Jason (00:00:02) - But when you start to get into the thousands of stores, no one retailer in the world can represent all of the retailers. And we are going, I mean, we have a lot of stores that are one-off stores, two-off stores, and three-off stores. So we have hundreds and hundreds of individual owners that we work with. Not one can represent them all. And so I don't know what the next thing will be. They will tell us or we will sort of facilitate that with our product manager.

Ariana (00:00:24) - Welcome to Secret Ops, the podcast uncovering the world of operations, one episode at a time. I'm your host, Ariana Cofone, and today's guest is Jason Vego, co-founder and CEO of Bevz, a SaaS platform for convenience stores. We dive into a lot of my favorite topics accidentally in this one, which is fantastic. Consumer product, goods, inventory management, retail. We also dive into the world of what it's like to be an operator, as a founder of a business, and all of the different skills that you learn not only on your way in creating the company, but also as you evolve and scale the business.

Ariana (00:01:02) - It truly is a treat to talk to someone that nerds out as deeply as I do about all of the operations of a business. So I hope you enjoy it as well. Let's dive in. Jason, thank you so much for coming on to Secret Ops. I was incredibly intrigued to talk to you today because as someone who's been in the consumer product goods space in the food industry, knowing that you're making a platform for convenience stores had all of the questions popping up in my brain, how are you doing this? How are you making a platform around this, this industry? So I would love to start with why? Why look for convenience stores? Why support them? You know, as a serial entrepreneur you're always looking for white spaces. So talk to us about the evolution.

Jason (00:01:49) - Yeah. So it was not the first white space I tried to fix. The first one was dog groomers. So before Bevz, built a very similar business to Bevz, which failed for several reasons, which I'm happy to talk about, but just sort of understanding of the market.

Jason (00:02:06) - But same sort of SMB client. I tried to fix dog grooming and bring a platform to them. So that was what I actually tried to do. Why we picked convenience stores is really credits to my co-founder. So my co-founder, Victor, has owned and operated convenience stores for 39 years. So literally for decades in the space, his friends wow, his friends, his family, his network, they're they're all in this space, right? So either retailers, convenience stores, distributors or suppliers, the brands. Right. And so he gets the credit. How me and him met, because why would I be involved in this in the first place? We're not your classic co-founder duo…he was actually my basketball coach growing up, so I have known him forever. I have picture proof, if that's of interest to the listeners.

Ariana (00:02:51) - That makes my heart swell with happiness. That's fantastic.

Jason (00:02:55) - Yeah. So I met him when I was six years old. He was my basketball coach, and he came to me in 2019 saying, no one's building anything for convenience stores.

Jason (00:03:04) - We've tried, you know, and he's a more sophisticated convenience store owner. And he's going, I tried the grocery tech stuff but it didn't really work. I tried the restaurant tech stuff but it didn't really work. I tried the delivery apps, not really built for us. Great for the consumer, not great for us. I want to build something. And so that's really sort of why we selected convenience stores. It was his decades in this space and then me being sort of adjacent to it. Right. I've known him since I was six, so I've been weirdly friends with and connected to many liquor store and convenience store owners in Southern California since I've been a child at their houses, things like that. So that's how we got started.

Ariana (00:03:38) - So we didn't discuss this before the intro call. That is so heartwarming and also amazing because you've got somebody who's such expertise in this field, who's lived and breathed it for so many years, then, you know, you've got this sort of like different approach. You are familiar with it, but you're not in the space of the same level.

Ariana (00:03:55) - Do you think that your different levels of knowledge in the industry gave you a leg up? Because I imagine if you're too deep into the space, you might assume certain things, and if you are too outside of the space, you might not be asking the right questions. So do you think the two of you sort of evened out and then became a good balance.

Jason (00:04:17) - 100%. So the dog grooming platform, we had zero experience in the industry and that was a big gap. We didn't know. We didn't know. I was a consumer. I had a dog that I brought to a groomer, but I didn't know what it was like to really be a dog groomer or own a dog grooming store. There was the perfect balance of pets because I agree, if you are only in the space, then how deep do you go to be able to sort of break out of it and sort of change it? That's the point, right? We're trying to innovate. And so Victor, being our customer was really critical.

Jason (00:04:46) - But I think that balance of me and him sort of combining, I think the one thing I would say, though, still being a co-founder and then being a CEO, I better know the space extremely, extremely well. So I look back, I think I learned it pretty quickly, but I, I still look back. I didn't learn it quickly enough, so I think we would have moved faster. That's the one gap the person without the industry knowledge, I would recommend move fast, suck up all the knowledge. And yes, you can't get 40 years in six months, but you can still get really, really close to knowing the industry at a deep level.

Ariana (00:05:19) - It's interesting because as an operator, I also find that I have to do the same exact thing. I work with clients in different industries. You know, they're building different products. The first thing I want to do is this tactile learning experience to almost like be absorbed into their brains, be absorbed into the world. What are some avenues that you chose to upskill yourself within the industry? Was it going on-site? Was it interviews like, how did you do that?

Jason (00:05:43) - Yeah, it was like all of the above.

Jason (00:05:44) - So one is, start with the low hanging fruit. Right. Talk to Victor. So off of that it was…tell me everything. I'm calling him asking him questions all the time. How does this work? Why does this work? All of that. The second was I spent a lot of time in his…he still owns two stores, so go to the store and just be there. And in the early days this was really tough because, uh, happy to share sort of my transition story, but I was still working full time initially when we were starting Bevz, and then I was in business school. It was like trying to do all three. And for Victor to go come hang out at my store for like hours was like, is that the best use of my time? It ended up absolutely being the best use of my time, because you have to see the sort of day to day. So the two ones that were sort of like trigger learning points for me was the day the inventory gets dropped off, or at least some of it, and then the beer sales day.

