I'm Rachel Horgan, join me each episode as I sit down with a guest co-host covering the latest business stories in the Seattle area. We'll read the news so you don't have to. This is The Weekly. Okay, hey everyone. I always want to say welcome to The Weekly, I'm Rachel, but I know that that intro plays ahead of time, so just know that I'm always thinking about it and I don't say it. I am back in the studio and by studio I mean my living room with our guest today. I heard that my neighbor was doing some construction and that's just me practicing my control issues and letting those go and I can't do anything about it, but hopefully it's not too loud for you guys today. I'm going to introduce my guest right now. I've got Jamila Conley with me. Hello. Hello, Rachel. It's great to see you. It's good to see you. So we met, gosh, a couple of years ago I asked you to be the keynote speaker at one of my events. Oh yeah, that's right. I think that's how we first met. And since then, and we'll kind of get into why, but I've run into you at my event industry networking events. And I'm like, Jamila, what are you doing here? You're in the tech world. What's happening? So it's always fun to kind of reconnect with people. I've been seeing you around town at other events too. Exactly. Now it's been super fun just like seeing you in different, in a different way outside of corporate America. Yeah, I know. We left. We escaped. So a little bit about you. You were most recently the VP of Global Talent Acquisition at F5, which is a really large Seattle Tech company here. And you had previous VP roles there, including working on mergers and acquisitions and IT products. You also worked in senior leadership at T-Mobile in software development. Currently, you're on the board of the Technology Access Foundation, and you're on the board of Seattle Chamber and part of the One Seattle Civic Partnership Committee, which aims to revitalize downtown. You're an adjunct professor at UW teaching program management, but you left the corporate world behind to start We Rise Wines, which will be a wine bar and shop with the aim of highlighting diverse winemakers. Did they get that all right? Yep. You got it all right. I was kind of joking with you before you start recording. So I left the corporate world in January, and I just got back into it today. So I was doing my sexual harassment training, and I was downloading Outlook to my phone, and I was gone for six months and coming back into it. So what's it been like leaving the corporate world? You know, surprisingly, I haven't missed it yet, at least, but I've also been very focused on how to stand up a new business. So I'm pretty busy and using all of my corporate chops for standing up the business right now. But yeah, I don't miss circling back and warm regards. Exactly. I know. I didn't really miss it either, but I do miss the paycheck. So back to the- There's that. Back to the cult I go. So I always ask my guests why they're passionate about what they do. And so for you, you know, I just read through your history and nowhere in there did I read a wine thing. So why wine? Why passionate about it? Oh my gosh. I'm just a- a- a for a few years, I've been trying to figure out what's next in my career, and I've always enjoyed wine, a bit of a wine snob some people say. And one of my core values is around driving diversity and inclusion, something I did a lot alongside my job. And as I got more into the wine world and learning more about diverse winemakers, I saw a gap and I thought about my operational experience. I thought about my DNI drive and my network and how could I help the wine industry, something that I enjoy and take all my corporate chops to a different industry. And so mixing my- my passion and my pleasure, if you will, with wine, you know, that led me to where I am today and starting we rise wines. That's awesome. And when does it open? Oh, isn't that the question- isn't that the question of the day every day? Actually, we just started construction. We're going to be at 2nd of Stuart downtown. So it'll be about a four-month bill, so around October, November. But in the meantime, we'll be starting a wine club and engaging- engaging our future consumers over the next couple of months until the bar opens. That's awesome. I'm excited about it. All right, let's get into our news stories. We have number one, Microsoft layoffs. Number two, a new interim police chief. Number three, there's an increase in scammers these days. Number four, a little bit of a wine deal it went through, and number five, we'll give you a little update on the Kroger merger that we talked about a few episodes back. So, ready to get into it? All right. Microsoft layoffs want- we've seen so many tech layoffs, and I thought we were kind of done with them, but alas, they didn't say how many in the article, but they- I don't know how many- do you know how many people you have to lay off for it to be considered a layoff versus just like a firing? Oh. I just- I don't know the answer. I don't remember the answer. I want to say that it has to be more than, I think, 6%, but do not quote me on that. Yeah, yeah. I should have looked that up ahead of time, but I was just curious because they, you know, the title of the article says layoffs, but then it doesn't say exact numbers. So, I have to believe it's a significant amount to make the article. They looked at posts on LinkedIn, and it appears to have affected product and program management roles. Oh, that's what you do. That's part of my core. I know. That hurts. But it is the beginning of their fiscal year, so that is part of probably why they started making these cuts to make their expenses lower for the next fiscal year. Last month, they cut 1,000 jobs, and in January, they