[00:00:00] Krushna Patel: I’ve emailed Gary Vee Mark Cuban, all these people. They’ve all replied to me. It’s, it’s literally that easy. I-
[00:00:05] Lori Boyer: Cold email
[00:00:06] Krushna Patel: When I first started, I spent hours just sitting in my high school classes just emailing people. Whenever you have time off, just email people. Simple emails like, “Hey, I’m a 3PL founder. Any advice? Like, what do you think I could do?”
[00:00:19] Lori Boyer: Welcome back to Unboxing Logistics. Family, I’ve missed you. It’s been a minute. I am so excited though today. We have an incredible guest. Krushna Patel is here with us, and he is the guru go-to guy when it comes to everything 3PL. But also, just in general, he has a really cool story, y’all.
He has … He’s just done some really great things in terms of his career here in logistics and fulfillment. Really excited for you to learn from him today. So you know the drill. I’m Lori Boyer, your host, and we are gonna have a fun next 30 minutes to an hour talking with Krushna and learning all about 3PLs, and just getting you excited about the world of fulfillment.
Krushna, welcome. Can you quickly, for our Unboxing Logistics family, introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background? You don’t have to go too far into it since we’re gonna dive into that more deeply.
[00:01:18] Krushna Patel: Absolutely. Yeah. My name’s Krushna. I’m the CEO of Awesome Solutions. And now I have to live up to your, your fabulous intro, so I appreciate that.
I’ve been in ecommerce and fulfillment for, like, a decade plus. I started selling online when I was 13, so all my experience and everything I shed is, is stuff that I’ve actually done.
[00:01:37] Lori Boyer: Krushna, you seem to have had kind of this entrepreneur mindset since you were young, and you live it every day. So we’re gonna talk about that, kind of what you’ve learned from the front lines.
But first, before we even get started, one of the things that I love to do is I love to hear who have been kind of … Who’s somebody who’s been your mentor, or somebody that you’ve really admired in the industry, somebody that you’ve worked with or even just read about, and, and why did you like them?
[00:02:04] Krushna Patel: It’s not industry specific, but Alex Hormozi been a, in a big part of me building up this, this company.
I think a huge part of that is because I’m not a fan of, like, the, the the guru type of mindset business stuff, but I really like tactical knowledge. So like specific sales scripts, like how to clone better, how to send better emails, like how to do the actual work. I’m a big fan of that. Like, I believe that if if you’re not given the, you know, if you’re not dealt the best cards, then hard work can give you a little bit of that edge.
So I, I like people like that, and Alex Hormozi does that, does that very well.
[00:02:41] Lori Boyer: That’s fantastic. You and I, we’re totally the same in that regard. I’m all about kind of the operator mindset. Like, there’s the consultant mindset, “Oh, what’s our overarching vision?” But then it’s like, “Okay, how do we get crap done?”
And so I love that. I think you and I, we’re, we’re friends in that way. Okay. Back us up. How did you end up in logistics and fulfillment in the first place? Give us a little background.
[00:03:08] Krushna Patel: Absolutely. So I started selling online when I was 13. It was… I was just doing it as a way to help my parents pay rent, pay the bills, that type of thing.
In our generation of just being able to sell things online, it, it’s very cool that you could just, you know, arbitrage that type of thing. So did that for a little bit.
[00:03:25] Lori Boyer: What did you, what did you sell, Krushna?
[00:03:27] Krushna Patel: It was cosmetic products. So the things that were given, it, it, it’s stuff that’s given out in like, essentially like defect lines, so you could sell them as liquidation.
And it costs pennies, and you could sell them for quite a bit more on eBay and things like that. So I did that for some time. Then I, I tried to scale that. It’s pretty hard to scale, so I turned that into an Amazon FBA store when I was old enough to. Scaled that up to a few million, and then learned some hard lessons along the way because that business is a very thin margin business.
Took some, took some big losses, exited it, and then I started doing fulfillment trade for both. So ecommerce and fulfillment is all I know. Found out there was a big gap in the fulfillment and warehousing. A lot of lack of transparency, for better words. So that motivated me to start in the fulfillment space.
[00:04:16] Lori Boyer: That’s so cool. Were your parents in the industries of fulfillment and logistics, or selling online? Or like, what in the world was in this 13-year-old boy’s mind of like, “I should do this. I could sell some stuff.” Like, how’d you even get that idea?
