00:00.85 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Welcome to the ModGolf podcast, where we speak with the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the disruptors, and the influencers who are shaping the future of golf I am your host, Colin Weston, and we're rolling with Season 20. This is our second episode. And before we get started here, I did want to thank, I'm very excited about this, as we have a new sponsor for our podcast this season, and that is Big Swing Media. And they do some really interesting things in the golf business space. I had Jimmy Roberts, who's one of the co-founders of Big Swing Media on the podcast, and they love what we were doing so much that they decided to jump on board as a partner here. So I'm going to talk about them a little bit later, but now we're going to get to the main stage here today and that I'm going to introduce in just a moment. The founder and the CEO of RepSpark. And if you're not familiar with RepSpark, they are a commerce layer for golf and outdoor lifestyle brands. They connect that wholesale B2B e-commerce platform that is built for apparel, footwear, and accessory brands. And they have a focus in golf, which is why we're here today. And that woman, that founder is Megan Butcher. Megan, welcome to the ModGolf podcast. Thanks for joining us today! 01:27.15 Meghann Butcher - founder and CEO of RepSpark Thank you for having me, excited to be here. 01:29.28 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so I saw what you were doing with RepSpark and I love entrepreneurial backs stories and yours, from what I understand, is certainly not a straight line and is an interesting one. So I'm really excited and curious to learn that. But hey, Meghann, I'm going to start with this question. I always love to ask this one. You and I haven't spoken before, so I don't know if you may be a scratch golfer that played competitively. Maybe you've never picked up a club before in your life. I don't know. So I'm just going to put this out there. Your connectivity to golf and that first golf experience you had so who who was that person if you've had one that introduced you to golf and what was that experience like? 02:10.21 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So I probably have a more unique one. I'm not the strongest golf player although hopefully when my three boys are grown and gone I will have more time to dedicate to golf however the first time I got introduced to golf I was dating my now husband. And he had the great idea to take me golfing. He is an avid golfer. i think a two handicap or something he's really good. My dad has always owned apparel and footwear companies more in the action sports side so i grew up in a very casual family beach family if he ever left the house in a collared shirt we knew the bankers were coming. That was the household i grew up in so my husband said "come play golf with me this will be really fun but you have to wear a collared shirt". I didn't own a collared shirt. I don't really know where to get a collared shirt. I grew up in tank tops and sundresses. 03:04.40 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 03:06.67 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So we went to the club and that was my first experience in a pro shop. really seeing a whole different type of apparel than i had grown up with or been used to. We played a couple rounds and had a lot of fun. And then he got me my first pair of golf shoes for Valentine's Day. Super romantic. i didn't really know what i was looking for but that's what i got. So i'll play with my son quite often but that was the first time i was introduced to golf 03:39.99 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Love that. So on that note, when you walked in and saw the women's golf apparel, what were your initial thoughts coming from an action sport and a surf culture? 03:48.29 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark That was so long ago at this point i think about oh gosh maybe 22-23 years ago and golf has changed so much since then. Especially in the woman's apparel, it has gotten more casual. There's so many more up and comers and newcomers entering the scene. We see so much more crossover now than before where you see. Brands that maybe didn't specialize in golf are moving into golf. We see golf brands moving into lifestyle. You see pickleball and tennis. And it's cool. At that point in time, I don't remember going in and thinking, wow, there's so many fashionable options in here whereas now going into a golf shop connected to a golf course. It's a true shopping experience. It's really fun. 04:40.20 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, yeah. Well, I've had quite a few founders of women's golf apparel brands and one of the things I've had this as a recurring gripe i guess we can say or at least comment or observation is they can They said "I can tell that all women's golf apparel was designed by men" because it was all boxy it wasn't flattering and we wanted to change that. 05:05.27 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast And it has changed over the last couple of decades. Okay, we're not going to go too much down that women's golf fashion rabbit hole right now because I want to bring it back to you and RepSpark. So, okay, let's jump right in here, Meghann. So you've built a company that is the dominant platform for wholesale in golf and other sports. So for our listeners that may not be familiar with RepSpark yet and may not be in the day-to-day of retail, can you explain the fundamental problem at RepSpark has created to solve and what was the pain point that you saw in that industry 19 years ago especially in golf, that made you do what you did with RepSpark. 