Eliminating the Retail Mindset | Vaughn Peterson

 

About Vaughn Peterson

Vaughn Peterson, the the founder and CEO of The Cambeo Group, a company the focuses on performance management in the retail industry. Prior to founding The Cambeo Group, Vaughn worked at Attensity Corporation and NexTalk Inc, Tenfold & Nortel Networks where he gained extensive experience in sales, HR and executive leadership. Vaughn attended Brigham Young University where he received both a BS in Psychology and a Masters in Organizational Behavior.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Vaughn Peterson, he’s the CEO and the founder at cambio. Welcome to today’s show.

Vaughn
Alan, pleasure to be here.

Alan
So Vaughn for the listeners here, can you give me your background how you got to where you are today?

Vaughn
Sure. I guess I’ve always had a passion for change and improvement. And that’s been a reflection in my career as well as my education. I studied organizational behavior in graduate school and, and loved applying that in large corporations and small, I worked in a fortune 100 company and senior HR roles. And I’ve also done that as an external consultant. Worked with, again, fortune 100 clients as well as the small clients, but it’s all about positive change, helping organizations and people improve. And that’s, that’s really been my passion for decades in my career.

Alan
So when we when you finish through school, though, that you immediately launched into your own company, you started with another?

Vaughn
Yeah, great question. I started out in a in a corporate role and human resources, organization development and human resource roles. And I did that, in, in the US. I also had a role leading large human resource organization for a telecommunications company in Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong. And in that environment, it’s all about just growing effective organizations. We’re growing rapidly. When I started with this company, we were about one and a half to 2,000,000,010 plus years later, we were 20 billion. It was like a rocket ride. So everything we were doing was all about growing effective organizations, developing leaders, helping employees onboard but really achieve their potential. And I’ve carried that theme through my career and that ultimately led to the founding of cambio.

Alan
So when you went when you were in the role of it was this over in Hong Kong that you had your inspiration for cambio or?

Vaughn
You know, it started, but came a little bit following that I got involved in some number of high tech, I’ve been involved in high tech companies my whole career. And I was at a point in my career where I was ready for some change, and started to reflect on do I want to I was I was involved in several high tech startups, do I want to keep making VCs money or maybe I want to found one myself and, and have a more active role in that. And as I reflected on cambio, I felt like we had the opportunity to bring best practices that I had used as an internal consultant and an external consultant. And bring those into a SaaS based software offering that would allow virtually any company to improve, to look at how they’re doing organizationally and how their people are doing. And that was, that was really the genesis for it.

Alan
You know, when you’re when you’re thinking about, Okay, I’m gonna go do my own company. You know, I imagine your your significant other, your wife probably had some new things to say.

Vaughn
She you know, it’s a huge sacrifice. Yeah. And a lot of risk. And, you know, initially it’s, Hey, are you sure? And, but she’s really become passionate about the vision. It’s been a journey. We’ve been at this for over five years now. And in those early couple of years, there were times where she said, hey, you know, you’re probably making less money than when you came out of school. And so you’re right, really making some sacrifices, but it’s been worth it. Now, we’re seeing a lot of success and growth. And it’s exciting to impact companies. It’s it’s exciting to be a part of your, your program, the American dream. We work with clients, a lot of our clients are in retail, and they’re pushing that they’re driving for that American dream. Some of them are large, and some of them are small. Some people will put everything they have into a franchise or a couple of stores. And if they fail, they lose it all. And to be able to help people succeed is very gratifying.

Alan
So Vaughn, I need to take a quick break. And because I’m here today with Vaughn Peterson, he is the CEO and the founder of cambia. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here with Vaughn Peterson, he is the CEO and the founder of Cambio. And fun. In the first segment, we talked about establishing your background, the inspiration to move into doing your own company. But I want to I want to jump back to the vision for your company.

