Bindiya Vakil is Keeping the World's Goods Moving

household essentials at the grocery store. Today, we'll be talking to a CEO who can give us a unique perspective on that huge disruption. She's been Da buck Hill, founder and CEO of Resilink, a company that focuses on supply chain risk management. Now you may not know supply chain risk management by name, but you definitely felt its impact.

During the early days of the pandemic. Everything that you depend on to get through your day depends on a supply chain, from toilet paper, to food to essential and nine masks. Each supply chain was pushed to its limit as the world reacted to the new challenges of COVID. That's where Bindia and Resilin come in RESI Link is helping companies reimagine supply chain management through software that takes into account the impact of issues ranging from natural disasters

to strikes to yes pandemics. I met Bindia through Springboard Enterprises, an organization that for twenty years has worked to accelerate the growth of women led companies through access to essential resources and experts. I recently spoke with Bindia about her struggles and her triumphs in bringing supply chain management into the mainstream. Her perspective on resilience provides a lesson for all of us. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bindia.

Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me so tell us a little bit about supply chain risk management. I think for our listeners it's really interesting to know what it is and why it is such a crucial topic right now. Supply chains have been around since humanity has been around, and supply chain management has been just as important today as you know the earliest days. I think we all have probably heard some of those from that little limerick about how for want

of a nail, a kingdom is lost. Um. I think that I would say was probably the humanity's first documented case of a supply chain disruption, So it is it's always been important. I think why supply chain is more critically important today or what has changed in the last ten day, twenty years, is that we now have a global supply chain. We take advantage of suppliers um overseas in lots of different countries. We ourselves are global, certainly all of our suppliers are global. So we are now

more vulnerable in some respects than ever before. Do these things that happen in countries that we are our suppliers operate in, and a lot of times we don't have enough inventory because we've also taken a lot of inventory out over the years to become more cost effissient. Well, we've all experienced a little bit of that firsthand during this pandemic, and we'll get to that. But tell us a little bit about what your company does. The biggest thing you need to fix in supply chain in order

to manage risk effectively is to get information. The two things that you need to know are I buy five thousand parts, which are the countries or what are the global sites that make those? And I know it seems so simple, right but because suppliers change, because the tools are different, there's a lot of dynamic dynamic shift going on. A lot of companies over time lose this visibility to that global supplier base where their parts originate. That's the

first problem. And the second thing is what are the things that are going wrong or things that are happening in those countries or those cities or towns which might affect my ability to secure the raw material I need to build and ship my own products. If we had this little two bits of information, then we could be a little more proactive, a little better prepared. We could predict what could potentially go wrong and manage it a little more effectively. And so you created res a link

to provide that solution exactly we were created. We created a digitalization of supplier data solution before digitalization was a thing. So I started wrestling. I mean, it was still early

days for digitalization. I started wrestling in. The idea was to take data that was out there in people's heads, in the suppliers laptops, not in any kind of RP system sitting in rows and columns, bringing it all through our network and our platform into a digital footprint up in the cloud, where many many companies could need collaborate

exchange this information seamlessly with each other. Well, we'll get into how it all works and some of the data science behind it, but let's start with your early days, your personal journey. Did you always want to found a company? It's very interesting, UM. One of my mentors, you know, she was the first person to interview me here when I came here in two thousand and to the United States, And in the interview, she always tells this story that I asked, Vinthia, what do you want to be? What's

your ambition? And I that apparently I told her I wanted to be the CEO of the company, and um, so she said that inside she was laughing. But that was ten years later I was the CEO of Resilink. So she, she says, apparently you wanted to you just never realized it. So I knew that I wanted to be at the top of whatever field I chose, but I didn't really know that the paths to getting there would be through starting my own company. So I know

it's a long answer to a fairly simple question. UM, but I will say, no, my ambition was not to found my own company. Um. But that's the path I ended up taking to accelerate it a lot. So take us through the early days of resling. How did you get it started? And you know, were there any obstacles in your way? The journey of wreslink, or the journey of any founder, I should say, is riddled with obstacle that you overcome, as you know, uh, and each one

makes you stronger. You know, whatever doesn't kill you make you, makes you stronger. It is very true, and it's certainly very true for us. UM. It started for me. It started with being at Cisco where I was in working in the supply chain risk management space in procurement and recognizing that someone needs to start a company for this solving this problem because we were building some tools in house and couldn't find any company that had a plug

