"An Editor-in-Chief" for Commerce"

Thomas: [00:00:00] They made a very conscious decision that that's strategy, design, and analytics, and then followed that, of course, with incredible engineering and delivery. And that's where this kind of courtship came about between Bear and Scoutside. We sometimes jokingly called it Cub Scouts, {laughter} which is beyond adorable. And then ultimately this really great marriage.

Brian: [00:01:47] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:52] I'm Phillip, and I have a squeaky chair today. I don't know what's going on. Can you hear that, Brian?

Brian: [00:01:56] Oh, yeah.

Phillip: [00:01:57] A little bit. {laughter} A little bit today. Also squeaky, this is the time of year it's the leaves are changing. The pumpkin spice is brewing at your local Starbucks. Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Waves are coming out. So we can all see the signs of the times. That means we're heading into the Fall. But aside from all those changes, there are a lot of changes happening in the eCommerce space. And one of those changes is more of these agencies and specialist agencies and the eCommerce ecosystem are coming together and bringing their various kind of capabilities together to deliver, I'm guessing, new commerce experiences that future-proof brands. And so today we are really excited to bring along for that conversation and so much more, the Founder of Scoutside, Thomas McCutchen, who's now joining Bear Group. Welcome to the show, Thomas.

Thomas: [00:02:48] Thanks, guys. I'm Thomas McCutchen. I'm Head of Strategy at Bear Group now, formerly the Founder of Scoutside. And I don't have a squeaky chair.

Phillip: [00:02:57] Don't have a squeak, but do you have a pumpkin spice latte? That's the question.

Thomas: [00:03:01] In Charleston, South Carolina, we're a little far away from pumpkin spice lattes. It's about 100 degrees out.

Phillip: [00:03:06] Yeah, Yeah. It's still the tropics, actually, as we're recording this, you're getting a bit of the tropics as we speak. I think you have a hurricane bearing down on you. So hunker down and be safe wherever you are, Thomas.

Brian: [00:03:17] Podcast from your bunker.

Thomas: [00:03:19] That's right.

Phillip: [00:03:19] Exactly. Actually, it kind of looks like it there. Thomas, let's kind of dive in a little bit about it. So first of all, just, hey, full transparency. Bear Group's been supporting the podcast for the past few months. We love having folks on who help tell us about why you might have partnered with Future Commerce. I think you're probably looking at building the future of agency capabilities. Tell us a bit about your role at Bear Group and what you're up to these days.

Thomas: [00:03:46] Yeah. So I'm now Head of Strategy at Bear Group, which is a new department altogether, and that's a really exciting opportunity. So we're moving and increasing services to help merchants grow and scale and be a better partner with them or a more intimate partner and a deeper partnership and help steer the future of their businesses. So by creating this new department strategy and working with design and analytics, we're helping from the ground up merchants grow and dictate their roadmap and measure the performance of the site with analytics, and make meaningful changes to their digital channels.

Brian: [00:04:41] Very cool. That's pretty fun stuff. That's where you get into the most exciting stuff, I feel like. But I'm assuming you didn't start here, Thomas. Tell us a little bit about your journey, being a software solutions provider, starting Scoutside, and then that path to now becoming part of Bear.

Thomas: [00:05:07] Yeah. So I am a computer engineer by education. The engineers we hire won't let me write code anymore, which is a good thing. But I realized that you really can write code in any industry, but when you actually like that industry and its business rules, you're likely to be better and enjoy your life more. One of my early jobs was building software for in-store solutions for retailers, so POS and back office and fulfillment. And that's where I learned retail math and turn and GMROI and sell through and the techniques that are used to sell in brick and mortar and this was, you know 2006, 07, 08. And I loved it. It made sense. I buy things. I'm a shopper. It made a lot of sense to me. But what didn't make sense was that user experience [00:06:08]. Software on these thick apps where the people using the app are employees that are paid, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. No one's investing in it. Even when you try. And I did. And so that bothered me. I wanted to make intuitive systems. I wanted to make systems that were easy to use, that were delightful, that actually the user experience itself was the very thing everyone was talking about. [00:06:36] So I left that company and founded and started Scoutside and focused on eCommerce, where the user experience was everything. And I wanted to work with merchants that were either launching or coming to market or growing, of course and put their time and money into the user experience that had a direct impact on their revenue, not just, you know, does it work but is it beautiful and is it improving sales and revenue.

