Seattle or something. He, they have badges and points. We're also the first app to use geolocation metadata, to qualify locations of information. It was earth shattering. It was shocking. We launched on 11 o'clock at night on the 17th of April thinking, no, one's going to notice within a couple hours, we had several thousand downloads by Tuesday, we did a simple press release. We were interviewed by CNN wall street journal. No one believed this that you could actually get paid to use your phone. And the rest was history. We just started driving down that path from that point forward.
Rick West: That's the, the whole primary aspect of this. If you're a listener to this is we knew there was a problem we knew we could solve. It sounds familiar from September of 2001, right? We had this problem we're solving. We knew that technology was going to solve a problem. We leaned into it. Kevin, what was crazy at that time? Think about it. Every business person we talked to had a Blackberry. Yep. There may have been a cool 21, 22 year old that just got out of school. They had two phones and iPhone and a Blackberry, because remember in those days the exchange system for email wasn't secure enough. So all corporations is bad iPhone. It was just a toy. Literally explaining it to VP senior VPs, how the phone works. They would say, well, Rick, if someone takes a picture with their phone, how are you going to train them?
Rick West: How to use the phone to take a picture? They said, yeah, but even if they take the picture, how are you going to get them to download the photo onto their computer so that they can send you the photo? Well, I mean, you'd never have that conversation today, right? No, those days are like, well, why would someone believe you could give them money? Are you going to send them checks? I said, no, we're just going to send it via PayPal. It's like, well, w w how do you do that? I don't get it. It was crazy complex, even though you and I both know, it really was a simple process because were changing the world collected information. That was a really cool time, but it took us a lot longer than we thought to get acceptance. It probably took us about 18 months until the iPhones became more normal before people really got on board and understood what were doing.
Kevin Horek: Okay. Fascinating. How has field agent evolved to what it is today and how have you stayed relevant and change with the trends?
Rick West: Well, the good news is Kevin. I do not have to explain how to use an iPhone.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. Fair.
Rick West: That's the beauty, but if you're, as you think through the practical part today, we've had over 2 million downloads. Wow. We're in seven other countries. Wow. The premise behind what we do today, went from a very base beginning of what we do, which is tell me the price of an item in a store, take a photo of an item. That quantitative data piece that we started out as our mainstay started to grow, as we increase, it downloads a demographics because now someone says, Hey, instead of sending in Kevin and Rick, what if we sent in a couple of thousand moms that had little babies and had them go to the baby section? Not that Rick and Kevin couldn't take a photo of the display or take a photo of the shelf, but now I want those moms to tell me what they think about the shelf, right?
Rick West: Probably what they think about the price. So, so the qualitative insights, they're like, oh my gosh, this is golden because you have literally hundreds of thousands of people that are giving me their opinion in near real-time. So that was that next phase. That was probably a year, two, three. We finally got enough scale to do that. From that over the last three years, we started dipping our toe into a. Now one of the, probably the fastest growing area we're in today is around trial sampling marketing.
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: Now the question is, Hey, Kevin and Rick were at the shelf. We can answer the question, but you think that mother of two, while she's there, do you think that maybe she would buy the product, try the product and either answer some questions or possibly even do a ratings and review? We're like, sure. She would. Now we literally have created that trial mechanism that you're not giving away cheese at a Costco and feeding people, on a Saturday afternoon, we're sending a core demographic, Kevin and say, Hey, Kevin, you like beer. How would you like to try some Budweiser seltzer? We'll pay you to try it and reimburse you for your purchase. We can be able to go get core demographics and create a trial mechanism, unlike anything you've seen. The scale we offer now for quantitative and qualitative opinion is great, but you start getting to the marketing world.
Rick West: It's crazy what we're doing. That was over the last three years. I'm going to tell you what we've just launched in January, but I'm going to pause there and see if any questions I'm going to walk you through what we just launched.
Kevin Horek: Okay. I think the thing that's interesting to me then is you could figure out in your seltzer, like what's popular in different parts of the country, if that seltzers in other parts of the world. You can gather like almost down to the city or a specific geographic region what's working and what's not working for your customers fair to say.
Rick West: Absolutely. So Kevin, are you a beer drinker?