Jason (00:06:31) - And so the beer sales day is my favorite story because I'm in the store and he's going, you won't believe how outdated this is. How like Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors are selling to convenience stores. Not a joke on a weekly basis. So literally every week they come to the convenience store, they put on a snow jacket, they walk into the walk-in fridge and they count the items. And I'm standing in this fridge freezing because I don't have my jacket. I was not prepared. Victor didn't prep me for that. And I'm just going, this can't, this cannot be what's actually happening. And they count. They find the number. It takes about 45 minutes and then the sales right at the end. “Oh, we launched a new seltzer. We launched a new beer. Uh, do you want to re-up on this?” And so, part two, go live it and be it. I think looking back on like the dog groomer or any other company I would do in the future is I either need to become the customer or live as the customer for a period.

Jason (00:07:22) - That was a really rapid learning, and I think the third was what you said. Interviews, talked to a bunch of customers, talking to industry people that I didn't do fast enough. I kind of just talked to Victor, and I wish I just was talking to Victor and talking to everyone while going to a store. And the fourth is there's a lot of great online stuff too, so I did that a lot later in the Bevz journey once the fun race sort of kicked off, but there's a lot of industry research around number of convenience stores, items that are more popular, like percentage of independent burst chain, like all that stuff. So I did get there. I would say I feel fairly confident in my abilities now, but it was a combo of those four things of like using my co-founder’s skill set, living and breathing it, interviewing industry and customers, and then doing online research. I think, uh, is the key.

Ariana (00:08:08) - That discovery phase, I find that it's sometimes hard for founders to absorb that space, because essentially it's you sort of feel like, am I wasting time? Because every minute counts, right? Every minute building something counts.

Ariana (00:08:25) - The second time around, after the dog grooming business, you had felt the pain of not doing that. So was it like, was it easy for you to jump into that discovery phase, or was it still constantly being like, “oh, but I want to start building. Oh, but I want to start doing this”.

Jason (00:08:43) - Yeah. It was still the combo of it. I think two things happened that made me really dive deeper into the learning. One was I said, I'm not doing this again. If I'm going to do vertical software at least, right, I'm going to…my co-founder better know the vertical or I better know the vertical. Or like I said, I better learn. I better become the customer for a period of time. Right? A lot of these stories of the old days of DoorDash, where they were like one of the founders got a job at a pizza company to do pizza delivery to figure it out. Right. So, so part of it was, yeah, I did learn the hard way.

Jason (00:09:13) - And I'm like, I'm gonna uplevel this. Bring someone in who really knows the industry in this case, Victor brought me in. But team up with someone who's industry knowledge. The second was I was getting my MBA at the time. And there is your capstone or your master's thesis. You could pick different ways. Unsurprisingly, I did the entrepreneurship path, and so we were starting a company and they sort of showed you what would be like best practice if you had more time than you normally would as a founder of really learning. And they have you do 100 interviews. So if you're going to start a company, you have to do 100 interviews, arbitrary number. But like that's a lot of interviews. So it was five of us and we all did, you know like approximately 20 but 100 interviews in addition to extensive research. So I saw what it would be like if I had unlimited time, this is best practice. I saw what it would be like to start a company without any industry knowledge. And so I was pretty avid to do it.

Jason (00:10:04) - But even then, which I would say had more than most founders, sort of a lot of pressure from multiple sides and experiences to learn the industry. Still, there's not enough time in the early days and I was going, “I need to operate. I need to like go raise money. I need to like, help build the product. I need to fix problems.” And so it's still a constant battle, even with all the pressure. And like I said, looking back is, uh, I would keep I would I would double down on that. The industry knowledge and it later helped me so much I built…I at least contributed to a better product. I raised money way faster when I knew the ins and outs of my industry, so I think it was a trigger effect, but it was still really hard then.

Ariana (00:10:42) - Speaking about going to school and sort of learning the more formal approach of starting a business, and also just like starting a business, having done that multiple times now, part of me always jokes I'm like, yeah, I think I got like, you know, a real life MBA. I didn't get an MBA, but I sort of like jumped in all these startup worlds where we had funding and Shark Tank and all these kinds of crazy things. Having sat in both camps, what do you think is the biggest difference and what would you recommend for others knowing that everybody's got their own path? Like what's your opinion about it?

Jason (00:11:14) - That's really tricky. The MBA and the startup, and I believe in a lot of things we've done accelerators is like, you get what you put in. And so I think you can make any of them really great. Someone said something interesting to me the other day, which was, I'm not remembering the exact numbers here, but it was something like six months at of startup is like one year of business school. You learn so fast, especially in the early stage startup where you're doing everything. So I think it's a combo. I mean, it was a lot of work to do, both of them.

Jason (00:11:46) - And then at one point, like I said, I still had my full time job because I couldn't pay for school without the full-time. So that was terrible. And I was bad at everything. Don't probably do that. But what I would say was that the learnings from MBA were so applicable when I had the startup. So honestly, I'd say if you want to learn the most, my recommendation would be to do both. If you can do a working MBA, it was a working MBA. To be clear, I was a full time student. I think, to answer your question, like what's the difference? I mean, they are so different, right? I mean, even UCLA, I went to UCLA was an awesome school for entrepreneurship, but it is still like the capstone project. A lot of the issues that the students have was that we wanted to start a company. Right. Well, it's still a master's thesis. It's a research project.

Jason (00:12:34) - Like you have to get a master's degree to complete. And so it is so much tedious work that I think you wouldn't apply. So, I don't know, I go back and forth, I'm now happy I did it. I think if you asked me at the time, I don't know how happy I would have been. I did take a leave of absence at one point and during my MBA, then I went back and finally finished it. But I think the key–

Ariana (00:12:56) - I’m sure you were exhausted. Literally just shoving tons of information and outputting tons of….I mean, that must have been nuts.

Jason (00:13:01) - Yeah, I'd say the one thing that I think is, is really important though, right? Is what your gaps are. So I keep mentioning the dog grooming app. It was just such a good opportunity for me to fail, learn and learn what I don't know. One huge gap for me was finance and operations at a higher level. I did operations more, minimal finance more in a project management standpoint in my previous jobs.

