Eric Best's guest appearances

Eric Best

African American Profile

Content Strategy Insights

What Fuels You

Beauty & The 'Burg

Playing for Keeps

Todd Bishop

Ryan Fisher

John Collins

Sadie Lincoln

Dan Brown

Scott Kubie

Kristina Halvorson

Jonathon Colman

Jared Spool

Val Geisler

Tom Johnson

Mark Adams

Amy Nelson

Ellen Bennett

Yuval Keshtcher

OwlTail

Eric is Founder and CEO of SoundCommerce, a data platform that equips consumer brands with advanced technology, enabling world-class shopper experiences that drive profitable growth. Eric is a serial entrepreneur with SoundCommerce being his sixth startup! He is a driven growth-stage internet/software executive with a proven record in consumer-direct and retail commerce, SaaS, cloud integration, digital currencies and digital advertising. As founder and CEO, Eric grew and led companies to shareholder liquidity including cash exits to Amazon.com, and Liberty Interactive. Eric’s twenty years’ hands-on contributions range from day-one founder to public offerings and board directorships and more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eric is Founder and CEO of SoundCommerce, a data platform that equips consumer brands with advanced technology, enabling world-class shopper experiences that drive profitable growth. Eric is a serial entrepreneur with SoundCommerce being his sixth startup! He is a driven growth-stage internet/software executive with a proven record in consumer-direct and retail commerce, SaaS, cloud integration, digital currencies and digital advertising. As founder and CEO, Eric grew and led companies to shareholder liquidity including cash exits to <a href="http://Amazon.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a>, and Liberty Interactive. Eric’s twenty years’ hands-on contributions range from day-one founder to public offerings and board directorships and more. See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

S9E12: Eric Best

 Amazon has incredibly low marketing costs for a business of its size because they’ve nailed down a competitive advantage in operations “You can only spend your way to growth for so long before you have to dig in and have a better understanding of retention, repeat engagement, customer lifetime value, like, LTV:CAC equation, and understand at what point and to what degree you’re going to actually turn a profit and be a sustainable brand.” Customer experience is the primary differentiator for brands, and being evidence-based and predictive in your approach helps to underline all the work that you do here Operations are a core driver of customer experience- so what happens after checkout? Honing in on the sources of your variable costs- the two biggest cost drivers for DTC brands beyond product cost are variable marketing &amp; the cost of fulfillment How real time operational state awareness and understanding the value of a customer (and order) can be used to respond to issues Here’s the Allbirds open letter to Jeff Bezos  Learn more about SoundCommerce here 

<ul> <li>Amazon has incredibly low marketing costs for a business of its size because they’ve nailed down a competitive advantage in operations</li> <li>“You can only spend your way to growth for so long before you have to dig in and have a better understanding of retention, repeat engagement, customer lifetime value, like, LTV:CAC equation, and understand at what point and to what degree you’re going to actually turn a profit and be a sustainable brand.”</li> <li>Customer experience is the primary differentiator for brands, and being evidence-based and predictive in your approach helps to underline all the work that you do here</li> <li>Operations are a core driver of customer experience- so what happens after checkout?</li> <li>Honing in on the sources of your variable costs- the two biggest cost drivers for DTC brands beyond product cost are variable marketing &amp; the cost of fulfillment</li> <li>How real time operational state awareness and understanding the value of a customer (and order) can be used to respond to issues</li> <li>Here’s the <a href="https://medium.com/@joeyzwillinger/dear-mr-bezos-e691f6d6d705" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Allbirds open letter to Jeff Bezos</a> </li> <li>Learn more about SoundCommerce <a href="https://soundcommerce.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> </li></ul>

How to Shape Your Business Ops for the 21st Century with Eric Best from SoundCommerce