Kevin Horek: I'm celiac. I drink like gluten-free beer, but yeah.
Rick West: Okay. So let's, you're even a better example. You're a gluten-free beer guy. And so what's your favorite brand?
Kevin Horek: Oh, the knee Lunenburg is not bad. There's one other one I can never pronounce the name of.
Rick West: As Gutenberg is an example. Let's say that Glutenburg has a main competitor and they're looking for gluten-free drinkers of that beer. Now, if I did a screener to try to find, a couple of hundred people or a thousand people, yeah. You never know how they're gonna answer, but here's the power of the smart device. I'm saying, Kevin, show me an open bottle Of Glutenburg with a fork beside of it.
Kevin Horek: Right. Okay.
Rick West: Cannot make up that photo. Right. You can't find it online, so you can't scan me. Now I go back to the brand and say, I now have found a thousand people that drink gluten. How do you know? Because they've got empty bottles and a force beside of it. Now I'm going to ask you to go by and try the competitor for the first time. Not only am I getting an interested person, I'm getting a diehard person in this category that really knows the, that particular brand. For the first time I'm getting used to switch and try another brand. What do you think that's worth to accompany.
Kevin Horek: Some priceless,
Rick West: As opposed to, I hope I can do some sampling. You can't even do that with beer. You take that exact same scenario around mascara, hair, color, shampoo, lunch meats, deli items. We find core people because I can validate with a hundred percent certainty that there are a Papa John's purchaser, and I can send them to another quick serve restaurant, because I know because they've shown me receipts or they've shown me a, a, an online version of their credit card statement with their thumb over their name and their account number. And I can show they purchase Papa. John's over the last, couple of months I've said, Hey, would you like to try little Caesars? So like, sure, it's crazy. The amount of detail that phone allows you to capture all that being said, that's kind of the rhythm of which we're bringing things in from a sampling standpoint, which has been fantastic.
Kevin Horek: Sure. Okay. Let's dive into what you just launched then in January.
Rick West: All right. If you're, if your listeners are, you got to put yourself in that demographic age, now you have millennials, gen Z, are generation Jones, which is not quite a baby boomer, not quite a, millennial based on where are you have either grown up with or transitioned into viewing your online experience from a B2C standpoint as Amazon driven,
Kevin Horek: Right?
Rick West: It just, it, the world that we have, everyone's copying, you could argue if you're a target, a Walmart, someone else you're doing unique, new and unique things, but let's not overthink this. Amazon is driving the conversation. It'd be to see In that world, what we started to find. COVID kind of reinforced this to some degree is that we've got fewer and fewer people that really want to have two meetings, two phone calls, and a six week process to develop an sow, just to get a $500 project launch. Because here's what we've learned, Kevin, is that if you bought a TV on Amazon for, let's say $2,500, it's a 75 inch Sony something.
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: Are, do you click and want to talk to a sales person on Amazon?
Kevin Horek: No,
Rick West: You're going to drop 2,500 bucks, right?
Kevin Horek: Yeah.
Rick West: How many friends do you know that have either purchased a car on vroom or Tesla and bought it sight unseen.
Kevin Horek: Of a number of them now, like it's almost like too many to count.
Rick West: You're spending 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 80, a hundred thousand dollars. You, but Rick, in order for me to do a ratings review project, I gotta be honest with you. I really want to have two or three meetings. I'd really just love to talk to someone I'm like w Y B really it's. What we've created, we launched this in January. We created, we've created the first B to B marketplace.
Kevin Horek: Okay.
Rick West: That acts and looks like to some degree, the same experience you would get on Amazon. We spent the entire time of COVID productizing the services that can be productized. We'll talk about what that means in a second, so that you can go to our marketplace and you can click, answer a couple of questions, go to a cart and checkout and never talk to a human being. Now imagine we had a person two weeks ago that launched a $50,000, multi thousand of store audit. They clicked three times answered two questions, hit, submit, and never talked to us all. Now the question becomes like, yeah, but I just feel better about three phone calls and two meetings to launch the thousand dollars to $2,000 project. Now what's happening in your age group, right? You're millennial, right?
