Nick Recht: Labels + Enterprise Software, Working w/ Product Managers + Engineers

What Teklynx Does

Adam: So we were just talking before —
we met a couple years back. Our daughters both went to the same school, and we
were at a school function. We got to talking about work, which — why not talk
about work at a school function, right? But you're talking about your business,
and it was super interesting because you guys have a really interesting
perspective on everything from accounting to inventory management to
manufacturing to the fundamentals of a lot of business systems. What exactly
does the business do, and what's your professional background?

Nick: Perfect. I'll start with Teklynx
and kind of peel back, because the majority of my career has been at Teklynx.
Teklynx makes barcoding and labeling software. At the core of everything we do
is designing a label to print. As you're very well aware, many times in a
business that touches more parts than people can imagine — inventory, anything
track-and-trace, all the way through finished goods leaving the door. Very
often, goods don't leave the door without a label, and businesses that do it
right do that completely on demand — it happens as the products are
manufactured.

Nick: That part of the business is
kind of at our core. Everything from — I always describe it as a mom-and-pop
sandwich shop, you know, the sausage stick you see at QuikTrip, all the way to
a medical device. It has a label — different procedures behind it, different
integrated elements of data — and Teklynx plays a role in that in one way or
another. But that's more on the design side of the business.

Nick: The part of the business that I
find really exciting is what we call the enterprise side, and it's our products
that'll link with your business system — whether it's your ERP, your warehouse
management, lab management system, a custom front end — and takes that data,
waits for a print request, processes it, and spits out the label. We have that
as kind of the automation piece. We offer some products that help with more of
a track-and-trace — everything from who designed the label, who printed the
label, where did the data come from, approve it prior to it getting printed,
and then be able to look back at the end to say, hey, if a label was
misprinted, was it just misprinted once, or was it misprinted countless times?

Nick: And then our really cool product
that has grown in popularity the fastest over the past six years is one that
lets companies involve their suppliers or their contract manufacturers or
out-of-network business entities in the label printing process. So it's really
a web page — you key in a work order, part number, SKU, whatever it might be,
to drive the flow within your business — returns your label and prints. So
that's really Teklynx in a nutshell: everything from designing your label to
maybe publishing it to print to your contract manufacturers across the globe.

Catalog vs. Enterprise Solutions

Adam: How much of the Teklynx team is
focusing on pre-packaged, almost catalog-type solutions versus the enterprise
customization?

Nick: That's a fun question. Even
pre-pandemic, there was a transition in businesses — listening to my mom — they
were working smarter, not harder. They started saying, it doesn't make sense to
print out of the same system in which you're designing it. Traditionally,
that's our product that's cataloged — we sell it through a series of resellers,
they do a great job. Label design software is a small part of a big solution —
there's media, printers, the business system.

Adam: When you say label design
software, that could be a device at a workstation that is essentially the
software and the database for the labels — lives on that device, it gets
printed off. Is that connected to the cloud, or a centralized kind of
repository, or —?

Nick: It can be both. Traditionally
it's all local, lived on that station. Then about four years before the
pandemic, we started seeing a major adoption of — I always refer to it as big
data. It's, well, we have one source of the truth, and it's not an Excel sheet
that's duplicated on five workstations where we print labels. People started
driving information for their labels from those single sources of the truth.
And that shifted to: I don't want to make a decision to print a label. I want a
label to be a result of an action within that business system that's holding
the single source of the truth. To: I want to leverage that data, but I want to
enable people outside of my business to print on my behalf, or print a label
for goods I'm going to receive.

Nick: So there's a central checkpoint,
and then the people — whether it's on the shop floor, it could be in a bakery
somewhere — they're executing on a command, not having to make decisions on
part numbers or whatever needs to go on the label. My favorite thing I see is
when a business pivots from having a label room — a room where people go to
make decisions to print labels and then carry them out to different locations —
to printing happening on the line. And naturally, when printing moves from one
room, a finite amount of people, to the line, you have a lot more fingers in
the mix. In that, you need the systems of control.

Software That Solves Problems

Nick: Let me peel back. I'm passionate
about using software to solve business problems. I have spent a lot of years
seeing software be the bane of people's existence. I grew up — my aunt ran a
software company distributing software, and I just had a lot of exposure to the
pain points of people complaining about the products. I was there when they
were rolling out SAP, and it took twice as long and cost twice as much, and
everybody was constantly mad. So I kind of use that to see it in a different
light, to say: I want to be the software provider that's making it easy. It's
one thing to just design and print the label. It's another to be able to go the
route of saying it happened — mistakes are completely eliminated.

