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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So Eric, welcome to the show today.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Can you give us a top level view of what it is that you do right now and your journey so
far?
Yeah, sure.
So I'm Eric Tinker and
I am a sales and operations planning slash supply chain management consultant.
And I've been doing this in, gosh, probably 27, 28 years now since graduating from
business school.
And I have my own firm, NextView Consulting, after spending quite a few years in some of
the larger firms.
we're a very experienced group.
We go all over the world to help clients
with very high impact projects.
Okay, nice.
And how did you get into this role then?
Why did you decide to pursue this after you graduated?
Well, yeah, I mean, why did I want to get into consulting, I guess?
Let me start there.
It's really a field that I felt that I could, mean, selfishly, at least initially, to
learn the most about businesses and major changes and so forth that could be made in
businesses to improve their operations.
But it's also a field that I felt I could contribute the most, right, faster.
I mean, we're all doing that in the companies that we're in, but with consulting, just,
you you do more faster.
So that was the motivation for me.
Yeah, no, I completely agree and it's good because you can keep learning, right?
You learn so much when you put into these different companies and you've got to really
understand these different companies and learn how you can actually create the change.
You just learn so much naturally as well, which is a really cool thing about the
consulting aspect.
But so, I mean, each company is different, right?
But the people are not necessarily different.
People are people.
Certainly, you have some different personalities here and there, of course, but...
The tools we use are the same, but you really need to understand the client business very
quickly and hit the ground running, and most of us can do that.
And then with that basis, we're able to really create a lot of value faster than the
client would do on their own.
Yeah, as you said, you put it really nicely there, creating value as quick as you can,
especially when you have your own business and you're working with these clients is you
need to display that value because then actually when you're working at these, I guess
these big consultancies, they've got these contracts and everything, but I definitely find
it myself now within my own business and working with these clients is I need to show them
the value as quick as humanly possible to make sure they stay with me as a client.
Is that something you find as well, going from, I guess the big agencies that you all.
consultancies that you worked at before to then running your own firm now.
You can't take it for granted.
You can't take your next project for granted.
It's easy to do all of that sort of thing in a big firm.
I mean, even in the big firm, you're very visible.
The client's paying a lot of money for this.
You need to hit the ground running and create that value every day.
I would say in the smaller firm, that's even more so.
And it's really your livelihood on the line as opposed to being able to just kind of move
on to the next project.
We, you know, our business is up and down and I don't always know where the next project
is coming from.
So you really need to make sure it counts when you have the opportunity.
Hmm.
Yeah, no, I completely agree is, you know, when you have your own business, it can be
feast and famine sometimes, right?
It's never just a consistent linear chart going up.
They're going to they're all going to get those ups and downs.
And so you've got to you've got to balance that.
And as you said, you know, make sure if you've got opportunities there that you take hold
of them and you do what you can with them.
So I guess on that note, why did you decide to pivot from working within a management
consultancy to then starting your own firm?
Like, what was the decision there and what was the motivation there?
Well, I guess it was always my intent or dream to rise to be a partner or an entrepreneur
or to start my own firm, you know, perhaps with a group.
And, you know, even my last few years in the big firm, I aspire to do those things.
And then I got an opportunity to join the management team of a smaller firm.
that looked like it was going some places and they had brought in a new COO that I was
going to report to and he was building something that was you know that that sounded
exciting and was different.
Unfortunately what I didn't really know at the time was the smaller firms you're not safe
in any firm right but you're even less so safe in the smaller firms in terms of if you're
not billing and we built something and it wound up
but then it wound down just as quick when a couple of our projects ended.
So that didn't work out the way I thought that it could.
And then when that happened, I said, look, you know, I wanted to build something.
I want to do this specialization in sales and operations planning, which you really can't
do in the bigger firm.
In the bigger firm, you're going to have to stay billable.
So you're going to be on whatever they can sell, right?
And a lot of us are athletic.
we can do that sort of thing but but I wanted to focus certainly in supply chain but even
within supply chain the the the area of sales and operations planning and so I said look
here's what I wanted to do I was building this you know the service line if you will and
this other little firm that didn't didn't work out I'm just gonna you know what I'm just
gonna put up the website and go for it myself
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
so within, I guess, the sales and operations side of things, what does that service
delivery look like?