05:41.91 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark yeah so before RepSpark you are talking about a very disconnected ecosystem And I'm going to focus really on golf because it is a very unique industry. If you think about it, It's a Pro shop, a facility, some brick and mortar establishment that is connected to something else, a club or a golf course. And that is not their main focus, typically. 06:10.53 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It is not just like your brick and mortar store that's in a strip mall or on the corner where you may go visit. It's the same members a lot of times that are playing it at a private club. A public club, you're going to have those repeat purchasers. And so it is very different. So I'll talk about golf specifically, but it was a very disconnected ecosystem. You have the brands. whether that's hard goods, soft goods. footwear apparel accessories And then you have these buyers at these facilities. Some of the larger facilities will have a buyer that's just for that pro shop and a merchandiser. 06:52.74 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Some of the facilities, it's a PGA professional who would rather be giving lessons and booking tee times for members, rather than stocking the pro shop. And so it's a very convoluted ecosystem where people have different priorities. And so what we aim to do is connect those brands, making their making visibility into inventory, product. The capability to customize a shirt. So if you go into a golf club, most likely it'll say the name of the club somewhere on it, whether it's a hat or a bag. So being able to facilitate that type of order entry. So that when the brands got the orders, they knew it was a good, correct order. Product was going to be shippable. Those colour existed. They didn't ship product anymore that had the logos on the wrong side or the wrong logo on the wrong side. 07:46.94 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Then for the buyers at the pro shop or at the green grass facility, we just made their life easier. So now they're servicing a member. The member comes up and asks them a question. When can I get this? Does this come in a different colour? You don't have the vest in my size. Well, it's different. They can't just go online in an e-commerce store and go buy the vest. They want it with the logo on it. And so it just facilitates on the buyer side, that membership experience. And also they can log in, they can track packages, they can place their own orders, they can place special orders. They can merchandise product assortments. So it really facilitated that communication and streamlining the operations between the brands and the buyers. 08:32.97 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast So to expand on that. So you have a two-sided marketplace. 08:37.47 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Absolutely. 08:37.51 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Perhaps you can define that for our listeners. Most of them. Probably know what that is, but we'll make sure that we clarify that and don't make that that assumption. So you talked about some of the pain points that you saw on the on the buyer side. How did you at the beginning manage to convert them to show that value proposition of how you can relieve that pain and add more value for them? And at the same time, talk about your early business model and how you looked at how quite bluntly, how how did you make money originally and how has that evolved over time? 09:08.54 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So we did start actually in the action sports. 09:12.62 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 09:12.99 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And we looked at this and thought there there must be a better way than these sales reps out there with their pad and paper. Marking down orders. Taking counts filling the product in these stores and so we started in the action sports and really built the same thing, a conduit way for the sales reps to place orders. 09:34.12 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 09:34.51 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Next, we thought, "well, wouldn't this be a lot easier if the B2B buyers could log in when they wanted to"? A lot of times they're taking inventory stock after hours or again, they're looking for a specific order. They're looking for a specific item. So to make their life easier, they can log on and again, see inventory, look at orders, place their own orders instead of tracking down a rep if they need five items. 09:58.97 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And that's where we started. And we did a lot of education at first. um It was interesting because it moved from a sales rep tool, which is why it's called RepSpark. And then we moved into this B2B buyer two-sided marketplace experience where they could really self-serve when they wanted to. We still see such an importance with the wrap. They're there for a lot of the pre-books, merchandising, making sure that the product selection is correct for each of the brick and mortar locations. But facilitating that everyday activity with these buyers by being able to log on and see that information themselves is where we really start to see. 10:40.07 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It's that first time that buyer logs in They're kind of like, "what is going on? Why do I have to do this myself? I used to count on a rep to do it". And then they look and they can go check inventory real quick. They can check other colorways of the same product. Wow, I'm selling out on the black. I wonder if they have navy. Those types of things that they can just start facilitating themselves. 