Phillip: [00:07:16] There's this thing that I've written about quite a bit over the last couple of years is sort of the maturity curve of eCommerce as a capability. eCommerce used to be an ecosystem, but eCommerce is a channel now and the ecosystems have sort of become their own little subcultures in the world of eCommerce. You have subscription, CPG, you have apparel. So you have these big monolithic shows that used to aggregate a lot of eCommerce merchants together in a lot of their capabilities. You had these broad agencies that had clients of all different types. That's not really how it is anymore, is it? It's changed quite a bit. So the developer ecosystem I think has changed every bit as much to where what you're looking at is people that have very specific skills, not just on platforms but in specific industry verticals. And that is what I think is most interesting about the space that you occupy is you kind of have to become a specialist in a certain type of a client and a certain type of delivery method for you to, I think, scale an agency in 2023.

Thomas: [00:08:21] Yeah, I agree. I think it can be really exciting and intriguing to work in all verticals. Some are sexier than others, maybe, but have their own allure. What is true of I think any industry is subject matter experts. And when you start to develop those skill sets and become an authoritative voice in a particular industry or vertical or technology, then people start coming closer. And that's the ultimate sign of success or growth is when you're actually sought out for your skill set. And so we, at Scoutside, started to work a lot with subscription commerce in the very early days of subscription commerce. I mean, what we had done to date leading up to 2016, 17 was design and build eCommerce sites. So there's a home page, a PLP, cart, and checkout.

Phillip: [00:09:25] Happy Path.

Thomas: [00:09:26] Right, and it was great. We loved it. And we, like everybody else, started to use it, started to embed recommended products and then making those recommendations intelligent based on other purchases and upsells and free shipping thermometers and cross-sells. And that was good. This was good, but it was very iterative. And it wasn't really overly unique. We were doing a lot of what everybody was doing. And then came subscription commerce and no one knew anything. The data wasn't in. What we were incredibly intrigued by is the business model right out of the gate with eCommerce, traditional eCommerce, someone buys your product and you just hope they come back to your domain. With subscription commerce, that's totally rewritten. They have to come back to your domain. It could be for something negative like canceling or filing a complaint, whatever they may be. "I've got too much product," but they have to come back to the domain. And that's very powerful. And as we started digging into subscriptions, it was the Wild West. We were really fascinated with both onboarding customers as subscribers, bringing them in, and how to be a subscriber. How do you subscribe meaningfully to this product and then what to do after that purchase to keep them as subscribers and reduce churn. And all these techniques we were pioneering these techniques. I mean, we couldn't do any wrong because no one knew better. We were collecting the data early and reacting to it quickly. But the fact that it was this, I don't know the Wild West of eCommerce all over again is what really drew us closer. And we made an intentional decision as a team collectively. We sat down in an all-company meeting and said, "Hey, we like this. We're pretty good at this. Should we do more of this?" And the answer was resounding yes. And it was really exciting.

Brian: [00:11:27] And Phillip mentioned the Forrester Wave and the Gartner Magic Quadrant at the beginning of the episode, which really sort of documents or tends to document the evolution of software, how it's changing and evolving. I'd imagine that as a subscription-focused, or that was one of your specialties, a business that you saw a lot of evolution in subscription, and when you first got in, it was the Wild West. Give us a little picture of how it's evolved over the past years.

Thomas: [00:12:03] It has evolved a lot. One is it's a very attractive business model for merchants. Recurring revenue is powerful. Being able to, some offer monthly boxes or aggregate orders into the first of the month or particular date and it becomes very predictable, helps with fulfillment, and helps with predictability and inventory. Baked into it, there's an ongoing relationship to customers. So what that did is attracted a lot of merchants to it. Maybe, maybe too many. We don't need to subscribe to, I think toenail clippers or something like that. I don't think anyone needs that. But there are a lot of great places that...

Phillip: [00:12:47] That's a visual. Yeah, that's.

Thomas: [00:12:50] I don't know why that's my go-to product that you don't need.

Phillip: [00:12:54] I don't know either. We should workshop that a little bit later.

Thomas: [00:12:58] Yeah. Different podcast. But not all products are best for subscription and consumers will become savvy to that. What's really going on here? What kind of relationship are they trying to have with me and what's a real price? And we want to be mindful about those things. But as it grew in popularity, subscription, so did the tech space software and platforms and their integrations with others. Loyalty programs started to become synonymous where you can reward subscribers at a different pace than non-subscribers or at different tiers and rates. You can offer really unique experiences like gated content for subscribers, how-to videos, and messages from founders or celebrity founders or influencers. You can offer early access to products or limited releases. [00:13:57] What's baked into subscribers is they are your most loyal customers. They already are by leaps and bounds, so there should be rewards for those. So the ecosystem grew dramatically. And with that, so did agencies, and so did people that understood how to use it and implement how to use it. And the tech space got pretty crowded, too. So there's definitely been some kind of riding of those waters that have kind of started to even out. But it's still an absolutely great business model and there are still better ways to implement it than others. [00:14:35]

Phillip: [00:14:36] But let's sort of get in a little bit on that growth trajectory because I think growth, especially in the agency realm, is sort of hard to come by. I think it really depends a lot on talent.

