We'll be back with a brand new episode next week. In the meantime, please enjoy this recast of Commerce Famous episode 2 with Tink Taylor, the man who changed online marketing for good! Tink Taylor is the Founder & President of the dotDigital Group PLC (dotdigital). Tink has over 20 years of experience in the field of digital communications and has introduced digital marketing to companies large & small. Tink has been pivotal in the development of digital marketing since its outset in both the UK and the USA and is generally considered to be an absolute legend in the industry. Tink first launched dotdigital in the US in 2012 and later took dotmailer to APAC in 2015. He constantly strives to help individual organizations, and the industry as a whole, to develop & progress, acting as a serial tech advisor and investor outside of dotdigital. Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs. Find out more at: www.shopware.com/en/
We'll be back with a brand new episode next week. In the meantime, please enjoy this recast of Commerce Famous episode 2 with Tink Taylor, the man who changed online marketing for good!
Tink Taylor is the Founder & President of the dotDigital Group PLC (dotdigital). Tink has over 20 years of experience in the field of digital communications and has introduced digital marketing to companies large & small. Tink has been pivotal in the development of digital marketing since its outset in both the UK and the USA and is generally considered to be an absolute legend in the industry.
Tink first launched dotdigital in the US in 2012 and later took dotmailer to APAC in 2015. He constantly strives to help individual organizations, and the industry as a whole, to develop & progress, acting as a serial tech advisor and investor outside of dotdigital.
Suggest a Guest for the Commerce Famous Podcast
Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs.
Ben Marks [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the commerce famous podcast, where we present you with the defining stories behind modern commerce. I'm your host, Ben Marks. This is episode number two, and with me today is someone who knows a thing or two about coastal winds in Greece, Tink Taylor. Tink's other claim to fame is being a co founder of Dot Digital, a customer engagement platform and all around marketing and customer insight super tool. Both Tink and digital, formerly mailer, have been around since the web was young. Now, full disclosure for this episode. Digital and my employer, Shopware, have been going steady for quite a while. But that doesn't mean we won't be digging deep into Tink's experience and perspective.
Ben Marks [00:00:40]:
Tink, why does being the co founder of Dot digital make you commerce famous?
Tink Taylor [00:00:46]:
Hi, Ben, thanks for inviting us on. So that's quite the question to start with, commerce famous? Am I famous? I don't mean obviously from a technology standpoint, being the founder or one of the founders of what is now digital. We went through a few different iterations of that. We obviously Dot Mailer before we founded out of a website design development company initially. So obviously one of the innovators in the industry was there right at the beginning. I remember sitting in a pub in south London when we actually were coming up with a concept of Dot Mailer, even just sort of saying, we want to build a tool that is known, used and love around the world. And I think 24 years later we're pretty much there, maybe taking a bit longer than we hoped. But yeah, maybe the other element of it, maybe what's maybe famous is much like yourself, I think for a significant number of years, as technology companies were building out in this space, we were almost on a world tour together for many, many years.
Tink Taylor [00:01:54]:
I think it was probably at my peak at 150 flights a year, and I would turn up in Singapore, Sydney, London, Austin, La. Wherever Ben Marks was there, Tic Taylor was there, and there's a whole host of other people that were there. Friends, foes, competitors. We were all friends together, sometimes competing for the same business, but we were on the same planes and traveling around. It was quite the world tour. So I've got myself known globally in this space. As a result, I think we've all stood on stage and been seen as thought leaders, giving out our knowledge and our findings, bringing forward some of our clients that are doing various interesting elements to kind of teach the world and the masses about what's the best thing to do. So my fame is led from the technology, probably driven by the innovative work that the clients have done.
Tink Taylor [00:02:50]:
But we've empowered with our tech.
Ben Marks [00:02:53]:
Well, it's funny, that vision, initial vision. I have two questions. One, is there like a napkin, like a cocktail napkin framed somewhere like this is where dot digital was put together from a pub in London. Boy, that'd be almost invaluable, wouldn't it?
Tink Taylor [00:03:15]:
Well, we got better than that. We have a different napkin. We took investment, or an investment. We bought on someone a long time ago as a consultant. He bought in and we did a deal on a napkin. I think it was about $100,000. All of the other money that people have had put into their business.
