Kevin Lawton

We say, we say warehouses are sexy.

If you can see my t-shirt.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think great point there about the average person, right?

Sure, a warehouse doesn't sound too sexy and it's essentially, you know, four walls of concrete with some cardboard boxes inside is probably like the general impression in society, right?

But it is such a critical point within all of our daily lives to be able to deliver the goods that we consume and utilize.

not only out of desire to consume goods, but also needs, right?

To get those critical things that we need, like food, drink, emergency supplies, medical supplies, they all run through a warehouse at some point.

It's really important to highlight that.

And I think the people that need to leverage them in their business, it is definitely a tool that the better you can leverage the warehouse and optimize the warehouse, the better it can be for your businesses.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are some definite indicators for businesses to look at.

Do we do the fulfillment distribution ourselves or do we hire a third party and outsource that?

I think it's interesting because there's almost kind of like this two different waves.

I think in the beginning, right, if you're just starting something, it's like...

too soon to unless you're, you know, unless you have really predictable growth that you're going to have and you have a lot of money behind you to push that product or brand or whatever it is, you know, the typical person that is, you know, going to just start a e-commerce thing because, you know, maybe they saw like on

TikTok or something like oh you can get these things and you can sell them online passive income right when you're starting to do that it's too soon I think to look at 3pl like you should ship yourself one because a lot of 3pls they're hesitant to work with startups because there's not proven kind of market there and they don't want to bring in product just to have it sit there they don't necessarily make so much money on storage right they want to pick and pack and ship that

product so you're gonna have difficulty there but also like you need to understand that part of your business right and the more you can understand that when you get some growth in volume you know when you start to get 100 couple hundred orders a month steadily like then when you move to a 3pl and it gets beyond you know just an hour or two of a work a day for you as individual that's when you start to make that transition to the 3pl but because you've been shipping it yourself you have a better understanding of what needs to go into that and you can better translate to that

3PL, which then creates a better relationship, better partnership with that outsourced party.

So I think that's important in the beginning.

But then as you continue to scale, there are certain points where maybe it would make sense to bring it back in house, right, where you can hire a team and things of that nature.