 be willing to change your way of thinking. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I'm your host, Beth Papdi-Kolov. And in the studio with us today, we have a couple of gentlemen who have some tried and true great test situations to talk to us about. So let me welcome Craig Jolly. He is the Operations Manager of Ninewood, and Thomas Nelson is the Marketing Manager of Ninewood. Thank you both so much for your time, and thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having us, Beth. Thank you for having us. Yeah, we're excited to jump in. So before we get into it, man, we've got lots to talk about. Why don't you each take a couple of minutes, introduce yourselves to our listeners, and tell us a little about Ninewood, and you can even tease us out to FastTrack, which I know we'll get to also. My name is Thomas Nelson. I serve as the Marketing Manager here at Ninewood. After I graduated from business school, I spent a couple of years with the Batik Consulting firm doing project management with Subsea Engineering. After burning out properly, I then joined the Boeing Company before I had my first quarter-life crisis, and I picked up woodworking as a hobby. It wasn't too long after that where I was able to find Ninewood or Ninewood found me to blend both my hobby of woodworking and my business nerd kingdom together. What a good millennial turning your hobby into your job. Good job. Craig, what about you? My degree is in industrial engineering from Oregon State University, so I've grown up in the Pacific Northwest my whole life. I spent 25 years in the food industry prior to coming to Ninewood. I've had career roles in scheduling, management, supervision, engineering all along the way. So I joined Ninewood in 2015. Have you been here ever since? And tell me a little more about Ninewood. You guys make specifically custom woodworking products at right? We make custom wood ceilings. So Ninewood was founded in 2004. Our name Ninewood comes from Division 9 in construction, and we make custom wood ceilings. So we are the only manufacturer in the North America that focuses exclusively on wood ceilings and walls, so that's what sets us apart. From the company's founding, we focused on reliability. We wanted that to be our niche, the thing that set us apart. So we defined reliability as delivering the design intent correctly on time, and we worked on that for about a decade. And it turns out that that was not enough of something to differentiate. It was different, but not different enough. So we needed to add another factor on top of that, which was speed, and that's where the Fast Track program comes in. Before we jump into Fast Track and how you guys have brought some efficiencies into customization, I know that from an architecture and building an install or standpoint, custom installs, custom products can have so many hiccups. Talk to me a little bit about what your sales process looks like in the analog sense. The first thing that we start with in the sales process is always schedule, and specifically the customer schedule. Their schedule should determine the whole path that the customer really needs to take. Next, we often talk about the implications of missing that schedule. I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast has experienced the pain of a schedule bust. Too soon, Thomas, too soon. We're not ready to talk about schedules. Too soon. Yeah, sorry. It's a little hard talk. But our customers are located at the end of most building processes, so they get the most unpredictable schedules, the most unreliable schedules, and they need the speed and the reliability in order to ensure they have materials on site when they need it. So there, that's when we're ready to talk about Fast Track. I mean, for many of our customers, they are reassured knowing that it's an option for their product order. But for others, it's a complete lifeline when you are able to get those custom materials in three weeks instead of 12. It's not only an insurance package, but it also is the expedite package when customers really need it. So that's a really interesting approach. If a customer reaches out to you and says, hey, I'm interested in installing wood in my upcoming project, let's say it's an architect, they say they want to specify nine wood. Your first question isn't to go in and be like, great, here's 15 designs that we've done in the past, and this is why you should choose us. It's what's your timeline? Yeah, entirely. Do people just flip out? I mean, do they just like cry and say thank you so much for asking that? I feel like it's like the opposite way that most manufacturers go after specifications, especially when it comes to custom, it's let's dream big, fill in the details later, but you guys are starting at the details and then making the outcome fit within the timeline constraints. That's incredible. One of the tenants that we hold in both our selling approaches and our marketing approaches is that the customer is the hero, and we should not tread on that. We don't necessarily feel at our job to present designs to the customer. They will bring designs to us. But if we first ask the question, when is their schedule, we can answer, is it possible? Which is often one of the biggest busts that we see. I mean, being in specialty wood ceilings, located at the end of a project, it's pretty easy for us to get the eat out if the design is too intense, if the coordination is too much. So for that reason, if we don't start it off the gate, we're very likely to never see the project happen in the first place. It'll get substituted out for something else. You're hitting on the exact thing I wanted to ask about. Did you guys