EP 574: Building a Thriving Supply Chain Community for Operational Excellence
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The New Warehouse podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry. A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin.

Hey, it's Kevin Lawton with the New Warehouse Podcast, bringing you a new episode today. And on today's episode, I am going to be joined by Charles Cushing, who's the founder at StartOps. And StartOps is a community for operators. And we're going to dive into a little bit about his background, how he came to found this community, also has a podcast too as well. So we're putting him on the other side of the microphone today. And we're gonna talk a little bit too about

Those operators and what he's seeing in the market, how he's helping to address some of their needs and what they're looking for. And as we kick off 2025 here, also kind of what's top of mind in the operator's mind out there as well. So Charles, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, great to be here and doing well.

Definitely happy to get you on and happy to give you a break from the hosting duties a little bit too there as you joked before we start to record. So tell us a little bit about your background and how ultimately you kind of came to found this community, Startups.

Yeah, absolutely. So the part that's most relevant is sort of right at the beginning. I, after college, I was very briefly in finance doing equity sales and trading, but quickly one of my friends from high school recruited me to join his startup, which was a venture backed re-commerce company called Twice, a very similar business model to ThredUp.

And I started out in finance there, but pretty quickly they needed like a COO type and I was available. So I ended up taking that company from, you know, when I joined, it was, I think, sub 10 people up over the course of two or three years to about 300 at the time that we exited. We got acquired by eBay to power their assisted selling. And that was just like a complete trial by fire. You know, I'd never done anything operational in my life. And so pretty much every single day had questions that I just like,

wished I could talk to someone about. I had mentors who I could hit up once or twice a year, but they were very, very senior. And so going beyond that wouldn't have been possible. But even just for basic day-to-day stuff, like we're recruiting off of Craigslist for our warehouse team. By the way, the ops team of this company was, we ran our own warehouse and the ops team, CX and ops was probably 200 or 250 of the total headcount. And it's just like, yeah, like, you

Where do I find labor? How do I incentivize people to stay? How do I make a build or buy decision for a piece of software or a fixed asset investment? All these kinds of things, basically every project, I was just winging it. And so I was so busy with that that unfortunately it wasn't until after the exit that I had time to go and actually build something.

that group of people who I wanted to talk to you. And that's what ended up turning into the startups community. So it started out, I think with, uh, with Keith Frymark, um, who you just actually had on the podcast, I think recently we met in San Francisco, we started hosting drinks for operators. And then at some point before the

the pandemic, we moved the group onto Slack and that was like a big unlock. So it both allowed people to start inviting other people they knew. It was the first time the group sort of grew organically outside of people who Keith and I knew directly. And it was also perfect timing because it was right before COVID and this was

you know, every operator was suddenly facing unprecedented situations in their own company between the four walls. And it was the only game in town for a public forum for operators to discuss. So that's how the group got started.

I went on to build and sell a logistics SaaS company. I went and ran a founder community called OnDeck for a couple of years. I learned a lot about community management through that process. But I always kept startups running. And I love the people. I love the space. It was something I always wanted to get back to. And so today, the group stands at about 200 operators. We have a member organization.

based admissions process. It's very curated. I'd say probably 90% of the people who join still come in through referral. And we try to keep it to basically like active supply chain CX and finance operators at Omnichannel brands, right? You know, digitally native brands for the most part. And that's, that's how the group stands today.

Yeah, very interesting there. And I think similar ideas and paths there, I think, that we kind of went on in a sense because, you know, I can definitely relate to that as, you know, I came out of college. I had not, you know, done anything in logistics or supply chain or anything from an education perspective and found myself in that world. And I had the same questions. I started looking around and there's nothing interesting.