[00:04:31] Krushna Patel: I mean, I think it comes natural born in, in, in the people that hustle.
So we’re sitting there, we’re like, “What could we do?” My mom worked at a makeup company, in the, in the packaging department. So they would give out a box of the defective stuff at the end of the day at every shift. So she would come home with a few items. I was like, “There has to be money in this.”
So sell them for a few dollars each. Can’t really scale that, right, because how many more defect products can you get? So then I realized that there’s a cap to it, but being able to get a job at 13 is pretty hard, right? So, so being able to sell online is, doesn’t matter how old you are it’s, it’s, it’s very open to people.
You don’t need much capital. You could sell things that you could buy at, you know, anywhere. So that, that seemed like a very good opportunity at that time.
[00:05:15] Lori Boyer: That’s incredible. That’s a, it’s awesome mindset. Okay, so what led you to Awesome Solutions? First, tell everyone what Awesome Solutions is, and you know, how you’ve ended up in that space right now.
[00:05:27] Krushna Patel: Of course. When I started doing FBA when you work with these wholesalers and these, these large companies that need to give you product, you need to send them to a warehouse. I did it in a residential, like out of my garage as long as I can, but as long as I could. But once it started to scale, it had to go to a physical warehouse.
So signed a commercial lease. I was 18 or 19 at that time. Started doing the FBA from there. And the warehouse was essentially empty all the time. Because the way FBA works, you get inventory, you send it out right away, right? So you’re not storing it. And then I realized that there was such a big gap when I spoke to other FBA sellers in how fast their inventory turned around.
So if you start with very little money, your, your … The name of the game is to spin the cash flow as fast as possible, so they would get inventory, send it back as fast as you can so it would sell faster. So some of these FBA prep centers would keep the inventory for like seven days, 14 days. That’s, that’s a big, it was a big loss for the sellers.
So I realized that there was such a big gap. So I started fulfilling myself and realized how much of a value add it is when you can do it quick and accurate. So starting, started that and exited selling myself on Amazon and started doing it for clients.
[00:06:34] Lori Boyer: Oh, I love it. And I love how you said you saw a gap, because I hear that so often from entrepreneurs is, “I saw a gap, and so I did X.”
I think a lot of us see gaps every day in our jobs, in our lives, but we don’t take that next step, right? What, what tips, I guess, do you have? How do you motivate yourself to take the next step? How did you … You know, you mentioned sometimes you’re born with that hustle. What, what if we were not born with the hustle, but we wanna get the hustle?
I mean, what are your, what is your advice for us, Krushna?
[00:07:06] Krushna Patel: Absolutely. I mean, I’d say it’s, it’s, it … There are ways to calculate it and formulate it to make it less, less risky. So getting that initial warehouse at the beginning was, was high risk, right? Because I didn’t have much industry experience. But once you realize that there is a gap, you could start it in the smallest way possible.
You know, sign on a client that would be very little risk. If it was to fail, you could say, “Hey, I apologize. Here’s your money back.” Make them whole again, and you’re able to … You know, it wasn’t much of a risk at all. You don’t need to sign a 30,000 square foot facility for that. You could sign, like, a 3,000 square foot facility.
You could sublease somebody else’s facility. Like, this is fulfillment specific. I’ve tried a ton of things before I got into this, but there’s ways to do everything at, at a smaller scale, and test it out, get proof of concept. I think people spend too much time, time trying to get their version one to become, like, the best final product ever.
It’s, it’s not gonna be that way. The second you start getting feedback … Like, when we started fulfillment, it, we, we learned very early on that some of this stuff needs to be automated, because clients … For example, in the FBA space, clients take time to send labels back and forth, right? You can’t wait for that.
It, it, it kinda defeats the purpose. So we had to automate that, and now that we’ve done that, clients don’t have to be involved in every step of the process. They love it. It’s very easy. But that wasn’t our version one, right? If you scroll back to any, if you scroll back to any person that’s famous on TikTok, or any influencer, right?
Go to their first video. You’ll see that that’s not their, that’s not the video they post now.
[00:08:31] Lori Boyer: Okay. Really fantastic advice. I hope everybody who’s listening right now picked up that gem in there. What I heard you say was we spend too much time on version one, trying to make it perfect. So you’re saying you see a gap, you can find a way to move into it without a giant risk, do it.
Just start, and then test and refine. Is that accurate?
[00:08:56] Krushna Patel: Very accurate, yep.
