#218 - Forecasting 101 with Graza & Drivepoint

23:15Graza did XYZ last year. How many millions of bottles are we going to produce next year? And we're trying to give as much guidance as we can. And then, you know, I would say on a quarterly basis, we have like a financial reforecast that we're using for supporting marketing budgets and hiring plans. And, you know, we'll update kind of our operating model on a quarterly basis using whatever the latest rolling forecast is as the like base input. So pretty interesting to think about also just from your skew mix and how that could impact your forecasting because you know graza obviously incredibly well known for the squeeze bottles and then super interestingly you guys came out with the huge cans right that are refill canisters for the squeeze bottle which i think is a really beautiful thing and is brilliant and it's like you've never seen a can like that on a shelf before it like looks like a mini oil drum almost and people pick it up and And, you know, I think that that's awesome because the, I mean, just obviously one of the brilliant things about Graza was just the insight that people really like squeeze bottles.

24:22I used to work at Just Egg and all the chefs all had their squeeze bottles of olive oil. This is like pre-Graza, I think. And they would just put the olive oil in them. I'm like, wow, that's really smart. And I bought one of those squeeze bottles at home so I could feel like a cool chef. And then it turns out everybody actually likes that. So that was a cool thing for you guys. But then you came out with the refillable drums that, you know, great, make them more kind of sustainable and reusable for everybody. So when you have those refillable canisters, how does that actually impact your forecast then for all the SKUs?

24:52Like when you were launching those, did you have to think about, oh, well, how much actually of the velocity is going to move over to the refillable ones versus the squeeze bottles? That was a very challenging time. We ultimately had to go with our gut assumptions of, you know, we think this is, is it going to be 100 % incremental? It's, you know, it's technically the same product. It's the same oil. It's just in a different form factor. It's also a refill solution cared really towards a repeat customer. No one, I would think, wanting to buy their olive oil and just drink it straight from the can.

25:27So we expected some, you know, cannibalization or a mixed shift from the existing customer base. And, you know, we really, you know, just, you know, put an estimate of, okay, we think it's going to do, you know, 50 % of the squeeze bottle velocities. And, you know, as soon as we got actual data, then we would, you know, update our forecasts accordingly with, okay, we thought it was going to be 50%. It's actually 40%. And we're going to use this until, you know, we learn more. And yeah, it was a very challenging time to predict. Anytime you're launching something new, you have no data to work with.

25:59You are, you know, hopefully smarter learning from your existing products in market. But it's a guessing game anytime you don't have historical data to go off of. Yeah, that's a tough one because it's not as simple as when somebody launches a bigger pack size or something, right? Like, okay, people love this. Now let's have the value pack or the bonus size or whatever. I feel like there's a little bit more data out there for that kind of stuff versus we're launching something. It's bigger. It's also like it's going to cannibalize probably some of the business, which is great. That's why we're doing it.

26:28But I think that's a very interesting problem to tackle. So it sounds like you guys definitely did the art meets, science meets good process. So Austin, as you're hearing about how Graza goes about this, does that sound pretty typical in terms of the kind of forecasts that are out there? And just from an overall business perspective, like, you know, okay, you might have a plan at the beginning of the year. Like, hey, here's how much we're going to do. It corresponds to a top line revenue number. It also has our volume number that we're expecting for the whole year and even all the way down to profitability probably, right?

27:01But then you're going through and then you're going to have your production forecast, which hopefully is that same thing and even bigger. But, you know, that doesn't always happen with every business. And what are all the different kinds of forecasts and plans and things that we have as businesses? Yeah, it's a great question. I think a couple of things struck me as David was talking in the first is, and as you were asking questions, Daniel, like there are layers to the forecast, right? There's a top layer in what David was describing and sort of forecasting velocity at shelf, right? Of saying, okay, I think at Whole Foods, we're going to sell 3.4 units of sizzle, you know, per store per week and getting to that level.