Nothing really easily digestible or interesting to learn about what's going on in the warehousing industry from. And that's ultimately how the podcast started, too. So I think it's great that you had that itch, I guess, in a sense. And you went to scratch it and you found out that other people are looking for the same kind of information. And how do I just bounce something off somebody else? Or somebody else is probably...

done what I'm trying to do. So how do I tap into their knowledge and how they tap into my knowledge? And I think, you know, creating that community is such a great way to do that. So, you know, as you, you know, started to tap into these other operators as

you know, what were some of like the challenges that they were, they were facing? Cause you started as a few, a few years ago. Right. So, you know, obviously a lot on that omni-channel space has, has happened in the last, you know, four to five years, especially. So like, what were some of the, the big challenges maybe in the beginning there that stuck out where people were like, Oh, I'm so happy. Like I have somebody to like relate to what I'm going through.

Yeah, it's interesting. So whenever someone comes on board, we ask them what they're looking to get out of joining the group. And it's pretty consistent. But it actually really also matches sort of the percentage of like the types of questions that get asked in the group. Number one is just...

Meeting new people unsurprisingly people want to join communities to expand their networks in a way that doesn't feel network II I'm personally of the belief that one of the best ways you can get to know a person is by helping them and communities create this sort of surface area where you can sort of be useful to other people and get to know them that way and that feels really good and then and then also

you know, accept reciprocity and ask your own questions and get help. Yeah. Teaming up with someone on a project, whether it's for 15 minutes or you end up hiring them, it's just an incredible way to connect. Interestingly though, a really close second is I put it in the category of like vendor Intel. I feel like, you know, this is maybe a controversial statement, but I feel like a lot of being a great, you know, operator today is,

Effectively stack building partner selection, you know Nobody does everything in-house anymore. Even if your main partner is just like your 3pl, right? That's just such an important relationship and

And being able to have the right long list, have the right short list, get benchmarks on what to expect before you go into a relationship. The delta between what's on someone's website and how things actually are under the hood can be so huge in operations. It's incredibly important to make sure you're getting that right.

The only good source of true information is other operators. That's why communities like this are really valuable. It's almost like, you know, it's the internet that

exists for all the things that aren't actually out on the internet, right? It's the knowledge that's in people's heads. And so that's really especially important for things like vendor selection, where you're making five, six, seven figure decisions whenever you pull the trigger. And you're also going to have to explain to your CEO, to the board, when those mistakes go wrong. And then the final category is hiring or getting hired. This happens, I'd say, less out in the open, but

a lot of startups members end up working with and for each other in different capacities and or finding referrals through each other. I just got off the phone with someone a day or two ago that they just made a senior hire through the network. And that's also super important, right? It's all trust-based and

yeah so those are the three big functions that we serve like we help operators expand their networks we provide a venue that like until recently you know didn't really exist a lot of other places yeah i think it's great the industry is rapidly becoming more tuned to the needs of operators and you're getting a lot more dinners and events and communities even for a good six years there that was there wasn't really anything you know getting that vendor intel and then and then finding your next role or hiring your next teammate

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's great, too. I mean, I think it's great to hear, you know, those, from like a community perspective, you know, I would call those wins, right? You know, that, you know, hey, somebody, you know, got their next role because of the community, right? Or that network that you've created, or as you mentioned, you know, they've able to make a better, more informed decision, right?

you know, to, to, and due to that. And, you know, I think it's, it's great to be able to, to have that forum. And I think it is great, like you said, to, you know, see the, the recognition of, uh, you know, the operators themselves and, you know, even just the operations world in, in general, especially from like a supply chain perspective, uh,

Unfortunately, in some ways, it took a pandemic, I think, for people to recognize the importance of operations and supply chain and all those things. But it's great that that recognition is happening now and people are finding places too. Like you said,

you know, to share with each other and learn from each other as well. So now you mentioned there, you know, talking about you're looking for partners and, you know, how to solidify those and vet those out as well, you know, amongst peers, I think is a great way to do that. So, you know, tell us a little bit about, because obviously, you know, I think your community is very well curated. I think I read something somewhere that, you know, you take pride in making sure that

you know, the, it's not necessarily infiltrated by people trying to sell something in there. Right. So, so tell us a little bit about, you know, from an operator perspective, why is it so challenging to, to get some of that reliable information that, you know, maybe hasn't been influenced in some way by a marketing or a sales channel, you know, like, why is there a challenge there?