[00:08:57] Lori Boyer: What are some lessons you’ve learned along the way? Let’s talk about hard lessons, you know? What, what can we glean from the mistakes that Krushna’s made that we maybe don’t have to make them?
[00:09:07] Krushna Patel: Yeah, there’s a lot of them.
There’s a, I have a, I have a long notebook full of them. But so, to start, like, this is for my, my founders and entrepreneurs that, that start from nothing. There’s something in our mindset that, that makes you want to rush the process. And I think one of the big things I learned is it has to take time to mature and fully develop before it could be you know, something that you’re, that you’re super proud of, something that you…
You know, like a lot of this stuff looks like it’s, I could go from, you know, zero to five million in one year, for example. But the point of it is to really learn and build up your skill set, your callus during that time period, to be somebody that can handle all those processes, handle those clients, handle that volume, and you don’t want it to happen overnight, right?
Like, if you were to achieve everything you thought of tomorrow. You know, your life wouldn’t change that much. Whatever you drive, whatever you, like, whatever you, you know want to accomplish, it’s, it’s better to be in that journey and that destination for some time and, and really take your time to do it.
Because the best decisions I’ve ever made was when I thought long-term, and not, like, within six months I need this amount of money, or I need this amount of growth.
[00:10:18] Lori Boyer: It’s a really interesting contrast, because tip number one is don’t wait to start, but then tip number two is don’t rush, you know? And so it’s kind of like you’ve gotta get going, so don’t wait before you start, but also I, I, I am so guilty of it.
Like, I kind of… I wrote it down. You don’t want to have… You don’t want it to happen overnight, and yet I think a lot of us do want it to happen overnight, so really interesting. Is there a way that you pace yourself or that you do set goals eh, but are able to keep the long-term in mind?
[00:10:58] Krushna Patel: Absolutely. Like, Alex Hormozi says it all the time, and I, and I, and I take a lot of his stuff and I make my own rule with it. And he said the longer somebody’s time horizon is how much he could tell how valuable they are to the game, how much they’ll make out of this game of entrepreneurship. I think one of the biggest things that’s helped me is when I make a decision, like, I’m not setting a one-month target, right?
I’m setting, like, a five-year horizon of what I want the company to look like, and then I’ll shrink it down into a three-year, into a one-year, and then that’ll give me what it’ll look like for the monthly. The goal isn’t to make X amount in this month, right? So I would say ask yourself why you wanna make that amount of money in that short amount of time, right?
I’m just setting a monetary value, but it could be with any goal. So you would have to ask yourself why that is, and then you’d, you’d be able to make a rule for yourself of how much are you thinking in the long hor- long-term horizon versus what are you thinking about right now. And I think that’s all my decisions where I thought like, “Hey, if I got this in one year instead of one month, would I still want it?”
Like, those have always been… If you, if you’re looking for getting money quick type of situations, like, look back at all the times you’ve done that. Chances are you lost money.
[00:12:07] Lori Boyer: It was kind of start with the end in mind. So you picture where you wanna be. And I love this, ’cause this applies to everyone, not just founders, entrepreneurs, but in your position, in your family life, in your, you know, physical goals.
Where do you wanna be five years from now? Okay, so imagine that, and then work backwards setting goals all the way up to the current. That’s fantastic advice. I really, really love that. Anything else that you would say? Is there anything that you wish you’d learned earlier beyond that?
[00:12:44] Krushna Patel: You gotta focus on what you, what you want instead of all these side things, like the shiny object syndrome.
[00:12:51] Lori Boyer: Okay, what do you, what do you mean by shiny object syndrome?
[00:12:54] Krushna Patel: So I’ve been taught in business in general, like I’ve just picked up these cues where all revenue is good revenue, right? So in the 3PL space, if I could own the truck route, I’ll make X amount of money. If I could do my own staffing, I’ll make X amount, right?
These are just examples, but you don’t wanna be the master of, of everything, right? Because then you’re really the master of nothing. So my goal is to provide the absolute best D2C and FBA fulfillment, right? Our goal is not to own the truck routes. It, it, you know, it’s not, it’s not to do all these, these extra things.
So shiny object syndrome could be in any vertical, but even in … The, the bigger you grow in business, the more things will pop up and opportunities that are, that are sickening to turn down, to be honest with you.
[00:13:40] Lori Boyer: How do you, how do you assess them, Krushna? How do you decide if it’s a, a shiny object you should go for or it’s one that, like, we’re putting that on the shelf?
