SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to the Futures Ventures Podcast. I'm Skelly with Clarity. On today's podcast episode, we're joined by Omar Sachoon. Omar is a serial entrepreneur and a technology operator with a deep background in e-commerce, fintech, and retail infrastructure. He first became widely known as the co-founder of Team Buy and DealFind, two of Canada's earliest and largest daily deal platforms, which collectively scaled to more than 4 million members. Since then, he has worked across digital banking, merchant finance, and commerce technology, including leadership roles at Ario and Purpose Financial. Today, Omar is focusing on building and scaling Brand Effects. In Brand Affacts portfolio, our companies are to shoppy, whack, jack, and go CXM. I'm super excited about today's conversation, kind of unpack what lies ahead for CPG brands and how AI is enabling this. Omar, welcome to the stage. I'm super excited for the conversation because you're really at the at the call's edge at the at the front lines in terms of what's happening in CPG and how do big brands get in front of consumers. So why don't we start off by just thank you for having me? For those that don't know who Omar is, which is probably not very many, uh, people that don't know, but like for those that don't, who is Omar? How did you come to do what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

So uh it's it's a it's a good question. I think it's a you know that there's been a uh two decades of um building different uh uh call it careers or companies, uh but I think in the last few years I finally found the the perfect intersection of past experience, uh which ultimately you know we do in our 20s and 30s and then figure it out later in that in our 40s and and later on and and zoom in on what we think we're good at. So um, you know, as as as you you know you laid out a bit of my background, uh not to bore the uh the audience with the with the details, but you know, my career started essentially as a very boring accounting uh out of out of university. I was an internal auditor for a big corporate uh you know conglomerate around the world. Um and and later on I moved over to uh management consulting down in the US, so a uh subsidiary of Boston Consulting Group, uh where we focused on um mid-tier uh companies, some public, some private, uh, but really focused on CPG. Uh so that combination, call it of accounting and management consulting, which is a mix of finance and strategy, etc., uh was very, very helpful in establishing a call it a uh quantitative approach to to business, is just looking at business through numbers. Um but I always had a creative side or a passion, or at least I thought I am a creative guy. Uh so I got into you know my first startup in in 2009, uh, which was uh team by as you mentioned. Uh and it was a you know, back then it was almost fashionable uh to build a marketplace or an e-commerce company. Uh, you know, fast forward seven, eight years, uh that world kind of crashed. But you know, the learnings from um uh I mean building a company, obviously, uh raising uh uh a lot of money uh from VCs, from private equity. Uh, but more importantly, call it the the the foundation of e-commerce uh gives you something that is harder to replicate in in a brick and mortar setting because you can measure everything. So, as a numbers guy, as I mentioned, you know, I learned a lot on you know what a cost of acquisition is, what LTV and why it matters. So, how to really spend your dollars and measure and be accountable uh for a return. Um, and this is in a time where you know 2009, 2010, um these were early, I wouldn't say early stages of e-commerce, but really early enough where everybody was learning together. Um, and and and there was a lot of collaboration uh amongst the startup world. So I I learned a lot. Um, you know, years later, uh I moved on to fintech as you mentioned with the uh uh Ariel platform, which was a digital banking and digital lending platform. Uh again, this is around 2016, where lending online was a new concept. Uh adjudicating a person's uh loan or a business, you know, in a matter of, you know, same day approval was a big deal. It's very commoditized today, but back then it was a big deal. Um, so why the shift is because A, it was a new market, a massive market, and a new one to disrupt. But I did believe that what all the learnings from e-commerce and building a marketplace, which is essentially what it's it's getting consumers to sign up to your website and go make a purchase. Yeah, conceptually, lending online follows a similar flow, uh, or at a minimum, the similar KPIs, uh, cost of acquisition, and you you want to a consumer or business. In in Ariel's case, we did business lending, um, to onboard on your platform and trust you enough to provide some of the your you know deepest questions you can ask someone is their financial background, and then get a loan from you, which is a purchase. So it's the same path. And back in 2016, a lot of people from e-commerce got into digital lending because that was the cohort of of startup entrepreneurs that understood how to build a business online, how to get data. So, so again, you know, that timing uh was great, uh, and it was a new adventure. So uh appetite for learning. I I knew, you know, I knew nothing about finance and lending, but that's the part you learn. But I think I had the asset that my partners and investors uh in in that venture uh appreciated, uh, an operational background, but also an understanding for uh you know marketplace tactics. Um years later, um uh we we exited