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm a 38. So kind of geriatric millennials.
Rick West: Well, the geriatric millennial you're even saying, Hey, do I really need to have three meetings to buy this? The answer is no. What's happening is that as we're bringing younger people in of people at twenties and thirties into major decision-making modes, they've gone into the B2B world saying, I don't know that I need to have all those meetings. Maybe I think I can know by past that to some degree. Even the staff think Forrester came out with a stat that said, I think it's three out of every four, B2B buyers would rather self-educate and to have a sales person. Right? They said like 75% of B2B procurement spending is going to be happening online marketplace in the next five years. We saw that we saw the business that we had. You go to field agent.net and you click on shop, it takes you into our marketplace and you can now buy our products and never talk to us all.
Rick West: The beauty of this, Kevin is much like Amazon starting out with books. We now have taken it to new categories that we are not providing the products. We now have a third-party mark merchandising provider. We have a third party that will provide you a photo shoot for lifestyle, or just the white background photos for your website. We've got e-commerce providers they're on there because they need to get their products in to a marketplace environment because they realize the same thing. People are tired of going after all the meetings.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. No, I a hundred percent agree with you. I think, and I don't mean it to sound arrogant. I usually have found it. I know more about the sales person that is trying to sell me that specific product, because I've watched, hours of reviews and read a bunch of articles. And like, I know what I'm buying. I think a lot of people are like that where it's almost impossible for a salesperson to know every specific detail about everything that they're selling. Right. Where if I know the make and model, I want I'll research it until I, I know everything there is to know about it. When I buy it, well, you're not going to convince me of some other product because I've done all that. Right.
Rick West: So that's thinking about the end. We'll give you some, I'm an analogy, storytelling guys. Okay. Here's the story. The next industry that's facing, this is going to be real estate.
Kevin Horek: Sure.
Rick West: You go to Zillow, you got to realtor.com. You look through things saying, why do I need a real estate agent to walk me through the house? I've got a video tutorial I saw. I mean, I told him I'm going to now spend 200,000 half a million dollars, a million bucks. I might never physically go in again. Do I really need a realtor to make that happen? Now you fast forward a little bit. You look at the world of COVID and the poster child, for example, for an example. If you're a services company, I want you to think about this. Zoom was one of the big winners in COVID, right? I think they went from 30 million users to 200 million in six months.
Kevin Horek: Wow. Yeah.
Rick West: Now here's the math and I, it's not my map, but I saw it on the internet. So it's gotta be true. Right. I saw a study that said, if they'd use traditional sales, a demo methods where you click schedule a demo, have somebody explain it to you, and then you sign up, it would have taken them 10 years. They would have had to have hired 103,000 new sales reps just to go from 30 million to 200 million in six months. That's seven days a week, 10 hours a day, 30 minute phone calls.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. And.
Rick West: The scaling part of a marketplace or a kind of that product led approach is important. For a services company, like, yeah, but Rick, I don't think they're going to buy it from, they need to meet me. They need to know me. They're going to love my team. Some that could be true, but what happens to people like Kevin? Who's saying I've already researched three companies. I've looked at your reviews. I get it. I want the least friction, the most frictionless experience I can have to get great results. I want to be able to click and go to our cart. Now, if you're a services company, now you've got to think about how your product ties things. That's what we learned over COVID there is some secret sauce to saying, yeah, I've got a custom project and I need to spend time with you. We're always going to have custom projects, but you and I both know Kevin that for most services, it's 80 20 model, right?
Rick West: For 80% of the executions of a service, it's the same questions. It's the same engagement. There's always going to be 20, 30%. That's going to be custom. We realized that our products that I think we have close to 35% of our volume already running through this marketplace, never talking to assault. They're so happy. They can't stand it because it's like, man, 10 o'clock at night. I don't have to call you. I just click, go to cart. When I get up in the morning, my data's already there and that's the new world. We started seeing our marketplace that we've launched. We're just now bringing in other third parties that we think we're going to revolutionize this the same way we revolutionized collected data back in 2010.
Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. How do you stay up on these trends and decide to add these feature sets and like this marketplace, because that can be really challenging, right? In a lot of cases can make or break your business.
