Timely Supply Chains and Double Data Genes, w/ Jon Perl

Power BI has altered the course of many people's lives for the better, and that is surely the case with our guest Jonathan Perl.  Coming from a financial background, he was already well versed in the Business Intelligence tools of the past. But the Power Platform spoke volumes to Jon.  So much so that he changed his entire career path in order to share his expertise with these tools with others (and make a few shekels while he's at it).  His data journey is as unique as they come!

Episode Timeline:

• 1:55 - A LinkedIn message turns into an awesome friendship and professional relationship, Jon not only identifies but solves a problem in the Supply Chain, and Jon's new software product NOAH is born!
• 15:25 Jon's ability to extract useful data from the dirtiest garbage is amazing!  Cut and Sold-sounds simple, it isn't so simple
• 30:00 Which backgrounds are the best makeup for C-suite executives
• 54:30 Rob's experience of an orthodox Shabbat observance at Jon's place was eye-opening...and what's next for Jon Perl?

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hey everyone. Today's guest is Jon Perl. JP we call him. JP's got a very interesting backstory. Jon has managed rock bands. He's worked for Hedge Funds. He started his own successful apparel company and ran it for a number of years before encountering Power BI, and deciding at that moment that data was a better business. So he sold his company in response to encountering Power BI, I'm not making this up. So now, in addition to slinging Power BI on a part-time, nearly full-time basis, he now also runs a software as a service startup in the supply chain and logistics industries fields, domains. Additionally, he's also one of the most interesting paradoxes I've ever met. As an adherent of the Orthodox Jewish faith, he spends a full day every week with no technology, and in the other six days more than makes up for it. Absolutely crushing it. No one navigates technology like this guy, he just takes a day off, one day a week just to rest. Really compelling figure. Fantastic conversation. I hope you enjoy it. So let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:10): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:15): This is the Raw Data by P3 Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw data by P3 is data with a human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:34): Welcome to the show. JP, Jon Perl. How are you, man?

Jon Perl (00:01:40): I'm great. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you, Tom. Nice to see you, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:01:44): It is a pleasure to have you. I'm glad that we got this queued up. We pulled this together pretty quickly too, so go us. Agile. That's right. We don't do waterfall podcasting here, we run the agile method. So Jon, it's probably three years ago, two and a half maybe.

Jon Perl (00:02:04): Something like that.

Rob Collie (00:02:05): I got what is definitely my absolute favorite LinkedIn message of all time.

Jon Perl (00:02:11): Thanks.

Rob Collie (00:02:12): And it just came in, out of the blue, and it was so heartfelt. It didn't have an agenda other than just being human. It was just such a gift.

Jon Perl (00:02:25): Wow. Thank you so much.

Rob Collie (00:02:27): It was from this guy named Kevin. I'm just kidding. It was from you. Do you remember sort of the gist of what you said in that note?

Jon Perl (00:02:40): Yeah. More or less. I remember I just read your book. I was super jazzed up about Power BI and this whole new power way of [inaudible 00:02:51] data that I had struggled with before. You tried to build all kinds of little duct tape type connectors with different tools, and then to finally see it come together in such a beautiful way. I was obsessed. Yeah, I was in business at the time. I had a company called Andy & Evan. I was in the clothing manufacturing business. I did it for about 10 years until I hit a breaking point in the [inaudible 00:03:15] business, slinging onesies.

Rob Collie (00:03:16): Yeah. I mean, you started with the signature product, right? It was like an Oxford onesie, or something like that. What was it?

Jon Perl (00:03:26): Yeah. We called it the Shirtsie. I was laid off from a Hedge Fund in 2009. I had nothing to do. I started a business with my friend from Synagogue. "Hey, you're unemployed. I'm unemployed. There's no jobs in finance. Let's go sell shirts. Let's go sell custom shirts." Custom shirts are like the worst business in the world, going, selling three shirts at a time, measuring people, it's humiliating. They don't fit. Then my first son was born and I said, "Hey, this is not working out anyway. Why don't we have some fun." I made him a dress shirt with a onesie, snuck a snap closure in the bottom, and we said, "Hey, we have something here." We had $3,000 in the bank. We took $3,000 and showed it at a trade show. Literally went for broke.