[00:13:49] Krushna Patel: I mean, you have to ask yourself, would, would saying yes to that opportunity reduce your chances of what you’re looking to get out of your current opportunity?
[00:13:57] Lori Boyer: So that original five-year goal, even, you’re like, “Is this even playing into that?”
[00:14:02] Krushna Patel: Yeah, like, if I started a trucking company or another company, would that affect what I do in the 3PL space?
Absolutely. Like, I would have less time and resources to put into it, so that would therefore make it affect my current goal, and that’s not what I want.
[00:14:16] Lori Boyer: That’s great. So if somebody’s trying to get started in it, like, how do you develop relationships or mentorships? Or I know that’s a big piece of any entrepreneur founder’s journey.
What, have you found any tips for getting kind of advice from people who have been there?
[00:14:32] Krushna Patel: Email people. It’s, it’s literally that easy. I-
[00:14:36] Lori Boyer: Cold email …
[00:14:37] Krushna Patel: A lot. I spend, like, when I, when I first started, I spent hours just sitting in my high school classes just emailing people. Whenever you have time off, just email people and ask them, like, you know, don’t, don’t say, “Can I pick your brain?”
Nobody, nobody will ever want to say yes to that. But simple things like I’ve emailed Gary Vee Mark Cuban, all these people. They’ve all replied to me. And simple emails like, “Hey, I’m a 3PL founder. Any advice? Like, what do you think I could do?” And I’ve gotten a response from people that you wouldn’t believe, even, even deals with companies that are way above our, our standard of what we could purchase at the time when we were selling on Amazon.
Like, those are some of the largest manufacturers and distribution companies in the US, and I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with at least half of them. So it’s just a cold email. “Hey, can I work with you? This, this is what we do.” you know, I’m hungry. I’m, I’m here. I’m, I’m trying to, I’m trying to build this partnership here for the long term, and people wanna invest in that.
So they’re interested in starting young.
[00:15:37] Lori Boyer: That’s such good advice. I’ve found that myself as well, that it’s surprising how often people do respond. You’ll get 95% who don’t respond, but you get that one or two who reach back out, and, and it is … I- it can be massive.
[00:15:53] Krushna Patel: Some of my biggest deals have been from a cold email.
[00:15:56] Lori Boyer: Wow. Yeah. And it, and it-
That’s incredible …
[00:15:58] Krushna Patel: It’s not always an ask either. It’s like, “Hey, Merry Christmas.” And then it’s like, “Who is this guy,” right? “Who’s bothering me?” There’s stuff like that, gets into that type of conversation, right? Like, it, it really can flourish. It’s the same thing with in, in in-person networking, but email is, like, vastly accessible to any folk.
You could search anybody’s email, shoot them an email, ask. You know, like, some of the best people that have interned for us have been people that just send me a cold email like- Yeah … “Hey, can I, can I intern?” They don’t go through my team. They just send me an email, and they’re just like, “Hey, you know, if something.”
I’m like, “All right. Cool. This guy hungry. Let’s-”
[00:16:29] Lori Boyer: Yeah …
[00:16:30] Krushna Patel: What’s up? Right?
[00:16:30] Lori Boyer: They’ve got that, that something. Or, when I hire people for my team, I’m always as well. I feel like we can teach so many skills. You can teach a lot about business. You can teach a lot about fulfillment. You can’t always teach that, that drive, that hunger, that, that You know, attitude of, of moving forward.
[00:16:48] Krushna Patel: That’s right. And, and even, like, back to what I was saying before about being patient, about the actual journey, that, that’s not to be confused with being able to make decisions, right? Making decisions fast is, is very important. As an entrepreneur, emailing people, like, getting work done is obviously, is, it’s, it’s one of the most important things.
But being patient in the long term, the goal that you set, right? Just realizing that every day you compound and become a little bit better. So send that email, make that phone call. Do what you think might not work, and let the universe take, you know, take control of a little bit of that, so.
[00:17:17] Lori Boyer: Yeah. I think that’s so true.
Make decisions fast. Time kills all deals, we hear. So absolutely make the decisions fast, but keep the patience in the long-term process, that we don’t freak out, don’t get distracted by shiny objects. Anything else that you would give as advice? We’re gonna move over to our 3PL section, talking about, I have some questions about running a 3PL.
But any other final advice for people who are entrepreneurs, founders, just wanting to get to where you are?