11:03.06 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And then they get used to it. We talked to so many buyers today especially in golf in the green grass space and they they'll say, "oh my gosh, you've changed our life. You've changed our life! We have so much more time now." Or you make it so much easier. Or these special orders for these members, we can give them an entirely new experience. Tell them right away if they have a different colour and need a different size instead of tracking down the rep, calling customer service, trying to place an order, get a confirmation that the order's placed. What possibly took 10 calls a couple hours, they can do it in five minutes now. 11:38.31 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Nice, nice! And I see that one of your strengths and something you're very proud of is the fact that storytelling piece, the brand customization that you can have. So why don't you walk us through that a bit? I don't know if it's a private club with a certain brand, that then that convergence of those two and they want merchandise that has their brand logos on that. So how do you fit into that piece of the puzzle? 12:03.76 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So that was one of our differentiating factors from the beginning. So we took a really long time and had some great partners in the beginning who really explained the complexity of mass customization, so customizing a product at scale. Remember it's not an e-commerce site where you're building a water bottle and putting your name on it. 12:18.55 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 12:23.62 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It's ordering 50 polos, you know, 60 polos. 10 colorways, all with a logo on them. And so it's a bit different. We took a lot of time understanding the pain points of that, making it really easy for not only the sales reps to do it. But the buyers, and also to have the accurate information. Because if you do that wrong, And you send a golf club. the shirt with the logo on the wrong side, wrong colour, wrong colorway, it's too big. You can't go resell that shirt. 12:56.37 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast They're coming back. 12:56.36 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark They're going to send it back. Yeah, but there's nothing you can do with it. It's extremely complex, but extremely important to get right. it's incredibly nuanced and so we took a lot of time and effort to really understand where the pain was and what we were solving with that and no one else does that in the market. 13:21.96 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Gotcha. Gotcha. I noticed on your platform that you've got some great recognizable bigger brands like Johnny O and Antigua, I believe. But you are also open, I'm assuming, to to smaller brands, some that maybe people don't know that, especially on the women's apparel side, there's so many amazing companies out there and they are still small. And I've seen them at the PGA show and it is a fairly crowded space. So talk to us a bit about that. You're not just appealing to big brands. Could any size of brand. Even in the startups space and apparel, can they benefit and get on your platform with RepSpark? 13:54.23 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Absolutely. So we have three different tiers. So you have the enterprise tier. That's going to be your Peter Millar, your Johnny O, your bigger brands. 14:01.37 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 14:01.98 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark But then for the new up and comers, the thing that It really allows, it levels the playing field a bit. So the new up and comers can have the same platform, allow the same visibility. Allow the same order entry system as some of the bigger brands and it really allows them to present a modern front that's maybe much bigger than they are. 14:27.58 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark The look and feel is the same as some of these big players in the space. um It also, with our microsites, our microsites allow a digital pop-up store. And what we see a lot of new brands doing is it allows the pro shop to actually test the product without carrying the inventory. 14:47.34 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So it's really nice. It's a way to say, hey, send this out to your members. See if they're interested. They can order. And then a lot of times the pro shops will come back and say, wow, we had ah you know we had a huge hit with this. A lot of the members were really interested. Okay, now we're going to take a chance. and purchase the inventory and stock your products. Hold on one sec. My dog is now climbing on the table and I'm going to go let her outside. 15:35.73 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay. The question I was going to ask you is this. So what you mentioned is a two-sided marketplace. So is there for brands, especially once again, those up and coming ones that there isn't that awareness already out in the marketplace? Do you also serve? as a almost like a discovery engine that you have Pro shops, clubs can then see certain brands that they've never even heard of before. So are you finding that also as part of the value that you're adding, especially for those, as I mentioned, those those brands that are that are fairly new that people don't know of yet? 16:10.05 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Yeah. So how the marketplace works is we have a whole community and the community is open to anybody. not anybody you still we have an approval process for that they can come into the community and they can see all the brands that are up on RepSpark. So imagine you're a new buyer stocking your store. You could essentially go on RepSpark and find from Golf clubs. to golf tees, to apparel to footwear whatever you want you can find on RepSpark and Then you ask the brand to connect. 