Jon Perl (00:04:15): Out of the gate, had some traction, built this business over 10 years, selling to department stores and discounters and really kind of working my way up the chain, or down the chain, however, you look at it, ultimately selling to master retailers and kind of hitting a breaking point, running a small business that's so capital driven and with no investor backing and high cost of capital.

Jon Perl (00:04:37): I was having a really hard time in the business and one of my twice a year, number crunching marathons to plan what we were going to buy for the season. It would always fall out on a Jewish holiday. That Jewish holiday I was in Portugal with my family, having a really nice time. Right afterwards, okay, partner dumps all the buying on me, in the middle of the holiday. I'm on vacation. I was up all night, three nights in a row and slept during the day when my family went and toured in Portugal. I said, "You know what, enough of this." I had your book with me.

Jon Perl (00:05:07): Then on the holiday days where we don't carry a phone, we don't turn on lights, we read, and we hang with our family, whatever, I had your book. I was like, wow. I just spent a week doing this crap. I'm done with selling Shirtsies. I'm going into the data business. I used the technology, the power query and Power BI to create a pitch deck for my company to go and sell it, and met with as many people as would meet with me. Got lucky. Six months later was able to close a deal, sell the business. From then on, it was like a new career, a new beginning. I reached out to you to say, "Hey, what's up? Who is this guy? This guy just changed everything."

Rob Collie (00:05:49): First of all, I love the idea of a Jewish holiday that's dedicated to reading my book. Can we invent something?

Jon Perl (00:06:00): [inaudible 00:06:00] into the holiday, but you know, there's some.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:02): There are a lot of them you, so it's possible. It could already exist.

Jon Perl (00:06:08): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:06:08): You just have to discover it, I suppose. The other thing is, I just love the random stories. It's so typical really. It's a story old as time. Get laid off from a hedge fund, start an apparel business making dress shirt onesies for babies, and then discover power BI and go, oh, I need to sell this business and go do something like this. I mean, how many people share that story? It's probably like two, 3% of the population. Every story is so unique. I love these semi random, zigzag paths. They're just, I think one of the most fascinating and valuable things to me. I don't really know what it is about them that speaks to me, but they really do. Let's complete the picture. Pre hedge fun. Anything interesting in the pre hedge fun days?

Jon Perl (00:07:00): Managed a band. Toured around the world with the Jewish rock band. That's a whole another story for another time.

Rob Collie (00:07:08): I didn't know that, I don't think. Maybe you told me once. I have to hear things like five, six times before they really get cemented.

Jon Perl (00:07:15): I tell you what was very really interesting, post that story. The part that I skipped was that process of trying to sell my business. I went to bigger companies. I was selling to Costco. I went to bigger Costco vendors. It kind of went up the chain to some bigger folks who were doing business orders of magnitude larger than mine. One or two orders of magnitude bigger than my business. What I saw was just fascinating. They didn't have the tools that I had. They had floors full of people, crunching numbers and exporting and uploading and emailing. They were clueless to all this stuff. That's where I really saw the opportunity.

Jon Perl (00:07:57): Like hey, I have this little business operating on such a small scale, but doing the same type of business, more or less. I'm communicating, I'm EDI with trading partners, and sending messages in and out of my ERP. I want to pull all kinds of data from my ERP and measure certain things and watch certain things and trigger certain things. The business is really all the same, regardless of the scale of it, was the same business. I had job offers, when I met with all these people that said, "Who made the charts? You made these charts? These are good charts. Think he's a chart guy. Our CFO just left. Do you want to be CFO?" Literally, I had CFO offers, COO offers, and I chose this path of being independent and start a software business and continue to do consulting in this discipline. Keep my tools sharp.

Rob Collie (00:08:48): Yeah. Tell us about the software business, because when you wrote the mail to me, you wrote the LinkedIn message, I don't think you had the software idea yet. You were data B