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Welcome invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now Let's join your host, Phil Better, and his special guest today on invest in yourself, the

digital Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to invest in yourself, the digital podcast. I'm, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I'm excited to speak to our guests today. They are currently the GM of brand, direct brands at Vendasta, which acquired Yesware in 2022 where our guest was the CEO, so he helped managed that sale. But before that, he helped build from scratch to 400,000,000 Annually Wayfair's b to b business as well as help, guide them through their launch as a publicly traded company. He has a MBA from Yale, a BS from the University of Illinois, and he's on his way to be the number 1 endorsed person on LinkedIn for humor. So please put my your hands together for our guest, Joel Stevenson. Joel, thank you so much for being on the show.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. The the BS comes important for, the LinkedIn part too. So

Joel, How you have had a very varied career. You've helped in sales. You helped build a a a whole division for a company. Could you introduce yourself? Give us a little bit more robust introduction.

Yeah. I I I started my career in sales and, you know, many, many moons ago with the with the idea that, actually, I was originally planning to be a finance major. I was a finance major, and I sorta got redirected by this guy that sort of argued that, know, no matter what you do, you're in sales, and that that's a good place to start a career if you don't have, like, a a very strong point of view about something else you're gonna do. So I did that, And, that was great. And, eventually, I I worked in, you know, mostly technology enterprise, is, software type organizations then .com happened. So it was sort of great up until that point. Ended up going through a couple of Joining a couple of companies that were laying people off and eventually sorta got the message that I should do something different. I went, went back and got my MBA With the idea of, like, trying to sort of reinvent myself from being more of a customer facing person to being more of a quantitative person, so I I did that, and then I Joined a consulting firm, sales consulting firm called Z Associates for for a while, and then ultimately ended up back in sort of the startup business with a Supply chain company out of Chicago, which was pretty interesting for a while, but the the business model had some issues.

But the thing that that did was that Ultimately led me to this company called CSN Stores, which had 300, you know, individual microsites selling, you know, furniture and all kinds of other stuff, which Later became Wayfair, many years later. So, yeah, great, great seven and a half year run there. It eventually got a little bit too big for me, so I I I did a bunch of different jobs there, which was great. The last job I did was sort of an outgrowth of something that I Started earlier, which is a speed to b business that you mentioned earlier, which which was awesome. But, eventually, the company just started to feel a little bit too big, for me. And so I decided that I would, I would instead go and try something new, so I took a little bit of time off. And One of the ways that we drove so much, you know, such impressive numbers on the b two b side was we invested heavily in technology As applied to the sales productivity problem. And so that's kinda what in a roundabout way brought me to Yesware, but we had an investor and a board member in common there.

And, that's, that's kinda how it, that's and that's kinda how I got to where I am.