Ben Marks [00:03:35]:
Is it too late for me to retroactively get in at that level?
Tink Taylor [00:03:40]:
Perhaps so I've got that napkin somewhere. I have to dig that out. My house back in London. But in terms of what do we have in the pub? I'm not sure. I'm sure you've been to our hq in London. Number one, London Bridge. The pub that we came up with, the concept of digital was called the Treehouse. It was opposite our office.
Tink Taylor [00:04:02]:
And the guy surprised us when we refurbbed our office and did the launch that the lunch area where everyone eats, they did a replica of the pub. They call it the tea house, being british. So that's where everyone goes to have lunch. And within the tea house are the very tables from that pub. So they went back to the pub and explained what they're doing and the pub donated their table. So it's probably still got maturing gum on it. But I have the table where dot Mailer was conceived.
Ben Marks [00:04:29]:
Oh, my gosh. That is absolutely amazing. Now, one of the things, actually, I think before we go any further, you mentioned part of the vision, even all the way back then, was you wanted to build a tool, and I guess at the time, to really solve problems that really hadn't even been conceived yet. But you wanted to build a tool that would make people, empower people, and people would love it the world over. Right. And that. Know, I asked Roy Rubin a few years was if he was shocked at the success of Magento and was he surprised by it? And he said flat out like that was his goal. It was actually his intent to democratize e commerce and basically to empower the people actually working hands on in the space to do the things that they needed to do and to have the insights that they needed to have.
Ben Marks [00:05:18]:
And that sounds similar to what you all were setting out to do.
Tink Taylor [00:05:21]:
I mean, what you're saying there is. This is just resonating in my mind. I've been asked that question so many times. Are you surprised by the success of this? No. We set out to do this. That was the mission. We rolled up our sleeves. I still think we've got work to do and, yeah, 100%, we wanted to build this technology.
Tink Taylor [00:05:38]:
We knew it was good, we knew it could go global, and that was the mission. Until that's accomplished. That's why I'm still here. I still love doing it, still enjoying it and still finding things to do. So, yeah, I 100% agree with Roy, and he's probably faced that question, are you surprised? And I'm not surprised. His answer is no, because that's what we set out to do.
Ben Marks [00:05:58]:
For me, it's still, boy, I don't even know if I was ever confident or ever would be confident enough to think I could do that at an industry level. But I think we're all lucky in this business to have founders who have that kind of vision and especially grit to be able to accomplish what you've accomplished so I can frame things properly for people, for our listeners. So, starting digital, founded 1999. Making. Making websites and doing marketing for the BBC in 2002. Deloitte Fast 50. I'm sorry? Deloitte Fast 500 in 2008, publicly listed the London Stock Exchange in 2009. And then you yourself have ended up on numerous councils and panels and everything.
Ben Marks [00:06:52]:
So clearly, you've not only helped sort of define the category, you all at Dot digital have not only helped define the category, but you've also participated in sort of the curation in this space. What has that been like? I mean, that must be quite the perspective to have as you go from the beginning of digital to where we are now.
Tink Taylor [00:07:19]:
That's a good question, actually. I don't think I've ever faced that one. So kudos to you for asking that. So, yeah, it is interesting, looking back with hindsight. I've worked for the direct marketing association in the UK, been elected board member there. I'm still on the equivalent. In the US that was called the EC is now part of the ANA and worked with the movers and shakers, and that dates back 20 years now ish. It's starting to age me.
Tink Taylor [00:07:50]:
This podcast on those councils, there would be a splattering of vendors, my competitors that are still really good friends on a one to one basis. Obviously, we're not friendly if it's in the pitch. A number of clients and sort of agencies and such like, and they really were the movers and shakers in the industry and we have shaped a lot of best practice. It's definitely shaped the mailer now digital platform because speaking to the end clients, speaking to those agencies are on the cutting edge. I wanted them as clients and they were all be saying, you can't be clients. We can't be client of yours if you don't do x, Y and z. This is what we want to be able to achieve. So between us, we kind of set out to do that kind of thing and we shaped each other and then we shaped the industry in turning what they should be doing and what is possible to achieve.