Yeah, I think there are a number of reasons that getting good information as an operator are challenging. One, I sort of already alluded to, like, just like the problem with websites, there's so many problems with websites, especially in logistics, right? One is that I think it's often just really hard for marketing teams to translate what a product does into the language that operators understand. And that's something that we sort of are working on. You know, we've got some projects on our own.

side to like do that translation. Another thing is that they go out of date. Like I say probably one in three calls I do with like a founder at a, you know, a kind of tech company or supplier or whatever. They're like, oh yeah, our website, we're about to redo our website, our website six months at a date, like whatever. And I think there's also just a big fear of competition. So people don't put

the whole shebang up on the website, right? Like sharing demos you think would be like a really obvious thing. It's what every operator wants, but a lot of people are scared to put demos out. So this is like a back channel for all that information. Another issue is that there's just like a matching problem. Supply chains are very specific, right? You get this huge multivariate, you know, optimization problem and whether you're using, you know,

that's sweet or fulfill is your ERP actually has lots of downstream publications and probably like was the result of lots of upstream decisions. And so being able to put your questions, yeah, like one size fits all answers don't really work. It's almost always, you're going to get information from someone who has like

pretty good match with your supply chain setup. And it's not always obvious who that person is going to be from the outside. You usually can't just go look at LinkedIn and say, oh, this person's sourcing from China and they're using these partners and blah, blah, blah. And so we directly and indirectly create liquidity for those kinds of questions to find the people who can answer them. So I'd say it's like a two-part thing. There's like one marketing, getting past the marketing or translating. I don't even think people are trying to be

you know, deceitful in their marketing. It's just really hard to convey the extent of what a product does. And then even beyond that, if you want to get any sort of external validation, finding the right person to talk to is, is hard. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's great points there. And, you know, I'm curious on the point there where you said that, you know, you would think that these companies want to show demos, right. But oftentimes like they don't. Right. And I've run into that myself where, you know,

you know, we were trying to do a while back, we're trying to do a series where we would just do like live demos with some of these solution providers on, on LinkedIn. And there was a lot of resistance there. Like, you know, Oh, we don't, we don't necessarily want to show anything live. Right. Can we just do a live and show some, some slides? And I'm like, no, we want to see, see how this works. Right. Like that's the whole point. And, and,

Uh, and I'm curious your thoughts there. I mean, like why, why is that resistance? I mean, do you think, and maybe from the community too, people have talked about this, I'm not sure, but when that happens, right. And these companies don't necessarily want to show demos or not as, you know, like forthright and, you know, putting that demo out there. I mean, do you think there's, there's some skepticism there or like, you know, how does like an operator react to that?

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it's a mistake. I think most people who don't show demos should, it is, again, it's like the most requested piece of information. Like I think an operator can get a sense of what something can and can't do so much more easily than you sitting there explaining it. But in terms of like the reasons I've heard people don't do it, I think again, the ones that have come up anyway, like one, again, it's just privacy. People are scared about competitors ripping off their product or knowing what happens under the hood. So that's definitely a big one.

Another, I think, is fear of it going out of date. Like the products are updating all the time. They don't want something that's out of date floating out and misrepresenting the company. And then the final one is a lot of these tools are like quite overwhelming. And I think that salespeople and founders are afraid of just showing the whole cockpit instead of guiding you sort of step-by-step how to fly the plane. And that, you know, that I think there's something to that. Like if you just see like an ERP interface for the first time, you've never seen one before, you're like,