in play type of solution. And so that was kind of the German Nation of this idea that there I had stumbled upon. It seemed, um that I knew something unique and different about a space that no one else was really tackling, and it was a little bit of a niche space, supply chain risk management UM. And I ended up becoming one of the experts in this space just because of my passion for it. Risk just appealed to me. Doing something about risk became my um purpose,

you know. So it was somewhere deep inside of me that I really believe that what I had, uh to my my solution to this problem was real, unique and could solve a very large problem for the industry. Um And from there on I was I will admit, the day I started wrestling, I was a much naive procurement person. I had never thought about being an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to start my own company, but I had no idea what to do. What is the first thing you do when you sit down you've quit your job?

And uh, it was this profound moment and I still remember I sat staring at the screen for ten minutes thinking what am I going to do now? You know? Um, But that from that moment on, you know, you just talked to a lot of people. You never look back. You tell people why you want to do this, and they From there it takes on a life of its own, but it is definitely riddled with a lot of nose

for every yes. And I don't want to mince my word words there I have said it many times that for every yes that I got, I got sixty notes that I had to you know, write, overcome, overcome yes, and those I used to call myself. And sometimes I still feel like humpty dumpty. You know. I walk into a meeting sometimes and I feel like I just got pounded, and then I have to kind of put humpty dumpty back together, put a smile on my face, and go pitch it again to the next person, or the next investor,

or the next customer. Well, it's so interesting that you say that, because much of what you said I feel like the universal experience of entrepreneurs, you know, looking at that blank screen after you quit your job and and saying to yourself, now what, but then pushing through and then facing all those knows. I know, you know, we've talked about this a lot, but this idea of getting comfortable with hearing no seems so critical because if you can't hear no, it's very hard to get to they s.

So how do you deal with that? That has been one of the most difficult things that as a founder I have had to get overcome. You know, it's it's it comes from a deep place. So so here's the thing. It's not just to know that you hear from friends or family or someone. This is a know that comes from people who are extremely successful, extremely rich. They've been there, done that, um started and sold a large company. You know.

These are people who are your potential investors. These are people who are your potential customers, people who you would look up to or respect. And when those types of people tell you and no, I do feel it is a lot harder to take that fine that in our why am I doing this? Is this really help? Going to help? And and for me it always took. I always went back to know what I'm doing is important,

and here are the three reasons why. One was I've seen firsthand paying millions of dollars when things went bad and we couldn't get parts. We were losing hundreds of millions of dollars when those types of events happen. So people who are saying this no today may not have lived my life, and so they don't understand what I understand. I am an expert in my space. They may be an expert in something else, but in this space, I'm an expert and go. That does not come easily. That

self confidence, particularly when you're younger. When you're not an entrepreneur by by design. When you're not, you know, you're just I will say a lot of times I say I wasn't nobody when I started wrestling. You know, I had no personal brand, I had no experience starting a business, and so it took me a long time to really put that note into perspective, find that deep place within me where that spark was there. That No, what I'm saying is correct. The world doesn't see it today, but

they will see it eventually, right, because you're breaking new ground. Absolutely. In fact, I can I say that my biggest salesperson today is our president are in the White House, because he last week made it an executive order that supply chain risk management is a matter of national security. We'll be back with senecas made by women after this short break.

That actually brings me to what you've been doing during this pandemic, because if anybody didn't under dan why supply chain is important when you couldn't find toilet paper or you know, other essentials in the early stages of the pandemic, I guess that's a great example. So what has been your experience with this pandemic? The pandemic was the disrupter

of disruptors UM. When I say I have been in supply chain risk management for twenty one years now that I have lived through earthquakes, hurricanes, obviously, the swine flu pandemic, of all nine, multiple supplier bankruptcies, UM, multiple force major issues, capacity problems, I've seen it all. But over a period of fifteen years, twenty years, we saw covid bring all of those things within the space of four months in

that's covid UM. So it was an incredible moment for supply chain practitioners because it was the Black Swan of ax Wan event and it moved on us. It started in one region that was economically and very critical region for our supply chain, which is the Hubei Province of China. Wrestling AI picked up that initial alert on December twenty eight, when the local Wuhan government asked the hospitals in the area to be on the lookout for an unknown pattern