Tink Taylor [00:08:49]:
And we've shaped a lot of legislation right way back to things like the cookie law right through GDPR and what we're seeing now in the US and up here in Canada and the Castle act and what have you, it all sort of has come out of that. And we've lobbied the data protection officers globally on this. And for a long time, those bodies, we really sort of set the barrier for best practice, higher than what the law was at the time, because we knew if we encourage people sort of to push the limits all the time, legislation would be forced upon us and then that shuts the whole industry down. So as a collective, we really did push the industry, raise the industry. Back in the early days, there was very much the fight with on versus offline traditional marketing. And then over time, we've had all sorts of other channels come in from SEO and blah, blah, blah, email is dead and now we've all got omnichannel. So it's really helped shape. I'd say the exciting bit and reflection is we have been part of shaping the industry and the legislation and there's not anyone you can't talk to these days who doesn't know about data protection and data leaks.
Tink Taylor [00:10:01]:
Our friends at Facebook have done a very good job of getting us in the news and in the headlines all the time on that subject. And it's something I've worked on for.
Ben Marks [00:10:12]:
Actually. I had no context there that you all were so involved. I think you mentioned it to me before, maybe over a coffee or a beer. But just the proactive sort of self regulation, right? And I love that approach of, hey, right now it's the wild west, but it won't always be so. And at some point, the people who are so disparate, so far away from this industry, they're going to be coming in and probably doing a bad job of it. So let's take care of it ourselves. Now, you just said something in there, though, about omnichannel. Is this for further perspective? Because I think there are a lot of people in this industry, it's always a self renewing space, right? So we see the younger folks coming in, but we're talking about.
Ben Marks [00:11:05]:
So the advent of what started where dot digital started. Google had literally just moved out of someone's garage, right? And this was five years before Gmail was even released as a beta. And then for further context, it might connect, might resonate a little bit more with folks. Omnichannel as a term wasn't even coined until eleven years after digital was created. And if you think about it though, that was probably the first two channels. You had websites and you had email and they were really not very well. They really weren't orchestrated at all. So my question there is, what more could you share about the landscape back then? It was basically less of a land, it was just a frontier.
Ben Marks [00:11:56]:
It was wide open.
Tink Taylor [00:11:58]:
Yeah, everything was hand built. I think we'd just come out of the era of brochureware websites. What made us quite niche as a web design development company is we built a content management system, funny enough, that was called dot editor and that was revolutionizing people's worlds. They could update and maintain their website easily with a visual editor. We've always been ahead of the curve on that front. Even today I think our editor is the best on the market. But we were the first on the market way back then and that's how mailer came around. We built a number of websites.
Tink Taylor [00:12:35]:
Most people are probably familiar with Jeremy Clarkson and Topgear. So we built the Top Gear website. BBC had a number of other publications like Top of the Pops garden as well. And what we built these websites, we put a load of competitions on there and they collected a load of emails and they said, our email system is terrible, can you help us with that? So we were like, well, we can let you build your own. So for us it was taking all the power of our content management tool editor and saying, well, we only need to edit one page. That's your email. So that was the start of it. And then obviously the rest of the mechanics about how you can send and profile and upload data, what have you came thereafter? But that was kind of the essence of how it started.
Tink Taylor [00:13:15]:
And at that very table that I talked about in the pub, we had a very unique character. Roger, who was our sales guy at the time, was selling websites. He used to come into office every day sort of dressed as a secondhand car dealer. He just sort of stuck out like a sore thumb, but over a pipe. He kind of described putting an invisible gif into an email to make it tracking. He used all the wrong words. He was completely non technical. But it was the eureka moment.
Tink Taylor [00:13:43]:
We sat there with Simon, my co founder, and we kind of looked at each other and went, we could do that tomorrow. Like literally get that done tomorrow. And that's kind of where the tracking and that's where all that sort of comes from. But, yeah, it was a couple of beers in the second hand car sales, if I'm honest.
Ben Marks [00:13:58]:
That'S the eureka moment that you've talked about. I think in other interviews and for people today, it seems so obvious, but I remember those days and it was, oh, wow, if someone opens this email and that email pulls in a remote image, if that is somehow uniquely identified, then great. You now have proof positive that someone opened that email. Absolutely genius.
