Episode: 97
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Francois Jaffres, Director of Business Development at Noviland, Inc.
Subtitle: Why are the Shipping Rates Going through the Roof?
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-97-the-current-state-of-sourcing-in-2021-w-francois-jaffres/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Francois Jaffres, Director of Business Development at Noviland, Inc.
Francois talks about what is happening with logistics right now. He also shared some advice on how to build a good relationship with your manufacturer and 3PLs.
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Norman 0:03
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.
Norman 0:21
Okay, so today we have returning guests from Noviland’s Francois Jaffres, and we’re going to be talking about the world of sourcing what’s happening, things that are happening logistic wise, crazy freight costs that are happening. But before we get into that, I’m just gonna bring in Kels.
Kelsey 0:39
Hello.
Norman 0:41
Hello Kelsey.
Kelsey 0:42
So we are trying to make this a shorter intro today, because we did a little thing on our Facebook group and you guys wanted a short intro. So we’ll just try and get the main points. So such as, join our Facebook group, Lunch with Norm, Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. I’ll put the link in the comments and if you’re missing parts of the episode, you can always find us on the YouTube channel. It’s Norman Farrar, but again, put all the comments, all the links, all the good stuff in the comments section and welcome, Marcia. Happy February 1st. Dr. Koz, welcome. Welcome from Los Angeles. Mark, Oh it’s very cold here.
Norman 1:24
Yeah.
Kelsey 1:27
Welcome, welcome and Lisa, nice to see you guys. We do have a prize today. It’s going to be a pretty nice one, it’s an hour consultation with Francois for the supply chain. So he’ll fill you in on more of the details. But yeah, it looks like we got even more people. Faye and Facebook User and Yacov. Wow, a lot of people are coming. Alright, so let’s jump right into it. Unless there’s anything else Norm?
Norman 1:56
Okay. No, I think that’s it. One thing, if you do have any questions, just put them over to the comment section. We’ll try our best to get to them. If we don’t, we’ll try to get to it after the podcast. But for now, let’s sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the podcast.
Norman 2:17
Hey, stranger.
Francois 2:19
Hey, Norm. How’s it going?
Norman 2:20
Good. How’s it going over there?
Francois 2:23
Can’t complain. It’s a little cold. But it’s not Pittsburgh cold. I’m in Atlanta right now. So, I used to play that much.
Norman 2:30
Yeah, up here is a little bit different than that. It’s very, very cold. But anyways, so for people who don’t know who you are or the company, can you give us just a very brief background?
Francois 2:43
Yes. So my name is Francois, Francois Jaffres. I’m the Director of Business Development here in Noviland and we are an end to end sourcing supply chain management solution. We centralize everything in this one platform where you go from sourcing logistics QC, production oversight, the entire process, essentially all in one platform. So that’s just a quick 10 second intro, but that should do it.
Norman 3:07
Alright. Very good. So the big question, and so there’s so many people that are upset at what’s going on right now and the big question, why are these shipping rates going through the roof? I haven’t seen them this high in a long time. But what’s going on?
Francois 3:25
Yeah, we heard from some of our shipping partners that this is the highest they’ve seen it in almost two decades. In some instances.
Norman 3:32
I haven’t seen it this high. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Francois 3:34
Yeah and I mean, there’s new solutions, as opposed to what there was a decade ago, even so things like expedited shipping or expedited ocean freight. It’s a lot more popular now with more people locking in more annual contracts, which we just got one quote back from that we quite literally laughed at. It was in the 8000s for a 20 foot container coming to the east coast. A 20 foot container and so we said, Okay, we’ll just work with a few of our other shipping partners. For these instances, but yeah, no, it’s really bad now more than ever. One because we’re right before Chinese New Year, right and some can argue we are actually launching Chinese New Year starting February 1st, realistically. It’s supposed to start February 12 but starting now, there’s a container shortage. There is a backlog of production all the way tracking back to 2020 and companies are just trying to navigate these risks and mitigate them as much as possible by placing larger production orders, let’s say back in December, November, where I think yourself as well as Noviland was telling everyone Hey, you have to place your orders now. Otherwise, they’re not going to get taken.
Norman 4:48
Oh, Francois and this doesn’t go back a month ago, or even two months ago. We were letting people know that because of what’s happening right now, we saw a completely different shift that was going on and even a three or four month back saying, Hey, you put in your order, something is happening, like an extended from COVID, manufacturing was backed up, the shipping backup was going to happen and getting it into port was going to be a problem and it all came true.
Francois 5:23
It did. I think actually last time I joined you, we talked about it. That was several months back even before that six months ago, we started talking about it. I think the first time I started talking about it was in June with Meghla and she was saying it’s a little early, and there’s no way that is too early to actually start planning for it. So it’s when it comes to logistics, it’s something where no one is for certain going to be able to tell you Hey, right after Chinese New Year, right after all that backlog clears off, the prices are going to start to go down. There’s absolutely no guarantee, any freight forwarder says otherwise. To be frank is a damn liar. No one can actually predict that.
Norman 6:06
Not just a liar.
Francois 6:10
They’re coercing you into something that you probably shouldn’t be involved with. That’s more the case. They might say, Hey, we’ll lock in some rates in February, or they might try to go off of rates from last year around the end of February, not going to happen, this can go for one month this year, or for the next six months. We have no idea, there’s container shortages, the ports being closed down, the inland ports in China, the lack of truckers, another serious, serious thing, I really do want everyone to realize that this is unprecedented times, right? China is restricting a lot of their workers and these are millions of workers from traveling back to their families in mostly rural areas. But also they’re implementing these restrictions on travel into major cities, they’re having two week quarantine times and an extra COVID test every seven days that most workers have to finance themselves. So they’re making this almost impossible or just non feasible to travel back home for Chinese New Year. What we’re gonna have to realize is that post Chinese New Year, there might be something else that happens, right? That might mean that workers are going to wait, and they are going to shelter in place, and they’re not going to travel back and they may travel back after Chinese New Year, they may have started leaving two weeks ago and don’t plan to travel back because of all these new risks that are involved with traveling to factories, right and in some cases, it’s sort of their perspective is we come to work for months at a time without seeing our families for let’s say 6 to 10 months and work these 996 shifts from 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week, with the hopes of going back and spending the time with the family during Chinese New Year. Now that’s taken away, right? So we’re gonna have to see it’s going to have to be a real time insight into the market as we go into February, even as we go into March, how our factory is going to be reacting to Chinese New Year and how are the workers going to be reacting more importantly, I think.