16:44.21 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark The brand says yes. They go through their process of accepting the buyer. So the brand still has the ultimate say. and then the buyer can start purchasing. But what we found, we did a survey with AGM, who's the association of golf merchandisers. And 80 % of their buyers were looking on RepSpark to find new brands. They're irritated with their water bottle vendor or their hat vendor. They'll go on and they'll try to find somebody. Or again, they want to stock some more children's apparel or women's apparel. 17:15.53 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark They'll go on and they'll use RepSpark to source those new brands. And it's really fun now because we have a lot of green grass retailers who said, we won't even stock a brand now that's not on RepSpark. You guys make it so easy. Why would we do that? We can bounce back and forth. We have a single platform where we can access all of our brands, all the information. Everybody knows how to use it, which you know is it was a real tipping point when someone comes up and says that. 17:43.77 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, I bet. Okay, I got a scenario play here. There's this small but mighty brand called Modgolf, and Modgolf actually has hats now and we've got hoodies and the I had a partnership with a small apparel supplier Great guy. Friends with him. and he created everything for me so i didn't have to go out and buy it all first and it he it Great for him. He sold his small company to a larger apparel company. So I don't have that relationship. So let's work with that. Is someone like... 18:18.95 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast This company called ModGolf and this brand. That Would they benefit from getting on the platform with RepSpark or too small? I'm just curious here. 18:29.89 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It's not even the too small. It's more that someone needs to have a wholesale strategy. 18:35.00 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 18:35.77 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark They want to be in 500 golf shops, 2000 golf shops, 5000 golf shops physically in the shop. Those are the brands that we work with. So if ModGolf wanted their hoodies and hats and had a wholesale strategy to grow and expand and hire a Salesforce and be physically located in those stores, that's when you would turn to RepSpark and say," now we're ready". 19:00.38 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. We'll give you another five years and we'll have that conversation again there, Meghann. 19:02.90 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark There you go. 19:03.74 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast It'll happen. Not quite yet, but Hopefully that will. We'll get there. So on that, could you give us a success story in the golf space. I'm sure there's lots of success stories, but one that you're really proud of. Maybe someone came in, a brand and they were a bit reluctant, hesitant, and now you've just blown the doors off and they're over the moon here. Can you give us an example of one that you're proud of maybe even in the woman's apparel space too also as a little bonus? 19:28.37 Meghann Butcher I mean, we've had brands come in and they're in two to three retail stores or two to three brick and mortar shops. And they come in and within a year, they've expanded to 200, 500, 700 doors. And that's really hard to do without a unifying platform. 19:43.22 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 20:37.34 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Okay. So we launched with Johnny O quite a long time ago. they have been an amazing brand to work with, and it's been really fun to watch them grow over the years but when we went live with them, gosh i don't know how many years ago, they their average b2b order volume over the three years grew 744%. 21:05.39 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 21:06.18 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And Those are rep unassisted orders. And the cool thing about that again going back to the beginning where they were focused on reps. All orders that the buyer just wants to place on their own. You still need that rep to really help. Drive that assortment. 21:27.51 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark But it's all these other orders just don't need that intermediary person. Even before AI and we started talking about all this, we've been doing that for 15 years now. 21:37.97 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right, right 21:38.48 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark But just those unassisted and the information and intelligence that you can share really helps to grow both the brands. And then it makes the brands sell more into these stores because these stores are like, "great, I can see exactly what I'm getting. I can see when I'm getting it. I can see the other colorways". So it really establishes a lot of trust between the brands and the buyers as well. 21:59.76 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Got it. To expand on what you just mentioned there Megan, that the all the back end data and analytics that you have there across that must be another piece that's incredibly valuable for all of your buyers. And also for uh for all of your your apparel companies too that otherwise, it's all brought together in one place so they can really see, get an overview and a snapshot to help define their strategy moving forward. 22:27.10 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Yeah, it's extremely important. If you have a platform that isn't going to combine all the information, it's not going to be super helpful. So what RepSpark will do is it combines the ERP data and if you don't know what ERP is it's like the backend brain, right? 