Business, Family and the Search for Peace with Sheldon Mydat

This week we are going across the pond all the way over to London to chat with a good friend of mine , the founder and CEO of SAPICO , sheldon Midat . Good morning , sheldon , or good afternoon to you , sir . Good afternoon , nate . How are you ? I'm doing terrific . So a wonderful Friday here in the States Morning for us , afternoon for you .

I know you have an exciting evening ahead of you tonight , don't you ?

So , sheldon , you and I have known each other for about a year now , I think , and I've gotten to watch some of your entrepreneurial updates and journey online , and we chat every month as well . But before we go into what you're doing with SAPICO , I want to go back to your earlier career , because you've had a pretty wide range of experience .

I saw that you worked for Lloyd's Banking Group and then spent time with Royal Mail , which I researched and realized was started by Henry VIII , basically 400 plus years ago , and then you spent time working with the London Metropolitan Police , engaging in a bunch of work with the central government all around the procurement space .

So first question is when did you become interested in procurement and how did you connect that with working with governmental agencies ?

I headed up the IT divestment program for the Verdi divestment , which was a big regulatory divestment from Lloyd's Bank . I've kind of worked my way around central government for the Met Police , for the Department of Health , for the Foreign Office , for the Cabinet Office , for the Ministry of Justice . In fact , royal Mail Group Technology .

That was part of the public sector . When I worked there it was pre-IPO . I've really kind of charted my way around central government . I've had a lot of private sector experience as well , obviously Lloyd's being one of those organizations T systems , everything everywhere , shell oh my God , british American tobacco the list as well .

Honestly , I think I even fell into it . I think you'll hear that most . A lot of people at working procurement fell into it . It's one of those things you fall into , you just stay . It's such a big , diverse area .

I've just charted my career around supply chain and procurement across all of these different organizations of shapes and size , mostly enterprise , to be fair .

I'd always come at it from the relationship angle rather than looking at as a transition modeling expert . I'd always look at the relationship space and think how do we drive value out of these key relationships that service these organizations whilst these organizations are going through big structural change ?

It was never a case of let's just focus on the numbers those predefined , pre-negotiated , contracted margins that's kind of fine . As I say , it's pre-negotiated 10% to 15% . The factor margins 20% . Whatever it happens to be .

I'd always look at the relationship space in ways that we could actually unlock the value that lives in the uncontracted space , the collaboration and the innovation , the shared R&D and all that really , really good stuff that has hemorrhaged for years because of poor relationship management and the fact that supply chain has , for more years than I can remember , been

seen as an overhead . As is the case with most overheads , the emphasis is going to be on driving cost down .

Then you've got the fact that purest procurement over the years are the ones that let all of those contracts and their raison d'etre , if you like , traditionally would have also been to drive cost down You've got these big barriers to driving relationship value standing in the way .

I'd spend a lot of time working with these organizations and I was a bit of a spreadsheet geek as well . I'd spend so much time creating these formulas in spreadsheets to try and emulate all this kind of subjective behavior , trying to turn it from being subjective into something that was objective , that we could then measure and drive value out of .

There's so much value there . A lot of the companies that I worked with really liked those templates . It was all spreadsheets and PowerPoints . There wasn't any tech that did it . They really liked it and said can we have it ? Long story short , that prompted me to think about shrink , wrapping it into software , and that's what I did .

The best theory in the world as soon as it encounters the first human being , it starts to erode because that person has feelings and experiences and maybe just having a bad day , and your tool might give them the absolute right answer best answer and yet they are , like all of us , flawed and biased and subject to our own whims .

I know that you studied the psychology of sales a long time ago . I'm curious what did you draw from that that helps you bridge that gap in that uncontracted space that you talk about , because it is fundamentally human ?

And that's what managing relationships was always like . There have been effort way back . Peter Crowder , 1983 , mckinsey Consultant , famously started writing about supplier management , the early days of SRM . But it wasn't really SRM , it was supplier management and it was driving performance .

It invariably became quite a conflicted situation adversarial , that's the word I'm looking for an adversarial type situation between customer and supplier and didn't really end well . And so relationships have always been pushed to the curb in favor of a more addressable kind of way of doing things and driving value .

And so one of the things that I did was to think well , how do we take all of this subjective stuff and turn it into something objective ?

And it's not just about the KPI , it's not just about the formula in Excel Obviously we've taken it away from Excel and turned it into a dynamic platform for supply chain but importantly , it's about creating an infrastructure within the relationship space . So you've got a contract that looks after all of the obligations and clauses , etc . Etc .

All those SLAs and KPIs and the pricing , yada , yada , yada . All these are within the contract , but , as we know , we don't live within the contract . How do we take that and create the same level of objectivity and structure within that otherwise loose space ? That's what we needed to do .