Like, what do you, when you go into a company, how do you create that change within them?
Because I know from the marketing point of view, whenever I've gone into a company is
sometimes it can be quite difficult to, I guess, change the mindset of the team that you
need to in order to create the change.
So how do you go about it?
And what does that service delivery look like on your side?
Yeah, sure.
So, so sales and operations planning is an executive higher level management planning and
management process to bring together the different functions of the company.
Certainly sales, commercial functions, product management, operations, finance, all of
these together.
And we start in kind of the upper mid level and then we move to the executive.
sales and operations planning meetings and process there.
So it's highly visible.
So when we come in, we already have a relationship with an executive leader.
Sometimes that's the CEO, depends on the size of the company too and the scope of what we
do.
And sometimes that's a designee of the P &L owner, a vice president of supply.
chain, a COO, a vice president operations in these sort of roles, you're going to need
that level of person to one, bring us in to begin with, and two, to really make this
successful, right?
So when we come in, we will look at what they're doing, their existing processes in terms
of what at least they're calling, SNOP.
and how well the underlying processes that would support that demand planning, supply
planning, and in that I'll include things like inventory, how well the finance may or may
not be integrated.
We'll look at those things.
We'll look at the strength of the underlying organization.
Are there roles missing?
Typically, we would find something that's missing that needs to be reconfigured a little
bit.
And as SNOP is a fairly data-intensive process,
We are also looking at their IT capability to bring all this required data together to
support the reporting and KPI development.
So what I've described is a bit of our assessment, right?
And the other thing that I think that's different about our firm...
that I learned in my precursor firm, one in particular, is about results delivery.
So I've had the opportunity to lead large global assessments, all kinds of studies
throughout supply chain and other parts of operations as well.
But so our approach is fairly quantitative in the assessment to arrive at a business case
if the client can invest.
in that and some of our more mid-market clients, they can't always do that.
I mean, I have an idea immediately where the benefits are going to be, but we're able to
do a much more thorough job with larger organizations and a small surgical team to do
that.
And that would be the start of it.
Then with the help of our sponsor, we would jointly design what an important
program would look like.
in this time, we're also speaking to other members of the management team.
They need to be involved.
They need to be champions of their respective areas.
it's very visible.
It's very integrated across functions.
Some on the management team, they may not have had the experience in this particular area.
They're stars in their own areas, but
Maybe they haven't had the experience of seeing what I call real SNOP or a proper SNOP is,
or they don't think that it's part of their involvement.
Hey, I'm the sales guy.
Why do I need to do this?
That's all up to them.
No, no, no.
It's all linked together.
And so sometimes we're creating that vision of how this is going to work together, how
it's going to benefit them, what's in it for me, if you will.
and then we would put that together and start with training and execute our project plan.
sounds like a very in-depth process to get things moving and getting those results within
it.
It'll be interesting to know, I guess, over your time working with these big organizations
and creating this change, are there any common problems that you've noticed that are
pretty consistent across maybe multiple different clients?
Where maybe it's some structural problems, some organizational problems, what do you see
that's a common trait between them?
Yeah, I can answer that question in terms of larger companies and then more mid-market
companies.
In fact, I just wrote an article on the common challenges for sales and operations
planning that we find in mid-market companies.
But let me start with the big ones first.
So they typically, they have much more advanced IT, although they have disparate systems
that, you know, they may have unintegrated acquisitions.
They may be going through a large ERP upgrade, for example, that's draining that.
We can do our projects in concert with those.
However, we just need to make sure the resource balance is correct and the schedules are
integrated as well, right, to support the underlying processes that feed into what we
would do for SNOP.
So they've got some of those issues and, you know, especially if there are multiple GI
or a particular business, there's always the geography or there's the business unit where
the leader of that's not quite sure, then they kind of say, we're different.
We don't really need this.
Oh, we already did an effort to improve this.
And sometimes they have done some work that we can perpetuate throughout the other
business units or regions.
But the change, what I'm trying to get to is the change management is more difficult.
Sometimes there's different languages, cultures and so forth.
All of that can be involved.