[00:17:50] Krushna Patel: Yeah. Aim to be a little bit better every day. Send that email. Make that phone call, right? Do your thing. Be yourself. I, I hear a lot of advice about people doing like 100 different things at once.
Find your few things and, and absolutely kill it. Like, if you wanna post on LinkedIn as, as your marketing channel, you know, crush that. Like, the D2C brands we talk to and the ones that do really well, they mastered Shopify, for example, so well, and then they go to another sales channel because people are asking them to, “Hey, when are you gonna be on Amazon?”
“Hey, when are you gonna be on TikTok?” Right? They didn’t sign on to every single one of those from the beginning. It was let the, let the demand come to you. Once you start getting good at one channel, people will come to you. So, so focus on that.
[00:18:32] Lori Boyer: That’s so good. It’s like do, take what you’re already doing and do it better instead of just doing more.
Sometimes we’re like, “More, more, more, more, more.” But instead, if you take the things you’re already doing and just improve it a little bit each day, killer advice. Okay. So we do have a lot of founders listening, but we also have a lot of 3PL leaders, fulfillment, operators, logistics. You know, we got the, the, we run the gauntlet here at Unboxing Logistics.
So I thought that we could ask a little segment, ask the owner, put you in the hot seat, and see specifically kind of advice that you have. So if you were gonna start a new 3PL specifically tomorrow, ground up, what is something that you might do differently from day one?
[00:19:15] Krushna Patel: That’s a really good question.
So I would say that I would focus, I would focus very much on the communication aspect of the 3PL world. So this is something that I’ve done, and it’s played a large role of our success. But I would do it even more- emphasize then how I did it because there are a lot of 3PLs in the game, but the ones that are clearly communicating, the ones that are there to show that, A, we’re reliable, we’re with you when you scale, that makes a huge difference.
Cause nobody wants to have an issue and then talk to an AI agent, right?
[00:19:58] Lori Boyer: So that’s what I was gonna ask you. Where’s the balance between kind of the AI communication, which is massive in customer support right now, and, and for, for good reasons, right? It can answer a lot of basic questions. And then the human element.
Like, how are you balancing that? What are, what are, what is your advice specific to 3PL?
[00:20:16] Krushna Patel: Yeah, it’s a great question. I, I think that it’s, it’s a … It has to be based on the tier of what support is required. So there’s certain things that are like, “Hey, where’s my order?” An AI agent could do that. It doesn’t matter who, who responds to it essentially as long as they do it in a timely manner.
But things that get a little deeper, like if it’s something invoice related, if it’s something that’s order specific, like duties, things like that, that are harder to systemize with an AI agent. Of course, there’s some great ones out there, but a lot of time they wanna ask follow-up questions to a natural human.
So in my personal opinion, like when I call a larger company or chat with them, I love to speak to an agent so then I can kind of put some feeling into it, things like that. So those types of things I would say is it’s, it’s good for an AI agent to an aspect, but it sh- there should be enough company resource that somebody can get to with claims that require it.
[00:21:08] Lori Boyer: No, I love that. Do you have a, an SLA or, you know, something on how quickly you recommend people try to be getting back? Is it based on the level of customer, you know, how, how big of a customer they are? Do you, I guess just do you have any tips in general with that?
[00:21:22] Krushna Patel: Yeah. We don’t do it based on the size of the customer.
Everybody we sign on would be treated to that same standard of communication. It’s usually under 20 minutes for any standard business operational SLA is, is just set at 20 minutes. That’s usually set for every day, Monday to Sunday. If it’s something that requires like a, a technical problem, things like that, those could take up to three hours, four hours.
But it is much faster than the standard just because if it was me on the other end, I would want that same level of communication and respect, so we do that for our clients.
[00:21:54] Lori Boyer: Yeah. I think of it often from my own perspective. We’re all consumers ourselves, so I do know as well when I’m, like, speaking with an AI agent or something, I don’t mind doing it, but I want to know that I could access a human if I want to.
I hate those looped systems where I feel like I don’t know how to reach someone. And yeah, so we still gotta have that available. Okay. What about any other technology specific? We get a lot of questions about that. What technology capabilities would you feel like must have from day one, or even from day 272? Yeah. Whatever.
[00:22:29] Krushna Patel: Yeah. I would say all the basic stuff. I think people overcomplicate it a little bit. So it depends obviously on what category of fulfillment you wanna be in, right? B2B, D2C, retail, like there’s different avenues to it. But standard, you want a WMS that’s gonna take care of all of your inventory management.