27:39then you have to take that and then back it into your what your shipments forecast is going to be which david i know is something that we worked on together in the very early days of getting drive point set up was okay how does that velocity forecast then turn into a shipments forecast what actually is leaving your warehouse because in order for those units to be sold they have to get there you know several weeks before that velocity is going to take place and so you're backing that timeline out and then you have to actually back out the production timeline to your point daniel of like hey there's actually you have to back that timeline up even further to get to production And then interestingly, when you bring the finance angle of it, there's actually a fourth layer, which is the cash and the physical products don't move at the same time.

28:16So you actually need to, you know, once you decide how much you're going to produce, well, there's typically some sort of a down payment that you have to produce with your supplier, some that's available FOB, some that's available upon delivery in terms of how much you have to output the cash piece of it. And so there's a lot of complexity in the layers of this that have to get put together. And I think in the early days, it's definitely useful to shortcut some of that. Like we see a lot of people saying, I'm not even going to worry about the velocity forecast. I'm just going to start with forecasting shipments because that's what my sales team knows.

28:44That's what the orders that are coming from the retailers are. And I'm not even going to worry about velocity. There are puts and takes on that is, you know, you can really get blindsided if you don't go all the way to forecasting at the velocity level in pretty short order, where like you're expecting orders on some predictable cadence. And then all of a sudden the floor falls out and you're left asking your rep like, hey, that happened. They're like, well, it's not moving. Like there's no push at shelf. Right. And so if you're behind that that curve and you're not starting from the end consumer perspective, there's risk.

29:13So that's the first thing that sort of comes to mind are the just the layers of this stuff. And there really are three or four different levels of forecasting that have to get done to create a good process. Okay. So, yeah, I really like that point you made about the timing of things as well. Because, yeah, it's great. You do velocity-level forecasts. You're launching it. Whole Foods, you know, in October, whatever. The reality is the order that they're going to place via distributor is going to come in three months before that potentially. Or maybe it's going to have to leave the warehouse two months.

29:43Like they need to get it. They need to actually set it up into their DCs, into the stores. And yeah, so a lot of big, big timing impact there. And so, you know, let's say for then an early stage range, you're talking about these different layers. In an ideal world, at least there's a nice template for people to be doing this kind of forecasting. And I know for anyone listening, we are going to drop a very cool template that the DrivePoint team made available. So it basically, you can like, you can see this already in your head from all of the different inputs. like, oh, buy retailer, buy SKU, calculations about velocity over time because they also can change if you're launching.

30:21Hopefully you're going to launch at one velocity and it's going to grow and just overlaying all these things and just to get it to where it can flow up into one top level forecast. Also, obviously that needs to translate into dollars so you understand the cash impact, all of these things. So at least at my company, we were doing this in Excel. It's a nice Excel, but it took a lot of time to do it. So, you know, you do what you need to do, right? because that's just how it works in the early stages. But we had that. And then when our CFO needed to then report numbers to the board, it's an exercise, right?

30:51Like, okay, he needs to copy paste the new model that I'm giving, run it back through, hits the cogs, hits also the pricing by distributor, understand also the discounts that we're giving to different retailers, the promos that we're running to like tie all that back in. So this is an ad for DrivePoint, Austin, that I'm setting up basically for you. But for real, that is a lot of what DrivePoint and automated tools like that can offer, right? Is that like that all now is actually going to at least be tied together. You do need to go in and actually input all the assumptions and get all that stuff right.

31:24But if you have a tool like DrivePoint, that's going to make it all flow together. I think that's right. And I appreciate the plug. I would say two things. One, we love Excel. Most of DrivePoint is built on Excel. The model that David uses every day inside of DrivePoint is built on Excel. David and many others like David are Excel super users and we don't want to strip that power away, especially because in this world too, as you get further into demand planning, like there still is a very large art component. And so I think the idea, like people often simplicity will sort of look at this and be like, oh, this is a math problem.

31:56Like AI should be really good at this and we should just be able to automate this whole thing. And my goal would be like, well, I want to automate the first draft, right? But give the human the opportunity to use their unique insight and ability to edit. So we love Excel. DrivePoint works, is built literally basically on top of Excel. So that's one. But I think what we've learned is that as you get into that level of complexity, and you were just talking about it of like, okay, let's say you, you know, Graz has done a great job, has still has a handful of SKUs. And so relative to some other brands, like in some ways, a relatively simple forecast, think about a brand that has 20 or 30 SKUs and has 10 or 15 accounts, right?

