The Future of Retail Over The Next Five Years, with Scott Webb, President of Avionos
I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Webb the president of Avionos, which designs and implements digital commerce and marketing solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes. He oversees executive leadership and their go-to-market strategy, which includes direct responsibility for managing all sales and delivery teams, Scott has a Bachelor’s from Bradley University and an M.B.A. from the Marshall School of Business at USC. Additionally, he has over 20 years of experience in the integrated digital business and technology services spaces, as well as expertise in driving strategy and implementing digital platform services for clients in the retail, CPG, manufacturing, distribution and financial services industries.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My first experience with technology was explaining to my parents how our home computer worked, so I guess it was only natural that I would find a career in consulting. When I was growing up, the home PC was a pretty new concept, so when modems arrived and you could suddenly connect to people anywhere on the planet, it was literally like a whole new world had opened up. Everything was so new that a lot of people just wanted to see what they could get away with, like some knock off version of Matthew Broderick in WarGames. But, just using technology for technology’s sake was never what interested me.
For me, it was always idea of finding some new way of solving a very old problem with this new tool that was hugely compelling. I gravitated to consulting right away because our whole purpose is to help our clients look at their problems in a completely new way, and we use new digital technologies as the tools to solve the problem. It’s the same reason that drew me to Avionos, because after nearly 20 years in the industry I realized that the consulting model itself was broken and what we needed to do was find a new and innovative way of delivering our services, and not be held back by the old ways of thinking.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
The most interesting thing that happened in my career, and ultimately the most positive, was when I was fired.
I was leading the technology practice for a global services firm in the Bay Area and things were not going well. It was clear after the first year that my definition of success was not the same as the organization’s, but I was still relatively young, my wife and I had just had our first child and I prioritized the stability of a job over what I knew to be the right decision to leave. Luckily for me, the decision was made for me and after three years of trying to change the culture from the inside, I was asked to leave.
The timing could not have been more perfect. A team of entrepreneurs whom I had worked with earlier in my career, and with whom I did share a vision of success, were looking to open a San Francisco office of their firm and within three weeks, I’d come aboard to launch their local practice. It was a turning point in my career as I realized that all the signs had been there for over a year that it was time to move on. Once I was forced to commit myself to that path, I found an even greater opportunity, which has shaped the rest of my career.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
During college I had an internship with a local consulting firm testing software upgrades to Windows 95. I was doing QA testing at the client site when the client sponsor called a meeting to find out if the project was going to be ready for launch. I watched as my teammates went around the room nodding their heads that we were almost complete without actually saying anything, until finally I just blurted out “there is no way we’re going to hit this deadline.” The room went silent.
At that point it slowly dawned on me that no one was actually asking me what I thought.
The client turned to the group and said, “everyone can leave, except for the project manager and that kid.” The truth was, he already knew we weren’t going to hit the date, he was just looking for someone to acknowledge it. It made for a very uncomfortable few weeks and I was not well loved by most of my colleagues at the time, but eventually we got back on track and delivered. For me it was a critically important lesson in how often we struggle to avoid addressing the uncomfortable truth that everyone already knows but is too afraid to speak out loud. At Avionos, we use a philosophy I picked up from Steve McClatchy called the “Dead Moose Principle” — if you see something uncomfortable, call it out and address it early.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Everyone in consulting will say their people make the difference, and that’s true, but in our case it’s how our people have embraced the change we are making that truly makes a difference. When I left the Bay Area to come to Chicago to lead a start-up technology company, plenty of my friends thought I was crazy. Why would I leave the most talent rich environment to start a services company in the heartland? The reality is I knew that we had to do something incredibly different, and we needed a different kind person to make that successful.
We were trying something that no one had attempted before, turning the consulting model on its head and building horizontal outcomes-based services instead of verticalized practices. To do that, we needed to build a team of high performers that also had empathy and humility. We talk about our CORE team model where no one does everything, but everyone does more than one thing. It means we had to build around teams of people that were willing to share roles, share expertise, be leaders and teammates at the same time.