Rick West: It's a big bet. Kevin, listen, we're not out of the woods yet. W I'm talking you through a concept that intuitively the, when you go talk to 10 people after this phone call, not one person will say, I'd rather talk to a car dealer. I'd rather talk to the sales guy about the table. No, one's going to say that. So intuitively we know we're right. The question becomes, are we a year too early? Are we six years too early? Are we, are we in the middle? I mean, that's the bet. Right? We, this is filled Asia after talking to our customers, I think we're probably a hundred deep and interviews. Not one person has ever, nah, I'd rather talk to you. They're all like, huh? If you could provide an Amazon experience for me, I totally would go that route. I mean, not one person has said, nah, I'd rather have more phone calls with you.
Rick West: Not one person. Now that being said, there's always big projects, big, customized things over here. I'm not talking about that. But these are the basic core things. Intuitively I know that, but because there are people, not 38 people that are still older, they have certain expectations. We're early in driving it. As people, the millennials disease becoming influential positions, they're going to say, w why are we wasting all of our time in meetings? Why aren't we just click, click, and go? And they get it. So we're a little bit early. We've got to be brave to be able to push forward. Since our clients are asking for it, we feel really confident in where we're going.
Kevin Horek: Okay. I'm curious, how do you come up with these kind of thoughts and principles and kind of changing the rules because that in itself can be really scary. How do what to build or compared to like, maybe we need to shelve that or, or whatnot, because you've kind of, you've talked about kind of your principles and rules earlier on in the conversation.
Rick West: Yeah. So they get part of it. Think of your life in again, if you're listener, think of the ideas you're like, oh, I did have that idea. I'm just not cocky enough to say at a party, I had it before someone else had didn't have time to do it. I mean, we all see things that there are certain brain styles and certain personalities would say, yeah, I see it, but I'm not willing to take the risk. Now I want to switch over and talk to the entrepreneurs out there as an entrepreneur. If you've got a product or a service that solves a problem.
Kevin Horek: Yup.
Rick West: If you know, I mean, you'd know it, you know that, and you've got someone that's gonna pay you for it. The words of guy Kawasaki, a guy and he's pushing on this and saying, listen, if you've got that, don't spend the next three months or next two years trying to make it perfect. Get your product into the market. Ethic has words are ship your product with elements of crappiness don't ship crap, but ship your product with elements of crappiness and listen to what your customers tell you. That's going to take you Lee it's Ellie, if you literally leapfrog what your own brain says, the product should look like. And we have the confidence. Now, Kevin, to do that, our marketplace isn't perfect, right? There are some clicks and little, edges. We wish we had the UI UX standpoint better, but man, it does a great job.
Rick West: It does what it's supposed to do. We're now listening to our customers that say, man, my experience would better if you did this. We're confident that we can go turn that back around and give them the experience they're looking for. That being said, we could've come up with this concept of the marketplace, just like field agent and waited two or three years, it's going to happen. Somebody else is going to do it because the industry, we see it, Kevin, there's nothing in my mind, body and soul right now that says that the next five, 10 years, we're not going to see multiple services company enter into a product led engagement. That's going to have some form of marketplace because we simply aren't going to be, we want tolerate someone saying, yeah, I'll get you on my schedule in two weeks. Let's have a phone call about that.
Rick West: Those days are gone. Right. I'm confident they're gone.
Kevin Horek: No. Yeah. I a hundred percent agree with you. I'm curious though, what advice do you give to people to actually take that idea and actually go for it? Because it's easy for somebody like me and you that have actually made that leap and built a startup and built a company. I always joke the best motivation to making things better is when you're embarrassed by what's live and people are using, and it's similar to what you just mentioned. Right? Right. Like how do you actually encourage people to actually make that leap and start building that idea?
Rick West: Yeah. I, you can imagine in my world the number of people with an idea that show up on my doorsteps and Hey, Rick, this is, I received one gosh, two weeks ago, a week ago, here's the plan. I only need $500,000 to get this thing launched.
Kevin Horek: Right.