Jason (00:13:25) - And so that was something I went from like zero to something I think good enough to keep Bevz alive. Right. So know your gaps. I've known a few people get the MBA and they're quite strong in product or finance. And if you're not taking the gaps you need for the career you want, then it's a problem. So I think for me, it ended up being the perfect balance because I really like the finance skill set. And I do think those are important skills for operating a business.

Ariana (00:13:50) - I could ask you a million questions on this, but I want to talk about Bevz and what you're doing from a platform standpoint and how you're looking through the operational lens of, we talked about, you know, building the business operations versus now learning to scale, to build into the different versions of the app that you're releasing. Very different skills needed, very different considerations to think about. So can you give us the like, hey, you're one and two. Here's what we were thinking operationally now year three plus here's where we're at.

Jason (00:14:24) - Yeah. And it was very different. So year one 2020 we go to market in January. Pandemic hits. And our platform was very different. So we were…it actually helped us. So we launched and helped her and it sort of got us where we are. So we launched in January 2020. Pandemic hits running a team in the pandemic is a whole other conversation that was really tricky. You had different perspectives on sort of social distancing and not and like not having your core team sort of working together in person was rough. But that wasn't your question. Sort of…we had our three year journey and it's very tangible how different they were. 2020, we go to market with a marketplace model. So we were basically DoorDash for convenience stores. Right. So that operational scale was very different. We were fueling marketing with paid digital. We needed consumers and we needed retailers. So we were just running around L.A., getting retailers to join the platform. It was free, though, because the marketplace model was you took a percentage of the sales, so it was a little easier to get them on board.

Jason (00:15:21) - But still, at the time, 2020 stores going like e-commerce, what are you even talking about? But that's what the pandemic helped. It was like, oh, e-commerce. Yeah, I need that because people aren't coming into the store often. And so we were doing both. But then the big learning in 2020 by going to market was they didn't need another delivery app, they needed an operational platform. Right. So what we the biggest learning was they had no ability to do inventory management. Not because of lack of skill. I mean partially lack of skill, but really lack of infrastructure and technology. These stores have 5 to 10,000 unique SKUs. They're getting hundreds of cases of inventory sent to their store on a weekly basis. One clerk maybe a second person there. And people coming in. And now delivery orders coming in online, they couldn't keep track of what they have in stock. So they still have a great business selling these items.

Jason (00:16:09) - But they couldn't use our e-commerce effectively or any of them. So then 2021 was all right, hit the stop button, pivot completely. We rebuilt Bevz entirely. And then 2022 was where we went to market with the B2B software platform, which is basically supporting stores and their ability to buy and sell inventory. So we're building automations and integrations in the way they buy from their distributors, where they sell in-store through the point of sale system and where they sell online through their e-commerce and delivery apps. And so I think the real answer to your question was like 2020 was an entirely different business model. The way we made money, the way we scaled, the way we acquired customers, the two sided marketplace 2022 is a totally different business. Now we're selling a SaaS platform. There is an upfront fee, but we're giving them more features. And it was figuring out what those what we call “the wedge features” were to sort of get them in. What I just said out loud, there's no way we're going to build every single integration with every distributor, every POS and every e-commerce.

Jason (00:17:07) - It was what's going to get them? And so we focus on that inventory management piece. We built an inventory management platform. We preloaded normalized data across name, description, photo and UPC code. And then we gave it to them that they can easily use to then manage the other e-commerce and delivery apps. And so that model is very different on how we manage operations and scale. It was very sales driven, no more marketing driven. We literally cut the entire marketing spend and department. We started to run out of territory in Los Angeles. So how did we start to scale? And so happy to talk through all of that. But it is so contingent on the business. And now going into 2024, we've scaled up. We have, you know, about a thousand stores on the platform today. And now it's obviously not me or Victor or one of our founding team members physically just walking into stores. We scaled up the sales team, and we're really now more metrics driven and sort of tracking capital efficiency at scale.

Jason (00:18:02) - But it's been quite the journey for both startups. I consider Bevz two startups because the first one. We just sort of learned a lot, but totally pivoted it.

Ariana (00:18:11) - I'm having fever dreams and flashbacks to…so when I was in when I was working in the food industry, you know, we were creating the food product, we were creating popcorn, and then we were sending it. So we were working with distributors and warehousing and small retailers, big retailers and and the thing that surprised me most was twofold. One, how antiquated the systems were, just like super duper antiquated…fax machine orders still coming in and really getting zero visibility on your entire sort of supply chain. The second part that makes it extra stressful when it comes to anything food related, is you immediately have a timer with the expiration date. So very quickly you all of a sudden have this like immediate…everything has to get sold at a certain time, otherwise the product is done. And there's all these different terms about when a product expires you lose all this cash.

Ariana (00:19:07) - So this was something that I had no idea going into it. Now I've got such a different appreciation. When I think about convenience stores and the SKUs. Well, how did you make that process easier? Because I have very few SKUs. You know, some people, like you said, are dealing with thousands of SKUs. Where did you even begin to tackle that problem?

Jason (00:19:28) - Yeah. So some of it was luck, which was in the initial sort of database where we were building to enable them to sell online in the first place. We started pulling from various databases in the early day manual. Obviously, we're getting pictures. We're we're copying descriptions, and we're sort of doing that. Once we sort of rebuilt that one into phase two, we recruited a really talented CTO who had done this in a lot of ways, and we started building integrations with various databases. And where his skill set was so strong was we tap in all these different databases we information share with places like DoorDash or things like that. And then what we would do is we would normalize the data.