It’s thrilling to be uprooting the industry in such a fundamental way, but it takes a truly different kind of person to make that succeed, and so far, the results have been outstanding.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Work with people who share your vision. Consulting is a high-stress and high-turnover environment. At Avionos we’ve strived to build a culture where, while the work being done can be stressful, the time you spend doing it every day doesn’t have to be if you work with people that you respect and do the type of work that at the end of the day, you feel good about.
Accomplish something each day that isn’t work related. I was affected early in my career when a colleague, who had put in crazy hours alongside me for months, suddenly lost his wife and child in a terrible car accident a week before Christmas. We talk about work-life balance, but on any given day, you rarely see it balanced — it usually tips one direction or the other. What we can do is make sure that even on those crazy days that tip heavily toward work, we find the time to do something meaningful, something we can look back upon and be proud of that has nothing to do with our jobs.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
So many people have influenced my journey. Kevin Steele, one my first managers in the corporate arena who was able to work effortlessly with so many different kinds of people and bring out the very the best of them. Brian Owen, a colleague at Sony Pictures who helped me understand what it means to take the long view and actually live with the results of your work. Chris Dalton, chairman of our board at Avionos and someone that I’ve worked with multiple times over two decades, who brings an infectious passion and enthusiasm each and every day.
But the most influential people in my career are my parents. They instilled in me very early the principles that I use to measure myself and my success. It was equal parts belief in personal potential, with drive to put in the work every day and take advantage of every moment, that’s guided my path to where I am today.
Are you working on any exciting projects now?
I can share one of the more exciting projects we are involved with is a nearly two-year program with Kellogg’s Bear Naked granola brand. They had identified an opportunity to bring a very novel concept of customized granola direct to consumer, with an emphasis on exploration of new taste profiles through an integration with IBM Chef Watson AI. We worked with them from the beginning, and from concept to launch we were able to get bearnakedcustom.com to first order in under 6 months. From that initial launch, we’ve continued iterating with them with regular enhancements every six weeks to launch capabilities like custom packaging, Amazon storefront integration and enhanced ingredients. It has really been a fun experience for the team and a great demonstration of the power of our model to move quickly and see immediate results.
Can you share 5 examples of how retail companies will be adjusting over the next five years to the new ways that consumers like to shop?
Well let’s be honest, anyone who says they know what the retail landscape is going to look like five years from now is fooling themselves. The pace of change in consumer expectations is staggering and we don’t know what the next 18 months will hold, much less the next five years. That said, I can probably think of four emerging trends which retailers need to be actively addressing to stay relevant today and in the immediate future. We recently released the Consumer Expectations in 2018 report, which looks at the demands that today’s consumers have when it comes to the shopping experience.
· Impulse purchases are still dominated by brick-and-mortar, but getting consumers to travel to the physical store is an increasingly high hurdle. That’s why we see an increase focused in value added services for physical retail like PetCoach by Petco, an immersive retail experience offering veterinary and training services to pet owners, to draw consumers in for an experience more encompassing than just the product selection.
· Consolidations between traditional and online retailers should continue. Driven by Amazon and Walmart’s aggressive acquisition strategy, we expect to see more combinations of physical retail with digital reach to provide a greater number of connected options for consumers.
· AI-driven personalization will continue to evolve and move out of the lab and into the field, with models like Nike Live being just the latest example of hyperlocal merchandising and one-to-one personalization at scale.
· The rise of the natural human interface, retail models which incorporate voice and touchless control — think Minority Report. Our research indicates that 42 percent of consumers expect AI to lead to faster checkouts and 77 percent find that the increase in voice assistants for ordering has positively impacted their eCommerce experience.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d love to believe I have even a little influence, but if I could start a movement it would be to bring the same joy of discovery in technology to today’s youth that I had in my early years. In a way, the prevalence of digital devices in our everyday lives has jaded young people to the powerful transformative impact it can affect. We see technology today not as an onramp to opportunity and discovery, but as an access point to cyber-bullying and danger.
I would love to see a program in a large city like Chicago where we are able to build productive skills among the at-risk youth in roles like software testing and programming. This way we can empower young people so that, rather than being passive consumers of technology, they are active participants in shaping its use and function.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Twitter: @scottewebb, @avionosllc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottewebb/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