You might not, you know, know exactly what to do with it, but I do think, I still think it's better than trying to over abstract it. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think it gets like cloudy then in a sense, right? Cause you're kind of like as an operator, you're just like, well,

just how does this work? Like, just, you know, let me like play around with it. What are the tabs? What are the tabs? Is it inventory tab? Okay, cool. I know it does inventory. Yeah. There's a lot that you can sort of shortcut there, but yeah, definitely interesting there. And, and so, you know, obviously, you know, you have 200 operators in this, this community, right. And, and obviously they're,

they're talking in there, I'm sure. Right. And, you know, talking about, you know, some of the things that are important to them. So, you know, as we're, you know, in the beginning of 2025 here, I'm curious, you know, from the community, like what are some of the hottest topics that are being talked about? Like what's top of mind for these operators and, you know, what are they maybe excited for in 2025 or maybe what are they, you know, worried about, concerned about for 2025? Yeah.

Yeah, I can pull out some themes, but I think the thing that is interesting, the thing I love about the community is so much of it is actually just like brass tacks. You know, there's not necessarily a theme to it, but it's like, yeah, I pulled out a couple of questions just as an example from the last like a couple of days. It's like, for those working with retailers and wholesalers like EDI, Big Box, how does your org structure ownership and responsibility of monitoring and addressing chargebacks on their remittances? Right? Or like,

Curious if anyone has any perspective on the flexibility or fungibility of scanning GTI in 12 versus GTI in 14 for master case labels. Like it's like the, you know, artists discuss turpentine, you know, like nitty gritty. I don't think anyone's out there really talking that much about like, Hey, like here are big themes. And that's why it's useful. Like you could take that information and go back and use it like that day. That said thematically, I think perennial discussions that happen, you know, both on and off Slack, like,

S and O P, how do you set it up for success? How do you convince your team that it's important? Like ops obviously is like the tail of the dog on a lot of marketing initiatives. And so getting that to work in a way that is copacetic to all teams is important.

So inventory planning and software, you know, I think a lot of people still use spreadsheets and there's always just like questions about, well, is this the right product to use to jump to? When should we do this? Can I handle this complexity? That kind of thing. 3PL stuff perennially. Who should we use? Are these guys good? Will they do this? You know, how do we benchmark these kinds of this pricing? And then really, really interestingly, new tech comes up a lot. Like whenever new products come out, operators are,

incredible early adopters. In fact, I'd say I can name probably four or five companies out there that like might not exist if one of our members wasn't their anchor design partner. Really interesting. And, and so, you know, and there's new stuff, it's, it's accelerating. Like there's new stuff coming out every single day and people are curious and they want to learn more about it. And you have people bringing their favorite tools to the community and sharing them and people asking about stuff. So that's a huge one. Like,

Obviously, there's some timely stuff tariffs section 3 2 1. Yeah come up a bit carry diversification on shoring like if you had to pick some themes But yeah, it's it's mostly nitty-gritty stuff and then really interestingly I was thinking about like non topics very little explicit discussion of AI In the group interesting like people are using it. Yeah, it's not it's just kind of part of the drinking water Like we got people using it for all teaching their team to write scripts, you know, whatever but like

it's not it's not there hasn't really been any like significant discussion about that and then yeah also like i feel like sustainability to the extent it was it was never like a huge topic honestly but it hasn't really been that much in the discourse recently as you as much as you might expect yeah interesting yeah interesting to hear that and kind of the the variation there and the the questions as well and some of those examples too like yeah i mean that's definitely something like

You know, the, you know, G1012 versus G1014. I mean, that's something like you're not going to find on like a whole podcast episode out there or something like that. Somebody's just talking about that. Right. And I think that's really interesting to hear. So you mentioned in there that

Some of these operators are quicker to adopt some of this newer technology, right? With some of them, you're saying even being like their initial kind of anchor clients to have them have some longevity in their business. So I'm curious because I'm sure most of your community members, as you mentioned, are operators working on the channel and obviously start ops, start ups, right? So they're newer businesses in a sense.