Brian: [00:16:06] Hmm. True.

Phillip: [00:16:06] You know, the trajectory and the resiliency of a particular capability that you have. So it's like the right place at the right time with the right people. You know, I think Scoutside before the merger with Bear Group had touted an Inc 5000 designation, that feels like a thing you kind of have to architect for as far as growth which I think a lot of times is just out of the control of the agency or is it more in control of the agency based on... You're Head of Strategy, so I'm guessing you probably have an eye for this and sort of thinking about where the world will be in some period of time as opposed to reacting to what your customers are demanding from you right now. Maybe think a little bit about that. How do you plan out the growth and how do you make the team build intentionally as an agency rather than just reacting to what the market is asking?

Thomas: [00:16:59] Well, admittedly, I'm a founder. I'm an entrepreneur. So [00:17:05] I didn't found an agency focused on Inc 5000 or you know I think we were 346. And I mean, that wasn't a goal at founding. Really, I became passionate about commerce and eComm. I had an experience building the in-store apps and it left me wanting more. This didn't feel like the promise of technology that as a whatever elder millennial. This didn't feel like the promise of technology that I signed up for. I wanted something better. [00:17:44] I wanted to help more merchants, and I wanted to do that at at an increasingly higher caliber. So I bootstrapped it. I did the best at whatever was right in front of me every day. That was it. I mean, it really was that simple. And yeah, I mean, there's plenty of luck, no question. And there's timing and there's good execution and having good people that you can count on. I mean, quite literally, as soon as the business made enough money to pay me, I hired someone. That was it. And I did that for a long time. And we continued to grow in that fashion, I mean, very, very organically, but also quickly. But certainly Covid ramped things up. eCommerce is on a forever positive trajectory, but it just had a quick spike over that period. And all of these things come together to create these really terrific opportunities. And I had a peer said, "Have you thought about Inc, have you thought about Inc 5000?" I said, "Not really. Do they ask you? I don't know how this even works," and started to look into it. And we were really close and it's a revenue based goal is the measurement and that that felt a little interesting. It's like, okay, well now am I bragging about revenue? And this peer helped me understand. Absolutely not. No, that's a flawed way of thinking about it. What it means is that's just the metric they use because you can't fudge it. It's a very finite measurement, revenue. But what it means is you have created enough trust and enough expertise to collect, to have that many people pay you that amount of money for your services. And that's extremely celebratory. And so when phrased that way, yeah, we then kind of set out to hit that goal with a little more intention, but still quite organically, always doing the best thing that we could possibly right in front of us.

Brian: [00:20:07] It sounds like it stems from passion to start. You can't go into it...

Thomas: [00:20:12] Yeah.

Brian: [00:20:15] The Inc became a way for you to help gauge where you were at or be able to have a public gauge as to where you were at. But it wasn't really the true driving force behind doing what you did. In fact, you said it earlier in the podcast. You got into this because you took your skills and you found an industry where it was like, "Oh, I enjoy employing them here." And that seems like that's been the thrust of like the growth of the business over the years.

Phillip: [00:20:48] It's kind of hard to fake the passion in the space and sort of commitment to wanting to continue to improve the work you're doing and to stay in it for a long period of time, which is what I think is actually necessary to build a brand. You have to endure for a long period of time through many market cycles and through many changes in technology. And that means [00:21:09] you have to be resilient and that means you have to be dedicated to the problem space. I think that's where a lot of agency owners struggle is they let the happenstance of the customers that walk through the door dictate the directionality of the business as opposed to them being obsessed with a particular problem and trying to solve it. Ultimately, [00:21:35] you know, I think Inc 5000, Gartner Magic Quadrant, the Forrester Wave, they're not exact equivalents, but they're all a form of trust badge and a trust badge, I think, at the end of the day isn't the thing that makes people choose one thing over another. It helps to validate the decision that they've already made in their minds to cement the fact that you are making a qualified decision based on some third party criterion that I think a lot of us don't understand the inputs into, to be honest.