We created an infrastructure within the relationship space for every customer supply relationship that we have . That enables us to break it down into my new share of detail so that we can actually measure it , manage it , improve it , fix it , etc . And we did it in a way that allows us to bespoke it for any type of service and scenario .

Even within one service , you've got different suppliers doing different things , and so you need to be able to create this unique infrastructure but also needs to be done in a way that's simple . That's simplistic Again .

Remember , I was a practitioner for many , many years , so I know what it's like to be on the other side of the fence as a bio , if you like , rather than a sell , and the last thing I'd want is to be given more and more owner stuff to do inside portals and platforms and whatever . It's always been about transforming rather than transitioning .

Let's not just take what we do and stick it in a platform . Let's just transition it and give it a small work to do . Invariably , this is about transforming , making life easier , and so we ensure that the platform does as much of it as we can actually kind of automated workflows to make life easier for people .

As a good buyer of supplies I would look at that and say we need to get lower cost per unit or we need to be buying in different quantities or frequencies , anything we can do to drive that cost down , and put together an initiative .

And it didn't quite work the way I had hoped and I couldn't figure out why and went to talk with a few of the folks on the front lines who were actually placing the orders and said hey , we spent $300 on this item and we got 50 of them . Do we really need 50 ? That seems like it lasts us a year .

Well , we don't need 50 , but if we buy 50 , we get a free baseball cap . It helped me understand why we're buying more of something than we need so that we can get a quote free gift , and saw a box full of baseball caps and swag and all of the Bluetooth speakers .

It just dawned on me no matter how well-intentioned a purchasing strategy can be , when there's an incentive for somebody else to make decisions in their own best interests instead of the companies , or even just a nice to have you run into a brick wall of . I now have to navigate somebody else's decision making . That's not quote rational .

It's not in the best interest of the company . That was a hard lesson to learn . It cost money to learn that lesson , but it was very insightful because it teaches you how people will behave when there are incentives .

It's so , so important and it hasn't really it gets forsaken for the more binary aspects of engagement and , to be honest with you , it's only coming to prominence now the acceptance or the realization that we need to embrace these relationships and really drive the value out of them .

Because in times of turbulence , cost of living crisis , whatever the different stuff going on around the world , it's not an easy period for any of us . Simple economics times get hard , business shrinks , your margins diminish .

You're forced to look elsewhere for the value you got , to look up rather than down into the contrary , and that means embracing all of these different areas and really understanding how these relationships , how these relationships work , because they unlock a lot of value . They really , really do .

to the races Now , we've got our first customer or a moment like that where it strengthened your own conviction ?

That's inherent in me . To be honest with you , being a relationship person , that moment dawned on me way before the technology was conceived . To be honest with you , and I've always had a real passion for what I do . I mean , we know each other very well now , so we spoke many times on the monthly calls etc .

You'll know that I've got a real passion for what I do . I wear that on my sleeve as well . It is what it is for me Real passion for all of this stuff . I know inherently that the relationship is such a key enabler of value . I really do .

And so , working through these earlier engagements with spreadsheets and getting all this really positive kind of affirmation from these different organizations like Lloyd's Banking Group and Fujitsu Services T-Systems these organizations aren't small , they've got big use cases and they were saying , yeah , we love this stuff , can we have it ? So those are the early prompts .

We trialled our software long before it was launched to production . We trialled it across BAE systems . We did four product fit pilots live pilots . I'd say it weren't production , but it were live pilots with real data , with real people , real organizations involved , and we tested the metal of the software . It was a great experience .

The feedback was good , lots of learning , don't get me wrong . It wasn't just all fall in our laps and we made mistakes , of course , but yeah , it was all heading in that same direction . And you look now at SRO , it really has come to prominence , especially coming off the back of the pandemic .

We launched to production in April 2020 , just as the first lockdown hit and we were like , oh my God , what are you going to do now ? We just launched , we were about to kick off a big sales campaign and suddenly every organization on the planet is closing down , literally . So there was no point in us selling this because no one's going to buy it .

We're completely unknown . So we decided not to sell it at all . We thought , right , we're just going to raise awareness of our brand . At this point , we had just finished trialing with BAE . We launched a production . We carried on doing some work with them and January 2021 , we signed our first license with BAE Systems . It was great .

It was an amazing feeling , fantastic . We decided to do some work with a PR firm . We published our first case study and they said , right , let's wrap a press release around that first case study and drive it out through the industry . And so we did . They wheeled me out in virtual shows and September 21 , we did our first back to it face-to-face show .

I started doing panel talks and keynotes , et cetera , et cetera . I've been in the industry a long time . Long story short , we didn't sell a thing apart from the one that we already had in flight BAE . We just drove PR to build our brand , and it's only been just recently that we've started really selling . So there's no point selling .