Rick West: I said, okay, have you manually gone through the process? Have you talked to a stranger that wants to buy this note, but I know it's going to be awesome. My friends and family and my mom, my brother, my two cousins and my wife said, it's amazing. All I need is $500,000 from you, Rick. I'm like, that's just not what we're talking about here. My charisma to people is that if you have the passion and you think this thing is going to work, all you need are a handful of strangers that are willing to pay you for something that you can gut it out and manually do. If you get that piece going that I'm saying, take the leap. If you're not willing to do that. You want to keep talking about things in theory, and you're not going to leave until you have a bunch of money to make sure you're going to be safe and say, listen, you don't have the guts.
Rick West: You don't have the willpower. You do not have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You're just coming up with an interesting idea that you want someone to pay you as an employee to go try. That's not what we're talking about here. Now. I know there's things that are in between. I don't want to talk to pick on anyone. That's raised several hundred thousand dollars from angel to get started, but ultimately you've got to be willing to step out. As a good investor, you're going to wonder, it's like a episode of shark tank, man. You've got an idea. You sold it to three people. You just want me to pay you to manage something. That's not what I'm doing. You need to have some skin in the game. Most of the time, the skin is time, effort and of money to push something out, to get complete strangers, to buy it.
Rick West: That's the biggest leap and to a person, Kevin, I probably the majority of the people I've talked to just aren't willing to do it. They're not willing to take the step to go manually, do the things they have to do nights and weekends to make it work. They want someone to pay them, to leave their job, to go try it.
Kevin Horek: I a hundred percent agree with you. It's interesting. Just like it's hard and it sucks. It's the greatest thing I've ever done. The worst thing I've ever done at the exact same time, but you need that kind of mindset that you just outlined that you just are willing to do it no matter what. You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars or even tens of thousands of dollars to really build version one of your product, especially, or service, especially if you can do it manually.
Rick West: Yeah. Here's a simple one. This is for the, that the younger people that are listening to this thing, there was a guy that had an idea that he was going to pick up the trash from the apartment complex front door because the college students didn't want to walk the trash down to the dumpster. Okay. Here's my day said, I'm going to put an app together, a roll this thing out. All they're going to do is set their trash outside. When they set it outside, I'm going to pay a guy to come pick it up. They're going to take it to the dumpster. I said, who's going to pay for this. All the parents pay for it. These college students, they don't care. It's another five bucks a week or 10 bucks a week who cares? He said, this is the concept. This will be done it yet.
Rick West: He said, nah. I said, well, why don't you go to the apartment complex? Why don't you see how many people will pay you five or $10, do some AB testing. You get up on six o'clock on Wednesday morning and take the trash out. Or I don't want to do that. Like, dude, Why would someone give you money when you're not even willing to go work some early hours to go see if you can't sell this thing? He's like, well, I know it'll work. I said says, who says my buddies? We don't want to do the trash and we pay for it. You see what I mean? So it's that interesting aspect. Now, again, I'm picking on a few people, but that's still kind of the tendency that says I'm not willing to take the risk and you and I both know this. If you learn anything as an entrepreneur, you've got to put things on the line.
Rick West: You just do. By putting those things on the line, it's primarily your time, your money, your reputation, your ego, all that has to be set up and you've got to move forward and try. When people see that they invest in you and the product, if they don't see that they're not going to invest.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. I'm curious then where do you learn some of these concepts? Like, do you listen, do you read quite a bit, do you listen to podcasts a bit of both? Or how have you kind of learned some of these things along the way?
Rick West: Know I'm a decent podcast guy. I mean, I've got a few there out there that they're trying to encourage me. I'll tell you the one that I've been listening to and it's primarily driven by the marketing and the funnel work we're doing today. It used to be called flip my funnel. It's not called move, like a go to market podcast by Sanger. I'm the guy that was a co-founder of Terminus. Are you familiar with him?
Kevin Horek: No.
Rick West: Fantastic. He does. He does a daily podcast. That's crazy.