Tink Taylor [00:14:30]:
It was like wizardry. Back in the day, we would go to a trade show and people were doing offline marketing, and we'd say, look, we know someone's opened and clicked on this. They were like, what is this sorcery that you're doing? And then obviously, I kind of mentioned there protecting the industry and the legislation. To this day with the legislators, it's still a fundamental argument. What level of cookie is an invisible gif is something that's downloaded on the machine, blah, blah, blah, what's it being used for? And all of that sort of thing. So that's something that's been a big part of our world for a long time.
Ben Marks [00:15:03]:
And that's a perfect segue because that was back then. Right. So you had the problem of having any insight at all into what people are doing, what's actually happening with the content that you're pushing out there now. Today, of course, we have the other problem, which is, from where I see it, we've traveled the diameter, and each app in a merchant solution is trying to do. They're all trying to do more. So every single app is trying to push out against its boundaries. And rather than like, a paucity of feedback mechanisms and data, like, businesses are swimming like treading or drowning in lakes of data, and they need curation analysis more than ever before. But it's coming in at a rate that it's not like you can just have someone responsible for the pipe of data.
Ben Marks [00:16:04]:
There has to be tools around this. So given that reality today, how does this inform what digital are building really for today and even looking forward into the future?
Tink Taylor [00:16:16]:
Yeah, we transitioned, obviously, from web development into email. I think we became email marketing automation now. Omnichannel. And that marketing automation really was the first stage of what you were describing because of the lakes of data and the insights, just the data that people come with. We've got all this legacy data. We've been doing digital marketing for a while. We've got this website, maybe we got Pos, we got offline presence, then we got all this digital insight, the tracking we've done for various different tools. What can we do with it? Firstly, how do we get it into your platform? So we work very extensively to make that easily and consumable for our clients to sort of pump the data into us.
Tink Taylor [00:17:03]:
And then we've had to build technologies, automations, segmentations, things like in the reports, RFM modeling, so we can see recency and frequency of purchases and what have you, and identify valuable segments that you could do this by hand and some people do that to a degree, but a lot more automation is in play these days and obviously moving into the future, things like AI making decisions for us on that front because they can scan through the data so quickly and then can get the best results. So yeah, we've had to change absorbing that data, I think, in summary, and then is providing the tools from automation, segmentation now AI into being able to make that really usable. But yeah, it works. There's no question.
Ben Marks [00:17:58]:
If I'm just getting in the industry today. So if I'm thinking from the shoes of standing in the shoes of an entrepreneur, look back 20 years and yes, of course it was the Wild west, but some of the things that work in business, probably a lot of what worked in business back then still works really well today. And there's something actually that you said a moment ago when you're talking about the building a visual editor. Right. And I can also remember when these first content management tools came around and you were effectively, I mean, at best you might have a couple of formatting buttons with way less functionality than a word processor software, but what you said was that, hey, we built this thing, it was the best thing that had existed and we were the first, but you didn't exactly sit on your laurels there. And I say that because I think when I finally met the dot digital team in person at another platform conference in Vegas years and years ago, and I saw the digital editor just iframed into the back office for that was, I'm looking at it, I'm like, wow, this actually makes the software, the other software look really cool because what you all had built was so amazing. But I'm going to assume that that's actually what you've done in pretty much every corner of your business is ideally lead the way, and then not sit there and be satisfied with it, but continue to evolve and push forward. Is that a fair characterization?
Tink Taylor [00:19:38]:
Yeah, there's a mantra that I used to use internally, which it's sort of somehow externalized along the way, and it'll probably take to my grave, but I had a strap line. It's like always to the developers, let's build NASA technology, but with a Fisher price interface. I think a lot of our competitors and our tools back in the past, they did lots of clever stuff, so they were designed to look clever, but then it terrified the intended user, the marketer. You would need a massive manual to read that. And I think moving right to the present day, that's still relevant. We do like to make those really difficult things easy. I think it's quite easy to make stuff look easy, but not actually be meaningful in terms of the depth and breadth of what can be achieved. So we've actually see quite a few competitors now where things look easy to set up.