Norman 8:17
Yeah. In our Centurion Group and it was last week. Kian was on from Sourcing with Kian, and he was saying that I’ve never heard of this before. But he was saying that factories are actually having their workers run through Chinese New Year just to try to catch up. That just doesn’t happen usually.
Francois 8:39
It doesn’t.
Norman 8:41
I don’t know what’s going to happen. But one of the things that I’ve been looking at I’ve been talking about is not only trying to figure out your logistics and your lead time, but it’s that inventory management, it’s crazy right now, but afterwards, okay, hindsight, would have been awesome. But going forward is working with your manufacturer, negotiating with your manufacturer, working with that strategy that we’ve been talking about, because that strategy worked and that is when you put in an order and let’s say it’s for 1000 units, your normal order would be 500 units going to your warehouse or your 3PL, the other 500 would be going over to Amazon, we’ve talked about this before. You set up your inventory alert at whatever it would be to get the other 500 moved over. Once that’s done, now this is the trick. You will already have discussed another 1000 units to be stored by your Chinese warehouse, or sorry manufacturers. So when you put in that initial 1000, you’re actually putting in an order for 2000 units and then you cut the deal with the manufacturer to have those 1000 on the floor. We have negotiated zero costs. We’ve negotiated a 20% deposit, 30% deposit, but just trying to put something down and I was surprised, we actually got zero costs in 90 day terms in this one client. But anyways, by that happening, you can kind of manage what’s going on because you’d already have your inventory in place. Imagine, being late to the game last month, and trying to put it into production, it wouldn’t have happened. This way, production’s already there, it could either get on the water, or you could go high speed vessel or air or a combination of all three if you needed. But let’s say you needed a combination, you could get that out of the gate really quickly, while it automatically went into production. So now you’ve got this perpetual system that’s working, that works, it works. If anything, you might be a little bit late, because your forecasting is off. But at least you’re getting it over and if you do this properly, it’s all about the turning over, I was talking to Todd Snively, he came on again with Centurion last week. He was talking about the reason he likes Amazon wholesale is the amount of turnover you can have. Well, that’s the same here. If you order a lot of inventory so you can bring it into Amazon all at one crack and you do that twice a year, this way, you could do it four or five, six times a year and you don’t have to worry about it, and especially what’s happening right now. So anyways, I don’t know if you have anything more to say about that, or that type of system. But I know it’s saved a lot of our clients’ butts during this issue right now, but even getting it over to port, it’s that backup at the port to get it onto the truck.
Francois 11:50
Right. So 100% agree with your system. We have these little acronyms, the three W’s. The Working, Water, Warehouse, and you should always have inventory in your warehouse, you should always have inventory being shipped over. So on the water, you should always have products in production working. So that’s something that we like to try to keep in mind every time that we’re talking to any of our users or customers. So I 100% agree with that. But the challenge with that, I think for a lot of businesses or a lot of sellers is that they may not have that working relationship with your supplier, or they may not just be large enough to actually establish a relationship like that, or they come at it from a different angle have sort of this expectation from the supplier rather than seeing it as, Hey, the suppliers doing me a favor, I should also do them a favor by offering to pay some sort of payment and whether that’s the 20%, if I want to progress to a 90 day net term, then I should probably increase my orders gradually, every time and anytime I make a prediction or a forecast, I should be accurate. It shouldn’t stay at 500 units every time if you’re expecting to grow with a supplier and show them that you’re valuable and that you could work on those net terms and you could turn around that product quickly. So I think there’s just a little bit more that goes into working out those relationships and I think that’s what a lot of sellers need to prioritize over the transaction over the Hey, let’s get this 5% reduction, it should be Hey, let me try to get those net 30 terms or for the 70% remaining payment, maybe get net 15 that just improves my cash flow, I can do more with my business, maybe spend a little bit more on PPC, get more inventory out of FBA that reduces my carrying costs, and now I have more money to actually put into inventory. So there’s a lot of approaches, I think that could be taken in how you manage your supply chain.
Norman 13:49
Now let’s talk about the domino effect with the lead times. First of all, if somebody’s going to place their order today, what are you seeing for lead times? I know it’s very rough, depending on the manufacturer, but what are you looking at? So I go in right now, I place an order. What am I expecting?
Francois 14:11
Well, I think it all depends and just like you said, it’s going to be dependent on the manufacturer, on the relationship you have with that manufacturer, the size of your order, the complexity of your product. If we’re talking about let’s say card inserts, you should be able to get those done within just a few days. Whereas if you’re talking about some sort of electronic, that may be a 30 or 40 day lead time traditionally, not because it takes 30 or 40 days to produce but just because of that production queue behind it and so when you’re going into these Domino effects, they’re still catching up from orders from 2020 in some cases. So the smaller orders tend to be on the back end and those tend to just keep increasing with lead time if they promised you 30 to 40, maybe 60 to 90 day now. That’s what we’ve seen from a few of the factories in our network. We try to keep those leads times as limited as possible. So if we’re saying it’s going to be done within 25 to 35 days, we push our factories by incentivizing them by bringing them more business or by helping them logistically on the China side, to help stay within those 25 to 35 day lead times. But right now, if you’re placing an order today, February 1st, don’t expect them to pick up that order, I would say until after Chinese New Year, and that’s just to set the right expectations. Right? If you’re a large customer, and you’re asking them to do you a favor, and you’ve proven yourself that you could grow, and you have grown with them, you’ve always paid on time, maybe paid early, whoever your representative is, maybe you’ve sent them gifts during Chinese New Year in the past, this money that they received now is something that’s going to hold them over ultimately until after Chinese New Year. So it would be in their best interest to do that. New customers, fully customized products, you might be coming to them for even a request for a quote or an RFQ, you might not be able to get a quote from them just because they’re so backed up. So I would say, not to expect anything for placing an order today until to start production until after Chinese New Year, late February, maybe even early March and then I would say at least a 30 to 50 day buffer on that. So that’s why, when we were talking about this back in June, we were saying plan out your forecast until next May till next summer, really and it’s hard to do when you’re a new seller, but it’s something that has to be established early on has to be part of your business model.
Norman 16:36
Yeah, lead times we’re showing right now to land May, June.
Francois 16:42
Yeah, that’s about right. May definitely, at least if you place an order now. Likely June, just depending on if they’re receiving those containers back. How quickly can they get workers back in those manufacturing facilities? How quickly can truckers actually get those products from a feeder port into let’s say dingbo or Shenzhen or any of those major ports for export?
Norman 17:12
Yeah, I’ve seen some interesting pictures. Where did this is lined up probably for days? I don’t know. The trucks are lined up.