that business, and uh I kind of missed you know the e-commerce world. It's a very different crowd, the fintech and e-commerce, very different kind of people you deal with, etc. Uh, and I did miss a little bit of of that world. Uh but but this was around 2020 when uh COVID was coming in place. So it wasn't about getting back into e-commerce, which by the way, companies thrived in e-commerce, but I wanted to have a slightly different angle. Uh, and I think that's part of the focus that you know we'll get to brand effects. Uh uh, that is really finding a white space, not doing what others are doing, but uh finding a parallel and a white space where you can actually disrupt better. You can you know get in early and you can maybe pioneer something. Um and that's where you know Shoply uh came to place, which was the first of the three companies that we'll get into. Uh and the rationale there was uh twofold. One is um COVID's happening, um, a lot of people are buying more online. The rise of e-commerce was evident. Uh before COVID, it's it it's a stat I always kind of keep in mind is you know, 80% of commerce was still done in a brick and mortar setting, face to face. You went to a store, you bought something, you went to a grocery store. And I think the stat remains today around 70%. That's you know, significant this whole rise of commerce in COVID, yeah. Um, it it looks great, but the reality is the majority of the world, whether it's 65 or 70, it's the majority of the world is still doing conducting commerce, specifically in retail, face to face. Um, so how do you apply all these e-commerce notions that make e-commerce amazing? And how do you bring that to a brick and mortar setting? Um, and the focus was always, you know, SMBs. Um you know, if you think about the path, it was it's it's always that I've had was always around SMB. Um, you know, the daily deal space catered to SMBs and consumers. Uh, you know, Aereo, which was a digital lending platform, was for SMBs. Um, so you know that that was an area that I know well. I mean, growing up, I grew up in the franchise world. Uh, my family had various franchises from Burger King to Compu Center, which was a store before Best Buy took over, uh, Second Cup. So I worked in all these, you know, small franchises and different roles, and it's something I know well. So it made sense to uh build a business that brought e-commerce concepts. And what do I mean by e-commerce concepts? It's you know, better loyalty, personalization, how do you treat a customer um with better knowledge? How do you retarget a customer? You know, your traditional brick and mortar store may not have the tools or knowledge uh to get into these concepts, which are very easy online, but you know, a an average restaurant or retail store, and I'm talking about your just your traditional mom and pop store, you know, they have a point of sale, they have a payment terminal, maybe they're a little more sophisticated because they use Shopify, they may have a CRM and have a knowledge on their customers, maybe a loyalty program. But just by describing what I just did, those are individual silo tools. So you have to get five different descriptions you know to achieve all that. So Shockley came in and said, Well, how about we put all that under one roof? So, you know, you're not essentially viewing a customer as a transaction, which is what the point of sale world has traditionally been, you know, doing. And how do you treat that customer like a relationship? Uh, how does that customer come in, have an uh you know, a better experience shopping, uh, using their cell phone, for example, uh, scanning things off the shelf, building a shopping cart, uh, just like you build an Uber Eats, you know, order. Um, but in doing so, how does a salesperson know who Omar is if he's a repeat customer? You know, I'm scanning a QR code now on the loyalty program in the setting of the store. A sales rep can come say, Hey, Omar, welcome back. How did you like those jeans you bought last month? Uh, we have a special on uh on our latest collection. Would you like to look at it? Why? Because I just see what I'm talking about. They have visibility, but in real time, it's not in some CRM where business owner or the marketing manager is, you know, giving uh a post kind of uh uh post analysis. It's it's real time, and real time everything we were focused on. Um, but equally as important, I buy something and you know, I leave the store. How does that store stay in touch with me? How do they send me an SMS a week later talking about some new promotion or asking me my feedback, which is also very important? So, as you can see, these are all uh concepts that did exist, but you know, uh restaurants is another division. We had very fragmented, a typical restaurant that's somewhat sophisticated, has to buy five pieces of software to achieve what Shoply did in one. Uh, and mobile first, and and you know, a lot of call it the modern uh way of shopping, and and that was truly inspired by COVID. I I just kind of knew that uh consumers uh would be uh uh accustom growingly accustomed to the convenience of e-commerce. That's really what it's very convenient. Uh but once COVID would end, well, you got spoiled customers because they shop more online during lockdown years, but then the world would kind of come back to the same. And in fact, it has. And that's where I go back to saying, well, the majority of business is still conducted in a brick and mortar setting. So so that was the the the Shoply story. Um we then just double-click on Shoppy.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