32:30And then has those four or five different layers for each of those SKU times account mix, like the thing just gets complicated and hard to manage if you're managing every single input manually, let alone you sort of heard David talk about how important it is to use the historical data to inform future trends, right? So it's not just managing 150 or 1000 inputs even, right? It's about actualizing those in a seamless way. And so when David rolls forward, his model is able to get up to date forecast data directly into that model with a couple of clicks, instead of having to spend three or four hours or hire a junior person to manually update all of that.

33:05And I think that's where, as you think about continuous forecasting, right, that having a tool like DrivePoint gets really useful because having that data at your fingertips and using historical data to influence future projections becomes kind of mission critical in terms of getting this stuff right. We'll be right back. You know it is so hard to raise money these days or really even know what VCs actually invest in early stage brands. But good news, we are bringing all those early stage investors together. I am so pleased to announce Startup CPG's founders and funders, powered by our friends at DOS.

33:41It's happening December 11th in New York City, and it will be totally unforgettable. We'll have the top 50 early stage VCs, meaning the ones really writing checks for pre-seed and seed stage brands, and we're pulling them together with the top 100 brands of the year. There are going to be amazing panels, one-on-one matchmaking, and tons of networking opportunities. If you know anything about us, you know what a ridiculous opportunity this is gonna be. So I really recommend getting your application in early. The website to submit is in the show notes. It's fandf.startupcpg.com. Good luck.

34:18Okay, so we've talked a lot about retail inputs, but also there's the whole e-com side of it for a lot of brands. Maybe some that have heavier products are more interested in it as a way to get trial and let people order around the country, whereas other brands might even be e-com first or e-com only in some instances. And I know it's just not so simple as, well, how much are people ordering? That's our forecast. In a lot of ways, you have a lot of the same complexity or maybe even more than in the retail channel, right? Because you have different cohorts of customers coming in that are buying at different rates and you're going to make different investments at different times into the e-com channel.

34:56So Austin, how do you see brands typically accounting for all of that? Any tips for them that might be different from the retail bottoms up? Yeah, great question. I'm actually going to, I'll go separate even further a little bit to say you sort of have direct-to-consumer e-com and then you have marketplace e-com and they are uniquely in their own right. So starting for a direct-to-consumer, the big shift is that really instead of thinking about units sold, which is kind of the core measure when you're thinking about wholesale, you start thinking about customers acquired, right? and those customers acquired really drive your sales math or your acquisition math.

35:30You're spending$50 or I hope it's$50 for the brands out there. It might be closer to$100 for a lot of brands today to acquire that customer. They're coming to your website, but you don't have as much control over what they're purchasing at the point of sale. And you don't know exactly how frequently that customer is going to come back. We do have more data than we have in wholesale. And so what we're typically encouraging brands to do and how all the drive point models work is to go, okay, you have a customer. That customer is going to place an order. What are the likely components of that order from a value perspective?

35:59And then getting to a units-based forecast that way. And then also, you mentioned cohorts. Like, we go really deep into cohorts, and now we're actually making a prediction for once that customer is acquired, when and how frequently are they going to come back and make a subsequent purchase? So there's another layer of repeatability that's easier to predict with the right amount of data on the direct-to-consumer channel. The marketplace channel is a little bit different, functions sort of as a hybrid of these two things. at Marketplace and talking about TikTok shop, Amazon, Fair, things like that, where you're trying to really understand, okay, I'm going to acquire a certain order.

36:32Inside that order, there may be one or more products. There's an order mix, and that's how we translate down to the SKU level. And then bundle that all up, put it together with your wholesale forecast, try and figure all that stuff out, and, you know, it's easy. Bob's your uncle. Yeah, right. And at least you don't have the... With Amazon, you will have some pre-loading kind of timing differences, but with a lot of the direct-to-consumer stuff, at least you don't have to worry so much about, oh, the distributor has to pick it up three months ahead or whatever. So David, how does that all sync with you guys for Graza?

