Lou Sandoval With SupplyHive

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Chicago, Illinois, it’s time for Chicago Business Radio brought to you by FirmSpace, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to Firmspace.com. Now here’s your host.

Max Kantor: [00:00:21] Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kantor. And before we get started, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor for today’s show. So special. Thank you to firm SpaceX for sponsoring today’s episode because without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories that we do, and I have a great guest today. Very interesting guest. He is the president and CEO of SupplyHive, so please welcome to the show, Lou Sandoval. Welcome to the show, Lou.

Lou Sandoval: [00:00:51] Hi Max, how are you? Glad to be here. Thank you for having me on the show.

Max Kantor: [00:00:55] Thank you for being here. I’m excited to kind of talk to you and learn all about supply, hive and what you guys are doing so to jump right in. What was the genesis of the idea of supply hive? How did you guys come about?

Lou Sandoval: [00:01:09] You know what the. So the company was founded in 2018 by our founder, Michael Equiano. Mike’s a serial entrepreneur like much like myself, you know, and he’s done a couple of successful exits in the supplier diversity space, the procurement space. So his last exit was then, you know, for a company named CVM that was sold to a private equity firm and then later sold again. So, you know, he’s really steeped in knowledge and and I think really the genesis for supply was sort of like to kind of create sort of like a moodies for procurement for suppliers, you know, sort of a rating system that gives a little more information on on the different suppliers that a buyer or a company has. And just a way to improve the relationships using performance data.

Max Kantor: [00:02:02] So what a supply hive do exactly for its clients, you know?

Lou Sandoval: [00:02:07] You know, simply put, I mean, if you kind of look down our website to like where where we’re a B2B cloud based supplier performance management platform, you know, what we really do is we provide visibility to performance data at scale for procurement teams, at companies and their suppliers. You know, by doing this, we enable growth and improve the operating efficiency for those for those companies and then obviously for the suppliers. So really kind of we used we leverage the data that that they exchange within each other and they procure this data through surveys and just, you know, ratings of each other. So the supplier rates, the company, the company rates the supplier and they use the information from that to develop an action plan on how to make them better.

Max Kantor: [00:02:53] What pains were suppliers having that supply hive solves?

Lou Sandoval: [00:02:59] Well, you know, it’s interesting because there isn’t. The pains are specific to a lot of the the procurement to pay and source the pay suites that are out there. The ERP is a very large legacy systems. They’re there in every major Fortune 100 company. The challenge with those systems is often the implementation that we’ll call it at. The grassroots level leaves much to be desired, and employees end up finding ways to work around the systems, and it ends up being very static data. So one of the things that has come out of the pandemic is obviously, you know, you know, the real big need to digitally transform any spaces because one person is tougher to come by skilled personnel, but one more importantly to, you know, the more that we can do across different platforms, especially with people working remotely working from home, different locations and globally, the more we can do in a cloud based type system, the better off it is. And the ability to do it at scale is even better. So if if there if I had to summarize it into two big endpoints, one is the stat the static capability of the existing systems and to the inability for those systems to operate dynamically and at scale.

Max Kantor: [00:04:15] Yeah, for sure. And you were talking a little bit about, you know, the the wide range of of companies. I think you mentioned companies that are working from home, companies that are in the office. So how to supply Hive integrate into your clients business? And is it a challenge or difficult to do that with every business being so, so different?

Lou Sandoval: [00:04:35] No, it’s really simple because you know what what they do is they’re able to kind of. So we have some drop down features that they can kind of customize their KPIs. So their key performance indicators and depending on what what is what the specific company is looking to to identify and their suppliers, they can take those those ratings and then drive them across all suppliers. And that might be. So for example, that might be their their hard line suppliers or Tier one suppliers. And then their Tier two suppliers are the the ones that are focused more around services. And that’s really where they’re able to do that at scale, you know, really kind of helps them gather the data they need to work more efficiently to improve the return on investment of the spending. The average fortune one hundred company spends a large portion of their gross revenue goes right back out the door in through their procurement arm. And so that’s why it’s so important, because it’s so tied to the revenue that comes into the company.

