Revolutionizing HR and Supply Chain Management: Tom Gustafson on Navigating Business and Technological Trends

Embark on a transformative journey through the dynamic realms of human resources and supply chain management with Tom Gustafson, the visionary behind Consilium. Tom's illustrious path has seen him revamp Bed Bath and Beyond's supply chain operations and concoct innovative employment strategies at Sephora. Our exchange traverses the trials of business inception, emphasizing the craft of sales and the integration of AI technologies such as ChatGPT. Deliberate with us on the value of tools like LinkedIn's Sales Navigator, Tom's personal anecdotes on employment inclusivity, and how his consultancy is shaping the future of strategic business processes.

As we cast our gaze forward, the conversation steers into the seismic shifts disrupting the HR landscape, where e-commerce expansion and labor automation are altering the workforce. Tom elucidates on the necessity of flexible scheduling, highlights the emergence of daily pay, and underscores the crucial role of diversity within the modern workplace. His insights into the burgeoning demand for remote and hybrid work environments are a clarion call for companies to adapt or risk obsolescence. With Tom's guidance, any business leader or enthusiast can navigate the technological wave and harness the latent power in their workforce. Tune in for a stimulating session filled with expert advice and forward-thinking strategies.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm happy to be here with Tom Gustavson, founder and principal of Consilium. Welcome, tom.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Thanks for having me, dylan, glad to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Yes, thanks for your time. I'm looking forward to it. So, to get us started, can you give us a little bit about your history and your background and how you ended up where you are today?

Speaker 2: 0:31

Sure, I'd be happy to. So I grew up in Minnesota so I had Best Buy right in my backyard Big retailer corporate headquarters there and I started working there in their supply chain organization and human resources and honestly, ever since then I've worked in that department for all kinds of big box retailers. So 20 plus years in human resources, supporting supply chain for Best Buy, gap, sephora and most recently Bed Bath and Beyond. And I've kind of found a love for supply chain just because it is kind of an unrecognized part of an organization, because usually when retail it's everything sales and storefront right Supply chain is behind the scenes getting goods to and from stores and to customers.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Especially in today's world where e-commerce gets to be more and more prevalent, supply chain is becoming more of a recognizable division within the organization. Now, especially during COVID when supply chain kept going when everyone else started working from home and someone had to get their goods in the economy moving and that really fell on supply chain. So I just kind of fell in love with that. Recently I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to help them with their turnaround efforts with a $250 million supply chain turnaround and obviously they filed for Chapter 11. So I kind of thought of an opportunity here. Maybe I can consult for a little while and try that for a little bit, and so far I'm enjoying pieces of it.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Okay, amazing, and can you walk me through your overall strategy for Consilium and what exactly you do there?

Speaker 2: 2:11

Yeah, so what I essentially do is I'm a generalist, which means in the human resources world, my role is really to take a lot of the deliverables that come from the corporate office, so to speak, and push them into the organization. So, whether it's systems changes, whether it's maybe it's diversity and inclusion initiatives, it's really working in the front lines with the business partners, and then obviously you have a lot of other things. So I dabble a little bit of everything. Expert of nothing, if that makes sense. So what I do is I do a subtractional work with companies, which is essentially stepping in and leading an HR part of an organization for maybe a smaller company that may not have the budget for an executive type role yet until they grow up, where they can maybe have that.

Speaker 2: 2:58

I also do just connecting vendors with employers, such as staffing agencies, such as gig working platforms. But the one thing I really enjoy doing is working with companies to employ large numbers of people with disabilities, which I stumbled upon doing when I was at Sephora, where we had a big chunk of the workforce where people with disabilities. It was equal work for equal pay, very rare, very innovative. Most companies don't do things like this and we did a lot of work around studying that and sharing that with the community to try to get other companies to do the same thing. So I figured I'm going to try my hand at that, and so I have been working with a few clients doing that work, which has actually been really fine.

Speaker 1: 3:44

Okay, that's amazing to hear. I love to hear those types of things. And what has been the biggest challenge for you First of in starting your business and running it? What are the biggest challenges you face? I?