You want it to have at least, at, at the bare minimum, you want it to have transparency on all pricing, so clients can see what the shipment cost was, pick and pack cost, where the products are located, all of those things. Ideally, you would want something that tracks the exact second something is received and all that good stuff, because then clients have transparency, and you could track it throughout.
So that would be a huge thing for a WMS that I would … Yep, I would say that’s a, that’s a big non-negotiable, because people don’t wanna pay invoices that they don’t know the breakdown of, right? So you wanna have those things. But I would, on the other side of that, I would also say to be cautious of not getting a WMS that’s so complicated that you need somebody full time to be playing with the inter- you know, the back- the back end of it to get everything rolling.
You want it to be simple enough for clients, but also robust enough that you could do billing and all those transparent things.
[00:23:34] Lori Boyer: Well, I think there’s two things. Sometimes we have systems that we have a lot of features we don’t need and don’t use. Sometimes we have things we could actually use, and we aren’t even aware.
So I think when it comes to technology, we should also be checking in regularly and be like, “Are there features I should actually be using that I’m not using?” Because I think we all fall into that trap, too.
[00:23:51] Krushna Patel: Of course. It’s, it goes back to the version one type of thing, right? Like, you don’t wanna sign that with the WMS from day one that takes, like, 10 weeks to integrate with your systems.
Like, you, you don’t want that, right? You wanna start with something smaller, start with something that’s lower risk essentially, right, less cost, things like that, beginner level, and then you can scale it up from there. Switching WMSs is, it’s obviously takes some work, but it’s better to start smaller and then grow to what you need.
‘Cause you’ll learn in that process what things matter to you as a 3PL.
[00:24:21] Lori Boyer: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fantastic advice. Okay. So let’s talk about carriers and carrier flexibility. That’s something that overwhelms 3PLs sometimes. How do you manage, I guess, carrier flexibility? How is it different, what are you seeing differently in the carrier landscape now to even five, 10 years ago?
What, what is your advice around carriers?
[00:24:42] Krushna Patel: Of course. There’s a ton of regional carriers popping up in at least in the last few years. I would say that it’s very important to be flexible with them, because some of them have very competitive pricing for certain ranges and certain pricing I mean, in, in certain weight classes.
So I would say that’s, that’s a very big concept. Definitely having your floaters out there is big, right? Like, have the ability and have the conversations with these carriers to see what it looks like. Always, always negotiate with your carriers as much as you can, right? Obviously, sometimes that requires bringing some volume.
But to your advantage, you could try to, to, to scale with them. Mention that we’re starting off a little small, but we, we have the, you know, we have these few things in line that are gonna help us scale, right? So those types of things I think are, are really big, but being flexible is huge because clients want specific services.
Some of them want pictures on delivery, some of them want certain flexibilities when it comes to duties or international shipping. So you wanna have your, your net cast wide enough where you have those different service levels for each client’s requirements.
[00:25:48] Lori Boyer: Yeah. I, I think it’s so true. We see…
Because we live in the carrier world here at EasyPost, and, you know, we’re carrier-agnostic. We work with, like, all the carriers basically. But there are some really huge financial opportunities that people are often missing out on because they don’t realize, like, oh, if I just change service level, or if I changed, you know, this lane, or I change…
That there are a lot of opportunities out there. And I think people sometimes get scared of some of the regional carriers. I don’t think you need to be. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there.
[00:26:19] Krushna Patel: Of course. Yeah, I would say, I would say definitely get feedback on the carriers. Most likely if they’re, if they’re pitching you, they pitch somebody else, and there’s some other 3PLs that are working with them.
So put your feelers out at any networking event, in any chat that you’re in, and you know anybody you know and, and see how their experience is. It’s likely gonna be similar for you depending on what area you’re in. So I would say that’s, that’s a huge thing. There’s a, there’s a vast amount of knowledge out there.
You could, you could definitely get it.
[00:26:43] Lori Boyer: There is. It goes back to our, our point from earlier. People are happy to help more often than we think. So even though they’re your competitor, even though, you know, reach out. We’re still a community. Okay, what are you seeing from the consumer expectation? Kind of from brand expectations.
Are you seeing things that brands need or, or they’re focused on that are different? Or what, just what can we expect from brands these days?
[00:27:06] Krushna Patel: Of course. Yeah, I think more, more than before they wanna see transparency. So as we get into this, this new world of AI and being able to make invoices in like a blink of an eye, right?