Adam: That's such a great perspective.
Software can be so incredibly useful if it's done properly, and incredibly
frustrating if it's not. My experience has been that oftentimes various systems
don't play nice with each other, and you really need a partner or somebody
within the organization that understands enough of the operational side of the
business but also the technology side. Oftentimes those are separate
departments, separate people — all with great intentions, but they maybe
haven't spent any time on the floor, maybe haven't spent any time with the
accounting teams, maybe don't know the vendors that are also managing their
portion of the software. That was really fun chatting with you early on — just
the breadth of perspective. Is that something you guys kind of lead with when
you're working with clients — a full-spectrum understanding of what's going on?

Nick: It's relatively situational. It
probably depends on the size of the company and how sophisticated they are.
Early on in our discussions when you were talking about labeling the shelves to
keep the inventory in the warehouse that you're currently building — we try to
take that approach. Dump all the information on us, and then we lean on our
experience to either say, okay, I think we can help in one way or another, or
say, I've seen other companies do this and it's not something that we
necessarily help with — but we try to take the caregiver approach. I'd love to
sell you something, but I can't always do that.

Growth Within Existing Customers

Nick: What I'd say hits home the most
with that question is how much swell happens within a business. We'll start in
a company where we'll automate printing out of one business system. They get
acquired, or a different branch sees how they're doing it — IT guys talk. They
see, well, it's easy to generically integrate any system of data with the
labeling system via a variety of different technical ways. They can say, we can
eliminate any integration on occasion and have printing be the result of an
action — whether that's even printing an inventory tag or a work-in-process
tag. We see so much of our business from people we've already done business
with. And more often than not, the really fun part about it is it's the same
printers. It's just a different workflow. So they're really squeezing the most
juice out of that fruit. Unlike some ERP providers and whatnot, everything we
sell isn't a bolt-on. Sometimes it's like, well, you want to put a new system
in — it's the same device, go right ahead.

Nick's Background: UWM to Teklynx

Adam: So what's your background? I
know we both went to the same college. I went to UWM. I was a finance and econ
major. You studied management information systems?

Nick: Yes.

Adam: Were you in an engineering role
early on in your career? What is your education and professional background,
and how has it evolved?

Nick: I graduated in May of 2009. I
got smacked in the face with a little bit of reality right at graduation time.

Adam: There was a recession.

Nick: The year before, the world
changed a little bit with the crash of the housing market. At that point in
time, I was going to school for finance. UWM did a really great thing where
they would always publish the business degrees and the percentage of students
from the previous year that were employed. In 2008, people with finance degrees
went down — like sub 40%. But the management information systems degrees stayed
like a solid 85%. So I switched majors right then. Did all of my MIS classes in
one year. It was a real hard year — I always liked the night class where it was
once a week for three hours and then one lab. I had four of those in one year.

Nick: Got through it in May 2009. My
parents came to visit me to talk about graduation, and my dad pulled an
envelope out. I said, I'm getting some money! I felt so excited. It was my cell
phone bill. That was the last thing they were taking care of. So I immediately
went and started looking for a job. And I fell for a great scam — I applied at
a staffing agency to be the data guy, and the staffing agency said that
position has been filled, but we have many places we can place you. It was
great on their part, and in the end it worked out great for me, because they
placed me at Brady Corporation, at a subsidiary of it called Teklynx that made
barcoding and labeling software.

Nick: The job was a production job —
that was 13 years ago now. I was packing boxes in production. Back then we
shipped a lot more physical products.

Adam: That's a great place to start.

Nick: Comes full circle. I was
applying labels using our labeling product to our labeling product. A
life-cycle thing there. I worked in production for about six months. It wasn't
the most lucrative job. I had paid my cell phone bill. I was also side-gigging
as a bartender, so I didn't necessarily care too much.

From Tech Support to Sales Engineering

Nick: From there, I didn't want to
bartend anymore — wasn't a healthy long-term lifestyle. I told my manager at
the time, hey, there's no openings here, but I'm looking to make a shift to
something a little more related to my degree. And she said, well, we have a
spot in tech support if you want it. I was like, how much does it pay? We went
through the talks, ultimately worked in tech support. Then I worked in customer
service and tech support simultaneously.