Thomas: [00:22:03] What was also really surprising, but maybe obvious, is the team really got excited. The team at Scoutside, all the employees were really excited about this and we celebrated and we had a cake and we had balloons and we had a cake with the number on it.

Phillip: [00:22:16] That's great.

Thomas: [00:22:16] Yeah. And we recorded it. We recorded the reaction as it was announced. And you know, that is way beyond a number. I mean, any company's beyond any one person. It's all about the team.

Phillip: [00:22:32] Of course.

Thomas: [00:22:32] And so I hadn't really weighed in what that would do for the team. But it also validates all of their work and hard work, which was invaluable.

Brian: [00:22:44] So true. Yeah, I love that. I love the focus on the employee and using that to show them, "Hey, look, we're doing good work. Really. Genuinely." Everyone recognizes it and it's really cool. I think another question I have is, as you now are making the transition to Bear, I'm assuming that this is going to..s And you're changing your role. This is going to change the focus. This is going to change sort of how you fit into the ecosystem as a business. Tell us how as Bear and Scoutside come together, what's going to come out on the other side? What's this new world?

Thomas: [00:23:26] Well, I mean, short and sweet. Something really terrific. Yeah, it was, again, not a goal of mine. I never actually had a goal on paper that was at some point, you know, you should sell. It's all about what is the best thing for the company and its employees. And what we were staring at at our size, I mean, this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, of course, is at about 18 people, it's an interesting size. What we really need is arguably seven more people. We need, you know, account managers. We need a bigger sales team, we need a larger strategy team, and more designers and of course, into engineering and QA and the need at which we needed to grow to continue to do our best work and achieve this path we were on was not one in which I could achieve alone. I mean, the idea of bootstrapping and organic growth becomes really challenging at sizes. And that for me seemed like that size is either we as a business need to take a huge risk to start rapidly hiring up at which point you lose a little bit of control. You're making a lot of... Trying to grow 6 or 7 people in a year six months just creates a lot of risk. And so I'm looking at that as a problem that needs to be solved. And how do we want to solve this? Is this do we want to hire against it and take this risk or is there a faster way that is a little less risky? And that's where acquisition and merging kind of started coming onto the table. Conversely, from Bear Group, this amazing engineering group, an amazing delivery team, twice the size of Scoutside with just those two services which is highly notable, is thinking about something similar in the sense of growth. How do we grow? How does Bear grow? What does growth look like there? Do we just want to be engineering and stay in that swim lane or do we grow services? And of course, they focused on the latter and started thinking about, "Okay, well, how do we help clients more?" That's it and Scoutside did it for a little bit too. We were dev only and engineering only in the earlier days and what I quickly realized, and Bear did too, is you get to control a lot less. You have a lot less to do with the actual output of the business. Yes, you can be better at building the platform and developing it, but are you actually impacting the revenue? I mean, if it's bad code, you're negatively impacting it. If it's great code, you're just neutral. So how do you have a more meaningful impact on these relationships? How do you control more of the future and the outcome of your work with your clients and partners? And so they made a very conscious decision that that's strategy, design, analytics and then followed that, of course, with incredible engineering and delivery. And that's where, you know, this kind of courtship came about between Bear and Scoutside. We sometimes jokingly called it Cub Scouts, which is beyond adorable. And then ultimately this really great marriage. I met the founder of Bear who is retiring. Greg Bear. And spent a lot of time with him. And it was really obvious that he grew a business just like me on the same principles. Good morals. Great business ethics and personal ethics. And family matters and work-life balance and doing a really, really great job at what's in front of them. And that made it really easy knowing that that is what this founder... Because culture is built from the top down. So if this founder is this way in his personal life and if Greg is this way in his personal life and his business life and I am too, then this is going to be a natural and great marriage. Another great benefit of the merger is getting to merge two amazing teams. So I mentioned earlier that Scoutside was about 1618 people. Bear group is about double that. And so between those two, we have really great producers and executors, but also fabulous levels of management and leaders. And we get to blend both companies together to be way more powerful. I was mentioning that Greg Bear, the Founder, is retiring and taking over in his place is the new President, Travis Caldwell, who's absolutely fabulous. He was the VP of Operations at Bear Group. He's been there I think eight years, something like that. They have employees that have been there for a long time. All the resources there at Bear Group, a great leadership team through the delivery. Monique and through the engineering with Jay and then of course Scoutside bringing with it its great players as well and really excited about what this can mean for existing Scoutside clients, existing Bear clients, and even, of course, new clients.

