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10. The Supply Chain Consultant Who Testifies in Court with Steve Hopper · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  Jack Tompkins: What's going on everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful. It's a show where I sit down with your favorite consultants and we take the comedic route through their life and find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, the CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm with today's fun fact, ducks have regional accents. Apparently a specific kind of talks in different language. It's weird, but pretty interesting. That's neither here nor there though. Today I'm joined by my friend Steve Hopper. He's the founder of Inviscid Consulting. He's a supply chain expert. He's the leading voice in the industry. Steve, do you think you fall more on the sophisticated side, more on the scrappy side of business?
• 0:51
  Steve Hopper: Well, do you want me to answer with the duck regional accent or just with my own?
• 0:56
  Jack Tompkins: If you've got a duck regional accent queued up, let's hear it.
• 1:00
  Steve Hopper: You know, that's a great question. I don't necessarily find them mutually exclusive. I like to think to a certain extent I'm sophisticated, but I'm also scrappy. And I think it depends on which aspect of life you're dealing with and what the implications are of taking one approach over the other.
• 1:25
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, I think a healthy balance is probably where a lot of people end up falling. But either way, we'll see if the data agrees with you. Take me back to the beginning, Steve. Where did you grow up? Did you have entrepreneurs in the family? I know you're a Southeast kid. Tell me about growing up in the family.
• 1:44
  Steve Hopper: Yeah, I grew up in your kind of typical average middle class home - the Leave It to Beaver scenario in the Charlotte suburbs. I was there till I was about 13 years old and then moved to the suburbs of Atlanta, Marietta area, and spent the rest of my youth years there. Then on to Georgia Tech and onto my career. Since that time, I've been baked in the Atlanta area.
• 2:19
  Jack Tompkins: Gotcha. And did you have entrepreneurs in the family?
• 2:22
  Steve Hopper: We really didn't. My dad was an insurance guy - kind of one of these risk-averse types. Loved him to death, he's gone now, but he was risk averse and just not the type to take certain risks that you have to take as an entrepreneur. Between my parents and grandparents, it was all pretty traditional - emphasis on get an education and have a career in a corporate environment. Maybe I broke that mold a little bit.
• 3:17
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, it's fun to break that mold. My mom was famous for saying you can break the chain. Did you have the entrepreneurial bug as a kid? Did you have a lemonade stand or anything?
• 3:40
  Steve Hopper: Yeah, when I was a kid I did a little of that. At school I would sell candy and in Cub Scouts we'd have sales - selling popcorn or greeting cards. But I didn't really get the entrepreneurial bug until I was well into my career. I recognized I wasn't really happy with the traditional corporate track. I'd had some experiences with not-so-great bosses and toxic political environments. That's more than anything else what pushed me to get out and take things more entrepreneurial. I'm really thankful that I did.
• 4:49
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, good things can come from bad things. I've been in situations where I really just wasn't happy going to work. Whether that be the toxic environment, the boss, whatever - it just makes it tough. And out of that springs the entrepreneurship. Tell me about the leap to entrepreneurship - the story of you launching your own thing.
• 5:23
  Steve Hopper: I was in one of those toxic environments, wasn't happy with my corporate career, and was being considered for a pretty high-level position at a well-known material handling company. I interviewed with the CEO, they made me the offer, and my wife said - you've talked for a long time about starting your own business. I was playing devil's advocate, going there's risk there, you don't know where your paycheck is going to come from. We had young kids at the time.
• 6:15
  Jack Tompkins: I still don't.
• 6:16
  Steve Hopper: I did the Ben Franklin comparison - the pros and cons of the offer versus going out on my own. What I realized was the best case scenario of going out on my own was better than the best case scenario of not. And the worst case? I do this for six months or a year, it doesn't work out, then I get another job. I also had a very close friend who drilled into my head the idea of taking The Road Less Taken - the Robert Frost poem - which is one of my favorites.
• 7:37
  Steve Hopper: It's not about what they all say is supposed to be the trajectory. It's really about what fits you. So between the counseling of my wife and my buddy, I decided to take the leap. And I'm really, really thankful that I did.
• 7:57
  Jack Tompkins: Tell me about those early days. You take the leap, you just turned down a nice corporate offer. Do you have an initial client? What was your version of the ramen noodle dinners?