cut 2,000 jobs. So, they are really cutting down. One reason why in the article is that it could be because of spending on infrastructure for AI. Yeah. The robot's taking our jobs. Yeah. You know, I think there's two things that the tech companies continue in to recover from. And I'm just saying that these are my opinions and what I have seen coming out of the tech industry is during the pandemic, a lot of tech companies got an unanticipated lift in demand because if you think about it, you had a lot of companies out there that did not have work from home policies. You definitely did not have 100% of your workforce sitting at home. So, a lot of tech companies benefited from that because once we were all locked in our houses, and it's like, "Well, the show must go on," they had to equip people. For the equipment, the bandwidth, when you think Microsoft, you think about like Azure, their cloud platform, so to increase that pipeline of what is needed to then power everyone to have a computer at home and anything else, that was a lot of demand. And so, tech companies started hiring more. They were selling more. A lot of tech companies, you know, they had some of their best years during the pandemic. So what we're seeing is that demand was kind of a one-time thing. It's a pandemic for a reason because it's not going to continue to happen for another, you know, hopefully centuries. Yeah. Right. But do you think, like I've heard that argument of like they were right sizing for the pandemic, but that was like a while ago. Do you feel like these layoffs are still coming off of that? So I think there's a yes. So the short answer is yes. So one, as that demand funnel, and we all remember the supply chain shortage, so that also gave a, again, unanticipated or anticipated lift because then as those chips and the supply started rolling in, there was still the sales and the revenue to support a lot of what that workforce was. So now in the last like year to 18 months, a lot of tech companies are starting, ever starting to realize like, okay, we've cleared the backlog of everything that happened because of the supply chain shortage shortage. We now can't support our labor force that we have because that demand isn't coming back. So they're starting to flatten out. So which means you have to start tightening the, you know, your belt buckle a bit. And thinking about, okay, how do we control these costs? And we're also a public company. So they've also projected to the street what they're planning to make. So yeah, you're going to continue to see that. And then with AI, because I don't want to discount that either, is that so it's a lot of cleanup from the pandemic to put it in kind of late terms of, you know, what you're continuing to see, and you see the layoffs are getting smaller and smaller now. So what we saw last year, unfortunately with the thousands and thousands of layoffs, that was kind of really the right, the right sizing from the pandemic. And now you're starting to see, okay, how do we cut our costs and how do we improve productivity? And that's where AI is starting to come in, where as AI is helping us improve productivity. Yes, you're not going to need as many humans. And even though you need humans to program AI, et cetera, but you're going to see some of those more administrative jobs and administrative tasks go down and you won't need as many people. So unfortunately, I do think this is going to be a trend is not going to be like what we saw a year and a half ago, but it, but you will continue to see this. Yeah. So when you were at F5, did you have to deal with layoffs personally? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Global talent acquisition, yeah. Yeah. So and unfortunately, during the pandemic, when jobs are on the rise, they couldn't hire enough recruiters. So there were so many recruiters out in the industry, especially tech recruiters. So which meant we went through a layoff last spring. And with me owning a global talent acquisition team, my team was the biggest team in HR. That was impacted by that because hiring had slowed so massively last year. So yeah, it is just like, and it's hard because you have to think and the balance with layoffs is you both have to think about how do we save the cost and how do you think about. And I should say, you don't start with, at least if you're a human first company, you don't start with how many people, you know, are we going to let go? You start with what other levers can we pull? Yeah. So I know when I just feel like you're seeing that a lot like the consulting companies come in and say, like, here's an idea, they ever be off and they're like, okay, I guess. Yeah. Well, and it's, you know, it's like, I think that's the part that what we've noticed through a lot of layoffs over the past couple of years is that you see the companies that take a human first approach and you see the companies that don't. And some of the horror stories you hear is just like, wait, you received an email that said you were laid off, you know, and it's just like, like I said, at a five and our approach was what are the other levers we can pull? Where are their systems? We can pull back, you know, where can we cut some budget, things we don't need? And then as a very last lever, it's okay, we're still not meeting our objective. Now how do we start thinking about our resources? But then how do you take care of them as also as you're exiting them? As you know, they are friends and they've done a lot of great work for the company. Yeah. I think what's hard is that when you do layoffs, if you're not also changing your goals and your, but like what you're supposed to hit, because if you're laying off, okay, we're closing down this whole department, we're not going to do that