Speaker 2: 4:01

think one of the biggest challenges is the sales piece. I Think everybody that steps into a consultant role because what you realize is that you have to wear all the hats, so you have to be the expert at something. You also have to do the back office things. You have to do the billing, you have to do the tracking of ours the sales piece of it right, because there's a trick to that right. I think you have to have a pretty good network. Linkedin is used a lot For the type of business that I'm in anyway, where you want to get the attention of mid-sized to big companies. So really utilizing your network and trying to understand what companies are looking for and where they need help and where you can insert yourself into that, that project work if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And Are they? Have there been any specific tactics or tools that have helped you get to where you are?

Speaker 2: 4:59

There's. I've stumbled across a couple. First of all, I've learned that LinkedIn is really it is a great facilitator of networking. It's really quite amazing the different tools that exist in there that I didn't realize until I started this work. So the sales navigator piece, which is an opportunity you pay a monthly fee In which it's not very expensive for what you're getting out of it and you basically are able to connect with people based on their job titles, their function, their area, their region. You can essentially filter all kinds of different people by role, by company, and you can get it to the number that you need. The other part of there is a software out there as well. You know that I utilize call this ferris, which you can essentially connect to LinkedIn and you can run automation in order to communicate with With a lot of potential clients. I found that to be pretty helpful.

Speaker 1: 5:57

I'm still learning a little bit about it, but it's a really, really cool piece of technology. Yeah, 100%. I also make use of sales nav and we've got our own different tool that we use and it's, it's so effective.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Probably know a lot more than I knew about it, that's for sure.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Yeah, it's. It's amazing what you can do with technology and Are you making use of any AI technologies to help automate or Speed up your business processes?

Speaker 2: 6:25

Yep, I have just I've just learned about chat GPT. I think that is an amazing tool and I use it not to write things for me but, for example, when I want to put something out there around. Here are the big challenges and staffing. Today I know what those are just from experience. But what's nice when you use chat GPT? It basically organizes your thoughts for you, and that's what I love about it, because I there may be things in there I may not agree with or I just might need it just to jog some of my, my thought process, if that makes sense. But there's so much out there that you can utilize and I'm still learning about chat GPT, to be honest, but so far I've only used it just a couple of times, because I want to make sure that when I do put things out there, that they're my own thoughts and not something I'm utilizing AI AI for.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Yeah, 100%. The thing with chat GPT is it basically told you what the average person wants to hear, which Oftentimes is good, based on what you input. But let's just be careful with sharing the stuff that it puts out there, like. I like to use it as well for my own thoughts and that type of thing, because you can literally write down a couple bullet points and it'll write out a whole Paragraph on the topic, which is great. But then when you, when you want it to write emails for you, it gets a little bit. I Don't know how to explain it, but you can kind of tell it's being written by a robot and not a human, and I'm trying to shy away from that.

Speaker 2: 7:56

Yeah, I was playing with it a little bit and I was teaching my 12 year old or showing it to him and what it was funny because he said he did it was a lot. We started with how the United States started. I was just trying to do it with his, with his background. So it was interesting because then and then I asked it to communicate Can you write it in a way that a for his purposes? So we understood. I said can you write it in a way that a kindergartener could understand? Chat GBT literally did that through and spelling errors and it was really funny to see. So it was great for me to see as well, because that's was very eye-opening for me to understand what this tool can do.

Speaker 1: 8:32

Yeah, it's actually. It's insane, and once you get like deeper into how to engineer the prompts correctly, you can do some crazy things with it.

Speaker 2: 8:42

It's amazing. I don't makes me wonder what our future is gonna look like for the tool like that, yeah that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1: 8:49

I think it's gonna be in for a wild couple years coming. With the technological Evolution we're at, it's gonna be insane.

Speaker 2: 8:56

I think you're right and I would love to talk to more people that use this, just to understand how they use it.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Yeah, exactly, I'm happy to chat to you a bit more offline once we done here for short, and so back to conciliam. I want to know what metrics or KPIs do you use to measure the success of your business?

Speaker 2: 9:18

I Speaking the being that I'm still fairly new. What I do is I think it's just important to look at just top-line sales and then what you're. For me, as a consultant, it's really important to look at how many, how much time you're spending to get to those numbers, because that's one of the things when you're starting out new like this is, I found myself, because you're trying to Put your business out there, I'd find myself providing free advice, and I think that's important as A business model when you're starting your business up, because you want to share what you know right and it, yes, you could put little nuggets out there that people can understand, like, okay, it sounds like he understands that that concept. So, to answer your question, one of the things is is that you want to make sure that you're Not giving away too much free advice, but you want to make sure that you're billing your bill rates right and that you're Competitive with the market. And then, obviously, with consulting, there's not a whole lot of Expenses and things like that, which is kind of nice. That's the nice part.

