Should Your Brand Be Using an ERP?

Written By Sherilee Maxcy

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast, host Jon Blair speaks with Kyle Hency, co-founder and CEO of Good Day, about his journey from finance to building successful consumer brands and software solutions. They discuss the challenges of scaling DTC brands, the importance of product development, and the unique approach Good Day takes in providing ERP solutions tailored for e-commerce businesses. The conversation highlights the significance of understanding customer needs, the pitfalls of inventory management, and the critical connection between operations and finance for sustainable growth.

Key Takeaways

  • Brands should build with a margin structure that supports multiple distribution channels from day one.

  • Brands often fall into traps of over-optimizing their operations without needing complex systems.

  • Product quality is essential for driving marketing and sales success in consumer goods.

Transcript

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00:00 Introduction

01:07 Kyle Hency's Journey to Good Day

03:52 Similarities Between SaaS and Consumer Goods

06:06 Key Success Drivers in Scaling Apparel Brands

08:41 Navigating Physical Retail for Apparel Brands

10:35 Aha Moments Leading to Good Day's Creation

12:02 The Importance of Inventory Management

14:42 The Role of Former Operators in Business Success

19:03 Why Not NetSuite for E-commerce Brands?

21:54 Common Traps in Inventory Management

27:22 Unique Approaches to ERP at Good Day

29:10 Connecting Operations and Finance for Better Scaling

32:04 Personal Insights and Conclusion

Jon Blair (00:01)

Yo, what up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Free to Grow CFO podcast where we dive deep into conversations about scaling a profitable DTC brand. I'm your host, Jon Blair, founder of Free to Grow CFO. We're the go-to outsource finance and accounting firm for eight and nine figure DTC brands and today I'm here with my buddy and I'll say fellow Texas Hill Country transplant, Kyle Hency, co-founder and CEO of Good Day. Kyle, what's up, man?

Kyle Hency (00:27)

Hey, not too much. Good to see you, man. How are you?

Jon Blair (00:31)

Good, I I'm sweating my butt off in the Texas Hill Country heat and you're just hanging out in Tahoe so a little bit jealous but that's all good man.

Kyle Hency (00:40)

That's living, that's living.

Jon Blair (00:41)

Well, dude, I'm stoked to chat. Who knows what we're gonna get into because we've got Good Day, your current project, IMS, ERP, Chubby, so many different things we can get into. So before we dive into kind of the meat of the conversation, I'm just curious about your kind of like your elevator pitch, like background, your journey to getting to Good Day. Can you run the audience through that?

Kyle Hency (01:07)

Yeah, yeah, so I guess in my former life, kind of like, I came from a finance background. I got to a place in that career where I was like, you know what, I just don't want to work for the man anymore. Like, I don't say that in any sort of like bad way. Like my former bosses are my best mentors, et cetera. But just wanted to like break out on my own and do my own thing. That journey for me was Chubbies. We started that on the side while we had other jobs.

Jon Blair (01:20)

Ha

Kyle Hency (01:34)

It went so well, me and my like three closest college buddies were all of a sudden in business together, know, full time investing in our careers for over a decade building that brand. And while we were kind of navigating that journey, we built a piece of software called Loop Returns for ourselves at Chubby's, effectively. And there was a whole operational team that went and ran with Loop after we developed it initially.

And I was able to kind of be at the board level for that business for shoot this makes me feel old but now eight years. And the manifestation of Good Day is really applying a lot of what I've learned there but also applying it to the operational challenges we experienced at Chubbies right? Like I was just telling a brand earlier today that I was talking to about Good Day You know, we were marching marching marching got to call it 20 million in scale. We're starting to expand distribution channels and it felt like our whole like operating infrastructure blew up. And it took several years to kind of get systems in place, get processes in place, just get better at everything we were doing. And it's like that experience that we're trying to just make less abrasive for these brands and that's Good Day.

Jon Blair (02:47)

I love it, man. I always forget that you guys were the ones that started Loop Returns. That's, yeah, so I'm interested, I mean, this is not necessarily where I was planning on starting the discussion, but I am curious as you're going through that, what is, you have this background of like starting and scaling a consumer goods brand, right? But you've also started two software companies. Like, what has been like interesting in terms of like,

Kyle Hency (02:55)

Yeah, well.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jon Blair (03:17)

the differences and or carried over similarities of like running SaaS versus running consumer.

