S13E08: Taking on a global giant, with Andy Hunter (CEO, Bookshop.org)

Andy Hunter
I don't know why I decided to do the math at three in the morning, but I did it at three in the morning. I'm like, how am I gonna get 375,000 customers? Like, how that's? Like, fooling myself? And, you know, I had one of these dark nights of the soul, and but the answer was kind of built into the idea, which is you don't go out and get 375,000 customers. You bring together a group of stakeholders that each have 1000 customers. We brought in 1700 bookstores. We brought in other affiliates and groups like the Authors Guild, and we brought in places like BuzzFeed and New York Magazine and The New York Times that all started linking to Bookshop. We brought in book clubs, we brought in authors. Everybody that we brought in had an audience.

Richard Medcalf
Welcome to the Impact and Multiplier CEO podcast. I'm Richard Medcalf, founder of Xquadrant, and my mission is to help the world's top CEOs and entrepreneurs shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a huge positive impact on our world. Now, that requires you to reinvent yourself and transform your business. So if you're ready to play a bigger game than ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier CEO. Andy, it's great to have you here today. Thank you for joining me. I'm really excited to jump in. You're a man with a mission, and it's a pretty small mission. You've just decided a few years ago to take on a small local business known as Amazon.com. So it sounds like it's a David versus Goliath story or something. So how did that happen? Tell us a bit about your origin story. How did you get into creating a Bookshop.org and taking on one of the biggest companies in the entire world?

Andy Hunter
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm somebody who for whom books have always been a really important part of my life. And I and I believe beyond my personal attachment to books and how important they've been to shaping myself, my worldview, my understanding of myself and others. But also, I just believe that books are a net cultural good that has helped humanity. And you can see the evolution of moral consciousness and society from the point that books really became popularized, how much technological leaps forward have been fueled by books and also just kind of consciousness raising. So I believe that books are an important part of society, and I want them to continue to be a relevant part of our culture. And I think that bookstores I was in the publishing industry. I was publishing a lot of books, and I would see bookstores start to suffer from the massive growth of Amazon. And Amazon went from being 15% of the market to 35% of the market to by the time we launched bookshop, over 50% of the market. And at a certain point, these kind of mom and pop high street bookshops won't be able to survive if amazon grows more like they're already kind of strained. And yet every single independent local bookstore is for their community, an advocate and an activist in the favor of books. And they're staffed by people who love books enough that they want to dedicate their professional lives to them, even though it's not a high paying profession. Booksellers, like librarians, are people who are living their passion. And I always wanted to help these people, and I felt like helping them would help make sure the books stayed relevant and safeguard their future in general and the diversity of books that are available in those shops as well. So I looked at all the different reasons why bookstores were being feeling pressure, and I felt like we needed to create something that was so simple that any bookstore, no matter how small their resources were, could participate in. And that would allow them to compete with Amazon for online sales and allow their customers, their loyal customers, an easy way to support them when they were buying books online.

Richard Medcalf
Thank you. I love it the fact that you identified a need like, these are people I want to serve, people who are standing up for their passion and creating something which is valuable, that I see as valuable in society. And you decided to do something about that. So I love that kind of Michael stakeholder focused. These are people I want to actually serve at the heart of the business. I know that was the beginning of the journey. You launched bookshop.org. You scaled to, I think, $60 million in the first year. You grew 50 X in one month. At one point, we can get into some of that. And I know sort of the outcome of this. Let's just jump forward. Like, where are you now as a business? Could I give this idea of the scale? I know that you've just been recognized by real leaders as part of their Impact Awards because you are, as you say, standing up for small businesses and working for kind of cultural benefit. So I guess that's where that came from. But just kind of when did you set up bookshop.org and how many years later kind of where have you got to in terms of scale and impact, would you say?