Jason (00:20:05) - So you'd get all this data and you would normalize it together. And that's how we sort of started. It was almost accidental because we had to have some form of infrastructure in there to allow the delivery app to work in the first place. Then we realized that is the trigger. It is too much inventory. They're never going to have sort of the full tracking and abilities for it. And so if we normalize all this data, we present it in a really simple, easy to use way. Then we can start to scale that out. And that's what I call the heart of the system. Right? There's no Bevz. Or like you're saying, there's no way you're ever tracking. And we don't have that sort of heart of the system. And then we can start to build the integrations and track it. But partly luck and partly like catching on to what we now believe is maybe like the entire infrastructure of the whole system.

Ariana (00:20:48) - I can imagine how dirty the data must have been pulling in from different sources.

Ariana (00:20:52) - Was that a big struggle? Struggle in normalizing the data was like figuring out duplicates. I mean, I just feel like the cleaning process for that would be a nightmare. But how did it…

Jason (00:21:05) - It's a nightmare. It's getting better, though, right? I mean, part of it was like the team you build. So our CTO, Jim, has done this before. He was one of the founding members of Ticketmaster Online. He always says, like Ticketmaster is basically a giant point of sale system, like behind the scenes. So we had the skills to do it. I'm not personally normalizing all this data, but I've heard the horror stories. It doesn't come out perfectly, but the more we input, the better it gets. Wine is a great example. Wine sucks because you can have the same bottle, different vintages and years, and it's like the SKUs are not always perfectly aligned. And so there are sort of machine learning tools. We're starting to build out that we can sort of match based on photos and descriptions and barcodes and all these different things.

Jason (00:21:52) - For now, we didn't touch wine at that level. It's just whatever year it is. That's the wine that it is. But it is messy. But it, I will say our technology team, unless they are lying to me, uh, seems to enjoy the challenge of it. Right. Like part of, I think what a lot of technologists want and seek in a career, right, is not the easy projects. And so our tech team has been at least quite excited around this. We've talked about this sort of data lake where we sort of pull all the data into this. It's called a data lake and sort of redistribute it out, like we were almost going to outsource that project and they were like, if you have to, but we would want to build it. It's a challenging project. So I think that's part of it. The team, the people. And if it was super easy, everyone would do it. And that's why it hasn't really been done in our space at scale yet.

Ariana (00:22:38) - Going back to the moment of the business being in a year, being a different type of format and then having to pivot it to something different. What was that moment or collection of moments where you were like, we've got to change this. And at what point…Because I think that's very hard for people, right, to either say, this isn't working or we need to pivot to something different, like, what did that look like? And I guess what can others learn from your experience?

Jason (00:23:05) - Yeah. So a few sort of key moments and yes, I think almost always any founder or founding team I've talked to that has a big pivot. It's classic that one founder is going to disagree and so totally me and Victor in the early days had a lot of disagreement on what, how, and it's a resource issue. Right. Like we could keep everything. We just keep everything. But if we had, I always felt like if we had one foot in each lane, we would just be doing like half the work in each of them.

Jason (00:23:33) - So it wasn't really working. A few things started to happen. One was by being our own delivery app, we saw how many mistakes were being made, and it all funneled back to the same issue, which was the ability to manage their inventory. I think the second was aligned with the trends of the quantity of items in store. So we think back 40 years ago when Victor bought his first store, there were not hundreds of beers. It was a handful of beers. Now it's like people are looking for not just beer, not just craft beer, not just an IPA like a hazy IPA. It's the trickle down. It's insane. I think of even hard seltzer. Hard seltzer was like not a category not that long ago. Right. And so I think part two is just seeing the trends, which they're not going to have less types of items in these sorts. Are going to have more types of items, less in stock of each of those items. That's two. The third was we were always retailer-first.

Jason (00:24:23) - That was literally…it was like Bevz built by retailers for retailers. We would get calls from our customers and they'd ask us a question like, hey, how do I do this thing? And it's like, right off the bat, you already know it's not the best platform. They're on another delivery app platform. So they would call and ask for help with one of our competitors. How do I do this in? And then we're like, what app are using Postmates? And we're like, you know we're Bevz, right? We're not Postmates. That's like our competition. And they're like, but they won't pick up the phone. And so off the bat we were like, we help them anyways. In the end, it was like, if the retailers are happy, we feel like we're winning. It's not a great business model if all your revenue comes from not doing that. But that was sort of the three sort of key points. And then I think the fourth one was that the space got really crowded.

Jason (00:25:04) - There was no way we could compete against the delivery apps without a ridiculous amount of money. I mean, like, so in LA you're driving around, you see, the biggest billboard by where I live is now owned by Disney. Or at least they've just taken it over. It's massive. And Studio City off of Ventura Boulevard, it was Uber Eats, alcohol and snack delivery like huge. DoorDash. You're going around like buses painted with it, ads and commercials. It was like so much spent. And then their technology is ten years ahead of us. Right. So ways you could click buttons, ways you can replace and sub out items, all this stuff, you take those sort of four key pieces and we're going I'm not saying the delivery app wouldn't work. It was just not the right fit for us at the right time. And we didn't have the right budget. And then I think the core reason, if you sort of bucket that all together into one, we take a step back and go, like, why did we do this in the first place? It was never to get consumers more snacks and drinks ever.

Jason (00:25:57) - It was always to help the retailer, like embrace e-commerce and we realize, right problem, wrong solution. We do not need to give them another delivery app. We need to give them an infrastructure and an operational platform to first and foremost embrace e-commerce and use the pre-existing delivery apps and then secondary like what we're doing now today, which is starting to touch the way they buy, the way they sell in-store. And then longer term, which I'm sure you'll ask me eventually, but around where we're going to go with it, which is a full operational platform, right? These stores have all sorts of things, phone and internet security, refrigeration, people that they manage, just like any corporation or business that they don't really have the tools that are custom built for them. So yeah, that's how we kind of did it. It all came back to sort of like who we are and what we wanted to do, but the writing was on the wall, and I think the beauty of this was like, if you go out there and you put something in markets, the absolute best way to sort of see what happens.