• 8:45
  Steve Hopper: The one good thing was I was pretty well networked in my industry. I was already on LinkedIn - at the time I think I was one of the first million people on LinkedIn. So being able to get the word out to people I knew was key.
• 9:08
  Steve Hopper: When I started my firm was 2004 - so 21, 22 years ago. Just leveraging my network, turning over rocks to see what's underneath - that was the process. In the early days, much of my work was subcontracting for other firms who needed expertise or bandwidth. Over time, building brand recognition has made it a little easier to generate new business. From day one to now, everything has been an overall positive trajectory. Not exponential growth, but a nice steady slope progression.
• 11:01
  Steve Hopper: But to be fair, I had to learn a lot of things the hard way. If I had it all to do over again, I'd do some things differently.
• 11:12
  Jack Tompkins: It's interesting - your family comes from the stable, steady corporate world. And yet you took the risky route and started your own thing. Now you've got this steady upward trajectory. Would you argue it ended up being more stable for you?
• 11:44
  Steve Hopper: It depends on what you consider stable. Has it been stable with respect to income? No, it's more of a roller coaster ride - feast to famine, windfalls and then periods where there's nothing. If you consider stability having a weekly paycheck, it's not stable. But I would trade some of the other forms of instability for that any day.
• 12:13
  Steve Hopper: Knowing that when I invest my time in something and I succeed or fail, that's on me - instead of taking the brunt of other people's decisions and them taking all the credit while others get the blame.
• 12:41
  Steve Hopper: There's this concept I preach to clients - the authority and accountability relationship. You can't hold someone accountable for something over which they have no authority. That's rampant in business. When I circled back to the entrepreneurship thing, that was one of the things I thrived under - being able to make my own decisions. If it was a good decision, I got the benefit. If it wasn't, I got the downside. I really liked that level of independence.
• 14:22
  Jack Tompkins: Right - so maybe it's not stability, but it's control. And that's pretty important.
• 14:30
  Steve Hopper: Maybe control is too strong a word, but just an ability to drive your own destiny, as opposed to being at the mercy of other people who sometimes don't care about you.
• 14:57
  Jack Tompkins: In the early going - is your wife employed or are you guys relying solely on your income?
• 15:10
  Steve Hopper: Yeah, she's employed - she's like an office manager. Her income helped all the way through, except when the kids were really little. We never went through extremely lean times, by the grace of God. Never struggled at the level where I was worried about basic gifts or anything like that.
• 16:11
  Steve Hopper: I've been blessed with just the perfect wife. We've been married 36 years almost. She's encouraged me every step of the way - someone to bounce things off of. When I jumped into entrepreneurship, it's been very, very helpful to have her as my partner all through these years.
• 17:02
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, that's awesome. Some people find the one and that one may not always support the entrepreneurial dreams. Did you meet in high school?
• 17:13
  Steve Hopper: No, we met at a New Year's Eve party in downtown Atlanta in the late 80s. My buddy got invited to a pre-party and I went with him. She went with her friend to that same pre-party and we met there, then we all went on to the big event. That was New Year's Eve - we got engaged the next New Year's Eve and married about six months after that.
• 18:09
  Jack Tompkins: Wow. You're a successful entrepreneur and also your own rom-com leading actor.
• 18:18
  Steve Hopper: A little on the boring side for that. It wouldn't have the level of excitement you'd see in a movie, but it worked out really well and I certainly can't complain.
• 18:37
  Jack Tompkins: All right, let's talk about today. Going back to accountability - do you get into role-specific KPIs for folks working in the warehouse, or is your consulting more at the high-level strategic KPI level?
• 19:13
  Steve Hopper: I'm a big believer in KPIs. There are DC-level KPIs that determine the health of the overall operation, and then there are KPIs that measure the performance of individual workers or teams. I'm a firm believer you can't manage what you don't measure - I think Drucker came up with that.
• 20:04
  Steve Hopper: How would you play football without stripes on the field? How would you play tennis without a net? You need something to measure against. Sadly, so few companies are actually taking metrics, measuring KPIs, and benchmarking themselves against peers to know how they're doing relative to their competition.
• 20:45
  Jack Tompkins: Who are your typical clients? Are they the small scrappy startup just figuring things out? Or more the sophisticated $12 billion company?
• 21:08
  Steve Hopper: We've covered the gamut - we've worked with 80-plus billion dollar corporations and with startups. Let me take a minute and tell you about what I call the pyramid. This may be helpful to other entrepreneurs looking at their market.