Speaker 2: 10:23

Until tax time comes around, right, they have to do all your deductions, but for the most part it's just primarily sales. And then I try and these aren't financial metrics that you're looking for, but one of the things I do is I try to reach out to five people every single day, and I think that that's an industry best practice, no matter what sales you're in is what I'm learning, because what happens is you build up not only a network of people, but even if you just connect with 25 people a week, you may not get anybody, but moving into week two, you might be on the 50th person, but you hit that that one person that could be a really great Partner or client for you. So that's what I'm learning is that you can't be this, you can't be discouraged by all the nose, because it's very normal. So that took a little bit of time for you to get my head around.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, I've been in sales for like seven years now and One thing you need to learn to accept is nose, because it comes with the territory. Yeah, if everyone said yes, I'd probably be retired, I'd probably be retired. That's how I think you just got. You got to have thick skin and understand the nose of part of the game, and it's a good thing when you finally accept it. Yeah, and it's true, exactly. And what metrics are you looking to improve, let's say, over the next six months? What metrics are you actively looking to improve?

Speaker 2: 11:51

For me. The number of clients, I think is a metric that I know it sounds so basic, but I think the number of clients I think is most important. There's that and then it's, I think, expanding my network. So the more people I talk to, the more people I connect with. They might know somebody that might be able to refer business to me. I think those two important metrics are really important, or what's key to get your business Up and started for, for an independent contractor like like, like I am, yeah, I couldn't agree more on that.

Speaker 1: 12:26

and when do you see your industry heading in the next, let's say, five years? Obviously, we're at this crazy time with technological evolution, so what do you see changing and where do you see the industry heading?

Speaker 2: 12:41

Sure. So when you say industry, I'll answer it in terms of just the human resources aspect in a supply chain organization, because that's really my expertise I would tell you that people that work in distribution centers and supply chain by the way, the jobs are becoming more and more as more people buy e-com, right, think of Amazon, they have 100 and some distribution centers, and that's just one company, right, and these are almost a million square foot buildings. I mean, these are huge footprints around the country and they keep going up. On top of that, these companies are also learning that it's hard to find labor. So now what they're doing is they're going to invest more in automation so that way they don't need as many people to process orders and volumes and so forth and move goods from goods to consumers. So what you're starting? On top of that, you have employees that come in every day in this workforce that when they look around, they see a lot of people working from home. They don't have that option typically. So what I'm seeing is that, okay, but they also know that they want to stay in that industry. So now they're looking at companies saying, well, can I get a flexible schedule at least, which is now demanding that these companies have software where people can use their phone, for example, and pick their schedules, kind of like something you'd see with Uber or with Lyft. Something like that.

Speaker 2: 14:08

50 some percent of the workforce today of the total US workforce is a contractor.

Speaker 2: 14:14

That is a very interesting statistic that is completely skyrocketed over the course of the last five, 10 years, and the reason for that?

Speaker 2: 14:22

You can think of Uber, you can think of companies like Uber and Lyft, and I can't. They are escaping me, my work choice, some of these other ones that are out there for getting placed into these organizations for just a shift. So companies are learning from them as well. So you're going to start seeing daily pay. That's another thing that's going to start to be important because there's going to be demand, because Uber, lyft, myworkchoicecom all these companies can pay people daily, which is starting to pressure companies to do the same thing for employees that do the same type of work. So it is going to be very interesting to see, because the future of work in these buildings is going to start demanding more flexibility and workplaces that really value diversity, because of these buildings have so much diversity in them, which you're starting to see now. Anyway, I think companies are really starting to grab hold of that and really driving that to be an important part of their business models.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Yeah, 100%. Even for me I'm in South Africa and the whole mindset of the workforce and how we approach getting jobs and everything it's shifted completely since the pandemic. Because we all want hybrid or remote work, because it's just we don't need to commute to work. We're saving like an hour and a half on the commutes, we're saving time getting ready. We don't need to. We can wear pajama, pants and slippers and it's just more comfortable.