Kyle Hency (03:24)

Can I do the opposite? Can I do what's exactly the same? Because I think it's easy to imagine what's different, but it's maybe more compelling to do what's the same, right? It's like, well, there's a problem, right? You need to come up with a real solution to the problem and it needs to matter to somebody, right? And so in the case of both Loop and Good Day, I mean, we spent a decade living these problems. In the case of Loop,

Jon Blair (03:25)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, let's start there.

for

Kyle Hency (03:52)

My former CFO and COO, who's now my co-founder at Good Day, was sitting over his brother's shoulder watching him do manual returns and exchanges via email. I was just like, this is insane. Are you going to do this all day? And he's like, yeah, this is 80 % of what I do for my job. And it's like, OK. That was a pretty simple insight. Like, wow, we can make that a lot better for ourselves. And I bet that will actually be better for the

Jon Blair (04:06)

For sure, for sure.

Kyle Hency (04:20)

the end customers as well. And that was really the insight with Loop is that the end consumers also like a self-service experience better. The emailing and manual nature of what they were doing wasn't good either. And so that same mentality is very much what we take into good day. It's like, well, we lived this pain. We had our operating system totally blow up on us. We couldn't satiate the different sources of demand. How do we build scalable infrastructure that works for smaller and smaller businesses?

Jon Blair (04:31)

for

Kyle Hency (04:47)

and makes that easier at an earlier stage in their life cycle, right? That's a problem we experienced. This is the tool we literally wish we had. I was telling somebody the other day that the case of Good Day, we've been building for two years and we know exactly what we're going to build. And we have from day one and the product roadmap has not changed hardly at all. That's so much more challenging if you don't have the operational experience, that's so much more challenging.

Jon Blair (05:05)

for

Yeah. No, it's interesting because like, like I...

Well, you know your customer and their problem at a deep, deep level. It's actually like very akin to our story at Free to Grow. I tried to replace myself at Guardian Bikes with a fractional CFO so I could elevate to like COO president and I couldn't find a fractional CFO firm who understood e-comm. And I was like, dude, someone's got to get this and they just didn't. And so I started the fractional CFO firm that I wish I had.

when I was trying to scale Guardian Bikes and delegate and elevate. I'm curious, apparel is tough for a number of different reasons. What are some of the key things that you recall that were drivers of success as you guys scaled an apparel brand at Chubbies?

Kyle Hency (06:06)

Yeah, I think the primary insight was that when you are building a business and you just talking specifically to apparel, right? You learn what it means to be in a fashion cycle. You learn what it means to be in a seasonal business. In the case of Chubbies, were very spring, summer seasonal. And your natural inclination as an entrepreneur is to try to solve those things.

Jon Blair (06:21)

Mm. Mm-hmm. For sure.

Kyle Hency (06:30)

Like, holy cow, we have to, in the case of seasonality, I remember, very early in our life, we opened up an Australian subsidiary that failed pretty immediately. That wasn't because it was like we were bad operationally, it was just a really bad idea. And we were trying to solve something that was natural to our business. And so what we learned was like, actually, no, that's actually core to what you are. You need to make the most of those peak seasons. That's more important than trying to lift the valleys.

Jon Blair (06:54)

Mmm.

Got it.

Kyle Hency (06:59)

And so the more you can identify in any business, I think, what is the core of what you are and attack and make the very best of you, the very, very, very best. I think that that's just like a recurring theme that I've seen and it's particularly applicable in apparel. Like you can't make apparel not have a fashion element to it in my mind, right? Like there's just always there. In our case at Chubbies, we couldn't make our business not seasonal.

Jon Blair (06:59)

Mm.

Totally.

Kyle Hency (07:27)

Shoot, we tried, over 12 years we tried literally everything. At the end of the day, three quarters of that business happens in spring and summer.

Jon Blair (07:37)

I'm curious and then I wanna dive into Good Day some more, but just because this is something that I see a lot of brands struggle with as they're scaling apparel or not, but I think probably there's certainly some specific challenges with apparel or kind of like maybe a specific kind of sort of playbook or threshold. At what point, from your experience, at what point do you think brands who are scaling need to start thinking about channels other than e-com channels and getting into like physical retail like what was your learning about like what what when was right and what was wrong about getting into physical retail.