Vaughn
Right, right. You know, at a very high level, our vision is to improve the quality of life. That’s, that sounds so huge, and enormous. But it’s very relevant for us from this standpoint, we spend more than half of our waking hours in organizations and at work. And if we can impact that, if we can help organizations be more effective, be more attentive to their employee base, if they can help people reach their potential if there can be better communications, a better culture, all of a sudden, dramatic things begin to happen. People are coming to work excited. They’re engaged. Employee engagement is one of the biggest challenges facing our country in the world. More than roughly 70%, according to Gallup, of employees in the US workforce are unengaged, or actually active actively fighting against their employer. And so the ability to begin to change that, and to help organizations not just engage their employees, but help them succeed. It’s it’s a, it’s, it’s a powerful opportunity.

Alan
So when when you’re looking at the elevator pitch, yeah, so who Yeah, so first of all, who is your target?

Vaughn
You know, our focus is, is on retail, distributed retail organizations, and we size that the companies, oh, it can be as few as maybe 10 or 20. Stores, it could be hundreds of stores, or, or, and our definition of retail is broad, it could be banks, or hotels or restaurants or general merchandise. So but but our goal is to help them overcome what we often refer to as a retail mindset. We chose retail, because, one, it’s one of the largest segments of the economy, over $5 trillion in annual revenues and retail, one in four jobs in the United States are supported by retail, over 15 million people employed in retail, and yet very little focus on that segment. And so we wanted to engage that segment, help them be more effective. And and our model is to help them identify, hey, which stores are really performing well, how are people doing? Are they are they performing well, who’s struggling? Identifying important tasks. And when you identify all of that information that creates valuable data, that you can then begin to look at ways to improve it. And we have a learning platform that then helps them improve. But the real power of what we do is, is bringing the human capital information and fusing it with their financial information. And then creating predictive analytics. So we can not only just measure store and employee performance, we can tell you which things you’re doing are going to drive revenue and increase profitability. We’ve had. We’ve had a we have one client that increased their profitability by over 200% in one year. Wow. It was it was dramatic. Not everybody is, is that significant in the results they’re getting. But when you put focus on organization and people, wonderful things happen.

Alan
If would you say you have aI built into the Cambio?

Vaughn
I saw, I think I mean, there’s some elements of that when we get into the predictive where we’re able to say, hey, these things will actually drive this amount of revenue, we have a case right now that we’re working with, where they were able to identify we were able to identify and their assessments that we do through our, our productivity suite, that simply giving their shoppers, their their customers, a shopping basket, when they’re caring three or more items would result in $6.22 a year or sorry, $6.22 a day per employee and increase revenue. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but for that company, it’s a million dollars in a year. Wow. So if I hand you a shopping basket, that’s a million dollar opportunity if I do that 95% of the time versus 75% of the time. So we’re taking human capital issues that often people think are just soft, and bringing a hard edge to it in terms of revenue and profitability. But again, ultimately, we’re impacting quality of life. Because it’s not just about the money. It’s also about the expense. As people are having in their in their work in their company.

Alan
I’m visiting here today with Vaughn Peterson, he is the founder and the CEO of cambio, we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here. They were Vaughn Peterson and now we’ve been talking about cambio and the vision that you have for the retail industry. And I want to spend a few minutes on some of the challenges in retail because you know, you have you have the corporate culture, right. But then when you hire the individual employees, how do you get their mindset to convert over from this is just a job to an actual career?

Vaughn
Great question. You know, one of the things we often refer to and cambio is something we call the retail mindset. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about. An employee who says, Hey, this is just retail, who cares? It’s not, it’s not a significant job. And then you have customers, we’re all guilty of going into a retail establishment with very little expectation that we’ll get a quality service experience or get the help we need. And even owners of these companies, executives of the companies will say to us, who do you expect we can hire this is just retail. And and our contention is, retail is is a huge, important part of our economy. It’s an it’s a vital service and providing a great benefit to our society. And it’s not just retail. An employee who can be outstanding in a retail role, that can juggle responsibilities that can merchandise that can give great customer service that can deal with with difficulties and complaints. A customer who’s unhappy, who can sell who can upsell, if you can do those things. Wow. That sounds like a great, great recipe for success in a lot of jobs. And you know what, there’s great people wherever you go. And you can hire great people, even in retail. So for us, we want to eradicate this retail mindset, and really change the way that retail supports and services, their clients and their customers. And the way employees engage in it even the way executives treat the culture and the opportunity that their stores can can provide.