Francois 17:20
Yeah, I guess to put it into perspective, we’ve had a few containers that were supposed to be shipped out February 1 and their final destination was supposed to be Long Beach or the port of entry into the US is supposed to be Long Beach. Long Beach had that 10% foreman workforce outbreak of COVID and that was a weird way of saying it. But they had that COVID outbreak there, right? So now all the containers that were supposed to receive there, those are all backed up, China had to lay that by about four days. So they’re expected to leave February 5 now, whereas they’re supposed to be leaving today. We’ll see how that goes. This has nothing to do with the manufacturing not being done on time or anything like that. This is literally just from the ports being so backed up that they can’t take new containers. So vessels are just sitting there on the water and don’t get me wrong, the shipping carriers are losing millions and millions and millions of dollars. So to sort of put that into the supply and demand sector, they are going to charge those ridiculous rates and they’re going to continue implementing GRIs or general rate increases to the freight forwarders and to their shipping partners to hold them over. Because they have to survive this in order for the entire supply chain to work.
Norman 18:41
Yeah, again, just experienced that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen a go. I feel sorry, I should probably listening for this one client, but it started out three times higher than it should have been. Then it went higher than that and then there was a manufacturing delay and when we finally got the quote to her, it was seven times what we originally quoted.
Francois 19:05
There’s nothing you can do about it. I mean that the alternative option to that is to do absolutely nothing, don’t source and wait until some of this blows over. Yeah, I mean that is I think the only other option. You can look into other countries, you’re going to spend time looking into other countries. You’re gonna have to learn their infrastructures. You’re gonna have to see how logistics is impacted from those countries into the importing country also. So I mean, the supply chain is extremely volatile right now more than ever more than I’ve seen in the past five years, even when the trade war started back in 2018, even more volatile than that. So I guess that’s just to put things into perspective, that no supplier I think right now is necessarily trying to screw you over. I think everyone is just trying to navigate the waters and react as quickly as possible. So staying nimble is important.
Norman 20:02
Everybody’s in the same boat, too. So you’ll probably see price increases going up on Amazon. Okay, so is it worth going to the East Coast rather than to the West Coast?
Francois 20:17
In some cases, yes. So, if speed isn’t a top priority for you, then realistically, I would say you can go either one, because you have no idea how long it’s actually going to take to clear through the West Coast as opposed to the East Coast. We’ve seen a lot of success with having our customers actually import through the East Coast and in some instances, it is even more cost effective than importing into the West Coast, just because of the lanes that they’re taking and if it’s an LCL container specifically, it tends to be a bit more cost effective and clearing the ports, that that’s another thing. So, if you’re trying to go into Long Beach, it’s almost impossible to get any guaranteed estimates. Whereas going into the East Coast, you don’t have to worry about the railroads. You don’t have to worry about that last mile of trucking necessarily from the West Coast. Don’t get me wrong, the warehouses are overwhelmed on the west coast. So all of the warehouses that actually received those products, deconsolidate and then ship them out with different truckers. They’re overwhelmed right now. So I would say going to the East Coast is actually a better option. I would say it for at least the next month, maybe two months, then going to the West Coast until they catch up.
Norman 21:29
Yeah, I agree with that. Alright, Kelsey. Oh, before we bring in Kelsey. Kelsey can come in. Here we go. He’s part of the action. There we go. All I was gonna say is before we were gonna ask any questions, just first of all, welcome everybody who’s just joining and to remind people if they could hit that like button or smash it or whatever you want to do with it, ring a bell, all that stuff that Kelsey will tell you to do subscribe. But if you could do that, that would be fantastic. That definitely helps out the show. Any questions or engagement that you can provide? That would be awesome and Kelsey, do we have any questions?
Kelsey 22:11
We do but first, Francois, do you want to talk about your consultation?
Francois 22:17
Yes and I meant to do it at the beginning and I kind of got carried away with it. So it’s an hour long consultation, anything supply chain. So that’s whether you are planning on launching a product and you just want help or some guidance with your RFQ, that way you’re set up for sourcing success and you might not reach out to them until after Chinese New Year, we can get everything set up now. I’d be more than glad to talk about molding and tooling expectations. A lot of times just on first conversations that I have with some users, they might come in with a $2,000 purchasing budget, but they have a fully customized product, they have everything drawn out, they have no idea that the molding itself is going to cost 5 to 10,000. So I want to make sure I set the right expectations in the supply chain, as well as just review how your supply chain is currently looking. If there’s any better alternatives, any problems or struggles you’re currently encountering. Maybe Norm can chime in or I could reach out to him for some insights also. But yeah, that’s an hour long consultation. If it goes a little bit over, perfectly fine also.
Norman 23:23
Okay, fantastic and how do we get our listeners to get into that one?
Francois 23:29
So to do that, all you need to do is the #weloveFrancois into the comments and yeah, that should get it started.
Kelsey 23:42
We have Radd posting one already, so yeah, keep them coming and we do have a question. Just a second.
Norman 23:51
Now awkward silence for a second.
Kelsey 23:55
Sorry. Okay, we’re here. So we have one question from Simon. How long do you predict the bottleneck to last? Will it come back this year?
Francois 24:06
So if I understand the question correctly, it’s kind of like what we just address it’s going to be almost impossible to predict. But in regards to the logistics bottleneck, I think at least for the next month or two, this is going to be a similar story where it’s going to be backed up during Chinese New Year. there isn’t going to be as much output in production from the manufacturers. So we’re hoping that these ports are going to be able to I guess decongest from these containers and get them back to China. But then we’re also going to see a huge surge right after Chinese New Year where everything that was leftover in those ports, because remember, the ports also shut down during Chinese New Year for a short while. Anything that was in those ports, those still need to be moved. If factories are actually producing through Chinese New Year and if anyone is staying true to that and workers are not leaving their towns, then we may still see some production continue going and in those cases, we’re gonna have to see truckers, we’re gonna have to see feed reports being able to transport those items to the major ports. So I mean, the bottleneck, I would be hypocrite if I said I could predict exactly how long it’s going to last. I would just suggest, smash that like button with Lunch with Norm, and hopefully, you’ll have it back on in a few months and we could talk about it again. But if not, definitely follow these different logistics companies and different sourcing companies. Norm, I know you have a tremendous sourcing company, also that I’m sure is giving out some great insights to its customers and users. I think just getting as much feedback and googling it daily, seeing how these COVID outbreaks are actually being responded to by China is important and it’s important to realize that you own your own supply chain, and you should be the most informed there. So gathering insights every day, I would highly recommend that and I’m sorry, I can’t directly answer the question of how long will this bottleneck exactly last?
Norman 26:05
Yeah, fingers crossed that I’m hoping a couple of months after Chinese New Year’s, we’re gonna start to see the prices decrease. But that’s a prediction.