Kyle Hency (08:13)

Yeah, I mean if I had to do it all over again and certainly if I were building a brand starting today, I would be starting on day one. I would be building the brand from day one with a margin structure that supported all of the channels. I would be building it in a way that it extended itself really well into all of the different distribution channels. You know, I think in the context of like getting a business off the ground,

Jon Blair (08:21)

Interesting.

Kyle Hency (08:42)

you can get an e-commerce and a wholesale business off the ground pretty easily. They're both variable cost structures and you need enough capital to buy inventory and you need to be able to isolate demand and move the inventory. In the case of things like your own retail stores or Amazon or a bunch of these things, think, and I talk about this quite a bit in general and in some of what I write, you have to really hone in on when you can handle these things operationally.

Jon Blair (09:11)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (09:11)

You know, Chubbies opening our own retail stores is the hardest operational thing we ever did. Period. Like obvious hands down in hindsight, like we should have gone much slower in that journey, right? And been much more methodical if I had to do it over again. But at the end of the day, 80 % of the market happens offline. And over the long arc of time, and you look at the very best of the Chubbies brand, which I would argue is coming to life today.

Jon Blair (09:16)

for sure.

Mm-hmm.

Totally.

Kyle Hency (09:41)

It looks a lot more like the overall market than it did the disruptive e-com only brand of 10 years ago.

Jon Blair (09:49)

Yeah, that's interesting and I think very wise advice. I'm curious, as you guys were scaling, and maybe it sounds like there maybe wasn't a single aha moment that made you wanna build Good Day, but what were some of the things that happened specifically as you were scaling where you're like, hey, building an ERP solution for, you know,

I will call it, maybe I'm wrong at this, like middle market solution that actually lives where it should live for a scaling e-comm brand. What were some of those like aha moments along the way of the Chubbies journey where you're like, Good Day, these are the problems we're gonna solve and it's a no-brainer that we have to solve these problems.

Kyle Hency (10:19)

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the big Chubbies aha moment that I think has led to all this effort we've put in to Good Day is that when you're building these businesses, it's easy to lose track of the one thing that can move all of your metrics is showing up with the right inventory at the right time in the right place for the right people at the right price. This is the mantra of retail. This is how retail works. You have to have an amazingly differentiated product.

When we were building our business, what we noticed in the early years is it's like, whoa, like the product is really the thing that makes marketing hum and makes distribution hum and all these other things hum. We're only spending 30 % of our effort on product. Like what if we put 60 or 70 % of our effort into the product and our resources into the product itself? And I think once we kind of let that unlock happened, you know, then we saw all these other things kind of work as a byproduct of that. And so.

You know, if you let yourself think that, you're like, whoa, then my inventory assets are really my most, my largest and most important asset in my business. And if you, if you just follow that journey, then you say, okay, wow. Then the tools related to managing your most important and largest asset, they better be evolving with the times. And I think for anybody who's scaled a brand on Shopify and found themselves on NetSuite, which is what we did at Chubbies.

Jon Blair (11:45)

100%.

Kyle Hency (12:04)

you look at that experience and you're like, well, that doesn't seem like the future that I'm imagining. Right. And so I think between just like the importance of it and that the market incumbent that we're competing with day to day, it's just, it's just technology from a different literal like set of decades. you know, that that's our opportunity.

Jon Blair (12:12)

Mm-hmm.

Well, it's interesting because,

Well yeah, so what you're saying, that makes me think about one thing that I've said a lot in my content is like, hey, if you're a consumer goods brand, right, no matter what class of consumer goods, you're literally, you're in an inventory, you're in the inventory business. That is the thing that you sell. And I've also, I also say like, a lot of people, you know, are kinda talking about like,

LTV heavy brands versus no LTV. I always say like, dude, LTV, repeat purchase, customer loyalty, it's not a marketing issue. It's a product issue. Like yes, do you have to have solid enough marketing execution to go to market? Yes, but you can't sell a crappy product that doesn't mean something to people, no matter how good the marketing is. Maybe you can do it for a time, right? But your brand will not withstand the test of time.