36:59Obviously, you guys have a healthy e-com business. Do you find it easier, harder to forecast? What role does it play in your overall business forecast? E-com is definitely easier to forecast because it seems to be a little bit more predictable. There is definitely seasonality with Q4 spikes. And if you run promotions, that can definitely cause a lot of sales spikes. or if you get some viral post about your product online, you might get a daily spike. But in general, if you're spending a consistent amount marketing dollars, you're gonna see very consistent daily sales orders. Now, the mix of what people are buying is often changing, but there's a pretty predictable kind of daily average in terms of orders and then the average order value of those orders.

37:50So that's kind of how we forecast as well is we're not trying to predict exactly where everyone's going to buy. We're just trying to say, you know, people are going to order, you know, 100 people are going to order today and they're going to order, you know,$50 worth of olive oil today. And they can buy sizzle, they can buy drizzle, you know, any certain combination. There's a plethora of offerings on our site, but that's typically how we forecast. And it's, you know, definitely we break down the individual components. There's subscription, there's non-subscription, there's first-time customers, there's repeat purchases.

38:25But in general, it is relatively predictable. Marketing spend is the biggest, I guess, driver of sales. And obviously, you can boost sales by spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads. But absence of that, it's a little bit easier, in my opinion, to predict. Every time you talk about the complexity, I'm like, oh, gosh, that sounds hard. Oh, wait. And I remember there's a template, though, that everyone can use, even if you're not at the point where you're ready to bring on something like DrivePoint. They are very nice and have built the best templates out there that I've seen for it. And you can access that in the show notes.

38:58So in case you were just starting to sweat with perspiration thinking of all of these different layers. Yes, it's a template. You can use it. It will be OK. So, David, for your guys' process, do you have specific goals, KPIs, any theory around how much safety stock to have around? Yeah, I mean, the answer is it depends. Definitely our goals are first and foremost to hit our revenue projections and our forecasts, make our investors happy, all of that. In terms of forecasting, we're measuring forecast accuracy. There's actually kind of two layers of forecast accuracy that we look through. It's what is selling through the register.

39:36That's what we hold the sales teams accountable. That's the way they think. But then there's forecast accuracy in terms of what orders were placed, which ultimately ties into our revenue for the month. But those do not necessarily equal each other in the short term. But we'll look at kind of forecast accuracy. Really, we're trying to, you know, in a perfect world, you're getting every customer, their SKU level, you know, number of units sold 100 % accurate. That's not reality and things are going to over and underperform. we're looking to you know ideally i would say 10 percent you know 90 accuracy on the forecast is good but really what matters is is the aggregate skew level like if you know k he's up 50 but publics is down 50 and that nets out and like actually we sold you know the exact number of sizzle units we projected for the month that's good you know obviously you can get the sum of the parts 100 % accurate as well.

40:35But that's the level of detail that we're looking at. In terms of safety stock, it depends really on your flexibility of your supply chain and what your goals are. You mentioned the cost of overstock and understock. If you have unlimited cash in the bank and you have a long shelf life product and you're okay holding 12 weeks of supply, that might be the right strategy for you. That way, if retailer XYZ calls you up and says, I want to place a PO tomorrow, you can say yes confidently. But typically, I would say it's like six weeks of supply is what we try to hold. But it's going to vary by SKU.

41:13And a new SKU that we're launching, you know, we just launched last the summer, you know, we're holding excess weeks of supply just because, you know, if one new account takes that SKU in, six weeks of supply is going to be gone overnight. So and we can't react as quickly on the production side of things. So long answer is it depends, but as usual, yes. Okay, so David, another question for you. I'm wondering if you feel like you see drama around the forecasting process. We're going to launch a new show here called Real Forecasters of CPG beyond Bravo shortly. but because i i have seen this where like past companies i'm sure you guys are not like this but where there was just you know a heated verbal argument between let's say the people like the sales team who has this forecast that they have to hit they're paid off this they're bonused off this which if you know sales people their bonuses are very important to them that's a lot of why they do what they do and they're good at it and they want to earn those bonuses and if the inventory he's not there, they might not earn that bonus and they'll get blamed for it.