And there's been many times where I've had to hop on the plane to like, you know, go get
that guy in or gal in Europe or even Asia involved to
kind of bring them into the fold and so forth.
that's on the large company side.
On the more mid-market side, they're always resource constrained.
Too many projects, like all of the managers, those on the manager team, they all see the
problems and they're like, yeah, we need to attack all of this sort of stuff.
So we try to help them prioritize in some cases.
A lot of times their infrastructure, meaning their IT, it just hasn't kept up with the
complexity.
of the business.
we need some real careful about that and setting expectations.
And typically our projects, they do involve some level of IT augmentation, improvement.
Maybe that's a new business system, an upgrade, or maybe it's just reporting that we need.
they have problems with that.
The management teams are typically tighter.
We don't get the level of politics that we see in the big companies.
And they're just, know, org resources in the smaller companies.
They're not, you know, they're either missing or, you know, the people are over leveraged.
So we run into those and we've adapted our methodologies to handle both situations over
the years.
But those are the typical challenges that our clients have.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
And it's interesting what you said about, you know, where they just have too many projects
and they want to do them all, but obviously they need to prioritise.
And I find that's the biggest thing I find with clients that I work with is they really
struggle to prioritise what projects they actually need to work on and what's really the
constraint of the business right now and identifying that and tackling that one thing
first and then you can move on to the next thing.
So it's interesting that you've noticed that within the companies that you work with as
well.
And yet another bit of it that wanted to dive into was, because you've worked with really
large companies and things like that, a lot of my friends within the marketing agency
world, they're always trying to break into how can we work with these bigger companies
and, you know, get them as clients.
So what lessons do you have in that realm?
And what does that sales process look like, I guess, from your point of view, when you're
looking to go in and actually, you know, sign these people as a client, let's say.
Yeah, the larger companies are much harder.
Even if you're very capable of doing the work and you have a solid team and you know when
we do that I present the actual people.
I don't kind of go in and say yeah we're gonna get whoever we get which is a lot you know
the larger companies don't necessarily say it that way but it ends up that way.
Yeah.
It's much harder for a smaller, what I'll call a boutique firm to do that, even though
they may be way better qualified than the big firm because big clients, they want to work
with big name brand consulting firms, right?
It's just, it's a much easier boardroom conversation to say, oh yeah, we got XYZ firm that
everyone's heard of on the job.
And if it goes south, we're going to be able to point the finger at them.
as opposed to saying like, yeah, we got Eric and Butch and Sally on this fairly high
visibility, large project.
Like, executives have a lot on the line on these projects.
And if they go south, they...
Their careers can follow that at least in the particular company that they're in so so
there's a lot on the line for them So they need to build consensus even though they're
decision makers or budget owners or so forth They still need to consensus and sometimes
there's board approval right that's involved too even even in the large companies so It's
just harder.
It's an easier conversation for them to have if they say yeah, we've got you know the
large firm involved in that.
I'll just add though, Kiel, that we've lost on that several times and I'm very upfront
with the large firms.
when I have discussions with them around that issue because I don't want to waste a lot of
time.
I've just, you I've got too many battle scars from those and transfer of IP and I mean all
of this sort of stuff that goes on during the sales or proposal process.
So I'm very upfront with that and what I've found is when we've been successful in that
it's because
somebody really, you know, either we worked with them in a prior life, all right, that's
happened a few times, or they may have read my book or been familiar with us beforehand,
and then we need to do a bit of a consensus building across the other key executive
stakeholders that might have a say or a nay.
in this process as well.
So it's much more involved.
In the mid-market firms, we can typically do it with a key decision maker and, you know,
okay, I get it, let's go.
Yeah, yeah, no for sure because you know when you're just working with that one person
right there you got to try and essentially sell on you know whatever work that we're
trying to do is so much easier and as you said having to engage multiple different
stakeholders at different levels within the business and get everyone to the same page and
you know and then also compete with the bigger firms or the bigger know agencies in my
case so it's so interesting that you've got that that point of view as well.
So you mentioned you have a book so I'd love to dive into what is that book about and you
know what
what lessons can people get from that book.
Yeah, sure.
the name, well, I actually got a couple.
One of them's kind of a half.
We'll get to that in a minute.
So the first one was published in 2018, Sales and Operations Planning Results.