of pneumonia. We alerted our customers January fourth, and then from there on, it was this unbelievable journey of alerting our customers on a daily basis about what was happening, assessing suppliers. When WUHAN shared down on January twenty two, we had already launched a supply chain pandemic readiness assessment out to twelve hundred suppliers. Now, remember it wasn't declared a pandemic until Margie Leven. We weren't even calling it

an epidemic yet. When we created that assessment, and we put out a maturity model, and we began doing these bi weekly UM webinars telling our customers and the broader community at large what to expect over the next few weeks. What are the numbers to watch, you know, how will the spread affected, how will media coverage, how will government react? All of those things we began to talk about since January twenty two, every two weeks, and sometimes we have

chose when we look back because all of those things happened. Wow, unbelievable. Who could have imagined, as you said this, this would be the disruptor of disruptors, but that you were so well positioned to help so many organizations. I mean, you've really been credited with bringing supply chain management into the mainstream. How did you educate people about this? Yes, so, suppling risk management, which is the space that I UH pioneered a solution for our back into thousands ten um. That

was not as as we talked about there. There were no solution providers as such in that space. There was a lot of consulting and all of that going on. Companies that wanted to do something in this space would do some in house tools, using in house I t um so and here I am UH. And at that time I was the ten I looked ten years younger than I do today. And again remember I was an

individual contributor at Cisco, had never started another company. So when I started wrestling, it was a little bit of a shock to me that the rest of the world was not on the same page. I thought, we take risks so seriously at Cisco. Of course, everybody knows that risk is important and it's an area that we need to invest in. And I left Cisco started wrestling, and

it was the wild West out there. You know, everybody was so driven by cost and cost reduction in procure are men that they weren't really considering risk to be a critical need. That they thought risk management was nice

to have a side project that we would do. And I think for me that was a huge and rude awakening, and from there began my journey of educating these very seasoned procurement leaders and experts about the need for doing this using data and um you know things like a lot of times people say, well, I'll just build another

factory in another country, or will hold extra inventory. You know, those types of things take billions of dollars in many, many years, right, and your customers aren't going to pay you ten dollars for what they want to pay two dollars for. So how are you going to fund that factory? How are you going to recoup your investment? Whereas having a risk management program with digitalization and cloud based technologies, that's nothing in terms of your investment and you can

use that to be resilient today. So explaining those concepts, calculating that return on investment, convincing customers, using each event as a learning mechanism to say, let's see how you experience that event. How many millions did you pay in expediting freights, are buying extra, paying extra for around materials, and using each event as a learning tool to go um, create that awareness. Well, we're so grateful for what you did,

because when this pandemic happened. As we talked about, you were well positioned to educate people early and quickly, and you worked with numerous hospitals from what I understand, to step up and fill the PPE gap. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. PPE is one of those products that hospitals by um In terms of what the hospital spend on PPE, it's three to five

percent of the total dollars of spend. But when you think about the time you walk in as a patient to your clinic to the time you exit, the hospital needs PPE in order to treat, process you all the way to discharge you. They need PP, which means the huddent of the hospitals operations need PPE in order to sustain themselves. Meaning you could have all the drugs, you could have everything ready to go, but no PPE, and it hampers your ability to admit patients and provide critical care.

So it's one of those products in supply chain that nail that brings down the kingdom. This is a classic example of supply chain disruptions on things we don't watch carefully or care about. So the PPE supply chain entirely relied on supply as predominantly out of China, where of what we bought came out of various sites there. And so when the initial disruptions began and ships began to leave China with thirty percent full from various ports, that

PPE became a massive issue. And what ended up happening in the US is the hospitals had disparities. You know, some hospitals had and nine, others had K and some had different sizes of and nine available some that they desperately needed. And in the absence of that transportation UH networks being available, what the local hospitals with and then I say local, I mean nationwide. What we needed was a way to find the ppees inventories that were available

between hospitals in country. And so what we did was obviously wrestling being a cloud system hospitals. We have about more than forty hospitals nationwide as our customers. We brought them together and then invited other hospitals, created a free digital almost like a matching matchmaking program where the procurement expert could say, Hey, I have this size of n N I'm looking for that size, and the system would match a hospital that had that particular model or variety. Wow,