Eric Best  Eric Best helps business leaders look into the future. As a scenario-thinking consultant, he helps you discover insights that let you formulate an actionable strategy in the face of uncertainty.  Scenario thinking gives you tools to explore the differences between your currently planned future and the one that may actually unfold.  Eric and I talked about:  his background in journalism, strategy consulting, and scenario planning how a couple of inaccuracies in my introduction highlight the power of storytelling how pondering multiple plausible futures reminds us that there are also multiple plausible histories how exploring a number of possible scenarios can prepare your mind for different possible futures the purpose of scenario thinking: to prepare your mind in ways you might not have been prepared for if you hadn't done it his process for conducting a scenario-thinking exercise:  identifying the relevant uncertainties in your milieu deciding who will be in the room, who will make up your organization's "distributed brain" to evaluate the scenarios identifying four equally plausible future worlds and crafting a narrative around them diving into the narrative in each of the four worlds and gleaning insight  how a 2x2 matrix with axes of your two most important uncertainties can create four possible scenarios to explore - e.g. globalization on one axis and tech development on another in his 1995 analysis of trade and economic trends for Morgan Stanley how four scenarios are usually adequate, but also how discovering a fifth scenario is not an uncommon result the "craft and art" of managing and keeping engaged big groups of people in collaborative settings:  preparing by interviewing all of the participants in advance constraining the scope of the current strategic exploration as you begin assembling in four groups to address each of the scenarios asking, "what do you think is a question that would be worth your answering?" - helps discover actual beliefs about what they should be doing discerning the most important uncertainties within each quadrant following this process - it has never failed him  the origins of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell in the 70s the importance of giving the scenario-thinking process time, of giving participants a chance to literally sleep on it, which leads to the insight that 2 days is the optimal amount of time for a scenario session the importance of assembling in person - "I believe that people need to be physically together to really communicate most fully" the importance of being able to literally embody a feeling of truth, to feel an intellectual decision in your gut the top-level picture of what's going on with his approach: influencing people's intuition, doing it in a very open, creative, abstract space which gets very concrete as the intuition gels the importance of listening - because "the most important idea can come from anybody anytime" a lesson from Navy research on human attention span which validates my attempt to keep these podcast episodes around 30 minutes :) the importance of planning and having an intention but also "being open to life as it's actually unfolding" the importance of being equally concerned with the present as you are with your plans for the future, or as his daughter put it, "You know, dad, I don't want to think so much about the future that I miss the present"  Eric's BioEric Best is an author, speaker, strategic scenario consultant, and executive advisor. His most recent clients include a crypto-currency enterprise, a major global reinsurer, Wellesley College, and The Conversation, a global journalism effort spanning eight countries. He has an excellent reputation for designing and facilitating executive strategy retreats, using a highly interactive method that draws on the collective intelligence and intuition of the group.

Eric Best Eric Best helps business leaders look into the future. As a scenario-thinking consultant, he helps you discover insights that let you formulate an actionable strategy in the face of uncertainty. Scenario thinking gives you tools to explore the differences between your currently planned future and the one that may actually unfold. Eric and I talked about: his background in journalism, strategy consulting, and scenario planning how a couple of inaccuracies in my introduction highlight the power of storytelling how pondering multiple plausible futures reminds us that there are also multiple plausible histories how exploring a number of possible scenarios can prepare your mind for different possible futures the purpose of scenario thinking: to prepare your mind in ways you might not have been prepared for if you hadn't done it his process for conducting a scenario-thinking exercise: identifying the relevant uncertainties in your milieu deciding who will be in the room, who will make up your organization's "distributed brain" to evaluate the scenarios identifying four equally plausible future worlds and crafting a narrative around them diving into the narrative in each of the four worlds and gleaning insight how a 2x2 matrix with axes of your two most important uncertainties can create four possible scenarios to explore - e.g. globalization on one axis and tech development on another in his 1995 analysis of trade and economic trends for Morgan Stanley how four scenarios are usually adequate, but also how discovering a fifth scenario is not an uncommon result the "craft and art" of managing and keeping engaged big groups of people in collaborative settings: preparing by interviewing all of the participants in advance constraining the scope of the current strategic exploration as you begin assembling in four groups to address each of the scenarios asking, "what do you think is a question that would be worth your answering?" - helps discover actual beliefs about what they should be doing discerning the most important uncertainties within each quadrant following this process - it has never failed him the origins of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell in the 70s the importance of giving the scenario-thinking process time, of giving participants a chance to literally sleep on it, which leads to the insight that 2 days is the optimal amount of time for a scenario session the importance of assembling in person - "I believe that people need to be physically together to really communicate most fully" the importance of being able to literally embody a feeling of truth, to feel an intellectual decision in your gut the top-level picture of what's going on with his approach: influencing people's intuition, doing it in a very open, creative, abstract space which gets very concrete as the intuition gels the importance of listening - because "the most important idea can come from anybody anytime" a lesson from Navy research on human attention span which validates my attempt to keep these podcast episodes around 30 minutes :) the importance of planning and having an intention but also "being open to life as it's actually unfolding" the importance of being equally concerned with the present as you are with your plans for the future, or as his daughter put it, "You know, dad, I don't want to think so much about the future that I miss the present" Eric's Bio Eric Best is an author, speaker, strategic scenario consultant, and executive advisor. His most recent clients include a crypto-currency enterprise, a major global reinsurer, Wellesley College, and The Conversation, a global journalism effort spanning eight countries. He has an excellent reputation for designing and facilitating executive strategy retreats, using a highly interactive method that draws on the collective intelligence and intuition of the group.

Eric Best: Scenario Thinking – Episode 54