Ariana (00:26:52) - That's a key thing that I'm going to take away from this conversation is like step into the environment of what you're trying to do. It's very easy, especially being on remote teams. I'm remote, right, that you aren't necessarily exposed to the thing that you're doing every day. But then when you are, you're like, oh God, okay, this is actually what we need to be focusing on. It becomes really clear the writing's on the wall. I think also that's what is it called, the sunken cost fallacy, where it's like, you know, if you invest money or time and something, it becomes like my precious and you have to be able to let go and say, like, we can't continue this just because we invested this amount does not mean it's the right choice going forward. Having those honest conversations, oh man, I mean, my heart breaks a little bit thinking about all of that in 2022. That's a very intense year for all of these lessons to be learned so quickly.

Ariana (00:27:44) - So let's talk about the future of what you're building. Because as an operator, everybody wants everything fixed in the kitchen sink they want they want to you know, I joke, but I'm like, my goal is to automate myself because every part of our job, we have to think about how do we make better for the next year, you know, three years, ten years. So where do you want to take Bevz? And what is the reality of the dream versus how do you prioritize the components of the dream?

Jason (00:28:12) - Yeah, it's really tricky. So in the early days, right. The “wedge” we sort of figured out. Right. Which what I would have preferred to do, is like the logical process of how goods are bought and sold is first, build out how they buy the inventory, then how they sell it in the store, then how they sell it online. Why did we go in reverse and start with online? It was because the ROI was there, right? Even now we're getting there where stores are being more receptive to order inventory online, but your store and your rep comes into your store physically like you'd rather that.

Jason (00:28:42) - It's like, why would I order online? Am I saving money? Am I saving time? And it was like, you will. It wasn't there yet. So we flipped it in reverse and we went with e-commerce and delivery. It helps them make more money, feel that sort of tangible ROI. So today what we're working on is those other integrations. We're building point of sale integrations to allow for that facilitation with in-store sales and the information sharing. And then we're building out inventory, ordering integrations and just the way they buy their inventory in general to have everything talk to each other. That's really the trifecta. So right now and for the foreseeable future, is just the way information is shared from what they buy and sell. So it seems really simple. But most of these, like Walmarts targets of the world, have bought really expensive technology, customized it like crazy, and there's no way a convenience store is going to be able to spend that kind of money. And so we're sort of taking that and building that sort of infrastructure to allow for them to do, uh, quantifying, automating, facilitating the way they buy and sell goods.

Jason (00:29:37) - So that's sort of like the next phase of Bevz, were in that right now after closing our last round. I think going past that, I get this question a lot of like, what other verticals am I looking at? You thought about grocery or restaurant and frankly, I like to stay super focused. Right now I have no intention of, for now, ever going into another vertical. The liquor convenience space is big enough 150,000 convenience stores across the US, 1.2 million globally. There are enough for us to hit this. And that's my focus for now. Will we never go to another vertical? I can't say that for sure. But for the foreseeable future, where we're staying focused because we build better, more custom technology and services when we keep the target there. So what am I looking at in kind of the next, I don't know, three, five years is we've cracked the code at least a little bit on this direct sales motion to acquire stores. Right. So we're adding hundreds of stores now on a monthly basis and we can scale it up.

Jason (00:30:32) - It's not perfect. It's not like you hire one salesperson and automatically get the stores. But we have a really good motion to do that. We're feeling better about lead generation. We're building channel partnerships. It's going to be exciting. So step one is like get as many stores as possible. We stripped again to the tens of thousands of stores. Like there's a lot of market power and a lot of really cool information. We start to get at a hyper local level. So that's one. The second is that I've talked about sort of the future. I briefly mentioned it earlier, which is once we sort of crack the code and really have a good baseline for what they buy and sell, I want to add more resources to the store and become like the full operating platform for a liquor convenience store. Key things like I mentioned before, right? It's phone and internet the way they do payroll and taxes, the way they do refrigeration, compliance and security. Right. A lot of break ins and things like that. That should be sort of all built into each other.

Jason (00:31:23) - And I think that gets really exciting being the full operating system for liquor and convenience stores. And, and that's kind of the focus for now. Eventually going international but we will be in the US for a while.

Ariana (00:31:34) - This excites me because as an operator, usually if you don't have a go to platform that is really looking at the problems in such a specialized way, you're hacking away, creating a solution. And I hate to say it, it's going to involve Google Sheets. It's gonna involve some crazy POS. You know, you're like, because you literally just don't have any…You don't have the best case scenario of like, how do we get you to operate best is the move to compliance and payroll and all of that. Do you see that…I guess the major pain points that you're trying to solve with those, is it about creating an all in one? Is it about sort of prioritizing what you're hearing from the people that are owning these stores? Like, how do you knock up the dominoes and kick them down? Like, how are you doing that?

Jason (00:32:25) - Yeah.

Jason (00:32:25) - No, it's a great question. Right? One thing we did was we actually hired our first product manager who is very customer-focused. Like that is the core job it is to talk to customers all the time. We have a customer support team and they talk to customers, but it's usually very focused on sort of complaints and onboarding and issues. You have a sales team who talks to customers all the time, but their feedback is very directly towards sort of what you have now. And our new product manager is really focused on what their challenges, needs, interests, etc. I think why I'm so hyped on these other layers where we start, I don't know yet. That's product managers that roll to tell us what the customer needs, because I really just don't know. And we still use my co-founder Victor's knowledge. But when you start to get into the thousands of stores, no one retailer in the world can represent all of the retailers. And we are going, I mean, we have a lot of stores that are one-off stores, two-off stores, three-off stores.

Jason (00:33:18) - So we have hundreds and hundreds of individual owners that we work with. Not one can represent them all. And so I don't know what the next thing will be. They will tell us or we will sort of facilitate that with our product manager. I think that's part one. Why I'm excited.