And it's about, primarily about developing a results case throughout your supply chain and
managing that.
through a large project and through sales and operations planning, right?
I always put the links to S &OP in there.
But a lot of the book is below what I'll call the S &OP layer and like visa specific
benefit areas.
Here's how you would develop the baseline.
Here's how you could track this because it's so hard and it's an art that I learned
through just develop, you know, through
participating and then leading many change projects with large global corporations.
And ROI is important, right?
And they're going to make a fairly significant investment.
We got to measure that, right?
And so a lot of consulting, they don't do that.
And a lot of, you know, especially client led efforts themselves.
or themselves, they don't really typically would result in some sort of measurable
improvement, right?
So that's the first book.
And I actually set out to write a much bigger book.
But that chapter, if you will, is just starting to get too big.
And I said, all right, look, there's so much here.
like, this is just a book in and of itself, right?
So I put that one together.
And then the second book, it's almost like a fat
booklet or fat pamphlet if you will.
I mean you can kind of page through it in less than an hour.
And we use that as a training tool and for project teams.
You know they're both on Amazon.
They're not expensive.
And so that one I guess technically it's a book and all that but it's really
It's really supposed to be more something that somebody on a project team who doesn't have
time to read a book can just like, alright, I get the gist of what this is.
I get the gist of like how this project's gonna flow and you why it's important and what I
need to do.
Alright, it's those sort of things.
the, what I'll call the big book or the more comprehensive book that'll have all of our
methodologies and probably some links to some tools as well.
That one's 60 % done.
I've been saying next year, next year for five years on that book.
But that one's got to get out.
That one's going to be more comprehensive than the first two.
So I look forward to doing that.
It's just busy on client work and other stuff.
Life and running the firm gets in the way.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, no for sure for sure and it sounds like you've you know done and tried a few
different You marketing things right because these books are centered around the work that
you do and obviously it helps boost that Authority than the space that you have so I guess
what were your biggest takeaways from you're trying to market yourself and trying to grow
your business and what lessons might might have for other people in a similar space trying
to You know trying to do the same thing as you and grow their firm
Yeah, so when you start out and you don't have any name or brand recognition, you need to
get that.
Because yeah, there's a little bit of a firm that's growing and yeah, maybe you're not
doing everything yourself, but you know what?
You're the one that's going to really make or break this.
I still get clients that say to me in the sales process, well, this all sounds good, but
we want you to be part of this.
Right?
How much are you actually going to be involved?
And I'm always involved.
I mean, I don't do everything all the time.
can't, I am significantly involved and sometimes I'm very significantly involved as I was
with one client last year.
the point I'm getting to is you need to establish that credibility and lean on that.
I remember the first few times I went into one client prospect in particular.
got no work there.
But I saw his list of books on sales and operations planning on his desk and I'm like,
yeah, I don't have the book.
And so I did fix that.
Now I go in with the little book and I just put it and say, look, I've got this other one.
Sometimes I just give them both.
I don't mind giving those away.
But so you've got to establish that.
And so where I'm headed is more towards the content marketing.
piece of this, right?
You need to get out there.
So I've worked very hard and I think we have a very extensive library on our website
around content, not only blog posts, of which there are numerous items, but ebooks, some
recordings, conference presentations I've done over the years.
All of these things are available and I'm able to target a particular one.
okay, yeah, just...
You know, just a minute ago, we were talking about problems, right?
And I'm like, oh, I just wrote, you know, an article on that, right?
So, yeah, so getting that out, right, I think that's very helpful.
And with the technologies now and social media now and, know, SEO search, we've done very
well in SEO search, right?
Even on chat GPT, right?
Just recently, I'm like, you know, I've tested it myself.
Who are the best?
SNOP consulting firms and ours comes up.
Right now I'm like, wow, okay, this is working, right?
But it's taken some years.
The book helped a lot and some of this will, it's not everything I've done.
All of a sudden it kind of feeds on itself and snowballs and so forth, right?
So here's what I'll say, that's very important.
It will never replace relationships that you have, right?
Because...
These executives, they've all used plenty of consultants throughout their careers and they
have relationships already.
So you got to break into that.
Right.
And the content helps.