I'm just curious um which Shoply um I mean you you're you're spot on. Uh a lot of transactions or uh the a lot of the customer relationship is very transactional. You you don't have information on them. We we we work with a lot of hospitality clients, and uh it's the same. It's kind of like how do you get to know them? We we partnered up with Cisco delivering to their Cisco Hospitality Summit, and this is very, very, very much the case in terms of how do you get to know, how do you personalize the the relationship? We've published recently a report on the future of restaurants, and the things that you're describing are spot on. So, do you have a stat in terms of like how you turn a transactional relationship into a customer relationship and what value like Shopli unlocks? Like, I'm just a use case. Give me a use case, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

I'll I'll give you some KPIs, even uh, I think even even more interesting use case because these are results, right? Um, so so uh we we found out over the years that uh you know, by switching over to Shopli, uh your your average uh order value uh does increase by 20%. Uh why is that personalization? So let's go. You talked about hospitality. If you know when I'm walking into a restaurant, I'm scanning a QR code, pulling up a menu, uh, which is standard, right? Uh but but why not do more with that? That menu allows you to order, but we're not necessarily focused on self-ordering. Why it eliminates jobs? We're actually here to help uh uh staff do better at their job, not eliminate them. So I'm scanning that QR code. Uh again, I'm I'm a repeat customer is the ideal scenario. Um and and a server now knows that table 51, there's someone there. Uh Omar is sitting at that table. And last time Omar was here, he ordered a dirty martini before his steak. Yeah, so I know that Omar likes a dirty martini, he's not vegetarian. So when I'm approaching that table, I'm immediately like I Omar's a VIP in my in in you know, in in the eyes of the staff, because whether I've met you or not, I'm gonna offer you a martini. Um, I'm gonna talk about you know the steak specials and not the you know vegetarian special. Um, I'm being very specific in this case study, but but overall it's it's about personalization. So, what does that do? Better service is average order value increases. The second one is convenience. Um, there are certain things where you don't need a staff member. Let's stick to hospitality. I'm mid-meal and I just want a second beer. Um, I know I'm talking a lot about alcohol, sound like but uh you know. Uh so do you really need to wait on your server to order that beer? Not really. You can do that yourself. So now there's convenience. Um, and what that does is stat number two is there's about a 40 to 50 percent higher turnover rate. Uh uh in call it the Shoply world. Uh, what that means is you can serve double the capacity with the same staff, uh, and customers remain happy because you know you're not chasing around the server. Um, that's number two. Number three is a two to three X uh repeat business from the same customer, and that's done through our targeting mechanism. There's a proactive communication that happens, and that's how you build the relationship. Once I leave the store, you know, talk to me again, bring me back. So, so those are kind of three stats, three case studies that we have seen, and you know, we monitor. Um, we monitor about two, you know, our 250 plus customers, uh, and growing kind of across the board because that helps us improve our product.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

Makes sense. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

A third one, and you know, I can keep going, but I'll stop at this fourth one. Sorry, is um uh the data. The data is very valuable uh in in the way we present it. We simplify it and we present it. And again, we have AI agents that support, obviously, not in the early years, but more and more. And what that does is um it just gives you better recommendations on how to do marketing. Let's say you're you know advertising through promotions and discounts, let's say, uh, which is very um there might be a subset of people that uh you know you'd be leaving money on the table if you do offer them a 10% to come back because they come back every week, uh, or vice versa, identifying who hasn't come in a while and used to order uh, you know, spend a lot, and maybe give them a different campaign than uh another group of or segment of customers. It's just not throwing a fishnet, it creates more personalization, but it's also you know, some of our features are, for example, scan and go, where you can scan things off the shelf. Uh, Amazon did it for Whole Foods and uh uh you know at a very big scale. Uh, really, what that uh does is give us information on who's browsing, e-commerce type information. But it's equally as important to know why someone may have added something to a cart and removed it. You scan something, but you don't buy it. So e-commerce that's called shopping cart abandonment, brick and mortar, you have no idea because I took something off the shelf, then I put it back. So doing it digitally gives you more depth.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

That makes sense. Um, do you want to talk about the other company before we jump in, kind of like what you see in terms of the evolution of uh commerce business?