Like, you want to be able to have accurate breakdowns of everything. People wanna see what they’re paying for, and I think that’s absolutely fair. I would do the same thing if I was a brand. So that’s, that’s definitely what they’re, they’re looking for, right? Like, if we put ourselves in the perspective of the brand, that, the communication being top tier is, is a very big deal, right?
There’s plenty of 3PLs, right? It gets commoditized quite a bit, but the level of service you get from your different 3PLs is vast. It’s the difference between you being able to sleep good at night or not, right, as the brand owner or, or the operations person for the brand. So I’d say that’s a big deal.
Pick your partner, not, not the company itself, but pick the people that you’re gonna work with.
[00:27:54] Lori Boyer: Mm. Well, that’s a good quotable one there. Pick the people you’re working with, not necessarily the company. I love that. So one of the things that I’ve was thinking about when it comes to the 3PLs is the fact that, you know, when you’re a brand, so if I’m shipping just for myself, or as you knew when you were shipping for yourself, if, if something changed, it changed for your whole company, right?
When you’re a 3PL, you’re dealing with so many different companies where it’s like this company might be wanting to add a new carrier all of a sudden. This company over here might be wanting to do something cool with their unboxing, while this, you know, somebody over here is dealing with wanting to change their speed.
Or how do you manage, I guess, being pulled in a lot of different directions and knowing where to focus?
[00:28:39] Krushna Patel: Yeah, I mean, the first thing is the team, right? The people you have surrounding yourself is, is the most important thing. So you wanna set up people that are accountable for each step of the process.
So clients in the onboarding process, they’ll get their first impression of your company, right? You wanna have that be a very good experience for them. So even when it comes to getting pulled in different directions, you wanna have somebody that’s gonna manage those shipping carriers for that client and be able to map that for them right away.
You wanna have somebody on the claims side that’s gonna be able to help, right? So everybody’s, you know, everybody starts somewhere. I was, I was that person for every single position at some point, and then you’re able to, to then scale out and.
[00:29:16] Lori Boyer: Okay, wait, wait, I wanna back up. I wanna hear that again. So you were that person for everybody, like within Awesome Solutions, or you mean back when you were…
Are you recommending people try out all these different positions, like as a leader?
[00:29:28] Krushna Patel: No. So you’re not gonna be the best at, at everything, right? Customer service, there’s, you know, you’re not gonna be the best at everything. But when we started, we just didn’t have the funding to be able to hire people. I’m, I’m sure a lot of people start that way.
We never raised money, so we’re fully bootstrapped. We start from a certain place, and I was the person that handled the sales, the customer service, the shipping carrier negotiations, everything on the tech side, right? So you, you start in that position, and I was essentially the warehouse manager, right?
Like, that’s, that’s how it begins. And then you start to get people that can have more skills than you, right? So, like, my warehouse manager is much better at that than I am. My claims department is better at that than I would be. So you get people that are better, and then you empower them. Like, you are able to invest in them, provide them better knowledge, take care of them as people, and then you’re able to scale to being able to do things that clients want at, at, you know, at the speed of whatever speed they need.
[00:30:19] Lori Boyer: That’s a cool thing with being a founder is that really boots on the ground experience. How do you pull back? I’ve worked with a lot of different CEOs over all the years. Some of them are fantastic. Some of them have trouble letting go of thinking that they know the warehouse better, or they know, because they have run those roles.
How do you get yourself to step back and trust your people?
[00:30:41] Krushna Patel: It’s hard. It, it takes some time to, to process all that, but, but knowing that if you’re the CEO of a company and your hands are in everything, that you’re gonna have to make peace with the fact that you’ll be at a certain volume, and that’s okay.
But for people that want to scale or want to grow, you can’t be involved in every process, right? Like, you won’t know every box that goes out. You won’t know all of that. But you can be very involved still in the communication and all the higher level things. So I think that’s a huge game changer. For, for us, one of the biggest things is our goal is not to take- You know, 100 clients right now, right?
Like, that’s, that’s not our plan. We don’t, we’re not an enterprise level 3PL where, where we just take numbers, right?
Our goal is to take a brand on, nurture them through the process, really onboard them. So we have, we have quotas set where we’ll limit the amount of people that we take on after we hit a certain amount, right?
Like, that’s, that’s our process. So we know that we can provide a very high level of service for that customer.