Tink Taylor [00:20:33]:
But if you actually want to go back to that data lake you described, and do something really deep and meaningful with that, kind of like your WordPress analogy there, it was a bit skin deep. What you can actually achieve, maybe with segments and automation and whatever, you can do the basics, that's okay. But if you're more than entry level in the world of ecommerce, there's definitely a lot more that can be done. And that obviously presents a problem when you get more and more complicated, you layer more and more channels on top with just a tool that's got more stuff in it. There is always a challenge to keep the UI really simple, and we look at that all the time. I think we did our most recent product release just a couple of weeks ago, and a big part of that was enhancements to the UI. We would like to review that every now and again and sort of update where we see we think we can make a difference.
Ben Marks [00:21:24]:
And I just love these little nuggets of wisdom there. Make the difficult easy, or make the complicated simple. And that is, I think, the irony of well laid out tools. And even from where I sit on a day to day basis, the better that a platform or ecommerce platform ecommerce solution is. Ironically, the less I think the end user actually even thinks about the fact that they're working in software. They literally just sit down, whatever the scope of their work is, and they just do their job. And ideally they don't feel any friction as they're accomplishing their tasks, they're keeping it very high level because the people behind the systems have put in all of the thought and effort to build that interface that either does probably 80% of what it should by design, and then maybe there's another 20% that is configurable and adaptable, so that people are seeing exactly what they need to see and not seeing what they don't need to see. That must be a huge.
Ben Marks [00:22:29]:
How big is your product team in terms of prioritizing these decisions about what to build, what not to build, and then how to do it?
Tink Taylor [00:22:40]:
Yeah, we go through quite a process on that. It's well documented internally. We obviously have to listen to our clients. So we do a whole load of that and we take feedback, we look at what we're being asked for by our prospects. We then go round to the various teams in terms of csms and AES and what have you, and see what they're doing. So we do that as a collective, globally. Obviously, there's. The innovation is a key part of that.
Tink Taylor [00:23:06]:
We do hack weeks where the development team come up with bright ideas and anything that's good in that will ultimately move into production at a later date. AI, Winston AI, as we call it. Winston's our company mascot. Winston was a technology as well. Back in the day, Winston was our watchdog and he watched all the data that was being pumped into our system. When we go back to saying it was the wild, wild west in terms of data protection and laws, Winston, the watchdog, would look at what was being uploaded into the system to make sure there wasn't any spam lists and what have you on there, because people were very cavalier back in those days and that would not only get us blocked, but it would get them blocked. And nowadays you get like, fines in the tens of millions of euros under GPR and what have you. If you send the wrong stuff, you don't have permission on.
Tink Taylor [00:23:54]:
So Winston was like this amazing technology. No one really had it. I think Mailchimp came along and did a replica of it a couple of years ago. I still don't think there's many out there that do what Winston does day by day, but we surfaced him in the app. Finally, he's appeared as our AI engine, and so he's helping advise people on content, subject lines and things like that. So it's a nice little innovation for him.
Ben Marks [00:24:16]:
I feel like we're delivering on the sort of jetsons like dream of what Clippy was. Clippy is now actually going to be really smart, the AI assistant. I mean, the whole concept of copilots. I know we at Shopware have just announced this, and I know every single platform, and not just e commerce, but any tool with any kind of breadth of user base and breadth of wide scope of responsibilities is going to be doing this. It's where the industry is headed now. I'm sorry, I can't let, given what you just mentioned about nefarious actors and people being cavalier, what is this I hear about a profanity thesaurus? That story, there was something, I think you got an email once with a fairly salty word, which when someone from the UK says, oh, this was some salty language, I'm like, wow, that must be really salty. What was that?
Tink Taylor [00:25:21]:
It wasn't our technology, to be honest, it was someone else's technology. But yeah, I emailed. I forget who it was now. It was a long time ago, and I received a one word response that the sea bomb, which probably has less impact in the UK, but still impactful than it does here in North America. And I was like, wow, what have I done here? Who have I upset? And then I got an email about an hour later going, so we've been doing some experiments with our profanity software, and results have been unexpected. So I imagine they just emailed everyone a random swear word, right?