Why do you think they are maybe quicker or earlier to embrace some of these newer technologies versus some of the larger retailers or other players in industry that have been around for quite some time and maybe arguably would have more cash to test some things or more resources to do some of this like

R&D with newer technologies. Yeah. And I think it's actually worth calling out because I sort of didn't properly address this at the beginning. The ops leader who is in startups is at a $50 to $500 million solidly mid-market brand. There's actually not a lot of smaller brands. And we also don't do a ton of enterprise just because those are completely different. They're all different beasts from each other. So these aren't small companies.

So I think it's actually, yeah, it's the sweet spot for testing new tech because, you know, you're not so girded into an enterprise structure where everything needs...

a million, you know, if you're the VP ops at, you know, I'll just use Caraway, right? You, you can pretty much make the caller like champion a tool. Yeah. Right. It's not going to have to go through a million committees. And so you can get stuff in there pretty quickly. And you're big enough that if it's the right technology, you know,

saving percentage points can mean saving millions of dollars. And so it's meaningful versus the other ends of the spectrum where, you know, it's maybe too small to have a huge impact or it's too big to be able to like iterate with a startup or be able to take that risk. Interesting there. Yeah. I was curious about that because, you know, oftentimes, you know, I talked to a lot of solution providers, right. And people are bringing different tools to the market and things of that nature. And especially on the startup side too. And,

Yeah, I mean, there is like, there is a lot of, I guess, red tape in a sense, right? Where, you know, you look at somebody like, I don't know, just a big retailer, like Macy's maybe or something, right? Like, well, there's a lot of like approvals that need to happen and all these different things and we don't know. So it's interesting to see that, you know, and oftentimes I think, you know, they'll probably get,

wins from that to move quickly on something and, you know, put it in place and be nimble in that sense, which is an interesting way to look at, I guess, these newer businesses in a sense where, you know, these businesses that have been around for, you know, if you take the example of Macy's for however many years, right, decades, right, then, you

You know, in that sense, it's like, well, you know, they're trying to almost catch up. Right. And in a sense, it's very, very interesting position there. So. Yeah. So now I'm curious, too. I mean, as you look at this and, you know, you think back to like, you know, where you were starting in operations and some of the operators there and the community as well.

How do you what are some of like the biggest challenges you think operators face as they kind of continue to grow their careers? I mean, you've mentioned that a couple of operators in there have found their their next job in the community or through the network. And, you know, what are some of the challenges that they face as they kind of try to continue to move up and scale their career to?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a couple. One that we see, it's kind of sad how sort of prevalent it is, but like one is just burnout. Ops is hard. You hold a lot of responsibility. You get blamed for a lot of stuff. You're moving physical stuff while everyone else in the company is moving bits. And I think there was this sort of like halo that, you know, during COVID, everyone suddenly appreciated the ops team. But like, from what I've heard, like that's also true.

For many people, it's sort of burned off a little bit. So we do, I'd say, a good number of operators at some point look around and they're like, do I want to go try something else in SaaS? Do I want to try going fractional where I'm not sort of holding so much of the bag on these really heavy decisions? So I think that's one big thing that comes up.

Another thing is, I don't know what's sort of behind this. I feel like there's still a lot of great ops roles out there and a lot of great operators getting hired. But it feels like in the last year or so, a lot of those jobs have gone a little bit underground. Like you see them come through recruiters, you see them come through, you know, networks and communities like startups.

But they're not getting posted as much we run a jobs newsletter or a newsletter that includes jobs and we scrape about 1500 jobs boards as part of that and it's just been interesting to see over the course of 2024 the number of senior postings

I'd say taking down fairly substantially over the course of the year and a subsequent increase in operators interested in or looking to get into fractional work, being able to own their desk, whether they're working in another company currently or not, just being able to make themselves a little more legible and be able to plug in for specific things versus being dependent on a full-time role. So-

I'd say those are some of the challenges in the way that operators are rising to them. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I see the newsletter and, you know, the jobs in there definitely is a very good resource, I will say. And I thank you too for posting our events in there as well.