Francois 26:18
Yeah. We’ll see how that holds there. But I guess we can say both of them, and then click the one that’s right and then put out the one that’s right.
Norman 26:26
Yeah, there we go. We’ll show that we’re bang on.
Francois 26:31
Exactly.
Kelsey 26:34
This is from Faye, talking about Chinese New Year’s, is there such a service as a company in China that would deliver gifts to my manufacturers? Is there some sort of gift delivery system?
Francois 26:48
Norm, do you have any insights on this?
Norman 26:51
What I can tell you is that I probably talked to Afolabi and we would arrange some sort of delivery service. But going back and talking about gifting, Kian and Tim were just talking about this, whether to give a gift or not to gift and I like building relationships with my client or with my manufacturer and I was just gonna ask you by the way, what are your thoughts if I have a really good relationship with my manufacturer? Again, it’s about paying on time, it’s just not being a nice person, it’s making sure that they feel comfortable with you. Having that relationship, can that work its way if you needed the favor, do you think the manufacturer right now would go, Yeah, I’ll push this guy to the front.
Francois 27:50
That’s actually exactly what the relationship is going to help do. If you treat everything transactional, you’re going to go into a transactional queue, right? Where it’s just Okay, these are the top orders and the top orders are 10,000 and above and the middle 50% of the orders are between 5 and 10,000 US dollars and they might break it up in different ways or prioritize in different ways. But relationships are always number one. They’ll always say, Hey, this guy is stuck true to me. We’ve worked through not only the good times, but also the bad times, right? In the first quarter, you might have some defects, how do you respond to those defects? Do you just point the finger and say, Hey, this is on you, I told you to do this, you have to fix this or is it a How can we improve on this for the next order and they’ll see that as Okay, this is a building block and they want to continue working with me. I understand I screwed up now, what can I do to fix this with them and improve this relationship? I think it’s just as important to have those conversations as it is to have the conversations where Yes, that production run was amazing. Thank you for getting it done on time. Thank you for getting it delivered early. I think both of those conversations are very, very, very important and if you have those conversations, when you get into a time like this, where in about a week and a half, everyone should be gone already from the factories. They will push your order, they will say okay, this isn’t the biggest order, but they’ve been a loyal customer and I want to keep them after Chinese New Year.
Norman 29:18
Yeah, and there’s something else that you can do as well. You might want to think about it, it could affect your cash flow. But if you pay, you said it a little bit earlier about paying early. So you could always ask your manufacturer, if you paid early, can you get a discount. So a 2% discount paying early, and most likely, they’ll take that discount or you can take that discount, take advantage of it. Now paying early, what does that mean? Now you have to pay up front a bit quicker or, does that affect your 60 day terms or your 30 day terms? But one way or the other if you have 30 day terms and you can say your pay early and you can take a 2% on that, it’s well worth it and they appreciate it to you, all of a sudden, you became like, we have premium suppliers, they have premium customers.
Francois 30:12
Right. Now the only time that I wouldn’t recommend paying early is if it’s a brand new supplier, and you haven’t vetted them as enough, which a lot of times is the case. A lot of times when I’m working with nav users, the only experiences from getting some quotes on Alibaba, and never actually placing an order. Now, just keep in mind that if you’re working with someone on any marketplace, and you don’t have boots on the ground to actually validate them or anything like that, then that is a risky move. Even if they were to offer you 5% cheaper, that is a risk that you have to assess. They could be an actual trade agency just be taking the money running, that is a case and other cases, they could be completely honest and they could very much have every intention to manufacture this after Chinese New Year. But right after Chinese New Year, factory management decides to go in a different direction, maybe they don’t want to produce these types of mugs anymore, they want to pivot to something that just has more of a demand and then you have to struggle with getting your money back or it could be that everything goes perfectly smooth and you do get that discount. So, you have to think about every scenario in that place. When you have a relationship with them, when you’ve been working with them for a long time. Again, you’ve been through the good times and the bad times, you have multiple points of contact at that manufacturer, not just the sales rep. But also, if you could get someone else, maybe her manager, his manager, and maybe some factory worker, the QC Inspector, then that’s something that you may want to consider placing those orders early getting that discount.
Norman 31:55
Yeah, and I didn’t mean pay everything ASAP upfront. I was talking more like, if they say you’ve got 45 days, you pay earlier than 45 days or 30 days, and also just what you were just talking about. Factory audits are awesome. Expensive, but they’re worth it. I know over at Honu, people ask us why we have that upfront fee. The reason is it costs us, it costs us to travel, it costs us the audit. The other thing is inspections. We talked just the other day, we had a podcast strictly about inspections. That’s so important and for us anyways, as an independent, it goes through our company, but it’s an independent service that we have that we’ll work with, so that we could help protect the client. We don’t want and this happened last week, by the way. So this just happened. We had that podcast last week on Friday and all of a sudden, somewhere during the week, somebody said, Facebook messaged me and said, Oh, I had an inspection through my manufacturer and the horror story began. So it came in and it was horrible. It should never have passed the inspection. The inspector was taking a bribe. It went through, they lost their money.
Francois 33:33
Yeah, I mean, every part of this international business is there’s going to be risk involved, right and that’s why you have that upfront auditing fee. That’s why our team has to actually go out and visit the factories and understand factory management, not just a single point of contact. Because although everyone wants to sort of just trust that a certification or that, let’s say they’re actually FDA compliant, and they’re not just photoshopping their name on top as much as everyone wants to believe that that’s the reality and everything’s dandelions. That’s not actually the reality whatsoever and it’s all about navigating those waters. It’s just like you have your team. We have our team. I believe I did watch part of that QC.
Norman 34:23
I saw you snooping around it.
Francois 34:24
Yeah, I joined for a while as long as I could. There were some great insights, I highly recommend to go back and watch that from what I was listening to. It was a great episode. But I mean, QC and Factory audits. These are two things that you never want to skip. These are two things that should not be seen as losses, they should be seen as investments and if you receive those let’s say 500 products, just 500 products to begin with. It’s a $5,000 order and you skip QC or you have your supplier self inspect as well as I hear a lot of times. You just paid, let’s say, $1,000 for shipping. Now it’s in Australia or in the US and now you’re paying the carrying costs of warehousing that product. You’re paying for the negative reviews that you’re receiving. You’re paying for the removal order. You’re paying for the capital that you just lost in that entire order. How are you going to finance your next order? So there’s so much risk involved with that, that if you don’t perform that, let’s say $150-300 QC inspection, you have a lot more to lose than you have to gain that, again, that’s just an investment.