project anymore. Like fine, but I've been a part of companies where they're like, we're doing the exact same number of events, but you have three less people, you know, so that becomes hard. And I would say that that's something that's a reality. That's very hard to balance that there are definitely those things that you can completely shut down, we're not going to do it. And then there's those things that the show still has to go on and you have to manage and start thinking creatively and how are we going to do this differently. And that's where AI can be helpful if you implement it appropriately. Yeah. One more question on this and we'll move on. But speaking of your time as VP Global Talent Acquisition, is there anything you want people to know as your time doing that work in terms of hiring or any kind of advice for the people or something you learned? You know, one of the things that I was really focused on when I was in that role was how can we be more proactive? And how do you think about talent not from a perspective of is there a requisition open now? And but always thinking about where is that great talent? And it was something that I tried to ingrain into the team because I stepped in, like I said, when hiring was slow and a lot of recruiters were telling me, oh, there's not really much to do, et cetera, where I was trying to get them in a mind frame of, hey, this is the time that you go out and talk to talent, even if you don't have a role, but finding great talent. Getting a pipeline. Exactly. It's just like it's about building those relationships, those pipelines and getting people excited about the company. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Moving on to our next story. New interim police chief, so I guess this sort of, I typically don't cover government or city council or things like that, but the police chief is so integral into the business world and especially downtown and they themselves are a business, basically. So it felt, you know, you brought this article to me and it felt relevant. So Adrian Diaz was the police chief for four years. And then after some sexual harassment complaints and a few other complaints, he was out, stepped down fired. I don't know. He left. And in his place is retired Sue Rarr. She is, she was the King County sheriff and she's coming in as quote, a clean up chief with an expiration date. So basically, she's free to hire and fire. She is responsible for finding the next police chief. But there's no, they're basically treating it as like, you are the police chief, like don't kind of forget that you're the interim for a little bit and you can do whatever you want. Well, not whatever you want, but you know what I mean. So you actually had the privilege of seeing her speak. Is that right? Yeah. So what are your initial thoughts on this? And what did you get from hearing her speak? So it was, it was a pleasure and an honor to be able to actually hear her speak live and hearing her thoughts on how we need to work closer, like her key themes were, how do we work closely with the community? Because there is a fractured relationship with the community and the police department. And how do we build that trust again? And then also how the police department works closer with businesses, especially small businesses, and opening up a channel of like, what do businesses need? So we can have a safer, better, cleaner city. And I thought that was, it was really insightful, especially as a new small business owner, to know that someone's out there listening and she's taking the time and going around to every roll call, kind of trying to speak to every police officer. She's looking at changing, speaking of talent acquisition of how we build pipeline to get more police on the streets, as well as taking a tougher stance. I know, and like I said, it's like, we're not trying to get into any kind of politics of what's right, wrong, et cetera. But you know, there are some decisions made in the past that have impacted what we see when we walk the streets of especially downtown Seattle. And I know that she wants to take a harder stance on that. And I think that that's needed for us to truly think about how do we fully revitalize Seattle and bring it back and make it a place where businesses can thrive and want to be again, and what that looks like and what's needed from the police department to make that happen. Yeah, and I was thinking about it, so she's sort of coming into quote unquote a mess is what the article seems like, both internally and externally. So she was saying she's trying to fix things internally in the department, and then she's going to kind of go out into the community and try and fix things there. It kind of reminded me of this term called the glass cliff. Have you heard of that? Yes, I have. I have. So for people, listeners that haven't heard of it, it's similar to the glass ceiling. So when women can only go so far in terms of leadership, the glass cliff is basically when a company is like doing terribly, and many things from years behind have gotten them to this place, and then they bring a woman into the leadership role, and they just have a higher chance of failure because they're coming into a really messy place. But they, and then the other reason why women tend to take these roles is that they think like this is the only chance I'll get to be CEO of XYZ company, even though it's kind of a disaster right now, I'll take it. And then it just doesn't really set them up for success. And then you have these stats of like, well, X amount of women failed at the CEO role. I'm like, well, would they walked into it? So I thought what was interesting about this article is that they pretty much blatantly say that this is kind of a glass cliff like they're