Andy Hunter
Yeah, well, we're just getting started, really. We've been around for three years. We launched right before the pandemic hit. And so it was extremely good timing. I was really worried about, like, what's going to happen if nobody counters Amazon and Bookselling in the next three years? Like, how many bookstores are going to get a business? But the it turned out that there was a much more immediate threat on the horizon, which was COVID-19. And because of COVID all these stores had to go into lockdown. When they were in lockdown, they couldn't sell books. They couldn't risk their staff going in to sell books, and they couldn't open their doors. So suddenly, ecommerce became extremely important to bookstores all over the US. And the UK. We launched in the US in January, we launched in the UK in November. Both were launched into incredible booming situations because they shifted all of their attention and focus to online sales. And in a way, we grew three or four years worth of growth in three months. And since then, we've been sort of trying to build the plane in midair, as they say. We started with four employees, and suddenly we were doing like by the time we were in July of 2020, we did $12 million in sales in a single month. At that point, I think we had eight employees. We were barely holding it together. We've had to build a whole infrastructure of whole customer service, team knowledge bases, workflows, integrations with different suppliers, just all kinds of ecommerce basics, and creating a great customer experience, bringing creating loyalty among our customers. So we've been focused on all that stuff. And now that we feel like we've got it down, we are looking to expand into digital content. So we're launching an ebook platform in the US. To kind of counter the Amazon Kindle and help independent bookstores tap into that revenue stream. Because right now, if you like to read ebooks and you want to support local bookstores, there's no real way to do that. And yet ebooks are 20% of the market. We're going to launch ebooks and audio in the UK. So then we're going to have like a feature set that matches Amazon, where Amazon has Kindle and the Amazon has Audible for audiobooks. We want to have the same thing, but we want to have that in a place where people who want to support local small business instead of big business. Our kind of socially conscious, ethical consumers have a way to consume books and literature in a way that fits with their values and supports their local shops.

Richard Medcalf
So tell me what happened on that period where you suddenly grew 50 x with four employees. What was going through your mind? How did you cope with that threat? Huge opportunity. You're like, oh, wow, I've launched my business just at the time when my target market absolutely needs it. Right. So it's a great timing in some way, in many ways. Right, and yet you feeling this stretch before people just started this thing, and we're doing all this we've got all these customers coming, all this inbound. We now need to deliver. What was going on in your mind as a leader? How did you cope with that situation?

Andy Hunter
Honestly, it was day to day. Every day. I would be like, I don't know how I can get through. And like, this day, it was insane for a number of reasons. First of all, I still had a day job at the time that I launched bookshop. I still had a full time job as a CEO of a publishing company. So this was my side gig that suddenly was seven times bigger than my day job. And I was in a small New York City apartment with two kids who suddenly had to do remote learning. So they were on devices doing their homework, or doing their classwork, or in class on Zooms. While I was on Zooms trying to run my company, I was sleeping 5 hours a night dealing with Glitches and hiccups, trying to keep the site up, trying to make sure that all the customers who ordered books got them, trying to onboard bookstores, et cetera, and trying to hire like crazy. It was the most stressful and overwhelming time of my life, and I'm sure all of my employees felt the same way. But the great thing about it is that we had stores, some of whom had been around for 50 years in the UK. We had stores that have been around for 100 years that were reaching out to us and being like, thank God you came along. Without you, we would not have survived the pandemic. And that was just the fuel that kept us going, was how many people were relying on us and the fact that we were able to make a positive difference in a time where there was a lot of pessimism, anxiety and hopelessness and we were out there doing good. And so that made it all worth it.

Richard Medcalf
One question I have is around your team, because obviously you just said your team really stood by you and they were feeling this wave of stuff coming at them as well. And I've now been building out your team, I'm sure, and stabilizing things somewhat after that initial spike. But if your team were to describe you, what words do you think they would use? What would they say really drives you and governs how you show up in the world?

Andy Hunter
I certainly believe that they think I'm like a mission driven visionary. And I think in the beginning they would have said that I wanted to do too much too fast. I don't know if there's a word for that, but I was like, very too ambitious in a way. And because of that, I might have been a little too impulsive. And that's something I've learned over the past three years, is to slow down a little bit and execute things well and fully rather than try to take it all on, seeing the potential in everything and wanting to do everything. I think that's often an entrepreneur's journey is like, you realize I can't do everything by trying to do everything. I'm doing nothing well, and I need to instead focus on the most important thing. So that's been a big part of my professional journey since Bookshelf launched, I've.