reverse engineer where you're getting engineered out and figured out that it was time not versus budget versus materials versus quality versus competition. Really, you uncovered that it was time and then solved for time. Is that, am I understanding that correctly? Yeah. The way I would describe it, my background is in operations, but when I first started at the company a few months in, our general manager asked me to do a stint as the sales manager, which is an area I had never learned or had any experience before. And so I immediately just started talking with our representatives. We use independent reps all across the country and our internal sales people and asked them what problems is it that you guys are dealing with? What prevents you from selling more? And they said speed. At the time, we had nothing to offer. We were all specialty, all custom. Everything was eight to 12 week or more lead time. They said, we've got to have something faster. So in that sense, we did reverse engineer it slightly. And we came up with a base core of our products that we could do very, very quickly by reducing the option slightly, but still offering a huge amount of variety. And that it's that tradeoff between architects and designers believe if I go custom that automatically means slow and long lead times, but that's not necessarily true. As long as you stay within certain boundaries, you can have a very custom wood ceiling and we could deliver it very quickly. What we found is that everybody wants custom, you know, unique in some way, but a lot of people are afraid that it's too slow. In a way, none would sort of exist to prove that's not the case. I mean, we're centered around the premise that customers can both have custom wood ceilings and competitive lead times. And that's been our entire process improvement initiative over the decade, you could say, is making custom faster. From an external standpoint, this makes a ton of sense. I've sat in the internal perspective of these conversations enough to know that when you bring the idea of, hey, we're going to move away from highly custom to somewhat at least productized into an operation that is built around values, prides itself on customization, that can be a tricky conversation. Can you talk to me about what that was like from your internal perspective? Well, interestingly enough, we're still having it. Ninewood has proved that we can do custom. We're actually the most award winning manufacturer in all of Cisco. We've won four now founders awards with the ceiling and interior systems. No other company has won more than one in a way. It's like, how do we add to the awesome custom portfolio that we already have? The biggest value that I think we give to our customers is helping them understand the implications of their design questions and their design assertions. If they say they want it X, we can say X takes this long and it helps them decide is that really the route that they want to go. There have been many beautiful custom wood ceilings that have never seen a lot of day because the implications of their decisions were too long. We see it as our job to help communicate the lead time or the implications of going that full custom route. So we found that it's both and it's not either or now the discussion is still ongoing with our sales force about it. Are we moving away from custom in the answers? No, we're just adding a very fast route to basically expand the market rather than to subtract away from the custom market. I mean, some of the custom wood ceilings that we've done, they are absolutely beautiful. I want to go back to what you're saying, Thomas, because you've mentioned a couple of times and as the marketing manager, I know that you know overcoming assumptions and presuppositions about your entire category is really difficult in your marketing when you're trying to tell someone, hey, this will be really beautiful and it's going to nail all of your expectations and also here's five things that you assume that's wrong. Can you talk to me about what your marketing strategy has been or what successes you've seen when it comes to marketing custom and getting that message of speed across? We've already kind of talked about making the customer the hero. I mean, we have to honor what their needs are and really understand the needs that they aren't speaking about. You know, even though that an architect doesn't talk about schedule, they have to still honor it with the contractors and everybody else. From a marketing's perspective, we really are trying to be as transparent as possible. We know that, you know, when it comes to custom and custom shop, the first thing is call now for your quote to sort of break down that barrier and to actually give the answers for how much as a custom would ceiling cost to give the answers of, you know, upfront of how long things typically are. I mean, during the pandemic, we had crazy supply chain disruptions and we took the approach of talking about it and sharing it with our customers saying, hey, there's been disruptions over here, not over here. We suggest you go over here kind of being more of a guide rather than trying to usurp the hero. I mean, always honoring the customer as the hero, respecting their needs, we fill the position of a guide. I mean, it's very story brand-esque. You're singing from my songbook here. Yeah, we're going to honestly answer your questions and not really hold much back. You know, it's interesting as we sell the majority of our product through independent sales reps, who we are tapping into their customer and market feedback on a pretty regular basis. But to be able to express those answers fully and completely without having to