Norman 35:36
It’s not expensive. But I want to say that most is such a huge improvement. When I started going to China or Taiwan 25 years ago, a lot of difference between now and then. China in my eyes, is completely different. They’re trying to work with you, they’re trying one of the keys, even now, you got to let them know that you want quality. Because they still think that the North American market, Westerners want the cheapest, and they’ll provide you the cheapest but if you tell them that you need quality, you’re looking to and you lay it all out, that’s great. They’ll provide that but they need that direction too. Because they’re used to more sellers, coming to them and wanting the lowest price and that’s the other thing too. I’m going off topic for a bit. We’re talking logistics right now. But if you want the lowest price, whether it’s your logistics person, or if it’s the manufacturer, whatever you’re doing, you get what you pay for.
Francois 36:48
Yes, I 100% agree with that.
Norman 36:51
Quality time money. Take two or cheapest, take two out of the three, you’ll never get all three.
Francois 36:59
I 100% agree and that’s actually why we never go with the cheapest shipping partner that we can get. We deny a lot of the factories that give us the cheapest quotes. We reject a lot of RFQs that say just give you the cheapest price, because that’s not actually what they want. We find out, Hey, this project is now going to take six weeks because everything that this was based on was on the cheapest price. Cheapest price means the cheapest materials, means the cheapest manufacturing processes, means the cheapest workers typically that can work on that project means longer lead times, means more down the road costs. So when it comes to logistics, and we can apply it directly to logistics, we can talk about accessorial charges, right? So typically, when you’re quoted from a freight forwarder, they may say, Hey, this should take about one day to clear the port, and then we might sort in a truck yard for one day and then you have a one hour unload time. Well, this is a floor loaded container and the ports are backed up right now. In order for the warehouse to receive it, we have to pre pull this, why didn’t you plan all this out ahead of time? So now you’re talking about $150 pre pull that you were not expecting because this is just the cheapest quote that you had. It is not going to take one hour to unload, it’s actually going to ask to be a drop off. So now you’re talking about a $250 charge for that one container to be dropped off. You’re asking your warehouse to make sure that there’s absolutely no delays, nothing can go wrong. Otherwise, you’re going to be charged every day that it’s sitting in that truck yard so that could go from $50 or $250 and these are not charges that the warehousing is charging you. These are charges that your freight forwarder failed to charge you or let you know of ahead of time. Right? It’s not something that’s completely unexpected to them. It’s just poor management, hidden fees, and I see it all the time and so sometimes, when we are a little bit more expensive, it’s not because we’re trying to make more money than anyone else. It’s all about the service that you can actually provide, Hey, this includes storing it at the the truck yard for two or three days and the pre pull chances and making sure that it gets delivered at x hours and we’re actually coordinating with the warehouse manager, not just emailing them the day of because that’s we’ve seen that a ton with our warehouse also. So we know what the good freight forwarders do and we know what the poor freight forwarders do and if you go cheap, you’re always going to get this poor freight forwarders that those are the ones that have the worst relationships with their truckers because they’re always trying to negotiate a cheaper rate with them. They have poor relationships with the warehouses that they ship to. So they’re always trying to get it last minute and miscoordination. We’ve received containers that had different container numbers on them also from someone that’s handling their own freight forwarding and we just asked them, Well, why is this happening all the time? They have the cheapest rates. I’m like yeah, but you pay $10,000 in accessorial charges over the last month, is it actually the cheapest rate? So these are important aspects to realize. That down the road charges can add up to be more expensive than the extra $2-300 that you’re spending on a better service for logistics.
Norman 40:16
Do you recommend sellers to get insurance?
Francois 40:25
Yeah, and so freight forwarders should know this. Most freight forwarders and again, this is going back to the cheaper rather than maybe a little bit pricier. Someone that’s a little bit pricier, they tend to include that already upfront, they tend to include that on the half of the import or record to make sure that that insurance is taken care of because they have insurance agreements with the shipping carriers and so the way that it would work is that if you don’t have insurance with the freight forwarder, freight forwarder says, Hey, it sucks that that happened, here’s the shipping carriers information, you could file it yourself. The entire process, you’re not going to see that money for months at least. You get insurance with a freight forwarder, a freight forwarder says, Okay, we have all the paperwork we have, we know the exact invoice value, this is the vessel that it was supposed to be on, this is when it was loaded, this is how it was loaded. These are our containers, these are other products that were with it, they could file all of this and escalate it through the shipping carriers much, much, much quicker, because they can’t guarantee that the container doesn’t get lost or that this ship doesn’t go down whatever the case may be. But what they could guarantee is that the additional service of Hey, we’re gonna be here for you after the sale. We understand that this is challenging, so pay us some insurance, and we will make sure that that happens. Insurance is another thing that should be seen as an investment, again, not just a loss.
Norman 41:51
Now a lot of the insurance from what I’ve seen from a lot of forwarders. It doesn’t cover much. It covers very little. A matter of fact, you could have some major damage, and they’re always going to weasel out of it. Do you recommend having your own separate insurance policy? Like I’m trying to get Michelle Love on from inferred to talk more about it. But what are your thoughts on individual sellers putting insurance onto the shipment?
Francois 42:24
That’s an interesting concept because I know even the major enterprise businesses that we work with, they have some sort of personal insurance on the cargo itself, but ultimately comes down to the incoterm. So if you’re purchasing it FOB, handling freight forwarding yourself, then yes, definitely have your own insurance on top. If it’s DDP, which we offer all of our customers.
Norman 42:49
Just explain DDP.
Francois 42:50
Oh yeah. FOB is Free Onboard means that you’re paying for the product to get to the port in the country of origin. So let’s say in China, it would go to Ningbo and then from there, you’re responsible for that product all the way until it gets to the final destination. So your supplier, your seller just says, Hey, this is the term. I have nothing to do with this order anymore. This is fully you’re liable for it, you have to make sure you have the right HTS codes that you file the proper paperwork, pay the import duties, everything. DDP is Delivery Duty Paid. So that means that your supplier, your seller is telling you, Hey, we’re going to be responsible and liable for this product and all expenses associated with it until it gets to that final destination. Now, that might not include those accessorial charges and a lot of times it doesn’t, but that includes the customs and import duties that includes supplying customs with proper invoices, making sure that they’re legitimate, filing the HTS codes, delivery all the way to that final destination, whether that’s an FBA warehouse or a 3PL warehouse, or a residential address. That is what DDP is. Now, I’ve seen too many times and just a little sidebar, but I’ve seen too many times that someone that’s getting DDP incoterms are asked to pay duty separately. So that’s something I just wanted to touch on. Never pay your duty separately when it comes to purchasing an item DDP. DDP means everything is included in that. There should not be any hidden fees. There may be some last minute logistical charges just because the logistics are so crazy that you ordered a product six months ago, you’re not paying the same logistics charges as you are today. So you might expect that in the DDP Pricing. It comes down to how your contract is written now.