22:44.66 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark That has the style and the colour and all of that. And that combines with our top layer of business logic. So business logic would be something like You have 24 of these hats to embroider them o you have to buy 10 more than you did last year and you get a discount. So it's the business logic layer of it. 23:04.02 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. Okay. 23:06.80 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Then you overlay the marketing on top of it to allow the brand to really market and tell their story consistently. So a lot of times we're working with independent sales reps who may say something that's not really on brand or present a line a certain way. And so it gives the brand the authority to tell their brand story as well. So you overlay the data level With the business level, with the marketing level. And then the really cool thing is we know who's logging in. We know who didn't place an order. We know what they looked like looked at. We know it's trending far before anybody else because a lot of these times, these buyers are buying three, six months before. They're doing a pre-book order. So we actually know before orders have even been placed what's trending in the market. A lot of different layers that we're able to bring together into one platform to provide more intelligence in streamlining all these operations to make sure that order that gets placed is the best order possible and that it is a valid order. 24:13.00 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Got it. Got it I do want to mention here for our listeners, you're listening in right now, Meghann and I are going to jump over to a video conversation afterwards on the ModGolf YouTube channel where we're going to pull up the RepSpark website and show some visuals there. So rather than just waving our hands in the air and sharing our wonderful words here. 24:31.86 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Love a chance to have an extended conversation there. I will include the link in the show notes for our ModGolf YouTube video there. So Meghann, I want to ask you this. I did see that you have a BA in psychology and communications from Vanderbilt. That's just another reinforcement that a liberal arts degree will win the world here. So how does someone with a BA in psychology end up building a SaaS company and focusing on tech? how did How did that convergence come around? 25:03.89 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark I'm actually dying that you just asked this question because I was just talking to somebody yesterday. Actually, he's part of the legends group that does a lot in these golf events. And we were talking about the fact that once you start to build a company and get further down the road, I think I've actually used my psychology degree more than anything else. It's really interesting. And it's I'm just dying that you ask those questions. We were just having this debate the other day. A lot of what you do in business becomes psychology. You're really listening to somebody. 25:41.19 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Mm hmm. 25:42.02 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark You're listening to what they need. You're listening to how they're saying it. You are then taking that and molding it into how to say that to the next person or understanding what they need, understanding their background where they're coming from what their position is facilitating conversations and it's funny, if you are going to be an entrepreneur and start a company first of all Don't be afraid of risk. Do not be risk averse. That's not going to work. But having a background in psychology, I think has helped more than anything else. And that was not a planted question, by the way. 26:20.07 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast No, it was not. It was not. 26:21.46 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It was fun. 26:22.85 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Well, I've seen this firsthand because my wife, who was just sitting next to me before we started here, she was recording an interview for her work. She's in a tech-focused company that focuses on work place culture now and she's thrived and her differentiator is part of that human centric piece that's so important with you and that customer understanding. Her degree is in psychology. 26:47.42 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Yeah. 26:47.18 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. So you two are twinning on that one. So i've seen that at work twice now of how that is your superpower or one of your superpowers. 26:56.42 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Absolutely. It really is. It's understanding the pain points of your customers. It's really being able to be empathetic, or just understanding your team. I mean, growing a team is hard. That's probably the hardest part about growing a business is. Getting the right team around you. And a Major in psychology has helped a lot. I don't remember specifically a ton about my classes in psychology, but just that background and understanding has helped so much. 27:27.24 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast I bet. Just that critical thinking piece and all the other things that you get from a liberal arts degree and liberal arts degrees have been bashed so much over the last couple of decades here so you're another poster person for the value of a BA. There we go. 27:45.49 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark There you go. 27:46.53 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay, I wanted to ask you this because I spent time at the PGA show in Orlando in January. and the number of apparel companies, there is its own section, there's an ocean of them. It's hard. I can see how competitive it is there. And they're there, of course, to try to do in person what my understanding of oversimplifying this, but what you do and facilitate very, very frictionlessly on your platform. And then also in the summertime, the PGA show in Frisco now, which is