Max Kantor: [00:05:37] Do you have an ideal client or serve a certain industry? Or are you industry agnostic?

Lou Sandoval: [00:05:42] We’re very industry agnostic and really, at the end of the day, what we’re really focusing on four key verticals. We’re focusing on consumer products right now health care and biotech financial services in manufacturing. And two of those are really huge categories, obviously consumer products and manufacturing. But we’ve really kind of found some some stickiness in some of those those companies, you know, we currently have have. Some great relationships, some of our clients we boast to have Abbott, McDonald’s, Fox, Centene, First Energy, Mars, Facebook Pay safe, you know, are some of the many customers that we have so really kind of spread out, we’re industry agnostic, really focused on the deliverables, and we’re really keen on being a trusted partner to those companies.

Max Kantor: [00:06:30] And now how does supply Hive help your clients identify minority suppliers?

Lou Sandoval: [00:06:35] Well, here’s the beautiful thing. We don’t help them identify minority suppliers, but what we do is help by using data. We level the playing field because they don’t think about it this way. If we if you’re a large supplier, let’s just say you’re a big three. You know, every every one of the Fortune 100 have has the following suppliers somewhere in their top 50 Microsoft. They have a large law firm. They have probably a large consulting firm and Accenture and e.y a Deloitte, but some of that of that sort. So think about it, if you’re a diverse consulting firm, say you’re an MBA or an MWI consulting firm, you know you don’t have the resources to build those, those those relationships and invest in those relationships that say, an Accenture or a Deloitte or one of those larger firms who I might. But you know, often what happens is that that precludes the ability, you know, by not looking at it objectively through performance data. It precludes their ability to grow as a supplier. So by look, by focusing on the data, you actually level the playing field, you increase the the depth of the relationship because out of that, you know, the surveys that we do with the different suppliers, large and small, they they’re able to get an action plan on how they can improve. So think of who benefits from that. You know, the the large companies, obviously, they can do a lot of that. The small companies now get a clear path to how they can actually improve the spend with them and improve their growth with the large company.

Max Kantor: [00:08:06] So we obviously can’t talk about supply without mentioning kind of the havoc that COVID 19 created when it comes to the supply chain. So my question for you is simple how to supply hive help.

Lou Sandoval: [00:08:18] Well, you know, again, going back to the need for digital transformation, you know, and nowhere was that more evident in than needing the ability to kind of look at suppliers really across the entire dashboard and looking at where they’re strong in where they’re weakened and how to make the weak ones stronger, how to make the mid performers stronger. And then for those that are that are big performers, you know, you’re able to identify things that might be it might be areas where you might not have considered the risk, you know, cybersecurity risk, you know, there’s different things that you can do. I mean, our platform kind of you could measure on a variety of different things there and really got to break down how to make those companies stronger and better. So on the back end of the pandemic, it really kind of helps give that that insight regardless of where you’re at in the world, regardless of where the company focuses out of it really in a digitally transformative way.

Max Kantor: [00:09:17] What are some trends in supply chain that you see in 2022 and maybe even beyond?

Lou Sandoval: [00:09:23] Well, really, the move towards digital transformation is one that’s huge. You know, it used to be that the procurement department was the unsung heroes in a company. You know, those are the guys that always negotiated the best contracts for with vendors and the like. And and they often didn’t get the, you know, we’ll say the since they were often on the other side of the balance sheet, they don’t often get the notoriety that the revenue side gets that the sales team might get right. So what this is really kind of done is the, you know, the pandemic is done and more so the move towards procurement technology is really kind of, you know, highlighted the the importance of that procurement department in one leveling the playing field for diverse suppliers. But to, you know, leveling the playing field for large and small suppliers across the across the across the company’s platform. So it really that it’s really kind of been important for those companies to to get those insights, which allows them to really kind of make changes on the fly.

Max Kantor: [00:10:26] Earlier, you mentioned some of the companies that have worked with you guys like McDonald’s, Mars, Facebook. Can you share a success story where Supply Hive took a client to a new level?