say and call us for the actual answer is when we find it pretty powerful, we don't like to hold much back. We should talk about that because I was thinking the same thing. I think so often custom brands don't try to problem solve because they see that as part of the positioning. It should take longer because it's custom, even though it doesn't actually have to take longer. It should cost more because it's custom, even though it doesn't actually have to cost more. And we all buy brands that are more expensive because we love the brand name. And so, I mean, I'm a brand lover of certain things everybody is. It's not a hating statement. It's a, is that the right hill to die on? And what are the sacrifices that are being made because of that? To your point, do you feel like your brand is suffering or you're getting lumped in as a commodity? Excellent question. We feel that we are being grouped in, specifically our Fast Track program, that we're getting grouped in with QuickShip. Now, QuickShip is definitely a growing category. In fact, if you load up your Costco app on your phone, there's an entire QuickShip category right on the homepage of your Costco app. It's becoming a lot more ubiquitous. For us, QuickShip denotes or at least assumes off the shelf, which is not our product. Architects and designers don't want to specify off the shelf products. When they go to Ninewood, they're looking for things custom specified, custom colored, things that meet their specific design intent. We're really trying to define out that fast custom category that separates us out from QuickShip, because we know we can do full custom. That's in the bag. It's how can we make the beauty of custom more accessible to the marketplace? Well, that's faster custom. That's the hell that we're going to die on. So I'm a copy nerd. I think words matter so much. And you guys have said a ton, which tells me that you've definitely at least read Donald Miller's story brand book. If not went to the training. What's your what's your hero banner message? Oh, man. So it's a little bit in flux right now, because the majority of our marketing resources time and attention is all towards architects and designers right now. What we're trying to provide architects and designers as the hero is actually design freedom. We're kind of trying to rally around that as our battle cry and being able to give architects and designers design freedom around the products. I mean, less lead time for a product is to the benefit of an architect and designer to because it's more likely to come fruition. If the longer the amount of time that it takes to coordinate and produce something, the more disruptions the more chance there is for disruption to derail it by having a very fast and custom offering. We feel like this is arming our hero architects and designers with design freedom around custom wood ceilings. I mean, any color that they dreamed of any stainable color, the only colors we can't do are like chrome or reflective really high reflective colors. But we can do baby blue to mahogany to oak to dialing in your very specific color. It's that design freedom that we're trying to provide architects and designers as not being said, I don't think that we're nailed in on it right now. We don't have a direct relationship with architects and designers other than through our independent sales reps. So as much as we've been able to sort of influence it from here, from time to time, I think at the same time, you know, we're still searching. Right now, we're definitely on design freedom and fast custom. Thomas, what advice would you give to other manufacturers who are looking to up their game when it comes to marketing to architects and designers? First of all, you have to deliver on your promises. This was the element that we had to get it nine would reliability of your operations ultimately dictates to how your customers are going to feel about you. Second, once you are reliable and predictable, speed it up. I mean, for us, we're often competing with mill workers on the custom side and the distributors on the off the shelf side. It's really important for us to be faster than the distributors can be on the custom side, but more beautiful than the mill workers on the custom side. And third, institutionalize it as a marketing manager. I am full of joy, knowing that the number one metric on the shop floor is on time shipments, which currently sits around 98.9% for most products. And I think for fast track, it's 99.5% and a typical range were anywhere from 95 to 97% on time. So far in May, we're 98.7. But we measure these things. In fact, we measure the speed of samples for submittals, samples for designs, shop drawing for fast track. These are all kept under in most cases, two to three days. On the average, I want to say custom samples for fast track average right now was 4.8 days, which means less than one week. Institutionalizing it has been incredible, but we couldn't do that until we first got reliable. And then we sped it up and then made it all the way through the company as the main thing. Here's my question for operations Craig. There's so much that goes into what you guys have done from a systemization and productization standpoint. How did you decide which lever to pull first? Walk me through what that pare down and decision tree looked like for you. So our manufacturing operations are based on what's called a demand driven operating model. Demand driven operating model has three key points. Three P's, not the same three P's of marketing, but three P's position, protect, and pull. You have to position inventory at certain places in your system, whether that be internal to your company or to the