[00:31:37] Lori Boyer: Mm. So discipline. I, it sounds like a lot of self-discipline in terms of sticking with what your goals are, but also sticking with, at some point I have to trust my people if I want to scale. And so that’s part of my discipline, is stepping back and letting them run, and then seeing what happened.
It’s not like you can’t pivot later. Okay, this has been so good. We’re just about out of time, but I have a couple of questions I wanna make sure we get to. One thing I would just love to hear, as you are that boots on the ground person there, what do you see happening, like, in the 3PL world in the next five years or so with technology, with AI, with ecommerce booming, with consumer expectations shifting?
Do you have a crystal ball? Like, what, what kind of things do you think we should be looking for, Krushna?
[00:32:27] Krushna Patel: That’s a great question. I, I’m gonna look back at this and see, see if what I say comes true.
[00:32:30] Lori Boyer: Oh, sure. I’m gonna send it to you in five years.
[00:32:32] Krushna Patel: Yeah, I, I … Oh, I, I … So I think there’s gonna be a lot of automation going on, like, like everybody could see.
But I think a lot of the 3PLs that are gonna do really well are gonna be the ones that, that have that boots on the ground type of experience with their customers, right? So going back to the AI agent type of thing, we want to have people talking to people. So clients are gonna have, they’re gonna see a, a big price reduction, obviously, when they invest in the initial robotics and the, the automation infrastructure.
But I think that’ll lead to its own set of issues.
[00:33:01] Lori Boyer: Yeah.
[00:33:02] Krushna Patel: And the brands that want more human-specific approaches are gonna come to 3PLs that are on the smaller side, and ones that are less enterprise level. So I think we’re gonna see a little bit of a divide there.
[00:33:12] Lori Boyer: Yeah, I could totally see that. I, well, I’m gonna send it to you in five years, but I do think we’ve got some growing pains, ’cause there are huge opportunities, but sometimes we’re over-investing a little bit towards the automation side, where the human element may become one of those big differentiators in the future.
So this has been so great, Krushna. If somebody wants to learn about running a 3PL, they want to reach out and get advice, just like you said when you were cold emailing people from your high school classes. I hope none of your high school teachers are watching this right now. If they want to … Maybe they are, you know, doing fulfillment, I mean, or doing you know, maybe they’re a seller.
How can they get in contact with you? What’s the best way, I guess, first, to learn about Awesome Solutions itself if they’re interested in using your 3PL. But second, just contacting you. Are you LinkedIn, email? What, what’s the best ways?
[00:34:06] Krushna Patel: Yeah, LinkedIn’s definitely the best way.
They can search me up. If you could, if you could put my link in the bio so they can search me up there. It’s just-
[00:34:12] Lori Boyer: Will do it …
[00:34:12] Krushna Patel: Krushna Patel on LinkedIn. I post, I post whenever my team yells at me to post. So they’ll see that. They’ll see that happening there. If they need it, if they need any information on fulfillment, they can go to awesomesolutionsnj.com, and over there there’s a contact form.
So any brands that wanna reach out can just go directly on there, and then we’ll take care of that from there.
[00:34:32] Lori Boyer: Fantastic. And one other question with Awesome Solutions. Is there an ideal audience? Like, is there somebody, if they were listening right now, that you would say, “You are a perfect fit for us.”
[00:34:41] Krushna Patel: Yes. When it comes to D2C brands, we’re looking for D2C brands that are high volume, so a minimum of 2,000 orders going out a month. And the way we do things is for those brands that have a surge of orders, for example, like TikTok shops. So we’re partnered with TikTok shops, we’re partnered with Amazon.
We’re, we’re here to provide to the brands that are looking for high-touch fulfillment with a lot of ease on their end, so we could handle that entire process for them. Throughout the US?
Throughout the whole world, actually.
[00:35:10] Lori Boyer: Whole world. Okay, great.
[00:35:11] Krushna Patel: Yep. Yep.
[00:35:12] Lori Boyer: Fantastic. So if that is you, completely recommend that you reach out to Krushna.
He is fantastic. Really gives you that personal touch. But this has been so great. I’ve learned so much from you today. I feel a little bit motivated to maybe, like, look for where I’m seeing some gaps, be a little bit better tomorrow than I am today. So thank you again, Krushna, for being here.
[00:35:35] Krushna Patel: Of course. Pleasure’s mine.
[00:35:37] Lori Boyer: We’ll see you next time.