Phillip: [00:30:13] I'd like to kind of get into the maturity curve of the agency now, too. You know, Brian and I spent a long time in an agency. We helped to grow and exited one that was really nice. Saw it from the early days of maturity where we professed capabilities. So early on we had a lot of things that we did. I spent ten years at that business, so I saw a lot in the space of ten years. Brian left for Amazon for a spell. Brian doesn't get to weigh in. {laughter}

Brian: [00:31:37] You say spell. You mean a dot and a dash.

Phillip: [00:31:42] Well, then you went somewhere. I don't know. You made a little U-turn. You came back. It was great. Yeah. We had capabilities and that got us far down the path. We had these services that we evolved out of capabilities that I think also got us a little further. After the merger, after the acquisition, we realized that there was something above that. There were solutions and offerings, and the way that you take your services and adapt them to industry had a lot to do with the way that you market and speak to a given prospect and the way that you win prior business. We had a saying that to clients is a conflict. Three is a practice. Where are you on that sort of continuum? It sounds like you're kind of getting into the solution, offering territory or maybe you're far beyond that, because I think that's the other delta here is that the Covid era eCommerce agency, a lot's changed in the last few years. And dev is, I think, potentially a threatened thing when you have no code solutions, plug-ins galore, and AI at your back. And most of these ecosystems are now walled gardens where you really can't touch a lot of the inner workings of the things that move the needle the most. So yeah, maybe kind of talk a little bit about that future casting, what the future of that solution offerings looks like, and how you're going to continue to grow in your maturity.

Thomas: [00:33:19] So there's most certainly AI and no code solutions, low code solutions, and plug-ins. And I mean really what we're talking about is rising trends in the industry. And that's any entrepreneur, any founder, any CEO, head of strategy needs to be clued into those things. I mean, we were when we tapped into subscriptions. We were when we did a lot of headless work. You want to monitor trends, at least our philosophy is to look at trends constantly and try to identify ones that are here to stay and that actually have a meaningful impact to business, not because they're trendy, which is very much a thing, and then create unique solutions around that. So of course,  [00:34:16]will AI replace us all? I don't know. But for the time being, it can very much help us do our jobs. So it's important that we embrace these things and figure out ways to leverage them for value and then look at the overall market trends as well. I [00:34:32] mean, what is happening right now in the wake of the cookie apocalypse and ROAS is down and ad spend is up is budgets are tighter.

Phillip: [00:34:45] Yeah.

Thomas: [00:34:45] What merchants need right now is more from their current sites. There's a little less interest in full redesigns and rebuilds. I mean, they're out there. We want to make sure that you're on the right platform for growth today. And then what we do is come in with data and best practices, make meaningful and intelligent changes to your site, measure that, and move on to the next. Whatever test is successful, A/B test, we make live and we move on to the next. And I mean this is a way that measurably impacts positively our clients and merchants. It keeps us accountable and it keeps the relationship clean and happy. There's less room for emotion. There's no room for guessing. And that is what we're seeing be very successful, not just in "what's selling," but more importantly, what's helping merchants. That's what we're in the business of. And so we're seeing a lot in CRO and analytics.

Phillip: [00:35:58] Yeah. And also that's the natural progression of things. I think there's an evolutionary order to the types of solutions that merchants need, and the growing need of an agency is that a lot of work is being started by an agency but not operated by an agency. And these days, a lot of that becomes sort of turnkey or autopilot. There are so many tools today that just solve so much of this now. I'm an old guy in the ecosystem. It used to be that these things required a lot of care and feeding, not as much as it used to.

Brian: [00:36:42] You actually had a pretty similar path in some ways to Thomas, with your roots in engineering and your application.

Phillip: [00:36:49] I didn't want to step on Thomas's story there. I have a very, very similar progression. And what I found is that the, I don't know if you identify with this, Thomas, but what I found is the having a background in engineering kind of gave me a Rosetta Stone for translating requirements to a lot of diverse people as stakeholders and businesses, which is what I think most people would never ever admit this, but agencies really do two things really well. One, it gives you a dollar amount to become accountable for so that you actually have an end date to a project. So like, I'm going to pay money. It's like a personal trainer. I'm just going to pay money because I need to get this thing done and I'm never going to get it done otherwise. The other thing is you're like a Babelfish. You're going to take the thing I'm saying and everyone's going to understand it at the end. If you do your job really well, my customer is going to understand it. All these integrated partners are going to have to understand it and you're going to find a way to make this translated requirement of either subscription or growth or, you know, optimization. You take my requirements and you're going to translate them into customer experiences or playbooks or CX interfaces, whatever it might be. That's what I found as being like a superpower is, well, being a developer, you kind of get the worst of all of that. Just very honestly, you're at the receiving end of a lot of bad communication. You have to learn how to make it good communication.