dedicated only for apparel so i'm curious, are you involved there? Is there a connection there or is that a separate piece? Tell me your connection to both of those shows with the PGA. Is that something that you get involved with? 28:37.13 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark We are very connected to the PGA. We actually solidified a strategic alignment with the PGA of America just this summer so they have said that RepSpark is the commerce layer of golf and that we are aligned with them in that statement, which is great. So we are at all the shows. It's really fun at the PGA Show in Orlando. We call it RepSpark Row. And we highlight on the on the show map all of the RepSpark brands in bright orange. but really at the show we're there to answer questions at this point. It used to be a sales opportunity for us. 29:20.51 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark But we take a lot of account management now and we do a lot of training. So we just make sure that again, we're understanding what our customers need, what we want, making sure that we are at the forefront of the industry and making sure that we're supporting our customers at those shows a lot of the time. 29:40.29 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right, right So I'm Bringing out the crystal ball now. I'm really curious because you've been at this for 19 years. Not that I expect you to figure out what's going to happen 19 years from now because you probably don't know what's going to happen 19 months from now. But let's start with this piece. You touched on AI earlier. Are you using AI at all in order to be predictive? You had mentioned that you're able to see trends from everyone, not just in golf but in action sport of whether it's colour. Certain cuts. certain materials, where things are going. Are you starting to use AI in a predictive way to also help your customers or use it in any other way? Maybe you can touch on that a bit. 30:19.75 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So many ways, so many ways. Within the platform, technology should be giving the users, whether it's the sales team or the buyer better information. More actionable insights. Making things easier, surfacing up information that they may have had to dig for in the past. So within the platform, it's about predictive ordering. It's about intelligent ordering. If you can think of somebody placing an order for 10 different shipments so they have four or five different start dates, it's a $50 ,000 order that's shipping in 10 different orders. 31:02.35 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark I'll do 10 orders of $10 ,000, $100 ,000 orders. And so how do you make it really easy for someone to place an order of that size, but then also balance the order with AI? So we've implemented a way for AI to look at it and say, if you had this product on this order, then you could have a bigger shipment. So just we call it like the order organization. As well as the predictive ordering. So someone can log in and they see what they've ordered before, what's trending in their area, what might be trending that they keep replacing this one. 31:39.03 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Perhaps a green polo. Well, this time, do you want to triple your buy because you've already reordered that so many times. So that's more like the buyer side and some of the rep side. And then on the rep, it's how do you give them the information to be smarter as well? So an auto-generated order from templates, auto-generated order from set merchandise, or just a merchandise catalog order that's auto-generated. A sales rep comes in and it says, buyer abc hasn't placed an order yet and usually as of last year they'd already placed two just that kind of information and trending. And then we have all of the integrations. 32:19.06 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So if you think about the amount of integrations, you have your ERP. A lot of times you'll have some system that's holding all those images, whether it's marketing images, brand images, you have your e-commerce. So really optimizing that integration layer to make it really easy to combine all that data and make sense of it because that's what we're doing you're making sense of data from four or five different inputs. And then within our company, we're using AI from support, from finance. I think every department is using AI in their own way, which is extremely exciting to see. I use it on a daily basis for tons of different things. It's an exciting time. It's really fun. Just thinking about the roadmap and what you can do now is awesome. 33:09.54 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast I'm just picking up your infectious energy here. You've been out this almost two decades and it doesn't sound like you're ready to stop anytime soon that you're still curious, you still see that this is an expanding marketplace, especially in apparel as golf continues to grow, especially on the women's side that is still a multi-billion dollar opportunity that hasn't been fully realized, that ceiling hasn't been hit yet. There's lots of room to expand in the future. 33:37.58 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Yeah, absolutely. It's cool. I mean, the golf market is expanding. It's one of those industries that everywhere you read, there's 9 million more golfers this year and the golf game is rising and now. There's so many ways to play the game of golf that's not even traditional, your 18 hole course that you had before and it's really exciting to me to just see that growth and it really exposes the necessity for these brick and mortar, whether it's a merchandiser, a PGA professional, whoever's running that store. 