What started as a group of retailers coming together to build a tool that could address some of their own delivery and installation challenges has grown into a major partner for the retail and service community in the form of DispatchTrack. We sat down with Co-founder Bob Bauer to talk about the growth of the service, how retailers can leverage their technology and more.
Rob Stott: All right. We are back on the Independent Thinking Podcast, coming to you from Nationwide Marketing Group’s PrimeTime event, and sitting down right now with Mr. Bob Bauer, co-founder of DispatchTrack. Appreciate you hopping over. Not too far of a walk, was it?
Bob Bauer: Not too far.
Rob Stott: No? You close by?
Bob Bauer: I can handle that. I have to get steps in anyway, so.
Rob Stott: Well, the walk from the hotel rooms to over here, it does it for a day. We get our 10,000, that’s for sure.
Bob Bauer: And I had to go to FedEx twice.
Rob Stott: Oh, no.
Bob Bauer: Got a few extra ones.
Rob Stott: No, that’s awesome. Well, we appreciate you sitting down with us and diving into it. Nice to have you on the podcast.
Bob Bauer: Appreciate it.
Rob Stott: How you doing?
Bob Bauer: I’m doing excellent.
Rob Stott: Awesome.
Bob Bauer: Glad to be here.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Bob Bauer: Love the Nationwide Marketing Group, they’ve always been very good to us.
Rob Stott: Yeah, no, awesome to hear. A part of the Service Leaders Network community of vendors and partners we have here at Nationwide Marketing Group. Before we dive into the company, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and path through the industry.
Bob Bauer: Yeah, when I was 18, I got a summer job in the furniture store doing the stock, setting up the displays and everything else. Finished college playing baseball and moved on to, went back to the store full time and went into the warehouse. I knew product, so I was running the racks trying to find stuff on 100,000 square foot warehouse.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: And loading trucks and merchandising and sales and advertising, so I mean.
Rob Stott: A history that’s in the business.
Bob Bauer: Yeah.
Rob Stott: So you know what these dealers are doing walking around.
Bob Bauer: I know what they’re dealing with. I mean, I was general manager. I had owned my own two leather stores as well.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: And I traveled a company called Leather Center, was vertically integrated. We manufacture our own and delivered it and sold it out of our own stores. I mean, it was quite a operation. But then I went back to the furniture business and then KB, who I’ve known since ’93, and another co-founder, him and I, he was working with one of our customers. They were trying to figure out a solution for how could we help with a better delivery experience. We couldn’t tell them when we were going to be there. I mean, you could do GPS on the truck, but it tells you what’s going on with your truck, right?
Rob Stott: Yeah, exactly.
Bob Bauer: But not what’s happened actually happened with the delivery and what have you. So in 2010, he wrote us an app for tracking so we could actually see the tracking, but to also take pictures.
Rob Stott: Sure.
Bob Bauer: And notes. And from a retailers’ perspective, one picture done properly can save thousands.
Rob Stott: Yeah, changed the game.
Bob Bauer: I can’t tell you how many hardwood floors I replaced.
Rob Stott: No, that’s crazy. So what’s awesome about that is, I mean, we mentioned it is just your history in the business. So you understand what these dealers are going through.
Bob Bauer: 100%.
Rob Stott: And the challenges they face.
Bob Bauer: And when I say how many hardwood floors.
Rob Stott: They know exactly what you’re talking about.
Bob Bauer: I know exactly what they’re dealing with. And walls. I mean, customers ask them to take 96-inch corner sofas down a basement or up a staircase. I mean, they’re not flexible.
Rob Stott: No, not one bit.
Bob Bauer: They don’t bend corners very well.
Rob Stott: No. So you mentioned the app, is that the origin for DispatchTrack?
Bob Bauer: That was the origin, that was the first solution we were trying to solve.
Rob Stott: So you were building it for in-house, is that right?
Bob Bauer: We were building it for either a delivery or an installer or a service technician to go actually be able to document what they did.
Rob Stott: Gotcha.
Bob Bauer: I mean, it was really there to protect them and the company.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: And just have real-time visibility on what’s going on.