Alan
So walk me through the process of cambia. You Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So So what how does this first?

Vaughn
Yeah. So we start off, we have a software as a service offering. It’s best considered as a Productivity Suite. We begin by looking at things like tasks, task management, hey, there’s things that we need done every day. And we have tools that help them measure that we have the ability to measure the organization’s how are they doing on leadership? How are they doing on processes, how are they doing on customer focus, et cetera, and and see which stores are performing which stores are struggling? You know, it’s one thing to look at the numbers, it’s another thing, you know, the numbers at the end of the month, it’s another thing to see the inputs, what’s really driving change, and that’s what we’re able to bring to them. We also look at employee performance, we also provide tools to then train on deficiencies, so that they can can continually improve. For us, it’s all about a model of continuous improvement. And then we take that data, as I mentioned earlier, merge it with their financial data, and we can begin to predict what activities are going to drive success. And every every person in every organization, every business in the world, wants to know, what are the things I should do to ensure that I get a good result. And we’re helping them to identify that. So that’s, in essence, what we do. And we’re able to do that with predictive, predictive validity, that that really has an impact on these companies.

Alan
You know, and since you’re seeing as companies grow, they don’t necessarily grow in, you know, a perfect curve going up but it’s usually in a stair step. That’s right, um, as an organizational behavior, background and consume, when, when when you’re dealing with organizations and you’re walking through a company that is on track to scale. Will your software help them understand at what point they need to hire certain individuals to build out the organization?

Vaughn
Well, we what we do when you identify strengths and weaknesses, sometimes you identify, hey, we have the right people in place or not, or we don’t have enough. So yes, we can. We did a recent, we have a client recently, and that was one of their challenges in in one store. Not enough people in another store, maybe too many or the wrong leader. And so we can help help these organizations really identify and pinpoint down to a store level and even an employee level changes that they need to make to improve their performance.

Alan
How do you get the change in the organization? In other words, why what what are the problem is, what is the problem is the CEO of itself, the visionary.

Vaughn
That can be hard. Yeah, it can be hard. But sometimes having the data helps that leaders change. And we’ve had many of our leaders say cambios tools are powerful. Better put your flak jacket on, because you’re gonna get some feedback that maybe you didn’t expect. Maybe you’re maybe people were afraid to approach you and say, well, we got some real problems here. So when people have clear visibility, on what’s going on, then they can make change. And then you can repeat that process again and again. And that’s what we’re about really providing a finger on the pulse for executives, people at a regional level people at a store manager and then even the employees to see how am I performing? How’s my store performing? So it engages everybody and really drives drives that positive result that everyone wants?

Alan
So in the in the process of getting the software, you’ll also provide the service of being an advisor?

Vaughn
We do we do we provide. We don’t just throw software over the wall and say good luck. We’re there with them. As a team member, I’ve been a, I founded and ran a management consulting firm for a number of years. That’s something that I’m very comfortable doing. And we have a phenomenal team at cambio. So we’re there side by side with our clients to look at those results and say, what do we need to do to drive change? And and we are there if they want to call us do some on call consulting. It’s not an extra charge, we say, Hey, this is part of what we offer is really being a true partner to help you succeed.

Alan
And what’s the typical timeframe for expectations that an organization should have before change will actually begin to be realized?

Vaughn
Great question. It varies. Some organizations take longer than others we’ve seen some change within a month or two. They they start to see revenues go up because they’ve used some of the training we’ve offered on customer engagement. We’ve we see some that that? You know over a period of months begin to see that change. But invariably, we see material changes within six months to a year.

Alan
Isn’t here today with Bob Peterson he is the CEO and the founder and CEO and in for people that want to contact you how would they go about finding?

Vaughn
cambio.io is our website.

Alan
It’s the easiest way and they will have a link there. So Vaughn thanks for being on today’s show.

Vaughn
Oh, thank you for having me.

 

We hope you enjoyed this interview; “Eliminating the Retail Mindset | Vaughn Peterson”.

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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