as well in the newsletter, definitely. So tell us a little bit too about, you know, you have the community, right? Which we've kind of talked about here and you mentioned the newsletter as well, but you also have the startups directory. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us, you know, why you're building that and kind of what the purpose is

Yeah, this is something we're really excited about. It started out as like an internal tool for the community and we're always sort of testing new stuff with the community before we roll it out publicly. But there's no Wikipedia for ops. There's no Quora for ops right now. You have very good specific verticalized tools that will help you sort of understand, you know,

very specific aspects of the space, right? Like there are great 3PL finders and directories and brokers out there that get that. But in terms of just like the sort of top of the funnel, a place you go to ask any question, that's effectively what's happening in the Slack community right now.

the Slack community doesn't scale, right? Our group, it gets, in some ways, even though each person joining might add another 10 or 15 or 20 years of experience to the group, we're also adding another pair of eyes on the Ask channel that are maybe making it harder for people to just go and ask the question they want to ask. So we're working on trying to create a central repository for

all the relevant information about the different players, companies, people, jobs, events in the space. And we're going about it, this may be true of other industries too, but especially in supply chain,

Every, there are two types of information you always need to know, right? One is just the factual information. You know, what is this company? What do they do? Like what actual products do they have? That alone is actually quite hard to get as we talked about. And then there's the social piece, right? Can I trust it? Who do I know who uses it?

Like, how are they going to react in a crisis? And so that's like ultimately what we're trying to build with the directory. AI is unlocking some really interesting new ways of getting that information in a sustainable way and also servicing that information. And so, yeah, today, the way we're sort of starting out is on the company side. So we're building this company directory. The first step was just like trying to get a map of all the relevant companies, which we collected online.

Everyone who's been mentioned in onboarding or in Slack by every startups member, and we added it to a bunch of our own data. So you can now search all those. We then group them into lists, which we're going to continue to sort of use the community to curate. Like when you go to look for inventory planning tools, like

you know, who else should you be looking at? Like let's group, group those things together. And then the next step is going to be getting sort of a deeper dive into each product or service itself about what it does. And then we'll do the same thing for people and then put a layer on top of that that makes it all searchable. So that's where we're at, but it's live today. And if you go to startups.network, you can, you can take a look at what we have out there and we're shipping new, you know, releases pretty much every month. So. Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that because I think there's not like a one place to, to search for like the tools or, you know, what you're looking for. Like, even if I think about just back when I was, you know, an ops manager and stuff, if I was just looking for like, ah, we have this problem, like, is there anything out there like that? It's just like, you know, it's to, to Google basically. And,

you know, or, or somebody, you know, maybe, and, you know, and they don't necessarily know everything either. Right. So it's kind of like, you know, where is that central place to, to find those things? And I think that's a,

tool to be building and definitely excited to see how that continues to evolve and love that it's also you know has the feedback from you know users and operators that are in the community as well which makes a lot of sense so really interesting to hear about the startups journey here with you Charles and definitely interesting to hear about the community love what you're

doing and you know looking forward to continue to see how you expand on the startups world that you're building there so if people are interested in you know maybe checking out the community applying to join or looking at the directory itself or just you know jumping on the newsletter too which is a great resource i will say as well what's the best way to do that

Yeah, you can get to almost all that through startups.network. So our site, I don't think we, because the community is pretty referrals driven, we have a separate page for that, but I'm charles at startups.network. If you're interested in joining, just email me happy to, to, to have a look and you can get on the newsletter from, from the site as well. That goes out weekly with jobs, new relevant fundraising in the space, people, talent, you know, candidates for jobs who are looking for their next opportunity events and a bunch of other sort of useful resources.

All right, great. And we'll definitely put all that information at thenewwarehouse.com as well as in the show notes here so people can easily find it and get in touch with Charles and definitely make sure you do that. And yeah, thanks so much, Charles, for coming on the show today and sharing your time with us. You've been listening to The New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lahti. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com.

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