The other ways of working are, know, I've worked in firms before and they just, you know,
they had the engine room with like people pounding on phones and trying to get meetings
and so forth.
And, you know, that that's how I came up and learned in the business.
Now, I didn't have to do that.
But I showed up as the subject matter expert to talk to the executive after the meeting
had already been set.
But in my own firm, I've learned the hard way and painful that there's a huge value chain
before any of these executives will even spend 30 minutes with you on the phone.
getting to them is very difficult as well.
But...
You know, that's still another way.
And as I say, I tried doing that.
I hired people to set meetings for me.
I flew around the country.
Like, yeah, I'm like, well, you know, this is kind of what I learned in prior firms.
But I quickly learned that, you know, I would drain my frequent flyer balance and all of
my savings in a few months if I had continued along that path just because the funnel or
the hit rate or, you know, however you want to call it.
is fairly small.
And the business works with the, if you have 10 projects going, those projects subsidize
the whole front end.
And I didn't have that.
So I was either gonna have to make very large investments to keep people setting meetings
for me and work on that funnel or go broke or do something else.
that I could do that was more reasonable.
So I went down the content marketing route mostly.
Yeah, no, no, it's such an interesting thing you mentioned there, which is, you know,
relationships aren't going to change.
Yes, we have all this new tech, we have all the, we're doing all these different things,
but ultimately it is relationships.
Cause that's exactly what we're seeing within the cold outbound space right now is for a
period of time, everyone was very transactional in the way they were approaching sales and
marketing, sending out sales emails, expecting to get sales calls straight away.
It obviously doesn't happen that way, but now people are realizing, do you know what?
This isn't working for us.
And they're starting to make that shift back into
relationships with also content being a driver for them as well because the content brings
that that trust authority and then obviously that strengthens the relationships that you
have which obviously moves these these deals through.
So again very interesting that you've picked up on that same same approach as well and
you're seeing the results of that which is really cool.
And then I zooming out into your just overall entrepreneurial journey what lessons do you
think you could share for maybe the younger generation coming up who want to be
entrepreneurs.
and looking to get into that game.
Do you have any advice in that realm?
The most important piece of advice I think I can give them is don't go it alone.
Sometimes you have to.
You put in a position, like I had to go it alone first.
I came out of one firm that calmed down, right?
And I was like, okay, well, here I am.
All right, I'm gonna go for it.
But if you're gonna make the jump from something else that's more stable,
several friends who've built firms around, well, we got the client first and some, you
know, there's legal implications.
We've got to be careful with those sort of things, they were able to, or the set of
circumstances was right where they were able to get the client first and then had, you
know, opportunities to build it around that, right?
So we all need some form.
I don't care what kind of business it is, right?
Some kind of breakthrough, right?
some customer that's going to sponsor you a bit or some relationship that's gonna be a big
hit for you, right?
That's really what it's gonna take to springboard.
If you try to do as I did and build something without that, boy, it's just gonna take a
lot of perseverance, hard work, and a way to eat while you're waiting for something to
happen and up and down and...
You know, a lot of these sort of things.
So I would say you need some level of what I call a benefactor, right, if you will, to get
you going with this.
And the other thing, you know, in terms of the theme of don't go it alone is try to get a
partner.
One or two that are as good as you at what you do and are crazy enough to leave like a
regular paying high
potentially high paying job to do this.
And I've tried to do that before and I haven't been successful.
It's a tough pitch that says, there's no salary and there's no benefits.
And if you want to get paid, then go sell something.
That can be a tough sell to somebody that's like, well, I got to worry about my kids'
college educations and I have a family and so forth.
It's not always easy to find those sort of people, but those are the two things that I
think are required to really make it successful.
Amazing.
Well, I really enjoyed the conversation today.
Where can people find you if they want to kind look at your content, your articles, your
books?
Where can they find all that information if they want to search you up?
Yes, so it's very easy to find us.
Website is nextviewconsulting.com.
All-worn word, no T in NextView.
Or just Google my name, right?
Eric Tinker, or Google that, or Amazon, I'm easy to find on Amazon as well.
Sales and operations planning consultants, and any of this sort of thing, Google will lead
you to me.
Okay, amazing.
Well, thanks for your time today.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Yeah, same here, Keel.
Take care.