Speaker 1: 15:59

So it has been a huge shift and I think I would tell you I just think companies that aren't adapting to that are going to fall behind, because pretty much everyone these days wants that type of work environment.

Speaker 2: 16:15

Yeah, I would tell you that I actually miss working in an office. I like that. I like being around people. I'm probably one of the rare ones out there that to work from home.

Speaker 1: 16:25

Yeah, I can admit, like the camaraderie and the office vibes, I do miss that, but it's outweighed by everything else I love. I'm more productive at home, I just love it.

Speaker 2: 16:42

Yeah, a lot of people do and that's great. You know. That's to your point. Companies have to start learning and understanding if people want to work from home, if they're productive. When I was at Best Buy 20 years ago, they started a program called Rowe results-oriented work environment and they were innovators in this space. They were the first company to do basically this. So once you've, it didn't matter how many hours you're putting into your job. Output is what mattered and that's what they measured, and they were really kind of the trailblazers in this space. It was really fun to be there to watch how they did that.

Speaker 1: 17:13

Yeah, that's awesome and that makes the most sense to me. So I started my career as a real estate agent. So it was pretty similar. No one was micromanaging me, I was just based on performance. Albeit, they didn't pay me a salary, so they didn't have any leg to stand on micromanaging me. But that's how I got into the workforce, is choosing my own hours, and it was the work I put in, was the work I got out. So, yeah, I love it.

Speaker 2: 17:44

Which is great. I think that's. There's a lot of like. Recruiting is the same way. I ever saw a recruiting team and I would tell them I don't care if you're out in the boat, as long as you have a computer and a phone, you're good to go. Yeah, exactly Because, as long as the applicant flow is coming and more do I care where you sit. Right yeah, If it makes you productive, fine with me.

Speaker 1: 18:02

Yeah, 100%. I also wanted to ask you do you have any partnerships or collaborations that have helped you form your business?

Speaker 2: 18:17

Yes, I have. I have a couple of through networking, in-person networking, what that's. The other thing I would add is that going to in-person networking events is, I think, really key. I've met a couple of organizations that have we've created a partnership where I essentially helped connect them with companies. So, based on my background, I've worked with a lot of people that are executives that have gone to other companies, for example, not only at the companies that I've worked at, but they leave companies and they'll go to health systems or they'll go to a different industry. So, just connecting them with this partner that I'm working with and staffing for IT, that's what I'm doing right now as a key partnership.

Speaker 2: 19:01

I also do the same thing for an organization that does kind of similar to Uber or Lyft. It's basically on demand work that specializes in supply chain, and so I'm trying to connect companies with this group, which, by the way, is if companies aren't utilizing these types of business units yet, these types of businesses, yet my opinion is they're going to fall behind. You have to at least get in there and practice and get your own systems able to work with these companies. You're going to fall behind and I just I've always done that in my past I've always challenged my teams to really practice or play with technology. Get in there. It's not always going to work, but if anything, we learn, and I think that's almost just as important.

Speaker 1: 19:50

Yeah, 100%, 100%. And, tom, we are unfortunately out of time. But before we go, what advice would you like to give to other business owners looking to succeed in this ever-changing technological world?

Speaker 2: 20:06

I think it's what I just mentioned. You and I talked about touchdown a little bit there. I think getting out there and just trying and playing with new things, ask questions and be curious Just obviously managing large teams and large organizations as something I've always told my team is be curious, ask a lot of questions and, in terms and I would just applying that in the technology space is really important. If you don't know what chat GPT is, ask somebody, have them, show it to you. I'm just using that as an example Because when I look at that I think, wow, this is the next Google in terms of just blowing up how we think about technology. So I think that would be my biggest advice is just getting out there, exposing yourself to technology and asking a lot of questions.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, I completely agree with that, and thank you for being on the show, tom. I really appreciate your time. What is the best way for people to reach out to Tom Gustafson if you have any offers for them or if they're looking to follow your journey?

Speaker 2: 21:10

Yeah, linkedin is probably the best spot to find me. My profile is pretty pretty. What's the word I'm looking for? There's a lot out there and I would say there's a lot of content that people can see, where you can see kind of the work that I do, and a lot of it's pretty inspirational and I think you'll enjoy seeing some of these collateral that's out there on LinkedIn. Yeah, amazing. Thank you, tom, you bet. Thanks, dylan.