Richard Medcalf
Been learning the same thing. If I'm honest, that is so easy that to multiply the number of things that we do actually multiplying. Our impact comes from narrowing fewer things than better. I've got a little sticker on my desk right here. It says remarkable creativity. So thing I'm working on is, how do I bring remarkable creativity into everything I do? The podcast is still more to go, to be honest. I'm sure we can make it more remarkable, but that's the thing I'm really sitting with, because there's so much noise out there, right? There's so many things. How do you make things that really pop? So, yeah, I think that's a great catch. As an entrepreneur, it's so easy. I see them all the time. Projects left, right and center right, the project of the day, strategy of the day. And team can't cope. Team can't cope. So talk about being a mission driven visionary. You just said that that's how the team would see you. So how do you describe your own mission? What is the journey that you're on? I mean, clearly you've given us a sense of what you're up to with the business, but how would you describe by that bigger impact you want to make in the world if you were 25 years from now or whatever it is? Looking back, what would really light you up?

Andy Hunter
Well, I am a firm believer in human scale community. And when I say human scale community, I mean, like, I know my neighbors. I'm part of my local culture. I think that the interaction that we have with people on a day to day basis is important to our mental health and just important to our sense of self. It's where we live most of our lives. And I think that we've been sort of moving in society towards losing that and ending up with these huge multinational corporations that might market to us as if we're individual communities, but they don't really have skin in the game. So what I would really love to have happened is just the way book amazon started with books, and they were just doing books for years, and then they grew into other verticals. And now I don't think books are particularly important to them at all. I would like bookshop to start with books and then help all of these independent small businesses survive and thrive in an age of ecommerce and then move on to other segments of small business. Because just like it's important for in my downtown or High Street for there to be a local bookshop, I also think it's important that there's a local hardware store and that there's a local toy store and that there's a local pet shop and all of these kind of independent, quirky businesses that are individual people's dreams. And I think that they're also great employers. They give people good careers where they feel like meaning in their lives, and they're very valuable to the people who live in those communities. I just think they all need a model where they're allowed to compete with the Walmarts or Amazons of the world and hold their own and let their customers support them and still make it as easy as buying something from Amazon. Right? So I should be able to support my local toy store as easily as I can buy a toy on Amazon. I should be able to support my local beauty shop as easy as I can buy makeup on Amazon. And that's about giving all these tools and all these industries, like the tools that they need to create digital storefronts and easily fulfill orders and build. And so, 25 years. I would love to have taken bookshops, model and replicated it across industries, and strengthened communities in downtown so that they don't end up being like something that we look back on and say, well, wasn't the 20th century great when people would walk downtown and have coffee in a cafe and then visit their local bookstore, et cetera? That should be part of our lives well into the future.

Richard Medcalf
That's so clear and compelling. It's really, really clear vision. Did you start there or has that emerged as you kind of realize this doesn't apply just a book?

Andy Hunter
Yeah, it emerged for sure. I mean, it took a while. Independent booksellers are very independent. They're independent minded and they're a little bit skeptical of technology in general. It's always been an adversary to them. Like, online shopping has always been an existential threat to them. So building trust with the independent bookseller community has been a lot of work, but it's also taught me a lot and taught me a lot about how small businesses operate and how resource constrained they are. And then I was thinking about how they're curators, really? Like, every bookstore is a curator. There's 12 million books in circulation in the United States, and every bookstore is choosing like, these are the 2000 books that we think are important enough to put on our shelves. Right? Well, that's also true of toy stores. Toy stores are curating too. There's Legos and soccer balls and Hula Hoops, and they're deciding which ones that they want to curate. And so they're endorsing things and they're kind of creating a wonderful space that they want to fill with most delightful things that they know about and understand and kind of share those with their communities. And I think that's great. And there's no reason that those shouldn't have an umbrella over them that protects them and facilitates them bringing those goods to their customers because they don't need to be beholden on inventory. Like how much inventory fits into my 1500 square foot shop? If I have wholesalers that have all of the products that I need, why can't I sell direct consumer and have the wholesaler send that product to my local customer or maybe a customer that wants to support my shop but lives in a different state or comes when they're on vacation? We've got shops in Nantucket and in Martha's Vineyard, which are islands off the coast of Massachusetts. And they're huge summer communities. But until we existed, their customers had no way of supporting them year round, but now they do because we have central wholesale, they can send a book directly to a customer, and it makes it so much easier for the stores to administer ecommerce. So, like, kind of figuring out how to make it simple as possible for the customer and how to make it as simple as possible for the business to engage in ecommerce and make that a supportive, collaborative relationship and then scale that across industries.