I totally agree and like the product function within a business is so important. And furthermore, if you look at inventory, it is the thing, it's the biggest cash outlay and bet or investment that you place as you're scaling, right? Like certainly marketing is a big one as well, but you're always like, man, that cash outlay for inventory. And it's not about just the amount you buy in aggregate, it's about what you buy.

And with these seasonal businesses, you miss the seasonal sales pop, you gotta wait till the next one. It's not like you can just blow it out the following month. There may just not be any demand where anyone even cares, even at a super cheap price. So nailing it is super important. Dude, I'm curious, because I'm a big fan of businesses run by former operators that are just really deeply intimate with

Kyle Hency (13:56)

Yeah, yeah.

Jon Blair (14:19)

the customers they're serving, and the problem they're solving. That's my story with Free to Grow CFO. You've touched on this a little bit, but how important to Good Day's success, your product development efforts, your sales efforts, the way you serve your customers, how important is it to your success that you guys are former operators that just, you know your customer and you know what you're trying to do?

Kyle Hency (14:44)

Yeah, I think it's really important on two levels, right? So one is you have to be able to read the room and know when things are hard for your customers, in our case, our merchants, right? You have to be in it with them and supporting them. And I think, least as I zoom out and look at the technology landscape, I don't think most technology builders are used to operating at the pace that their merchants operate at.

Jon Blair (15:09)

Hmm.

Kyle Hency (15:09)

And

so like you better care a lot and have a lot of empathy for what these, I mean, look at this year. I mean, all of these brands rolled into the middle of April, not expecting their cogs to go up somewhere between 30 and 150%. If you went and held or hid in your shell because you were scared when that happened, that would have been really bad for your business, right? The merchants weren't able to do that. So the technology providers, I think,

Jon Blair (15:33)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (15:35)

diving in and helping is really, really important. I think we do that as well as anybody, even as a startup. That's partly because if you just look at our employee base, it's about half former brand operators. And those folks are in the trenches day to day with our merchants in Merchant Success, or they're me doing sales demos or whatever. We're all the way in there with these merchants helping them out. And in some cases, it has nothing to do with Good Day. I mean, we're dropping.

Jon Blair (15:45)

Mm-hmm.

Totally.

Totally.

Kyle Hency (16:04)

You know, we've referred folks into you guys, they don't, literally don't need an ERP. They need help getting accurate financials, right? And, and, and so, you know, I think we're, we're taking a slightly different approach that is just very, very merchant centric. And I think we're also making a, we're making a pretty firm statement, which is the ERP of the future for retail in particular needs to be wildly interwoven into Shopify's infrastructure.

Jon Blair (16:13)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (16:33)

Shopify is the market in our opinion. That's why we've built our product as a Shopify app. It's why you can implement our product in less than two months and be up and running and getting value from it. And so, you're like, look, everything down to those sorts of decisions are being made with a brand operator mindset. Like, yeah, the brand's already operating in Shopify. Let's just make this easy for them. It should be an app. It lives in the same interface.

Jon Blair (16:33)

Yeah, I love that.

Totally.

Yeah, man, I love that. There's a lot of parallels at Free To Grow. A good portion of our team is former operators on the finance side, both accounting and CFO. And there's a certain level of just, let's put it this way, consulting and service providers are notorious for being highly theoretical and conceptual, right?

And the theories and the conceptual frameworks are good foundational, they're good foundations to stand on. But if you've been an operator, you've seen it all break. It's like being, I'm a musician, so it's like being a jazz musician. They teach you in jazz, like learn all the theory and then throw it all out the window. You weave in and out of the theory, right? And that's what being an entrepreneur is all about. That's what scaling is all about. You learn the theory and the concept and the foundation.