34:14.29 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark It just puts more and more pressure on them to facilitate their service business with their members and there's more and more ways that they need to be doing that. There's more brands coming into the industry. We see Fabletics and brands like that were traditional. Lululemon does a ton in golf. 34:34.61 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast They do now, yeah. 34:34.96 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark All of these brands are coming in because they see that it is an industry that's growing. It's a vertical that's growing. There's more people, whether it be women, whether it be those who couldn't afford to play golf before. There's so many ways to do it now. It's really exciting to see how it all is going to fit together. Then to be able to facilitate the our customers' customers and make what they do easier and and better and faster and and more intelligent in what they're doing. So they can spend their time doing what they like, which is typically not placing a special order for a member, but they have to do that. 35:12.93 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Right, right. You had mentioned earlier that you're also involved in the equipment side, so just to be clear you're not just on the soft goods apparel side. You also are in hard goods in some way, shape or form and equipment. So maybe you can expand upon that, some brands that you've got on the platform, both in golf and I also you know with pickleball and maybe some other sports that you're involved with too. 35:32.69 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Yeah, so we do support a multivariate customization or configuration. So club configuration where somebody can come in, they can pick. There's so many ways to configure a golf club. That that was news to me. You go in, you pick your shaft, you pick your loft, you pick your lie, you pick your grip. Are you right handed, left handed? Are you women's or men's? So really being able to facilitate that type of configuration is something that we are actively moving into and now we'll be able to support after this quarter. 36:06.62 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. Love this. 36:08.50 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Very exciting. 36:09.93 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. Okay, so the to finish up here, I want to ask you before we jump over to the ModGolf YouTube channel for another conversation. You've been a founder and an entrepreneur for some time now. So you had mentioned some characteristics that makes a successful entrepreneur earlier. Perhaps you could expand on that. People that are considering entrepreneurship, they've got an idea, and just maybe don't know that first roadmap or where to go, especially with women. I speak to a lot of women and they're a bit intimidated. Not like guys. Guys will just stumble into things because for better or for worse, usually for worse, where women are a bit more reserved and waiting for things until they can move forward to build connections. So perhaps you can speak to all fledgling entrepreneurs out there, especially with a focus on women, to give them some an encouragement and some advice of some of the lessons you've learned over the last couple of decades. 37:05.03 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark I was really lucky. I only have a sister, my dad and my mom had two girls. We were just always treated the same as everybody else. I think that we were really lucky in that way. I decided to start RepSpark and I never really was worried about not being accepted. It was about five or six years into my journey and someone said, "Is it hard when you're a women CEO, because traditionally a lot of these brands are owned by guys. I mean, they just are, it's changing a lot, but let's just take ourselves to like 15 years ago. 37:42.72 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. Yep. 37:47.64 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And you know what's so funny? It never even occurred to me. I was like what? Oh. So i think it's just being good with who you are and what you're doing and understanding the problems that you're trying to solve. It really shouldn't matter. But other than that, you have to be really gritty. I mean, nothing can get you down. Someone can say something and you just have to either have the self-confidence to just say, I don't really care what that person said, but also the humility to listen, to understand what they're saying. And take that to heart too. Because it's both sides. You have to move on. But you also have to learn from it. And I didn't realize this in the beginning. But I think you have to be an incredible risk taker. I thought about it my whole life and when you start telling stories at a dinner table. This is a funny story. So I was at a dinner table the other day and we were talking about how different it is now for kids to travel abroad. 38:50.50 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Kids meaning like, college, post-college. We used to do it, get off a train. I had the opportunity to do it a couple times. And you would try to find a hostel. You just kind of showed up and you had to make it work.I traveled a lot with two women and it was great. We were telling a story about going to Pamplona and running with the bulls And I was saying, "oh my God, I was so crazy!" You get launched over these barriers and these bulls are coming at you and everybody at the table is like, "what? You actually like... Did that?" 39:26.86 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And I thought about a lot of times in my life where I was like, yeah it's kind of like business. You get launched over a barrier and now you're running and everybody's yelling and you just have to get there and you have to tune it out. You have a path where you're going, but You are just going. It was a couple weeks ago and i was like "yeah it's a lot like business. You have to be really risky and do it". 