Richard Medcalf
I hope you're enjoying this conversation. This is just a quick interlude to remind you that my book Making Time for Strategy is now available. If you want to be less busy and more successful, I highly recommend that you check it out. Why not head over to Makingtimeforstrategy.com to find out the details? Now back to the conversation. You talked to the Start about building trust. You said that trust was really important as you built those relationships with those stores. How did you do that? So how did you actually win them over? Was that a marketing campaign? Was it like a want you just go and talk to them? How did you go about solving the trust question?

Andy Hunter
I mean, I went to conferences. I did presentations I made inroads with the trade associations, and I enlisted advisory boards with respected community members from those communities, and I listened. And ultimately, I think the main thing I was able to get across is that this was a collaborative and cooperative venture. This was not a competitive venture. And I think that that is one of my main points that governs. Like, everything I do is like, there are people who look at life as a competition and the are businesses that look at life as a competition, and those businesses want to win. And if they're a startup and they want to disrupt an industry, they want to bring the dinosaurs to extinction and they want to take that market share and win. But we're not like that at all. We're trying to arm the dinosaurs. We're trying to give the dinosaurs ways that they can survive through the next hundred years. We love the dinosaurs. We want to help the dinosaurs, and we want everybody to collaborate and cooperate and create a bright future for everyone. So Bookshop is benefiting authors by making sure that the diverse ecosystem around Books still exists and the support that they get from independent booksellers continues for the next hundred years. Bookshop helps publishers. Bookshop helps book lovers and book buyers. We help bookshops. Everybody has helped, and everybody shares in the success. And so that's a big rationale for everything that we do. And eventually Booksellers, when they understood that, they were able to engage and trust us because they're stakeholders too, and we're trying to benefit them all.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I'd love to pick up on that, Andy, because that for me is this stakeholder panorama that you painted so beautifully just then as opposed to, many say, the more mercenary approach to business, which is like, here's my investors or which might be myself or whatever, stake shareholders and that's the kind of primary driver for business. And here you're kind of talking about all these other stakeholders that are going to benefit Jenny. I often take even leadership teams on who are all these stakeholders that you need to satisfy the demands of. They're going to be conflicting ones, conflicting requirements, but you need to at least understand what people are counting on you for and then you decide what's your vision amongst all of that? And I think it's how I see my own business. If I can help one chief executive or founder multiply their impact in some way, think bigger they've ever done before, or lead their organization in a different way, the well that's going to benefit their people. That's one scaling impact all the people who actually want to give more exciting jobs to do and more filling and more success in that way. But then also those ripple effects on customers, on ecosystems at large. I think that ecosystem thinking is just really important and I think not everybody captures it, but I think you paint a beautiful picture.