• 21:37
  Steve Hopper: Your overall market sits in a three-level pyramid. The top level is really big companies - revenue over $2 billion. Your Amazons and Krogers of the world. The base is all the smaller companies under $200 million - there are a lot more of them. And then you've got the mid-market between $200 million and $2 billion. The big companies at the top usually have in-house consulting teams and if they hire externally, they go to Accenture, KPMG, Capgemini.
• 24:02
  Steve Hopper: Then you've got the mom and pops. The VCs and PE firms are strategic for us because they get it - they want to take their business to the next level. But the typical mom and pop, frankly, is too cheap to pay for external expertise. They should be doing it, but they're hesitant. So we don't invest a lot of time there. The middle market - businesses that get the need for expertise but don't have their own internal staff - that's where we focus. They're willing to bring in consultants and not hesitant to spend.
• 26:34
  Jack Tompkins: Let's view it as an investment, not an expense. What's the potential ROI? What things do you help with that produce a strong return, and how do you measure it?
• 27:03
  Steve Hopper: Sometimes it's staggering. We worked with an auto parts company and were coming up with a half-year payback - a 200% ROI. We were afraid they wouldn't believe us so we made the numbers ultra conservative and presented a one-year payback. They still said they couldn't do it - they had budget for operating expense but not capital expense. We asked to talk to their CFO and they wouldn't let us. Leaving so much money on the table. It's not uncommon for us to see payback periods of two years or less. We ask clients upfront what their minimally acceptable rate of return is and that becomes our yardstick.
• 30:41
  Jack Tompkins: Are you going physically onsite to clients? If someone agrees to the investment, are you going to their place?
• 30:59
  Steve Hopper: Yes and no - it depends on the engagement. Some things you just can't do remotely. A detailed assessment of a warehouse - observing labor, material flows, layout, equipment, information systems, inventory - you have to be boots on the ground. But writing reports, crunching numbers, doing research - there's no need to be on site, especially in the modern era with Zoom and Teams.
• 32:43
  Jack Tompkins: You just dropped the expert witness thing. Are you the person they call on the TV show as the surprise expert witness? Tell us about that.
• 32:59
  Steve Hopper: About 12 or 13 years ago, out of the blue I got a phone call from an attorney in Michigan working on a case involving an incident at a warehouse. He asked if I'd be interested in being an expert witness. I did a little poking around on what's involved, one thing led to another, I did that case, and since that time I've been on 64 or 65 cases - probably six or eight of which are still ongoing.
• 33:59
  Steve Hopper: Not everybody understands the fundamentals of warehousing and distribution. It's a science with a lot of nuances that the mainstream population doesn't understand. The cases have involved contract disputes, class action lawsuits, intellectual property, and injuries and deaths in warehousing and distribution environments.
• 35:08
  Steve Hopper: Any accident or death in a warehousing operation has a root cause. It could be the company didn't have good safety practices. It could be the person made a foolish decision. Or oftentimes it's a gray area with multiple contributing factors - a perfect storm. I had one case with over a thousand documents to review and 20-something depositions, each 200 to 300 pages long.
• 36:36
  Steve Hopper: You've got to do your due diligence and get to the facts. What's misunderstood from TV shows is that we can't advocate for one side or the other - we're supposed to advocate for the truth. One side retains us and behind the scenes we can offer things for them to consider. But when the other side asks me questions - I've done 13 or 14 depositions and only had to testify at trial about three times.
• 37:54
  Steve Hopper: The vast majority of cases get settled before they ever go to trial. The general sense is if the other side's attorney isn't savvy enough to know what questions to ask, you don't have to answer them.
• 38:23
  Steve Hopper: You're not supposed to answer beyond the scope of the question asked. People hire experts to understand the nuances of the case - what's important, what's not, how to strategically win. One of the testimonies I did resulted in the side that retained me getting $31 million from the jury. About a third of my work these days is expert witness work and the other two thirds is traditional consulting.
• 39:38
  Jack Tompkins: That career arc is never gonna get topped. Let me hit you with some lightning round - scrappy vs. sophisticated. Somebody wants a meeting with you - are you saying you're free Thursday afternoon or sending a calendar link?