Lou Sandoval: [00:10:39] I’ll take this anonymously while I’ll share two with you. One is anonymous in the we’ll call it in the consumer products category, so I won’t name specifics. But you know, this is a company that they wanted to evaluate pesticides across their entire supplier network. So they use our our our system to be able to kind of look at all the different suppliers and measure the amount of pesticides that were going into that. This kind of this is the data that went into sustainability, which is another trend when you look at the ESG measurements that companies are looking to have, that they’re having to report out in their proxy statements. So some of the data that we measure the AI supplier diversity sustainability in, like in the case of this company, helps them in those particular areas. Another area that you know, we’ve seen some growth is for another large. We’ll call it food company. We’ll just say and we went in through their vendor management office, then they helped us, then they had us help them in their supplier diversity department. And then they, you know, on the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, you know, they had made some big proclamations in, you know, in twenty twenty. And on the one year anniversary of that, those proclamations, they said, Listen, we’ve got to start putting our money where our mouth is. So let’s measure DTI through our entire supplier network. And so they’re using the supply platform to do just that. They have asked all of their suppliers to sign a pledge and then they’re meeting them all where they’re at. And the beautiful thing about that is it isn’t a kind of a make wrong, but what they’re really finding is they’re giving them the resources, the tools to help them raise their game and get to a level that basically improves the supplier universe for all of them.

Max Kantor: [00:12:21] So, Lou, it sounds like Supply Hive is doing amazing work for the companies that you serve, but what do you need more of? Is it clients, talent partners? How can we help?

Lou Sandoval: [00:12:32] Well, a little bit of both. You know, I would say if there’s two key things clients so introductions and we’re working with a lot of different groups right now and introductions to companies that can use our platform. So that’s one. And then a collaborative partners is another one where we’re kind of working on some collaborative partnerships and and we’ll call them competition deals that will help us expand our platform, expand our use case and more importantly, improve the offering and deepen the offering to the companies that we serve and companies that we plan on. So those are two key areas. We just went through a little bit of a hiring spree on our techs on the tech side of our business because of course, deepening the talent pool, deepening the product capabilities are. So, you know, that’s kind of what one of our short term goals, but a long term goal is to continue to add logos accounts at new new customers.

Max Kantor: [00:13:27] Speaking of long term goals, what’s next for supply hive?

Lou Sandoval: [00:13:31] Well, right now we’re going to where we’re going to really kind of focus on on growing our portfolio to to hit 50 anywhere between 30 to 50 companies in the year twenty twenty two. And then that’ll probably set us up for a series, a race. You know, we just completed a seed round in in twenty twenty one that we finished up the third quarter. So, you know, going in, you know, I’ll say almost a year from now, we’ll be kind of in the midst of a series and no, after we hit all of our metrics. And that, I think, is going to position us for a major explosion in size of company.

Max Kantor: [00:14:07] And if our listeners want to learn more about supply hive, where can they learn more online?

Lou Sandoval: [00:14:13] They could go to supply Hive our website and learn more about that. We’re about to roll out a brand new website here in the next four weeks so that we’re very proud of that and also go to LinkedIn. Any of our social media channels LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, you know, we kind of cross posts. A lot of things are LinkedIn site has a lot of information on it as well. And you know, one of the cool things that was that most recently, we were named by one of the larger consulting firms, Gartner. We were named as one of their cool vendors of of twenty twenty one. So there’s going to be some additional information that comes out of that here in the weeks to come. So they had some very glowing things to say about our technology in the platform and how we utilize tech and automation, and I think that was a big feather in the supply cap.

Max Kantor: [00:15:05] That’s awesome. Well, congratulations on that. And Lou, thank you again for being a guest today on Chicago Business Radio.

Lou Sandoval: [00:15:11] All right. Thank you very much, Max, and I appreciate your hospitality.

Max Kantor: [00:15:16] It is not a problem at all, and thanks to you for listening to another great episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m max cantor and we’ll see you next time.

Intro: [00:15:26] This episode is Chicago Business Radio has been brought to you by firm SpaceX, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to Firme Space.com.