Ariana (00:33:31) - Oh, that's a beautiful thing to say that I don't know. We are going to find out. Like I actually love that answer. I think it's scary to say it sometimes where it's like, I'm not sure, but we're going to investigate it. Like that's actually what operators do all the time. Most of the time we don't have the answer to whatever the thing is, but we're like, we'll find out, uh, it's that hunger that you've got to kind of figure out the missing puzzle piece. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Jason (00:33:55) - Yeah. No, no. And what's funny is that sort of relates back to the literally the first question you asked me, which was around the sort of was it better, was it worse that Victor had all this industry knowledge and I didn't I mean, part of it, I think what benefited me and not being the industry expert is I'm going, “I don't know, I have to go find out.”

Jason (00:34:14) - It'd be crazy for me to. Sit your and tell you I know what every retailer has done because not only are there too many, I haven't spent my time in the space long enough to really know. So I think that actually sort of triggered that. Whereas I'm very much going like I have no idea what the customers need. I hear what my team says and I take that very seriously. I think I do a decent job at sort of honing in on that information, but as we're scaling it, we've got to find out what they need from them. And we've learned the hard way before that sometimes they'll say they need something and then it's not exactly what they need. Or something that was hot on their mind. So, uh, tough job to be a product manager in general, but especially at Bevz where we're getting all sorts of different things and we're going to sort of build small versions of them, little MVP's, test them out, etc.. So that's part one. I think why I'm really hyped about these other features is one is the time savings and two is the stickiness.

Jason (00:35:04) - So I mean, frankly today, right. Like we are solving the problem of managing inventory and selling online. But this moment if you ripped out Bevz, it's not like the store would just go under. What I want is not not to be the reason why they do or don't go under, but I want to add so much value that the store is going. “There's no way I can even run my store without bevs because I literally do everything in it. I pay my people, I buy my inventory, I sell that inventory, I manage Break-Ins and theft and compliance.” And so I think the stickiness is really important to sort of latch on to this market. That's what I'm excited about, these other features. But still, even today, we are pretty core-focused on just the inventory, right? We are hyper focused on what do they buy, what do they sell. And if we can facilitate that, that is a core business of the company, right? Like a store buying and selling items.

Jason (00:35:53) - So that's kind of how we're thinking about it. My short answer is I have no idea what's next in that operational piece. What I do know is next, is anything touching the way they buy and sell inventory that's happening in real time? We still have a lot of work to do there. I don't know what's next on this sort of operational tracking and monitoring piece. We'll find out from our customers next time we talk in a year. I'll tell you all the things we have built.

Ariana (00:36:17) - We'll get the update. Well, this is you know, I guess one of the last questions I have for you is I think operations gets a bad rap. A lot of people say that ops is synonymous to process, or we're sort of invisible or were the last thing that people think about. But in what you're doing, Bevz, I think you are sort of making the operations of how things are run sexy and slick and smart. So for all of us operators out there who are trying to figure out how to like market ourselves in a way that is, I guess just people get what we do. What have you learned in getting people to like and be engaged by what Bevz is doing from an operational standpoint?

Jason (00:36:58) - Yeah. So your question is more around really sort of like not the external because we are building an operating platform. Right. But your question is really more around how the internal pace of running and operating the business, right? Yeah.

Ariana (00:37:10) - And I think connecting that with a greater audience. Right. Like is it just about, “hey, we can solve this problem for you in the slickest way possible.” Is it about like, what things have you learned in connecting between what you're building and what you're marketing and what people seem to be engaged with?

Jason (00:37:26) - Yeah. So I think it's twofold, right? It is first getting the right people. And I think part of your question or maybe it wasn't, but is around like, how am I attracting good operators because we can't build anything without the good operators that I think we've done a better job at, which is it's so tangible, or at least I'm a very data-driven person.

Jason (00:37:42) - So anyone really who's…even if their title is in operations at Bevz, is really thinking about operations and project management. It's so tangible on time savings, money making sort of value to customers because we're tracking so much data. So I think that's that part in terms of selling it then back to the customer. Frankly, it's been super hard for us. I mean, that's why we started the way we did. We're not really selling sort of improved operations. It's not resonating with our customer yet. We tried that right, it was “let's help you order that inventory, operationalize it.” They’re just “ I'm good. I don't really care.” And so that's why we flipped it to make more money. So frankly my answer there and maybe it's not as helpful for some of the operators out there. But it's from a sales motion. It is finding the trigger point that really gets them bought in. And for convenience stores at least to start to embrace technology would make more money. And so how do we make them more money? The time savings and the operational piece is sort of funneled into that.

Jason (00:38:37) - So it was how do you make more money, use Bevz. And today what we're seeing is that the store uses Bevz. If they were doing delivery right, I mean, they're not doing any e-commerce or delivery. Of course, we're adding ROI there. If they were already doing it and they do the same thing on Bevz, we see a 68% increase in sales in the first few months, and that's because they're using our platform better. But once again, they're seeing “make more money in three months”. They're not seeing the operationalization. We're getting there. And we're starting to get more feedback from customers around like, okay, I'm making more money now. They're like, this thing takes me a lot of time. So I think unfortunately my move is no, your customer. For our customer , operationalizing wasn't a ROI yet. I'm very. And it will be so we lead with the thing that they care more about now, and we will layer on these things later. And it's hard. It's hard to quantify those because money-making is easy. You made 100 bucks, so you'll probably pay 100 or less to make an extra 100 bucks. But to save you an hour. What does that really mean to you? It’s really tricky with our SMB audience.

Ariana (00:39:35) - It makes me feel better that you also are figuring out how to crack that code, because I've been in ops for over a decade and I just still can't figure it out. I do think it's about appealing to whoever your customer is or stakeholder is. It is ultimately about making money or making money through saving time. Again, quantifying it sometimes becomes more of a headache than not quantifying it. So you have to pick and choose your battles. But I agree with you. I mean, that's honestly why I created Secret Ops. People need to understand that operations is how we run our lives, run our businesses. It matters. It can be super cool. Actually, if you give me a chance to explain it to you.