bringing, they say that she's coming in to clean this mess up, you know, yeah, and you know, when you frame that question, I was just like, this is a great example of that, but I also felt a little bit defensive if you will. Yeah, tell me. Oh, well, gosh, how do I put this is that a lot of times that I've seen a lot of women, myself included, where it's just like you're handed this mess and it's like, well, nobody else could do it. Maybe you can do it. And it is unfair because you can end up being scapegoat. At the same time, there's also a lot of examples where, yeah, it took a strong woman to come in and cut through the quote unquote boys club to be able to get to the facts and get and actually make an impact. Yeah. And so, and if you go in with the right criteria and the right skill set and background that like, I firmly believe that listening to Sue talk and what's ahead of her, she has the right skills, she has the right background and she set out the right criteria of what she needed. So you highlighted earlier that basically she's given the leeway of she can do whatever she wants to get it, get it fixed. But part of that was her criteria of her conversation with Mayor Harrell of, okay, if I do this, here's the things I need to make this happen. And I think a lot of times women aren't always given that opportunity to your point that they are given something and they're not, and they're not able to negotiate, okay, I'll take this on, but here's what I need. And I think to avoid that glass cliff that you also have to be really strong in defining what, what will success look like if I'm going to take this mess on. And sometimes it's unavoidable that women are just thrown in things and they don't have it, they don't always have a voice. So, and I think that's, that's kind of the balance. And I think that's where my defensiveness comes in because I'm like, she's kind of been a badass of defining like, here's what I think needs to happen and here's what I need to make this happen. Yeah, definitely. Anything else you want to say on this one? Um, no, I'm like, I'm really excited to see where she goes, what she does. And I am like sitting at the ready as a small business owner of, yeah, I'm just ready to raise my hand of like, whatever it is, I'm ready to support and lean in because I'm really passionate about Seattle and revitalization of Seattle. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, our third story is about the increase in scammers. It's funny because again, I mentioned I had my first day of back to corporate America today and the amount of like, anytime I try to log into something, put my password in and then I have to get my face ID onto my phone and then go back and put another password in and then I have to get admin access. Anyway, I was getting annoyed by it, but then I read this article about how much fraud is happening. And I'm like, okay, I guess I guess I'll do this. But the article is all about how internet scamming is increasing, especially with AI and law enforcement, A, can't keep up. B, some law enforcement doesn't think it's as important, especially if it's a small dollar amount. The examples of these can be something extreme, like somebody calls you and says they have a family member hostage and they play the voice of your family member, especially with AI, and then they need lots of money that are wire transferred. A smaller example can be those emails that you get that's from your boss, you think, that says, hey, can you do me a quick favor and go get a gift card? So it's all these types of fraud that the article is talking about. But I wanted to bring this into the conversation because F5, I guess from my googling, it specializes in preventing online fraud and security and things like that. So this can't be surprising to you to hear that it's increased? No, it's not surprising at all. And it's one of those that AI, like for me personally, I'm kind of on the fence, right? It's just like, it's fascinating software that can do some amazing amazing or fascinating technology, I should say, not software that can do some amazing things. But it also can cause some amazing harm. And so you have a lot of security companies like F5 who are trying to race against that clock of one, how do you continue to build your own product that is going to, so like one of our products and one of the acquisitions we did was shape security, which helps protect against bot attacks in corporate network environments. So you think you're a bank of America account in a bot that's just like trying every combination of username and passwords to get in that we have technology or F5 has technology that detects like, hey, here's a bot, let's shut it down, here's a bot, let's shut it down. But you know, it's like F5 and everyone in that security space is trying to race against the clock of, okay, now how do we get in front of AI? Now how do we block, you know, it's just like, it's kind of amazing to me that I feel like the criminals that come up with these different scams, if they just use, you know, 10% of that effort on doing something good for the world, you know, every time I get like, yeah, because every time I get one of these emails, I would not even email the text messages, they drive me crazy, I get so many of them now of the, you know, oh, hi, Alice, you know, this is James. How's your day? And it's like, they're just getting you to respond. It's just like, you're just constantly blocking, blocking, blocking, but they're trying to play on your use, they're using what's called social engineering, trying to play on people's feelings and emotions that, you know, it would be normal that if somebody called you and there's a wrong number, you just say, oh, sorry, wrong number. But I remember when that first