GrowthFactor is Made in America 

‍Products are built by teams of real people, and our team is proud to be based in America. You don’t often hear “Made in America”  from a software company, but it’s important to us. Here’s why.
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I grew up in American retail.

My dad ran a retail company. I’d visit my dad after work - he sat in the corporate office - and I’d shadow him during meetings. At 9 or 10 years old, he had me sitting in a conference room listening to the team ideate on how to improve margins and problem solve on store operations. I wanted to play Pokemon on my Gameboy Advance, but I also loved my dad, so I tried to pay attention and learn.

As I grew up and became a teenager, I wanted to start working with him. It was in my blood. I asked him how he started working in retail, and he encouraged me to start first with what ground-level, front-line employees do.
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The jobs that built me. 

My first job was flipping burgers after classes in a hole-in-the-wall burger joint, Boho Burger. I was fifteen. My mom would sit in the shotgun seat of her car while I practiced driving it to work. I learned, from older cooks, how to cook a hamburger. I learned how to feel the texture of the meat and compare it with my hand to make sure it was cooked all the way through. I learned how to clean a grill, how to clear a greasetrap, and how to mop the floors. I learned how to use the frier, and how much seasoning to put on our fries. 

I liked cooking, but some days, I was asked to take customer orders. I remember one day, when things were particularly busy, a mailman came in to order lunch. I took his order, and I could’ve sworn I hung the ticket up for the cooks, but somehow it ended up on the ground. I kept taking orders and handing customers their meals, but I watched the mailman wait 15 minutes, then 30, then 40. Where was his order? I asked an ordering customer to hold on as I looked through the tickets and couldn’t find it. I looked on the ground, and there it was. I was furious at myself. We finished his meal, I comped him for it and gave him a gift card, obviously, but I also couldn’t get over the feeling that I had failed to serve our customer. I’ve never forgotten how that felt – having someone disappointed because of my actions.

My second job was loading trucks in a warehouse at Books-a-Million. That was hard work. For whatever reason, my work in the warehouse felt more laborious than cooking burgers – at Boho Burger, at least I was snacking on fries between preparing meals. The warehouse, on the other hand, felt laborious at first. We were packing pallets, moving boxes, and counting inventory. It was nonstop.

I learned a lot, though. There were so many moving pieces in the warehouse that I never fully understood – the tracking software, the vehicles to load pallets, the schedule of trucks coming. The restaurant didn’t need tools or software to operate, but the warehouse absolutely did. I remember the process of logging and tracking inventory. I remember the amount of effort that went into fact checking what our records showed. I remember being excited when I found a mistake in the inventory – it felt like I had helped our business.

Of all the jobs I’ve worked, I don’t know if I’ve ever appreciated a lunch break as much as working in that warehouse. By the time 1pm came around, I was covered in sweat. I tried to eat relatively healthy at the time – I was playing football and wrestling for my high school – but during my time in the warehouse, I was HUNGRY. Most days, I would drive to Firehouse Subs or Subway and put down as much food as I could. By 5:30pm, I was hungry again.

My third job was being on the front lines stocking shelves and serving customers in the Books-a-Million in Brookwood mall. This was a pretty big shift to me – although I had been customer facing in the restaurant, a bookstore is radically different. No two customers were the same. One wanted a cookbook, another wanted trading cards, and the next wanted a new fairytale to read to their daughter. I needed to be able to serve any and every customer.

I learned the ins and outs of the store. I learned about end caps and tables, and how we might find books in places we didn’t expect. I learned what was on those tables and how frequently it changed. I learned our sorting system, alphabetical by the author’s last name, but also where a book could be if it wasn’t in the store. I learned how to use our concierge software to know if we had a book, and what to do if we faced “phantom stockouts,” when the number on the software was different from the actual number in the store.

For the first time, I learned how to really have a conversation with a customer. Not every customer knew what they wanted – sometimes they wanted to talk through what was on their mind. Their wife had joined a book club and they wanted to support her, their nephew was turning 13 and they wanted to buy a gift. All kinds of discussions, thoughts, conversations, all to pick out the right item.

I have a vivid memory of one customer, a young mother. She wanted to start reading to her daughter, but she didn’t know what books her daughter would like. I listened, walked with her through different sections of our store, and ultimately helped her choose something she felt great about. When I scanned the item at checkout, I was so happy – my actions had led to a deeper connection between a mother and daughter.
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A turn towards today.

My fourth job, and ultimately what inspired GrowthFactor, was in the real estate department of a retailer. All day I would obsess about where we would put our next store. I’d evaluate properties sent by brokers, I’d pull spotty demographic information from wherever I could find it, and I’d put together slides for our real estate committee. 

I remember my first site visit. We flew from Birmingham, AL to Baltimore, MD. Our flight had a connection, and our first flight landed a bit late, so I sprinted with my senior associate through the tunnels of ATL to make our flight. We made it, and as soon as we landed, we started “driving sites”. We counted parking spaces, took pictures, and drove through every angle to feel what our customers would feel as they approached the site.

A couple days later, I went back to the office and began putting together slides and using the tools I could. I remember feeling frustrated trying to pull together the full picture of what I understood about the location. The gap between how much I could see in the office vs. being there in person was so wide. I felt like I wasn’t able to evaluate sites at all without being there. Sure, we had some data, but it wasn’t enough for me to really think critically about whether or not we should put a store there. When asked “where should we go next,” I didn’t have the confidence to answer.

Ultimately, that problem is what we are solving. We want that young person on the real estate team, the person who is using the tools and building the real estate review decks, to be Superman. We want retailers to feel good about the sites they spend time driving and ultimately to make better decisions about where they put stores, in communities all across America.
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Why be “Made in America”?

I wanted to share a bit of the depth of my background for two reasons.

First, the reality of what runs in our culture is that I, the CEO of our company, am an American Retailer first. No matter how engrained I become in running a software company, I am a retailer. Our culture will always reflect an understanding of and empathy for our customers. We will always put our customers first.

Second, I wanted to officially make some commitments about how we plan to continue to honor American retail companies. Here is what we will always do:

1. Your data does and will always stay in America. We value data privacy highly, and we are implementing safeguards as we grow to keep your data in the U.S. 
2. As a supporter of U.S. retail brands, we are committed to helping retailers compete against large e-commerce companies, like Amazon. Opposing the threat posed by this particular company, we are committing to never directly using AWS for any of our data processing needs.
3. We will always make time for our customers to listen to and understand your business as deeply as possible. We view ourselves, from the local tier to enterprise tier, as partners of all of our customers

Building software for site selection is not new, but we want to do it differently - we want to know and understand our customers, and that starts with the fact that I worked in retail a decade before I opened the terminal on my computer. We will always prioritize American retailers, and we will relentlessly serve our customers to change the way site selection is done.

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