Nick: About 18 months into my
employment, I got my big break at Teklynx when one of the sales engineers quit.
Everything I was doing before that really fell into the commodity side of the
business. It was when that engineer quit that I applied for that position and
ultimately got the job. It opened up my eyes to — everything isn't a label
design product that you print out of. We do a lot of deeply integrated work to
automate printing to — like, on occasion, thousands of devices.

Nick: That's when I really got
exposure to using the technology to actually solve business problems. I worked
with a Milwaukee company — we implemented an automation solution. They went
from what I always call the “file, open, print, and pray” process — people
making decisions, people can make mistakes, they can fat-finger something — to
when they release their work order, the printer has the labels waiting. And the
lady there, her name was Victoria, she said, “Nick, this fundamentally changes
our business.” And I didn't even grasp the concept. She told me what I did, and
I was like, you're right — we did change it from decisions that people are
making, that have mistakes that are complemented by quality control and
potentially an error here and there, to labeling becoming a result of an action
in a business system.

Nick: That really accelerated my
success, because I was so sold after that. We fixed a problem. Not only was I
getting a paycheck, but I was feeling good about solving a real-deal problem.
Made me passionate. At that point, all the sales people really liked working
with me because they could bring an engineer in who wasn't the typical engineer
who was going to demo the product — it was the engineer who was talking about
other experiences, really getting people jacked up. Our business grew very fast
from that point on. We got more sales people, we got another engineer. I was
kind of the lead engineer. That naturally shifted into a product management
position.

Product Management at Teklynx

Nick: I'd love to say it was my idea,
but I really just took somebody else's idea to make a web printing tool. It was
somebody else's idea within Teklynx, but I was the product manager/engineer. We
have a great development team — many of them out of France. We have a French
location, a Germany location, an Italy location, one in Singapore.

Nick: I did product management for
eight years. I oversaw the strategic direction of our products as well as the
team of engineers that implemented them, while kind of overseeing our commodity
products as well — which we're always introducing innovation. New barcodes,
operating system support for new devices, connecting to cloud databases — the
things that have to be there. But I really gravitated towards the enterprise
side, because the business was growing faster there.

Nick: Then it was about nine months
ago that I volunteered to run the sales organization, because we kind of had
the right people in the right places for product management to have me step
back a little bit. So now I oversee the engineers and the sales side of the
business at Teklynx. I'm all in on Teklynx — that's my whole professional
career.

Adam: It's so cool to hear you talk
about all the building blocks along the way — from spending time on the floor
for a few months initially, getting into solving a technical problem for a
customer, being a product manager, working with engineers, working with a
variety of people. Sometimes maybe it takes a little bit longer for people to
really have a well-rounded skill set in multiple disciplines, but it serves you
so well in the long term, having that perspective. Would you agree?

Nick: Oh, I'd agree wholeheartedly. I
try not to adapt my communication, but people value different things. One of my
favorite things that I've learned is how one solution we sell brings different
benefits based on who you're talking to. If I'm talking to the person actually
on the floor, they don't want to change. So if I can say, well, if we change to
something that was so intuitive you didn't need to learn, they're sold. The IT
guy — well, this change makes it so you don't need to manage locally installed
software on each client station. All right, they're sold. The CEO — this
reduces your entire quality control group that's reviewing labels that may have
been erroneously printed, because the system's making the choice, not a human.

Adam: You essentially have learned
multiple languages. Different positions effectively speak different languages.
We talk a lot about that. We have application engineers, product engineers,
direct sales staff, strategic sales staff, fabricators, assemblers. Everybody
sees different angles on the organization. They're looking to get different
things out of it. You really need those people that can speak multiple
languages.

Nick: Or at least translate.

Adam: Exactly. What's the old story
about the eight different people describing the same elephant to the blind
person?

Nick: Exactly. And that happens every
minute of every single day.

Defining Product Management

Adam: I'm curious on the product
management side. This is something I've thought a lot about — developing a
product management team here at Wisconsin Lighting Lab. Product management
historically, I think, started in software. I see a lot more hardware and even
manufacturing companies start to adopt that type of role. If you were to define
product management, you spent eight years there — what does a product manager
do? What's their chief focus? And what does success look like?

Nick: Have you seen the movie Office
Space? A hundred times. You know where the guy's looking, he's getting fired,
and he's like, no, I bring the papers to the engineers? I feel like that joke —
somebody tells that joke at least once a week here. So that's an oversimplified
way to talk about product management.

Adam: Engineers are not people-people.