Rob Stott: No, that’s awesome. So talk about the move then, how do you get to DispatchTrack?
Bob Bauer: Well, KB sold them product. They got to talking. He goes, “Bob, I got something I’m working on but I’ll bring it to you soon as we got something to work with.” They built an app in 60 days. A little background, Satish at 16 and a half was 147th employee of Microsoft.
Rob Stott: Whew.
Bob Bauer: And one of 18 that wrote the mathematics to the Excel.
Rob Stott: Right, wow.
Bob Bauer: So that’s our CEO.
Rob Stott: Okay. He knows what he’s doing.
Bob Bauer: He knows what he’s doing. And his wife’s also engineer, and so she did product design and everything else. So the four of us, two retailers, two engineers, it was a great combination together.
Rob Stott: That’s incredible, that’s a really neat thing. Well talk about that a little bit. That is a unique team. So bringing that together and some very unique minds in the room, how important is that to what you’re doing?
Bob Bauer: Yeah, we sat in living room, we sat at Pete’s, we sat at Starbucks. KB and I did this for two years before we built the volume up that we could just go and do it full time.
Rob Stott: So legit start-up mindset.
Bob Bauer: Yeah.
Rob Stott: That’s pretty cool.
Bob Bauer: Yeah. So now I mean, I’m jumping way ahead, but now we’re in 30 countries and do a million stops a day.
Rob Stott: So what is DispatchTrack today? If you were explaining, what’s the elevator pitch to a retailer here?
Bob Bauer: Yeah, I mean the elevator pitch, take it back to the beginning.
Rob Stott: Sure.
Bob Bauer: I mean, what we were trying to solve was not only that, but we realized that we didn’t integrate with the point-of-sale softwares.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: We really couldn’t go anywhere because routing had to be done too. So we built a routing platform, and a routing platform’s built for the retailer industry so it’s not trying to take a routing platform and manipulate it for an industry.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: Ours was designed for this industry.
Rob Stott: It’s crazy. Well, I mean a unique story to be able to tell to a member that’s talking to you here, right?
Bob Bauer: Yeah. So we understand Warners’ Stellian, we understand skill levels that this set of this team can do a delivery, but this team can do installs.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: And have routing automatically be able to assign those jobs.
Rob Stott: Interesting, yeah. Right.
Bob Bauer: Now part of that depends whether the POS can give us that data, but if it can, that’s how far we can take it.
Rob Stott: So there’s a lot of, I mean without getting too far ahead in the direction I want to take you because I could see where we’re heading.
Bob Bauer: Right.
Rob Stott: There’s a lot of challenges that you guys can answer, right?
Bob Bauer: 100%.
Rob Stott: I’m curious, what are some of the, obviously that’s in mind too as you-
Bob Bauer: Routing’s a big one, right?
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: I mean, if you’re going to make a commitment to a customer, and if I’m a consumer and you tell me four hours.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: You told me I’m giving up half my day. During pandemic, when we were all working at home, it wasn’t a big deal, but we built our routing to be able to hit two-hour time windows 98% of the time.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: But with that being said, there’s a lot of nuances. You’re routing a delivery, you’re routing a service, you’re routing an install. It could be a drop-off.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: A lot of the retailers today with Wayfair as a competitor, a basic delivery, that’s free.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: That means I’m just going to drop it off. But if I’m going to go in your home, things change.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: And that leads to where communication, we were the very first platform that put communication in the same platform with routing and everything. It’s all our own proprietary software, so it’s not parsed out to anybody.
Rob Stott: No, that’s incredible. Again, the positive of being able to have that team right of engineers, they can, you got some minds you can lean on to build those kind of things.
Bob Bauer: And your retailers, they’ll guide you.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Bob Bauer: You just have to listen so we’re very solution-oriented.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: And if it makes sense for one retailer, it’s probably going to make sense for all the retailers.
Rob Stott: Probably, right. And having those conversations too because I mean things change, but the fact that you have that retail knowledge and experience, you can have those conversations and understand where they’re coming from, I’m sure, and navigate those challenges.