started about, I don't know, I feel like it's been about a year or so since they've really started that, that at first I'd be like, hey, you have the wrong number. And then they start trying to engage you and I'm just like, yeah, I'm not responding anymore. We're done here. But it's, it's, it's, it's an epidemic that the public has to be educated and even with tech companies trying to solve the issue is happening at such an alarming rate and especially with AI, it's even more important that people are aware of what's out there, what could be a scam being more vigilant on not clicking on links, you know, if you get a email that may even seem legit, double checking the phone number, like it just happened to a friend of mine where she got a text that was like, Hey, this is Jamila calmly, which to me, should have been the first thing that threw it off, you're not a first-last name, exactly. I need your help with something. And you know, it was just like, and then she responded and then immediately it was like, I need you to go buy a gift card and then she was like, ah, I just got a scam. Nevermind. Yeah. But you know, it's just like the things like that of like double checking, what's the number that is coming from, you know, not clicking on, on links and really being vigilant on like, how are we double checking that the source of truth is the true source of truth. Yeah. I know it's, it's a little depressing because I don't really have a good answer. And I think the article is talking about what's the role of the banks, like if the banks are seeing large transfers happening, but that's also like, how much can they really do too? So. Exactly. It's like, you hear about some of these things, something I heard about recently that didn't realize was like this whole sim swap technology where a lot of sims now aren't actual hardware. The sim card and your phone. They're like e-sims. And so, you know, people can steal your phone number and it's just like, and it's a very short amount window that they're using because if you think about it, like if someone stole my sim right now, we're doing this podcast. So I'm not going to be on my phone for the next 30, 40 minutes, right? But inside of that 30, 40 minutes, they have to try to figure out like, okay, what can we steal with this phone number? How can we try to break in or whatever to get my information? Because obviously then I go to check or try to send a message of what works. So then I call T-Mobile and we get it sorted out. But yeah, they've gotten that, they've gotten that crafty that, okay, if we steal this, what can we do with it inside of like 20, 30 minutes? There's not all you can do too. I had people were texting me and they're like, hey, I just got a missed call from this. Like random numbers would be like, hey, I just got a missed call. So somebody had figured out how to get access to my phone number to call random people. And it came up as my phone number. And then I went online to report it and there's just, there's not a ton you can do. You can submit your number in, but eventually it went away. So anyway. Watch out everybody. Yeah. Let's stop scaring each other on that. Although one time I did get a text from a wrong number and then I text back and end up being like a real person and I went on a date. Didn't work out. Didn't work out. It was with a guy. It was years ago. Okay. Our fourth story is a little bit of a wine deal. Yes, I brought this in so we could talk about your wine, but it is newsworthy. Charles Smith sold substance wines label to Larkspur. So House of Smith wine company is the largest independently owned winemaker in the state. And if you recognize Jet City winery over in Georgetown, they operate that. That's how I recognize them. So let's talk wine. I already kind of asked you why you started. We rise wines, but what's going on in the wine industry right now? Like what should our everyday people know is it? So you know, what's interesting in the wine industry right now is a few things. And I think similar to tech and again, my own conjecture is, you know, people aren't drinking wine as much and actually kind of a funny story. So one of the events I just saw you at a week or so ago, you know, I was pouring non-alcoholic wines and had a few people taste wines, you know, buy a couple of bottles of wine. That was great. Next day, I did another event where I was pouring real wine and I decided, oh, let me just grab a couple of bottles of this non-alcoholic. So I have, you know, another option for people who don't drink. And honestly, I didn't think that would be touched. I ended up having so many people asking me, hey, can I buy a bottle? No, like, and I hadn't brought inventory to sell because it was just like a tasting that I had to kind of think on the fly of like, well, and it was, it was actually out of five. It was part of their pride event that I was just like, well, you know what? Yes, I can sell, I can sell you bottles and I'll do a drop off next week. Smart. And so I sold a half a case of the non-alcoholic wine and I was like, what in the holy heck is happening right now? Okay. Well, that's a smart business decision that you were able to, like, because you choose which wines you're selling at your bar shop, right? So smart. You chose a bunch of those. Exactly. And what that opened up for me was I knew that I wanted to have non-alcoholic selections in the bar once we opened so that, you know, everything about what I'm doing is meant to be inclusive, you know, and it's meant to bring community and bring people together. But what I hadn't really thought about is that, Oh, there's a significant market here. And it's changing how I think about how we may do future promotions. They dry January, things like that. But yes, there is this, you