Ben Marks [00:25:56]:
I've certainly had my production screw up, so that one's pretty bad. Okay, look, you all clearly have spent a lot of time, a lot of thought, and something else to call out there is the collaboration, the collaborative nature of finding if you build a great product, then you get great partners and great customers to work with, and they're probably pushing things forward. And would you say it's a fairly essential exercise to innovate, not purely for innovation's sake, but also because in creating the thing that people need, even before they need it, you're going to attract the kind of attention and the kind of feedback and product input that will help you then build the next great thing. Have you seen a lot of that in your time in the business?
Tink Taylor [00:26:53]:
Yeah, I think a lot of the work, as I said, worked on these industry bodies and with various partners and what have. We would go and have a board meeting, but we'd always have a pint or two afterwards. Used to be that the Soho house in London was the epicenter for many years, and the strength of character involved in the industry then in those kind of boards was phenomenal. I'm not sure if it's still quite the same, but it was all owner founders back in those days and they had a real passion and to be honest, a lot of people were all friends, but they did rut heads on ideas. But so we would have a few beers and the ideas would just keep coming and coming and coming about what could be done, what could be pushed. And just through that, a lot of collective innovation came in the industry. And that's where I'd scott back to the office again. I think we should build this.
Tink Taylor [00:27:52]:
So it's something that we've always liked to do. And I think now, I think especially our development team, someone like name check, a couple of people like Steve Shaw, I think you've met, he's now our CTPO. He was arguably our first ever employee some 20 years ago. He came in with some work experience, went away, got himself a great career, and then we poached back. But our actual first official employee is still one of the head guys involved in our platform. John Atkins was just a couple of weeks later, and a number of their teams have been with us for that period. So the depth and breadth and knowledge they have in this field is just simply phenomenal. So those guys come up with a whole host of ideas about what we should be doing from an innovation front.
Tink Taylor [00:28:41]:
And then you layer that on from what we're seeing in industry, as you say, and then listing to customers is so, so critical and feeding that and putting it all back together. The challenge really is we have to decide what we're not going to do in the next release all the time. So we have the product team come in and present to us as a leadership team, say, this is what we're trying to ratify. These are the things that we're picking and why. And this is where it's come from. These are the voices that we're saying it. And here's the things that we're going to part for now, but we'll do later. But we lay all that out in our public roadmap.
Ben Marks [00:29:13]:
And for the listeners, I'm about to hit Tink with a question that there's been no preparation, really. I don't like to prepare these too much. I like them to be off the cuff. Looking back, is there something that you wish you missed the opportunity or something that you wish you might have done a little bit differently?
Tink Taylor [00:29:36]:
You kind of made me think of that earlier when you mentioned Google. In our very early days, we acquired a company in the UK and we acquired it primarily because we wanted their office furniture, but they did pay per click. So we had a company that did pay per click way before Google, and we were just too busy doing other stuff that we'd never really put our hearts minds into. It wasn't our focus, but yeah, we could have been Google, pay per click. So that's probably the biggest mistake.
Ben Marks [00:30:06]:
I don't really know if there's much money in that. Moving on, but moving on. But in the same vein, from your perspective today, and it really is true, the stories of digital and Tink Taylor getting tinked is a thing that exists in this industry among a certain number of people. But it's really about, for me, the experiences are about just what happens after the event, what happens outside of the conference, and it's about hanging out. It's about hanging out and spending time and having conversations, sometimes late into the evening. Right, so you have, and you have in the past, and you continue to put in a lot of FaceTime on the ground with people listening. And I think that makes you an ideal person to answer, to prognosticate about the opportunities that you see for people coming into the industry today. And I say the industry, you could take that to mean ecommerce, you could take that to mean customer engagement, whatever, however you want to bound that.
Ben Marks [00:31:16]:
But for people coming into the industry today, what are the opportunities available to them and then what do you see opportunity wise going forward?
Tink Taylor [00:31:26]:
Are you meaning players coming into the market as new platform services or people moving into the market in terms of job seeking and what have you?
Ben Marks [00:31:38]:
I think you could answer both questions, probably. I mean, you have employed we all, what, 400 people now?
Tink Taylor [00:31:45]:
Yeah, a bit more than that. I think now these days about 500 is going to lose count after a while.