supply chain, right? There's such a thing called the customer tolerance time. Customers are willing to wait a certain amount of time for whatever it is that they're requesting. You have to be able to deliver in that amount of time and that requires inventory. We are very fortunate to be located in the heart of the Northwest Forest. There are multitude of wood manufacturing, wood products, experts all within two, three hundred miles of us. So we rely very heavily on the supply chain. So that first step, where do we position inventory in the supply chain to give us the best speed benefit, but then also the most flexibility for being as custom as possible. Okay. So that's the first P position. The next P is protect. You have to protect from variability that is natural in manufacturing. And there's a lot of variability in custom manufacturing, especially specialty custom, right? So that involves buffering in terms of how much stock you hold, how much capacity you have, buffering against machine variation, people variation, demand variation, supply variation, all of that has to be protected. And then the last step is pull. We don't start making something until we have a clear contract, exactly what the customer wants to buy from us. So it's completely different than forecasting, which would be a push method. You forecast what you think the customer wants to buy, you make it, you put it on the shelf, and then you go try to get promotions and get them to take it. We're not that method. That's a push method. So we are very much about the pull. So it's those three things, position, protect, and pull. And one of the ways that we've really leveraged pull is deciding what to add to fast track next. The next product to get included into the fast track program is we look at quoting volumes, what products are being quoted that aren't in the fast track menu yet. And we know that some are a lot harder than others, but we very much value the raw data that comes from demand. We actually have an exception process where if somebody wants something that's almost exactly like fast track, but just slightly different, you can go through and view that. And sometimes we can deliver that. And maybe the lead time would be slightly longer. But we do that regularly. And the number of exceptions we get and the type of exception requests we get are what drive us to what we're going to add to fast track. Oh, everybody's asking for this particular wood species or this particular style. And we would change our program to include that going forward. We're constantly adding every year we add at least something new, if not too new things to fast track, trying to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible. It's often are saying, you know, nine would exist to prove that custom doesn't have to mean slow. I feel like this whole conversation is reminiscent of there's a story that's quoted differently depending on where you hear it. But it's when Ray Kroc was speaking at like Harvard and he was like, what business am I in? And people were like customer service, you sell hamburgers, your milkshakes are delicious. And he was like, wrong, I'm in the real estate business. I feel like that's nine would you could say, what do you guys do? We make beautiful buildings. We turn places into spaces. People love our customization. And you're like, no, we're in the speed business. You solved a problem that no one else in your category was willing to sell. And the idea that you've brought flexibility into productization, like Craig, your example of if it's close enough, we do everything we can to make it happen. It's basically genius. I'm really grateful you guys are letting us share this. But I feel like people should pay you for this information. It's so, so smart. Thomas, I need to ask the data nerd and me can't let this go by. So you mentioned you guys are measuring everything that's going out the door. You know, obviously it's the if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And you're measuring your lead times, your delivery times for everything, even down to samples. Do you have any data that you could share or speak to about the correlation between lead time for samples and the likelihood of getting in the spec or landing the sale? Interesting. We do not yet have that correlation. And one of the reasons why is because we our data collection really has took off in the last year, but our buying cycles are two years long. So we actually are waiting for some of that data to come to fruition to see what we do know is that our very first response sets the tone for the rest of the relationship. We have found that if we're able to respond very quickly to a budget quote or to a fast sample, we stay engaged with that project a lot longer than if we had just put it in the standard queue. I mean, part of fast track is dedicated capacity. That's just standing by. It's idle people that are standing by waiting for that to come in. So it doesn't have to go to the back of the queue. I would love as a data nerd to be able to say this is the exact correlation. I'm on it. Ask me in a year. Sales people tell us that they try to get a quick sample in the designer's hand the next day, even if it might not be the exact product that they're looking for, at least starts the conversation. It gives them something to look at and feel and touch and see up close. Yeah, we could follow up with a more custom sample with maybe a matching color a few days or a week or two down the road, but getting that conversation continuously happening and meeting their needs as quickly as possible makes a good impact at the beginning. I do have a little bit of a call to action to other manufacturers or