And then it all breaks and you have to figure out how to put it back together in a way that you've never been taught before and that they don't teach in school. So I think there's something about service providers, whether it's in SAS or otherwise who have been former operators that we have like, it's not just empathy. We have grace for the fact that stuff's going to go wrong. Right? And, and, and part of being an operator is saying, we don't have a playbook for this, but we're going to figure it out. Right? And so like,

I'm sure that the way that you guys serve your clients has that in your ethos. Like, Hey, this went wrong and we're going to figure out how to fix it. Right? Instead of just selling sunshine and rainbows, this perfect idealistic theory and concept is going to work for you. And like, that's part of reason why I personally have such a big issue with Net Suite in the middle market. I personally moved guardian bikes to NetSuite and then we moved off of NetSuite and we were sold sunshine and rainbows.

and it was not what we thought. And so like, I'm curious, NetSuite, the people on NetSuite probably don't like me and I'm not trying to beat them up because there is a place for NetSuite. Just most of the brands we work with, the market we play in, they're not in that place, right? So I'm curious, I to get your take and I'll share mine. Why not NetSuite for the space that we play in?

Kyle Hency (19:02)

100%.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, I think it's primarily the case that the brands in, let's call this middle market and down on Shopify, let's very arbitrarily say that's 200 million in revenue and down. I think that those brands have to be laser focused on the number one thing that matters in their business, and that's developing excellent differentiated products and taking them to market.

So anything that distracts them from that, especially including building custom software on top of a horizontal accounting system, right? Becoming a technology business, I think is kind of the antithesis of focusing on what matters when you are that scale of business, right? And so like Shopify itself 10 years ago,

Jon Blair (19:50)

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Kyle Hency (20:08)

We're trying to bring an out of the box experience to the ERP landscape. No engineers required. All of the data integrations we're going to go build for you if we haven't already built them for you or your peers. We're going to get you in the system getting value really quickly. Then we're going to acknowledge on the way in, yeah, there's a bunch of rough edges. You're not going to get any ERP setup in

voila, everything is perfectly automated across your business. What we're seeing initially is we can get value inside of four to eight weeks to our merchants, but we have a process over the next three months from there where we're really trying to help them automate a lot of the edges of their operating stack. In some cases, that's perfectly beautiful in product technology, and in some cases, it's just looking at it as a former brand operator and hacking through it with them in Google spreadsheets or whatever data warehouse they want to use.

And so there's, you know, one thing that we're really taking to heart is like at the end of the day, we're just solving problems. We're just helping these brands scale and automate better than they were last year. And that job never ends, right? That's going to be true again over the next year and the next year and the next year. And so over that time horizon, yeah, it should get much more automated. It should get much more rhythmic. And hopefully these, the technology, the processes, the systems can fade into the background.

Jon Blair (21:17)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (21:34)

And the team's resources can be focused in some of these more differentiated parts of their business.

Jon Blair (21:39)

I love that man. When a brand comes to you guys, what are the biggest traps or most common traps you see brands falling into again and again and again with the way they're managing inventory and operations prior to talking to you guys?

Kyle Hency (21:56)

Man, I think typically when you're not in a system, but you should be in one. So this is somebody who has a real capital N need to be in an IMS or an ERP light or whatever you want to call this sort of class of technology. I think of this as complex order management, complex inventory management, high focus on accurate automated cogs, those sorts of things you just cannot do unless you're in a system. I would say

Jon Blair (22:03)

Mm-hmm.

for sure.

Kyle Hency (22:26)

Folks who have the operational complexity that require a system that haven't put one in place, they lose visibility and they're asking themselves, why am I not managing these things well? That's how it feels day to day. So there's like that whole class. And I think getting into a system like Good Day is the answer to that problem. I think there's a whole other class of folks who I would kind of loosely characterize as over-optimizers. And I think those ones are the ones that

Jon Blair (22:51)

Mm.

Kyle Hency (22:54)

Absolutely don't need an ERP. They have a really simple business. They have 30 SKUs on Shopify. They're only selling on Shopify and they're kind of putting systems in place to put systems in place and and it's like satiating some Something for them. I think those are the ones that I'm like really brutally honest with and I'm just like as a brand operator in good faith I can't do this like you you really don't need this. You know on some level you may want it, but like it's just gonna be too much of a lift

Jon Blair (23:09)

Yeah.

for sure.

Kyle Hency (23:24)

and you're definitely not gonna get the value for the effort. And I'm pretty direct when I think that and believe that early. And again, that connects back to my roots as a brand operator. That's because I wanna be working on things where I know I'm driving value, right? It makes no sense to work on those things.

Jon Blair (23:30)

Yeah.