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Sure thing. So so Wag Jag is company number two. Uh uh, we actually acquired that one uh years ago uh for two reasons. One, it's it's a background that I know very well, uh, but also added a a you know, there's there's you know millions of Canadian consumers. It's a 15-year-old company, uh great reputation. It was used to be owned by Toronto Star and then sold to another public company called the Merge Commerce. So uh it was an established business, uh, a you know million plus customer base. Uh so being in retail, I think it was cool to uh get into a business that actually touched so many Canadian consumers. Um and and you know, not to say it's incorporated deeply with Shockley, but again, it expands its portfolio. Now we have retail technology, we have consumer technology or consumer marketplace. The third company was um uh founded and supported by myself from Inception from a partner of mine who had a a lot of success in uh a previous life, uh uh and a family office. Uh um, and and really that company's call uh is focused on major brands, so CPG. Uh and that company is called GoC XM. Go CXM has two divisions. One is a marketing division that works with these major brands uh that you Know traditionally sell in retail stores, grocery stores, but don't necessarily have a direct contact with consumers just because historically that's how the world works. The retailer owns the customer relationship, not but CPG brands are increasingly uh interested in communicating directly with customers, um, regardless of how supply chain works, it's just having that direct access. That's really what that division does, is it's called customer activation. You're spending millions of dollars in grocery stores and events and concerts, wherever you are. Uh, why wouldn't you zero and first party data? Uh, why wouldn't you send surveys? Why wouldn't you start connecting and offering promotions and content, you know, trips to FIFA and free tickets to engage consumers with your brand? Uh, so that's one division. The second division is the what you call the trade execution or retail compliance. Um, so that one is a platform for focused on supporting reps of these major CPG brands to ensure that their uh merchandising and their the various promotions in stores are executed to the specific compliance of a brand. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of stores, you know, our clients are in the US and Canada. Uh, you know, we have uh some of the biggest names that work with us. Uh they, you know, our large one of our larger clients has 30,000 sales reps across the US who have to go around different stores and make sure the compliance of a stand they may have paid a hundred thousand dollars to Walmart to be placed up front. Is it all there? Are you out of stock? So digitizing that process and again, real-time analytics, real-time visibility on how to fix it through AI agent, but also reporting to head office uh is key in that business.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Wow. Uh I mean that's amazing. Like we have portfolio companies that that could use uh could use these products, and we're we're seeing it, we're seeing these challenges. And so one of the things that we have always been wondering, like the kind of the the two problems we've been scratching our head in terms of how to solve is how to merge the physical with a virtual persona into one. It sounds like you're doing some of this, and the other one is um, because uh like one of the companies we own is Vino, Vino is a wine import company, and so we don't own the relationship, right? You you're going through in this case is the government is the distributor, DHL is the distributor, but the government, and then you have a retailer, you have on-premise or off-premise. We don't own the relationship. We sell to the wholesale buyers, but we don't own the we and we can't control it. We we can we can do chef talkers, we can do different things, but we don't own the relationship. So we've always been like, how do I get to talk to the customers? So I'm quite excited to to learn more about this because I think this could be a solution we can definitely leverage.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Absolutely. We've worked with a lot of liquor brands actually historically, uh, uh from DiAgio uh to the LCBO directly. And really, you said it best is how do you connect digital and uh off how do you recognize that person as one uh across the board? And and you know that it's called Omnichannel, but again, it's it's easier said than done because what we try to do is create a toolbox, okay? Uh a toolbox that essentially gives a reason to the consumer to give their information, right? A minimum tell tell us, hey, you can talk to us. Um the obvious ways are you know giving them something in return and an incentive, but there's a tech behind it, right? Um, and and then keeping that communication uh uh uh uh uh alive um is is very important. And and in fact, it's it's it's not just the marketing side, but the whole retail execution side uh has to connect to the marketing because you're spending a lot of money to drive a customer to a location, but maybe it's out of stock. Well, you know it's out of stock because the retailer's in charge of stocking the shelves. Yeah, so so why would you spend all these dollars in the wrong area? Because it's so there's a link.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Uh curious. Um I'm drawing a blank on the name of the company. It it's a Vancouver-based company. They used to be called something else. Recently went through a rebrand, they're publicly traded company listed on the exchange, I think, a couple of years ago. Uh, what they had developed is like a uh a device that attaches to the PUS in order to be able to kind of marry that the KDI's Omnichannel, like is Shoply and Go CXN interrelated, interconnected in some ways in terms of enriching the customer profile.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