Kevin Horek: Daily,
Rick West: A lot of work, but he's got these 15, 20 minute conversations with all these people in the industry. It just really interesting how he looks at the funnel. A ton of things there that are coming up, another guy that I loved to listen to, and again, he's primarily driving the kind of the leadership thing. His name is Andy Stanley. He's a leadership guy out of north point out of Atlanta. He does just say, once a month, 30 minute leadership thing, it's really straight forward. That kind of helps you go through things. If you get to the entrepreneurial side of things, and again, you could argue kind of where does that fit as you go in. There's there's one that I've been listening to. That brings a lot of entrepreneurs in and kind of the Midwest part of the world. I live in a, it's called middle tech.
Rick West: These guys have been around for four years and they're bringing in people like me, people like you. It's just encouraging to hear the stories cause there's some repetition, but it has that same vein that you're hearing about how guys do some starting up. I listened to those pretty often to get interesting information coming in. I've got a couple of health ones that we would talk about, but those are the primary ones I listened to all the time.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. I know we've talked about this before, when we've chatted, but you're obviously not in San Francisco or New York. How is, how have you found that to be an advantage and maybe some disadvantages and maybe the disadvantages are gone now because of just where we are in the world today. So what's your thoughts on that?
Rick West: Yeah. I wish my disadvantages would become gone because of the way in the world we're in today. But let's talk about working remote. I mean, there was a day that is listen Northwest Arkansas. It's fantastic. The cost of living's great. The weather's fantastic. We have the Ozarks, it's this, it's just really a little ecosystem with, three multi-billion dollar companies of Walmart, JB hunt and Tyson. All right here, you've got people transitioning in it's a growing economy, but what happened with COVID is that now you've got the coast saying, Hey, instead of moving to Silicon valley and your engineer or your customer experience person, I'll pay you Silicon valley wages and you could still live wherever you want to. For the first time in our life, we're getting, some poachers coming in, looking at our talent because I'm not trying to convince you to go sleep on a couch in San Francisco,
Kevin Horek: Right?
Rick West: You can continue to live where you are. So that's number one. We're, we're kind of facing that in this economy that we're, we're dealing with. On the other side of that, we continue to w we call people that leave filled agent alumni. And so they leave. From alumni standpoint, we'd love to stay engaged. If I was your mentor yesterday, Kevin, if you leave tomorrow, why would I stop being your mentor to continue to help you be a great person? We've had quite a few people come back to filled agent after they've been out two or three years thinking they're going to give something a shot. They realize it didn't work out so well, but what's been interesting. They've gone out and gotten great experience,
Kevin Horek: Right?
Rick West: We already knew they were tied in great with our culture. Welcome them back in and says, yeah, let's come back in and see what we can do for you and see what kind of role you're going to play. So, so the COVID thing, we've seen that kind of play out in the first piece I talked about, but also within this whole aspect of the ecosystem, we're driving, we feel pretty good about the machine we've built. We've been pleasantly surprised with the number of folks that are coming back our way after they dip their toe in another culture.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Any advice for fostering that culture, where people actually want to come back and work for you and the rest of the team of field agent?
Rick West: Yeah, I think it's the genuineness. I mean, Kevin, you've got your, the guys you do life with and my encouragement to anyone that's managing, like our team has close to a hundred people today. You've got to have the directors and your VPs thinking the exact same way, which is if you are genuinely concerned about Kevin and I'm pouring into Kevin and Kevin said, it's just not what I want here. Would you help me find something else? Right. If you get that conversation, we know our culture has hit it. That's my encouragement to the listeners, as opposed to, I don't trust Kevin, I'm not sure. And I give Kevin a two-week notice.
Kevin Horek: Right.
Rick West: Now, when that person tells you, they're looking for something and you come alongside them and you help them move somewhere else. Kevin, you still reach out and say, Hey, that's not weekly mentorship now, but once a month let's have coffee and kind of check in and how are you doing? How can I help you navigate that person? Not only realizes you are concerned about them as an individual, but what do you think they're telling every other person, they run into. That culture with Kevin and those guys, if you ever get a chance, you should go work there because they're the real deal. We have found that our market, our reputation stands for that is it we're stand up. People concerned about individuals. Now, again, I don't want Kevin to leave. I want Kevin to stay. Right, right. If that's the case, I want you to help be the most successful human being I can create.
