“On Aire Ep. 8 w/ Andrew Johnson – The Art of Industrial Real Estate Podcast” featuring Andrew Johnson from Shelfware
Host: teaching you the art of industrial real estate this is on air with Team Jensen hello hello welcome to episode seven of on air with Team Jensen the art of industrial real estate today we have Andrew Johnson with shelfware on with us thanks for coming on Andrew
Andrew: yeah thanks for having me
Host: appreciate you taking the time and really excited to kind of dive into what you got going with shelfware as well as o-ring the other company that you’re pretty heavily involved with
[Andrew’s Backstory & Family Business]
Andrew: my dad started a o-ring and seal company in 1982 and then I was born in 85 and my whole life has been wrapped up in this Industrial Supply Marketplace… my dad sells O-rings… how the hell do you make a living selling O-rings? He sells a lot of them… they’re in almost everything you touch. Like team Jensen I work with my family members… all three of my brother-in-laws work at this company. It works really well… part of why it works is they’re very different than each other and me. We stay in our own lanes… we don’t conflict a lot.
[The Concept of Shelfware]
Andrew: it is really like if you’ve ever got on to like a convenience store and you grab a bag of chips or a bottle of pop we’re basically running industrial convenience stores on Factory floors using automated technology… we have RFID smart labels (radio frequency identification) embedded inside the product packaging… it allows us to track the movement of that product off Factory shelves and then we push that consumption data back to the industrial suppliers… and automate the supply chain by creating orders for them right out of the system.
[Family Team & Innovation]
Host: who had some of that knowledge when it came to developing software?
Andrew: effectively none of my brothers had any experience me included… my oldest brother-in-law Adam who wrote all the original software is self-taught… Jay is the optimizer and he’s also a true innovator… I’m the kind of the bullshitting Visionary guy who comes up with the solution conceptually… but it actually hasn’t ever worked how do make this happen we’re going to do it and I promise it to people before we’ve even built it. My other brother-in-law Evan is a mechanical engineer… he’s a stabilizing factor between the four of us.
[International Sourcing & Harry]
Andrew: my dad was busy growing the sales side of it… he didn’t have enough resources to do the overseas work himself… an importer named Harry who had kind of cracked the code, he’s kind of a business mentor of mine… he jokingly said it’d be great if somebody would like carry my bags. I started traveling with Harry carrying his bags and learning the overseas market… he turned 81 this year still travels with me. I’ve met some of the best people in India… we do a lot of business in Taiwan… Vietnam is beautiful I love going there from a vacation standpoint the most.
[The “Forever Home” Real Estate Debacle]
Andrew: my dad tried to build his forever home building out off of K7 and Shawnee… he took a big step up to this… things were done at the job site that were done wrong. There was a local Kansas City typical thunderstorm popped up and it dropped a bunch of rain saturated the foundation and left basically an olympic size pool on top of the vapor barrier and then they poured the concrete the next day. We moved in… the moisture in the foundation started to come through… all the baseboards were molding the drywall was molding… he signed a commercial contract that only included arbitration. The arbitrator himself is a former contractor… it gave my dad a poultry cash reward… we sold it for about 50% what we paid for it. It was a dark dark period in the Johnson family household my dad almost went bankrupt.
[Future Goals & VMI Strategy]
Andrew: my overall basic goal is just to get shelf aware to be tossed out at a board meeting as like a problem… if I’m in the mouths of board members at some of these large billion dollar companies then I’ve been successful. We’re trying to push the trend back by providing a service level that any independent can license and use… it gives them the ability to look and feel and taste like Fastenal but not need branch locations and dudes and trucks.
[Wrap-Up]
Host: really appreciate you coming on with us today… best way to get a hold of you?
Andrew: go to LinkedIn and look me up it’s Andrew Johnson Supply Chain innovator… or you can go to shelfware vmi.com.
Host: well thanks again for coming on thanks a lot.