I mean amazing. I think what you've done in this period is so critical, and as I said, we're grateful that you started this business when you did, so you've seen firsthand how hard some of these world disasters can be and obviously the pandemic. What makes you optimistic in this moment? I feel that there's always something you know risk. The other side of risk is opportunity, right, That is it's you have. It's all about the lens with which you view a situation. And I always have been that

person that sees the opportunity in risks. Right. Um, I feel that. Um, and again coming back to my point, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right, So I feel that the world did learn from this. You know, companies that have survived COVID and COVID related disruptions. Um, we see this topic now, you know what, you know

that we we have an issue. When John Oliver is talking about supply chain disruptions, ar no Noah is talking about supply chain disruptions, we all percent of humanity experienced a supply chain disruption in their personal and professional life. And so this to me is that moment of transformation. It's that tipping point where risk no longer became a nice to have. It not only went in the business world from being a nice to have to a compliance

issue to a national security issue. And we see this more and more across more and more country days over the next couple of years, that governments will prioritize certain

sectors where mandates around compliance in transparency should be coming out. Obviously, the executive order came out from President Biden creating four industries um and this is very critical and quite frankly asked you, and I've said this years ago in I did a webinar where I said that semiconductors have the potential to end the life as we know it because every device today uses semiconductors from medical devices too. As we go into a more electric vehicle world, there's all

these routers and switches in consumer electronics. Heck, Nike shoes have electronics in them, right. So this is this one little minute sized part that is now of different types obviously that has applications all over and there's fast pace innovation, which means you need to bring up expensive capacity, clean room dependency, the need for continuous water and power in the manufacturing process. Billions of dollars to bring up a way for fat and this is a single point of

failure in the global supply chain today. Well, that's fascinating, UM and scary at the same time. My last question would be, I mean, obviously you've accomplished so much, and you've really shared some great advice for us, especially around you know, having the resilience to hear No. Is there anything else that you would tell women who are just getting started, who have a dream, who want to go after it, especially these difficult times, anything you would impart

on them. I will say a few things. I mean, I think from a COVID standpoint, I feel very strongly that COVID was very rough on women in general in the workforce, UM, in particular especially women who had children, and we saw news about how record women dropped out of the workforce to take care of children. So I just and I have tremendous empathy um for the struggles every day UM that women face in keeping things moving in their personal lives and their professional lives. And the

nose will always outweigh the yeses UM. I feel also that women as in general, and I don't mean the general life, but I do feel there are people men and women who take their personal confidence, who derive their personal confidence from what others are saying about what they believe in UM. And I think that in that moment when you're down, when you're struggling, you are hearing those nose.

Remember there's a yes right around the corner. Keep walking towards that, because every no brings you closer to the yes. The question is are you willing to keep walking towards it? And there was one very profound interview that I read several years ago during my lowest point that said that I will remain the CEO of wrestling until the day that I give up. Until that day, I will be the CEO of wrestling. So just in your personal life and your professional life, you are the CEO of your life,

and just wait for the yes. Don't let them know stop you from taking that next step. What's a no? A no is just you know something. You put yourself out there, and you put yourself out there, you got to know your you got to try again. You're no worse off when you ask for what you want then where you were before you asked it. So just keep on asking. You know, ask different people well, and you

need one person to say yes, don't stop. Such great advice really super important, and I think that's something that all of us can learn from entrepreneurs, not entrepreneurs, but particularly women entrepreneurs who are trying to move their businesses forward. Thank you so much for joining us today, Thank you so much for having me. Best of luck and best wishes to all of the listeners. I'd like to thank Bendia for such great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Here are

three things I took from the conversation. First, we shouldn't be afraid of getting a no. After going all in and starting her own company, Bendia pushed headlong into the process, never looking back. As Bindia says, for every s she got sixty knows and even though at times she felt like vote humpty dumpty, she just put on a smile, pulled herself back together, and went at it again until she got to yes. Second has been your points out.

We should have confidence in our own experience. Others may not share your experience, but you need to trust your firsthand knowledge. As bn Da says, look deep inside to find that spark of confidence. The world may not know what you bring to the table yet, but they'll see it eventually. Finally, perspective is powerful. As Bendia told us, there's always some risk, but on the other side of risk is opportunity. It's all about the lens through which

you view a situation. You can find opportunity inside most challenges. It's just a question of perspective. Made by women. Is brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, with support from founding partner PNG