Ariana (00:40:13) - Yeah, or if I can show you what it is. I don't think we're fully there yet. I feel like it's gonna be the next wave. Just like product management, design, user experience. Like in the last decade, I think we've seen that pickup in common knowledge around the business world. I do think ops is going to be in the next wave. At least I hope so. But of course, I'm totally biased.

Jason (00:40:35) - Yeah. No, I mean, my opinion is I think you've nailed it, which is because I experienced it as part of our fundraise. So when I was raising in 21 and 2022 and I was raising the pre-seed and the seed, I fell out of place because I'm deeply focused on operations. Right? So we were trying to be capital efficient. I was monitoring how we scale what we do because I'm like, how are we going to do this at scale if we don't figure out sort of the inputs and the pieces? I was like the outlier founder back then because it was all these founders raising at these crazy high valuations with insane growth.

Jason (00:41:08) - And these like to me, these like exuberant levels of confidence where I'm like, there's no way, you know that. What you're saying, like I've lost in pitch competitions like this is insane that you're saying this out loud right now. And then as things shifted, the market sort of broke a little bit. And then investors are very specific. It was now I'm like, wow, now I'm way ahead of the curve because I knew my metrics really well. We were tracking operational efficiency. I mean, you probably heard it a million times last year with tech startups especially like capital efficiency, like the hot word, it was not the hot word before. And so I do think we're in a new era, which is the operational skill set. And being a great operator is now becoming really important. I think it should have been important before. And there's a lot to say, right? There's the companies like the Facebook's of the world, who scaled so fast by making no revenue for so long and obviously changed the world with their product.

Jason (00:42:00) - But I'd say normally speaking, businesses have to make money and at some point in their life spend less than they make. Right. And so I'd say the future in the next several years is that tech startups are going to be pushed to be more operationally efficient, to track capital efficiency, to be really, really good operators. So I think I think the skill set is going to come into play way more than it had, at least in the technology sector, which is where I've spent pretty much all my time.

Ariana (00:42:26) - Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. I've seen that for so long. It was about revenue. What is your annual revenue? What's your increase in revenue? What's your adoption rate? And nothing mentioned about profit or profit.

Jason (00:42:37) - But what if I spend $1 million to do it? I'm like, so I added a thousand customers in a day and it's like, what did you spend $100 million. All right, well then we'll give you 100 billion more. It's crazy.

Ariana (00:42:47) - It doesn't make sense.

Jason (00:42:48) - That's what it was.

Ariana (00:42:49) - Yeah. And you do sit in the room like I've set rooms and I'm like, am I the crazy one? It's like you're sort of being gas–You're like, this doesn't like, even if I'm not a mathematical person, this does not make sense to me in any way or any capacity besides the anomaly, like you talked about, Facebook and all those kinds of instances. The flip was so hard in like, I think 2020 was a shit show, 2021, everything seemed to start to change, and now that's all I hear about. That's all I'm starting to understand again. Early stage startups are slightly different, but once you get to that maturity stage that you have got to be making money and bringing money in, the profitability is key, at least from an operational standpoint. I've got to figure that out.

Jason (00:43:31) - Yeah. I mean, to be super clear, we're not profitable at Bevz. So I don't want to sit here and be like, we're just doing it perfectly, but it's the path to profitability or the unit economics around what you're doing. We're now tracking, at least at best, the sales efficiency ratio, every dollar we spend on sales and marketing. What does that bring back in a dollar of annual revenue? Right. Ideally, being like, we should be trending toward spending less than a dollar to make a dollar. Right now we do not. But it's showing that we're tracking it. We understand it. Yeah, we're not profitable. But the idea is we know how to get there, or at least our unit economics make sense and we can fuel the growth and go, we'll still not be profitable if you want me to grow fast, but at least we know if we, like, hit the stop button and had to. Some costs or something like it's a business that makes sense. We make more money than we have to spend to keep it alive. Um, so it is the future. So I think we're in good places. And for a long time we were the not cool kids.

Jason (00:44:28) - And I think we'll be the cool kids very soon.

Ariana (00:44:31) - And I hope so. I mean, my husband will say it's cool. We'll get matching leather jackets and all the ops people. All the ops people. Jason, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for your knowledge and just sharing all of your successes and failures and learnings. I mean, so much has happened in such a short amount of time, and I really wish you just the best of luck, and I can't wait to hear what's happening in the next year of everything that happens in Bevz. As we wrap up, we want to learn about you as a human being because we're more than just, you know, our ops, we are also humans as well. So I have got some rapid fire questions to ask you. I'm going to shoot them your way, so you let me know what your first first comes to mind, okay. First one is what is your favorite part of the day?

Jason (00:45:18) - Morning. It wasn't before. I’ve become a morning person now. Not too early in the morning, though. Like nine. Like 9 to 10 range. Not like six.

Ariana (00:45:29) - Normal morning. Normal morning.

Jason (00:45:30) - Normal morning..

Ariana (00:45:32) - What is the best purchase you've made? Under $50.

Jason (00:45:37) - Under $50? I have been a fiend with my Bluetooth and voice enablement in my house now, so I'm going to say. And maybe I'm going overkill, to be determined, but, Alexa devices and Google Nest for temperature. Those have been awesome. And I'm just talking to my home all the time now.

Ariana (00:46:00) - Have you named your system yet?

Jason (00:46:03) - Not the full system, but each room does. So, a peek into my brain. So, like in the office, the Alexa dot is Office Dot, and then the lamp is titled Michael from the office. So you have to “Alexa, turn on Michael”, and then the lamp in the office will turn on. And so I've named different devices, so yeah, not the system. It's a good question. I need to name the whole system. What are the individual names? They have decent names.