So so that's a that's a great question. Um uh it was intended to originally by design, but admittedly, the opportunities at Go and the opportunities at Shoply did not necessarily uh interside. And you know, uh all these are concepts, but at the end of the day, you know, um running a business is still important, right? So you can have plans, uh they don't always go through. Uh there has been instances where uh they did interconnect, uh, but shopping's path uh ended up being in hospitality and apparel, retail, uh, and cannabis as a specific sector because it's it's its own, it has its own difficulties. Um whereas Ghost XM's path and you know very major names have brought us to uh grocery gas stations, uh events, uh, you know, anything from F1 to Raptors games to you know Walmart. So, you know, we we kind of had intended them to say, hey, you know, it's a like you're you said, it's a supply chain, it's CPG and it's retail, right? Uh, but the niche markets where we found success in one company did not coincide with the other. Um, yeah, so you know, where efficiencies came is um uh we do have a lot of uh internal uh collaboration, um where our our tech guys are constantly connecting because Shopley's knowledge is increasingly into call it the uh SMB consumer-facing needs because the SMB is our client, but our end user is a consumer, yeah. That's who we're for. Uh and you know, Go CXM, uh their client are the CPG, but also they'll work with the retailer. So, you know, there's a lot of knowledge that goes back and forth.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

Makes sense, makes sense. Uh so uh curiosity question Do you get paddock passes for the Grand Prix in Montreal?

SPEAKER_00 29:38

So that's that's funny because one of our uh I can't you know talk about our actually they're on our website. Monster Energy is on our website. Uh they they they we we do F1 for them. Uh so uh wherever you'll see Monster Energy, scan the QR code and you know win a snowboard, enter here, or or you know, something. Uh it's it's all us. Uh but I don't believe they gave us paddock. Uh uh, they they they they I think they provide us with day passes to come and if we want to hang around because they build this massive thing every time, but not bad. I guess I guess we have to do more.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah, you have to deliver higher value Omar. Um I noticed I noticed you went to McGill. Are you from Montreal originally? Because you you reside in Toronto now, but kind of like I do, it's been 15 years.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

I've I've lived in a few places. Uh I I've I've I've lived I did live in Montreal from 1990 uh uh uh four till 200 uh four, uh where those years I did go to McGill. Uh prior to that, I I actually was uh uh I grew up in in the Middle East in Lebanon uh and Italy. I have a mother who's Italian, a father's Lebanese. Get out of here. Uh but I've also you know after McGill, I I lived in Paris for two years, I lived in Boston for three years, uh, and ended up in in Toronto. So I thought you know, I've lived in five, six countries. It's just not sure what my identity is, but it's it's yeah, it's been exciting.

SPEAKER_02 31:19

Oh, that's that that's amazing. That's amazing. So talk to me now about kind of like what uh in in um I'll give you the context first. Um AI, agenda commerce, um, agent talking to agents, agent beh acting on your behalf, kind of like what from your perspective is the evolution of of commerce, kind of like what should we expect in 18 months in 36 months, and maybe let's not stretch it out five years now, but kind of like what's coming? What are you seeing? How should SMBs let's say prepare themselves for the for the agentic commerce wave?