39:52.78 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast I love that one. I have heard a lot of entrepreneurship analogies over the years, and I think that's one of the best I've ever heard. That's amazing. 39:59.94 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Good. Well, it's true. 40:02.89 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay, I want to finish with this question because as a four-time founder myself and the things that we've named, sometimes we've agonized over the name of the product or the experience or the event or the company. And sometimes it comes easy. Sometimes it is brutally hard. So I'm curious, how did you land on RepSpark? Were there any others in the running that were shortlisted that you look back now and maybe you cringe at? Tell me about that. 40:32.07 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark So it started as WebRep. 40:35.53 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast WebRep. Okay. 40:36.97 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And that was kind of the internal platform that we launched RepSpark out of. So RepSpark was kind of the original name. And our whole slogan at the beginning was to ignite sales power. 40:44.97 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast all right 40:48.36 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And so the spark was igniting and that's where we kind of went from. We thought about changing it as we move through our trajectory where now we have 100 1,000 buyers logging in. Is it really about the rep anymore? And so we toyed with that and what you call it. But at the end of the day, we're really trying to serve our brands and serve our brands in the way that they're selling. So we've never changed it. That was it. But we have thought about it quite often. We'll bring it up every so often and just say does this really describe what we do? And whether you're tangentially placing an order or person placing an order and facilitating that communication between the buyer and the reps and then the marketing and the brand, I think it still sticks. 41:41.37 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Absolutely. Well, you talk about it's a bit meta here, but you one of the virtues that you put out there to people is telling their brand story and their brand identity and you already have a brand identity so it ain't broke so why why bother fixing it! 41:56.15 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Why fix it? Yeah. So I think no matter what we do, we always go back to are we facilitating? And solving the pains between this ecosystem. And traditionally, I think even going forward, there's going to be a rep of some sort. In the middle of it all so i think it still works. 42:13.49 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast With a name, if you can turn it into a verb, then you've really got it. If you can end up doing it like a Xerox or Kleenex. If you manage to do that, then that's next level there. So you just say, you've got to Rep Spark it! 42:26.87 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Let's do it! 42:28.41 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. 42:28.31 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark My worst was I went to a brand and someone said, "oh Rep Sparkle's coming to visit us today!" I'm like, no, no, no, not Rep Sparkle. 42:38.78 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Oh boy. 42:38.98 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark There is no Rep Sparkle. But I like Rep Sparkle. 42:42.97 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, you got it. There you go. If you could turn it into a verb, then is marketing Nirvana, that is the platinum piece there if you can manage to do that. It becomes part of the conversational lexicon and then you're the go-to. There's no one else. You have to RepSpark it. Otherwise, you don't do it at all. 43:01.20 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark We're doing it. We're doing it. 43:04.32 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. 43:04.22 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Sending that to our marketing team right now. 43:07.07 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay, I'm waiting for my commission check in the mail once you actually activate that. We'll talk about that one. So as we finish up here, Meghann, before we jump over to the YouTube channel here, why don't you let our listeners know because we have listeners that love entrepreneurship stories. They're just golf nerds. But a lot of them, the majority of them, are in the golf industry here and they have companies and whether it's soft goods, hard goods, that can definitely get on the platform to Rep Spark it. So for them, if they're not on the platform yet or haven't had a look, what's the easiest way to learn more about RepSpark and get in contact with you and the team? 43:57.44 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark If you go to repspark.com, there's a request a demo or a contact me form. We have cool AI Sparky who can or answer a ton of different questions. Our goal and what we're trying to do is to keep improving the infrastructure of golf. The infrastructure that golf brands and retailers already depend on and really preserving their time and space to service their members. It's a service industry. It's different. And that's what we're here for. 44:30.13 Colin Weston - Host of The ModGolf Podcast So good! So with that Megan Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark And Sparky. I love sparky. Thanks so much for joining us on the ModGolf podcast today and sharing your entrepreneurship story and all the good things that you're doing here. And I look forward to jumping over to the ModGolf YouTube channel. so Meghann, again, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it! 44:51.94 Meghann Butcher, Founder and CEO of RepSpark Thank you for having me.