Ben Marks [00:31:50]:
Yeah. You've been directly and indirectly responsible for hundreds and hundreds of careers over a couple of decades. So I think that gives you the right to talk about, to have some perspective on the industry as it relates to individual contributors or people moving into the space. And then what do you see also out there for potential business opportunities for people or areas of interest?
Tink Taylor [00:32:20]:
Yeah. One bit of advice I've always given people in my team is, and this is something I got from previous employer, actually, but it was kind of make yourself redundant in your role if you get really good at your job and then you can tell the people around you how that's all done, that means I can sort of helicopter you out of that role and elevate you to another position. So we did employ a lot of people and promote a lot of people from within, but that was only possible because they sort of managed their backfill. So I was always able to stretch people and give them opportunities. Growing. We have probably the total number of staff we have today, but over the 20 years, there's probably hundreds, thousands of lives we've touched. And something I always really hope that I take to the grave will be I've made a difference in people's life that we've been able to touch in that way. Going to your question on coming into the industry, shopware now, it's a very fragmented market.
Tink Taylor [00:33:26]:
I think if I was coming into the industry right now, whether that be as a vendor or a service partner, I'd really look at what is my niche, unless you just got tons of money. Because there are some folks that have raised a load of money and you can say you can do everything for everyone, but the reality is you can't even. You've got the likes of Shopify. They're so strong at the bottom end. They've had Shopify plus for however many years they've seen successes there. But where do they really are known for their strength? It's where they came from. Magento, back in the day, same thing, open source to China, go up market, blah blah blah. You tend to be good at where you started your niche and where you got your fame from.
Tink Taylor [00:34:14]:
Results and drive for growth determines that we should look beyond that. But really, are you that good at it? So definitely if I was coming in, I would take a view of what is my niche and make a name for myself in that niche, specialize in it. Maybe it has certain terminology because it's in the finance world or the charity sector. Might be things that technology is the same, but can be talked about in different ways. So make sure you know where you sit in terms of size of client as well. That will determine things like marketing budgets and approach to market. It's very different to going after the small end of SME than it is the large end of corporate enterprise.
Ben Marks [00:34:58]:
That sounds like pretty portable and broadly applicable advice. Hell, for any industry as far as outside of digital. Are you building or advising or investing anyone that you'd like to talk about?
Tink Taylor [00:35:20]:
I have invested in a number of things over the years. Kind of built out that investment portfolio from people within industry and that network that, you know, I invested in a couple of Carl Hartman's businesses. Carl obviously was in, uh, back in the day and that took me out of technology. He had some HR technology that I invested in, but he also has a non alcoholic spirits company that's flying. That was my transition from just doing tech, which is sort of what my specialization is, I guess, into more businesses outside of that. So I've got all sorts of wonderful, weird and wacky things, and some of them I advise on. I like to advise on most, or at least like to know that I can make a difference. So Carl's HR software, I brought in one of sharks from Shark Tank Australia.
Tink Taylor [00:36:22]:
He was a guy, founded Monster.com. There's a bit of a hero, but I knew that with his background in recruitment, bringing him in as an investor, an advisor, and actually I think he's chairman now would make a significant difference that business. So, yeah, I have got my fingers in a few pies and it's just a bit of fun. I do advice, and I'm available for advice if folks need it. But the thing that time has taught me is to only get involved in ones where I know I can help with my connections. Won't be. That's what makes it fun.
Ben Marks [00:36:54]:
Yeah. So whatever the scope, making a difference and being able to actually have a practical impact, that seems to be a common theme with you. Well, take think that takes us to the end of the episode here, but just absolutely fascinating to spend this time with you and get to hear some of these. Just this amazing perspective from two decades in the space, helping to create and curate a significant part of the industry and significant driver of value over time. What an absolute journey. And I can also say it's been a pleasure knowing you for many, many of these years.
Tink Taylor [00:37:38]:
Thank you. I appreciate having you on. I feel honored to be second behind Roy. He's also a good friend.
Ben Marks [00:37:43]:
Well, very well. Okay, folks, well, that is all for us today. I want to thank each and every one of you for listening in and stay tuned for our next episode. Take care.