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Yeah, uh hot topic. Uh um I I so so many angles to tackle this. So I'll start off by saying something very basic, and and and I'll get into the agency. Um there's this can there's this concept that uh uh data will magically appear and then the AI will do stuff to it, right? And it goes back to the concept of let's lay the foundation um and the toolbox concept that I talked about a little earlier. You gotta give a reason to get to or or a way or a path to gather that data. Um, and I think that's an important gap, and it's it's old school, but it's yeah, data won't just magically appear. And if there is a company that has data, there is massive cleanup because it was not necessarily intended to fit the schema of how AI agents can cater to it. But then you're spending a year of pitching and cleaning various CRMs and this. So most important part, I think, and often forgotten, is uh clean data. Uh and but also the reason to capture data. Give a consumer a non-intrusive, a seamless way to give you data. Yeah. Um, and more and and up-to-date data, because you may have five-year-old data, uh, you know, and so what? Um second is is really around you you know, one if you have that data data uh uh segmentation or a AI agents have been built, and people talk about AI agents. I think that's obviously where you want to go, but I do believe that the concept of AI agent in itself is not necessarily the unicorn or the future of AI. I think AI agents are already commoditized, yeah, came and went. Okay, it's no longer, oh, let's invest in AI agents. That's just now the most standard thing. So AI agents are essentially a coding and an operational tool. I think where AI uh will win, and I and AI is such a broad term. So I'm gonna speak in the context of my world, okay? Retail, CPG, connecting consumers um is getting you know, hyper-localization, uh ultra-personalization, but truly not what we've been saying for 10 years, which is you know, we call it what you what we traditionally have been calling personalization is is cohort segmentation, it's you know, speaking to a group of people. Yeah, but it's not, you know, Maxime and Omar will get a completely different message, yeah. And imagine times a million, a million messages, and and that's that is hyper personalization. Um, but but what I was getting at is is is not necessarily the agents, it's the LLMs. And it's I think the future of AI and the winners of it will be the data scientists, not the coders. Okay, the writers are there to execute, the data scientists are to take your chat GPT level LLMs that are very generic by nature, but adapting what a company knows best, which is your audience, your sector, maybe your subsector. Retail is so broad, apparel has nothing to do with I don't know, auto parts, but they're both in retail, right? Yeah, so these LLMs have to become super niche and super focused on a sub sub sub subsector and become to me. That's data science. Uh, and it's doing you know things that may take you know a company 10 years of experience to get to know your customer truly and what gets them excited in a matter of hours, maybe, right? So so that's my simple take on it.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. Like, and like we we do a lot of uh digital information and AI work, and uh um uh up until like up until I left Parkland, uh we were building out the customer data platform, working on exactly the things you're describing. Uh, but the other thing we're doing is is implementing S4 or HANA. And out of the different streams, the one stream that was always a critical dependency was the data. Um the data didn't exist in some cases, like we like you know, Parkland is in 25 countries, including the Caribbean nation. Over there, um, email addresses was not common, right? Civic addresses was not common. So we need to generate the data. I mean, if you look at from an AI perspective, the most in-demand profession is data labelers, somebody to actually go and label the data because AI is just computation, right? Like, you need to have the data to create a computation, and then you can assign different weight factors and and and make it more specific. But like without the data, what are you gonna compute on?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

That's right. Yeah, as as our CTO, and pardon my French if I'm using uh a word crap in crop out. Uh if you put crap into the model, crap's gonna come out. So then that fundamental first step is is key. For sure. Uh and the winners again will be the data scientists and organizers.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

I agree, but I'm still surprised. And and to people like you and I, AI just like uh you know, we were doing agentic workflows back in 2015 when it was with with Pamina using UiPath. Maybe you can say, but this is a structure, not that's not exactly AI, but it but it's still like it's it's it's automatic workflows. Um but it when I think about hospitality businesses, I still see hospitality businesses websites. There's no menu online, there's no way to interact, call to reserve, um, there's no way to order. I'm like, how are you supposed to enable yourself for the uh like for a genetic uh yeah commerce?

SPEAKER_00 38:34

Absolutely, and and sometimes it's it's also you know, I feel like let's let's go to Shoply. Probably our job to figure it out for those uh you know if you're a restaurant in 2026 and you don't have an online menu or the ability to reserve online, I mean you're really, really you don't care or you know, um, but but it's it's you know, and if you're doing if you're there, you you don't you maybe don't even think of AI HS. But how do we bring that to uh to to the retail to the you know the SMB uh to the shop, let's call it a shop. Um without scaring them, uh and I think that's a very hard thing to build tech for uh or anything actually, you know. They in school it was always harder to write a an essay that had to have 700 words than unlimited, it's just harder, right? And the same thing with tech, and and you know, some of the stuff we are looking at is is is is AI agents to actually recommend things to you. So as a shop owner, you're saying, oh wow, that's that's a cool idea. You know what? I'll just press enter and it'll be done. So I explain it well to you. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Enter. That's it. Uh there's in that. It's it's it's not just UX UI, it's front-end development. Yeah, and and that's also challenging.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Uh, couldn't agree more. I mean, um, change management is uh super important in this perspective. And and so, like, even in our company, we kind of have two three different paths. Give me the information, let me see if I can figure it out on my own. Do it with me or do it for me. Um, and so in I mean, in some cases, people want like peace of mind, just just just go and do it, just take take my problem away. And in other cases, like, I want to learn so I can be better, and that's completely fine.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

Um, I like that do it, do it with me or do it for me. Those are two options, and they should both be offered. Uh well said, for sure, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 40:54

Um, what um I so you said uh during COVID it went from 80 to 70 percent in retail. What does the future of retail look like?