Norman 44:41
Most people are FOB though. Yeah, they don’t know otherwise. A lot of people
Francois 44:48
Yeah and so DDP is great for if you want someone else to handle all of the logistics for you. FOB is Okay, I can take the reins for the logistics myself. There’s a learning curve involved with it sometimes, but it is what it is, it’s all about what you want to manage, and what risks you want to take.
Norman 45:07
Right. Just the simplicity of it too. So I know Afolabi has some really good examples of just using different types of terms and what you’re able to save by using different different terms. Like he talks about working with x works, for example, and just what he’s been able to save people just by understanding what x works is, and then applying it. But anyways. Alright, one of the other things I’m looking at too, is working with a 3PL. So a 3PL is just your warehouse. Products are here, they’re going over to a warehouse to be stored, products’ probably going over to Amazon, or unless you’re an eCommerce seller, maybe it’s just going to a 3PL. 3PLs right now are very busy. Very, very busy. There’s a lot that are completely filled. Are there any suggestions that you have on building a great relationship with a 3PL?
Francois 46:12
If you’re starting off now, I would say starting off with a relationship mindset instead of a cost and transactional mindset, going back to sort of what we were talking about, even with suppliers. I think that is just as important right now. So just like you said, every 3PL is, I think, the busiest they’ve ever been realistically. I mean, I know we’ve seen the intake of containers just shoot up and skyrocket in the past six months and so I would say, build the relationship with them by one coming in with an understanding approach. Understanding that, Hey, if they’re saying that they don’t have capacity, it’s not because they don’t like you. It’s because they legitimately don’t have capacity. So whenever you’re working with finding out Hey, when can I contact you again? Do you have any recommendations for other places? I know 3PLs’ great way to form relationships is also to give them referrals. So saying, Hey, I have three other buddies of mine that are also doing Amazon FBA, and they need cross docking or FBA prep, or fulfillment for their Shopify store. So giving them referrals will always win you those brownie points with them. So those are just a few ways to sort of form a relationship with a 3Pl. But again, I mean, they are inundated with requests. I know we’ve got a huge uptick with just requests itself. A lot of it that we have to turn down just because we don’t have capacity in some of our warehouses for as quick as they need.
Norman 47:46
You can call me Francois.
Francois 47:47
I will call you, we’ll talk after this. I will 100% send them your way.
Norman 47:52
One of the things that I can tell you about building a strong relationship is don’t be a jerk. So right now, a lot is out of our control, or out of the 3PLs’ control because you might pick a product in 24 hours and get it out and meet Amazon’s requirements for Prime. I mean you can do it. However, even normal FBM. Okay, so fulfilled by merchant. The way that UPS and the Postal Service is running right now and they’re delivering late, we’re getting all sorts of late responses. So what we’re doing is we’re asking our sellers to beef up their handling time. So just put an extra two or three days in, and then that won’t affect your late time. But then the Amazon sellers come back with certain ones and say that that’s going to interfere with people buying our product. So you have to balance risk reward. It’ll look good when somebody goes to your site and sees that it’ll be delivered in a week, you’ll get the sale, but you’ll get the late. It could be delivered late or if you show that it’s going to be a week and a half, I hate seeing that or a month like it was before, but at least people have expectations. You have to manage those expectations and if you don’t, you’ll end up with a nice little message from Amazon that your account is at risk because of performance health. So it’s something that you can handle. It’s something that’s gotta be balanced, and I know, just from what we see on a regular basis. We try to manage those expectations. But it’s not Amazon or it’s not the FBM as of a year ago.
Francois 49:48
100%. I mean, to put it into perspective back in November, December and I’m sure you saw it over at Honu or your warehouses over there. FedEx and UPS were seeing pickup delays for places like I think it was LL Bean, Macy’s I mean, these major, major retailers that give them way more than enough business. I mean that we’re talking about the largest accounts they probably have on the corporate level, that they are telling them, Hey, we’re no longer sending, let’s say, the 53 foot trailers to pick up those products, because we told you, these are the capacity limits. So I have a buddy actually at FedEx, and he told me that they went from I believe it was delivering or processing 5 million packages per day to 25 million packages per day and it was just an insane thing that we had to deal with here and it was a challenge. I think for a lot of 3PLs that we knew that they were just not able to get those FedEx pickup trucks, or there’s no UPS pickup trucks anymore. So we try to get inventive, we try to get creative and this is all about the relationships right for everyone that we have here, we try to establish as good of a relationship as possible. So we actually had trucks, our own private trucks come in and we were taking them to a few of the FedEx pickup destinations and dropping off 10 packages here and 20 packages here and trying to work with the ship centers to see Hey, how many can we get in. But the biggest thing that FedEx and UPS see is, Hey, we can move, let’s say 1000 very small parcel items, or every 10 pieces of furniture, or for any larger items, we just don’t want to take them in because they can’t go through our conveyor belts. So it’s completely out of your 3PLs hands. But the relationships that you build with them, just like on the supplier side, determines how far above and beyond they’re willing to go to actually provide you with this quality service that everyone should be striving for. But not many actually are able to achieve.
Norman 51:55
There’s so many times where you’re set to go and then they cancel. Set to go and they cancel. We’ve had it where we cancel was three weeks, just waiting and get this, so we cancel and we hire another like a private trucking company. They came, they picked up. The other guy ends up coming at the same time.
Francois 52:20
Oh no. Good problem to have.
Norman 52:22
It’s not a good problem. All of a sudden Amazon gets it and it messed everything up because the one shipping plan was cancelled on the books. The other one was going over there. The one that the one ended up waiting, the one that was cancelled was getting received, they denied the one that was cancelled. They denied the one that was cancelled and when it did get in, they only allowed out of 750 units, 150 per day to come in. It was stupid. But from that, so Afolabi and I, we’re trying to figure out, we’re only an hour away from the EDP one which is in Hazleton. So we’re thinking, Okay, let’s just get our own fleet of trucks and start just driving over, but try to get an appointment with Amazon. They don’t make it easy. They don’t make it easy. But anyways, that’s another day. But Kels, what more do we have here? Any more questions?
Kelsey 53:30
Three questions I think we can answer. So Nathan, how do you convince suppliers to understand and accept small trial orders?