So we'll wait , we'll do PR , we'll raise the brand and , funnily enough , what that did was drive inbound as well , which is a lower cost of acquisition than outbound . Right , so it had its advantages .

I want to take a quick moment and call out that the show itself would not be possible without the support of our sponsors , so we'll take a break and we will be right back . So , sheldon , I want to shift gears .

Then , now that we've talked through some of your background and some parts of the company , let's talk about your background what you were like as a kid , and how did you discover about yourself that entrepreneurship was right for you ?

And when I finally got old enough I had this operation , I had my eye fixed , I started wearing contact lenses and then I went off the rails , not literally , but I started to live a bit . It was a real moment , real milestone . So yeah , the early years quite impactful for me in shaping me .

I started my first business when I was 17 years old in the motor trade . I started an electrical contracting company . I started very , very small . I was fitting cost scenarios at a Peugeot garage in the UK out of the back of my mum's 1978 Honda Accord with one of those old metal concertina tour boxes . Do you remember those ? I do not .

But we built this company right . So we built it . We ended up servicing every Peugeot dealership in the UK and at the time none of the electrical accessories were a factory fit , it was a retro fit . Now it's sort of factory fit obviously . But then it wasn't . No radios , no electrics , no central lock in electric windows , sunroof , tow bars , you name it .

They're a lot . We did it all and I built that company up , a bunch of guys working for us . I was known as the doctor . I didn't have any formal training , actually just for self-taught . There was another thing that used to do very stereotypical Any lots of kids that you know . We take things apart and they forget how to put them back together again .

So that happened quite a lot .

I came back from the US and I went off to Israel and I'd studied there , I did a diploma , I learned the language . I ended up working in the motor trade as well , doing car electrics , and then I came back to the UK a long story short , winding forward a few years , I ended up starting another . It actually made a change .

I went into IT at that point working as a resource for a company that wanted to become a consultant . It was a recruitment company in IT and I was desperately trying to become a consultant but at the time they were only really managing to kind of body shop . I came along . I remember I'm a relationship person .

They used to call me Sledge Emma there because I smashed open doors and made relationships . I was the first person in that company to win some true consultancy and that company was BT , doing some fantastic work at BT , and I made a name for myself there over the course of two years , winning some fantastic consultancy .

In fact , they had famously spent a lot of money on Siebel systems and Siebel didn't have the resource to actually help them unpack it and install it and work on it . So they asked me to go and find some resource and manage a project for them , something called E-Marketing 6.3 from Siebel . Anyway , long story on that .

I went over to California and I pulled all the guys out of Palm Pilot in California , bought them back to the UK and got them working with me at BT to kind of work through these requirements . And I'm still friendly with those guys now actually .

Along with this really big emphasis on relationships , I'd like to know what relationships that you have in your life have helped you along on this journey , the ones that you want to give a shout out to .

And he was very successful as a salesman and he never used to sell a thing in his life . All he did was have relationships with his customers and they used to come back and just buy from him . And he was very successful . In fact he only had one job his whole life . He was an mechanic for the Roots Corporation , which is part of Chrysler etc . Etc .

And it was the company that worked for all his life . And the dealership that I started my little business at back in those early days was a dealership that he ran . So he gave me my break in that industry and it just kind of flew from there . He has been a major influence .

It's all about those relationships and just opening things up through having a natural relationship . Can't force it , just let it ride . People buy from people . We all know that we kind of try to sayings , but they're all true and they're so impactful if you can just do them naturally .

And the ones that do it really well , though , are the ones who reach out and then try to learn something over the course of time , rather than you accept an invite and then they blast you with a sales pitch .

That's not relationship-based selling , but the ones that I share my time with and try to learn more from them about what it is they offer because there may be a need for me to use that service are the ones who take that longer-term approach and seek to understand the needs of the business or my background or something else , because then it doesn't feel so

transactional . I don't feel like a target all the time . That's why I don't enjoy a lot of trade conferences , because you walk in the door and you just feel like sharks everywhere and you're the fish that everybody wants to eat . There's not the attempt to start from a relationship , but with your father .

If you have that relationship , when they have a need for whatever it is that you sell , you're the person that they're going to . You may not even have the best product , but they trust you and know that you will likely follow through on whatever commitments you've made .

I think technology in some ways makes relationship management a lot easier , but it also creates a new barrier because you can hide behind a computer screen . That's why I love our conversation . Sheldon is their conversations . It's a dialogue , it's not a monologue and it's not just digital , it's not just text . I get to hear your voice when we talk .

I get to see your facial expressions having a conversation now , not a pitch or an interview . That's part of why I enjoy doing this so much is there's nothing to sell .