42:18Right. And so I've just seen these shouting matches between sales and ops and finance. And people are like, you're a lunatic if you think you're going to hit that. No, there's no way they're going to order that soon. Right. And the salespeople like, you don't know what you're talking about. You weren't on the call with them. You don't know what they said. So hopefully you guys don't have the shouting matches. But do you see that tension play out in the process that you have? David, I think one one interesting thing to add there is like who who because we get this question all the time from customers of like who has the final stamp right that because there is a healthy tension always between sales and ops and these things but how does it how does it work for you guys to get to that number that actually goes into the po yeah that's where the the snop process that you guys mentioned comes into play you know we definitely have our monthly forecasts you know ops has a perspective, finance has a perspective, sales rep will have their perspective.

43:10Ultimately, you come together with one forecast that you can agree on. And that's what's built into the production plan. And you can always check the math and, you know, month time, see who predicted the future the best. But, you know, it's a healthy tension to challenge the forecast assumptions. You know, we launch a new product and it's like, OK, it's going to start at this velocity and then is going to grow to XYZ. And, you know, the ops team will, and finance will be looking at historicals and say, you know, did we see this elsewhere? Like, does that make sense? To just gut check, you know, what the sales team is predicting.

43:46But yeah, there definitely can be some drama when POs don't get fulfilled. Yeah, right. Okay, so we didn't get too much gossip from you there. I'm not sure we're ready. I don't know if we have our main characters for the show yet, But that definitely, I mean, the only thing I would add to just jump into is like where it goes wrong, I think, especially for early stage brands is when there is no tension. Right. And so the drama might be the far end of the spectrum of what you're trying to avoid. But no tension is also not a healthy place. Like we see a lot of early stage brands, especially if they're working primarily with distributors or primarily outsourced sales teams where they just sort of like take the sales teams forecast as gospel.

44:26And I think that's an incredibly dangerous place to be in on both the upside and the downside, if there's not some sort of attention in terms of looking at historicals or having a finance perspective to push back and make sure that all the boxes are being checked. So drama, not good. No tension, also not good. We want to be somewhere in that healthy tension zone in the middle, ideally. I like that. And yeah, sometimes you might have an employee, it's like, why are they being so difficult? Like, no, that person is passionate and they want to do a good job and they take pride in their work and they care about this company and these products.

45:03And that's why they're arguing. I don't know, there maybe are some people who are just difficult, but often you're like, you want to embrace that. Be like, first of all, thank you. Thank you for caring so much about this. You're in this debate, right? Well, on the other side of the sales guy who wants to hit his bonus is the ops person who is worried about their position if they end up with half their cash tied up in stock that hasn't moved. So both people are highly incentivized and a lot of times their comp depends on it. And I think if you structure as an executive, and this is more for those later stage companies, but structuring the comp targets for each of those sides of the table correctly can be a really important tool in the toolkit in terms of creating the right level of tension in that S &OP process.

45:45Yes, I think that's true. I think it's hard to do it at the early stage to really get all that stuff right because it's just such a figure in the air exercise even about the volume. But, you know, I really like to believe having spent a lot of time in this industry, it's also it's not just about monetary compensation to get things right. I know so many people, ops people, sales people who just really take a lot of pride in what they do and they have opinions and they think things through very critically. And they just like to get that opinion across and because they care. Right. And so I think it's great for people to just recognize that when it's coming and just really try to understand their thought process and where it's coming from.

46:25Because I'll tell you, I've seen somebody like that ushered out of a company, and they were 100 % correct, it turned out. It had nothing to do with money. They were just like, this is ludicrous. There is no way that's going to happen. I cannot in good conscience actually support producing that. And it was bad. They were showing the door, and they were right. all the way out the door. It's just like, no, that's not the person. No, you don't like, just because they're not in the cult, like you don't get rid of that person. For sure. So Austin, I'm wondering, you work with a lot of companies. Sounds like Graza has a really great process that they're following.