Francois 53:43
That’s a great question. Because that is the majority, I think of the requests that we get and it’s really hard. Actually, it’s not as simple as you may hear some Amazon gurus or YouTube videos to say just Hey, just tell them this and they’ll give you a quote. Because number one thing is you want to establish an honest relationship with them and sometimes that honestly comes at a cost, right? Sometimes they just see the honesty, as you’re a new person to this business, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to give me any repeat business. So I’m going to do one of two things, I’m either going to ghost you, or I’m going to give you I guess, one of three things, or I’m going to give you a price that just doesn’t make sense for you. So that way I kind of turn you away. Or maybe it does actually make sense to me because I have to shut down a production line to produce your order and now that’s just more cost and more overhead for me for every production line. Where the third is that they’ll see that as a sort of an open relationship where you are being honest with them, and they appreciate that. It’s gonna be very hard to convince them one, if you’re not very well prepared and I would say if you come to them and you say Hey, I want this Yeti mug, and I want my label or this is the ping pong. I want the ping pong label here, and I just want a clear top. They’re gonna see that as this guy has no clue what he wants. They just want some random thing, why don’t they just go work with a trade agent, right? That’s sort of in their mind from a manufacturer’s perspective, they don’t want to deal with that. So coming to them with a very clear specifications, Hey, this has to be double insulated, it has to retain the heat for six hours and the cool temperature for six hours and the clear top has to be made of PVC, or Hey, this is the one that I found on Alibaba, and it just looks exactly what I’m looking for. So coming to them with these very, very clear and concise requests for quotes, I would say is number one, and that’s what we try to hone in on that here at Noviland. If you don’t set yourself up for success, you’re never going to be successful with the sourcing, because if you’re not prepared, they’re gonna see it, and they’re gonna smell it. Because again, you’re not the first one to come to them and say, Hey, I want to start off 500 units, but my second order is going to be 2000 units, and my third word is going to be 10,000 units. They get that request all the time. So coming to them prepared is number one. Number two, you can tell them that you’re open to pay a little bit more for the smaller trial orders and if they take that as, Okay, that might make sense for us financially, we’ll give this guy a try. But also give them your background, if you sold on Amazon in the past, tell them how long you’ve sold on Amazon in the past. What experience do you have? What case studies do you have of making products successfully launch?
Francois 56:46
These are things that you want to give them information on ahead of time and if you’re brand new, I would actually suggest maybe looking at trade agents not coming with a full custom product that you’re gonna have to invest 10s of thousands of dollars in unless you have a very, very, very good go to market strategy that might not just involve Amazon, maybe that involves Shopify, or maybe Kickstarter. Maybe working with a marketing agency that can help you with advertising. But getting them to accept a trial order is very difficult, specifically when it has customisations. Because they have to do all the work involved with ordering the materials, making the customizations, making sure that’s the quality that you’re looking for and they run that risk, right? Anytime that they take on a new project, they’ve run the risk, and they accept the risk of this might not be successful, but I just spent my time where it could be using my time otherwise, somewhere else, right? That’s an opportunity cost that they take on. So you could work with trade agents, or come to them very well prepared with your RFQs with very clear quality indicators of what you would accept, what you won’t accept, don’t come to them with a questionnaire of 50 questions, or try to understand their full manufacturing process before they’ve even given you a quote. Don’t expect more of them than you should expect of yourself. If you don’t prepare yourself when you’re talking to them, they will see it. So I guess that that is sort of my long form answer to this question. Norm, do you have any insights on that?
Norman 58:25
Yeah. The 50 questions, trying to be overly detailed. You won’t even get a response. Yeah, if you’re looking for a trial, it’s a pain in the butt, they’re not going to do it and they’re probably getting inundated with other Amazon sellers looking for similar products. One thing that I could tell you about, there’s two things, I’m old, I’m old, and I haven’t had enough coffee. But one of the things I was going to say is that you establish the price like you said, and then you just say, Look, if it goes well, can we settle back at the higher quantity? So let’s say that this is 250 because you’re ordering 100 units, but when you order 1000, could they give you a discount off of the first 100 that they ordered, so they apply a credit to you. So they’re looking at Okay, let’s get the product out there. Let’s see if this guy’s gonna work. If it does work, and you come back and you order the 1000, then perfect, then they’ll give you a better quantity break or you might not get the full quantity break, you might get a small break and that’s the same thing with samples. So if you’re ordering samples, sometimes there’s a charge because you’re going overseas and it might cost you 50 to 75 bucks. Sometimes it might cost you more but you ask them to put that credit against your initial order or your second order. One last thing on that. I wish I could get our senior sourcing agent on because she would tell you just nightmares about people that they know what they come off of a course and they want to get this garden gnome over here. But then they come back 10 times or 15 times with Oh, I got the quote. But what happens if we make the hat green? Or can we tighten up his beard? It’s not like you were saying it’s not detailed enough. Now, what I said before I said, Don’t try to figure out the manufacturing process but come as detailed as you possibly can about the actual product that you want. Because the last thing that they want is that somebody is coming back and asking too many questions. Again, it comes to be a pain in the butt and they’ll just let it drop a lot of the times or the price you like you said, right out of the market. Don’t bother me. I’ve got too many other clients. We see a lot where we try to manage expectations. We say, Here’s a list of questions. Please fill this in. We give a price and all of a sudden, Okay, but what about this? Does the price include this? It’s very tough to do and it’s very hard for our sourcing agent, okay to go back and keep working in that relationship.
Francois 1:01:29
Without giving the factory back anything sometimes, too. It’s more so just Hey, can I make this beard tighter? Can I change this to green without saying, Oh, I really like these aspects of it. I want to keep these aspects and not saying, I just need this piece of information from you. Every time you ask them a question, it gets closer to the, we have a great Australian client, awesome company to work with. They call it the THP or the too hard basket and the factories just start inching closer to every question that you have, closer to that too hard basket, they throw it in there, and they’re like, I don’t want to work with this guy. It happens. That’s the reality.
Norman 1:02:05
We see it a lot. Yeah. Alright, so we’ll take two more questions I think Kels. Before we do that, just so we can get the Wheel of Kelsey going at the end. If you’d like to have that an hour long consultation or chance to win an hour long consultation with Francois about logistics or your supply chain management. Just put hashtag, what is it Kels? We love Francois. Is that it?
Kelsey 1:02:33
There you go. You got it.
Norman 1:02:36
I got my coffee now.
Kelsey 1:02:40
All right, so we had a question from Radd. Read that since Jack Ma’s disappearance, the Alibaba manufacturers have increased their product prices. Is it true?