know, right now, there's kind of a surge in non-alcoholic. And so not great for the wine industry, but for what I'm doing is great for me to understand the different markets out there. And I do think that it's going to come back. Everything, you know, has a cycle and, you know, during the pandemic and where I was going with tech, my, comparing to the tech industry was, you know, everybody was stuck in their houses. Everybody was drinking other people were drinking more, you know, and so, you know, it's just like, so I think like, and a lot of, you know, most of us, myself included, all game weight during the pandemic. Yeah. So now everybody's like, okay, we're back to real life. How do I lose weight? What do I need to cut out? What's going on? So which means that alcohol sales have been down. And, you know, it's just like, and I really do believe that it will balance back out. But I also think it's healthy because it doesn't mean that people choose black and white one or the other. I also think people are looking for balance and great, I'll go out, I'll have two glasses of wine. But if I'm not ready to stop drinking, I might switch to non-alcoholic. So I think people are making different choices, but I don't, I personally don't see it as something that's showing a trend that is going to stay that way, because also what I'm seeing in wine is that there's a lot of new players coming to the market. And with my focus on diversity in wine, I'm just finding so many new labels and people who are really hungry for being mission-based in the industry that's traditionally seen as exclusive, and if you don't know wine, you're not really good enough to drink good wine. Yeah. And I see a big shift there as well. Do you have any stats on, I'm putting on the spot here, but for diverse winemakers, do you know how many percentage of winemakers are diverse? Yeah. So all in, including women, it's just about 20% of diversity in wine. For women winemakers, I think it's 18% for, and this is all in the US. So I'm not talking global, just US stats, Hispanic, Latinx winemakers make up about 15%. Black winemakers make up about 1%. Wow. Yeah. And so it's kind of shocking, and to just like, even put that in more perspective, here in Washington, I believe we have 1,100 wineries, and only 37 of those are women. Whoa. Yeah. Exactly. Do you know how many... Black? Uh, five. Maybe six. Yeah. Because I just learned about a new one down in Tacoma that popped up, so yeah. So about five or six that I know of offhand, so yeah, there's a lot of work to be done. And to me, there's a lot of work in how you bring the community along, and I do think that also some of the sales having a downward trend right now is that Gen Ziers, they're more picky on where they spend their dollars and how things are mission-based. So for me, being in downtown Seattle was also important, like I said, because it's about our community, and how are you bringing people together versus the exclusivity of come out and find us where we are, and you know, and it's just like, and I really want to bridge that gap. That's awesome. Well, I love the work that you're doing, and I'm excited to continue to watch the journey and run into your events. Thank you. Uh, we've got one more story, and then we'll close out because we are both so hot. Do you see me physically dripping over here? No, you can't see it, but it's happening. Um, okay. So Kroger. Uh, as a reminder, Kroger is QFC and Fred Myers. Albertsons is Safeway and Hagen, and obviously Albertsons. So a while back, they were trying to merge and the FCC was like, hey, no, that'll become a monopoly. So you can't do that. And then Kroger, this article is there like, well, what if, okay, I hear you, but what if we sell these 124 stores in Washington, the plan talks about all of the US, but I'm going to focus on walking Washington, we'll sell off these 124 stores to CNS wholesale grocers, which I had not heard of, um, in order to get this approved, um, it's not approved right now, but that's just what they're pitching. So I brought, I brought this into the conversation because you have a background in mergers and acquisitions. And honestly, I just think it's interesting. So what do you, what's something you think people don't know about when, when working with merging and acquiring other companies, things like that? Oh, yes. But before I go there, I was, when I was reading through this article, one of the things that a really, um, stuck out to me, because they showed the list of stores they would close. And one of them was my, the store I go to in West Seattle, I was like, wait, not my store. Why would they close my store? Um, so anyway, not here or there, but you know, it impacts all of us. Yeah, exactly. Well, no. And it's like, you see that because I also saw that they're closing the, um, they were proposing to close the Capitol Hill store that's been there forever. And that would be a, have a huge impact on that community. Well, they say we're not closing the other people will come in and, oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. And they're like, we're not going to lay anybody off. I, that's what they say. I mean, who knows? Yeah, exactly. And well, and I, and actually I thought about that as just like, well, they're not closing, but I just always feel that, you know, you say that, but they can change their mind, right? They can change your mind and, and this goes, and this, this is a segue way into your, um, your question is a lot of times the decision to acquire a company or merge with a company, obviously it can be strategic. It can be, um, to be able to drive revenue. Sometimes it was called, you know, a fire sale like, Hey, you know, this, this, this company is going under. So we want to, you know, we