47:01It's consistent. People are bought into it. It sounds like for other companies that you work with outside of Graza, are there any that you look at and you're like, wow, those people really have the whole financial and ops process really dialed in? And if so, what do you think it is about them that really makes that one of their core strengths? Yeah, it's a great question. There are definitely a couple others. I would go to, if you guys don't dose daily, they manufacture sort of a wellness shot across DTC. And they do a ton of their own manufacturing and have gotten really, really tight on this process.

47:35And we help them from point of acquisition all the way through. They buy their own raw materials and ingredients and get all that stuff together. And so what's made them really good, I think, is that super tight linkage between the point of sale all the way through to, you know, to the point of production. Like where this goes wrong is there's gaps in that process somewhere. Or like the finance and marketing team is two weeks ahead of a plan and the supply planners haven't heard about it yet. Right. And so you create these sort of natural gaps and it's usually human error or just timing or something that makes that happen.

48:07And so I call out Dose is one. And another one that's sort of next level on this stuff is Oats Overnight. Again, another completely vertically integrated brand. They've got even more complexity in terms of almost all of their packs are, you know, eight or 16 packs with multiple different flavors that customers have complete control over in terms of what that product mix looks like. They're also constantly shipping and iterating on new flavors. So that new product launch piece is constantly there for them. They have two manufacturing facilities now that they're trying to merge across. And so they've done an exceptional job.

48:39And I think, again, a great marriage of sort of a three-headed monster at Oates of a CEO who's really super focused on marketing, a chief strategy officer and chief commercial officer, Nina McKinney, who's phenomenal at managing the sort of both sides of it. And then an incredible COO who has incredible chops on the operating side and is pushing back in that healthy tension and that sort of holy trinity of sales ops and finance, basically working together to get that stuff done. So those are a couple, I would say, sort of like superstars. Now they're all well along the path, right? It took them a while to get there and they've got large teams to make that happen.

49:14But those are, if you want case studies of other than Graza, of it going super right, those are a couple I'd point to. I love it. Okay. So David, maybe last question for you is, let's say you are starting David's new SOSCO and you're trying to find the perfect person to run your forecasting process. What are the qualities that you really want in that person? I think you want someone who's a self-starter, willing to just roll up their sleeves and figure it out when there's no process, procedure. You want someone with ideally some experience in the industry, having done it before, that gives you confidence in them.

49:57But I think the most important factor is their attitude of how they approach the day-to-day. there's going to be uncertainty, things are going to go wrong, you know, you're going to have to figure stuff out as you go. And, you know, just want someone who's, you know, hardworking, willing to roll up their sleeves and just figure it out and know they make mistakes, but own them and learn from them and, you know, continue to iterate on the process. And you don't have to make it perfect. It's, you know, definitely the 80-20 rule to start. You know, if you want to keep the product on shelf, you want to, you know, have cash in the bank, you know, those are the the two most important things you want someone who who understands those well there ain't no party like a forecast party because a forecast party doesn't stop it really doesn't right it's just over and over and that's why you need someone like that who is just tenacious and ready to take some hits and keep on going right because the uh the good and bad news is you're going to get to do it over and over again all the time and you really need to be in the details and paying attention and talking to people and taking in inputs and this yeah again the stakes are high for forecasting.

51:02It may feel like a painful process for some people who don't live in spreadsheets or haven't grown up in them the way some of us have, myself included, or just, you know, really taking time out of, I would say, especially if, you know, you, the founder or your sales team, they want to be out there selling, right? They're out there trying to sell the accounts. You're like, hey, okay, everyone, like come inside for a while. Let's all sit down and just really spend time doing these numbers. But they are used to that and they expect it. And, you know you really can task salespeople with these kind of requirements like no i need i need you to sit in and put the account by account by skew forecast in place they do understand the importance of that and they also want to fight to make sure that they're going to have the inventory there so i think as long as the process is explained to them well and you're not making it overly onerous on them right give them a nice template don't make them actually become Excel wizards.