SPEAKER_00 41:05

I don't know. I don't think I'm that that smart. Uh uh and you know, I I think uh in an extreme world, yeah, probably unrealistic, I feel like retail can become, you know, leases could be affected. And you read about these things, right? That retailers essentially could become, if really properly digitized, showrooms. You don't need to hold stock and store, you don't need 8,000 square feet. Um, uh, but you still need person to person. I will always, whether I'm right or wrong, I'll always uh believe in the face-to-face. So how do you capitalize the face-to-face okay conversation um uh to just be more efficient, uh, more personalized, more relevant, more convenient. Uh it's it's you know, it's not a direct answer. I'm giving you abstract, but uh, you know, I I don't know. I don't hold the crystal ball, but but I think directionally, you know, it's it's these efficiency of of so landlords, I think, will be affected. You know, that's real estate, I think will be affected. We've seen it post-COVID. We've seen offices shrink, we've seen, you know, tele uh uh, you know, teleconferencing just become mainstream. Uh, but I think retail will follow, I won't say teleconferencing, but a showroom, right? You become a showroom, you got people to help you. Um, you have enough to touch and feel. I think the face of the face is important, not just because two humans are interacting, but you're buying something you want to touch, right? Uh, but size does you don't, you know, have one size of each and then get it shipped to your house, maybe even before you get home from the store, because logistics are going through massive evolution, uh, optimization, real just in time has become real, right? Uh, so so logistics will also be affected, landlords. Uh, but but so it's it's what surrounds retail, and I think retail is going through that now. Um, but I don't think the uh brick and mortar face-to-face concept will disappear. At least I hope not, because I don't want to live in robots.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Um I I mentioned earlier at the top of our conversation that we produced is the future of restaurants report. And so we we studied quite a bit in terms of talking to customers. Um, and so the they there's kind of two trends that are shaping the the retail and hospitality industries. One is omni channel uh revenue channels. So

SPEAKER_00 44:00

like your example like you may have a restaurant but the restaurant now has like cpg brand like uh like steak sauces whatever it is or they they sell uh like takeaways and so if you're a landlord how how do you price your your lease are you basically based on kind of the physical revenue that flows through or do you basically all yeah and and and the other the other trend we're actually looking at investing in the company this the other trend that we're shaping that that we're seeing is people are just so freaking fed up of living in a virtual world and we're seeing this shift away from like I'm tired of being digital I'm tired of being virtual I want an analog experience physical experiences so there's increasing need of people saying like I I just want to be amongst humans I just want to be so aware of these humans the the the sales sales 101 uh is you know you don't those those movies where they say sell me this pen right it's like uh it you sell on emotion emotion cannot be done you know through text it's gotta be face to face uh there's a saying you know that people won't necessarily remember what you told them but they'll remember how you made them feel it has to be face to face so how do you make the world more efficient with face to face not eliminate jobs make those jobs even better easier give them cheat sheets tools give them all the right tools uh and and that's you know we're humans like we we need interaction Omar what lies ahead of brand effects are you going to be the next become the next branded hospitality and start like venture capital for so so funny enough uh you know we're we're actually uh we find hospitality to be uh very competitive and okay you know we're we're a family office backed uh no outside pressures operators we we're not an investment company although we invest uh we build we we are operators so you know the the future will will it it will come I believe from where our roadmap leads us which is always customer driven what our customers want what direction are we going you know do we grow through acquisition or do we build ourselves uh you know we have a big staff we have a big developer office uh many many developers so you know we can uh evolve uh to the to our own pace most importantly uh we're in no rush and uh it's about sustainable growth uh we're not here to follow a VC type model uh we're here to build great stuff and be sustainable you know not rely on on anyone except ourselves and I think that's also very important you know we didn't talk touch much on what it takes to build a company and cash flows and investments but one thing I've learned in 20 years is if you can be self-sustaining and decide your own path that's very important and take your time think long term solve immediate needs think long term uh uh but not too far ahead because the world's changing every six months so it's a hard question to ask what happens in the future we're waiting on what our customer wants I couldn't agree more I mean with with this let's let's close the conversation I mean if you become customer obsessed it's kind of hard not to succeed uh so I I I love the conversation I love connecting with you sounds like you're like me or recovering CPA recovering CIA um so um it's amazing to see what what you do it yeah um thank you so much Omar really appreciate it thank you yeah