Ariana (00:46:34) - That's actually really funny. I'm going to do that as a prank for April Fools with my husband. That's going to be a good one. What is a book or an audio book that you're currently reading or listening to?

Jason (00:46:46) - Good question. I have just finished…so interestingly, we had the whole team sort of read books. I went teacher on them, and I assigned books to everyone. So the book I just read, I'm forgetting the name, but it was around sort of revenue generation. So it was how to sort of boost and scale revenue and it was by one of the earliest salespeople, I believe, former CRO of Salesforce. But I think it's like the Revenue Playbook. That's the one I just finished.

Jason (00:47:17) - Now I have to pick my next book, but I have over the years, just bought way too many books and I put them on the shelves. And so I have plenty to choose from, so I just need to pick my next one. But for now, nothing. No. No reading, I just finished.

Ariana (00:47:33) - Well it is the holidays too. We need to chill. We need to have time to just relax. What is your favorite quote?

Jason (00:47:40) - I don't know if I have a favorite quote, but I have one that I recently saw that kind of hit me really hard. As we're scaling up, uh, it was “what you tolerate is your standard”, and it just made me really think deeply about going like, if my team, my customers, my partners. Like, if everyone's performing great, but a few people aren't. This is where it gets really tough being a leader. Going like what I'm tolerating and allowing is my standard. When I felt like before hearing that quote, like my standard was what I was pushing kind of our best people to do and our best customers to do. So that one stuck with me recently.

Ariana (00:48:22) - That's that some light bulbs are clicking in me as well. When you said that. What is something that makes you little-kid happy?

Jason (00:48:30) - My niece it is her four year old birthday this last weekend. Nails painted face painting, grilled cheeses and french fries. And, this was not purposeful, but I live, like, a half mile away from my brother and my niece. And so, startup life was tough. Pandemic was tough. I saw her way less, of course, when it was the pandemic. She was one and two. And so now I try and see her more often, and she's the. She brings the kid out in me for sure.

Ariana (00:48:59) - If you were to go back in time to starting your career, talking to your early self, what advice would you give them? Now that you're farther along, what would you tell yourself?

Jason (00:49:09) - It's a good question. It's tough.

Jason (00:49:10) - I have a funny story which is out of college. I got two job offers. One was Citrix, which seemed like the safer bet. It was the big tech company in Santa Barbara where I went to school. It was the biggest company, it had cool offices and a cafeteria, basketball court, gym. And I was like, that's cool. I got another job at a company called Find the Best, and I was so tempted to take it, but I just thought I'd take the sort of better salary, bigger company, Find The Best ends up rebranding to a company called Graphic. And then what was happening was Find The Best was a bunch of find the best, biggest dog, fanciest coffee, whatever. They were tracking data. They rebrand a Graphic, get purchased by Amazon, and become the back end system for Alexa. So did I make the wrong decision? Maybe. I would say though, with that story and why I tell it is that my journey worked out at Citrix.

Jason (00:50:05) - I had some really awesome managers and I grew tremendously. I think be wary of that because I think a lot of people I met at Citrix and friends who I know went into big tech or larger companies just didn't learn as fast, and I think I could have learned faster. I would go back in time. I'd say work at startups. I didn't know much about startups back then. This seed to series A/B round. These companies are still startupy, they're way tinier than a big tech company, but they have the funding and backing to be fairly secure. And if you're looking at yourself…now, this is hard doing best because I sort of built up to a salary and a lifestyle, and then I honestly cut it by two thirds. I made a third of what I made at one point. Nothing. But that was tough. In your early days, the salaries aren't going to be that different and you can get such great hands on learning. With the one caveat being some startups are probably run by poor operators, so be careful what you're learning.

Jason (00:51:02) - But my my short answer would be I would recommend people who are younger coming out of college, like seek out those maybe not the earliest stage startup, but they like seed series A, series B startups, and I think you can learn an insane amount really fast across a lot of spectrums and not really give up much on salary to gain that experience.

Ariana (00:51:22) - Last question, which is what do you want to be when you grow up?

Jason (00:51:26) - So what I want to eventually do, I think Bevz is going to take up a lot more time for me. Eventually I will probably have another startup in me. I made too many mistakes along the journey of Bevz and the dog grooming platform. Where I'm like, I gotta do it one more time where I know all the things I know. But maybe I'll say that forever. What I actually, I think love the most is supporting other founders. So like, I've done a couple accelerators and that's where I think I get the most energy and my ability to help other founders.

Jason (00:51:54) - I don't think I could do that without living these experiences myself. Long term, sort of what I want to be when I grow up is I want to either run or create like a startup accelerator or studio, or I can be in startup life but not have the crazy pressure and stress that it is running your own startup. And I'm hoping I can live with enough experiences, meet enough people to sort of be able to help more startups at scale. That is what I am. I am long term hoping to do.

Ariana (00:52:27) - Jason, this is such a treat. If people are listening, they want to follow your journey with Bevz and just your journey as an entrepreneur. Where can they find you?

Jason (00:52:35) - Yeah, I am most active or maybe only active on LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn or add me on LinkedIn. I have other accounts, but I barely use them. And if you want to see what Bevz is up to, I post all about that on LinkedIn too. But our website is Bevz.com.

Jason (00:52:50) - And hopefully over the coming couple of years will be a little more active on our Bevz social accounts. But, a reminder that it's for convenience store owners. So you might not be the target audience, but yeah, follow me on LinkedIn.

Ariana (00:53:03) - Maybe one day.

Jason (00:53:04) - One day, maybe one day. Maybe we have a bunch of us, convenience store operators. Who knows?

Jason (00:53:09) - I don't know.

Ariana (00:53:09) - Jason. Thanks again. I really just appreciate your knowledge. It's really been a blast. Secret Ops listeners, as always, thank you so much for listening or watching us on YouTube. We always appreciate the support. Make sure to subscribe wherever you find your podcast or subscribe on YouTube and watch in person like I tend to do. We'll see you next time. Bye!