Bob Bauer: Yeah, you can understand the use case because if you’re going to go to engineers.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: They understand building something.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: But giving them the background on why you’re building some.
Rob Stott: The why, yeah.
Bob Bauer: It’s as simple as selling with features and benefits, right?
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely.
Bob Bauer: I’m going to have the feature, but how’s it benefit me?
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: So when I tell people why we built a feature, I give them the use case because I think that’s important to understand the perspective.
Rob Stott: What’s unique is you guys too, you’re constantly innovating is what I’m hearing too.
Bob Bauer: Constantly.
Rob Stott: So how often do you say there’s updates to what you’re doing? Is it too often to count?
Bob Bauer: We have releases every two weeks, just about.
Rob Stott: Oh, wow. Okay.
Bob Bauer: And so with enterprise customers, we stagger them a little bit longer and make sure everything’s worked out-
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: Before we roll out to them. But every two weeks, so for example, the original communication we did was to let them know their time window so they could confirm.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: But then you realize that the retailer’s dealing with a lot of reschedules and you’ve already routed. Your routes were designed to be tight with the most stops on them, now you’re going to pull off stops off the route? So then we built out communication to send them ahead of time, two, three days ahead of time so they could confirm before you route.
Rob Stott: Okay.
Bob Bauer: And that cut down some of our retailers down one retailer that was running 1600 stops a day.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: And having 50 to 60 reschedules and no shows. Cut them down to less than 10.
Rob Stott: Wow. It’s incredible.
Bob Bauer: Huge impact.
Rob Stott: Yeah, I mean, again, thinking about the startup mindset, almost like Nationwide, we take in feedback and you adjust and make the product or the service or the offerings, right? More-
Bob Bauer: Yeah, you know how it is in business. What if you’re not involved in it, you’re-
Rob Stott: Just what it is. Constantly, it’s awesome to-
Bob Bauer: You’re going to be going out of business.
Rob Stott: Right, it’s awesome to hear that you guys take that kind of approach. What’s the big thing right now? What are you guys working on right now?
Bob Bauer: Big thing is expanding on the communication. The other thing is partnerships. There are communication platforms out there that we’ve integrated with and we historically have focused on delivery installs, the last mile part of the process, right?
Rob Stott: Right, yep.
Bob Bauer: But retailers are starting to say, “Can you do more of this on the front side?” We’re looking into that, but in the meantime, there’s awesome partners out there that already do this and they do it well. So we integrate with them and direct the messaging. If we send a message, we direct it all back to them so they can do the communication, that gives the retailer one platform.
Rob Stott: No, that’s awesome.
Bob Bauer: To really communicate. We try to be good partners with the other vendors here as well.
Rob Stott: No, that’s awesome.
Bob Bauer: And I think that’s important.
Rob Stott: Of course. For a member or retailer that’s interested, if they’re not using your platform right now, what’s it like to get on board with you?
Bob Bauer: We’re pretty much an easy software. It’s an easy UI, user interface to use. So the first key is really just getting an integration going with the software they have, which.
Rob Stott: Right, the point of sale software.
Bob Bauer: Yeah, your.
Rob Stott: If it does.
Bob Bauer: Yeah.
Rob Stott: Most of, yeah.
Bob Bauer: Most of them here would do. Once we have data, we could train and have somebody routing and using the mobile within two days.
Rob Stott: That was going to be my follow-up.
Bob Bauer: But generally speaking, depending on the size of the retailer, I’d say 30 days for a retailer with 10 trucks or more, 30 days. Because when I think about all the areas of a retailer that we provide a benefit to.
Rob Stott: Right
Bob Bauer: Obviously operations because they’re doing the routing, and if an item’s coming back, they need to know what’s coming back so they could deal with what are they going to do with it.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: So operations, but marketing, because all the messaging and everything we’re sending out social, like doing a survey with a Google review. There’s branding, right?
Rob Stott: How was your experience? Yeah, all that, yep.