Thomas: [00:38:20] That's right. Yeah. At the end of the day, I mean, I'll admit I'm not the best engineer and I'm not even trained in design. I have a love for it and a passion. But, you know, it takes me ten times as long and it's half as good as our designers. But the background allows me to intelligently hire and communicate across all these divisions and seek out. I mean, I know what is great code. I know what is great design and I know what the market's doing and that's who I am. And that's of course, important to identify early and and hire against. And that's what we've done.

Brian: [00:39:00] You're like an Editor-in-Chief for commerce. I love that.

Phillip: [00:39:05] Thomas, your final form is to start a niche media business that serves eCommerce brands with philosophy psychology. Also, we're already competing with you because I think the website says future of commerce in big H1 text. So we're all coming for you one day. Fighting for that top ten. That Google page one.

Brian: [00:39:29] Speaking of the future of commerce and also you're just thinking about, Phillip, you were talking about the evolutionary aspect to this. There's there's a predictable element here to some degree about sort of the next steps. And Thomas, I'm sure you're seeing shades of this in your agency. And I have to say, Phillip and I talk about this all the time. It's like it was amazing being in an agency because you've got a really incredible look at what a very broad set of merchants were doing across industries. And so you could use that to help sort of guide your overall understanding of where the market was going and what was important next. And so I'm curious from your perspective, now that we're out of this and we're on a full-time media, what is coming next? I'm sure you have a really unique view into this.

Thomas: [00:40:20] I think... Yeah, well, I'm supposed to. And I do. I think zero and first-party data continue to be extremely important to a business objective. And there are these sayings, "Do I sell a product or am I a technology company? Am I a data company?" And that's a bit much. But most certainly we're looking for ways to meaningfully engage with audiences. And that's it. I mean that's what we are after. That is the purest form of commerce. It is 100% successful. We are great and lucky to work with fabulous merchants that sell needed and good product. So when we start with that premise the rest is how do we in a meaningful way engage with this audience? An example is we're working with this great water filter company and of course, not only they're making water safer, but they're also reducing plastic. So, okay, let's roll out a loyalty program that turns points into plastic bottles saved. So now you're looking at a number that represents your positive impact on the environment and you're using that number daily to interact with the site. And so it's front of mind and it's creating these moments that really create a symbiotic relationship between merchant and customer. And it's actually not that hard. You just have to care and that has to be an objective. So when we're engaging with our clients and then figuring out how to engage with their customers, we're looking for zero and first-party data to bring into house to then reach out to them in ways that help them. If we see that you're in a particular zip code, we're going to recommend a particular water filter that is more helpful for what's found in your water, in your area is a great example. [00:42:23] We're continuing to see value in tying content and commerce. So not only do we want to be subject matter experts, but we want our clients to be subject matter experts. So no longer just offering a product, but kind of owning the domain of knowledge around that product. [00:42:44] If it's diapers, then how do you become an authoritative figure on year zero through five of childhood?

Phillip: [00:42:54] Yeah.

Thomas: [00:42:55] What do parents need? If they're buying diapers, you know their parents, what else do they need? So you can start from these founding blocks that just do a lot more than simply sell a product, but actually create a relationship. And that's a spot that that we're seeing a lot of success with.

Phillip: [00:43:15] Well, and that is the future of commerce, according to Thomas McCutchen, who's now the Head of Strategy over at Bear Group. And I think it's been wonderful having you. Where can people find you and find Bear Group these days on the Internet?

Thomas: [00:43:31] You can find us at BearGroup.com on the Web and LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/company/bear-group.

Phillip: [00:43:41] Awesome. If you believe that you've encountered the future of commerce and it shapes up to what Thomas just outlined, you'll have heard it here first. Thank you for listening to this episode of Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce properties. We have five podcasts and three newsletters to satisfy your deepest insights. You can get them at FutureCommerce.com. Brian signaled to me there are six. There are six podcasts. But Brian, it's the end of the show. Just let me get through the end of the show.

Brian: [00:44:07] Alright. Fine.

Phillip: [00:44:08] And if you want to subscribe, we can be in your inbox three times a week, keeping you up to date on everything that you need to see around the next corner. That's FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. Thank you for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.