51:56I will say I probably have never met a salesperson who is better at Excel than I am. I'm not the best at Excel ever, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty good. Never met a salesperson who just is a super Excel wizard. Like usually they don't, I don't know. I don't want to, I love sales guys. I am a sales guy, but you know, they're typically, it's not so easy for them to whip their way around and Excel and pivot this and table that. They are really, really good at sales. And that's why David does what he does. Salespeople do what they do, right? So I really agree with just like, yes, ask them to do it, but try to make it easy for them to give you the inputs that are in their email chain with the buyer or whatever.

52:40Is that, David, what do you think is half fair? Or am I just ripping too hard on salespeople? The most important part is getting buy-in from the sales team. They know the retailers inside and out. If you are not leveraging the information in their brains into your production plans and forecasting, you're not going to be as accurate as you could. And so you want to pick it as easy and painless as possible so that they enjoy doing it, that they get by and they understand the importance. And yes, that's that is definitely a key aspect of the forecasting process. Make forecasting fun. That's what we're here to do.

53:16So, okay, Austin, as we're wrapping up here, any last thoughts on forecasting? And can you also just hit us one more time with just overall, if people are interested in DrivePoint, what should they do? How should they hit you up? What are the steps here? Yeah, the thought that I leave you with is sort of like, you know, one thing that I say a lot is that the importance of doing this stuff, you know, most founders will have had some scar tissue on a bad forecast or a missed forecast relatively early in their career. And I think CPG is unique again And in that instinctive, it's sort of this constant loop of forecasting, replenishment, sales, forecasting.

53:51And if you get that cycle wrong once, you probably are a little bit wounded. If you get that cycle wrong twice, you can find yourself in real problems. And if you get that cycle wrong three times, you're out of business. Right. And so I think that's sort of the key thing. Most people will learn the hard way at some point, but there is really no substitute for getting this better. And I've seen good companies that are not good at forecasting. I've never seen a great company that is not also really good or great at forecasting, right? These businesses are just too cash intensive relative to other types of businesses to not invest cycles in getting that right.

54:29Obviously, I'm talking my book here. Like, that's our reason for being. We love talking about this stuff. It's all we do all day long. The thing that makes us unique as opposed to any of the other forecasting tools out there is that we're super focused on CPG and retail. We don't do any other types of businesses. This is all we do all day long. And so all of our templates are pre-configured to sort of think about this stuff. All the data source connections are pre-configured so you can get that scan of velocity data that we were talking about from all your end retailers directly into the platform and minimize as much work as possible.

54:58So if people are interested, we'll make the templates available. I think that's a great starting point to sort of get your hands dirty with something. Even if you're not ready to purchase something like DrivePoint, start using the templates. We've already done a lot of thinking for you. And then, you know, when you're ready, we're here. You can book a demo on our website. You can hit me up directly on LinkedIn. You can send me an email. We'll put an email in there. But I'm always willing to talk about this stuff, even if it's not the right time to buy. I love talking to early stage founders and sort of helping them get on the right path with this stuff so that we don't have to make those mistakes in the early days.

55:27I love it. And the integrations are important. Integrating with your inventory management, with your retailer data. just try to take away a lot of the, let's say, non-value add steps of just getting all the stuff in there and leave you with a little bit more time to make decisions, analyze things, right? Chase down the hard problems. Yeah. We just did our deep integration with David to SIN7 on their side as well. So all the sales data, all the retailer data, the inventory and IMS data is all stuff that you can get inside a drive point. So it's been a fun couple of years of building this though.

55:58All right. So David, as we wrap up for you, any good way for people to follow along with you, connect with you on LinkedIn or just support Graza in general? Yeah, definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. And yeah, to support Graza, the best way is to buy our product. It's a great product. We got good quality olive oil, you know, available just about every grocery store or you can buy buy online but we got a lot of exciting stuff ahead for 2026 as well i love it and then maybe just one final tip from me that i think we didn't really talk a lot about is if you do find yourself in a situation which you will at some point where you did over forecast and you're sitting on some inventory that you need to figure out what to do with don't let it sit there because you eventually may have to actually even pay to destroy it which is really a shame on all fronts to have to destroy it and then to also have to pay to do that.