Bob Bauer: How was your experience? We can integrate that if somebody has their own as well. Customer service, because we’re what you would call an exception management tool. When things don’t go right, we’re identifying them in real time as they’re happening. We’re able to notify customer service that this event happened, or they could see it live on the dashboard so there’s different ways. And there’s also the ability to two-way communicate with a driver on the road. There’s the ability to two-way communicate with the customer at any given time, let them know, hey, there’s this route’s running behind or inclement weather so there’s custom notifications, but also management. Management wants the KPIs, how are we doing this quarter versus last quarter?
Rob Stott: Where can we improve, yeah, final.
Bob Bauer: And so we can improve the whole thing.
Rob Stott: Hey, the more data the better, right?
Bob Bauer: Yep. So really in some retailer’s case, that’s one person.
Rob Stott: Right. How am I doing? Where do I need to improve, right?
Bob Bauer: As retailers, they wear a lot of hats.
Rob Stott: Sure do.
Bob Bauer: I was talking to one retailer last night, and one of the owners stayed at home to man one of the stores.
Rob Stott: Yeah, wow.
Bob Bauer: That’s what you do.
Rob Stott: That’s just what it is.
Bob Bauer: That’s what you do in retail.
Rob Stott: Feedback-wise from members that are on board and retailers that are using this platform, is there a biggest benefit they’ve realized, or one thing that you constantly hear? I’m sure, listening to you describe it, the platform can handle a lot and improve a lot, but is there one area where you constantly are hearing that this is the thing that it’s best for?
Bob Bauer: Well, I think route efficiency is one of them because I mean, I was routing with Thomas Guides.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: Putting notes on the pages. So the routing, I mean, some of our big retailers, we route 2000 stops in two minutes.
Rob Stott: Yeah, it’s incredible.
Bob Bauer: I route 50 stops in three seconds.
Rob Stott: Jeez.
Bob Bauer: And that’s with machine learning, right? We looked at traffic patterns every day, backwards two weeks.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: Weekdays versus weekends, so we can predict when you’re going to get there.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: And so that’s important, but I think the pictures are huge. I remember early on, customer in Oregon delivered a leather pull-up sofa. And if you know about leather pull-up, it’s got striations and barbed wire marks and it’s natural.
And they get out there three hours away and the customer complains and says, “What are all these marks?”
And the driver goes, “Well, we can take it back and exchange it.”
Well, you exchange it, you’re going to have the same problem. So the picture was uploaded to DispatchTrack. They talked to the owner, the owner says, “Let me call you back.”
He goes to the floor, takes a picture of the floor, uploads it, then has a conversation with the customer and the customer goes, “Oh, nobody explained it to me.”
Rob Stott: Saved six hours of drive.
Bob Bauer: Saved the delivery right then and there. You imagine if they had to take another one back? Would’ve had the same problem, first off.
Rob Stott: Right.
Bob Bauer: But leather pull-up sofa, wholesale cost is over a thousand dollars.
Rob Stott: Yeah, that’s incredible.
Bob Bauer: It paid for the whole program for a year.
Rob Stott: That’s incredible, man. That’s awesome. Well, I mean it’s just neat too because you mentioned it, things evolve, right? The industry evolves and technology plays a big part in that too. And just being, it’s cool to see where it came from. You were looking to solve something that you wanted to solve, and now you’ve developed a platform.
Bob Bauer: I think that high level of communication with the customer is also a huge benefit. Consumer today, nobody wants to answer their phone.
Rob Stott: But if you could look on an app.
Bob Bauer: But if you could just see a text and now you can put branding in the text, you could put the image of the company in the text. I mean, now that’s branded so they know where the message is coming from. We’re even looking into branding the phone call.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Bob Bauer: To the phone call message coming in. I mean, a lot of cool stuff you can do.
Rob Stott: Yeah, it’s incredible. Well, it’s awesome, Bob. I appreciate you taking the time. It was awesome to learn about your platform. We’ll have links and everything underneath for those listening or watching to go learn more about DispatchTrack. But appreciate you sharing your story hopping on the podcast and doing it, man.
Bob Bauer: Well, I appreciate the opportunity.
Rob Stott: This is great.
Bob Bauer: Again, we love the group.
Rob Stott: Hey, absolutely.
Bob Bauer: Thank you, Rob.
Rob Stott: Talk again soon.