Andy Hunter
Well, that's exactly right and it's so important and it's worth getting up in the morning and doing. I haven't been a very competitive person and I'm generally happy when other people are happy and I want other people to feel successful and happy and fulfilled and I think that's a great place to start a socially conscious business. In the beginning when I was just building bookshop and I had raised some money and I was in the product development phase and we hadn't launched yet. I remember waking up one morning at like 03:00 in the morning, and it just hitting me, the math of how many customers we would need to actually survive and make an impact. And I'm like, oh, really? For this to work, we're going to need at least 375,000 customers. I don't know why I decided to do the math at three in the morning, but I did it at three in the morning. I'm like, how am I going to get 375,000 customers? Like how I'm fooling myself? And I had one of these dark nights of the soul, but the answer was kind of built into the idea, which is you don't go out and get 375,000 customers, you bring together a group of stakeholders that each have 1000 customers. We brought in 1700 bookstores, we brought in other affiliates and groups like the Authors Guild, and we brought in places like BuzzFeed and New York Magazine and the New York Times. That all started linking to bookshop. We brought in book clubs, we brought in authors. Everybody that we brought in had an audience, so we ended up cobbling together over 2 million customers. But that's through the power of these small communities and we were supporting all these communities and they were bringing their customers to us. And that's part of the power of this kind of collaborative, cooperative model instead of a competitive model. If everybody's benefiting, then everybody can trust you and everybody can bring their own value to the business.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, that's a beautiful description. Let me turn out to the future for a second. You've talked about this bigger mission that you're on, like there's bookshop and you want to grow that and saw potential from that. You talked about ebooks and audiobooks and then you talked about other shops, other stores, other local community pillars, other key parts of the high street. As you think about that broader mission, which is a huge mission, right? It's exciting, it's a big one. What are you going to need to do to multiply your own impact? Right? Because that's going to be a stretch for anyone. So what do you feel needs to come out of you, emerge from you to help you play at a bigger level, perhaps have more impact than you've.

Andy Hunter
Had in the past? Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is very personal, but, like my learning how to delegate, getting better at hiring and getting better at deciding to do the stuff that only I can do and finding everything that somebody else could conceivably do and try to hire somebody or bring somebody up to the point that they can do that. I think that that kind of specialization is extremely important. It's hard for me and I think it's hard for a lot of entrepreneurs that have been working at a smaller scale where you're a generalist, I'm a generalist and I kind of do everything and I've always done everything. So I can write a press release, I can talk about social media marketing, I can also talk about digital order fulfillment and building a database and all of this SQL and all this stuff. And so eventually I think to really scale your impact, you need to hire people at all of those things that you're good at, who are better at it than you and let the do it and try to figure out what are you best at and focus your role to only do that. And I think that that can also be very inspiring for your team and it can help you be a leader and help all of the people that work for you grow as well because you're not watching their every move or correcting their every move. So learning that and the scaling the company in that way I think is the challenge that I'm on right now. And I hope in two years I will be beyond that challenge and I'll have perfected it right now. It's still a work in progress right through it.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, totally understand that. Well, I think that's always the game, right? It's always actually the journey of multiplying. Our impact is always letting go of the thing that has got us to where we are, like, so paradoxical, because that thing's obviously got us there. And the tendency is to say, we'll just do this faster and we'll be able to get a bit more out of that machine. And that's why so many people work so crazy hours, because they're running fast on their little formula that they've figured out. It's like they haven't changed gears. As I say, you can't shift gears when your foot's on the accelerator, jammed on the accelerator. You have to kind of learn to stop, let go of some things to get to that next level. And I think you described that again really nicely in terms of, yeah, it's easy to be well, you can be a generalist and expert in a lot of areas, but what's your GDS that only you can do well? Hey, I've loved that conversation. Andy. I know time is kind of catching up on this now. If people want to find out more about bookshop, about you, about this over mission that you're on, where should they do that?

Andy Hunter
The can just go to bookshop.org if they're in the US. Or UK bookshop.org and browse the site, read about us more on our about page. It explains our mission and how the site works. They want to learn more about me. This podcast helps, and there was a profile in Wired magazine that came out about a month ago that goes pretty deep. And yeah, anybody that wants to potentially collaborate and sees value in our mission that wants to align with us in any way, feel free to reach out.

Richard Medcalf
Beautiful. Andy, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me, and I wish you all the best as you keep local communities vibrant and all the other good stuff that you're on a mission to deliver. So thank you once again.

Andy Hunter
Thank you.

Richard Medcalf
Well, that's a wrap. If you received value from this conversation, please do leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We're deeply appreciated. And if you'd like to check out the show notes from this episode, head to Xquadrant.com podcast where you'll find all the details. Now, finally, when you're in top leadership, who supports and challenges you at a deep level to help you multiply your impact, discover more about the different ways we can support you@xquadrant.com.