• 40:14
  Steve Hopper: I'm a slave to my calendar. I've actually gone a step further - I reserved a URL, timewithsteve.com. I tell all my clients and anyone else they can always go to timewithsteve.com and pull up my calendar and schedule time with me. It goes to Calendly but it's an easy URL to remember. I'm supposed to be an efficiency expert - that's one little way of doing it.
• 41:18
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, how many phone numbers do you have?
• 41:23
  Steve Hopper: Probably about four or five. The business switchboard, my cell phone, a Google Voice account I use for registrations. And I'm a drummer - my band has a number for booking. So four or five numbers.
• 42:04
  Jack Tompkins: How do you answer the phone on a business call?
• 42:10
  Steve Hopper: If it's coming to my personal phone, I say it's Steve. I used to say Steve Hopper speaking - my dad did it that way. But everybody would tease me and say hello Steve Hopper speaking, so I got away from that a long time ago.
• 42:38
  Jack Tompkins: If you've got a lunch meeting, are you always making a reservation?
• 42:46
  Steve Hopper: No - it depends. If it's a VIP meeting where you want to set an impression, yes you make a reservation. But generally, I'm kind of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get guy. I'm not the type to be too flashy. Let's just go roll up the sleeves and solve a problem. It's funny - when we worked with Walmart, we were competing with a more flashy, polished firm. The Walmart people told us the way we operate is actually right in line with the way we operate. Sure enough, they hired us. Sometimes it plays in your favor not to be so put on.
• 44:56
  Jack Tompkins: You said you're a what-you-see-is-what-you-get guy. But you've also dropped the expert witness and now you're telling me you're a drummer? Was that a hobby you thought was going to be your big break?
• 45:13
  Steve Hopper: When I was a little kid, coffee used to come in big cans and I'd grab them and bang on the tops like drums. When I was five or six, my parents bought me a beginner drum kit. I was in garage bands in high school. My band now is the Falls Brothers Band - fallsbrothers.com. We play classic rock, R&B, funk, blues around the Atlanta area. It's an outlet. My wife is constantly telling me I need to go bang on the drums and get out my frustration. Some people have golf - I've got drums.
• 46:37
  Jack Tompkins: I can't get a read on you - are you the scrappiest human I've ever met or the most sophisticated? How many unread emails in your inbox is too many?
• 46:51
  Steve Hopper: I'm very organized with my emails in terms of filing them. But actually in the inbox inbox, there are more than a hundred unreads that I've told myself I want to read. They just accumulate. Then once every few weeks I go in and do a mass delete - never read these 200 emails, so I'll just delete them and start over. Flush the toilet, so to speak.
• 47:54
  Jack Tompkins: Have you ever had to Google somebody mid-meeting with them?
• 48:03
  Steve Hopper: Yeah, I think so. My camera is in the middle of my screen so I can do it pretty seamlessly. Either something was scheduled too quickly and I didn't have time to do my homework, or I just missed something. I've gone to Google and looked them up on LinkedIn. I have to confess - yes, I've done that. But for anybody watching this, that's not a good practice. Do your homework before the meeting.
• 49:05
  Jack Tompkins: Do as I say, not as I do. I'm gonna say you happily walk in both worlds. There's sophistication and a healthy dose of scrappiness. It all blends together into this consultant, logistics expert, speaker, expert witness, and drummer. You're in both worlds and I love it.
• 49:29
  Steve Hopper: Well, it keeps me busy. I'm at a phase in my life where if I could only clone myself. Like the expert witness work - I can't subcontract that work, I have to do it myself. It's a struggle, but it's a good kind of struggle. It's much better than the alternative.
• 49:57
  Jack Tompkins: Thank you for coming on, man. We're gonna nerd out about data and dashboards in the future. Is there anything you want to promote or the best way for people to find you?
• 50:16
  Steve Hopper: Certainly go to inviscidconsulting.com. We have a really simple mission - for businesses that operate supply chains, our fundamental focus is to do two things: reduce operating costs and improve service levels, like capacity and accuracy. These are all measurable things with KPIs and metrics, so it's pretty evident whether you're successful or not. If you want to improve those things in warehousing, distribution, and logistics operations - we're the guys to talk to.
• 51:05
  Jack Tompkins: Everybody, Steve Hopper, Inviscid Consulting, thank you so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.
• 51:13
  Steve Hopper: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
• 51:16
  Jack Tompkins: Take care everybody.