Totally. Well, dude,

it's so funny, man. We really do have a lot of parallels. I have told so many brand founders who wanted to work with Free to Grow, no, you don't need to. And they're like, and they always say, hey, I really appreciate that, but like, why didn't you just take the fee? And I'm like, because I was a brand operator and I've been screwed by every overpriced consultant and attorney and service provider and whatever.

and not receive the value that I paid for. And I'm not in this business for that. I'm in the business to actually make a difference in the life of e-commerce brand founders, right? That like we make so much of a difference that it's a no-brainer you're getting the value out of the service. And that in turn makes your life better and me and my team get much more satisfaction. Like I had a brand founder call me this morning that we've been working with for like three weeks. And he's like, dude,

I'm so glad that we found you guys. The last, he's like we're still like, you know, working out the kinks and it's only three weeks in, we're getting onboarded, but like all the things that your team knows how to do and just live and breathe, I haven't had in my former fractional CFO who didn't know e-commerce and wasn't previously an e-commerce operator. And like the people that are on my team at Free to Grow,

They have been doing this for a long time and they do it with a ton of other brands. And so the stuff that I bring them that feels like hairy and scary and crazy to me, they're like, no, we deal with this all the time and we have dealt with this for years. Like, don't worry, we will help you through this. And that's where we get the satisfaction of doing what we're doing. Like truly and like no exaggeration. There's something spiritual about business, right? About like solving a problem for a group of people that you actually care about.

And for me, and I have a feeling there's some similarity with you, for me it's like I've felt the pain of these things going wrong before and I don't want them to go wrong for others and so insofar as my business can make these problems go away, I wanna try to do that, you know?

Kyle Hency (25:49)

Yeah,

I think the other maybe only thought I would layer on that I think is probably true of you guys just like Good Day is that, when you're managing one of these brands and your day-to-day decision-making is coming into question because you literally have no idea if the Information off of which you're making that decision is at all accurate? It's like a really good moment to be like well Why why isn't why has this gotten to a place where I can't actually quite understand the underlying data? right

Jon Blair (26:04)

Mmm.

Kyle Hency (26:18)

I mean, there's a whole part of what we were doing here that is very hygienic. It's like, do the necessary work to understand the underlying data and cleanse it so that in your day to day, you have high visibility to the operating information and you have a stable foundation off of which you can make strategic decisions. If you have that stable foundation, you can be a lot more decisive, right?

Jon Blair (26:37)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (26:42)

The hardest points that I've ever navigated through are when you know you need to make a big decision and you also in the back of your mind know the data you're looking at to make that decision is wrong. And it's like that last part of that, ⁓ man, we need to remove that as much as we can from these complex decisions. so in terms of like mission one versus mission two versus mission three for Good Day, mission one is that. Go clean that up and we're starting.

Jon Blair (26:50)

wrong. Yeah.

Totally.

Yeah, I love that, I love that, man.

What other things besides being built out in the Shopify ecosystem are unique to your approach of building ERP at Good Day?

Kyle Hency (27:24)

Yeah, I think we take a really opinionated approach to data interoperability. So the main thing being that in our ecosystem, for the most part, middleware is not as big of a conversation. Right? Like we're going and making the major connections for our brand. Yeah. And again, like the why is important. Is it, should it be a brand's job to go work with outsourced engineers?

Jon Blair (27:42)

That's huge, man. That is so huge.

Kyle Hency (27:52)

and develop custom software to connect these things, right? And so we are going and working with external parties as well as our own internal folks to make those sort of connections just work. And so again, it's a very merchant-centric approach. I think the closeness to Shopify is a really big approach. I think everything we've built in the retail operating system, so your inventory management, your supply chain, your off Shopify sales, all that sort of order management around all of those surface areas is built with the mindset of making accounting dead simple. So you're remember our Chief Product Officer, Dave, my co-founder, he was our former CFO and COO, he's a CPA at Chubbies, right? And so his big kind of like intellectual takeaway from the 10 years at Chubbies was like, man, we really never got great automation in the accounting stack until we fixed the inventory flows upstream.

And so we're just absolutely attacking the inventory flows at every step upstream with the hope that as we get into the accounting stack, things are just a bit more simple for us.