Francois 1:02:53
No. I don’t know if this is even actually a thing or where they got this piece of information from. I know I have heard the rumor of Jack Ma just disappearing randomly. I’ve never seen that associated with the product prices going up. If I did see product prices going up, it would be for other reasons like they actually want to work with more serious buyers or they just see that this clickbait pricing model isn’t working anymore. Because a lot of times, that’s what it is. They start off with something like 10 cents 200 MOQ, you contact them they’re like Oh no, the 10 cents is actually for the entire container load and zero customisations. You start adding your customization so you find that 10 cents plus 5 plus 15 starts to add up prices you add of having any type of margins and MOQs tend to just keep going up every customization that you have. But no, I have not heard or read anything about Alibaba manufacturers increasing the product prices from Jack Ma’s disappearance.
Norman 1:03:59
Okay, it’s gonna be a Jimmy Hoffa thing.
Francois 1:04:05
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Norman 1:04:07
We want Jack on the podcast. If you can hear us Jack, reach out. We want you on the podcast.
Kelsey 1:04:15
From Simon. Are you seeing warehousing in Shenzhen or Ningbo etc or overfilling and running short of space?
Francois 1:04:24
Yeah. I mean, warehousing across the board I think is struggling. It’s not just in Shenzhen or Ningbo or our warehousing in California or Georgia. It’s everywhere and it’s because the supply chain is so backed up. That’s just what’s going to happen. Inventory is going to start to be stored, people are going to be placing higher, larger orders. Putting a bigger strain on logistics and then it just warehousing tracking back from the US all the way to that country of origin whether that’s in China, whether that’s in Vietnam, in India. I mean, I think we are going to continue seeing these warehouse runkles in this capacity shortage.
Norman 1:05:01
Don’t forget it’s not only that. We’ve got a huge amount of new eCom sellers coming onto the market too. Yeah. So we’ve got to deal with that as well as the existing backlog.
Francois 1:05:14
New platforms. We have Walmart marketplace now and Amazon Poland is starting to open up. I think they just launched. New platforms are going to drive new sellers, new sellers are going to drive more competition, more production, manufacturing, greater strain on logistics, greater strain warehousing, just that domino effect you were talking about earlier.
Kelsey 1:05:36
Okay. Fatiha is asking if you provide freight forwarding services?
Francois 1:05:42
Yeah, we’d be more than glad to get you some logistics quotes. Just go to noviland.com/solutions. Norm, do you provide freight forwarding, or logistics management?
Norman 1:05:53
Yep. We provide it but we also promote our guests.
Francois 1:06:00
Hey, there’s enough fish in the sea. We can help out a lot more people than we tell them to try to fight each other.
Norman 1:06:07
I tell people that are my competitors on Amazon, I’d rather sit on the beach, talk about it and drive extra traffic. I got no problems and Kelsey can throw that in the URL into the comment section.
Kelsey 1:06:24
Depending on time, I don’t know if you guys are good. But there are two more questions.
Norman 1:06:31
Quick questions, that would be fine.
Norman 1:06:32
Okay, so from Olga, should I assume that if I get FOB prices, all customs costs are included?
Francois 1:06:41
No. So actually, that’s what we’re talking about a little bit earlier. FOB pricing has nothing to do with import duties, customs codes, HTS codes, any of that. FOB only get the product to the port. So let’s say they get it to Ningbo, now you have to worry about HTS codes, customs costs, so do not expect them to pay for any of those for you and if they provide you with an HTS code, which they may have those already on hand, because they might be familiar with shipping overseas. Make sure you always cross check that. Don’t just believe the first thing that you see, because they may be misclassifying it unknowingly or knowingly, right? So always double check or run by this trust but verify thing
Norman 1:07:24
Make sure it’s not an HS code. You want the HTS code.
Kelsey 1:07:30
Last one from Simon, are you seeing a shortage of cardboard stock for packaging?
Francois 1:07:37
Packaging stuff, I mean, we understand that the manufacturing of products is having to strain but packaging is just as hard because they have to produce it for all the manufacturers that are producing all these products and if the manufacturing while the product is increasing, of course, that’s going to put a strain on the packaging manufacturers as well. To say that it’s short, we have seen some minor cost increases across the board. There’s also some new regulations that we’ve seen with PPE and markings that have to go on packaging. So some suppliers have had to shift packaging manufacturers. So if that’s what maybe your suppliers are telling you, I would go again, trust but verify.
Norman 1:08:21
Yeah. Okay, so I think we’re coming to the end of the podcast. It is that time for Wheel of Kelsey.
Kelsey 1:08:29
Alright. I’ll start that up. So I’ll share my screen. Here we go. All right. Can you see my wheel? Alright. Here we go. So 3,2,1.
Norman 1:08:51
Radd. There you go, sir.
Kelsey 1:08:54
Congratulations, Radd.
Francois 1:08:57
Radd, we’ll talk, we’ll have a chat.
Norman 1:09:00
Yeah. So all you have to do is just get your email information over to Kelsey. So Kelsey is just k@lunchwithnorm.
Kelsey 1:09:07
Yeah, I believe I have his info already, too.
Norman 1:09:10
All right. Very good.
Norman 1:09:11
Francois. Thank you, sir, for being on the podcast today.
Francois 1:09:16
Thank you. It was a lot better conversation than I was expecting when it came to sourcing and logistics. I was a little worried that it was going to be kind of tricky or someone’s going to toss him some whirlwind of questions in there.
Norman 1:09:32
Well, they just might. You never know.
Norman 1:09:35
Alright. So we’ll get you on another podcast a little bit later on. But once again, thanks for being on the podcast. I really appreciate the insight that you brought today and we’ll talk to you soon.
Francois 1:09:46
Yeah, thank you for having me Norm. Have a good one.
Norman 1:09:48
You’re very welcome. Alright, so that brings us to the end of another podcast today. Kelsey, if you want to come back on.
Kelsey 1:09:58
Alright, there we go. Great podcast.
Norman 1:10:02
Yeah I think so. Francois is always great when we have him on. So let’s talk about the coming week, shall we?
Kelsey 1:10:11
Okay, so I believe Wednesday we have Cassandra Craven back on from Helium 10. Social Media expert. Yep. So she’s back and on the tip of my tongue, just let me check quickly on Fridays. But yeah, I’ll make sure to put this in the group to let everyone know. Oh, yeah. Brenda Ruby is on. That’s gonna be a good one. She’s Brenda Mendez. She’s going to be talking about branding and everything.
Norman 1:10:44
Oh, fantastic. Both of those ladies are incredible. So anyways, that’s Wednesday and Friday. All right. So we’re at the end Kels. Yeah. Just join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time and thanks again for joining. Welcome to the community for the new listeners and we’ll see you next time.
Kelsey 1:11:06
Yep. Alright. Thank you everyone.