want to save it. We'll bring it into our portfolio and it helps us build our portfolio, et cetera. Um, but almost 95% of acquisitions fail. And the reason is, is culture. I did not know that. Okay. Yes. And, and it's because there's not enough focus put on culture. So, and like I said, this ties into what we were just talking about is like, sure, CNS could come in, operate stores. No one, you know, gets fired, but depending on what that company culture is, that doesn't mean that as a consumer, we won't feel it, but we were just talking last episode about righted buying Bartels, exactly, and you can feel it and it's different and different culture and the employees are to the, yes, yes. Exactly. And it's just like, and that's a huge factor on the profit margin, how the customer loyalty, et cetera. And so, you know, culture, sometimes it gets overwritten by the things that you can quantify. And so there's not always enough change management put into how do you integrate these companies together. And even if you have a great process of integrating the companies, you can do everything right. But if the cultures don't match and if you don't have a strong plan of how to bring that together, you can have that business be impacted in ways that you almost can't ever really recover from. And so, you know, those are, that's something that is extremely important. The other thing where I've seen acquisitions go awry is that again, these decisions are made C-suite level, board level, you know, again, it could be strategic. I've like, oh, they have a product, we need that product because it's where we're trying to go, let's buy them, put them in, and now we can say we're X, whatever, right? I don't like saying X because of Elon Musk, but you know, it's just like, so you have people who do that, but then what they're not actually thinking about is how are operations actually work? How, you know, what systems do they have? What do we have? And I definitely have seen this happen because there's a thought of again, well, by the time they buy them, they have what we need, we'll be able to sell it in this way and we should see, you know, 10X growth. But then you get into the actual integration, and what I ran was the integration function, and you start to get into that nitty gritty of, well, yes, they have sales force. We have sales force. The way their platform set up is completely different from ours. And to actually get this integrated, this is going to be clunky, or it's going to take a lot of time, or it's going to cost more than we thought it was going to cost. And it's those factors that really are going to drive the success of the acquisition beyond just paying for the company, the product, its people, whatever. And those are the areas that sometimes people just actually lose the focus on how to create the long-term value. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is kind of look at some intangible things like culture and things that are kind of hard to measure, and then also talk to your ops people and figure out exactly how hard that will be. Yeah, exactly. As an ops person myself, I relate to that. I'm like, you just thought you could do what now? Right. Exactly. And so that was kind of me. Yeah. And then I went to it, it was just like, oh, yeah, this isn't going to work for a while. And then I have executives like, well, what do you mean? We said this. And I'm just like, yeah. I don't know. It's not even like a re-company. Exactly. All right. Well, Jamila, we're at time. So is there anything you want to plug besides, well, you can talk more about we rise winds, but I got to say that slower. I'm such a fast talker. Is there anything you want to plug to the audience? Not really. But go to my website, yeah, look forward to some great wine and you can follow our progress on WeRiseWines.com. We have a newsletter. We're on socials and like I said, we will be open this fall and we will have an event space. So if you're ever looking to do corporate or private events, you can look us up and we'll have an event space once we're open. And thank you. Thanks for having me, Rachel. This has been incredible. Wow. This went really fast. Yeah, you know, it does. Well, thank you so much to do that. This has been The Weekly with Production Assistance from Nick Patreon. If you'd like to what you heard, rate us and write a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We love listener feedback. So if you have any story suggestions, comments or complaints, email us at info@theweeklyseattle.com. Make sure to check back next Sunday for the latest local business news. We'll see you next time. Bye. (chimes) [BLANK_AUDIO]
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About guest co-host Jamila Conley - Founder & CEO, WeRise Wines:
Jamila was most recently the VP of Global Talent Acquisition at F5 and held VP roles in the company prior to that including Mergers & Acquisitions and IT Products. She worked in senior leadership at T-Mobile in software development. Jamila currently sits on the board of the Technology Access Foundation, the Seattle Chamber and is on the One Seattle Civic Partnership committee working to revitalize downtown. She is an adjunct professor at UW teaching program management. She left the corporate world behind to launch WeRise Wines which will be a wine bar and shop with the aim of highlighting diverse winemakers.
Host Rachel Horgan:
Rachel is an independent event producer, emcee and entrepreneur. She worked for the Business Journal for 5 years as their Director of Events interviewing business leaders on stage before launching the weekly podcast. She earned her communication degree from the University of San Diego.
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Website: www.theweeklyseattle.com