even contractors as well. It kind of goes around that speed, but focusing on the service aspect too for a custom operation, one of the biggest areas is approvals. And a lot of our competitors aren't offering support in approvals. That's the shop drawings, the custom samples that go to the architects and get signed off the submittal packet. These things that we have always included in our service offering and in our lead times are not necessarily included by our competitors. A call to action that I would make to all manufacturers out there is focus on what your customer is needing to do for their contractors, which often case is approvals offering that approval support and expedited approval support. It might look like a cost sink because it's not necessarily winning you projects up front, but in the long run, do that approval support is why our customers keep coming back to us? It's because we are continuing to offer what they need to do upstream from a fabrication release agreement. And when they're able to place their order, they got to get these things approved first. So that's my call to action is for manufacturers to go upstream a little bit and to actually be constantly helping during the samples approval, during shop drawings approval, offering full shops, not just template shops that get copied and changed the name at the top. That's always pretty discouraging, but really help during the approvals process for our contractors. That has helped us be successful in the customer. I think that's a great point. I mean, even when you're going towards speed and productization, it's people working with people. I mean, we hear that all the time. There is one more thing that I kind of wanted to add from our previous question that you had. It's about the question about how has nine would have been able to do all of this? I would love to say that it was all our fault, but practically speaking, it's because of the relationships that we've developed deeply in our supply chain. It has to do about where we're located, but we could never be this fast without the partner relationships that we have all up and down the West Coast. That was step number one for us to become reliable is to also share in that vision and share in the shared metrics, the shared profit that could be happening. Craig has a great quote from one of our suppliers a couple of years ago when the light bulb finally went off for what we were trying to do. It really encapsulates how we were able to do it. I said something to the effect of I have no idea what you guys are doing, but we can tell that the products that we make for you flow through our system much faster than anybody else and we're seeing real benefits of that. So they didn't understand it, but they saw the effect and they wanted to learn more about it. And they've actually been able to use some of those principles to help some of their other customers and improve their sales operations as well. And without their buy-in though, we couldn't have met the lead time that met the customer tolerance. So I have to point that direction and it's not just 9-1. No, I agree with that. Thomas and Craig, this has been fascinating. I feel like there's an endless amount of information and questions that we have, because you guys are doing something really novel and solving problems on so many fronts. If you could give advice to manufacturers who are working on speed, customer service, all of the things that we've talked about, where would you tell them to start? You have to start by really examining the operating model that you run your company, how you run your manufacturing business. The demand-driven operating model comes from a story called the demand-driven adaptive enterprise, which is a method of planning and scheduling and operating and improving your systems. Actually, a body of knowledge out there. It's based on three principles from genius history back in the 20th century, which were W. Edward Deming, who focused on reducing variation, Taiichi Ono from the Toyota production model, who focused on reducing waste, and LA Goldrat, who focused on increasing throughput. And it's commonly believed that those three methodologies conflict with each other and they don't belong, but they're actually very tightly intertwined if you use the right principles from each of them. And that's where this demand-driven material requirements planning process came out of, the learning from those and the evolution from the end of the the end of its entry to where we are today. Thomas, where would you start? Be willing to change your way of thinking. There are things that Ninewood has had to implement that feel very backwards, that feel wrong. For instance, idle resources. We require them in our facility in order to make things fast. That's kind of in the face with a lot of efficiency when it comes to production metrics, is to first be okay with changing your way of thinking. The second advice would be to involve your supply chain partners. And the third is to listen to your customer questions. And the more that we look back at the customer questions that we've captured over the years, the answers have been there all along. And answering those customer questions have been pretty pivotal. And when it comes to lead times or other expectations around samples or shop drawings, the customers have been asking since the beginning and we just need to be brave enough to listen. Well, thank you so much, both of you for your time. Thank you for your great answers for our listeners. If you want more great content like this, head to venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe. Until next time, I'm your host, Beth Popnikolov. Thanks everyone.