We create this relationship infrastructure to capture the value . We convert that relationship . What we're doing now we convert it into value . It sounds like a swallowed assignment of a cynic book . It's all about the trust , the relationship . It's all about coming up with these sayings like relay we all buy from one another , we buy people buy from people and etc .

That's all true . Behind that , the reason is people buy on trust . All these things promote trust .

Don't ask for anything , Just literally try to help and be ready for what happens , because it's not going to be what you think it will be . I came across that advice and that challenge at a key moment in my own development , in my own story . It was a shift .

It wasn't easy because I was conditioned to think I have an agenda and I want to get something , and so I want to be helpful . But I want to be helpful because I want to get something . Actually , this flipped it and just said get rid of that . Instead of trying to get , start by just giving and just see what happens , but commit to it for a year .

I didn't do it perfectly . I think I made a bunch of mistakes and lost my way several times , but it did become part of this show , because every founder that I've met , I try to take that same approach and say what can I offer you that you may need and not expect anything in return .

When I shared an update on that message online a handful of months ago , I got incredible engagement on it , more than I expected , with people I think are hungry for that , because we have become so transactional and selfish is too strong of a word but we've become so self-interested We've lost curiosity about other people .

We reduce them down to whatever their title is . So you're a purchasing manager , maybe , represent $500,000 and spend . That's who you are in . My world now is just a couple of digits on my computer screen . So that's my I don't say lesson . I don't know what the right word is , but I can vouch for that having a dramatic impact .

If you are willing to do that , listener , I hope that you do . In the vein of helping others and sharing , I'm curious , Sheldon , what advice you would give to other entrepreneurs at any stage in their journey that has been helpful to you and yours .

Know what you're doing , know why you're doing something , because when you get into it , you're going to be head down for some of the time and you're going to lose sight . You're going to be so immersed in all of this negative stuff . It's going to happen because it just does , because it's not an easy thing to do . It's a hard , hard thing to do .

It takes the most incredible amount of resilience and I would say , as well as everything that I've just said , because you're going to have to soak a lot of that up . But I would say have a good community of people to work with , to speak , to , have people to bounce off , have people to vent with . It's so , so important .

Because all of that stuff is going to happen , because it's not an easy thing . You will just absorb it all . You will . You need to be able to get it back out of you because it takes its toll . It will take its toll . This stuff is amazing . The ups are fantastic . The downs can take their toll . You need to look after your health . You really do .

If you don't look after your health , then all that stuff that you absorb it will bring you down . It will bring you down . It's so important to be able to manage that anxiety and that stress . I never used to suffer anxiety . Now I do . I do . I've been on .

We've been doing this a while now and I've been on we speak to doing that , been a practitioner for many years and I do talks and panel talks and keynotes and Goddard and podcasts like this and Waffle On for ages and now I suffer anxiety . I had to stop a podcast a few weeks ago .

I said , look , I've got a cool time on this , can't do it , my head is pulled over the place . And we rescheduled it for two weeks time . So it happens , it takes its toll . It does . We're not made of cast iron . With people , you can't see me on the podcast , but I'm only 25 .

And then when the seas do get rough , you knew they were going to get rough and you can be open about it and surround yourself with people that also understand it . It's invaluable for others to hear from people in your shoes , because some people can't talk about it or they only talk about it with their partner or their spouse . Sometimes people need help .

I mean , mental health is something that I'm passionate about personally , and I have my reasons for that , so I love to have others model just talking about it , because then it takes some of the fear out of it and normalizes it , and then people can actually get help when they need it .

And if that's not the basis of relationships , I don't know what is so 100% .

She had a network of distributors and so on . So it was a big thing . 21 years couldn't do it anymore . She likes to bake , okay . So she started a vegan baking business and I went and helped her with a show , with an event at a music festival just last weekend .

And the reason I say this okay is because it was quite cathartic in a way , actually , because I found myself standing there talking to people and they were chatting and it was really sociable .

You know , and bear in mind , we're used to sitting behind screens a lot more than we used to and there's in this festival and them talking to people about cakes and stuff , and it was so utterly different and incredibly refreshing and it felt really good for some .

I was just talking to people about all sorts of things and I actually clocked it at the time , very clearly clocked it at the time and what I was doing and noticed and felt this is really good fun .

, sheldon . Thank you for everything today , sharing your background and your entrepreneurial journey some very helpful advice for others . I wish you and your family all the success in the world and I hope you have a great concert tonight , going to see Billy Joel . I hope you keep tapping into that energy-giving relationship vibe that you recently found .

I know your journey is not always easy and I'm glad to call you a friend and I'm here for you anytime you need to . We're all rooting for you .

To learn more about the show and connect with the growing community of entrepreneurs , visit logisticsfounderscom . And , of course , thank you to all the founders who trust us to share their stories .