Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, Jeff Standridge here. Welcome to our season opener of the Innovation Junkies podcast. How you doing, Jeff?
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, Jeff. Oh, I’m great. I’m glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah. So I think we’re at Season Five now, maybe?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah. Can you believe something like that?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. It’s hard to believe.
Jeff Amerine:
Hard to believe we haven’t been canceled already. We’re doing better than a lot of TV series at this point.
Jeff Standridge:
And perhaps we have, and we just don’t know it yet.
Jeff Amerine:
It’s like we used to joke when I was in the military: what would happen if you called a war and nobody showed up?
Jeff Standridge:
For sure. Exactly. So yeah, so we’ve got a good season coming forward here, excited to be back. We’re going to be having a combination of guests and episodes where maybe it’s just you and me, but I know we’ve got several really good guests, particularly in the growth areas, revenue generation, sales, sales effectiveness, and what have you.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it should be fantastic. I mean, those are all hot topics, and 2024, 2025 are shaping up to be really interesting, challenging, volatile times. So I think these will all be great episodes.
Jeff Standridge:
Speaking of that little market volatility going on right now, just in course of the last record growth, the first six months of the year, and then even through maybe even seven months of the year, and then August and September have been extremely volatile and certainly the last week and a half or so you get to yours and my age, you try not to watch the market very much, but dad gum.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it is interesting. And some of those macro and even geopolitical factors that factor in the market will be up through four or 500 points one day and down the next. And we’ve learned we can’t really rely necessarily on government statistics in terms of employment or inflation. There’s been such massive corrections in markets in general, and this is at whatever level are driven by confidence or the lack thereof. And when you’ve got uncertainty, it tends to lead to volatility. And with volatility, there’s opportunity. But as an enterprise innovation leader, as someone that’s trying to lead at any level, it makes it even more challenging than it already was. So yeah, it’s going to be exciting.
Jeff Standridge:
It’s definitely a study in psychology watching the markets every week.
Jeff Amerine:
And no doubt about it. I mean, I think people somehow forget that everything we do is a people-oriented business, and if the crowd or the influencers or the thought leaders begin to lose confidence or have opinions, those that follow those opinions tend to follow it in mass, and it leads to sort of cyclical variation that is not just driven by supply and demand oftentimes.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, just anecdotally, I know you and I are both early risers. I get up in the morning, I turn on CNBC or Bloomberg or whatever, and I’m watching at the implied openings. This has happened multiple times in August and September; looking at the implied opening, and they’re predicting a hundred points plus on the Dow and the Nasdaq, and it’ll maybe even increase to 150, 200 points to the positive by midmorning. And then one report will come out that’s a few thousand off of projected, and it plummets, and it’s down 500 points to end the day.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. No doubt. And the sort of Nvidia phenomenon, clearly indicative of the growth in AI and ML and how much hype and reality there was around that. And now that appears to be leveling off, maybe flattening out, maybe going the other way. Some of the froth is coming out of the market, but it got to the point where the market cap was so high that it was driving in kind of an unnatural way, the overall market performance. And so when that steadies out, and plus you have geopolitical unrest, we have shooting wars in a couple of different places in the world, and if you’re in defense stocks, that’s probably good. And if you’re starting a business, that’s probably good, but it’s bad in a lot of other ways as it relates to oil prices, overall global free trade, and all that goes into that.
So I don’t see 2025 being less volatile, at least not initially. It seems like these technology trends and disruptors, AI and ML most notably is going to continue. That cryptocurrency has been every bit as volatile, and in fact, it’s almost been correlated with the market performance. And so the people that are in the Web3 space and the cryptocurrency space, they haven’t had an easy time. It hasn’t been just consistently up and to the right. And all that goes back to if you’re an innovator, you’re a founder, or you’re a leader, how the heck do you sort that out? I mean, I think there’s going to be a premium on agility and kind of trying to be flexible in the way you go to market and the way you add people, et cetera.
Jeff Standridge:
It’s interesting. Was asked to do a workshop last week for a group, and Grace and I delivered it together around thriving in turbulent times. And as I was building out that deck to talk about some of the key points that we really need to focus on to thrive in turbulent times, I was really drawn back to the fact of it’s really not things that you focus on in turbulent times. If you’re waiting till turbulent times to focus on them, you’ve probably waited too late. You really need to focus on the fundamentals every day, every day. And oh, by the way, because small medium enterprises where we tend to do the majority of our work, they operate on such tighter margins, such fewer resources, less access to capital, et cetera, that a little swing can have a big impact. And so if we’re not focusing on the fundamentals every single day, focusing on our customers, our customer acquisition, our customer satisfaction, our customer engagement, if we’re not focused on our people, our culture, our being a great place to work, giving people the tools and trainings and capabilities that they need to perform well, if we’re not focused on the fundamentals of our finances and being operationally effective, et cetera, if we’re not innovating and challenging the status quo, those are fundamentals that if we’re not focused on them during the good times, then when turbulent times hit, we’re going to be behind the eight ball.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, you get exposed, you get exposed as an operator. I mean, when everything is going up and to the right and times are good and you’re not having to deal with inflation or interest rate issues, it’s easy to become complacent. And it exposes people when you have sort of the typical volatility or a downturn and it can expose entire sector as well. Recently talking to a multi-generational farmer that said, no farmer in the US and this was probably a generalized case, is going to make any money this year. That’s because all those input costs are up and they don’t have pricing power in the market when they’re selling on a commodity exchange. That’s determined by macro level, geo level, geopolitical level issues. And so you think about that, what would happen if our food system really faced that kind of fragility because there’s not those government subsidies, et cetera, that typically buoy them in times when you’ve got a stagflation or a significant downturn in their ability to have the margins to make it even survival. It’s kind of a scary prospect to think about it.
Jeff Standridge:
It’s interesting. You talk about all the input costs being up. I’ve actually surveyed audiences multiple times over the course of the last 12 months and just said, how many of you have revisited your prices, have reanalyzed your input costs? And how many of you have actually revisited your pricing structures and your pricing strategies in the last 24 months? And the number of people who have not done that is staggering, Absolutely staggering.
Jeff Amerine:
And sometimes as a producer, whether we’ve seen this in a brewery space, we’ve certainly see it in farming. Sometimes they can’t pass it all along. There are just situations where there are larger players that are better capitalized, that have more cash on hand, that are able to take a hit for a longer period of time. And when you get to that situation as a small operator, you might get squeezed out. I mean, you might just not be able to weather it unless you’ve done some things with pricing or value or removing cost leading into it because it’ll be challenging. And they always say in cyclical businesses, things will go from the weaker hands to the stronger hands. That’s kind of a natural order of things. It’s just unfortunate that if you don’t pay attention to all the items you just ticked off, it can happen to you as a leader and an operator. For sure.
Jeff Standridge:
For sure. Yeah. So, Season Five, great guests we’ve got in the pipeline, volatile times, but we’re still going to reserve some time for just you and me to get on and talk about some of the timely points that present themselves over the course of the rest of the season and looking forward to another good run.
Jeff Amerine:
Me too. And I will guarantee we’ll spend at least half an episode talking about the merits of having a 12 team playoff in college football.
Jeff Standridge:
There you go. Can’t wait. Alright, guys. Join us Season five, innovation Junkies. Share it with your friends. We look forward to seeing you again. Talk soon.
Jeff Amerine:
See you soon.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. We hope you gained some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.