Nick: I define it as voice of the
customer. But if you Google “voice of the customer,” you're going to get, like,
hold this session, have this forum, so on and so forth. In a nutshell, the way
I always viewed product management was: what are the customers in need of that
is in our wheelhouse to create and deliver? And how can I ask a developer to
create that in developer talk?

Adam: Separate from engineering —
engineering, or executing on the requirements that the product manager
develops. So project management versus account management versus sales
engineering — there's some overlap.

Nick: Major overlap. My favorite part
of the product management role was getting to work with all the different
groups. I'd get to work with the technical group to understand the problems,
understand the shortcomings in our product. Then I'd get to work with sales to
say, are these problems that are identified things we can sell? From the sales
people, are there reasons we're losing business? Are there things that
customers want that would be nice, that are things we're doing that we could
enhance and put a price tag on? To the engineering and development group —
those are my favorite to speak to, because often an engineer will do exactly
what you tell them. I would always say, if I told them to make a gun, you'd get
one shot — it would shoot straight out the bottom, right at your toe, and
break.

Adam: So it's all about the
requirements.

Nick: Fortunately, at Teklynx, we have
the type of developers who we could say, we want a gun, and they'd say, you
probably want a safety, I know you — and all the complimentary things that
would make it nicer. But the more requirements the better. And then circling
back to the marketing group, so the whole cycle can start over. Marketing
markets it, sales sells it, support supports it, product management gets to be
the Wizard of Oz in between all of that.

Product Management Timelines

Adam: What do the timelines look like?
Is product management being fed information, or are they seeking information?
Is it both? Is it reciprocal — product management is educating the sales team
on what is possible, and the sales team is reporting back to the product
management team on yes or no?

Nick: In the perfect world, it's that
seamless. Most of the time, obviously, the sales people want it yesterday.
Product management wants to digest the information. The business wants to make
sure that the risks we take are going to have the outcome we need. The
engineering team wants exactly the right amount of work to keep everybody fully
busy at every moment of the day without any extra — and they definitely don't
want a requirement to come in last minute from somebody who has the authority
to make that change. And support — they want products that don't make the phone
ring.

Adam: That was a great answer. It's
both — there's such great information at all times that should be fed somewhere
and digested and then distributed to the folks that can solve the problem. It
sounds like product management is a great hub for that — speak or translate for
the engineering team, the technical folks, interact with the customers and the
sales team to know what the problems are that need to be solved. I do see in
the manufacturing space, especially companies that are developing products —
they're not just making parts for somebody else's products — more and more
product management-type roles being adopted.

Nick: It helped accelerate our
business. We still talk about it maybe twice a year — having a forum or a user
group. And every year it comes back to the same thing: well, we're not an ERP
system. Even our enterprise label management system, Teklynx Central, with the
web-based printing that combines all the other stuff — now that it's deployed
across hundreds of very large companies, everybody's got their own special,
unique use case for how they use it. So our user group is less of our customers
talking to our customers, like you'd see in a SAP or an Oracle-type forum. It's
more of the engineers talking to the customers, maybe bringing in the customer
to discuss with all the engineers to facilitate future enhancements or new
product ideas, with product management.

Back Out and About

Adam: We try and do something similar
— customer visits. I'm actually going to Ohio next week with one of our account
managers and our applications director. Just get the right people in the room.
If it's a technical problem on the control side, bring one of our controls
engineers. If it's for retrofitting a large lighting tower, bring a mechanical
engineer. So there's not as much translation needed.

Nick: How nice is it to be back out
and about?

Adam: Oh, man. Very, very nice. This
area stayed relatively open because there's just so much manufacturing. There
wasn't a whole lot of shutdown that could happen. But it's really nice to see
certain markets being open for business again. People — it's nice to interact
and solve problems in person. I don't think every business problem can be
solved via Zoom.

Nick: We can't do WiLL Casts via Zoom.

Adam: No, we haven't yet. I was
desperate for a while, man. But it's nice to be back in the WiLL Cast game.

Sales Philosophy

Adam: So you're in a sales leadership
role now. I'm curious to get your thoughts on your sales philosophy and
approach. If you talk to 10 different people in sales, there's 10 different
ways they approach supporting their customers. One of the things I really appreciated
about you was you were very honest about some of the things you could help with
and some of the things you couldn't. When you're managing your team and your
approach, what would you say your philosophy is when it comes to sales
management?