Jon Blair (29:00)

Okay, so last question here for you, and I had prepared this before and you just segued very nicely into it. What are some of your key viewpoints around the importance of the Ops Finance connection?

Kyle Hency (29:12)

I think the more that they can be interwoven, the better they'll scale. I think if you can make decisions that say, if we get great data at the point of creating a purchase order, then we're going to get a lot more visibility downstream when accounting is tying out your landed costs. I think if you can start to connect dots that are like, hey, we have the right inventory in the right channel, right as demand is arriving, we really spin up our cash cycles and we make a lot more cash as a company. Again, that's connecting the operating arm to the financial arm and making sure that they're really closely interwoven. That was happening organically at Chubbies because Dave is one human. Yeah, so I think organizationally there's a lot of there there in terms of marrying those parts of the organization.

Jon Blair (29:55)

Yeah, I was the CFO and COO at Guardian too, so like that connection was in me, you know?

Kyle Hency (30:08)

And especially making sure that that part of the organization is really geared up to support the product and marketing teams who are driving velocity on the top end. And so, look, I think it's really easy to under invest in those parts of the business. And I think as a brand operator, you should be pretty wary, especially when you start to lose visibility and trust in your underlying data.

Jon Blair (30:35)

Yeah, and you mentioned the cash cycle. For an e-comm brand, basically generally is very little to no AR. So your whole cash cycle is inventory days and AP days. And inventory days being the big piece of that. So there is no way to disconnect cash management in an e-comm brand or consumer goods brand period from inventory. They are one and the same, you know?

Kyle Hency (30:56)

Yeah.

The other thought I will just call out is you find out you've under invested in these areas at your very harshest moments. If you've under invested in this entire part of your business product through accounting and tariffs drop on you you have no idea what your margins are all of a sudden, and you have no way to flex in and around the policies that have just arrived, you're going to feel it, right? And so I do think it's like,

Jon Blair (31:06)

Totally.

Kyle Hency (31:23)

a set of investments you have to be pretty proactive about. You have to make while times are good so that if times are less good in the future, you have the right systems, people, processes kind of humming already.

Jon Blair (31:28)

Yeah.

Such a good point. I have talked about in my content before the number of times I've seen founders go through an oh shit moment where they have this oh shit moment where accounting and finance is not dialed but they can't ever unsee it after that. They can't go back and putting it in place is a lot more painful than having it done on the front end and they may have been able to have navigated that moment a whole lot better and quite likely would have. Man, this is super awesome. I wanna end with a personal question, a little known fact about Kyle that people might find shocking or surprising.

Kyle Hency (32:07)

Okay, let's do it. Yeah.

Oh man, I think I've maybe told this story before, but in college I played soccer. And my friends who would frequently come to our games would chant, every time I would get the ball, they would chant the gazelle because I was notably one of the slower players on the field. So I just had like an army of 20 dudes like totally dragging me.

Jon Blair (32:30)

Hahaha

You

Kyle Hency (32:41)

every single time I got the ball all the way through college. But yeah, I was just happy to be on the field, to be honest.

Jon Blair (32:48)

That's awesome, man, that's awesome. Well, before we land the plane here, where can people find more information about you and about GoodDay if they're interested in learning more?

Kyle Hency (32:55)

Yeah. Yeah,

I would just say go to www.gooddaysoftware.com. You can also find us under Good Day Software on LinkedIn. I'm on the front lines doing our initial product demos for almost 100 percent of our demos. So if you want to see the product, I'll be in there with you diving into it and would love to hang out and show you what we got.

Jon Blair (33:18)

Yeah, look, I highly recommend reaching out to Kyle and his team if you're interested in learning more. I don't know an e-comm brand that's scaling towards success that doesn't have challenges with managing inventory. So you definitely gotta see what they're doing over there. See if it might be a fit. We have several mutual clients and I highly recommend getting to understand how they might be able to help support your scaling journey. So, yeah man, well this is a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you coming on.

And just as a reminder for everyone, if you're interested in learning more about how Free To Grow's DTC accountants and fractional CFOs can help your brand scale, check us out at freetogrowcfo.com and until next time, scale on. Thanks, Kyle.

Kyle Hency (34:02)

Thanks, Jon.

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