56:52So I really recommend everybody also checks out ways like expiry product inventory channels. So I did this at a brand that I was at previously, we were sitting on all this stuff. I'm like, what can I try to sell it? Okay, cool. So we actually created a whole resource that's on our website. If you go under the founder resources databases, there's an expiry product outlet database there. And it has on there three different things. There direct outlets. So that would be like a grocery outlet or misfits. Like they would actually buy that expiry product inventory from you directly. Grocery outlet, which is a very beautiful thing.

57:27They, at least they were the fastest growing grocer in California. So many locations you as a consumer can go into the store and buy stuff for about a third, I think what it would typically be in other stores. So it's a great place to shop and get good deals. And also, I mean, it's California. A lot of people want access to those consumers as well. So almost like you're going to get some really cool trial out of it and have your product be seen in a cool place. California is cool. Come on. And that's a really good one. And, you know, I think grocery outlet team for me, you know, they're, I think, fair and straightforward.

57:59The pricing is not what you want it to be. It's not, you know, it might be a fraction of your cost even of making it. But it's way better than paying to destroy something to actually get it out somewhere where you're going to get, you know, impressions and feedback and people carrying the product around. So I love that as an option for people. We also have in the database brokers. There are some brokers out there and they're looking at places like discount dollar stores. Some of them may specialize in things like prisons. And you can also, even if your product is actually expiring or expired, a lot of times you could contact your manufacturing partner and ask them maybe to work with the food quality team to get an extension on the expiry, which would then allow it to be sold through one of those channels.

58:44Or you can even ask if you can re-sticker the expiry dates in a lot of instances. So a lot of things you can do there. And then the other kind of outlet that's on that database are food banks. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's actually hard a lot of times to get branded product into food banks. A lot of them would prioritize monetary donations. They have a plan to do stuff with that versus actually being, you know, really equipped to actually accept deliveries. But there are a lot that do. And I found that the Feeding America network of food banks are the ones that are most likely to be able to take products.

59:16So we actually listed every single Feeding America food bank at the time that we released this in our database. So you can see which ones maybe are even nearest to where you're holding all that inventory. But we just we really love making that available to everybody because there's it that's a tough one to swallow, right, is destroying food and beverage and great products when there are a lot of ways that that could be used. So I hope that everybody checks that stuff out. Hopefully you sell through all your inventory and need more of it and keep growing, but this will happen to you at some point.

59:46So I just want everyone to be aware of those tools. So I really want to thank David for joining us today because all of this stuff is just theory if we don't have the brands here to give us how it's actually going on the ground. And I think also just, it feels very special for everyone to get to hear how it works at a company like Graza that so many people look up to, leaders in the industry, having pioneered just so much stuff. So thank you, David, for all of your contributions and being here today. And thank you again to Austin. This is just one of my favorite things that we get to do as a community is really educate people, I think, on these kind of topics that are so important that take experts who have done it across tons of brands to explain to people and people who are just, you know, focus their whole businesses on innovating on tools for emerging brands to make this journey a little bit easier, not so, let's say, resource intensive to get things done.

1:00:41And, you know, I know in the future, we'll all just have all of this stuff that will be one click of the mouse away and we'll have all our forecast robots out there in the field translating off for us. But I really am excited about this process and progress that we're all making. So thank you, everybody. I hope you all learned a lot and definitely check out the show notes for the templates. Trust me, you will love them there. It's so great to have those kind of templates. So thank you, everybody. Hope you all had a good time. Thanks so much, Daniel. Thanks so much, Daniel. All right, everybody.

1:01:13Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you loved it, I would so appreciate it if you could leave us a review. You could do it right now. If you're an Apple podcast, you can scroll to the bottom of our Startup CPG podcast page and click on Write a Review. Leave your company name in there. I will try to read it out. If you're in Spotify, you can click on About and then the star rating icon. If you are a service provider that would like to appear on the Startup CPG podcast, you can email us at partnerships at startupcpg.com. Lastly, if you found yourself grooving along to the music, it is my band.

1:01:47You can visit our website and listen to more. It is superfantastics.com. Thank you, everybody. See you next time. Thank you.