Nick: I have to adapt depending on
which part of the organization we're talking about. When we talk about the
commodity products, the label design products that we sell quite a bit through
our channel of valued resellers, I put on the mindset of managing a channel —
the channel is representing us. How do I take care of them? Educating the
channel so they can resell. We have a strategic partnership channel as well,
where there are sales organizations that represent our brand and products, as
well as other brands and products. So that sales team — they do work on project
business, where they're helping support that channel's customer base, but a lot
of it is awareness of our products, our brands, and education. Awareness, tools
— channel loves tools. A product selector guide, a demo that starts with a
label for the auto industry, halfway done. And they also love coffee and donuts
and a friendly face at their location.

Nick: Now the enterprise side is where
I can say we have a philosophy that I find more fun. And it's all around
solving a problem. Nobody's going to spend a nickel if we're not solving a
problem. We try very hard to not start by throwing out all the product names
and telling you exactly what we do. We try on the enterprise side to really
talk about business problems. Majority of the time, businesses are doing
something — it's rare that we talk to a company that's not labeling anything.
Actually, we have a really cool case study with a company called The Real Good
Life that we took from a Sharpie marker to actually printing labels — we did a
video case study. That was fascinating, because it's rare that I see somebody
with the markers.

Nick: A majority of the time, somebody
has a process or a procedure in play, and we really just focus on: what are the
problems? Fully understanding them, digesting them, and then switching to: what
products do we offer that can solve that problem, and ultimately associating a
value to it? Is the spend on the product ROI? Is it going to be justified based
on the money it saves?

Holographic Instructions & Label Parallels

Adam: I was at a trade show yesterday
in Milwaukee — kind of on topic — it was wire processing related, but there
were some assembly vendors there. There was this one vendor that had this
really cool setup where they actually projected a hologram onto the assembly
bench. It sounds — I'm sure a lot of your labels are used for — there's
probably some instructions involved as well. But more or less, they were
projecting instructions onto the workbench for the staff.

Nick: I was hoping it was like a
hologram of Michael Jackson.

Adam: There actually was another
vendor doing something like that, too. A lot of it comes down to the
centralized database, approving work instructions, improving labels, and then
projecting or distributing it to the people that are using it. But anyways, it
was a kind of interesting parallel — wasn't a label specifically, but it was
kind of a holographic label.

Nick: Well, in labels — the core of
our business is labels. But as soon as you put a design application in front of
somebody and they say, well, I could print my instructions for use out of this
as well, or I could have it print a complimentary work order, pick list, pack
list — and the data is being facilitated from the same spot — we've often seen
people exploit the features of our product to complement it with, once they see
the usefulness of the labeling side, to be able to apply that to other
functions.

Nick: Circling back to the product
management side — we have strategically put things into the product to manage
pick lists that may be multiple pages, and it's still four labels, but we can
handle a document based on that. And it complements it — it's maximizing the
ROI on your investment in the product, because you can do more with it. On the
sales philosophy: one of the things we really hit home on when we're talking
about an automated solution — printing out of your ERP system or your warehouse
management system — is, you've spent a considerable amount of money on that
system and you're trying to maximize the ROI. Bolting labeling onto the back of
that is a very great way to not only justify an ROI on our product but also
maximize the ROI on your existing business system.

Adam: And based on our initial
conversation, that's exactly what you guys do here. Once you witnessed the
system and saw the technology capabilities that we had in-house, you said, I
think if you guys do this and that, you can spin this thing up in a few weeks.
And that's exactly what we did.

Nick: I saw the labels today. Awesome.

Where to Find Teklynx

Adam: So if people want to find you,
if they want to contact you — we've got a lot of good manufacturing people in
our network — where can they get in touch?

Nick: They can always go to
www.Teklynx.com — that's T-E-K-L-Y-N-X. And we can share my email with the
video. I'm happy to — I actually prefer to communicate with people directly. If
it's just a question or a networking thing, I can funnel you to the right people.
But I'm always available, always happy to help. If anybody wants to invite me
and a member of my sales team to take a look at their manufacturing process —
as you know, even if I can't help, I love seeing it.

Adam: At some point you were super
helpful. It was confirming maybe some of our suspicions of certain directions
we could go, but also just overall, it was great to sync up and learn some
stuff. You were very open and very helpful, so we appreciated that.

Nick: Right on. And you guys got a
brewery, so there's that.

Adam: There's always a reason to come
here. The brewery might be one of them. Well, man, thank you very much. That
was awesome. Appreciated.