Rick West: I want to the be the most give you help. You have the most significant impact you can have on society. That's going to make us all better, but that is a culture thing that you've got to ingrain in your team. I think we've seen tremendous benefits from that.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. I guess at the end of the day, well, and you could give me your thoughts on this is if you create a good culture and it gets really hard to recruit people, the people with the best culture always went out and that's not always related to money, correct?
Rick West: That is correct. Because whether you're an alumni here, or if someone else you can go chase, dollar a and dollar B, and you can go chase that right position. For a season, you can grind it out and deal with a toxic environment. You can grind it out, working crazy hours to go make the money. At some point in time, you're going to come back and say, yeah, but field agent, the salaries were close or they were within range. I have this amazing environment where I can use my creativity to do these things. You've got to weigh that out and say, where do I want to work? For some people does it really matter? They're not worried about the culture. They just want to make the dime and you should go do that. If you're interested in making something bigger, to be a part of something bigger than yourself, that's, we've got folks looking at our culture to say, Hey, not only is a great work environment.
Rick West: You know, they're focused on the community. They're focused on other things we're really trying to help people develop. That, is that, that engagement that we have with them. They tell their friends and other folks. We know we're an aspirational person place to work, but at the same time, we know that there'll be people this, gosh, I spent three years here, five years here, I want to do something different. Kevin, I don't think we should look down upon someone because they want to do that. The genuine person says, I've mentored you yesterday. You left tomorrow. I'm going to continue to engage you in life, as opposed to I mentored you yesterday. I said, all these things you left today, I'll never talk to you again. That's just not genuine. And that stuff gets around. We feel like in our culture and our environment here in this community that we're known for that,
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's really great of you guys, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, field agent in the marketplace, and anything else you want to mention?
Rick West: Yeah, I'm a pretty good LinkedIn guy. Easiest way is just to DME on LinkedIn. Find that Rick west, the field agent guy really easy to find would love to chat with folks. Even if you've got an entrepreneur listening to this story and wants to just bounce around a few things, you'd be surprised how quickly I'd say yes to a thirty, forty five minute call just to help you out from the practical side. If you're trying to make a few extra dollars lists of where the place you want to download our app, make a little extra cash, but more importantly, even if you're a startup, if you've got a product or a service and you want to do the concept test, if you're a product or a service and you want to have someone be able to engage your product or be able to go out and tell you what the product looks like in the real world, simply go to field agent.net.
Rick West: You read about us, click on shop, and you're going to shop . You go right into our marketplace and you don't have to call Rick. You can click and do an audit, click, and do sampling, click, and do ratings and reviews. Swipe your credit card. It's the best eight, $10 a pop you've ever spent all a cart all day long. That's the easiest thing folks can do.
Kevin Horek: Perfect Rick. Well, again, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. Have a good rest of your day and we'll talk soon,
Rick West: Kevin, man. I appreciate it. Take care.
Kevin Horek: Thanks Rick. Okay. Bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you think of that?
Jon Larson: Well, that was great. Didn't disappoint at all. It was all what I was expected and more he's got great energy. He's got great insights into business. I loved his journey from working at Proctor and gamble to, as a market research firm. Taking advantage of technology when he saw that, I thought it was a it's one of those great business stories.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, that was super cool. I mean, he's so passionate and very well spoken. I might add too, so very easy to listen to you that way. I thought it was I there's actually more that I want to hear from them little nuggets in there that I think we could talk to Rick some more I'd love to hear more about. Just personally, I kind of loved his comments about entrepreneurship and some things to help inspire entrepreneurs to, to try. Cause it's taking the risk is really, really hard. And so it was solid advice. I think that he gave for people to take on the risk as entrepreneurs before, or as well at the same time as seeking investment. Yeah. That was solid advice.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I know he's one of those few people that like, I think this is the fifth or sixth time I've actually talked to him and interviewed him. I still have always felt like I could go another hour. I feel like every time that hour comes up, I'm like, I could ask him another hour of question. So, But Johnny, we're going to say,
Jon Larson: Well, he also is always try to look around the corner too. That's what I found it find interesting because he did adopt the use of the iPhone early on just, seeing that it had a camera and how he could apply that to market research and then how his new project is. He's looking around the corner of what's coming next. And I think that's interesting.
Gregg Oldring: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.