(00:00) Justin King discusses the concept of a nonlinear career path and how his own career in B2B eCommerce evolved.
(03:33) Justin shares his experience of starting a blog on B2B eCommerce, despite it not being a popular topic at the time, and eventually gaining recognition when Granger launched their website.
(07:04) Writing is a valuable tool for generating ideas and content, and it has been beneficial for the Justin’s career in various ways.
(10:39) Justin shares the story of authoring his first book!
(14:10) Justin King discusses his vision of creating a community for B2B eCommerce practitioners.
(17:41) Building a personal brand and developing side skills can open up new opportunities for your career.
(21:17) Justin King uses AI in almost every aspect of his career and personal life, including writing emails, crafting blog posts, editing podcasts, and finding related stories for his talks.

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Justin King Managing Partner at B2X Partners  and B2B Ecommerce Association. Justin is an expert in B2B eCommerce for distribution, manufacturing, chemicals, transportation.  He is a sought after industry expert and his nonlinear career journey has evolved into speaking, writing, and advising.  Justin shared many great insights including:

• How his speaking career started and evolved
• Authoring his first book, Digital Branch Secrets
• The power of his personal network
• How he leverages AI to accelerate his productivity and content generation

Justin King on B2B eCommerce, Career Advice, Writing a Book, and Leveraging AI

[00:00:06] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to episode 31 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast. I’m your host, Ron Laneve. Each week we share career stories of tech experts and marketing mavens, operational gurus and sales leaders illustrate how they have navigated the nonlinear career path. I had the privilege of originally meeting today’s guest almost 20 years ago when we recruited him to join our rapidly growing consulting firm.

[00:00:33] Ron Laneve: His career has been primarily focused on the B2B e-commerce space. And as you will learn, he’s a true expert in his field. He’s a writer, a sought after knowledge leader and speaker, and an accomplished entrepreneur many times over. Although he’s mostly followed a linear career path in e-commerce, his role progression has definitely been non linear.

[00:00:54] Ron Laneve: I’m very excited to introduce my old friend, Justin King, Managing Partner at B2X Partners. Justin, thanks a lot for being here. 

[00:01:02] Justin King: Oh, it’s great to be here, Ron. Nice to be here with you too. 

[00:01:05] Ron Laneve: Yeah, it’s good to see you again. I’ve done, probably three dozen of these conversations with executives like yourself from marketing to technology and coaching . You’re the actually the first accomplished e-commerce person I’ve spoken with. But what I found and what’s fascinated me is what I call the nonlinear career path that a lot of people follow.

[00:01:24] Ron Laneve: More about the how and the why around how individuals decided to make the changes they made over time, how they decided to become entrepreneurs. Why? Was it serendipity? Was it pure luck? Was it intentional? So you know, can you give us an overview of your background, how you got to where you are today and walk us through how those things evolved?

[00:01:47] Justin King: Yeah. I love this topic of nonlinear, first of all. When I came out of school my job that I have today didn’t exist. If there’s something to communicate to the audience, it’s that there’s just thousands of jobs that are out there that we don’t even realize are jobs, right?

[00:02:04] Justin King: My job didn’t exist. I was double major business and computer science. Came out joined a small consulting firm. That part of my career is pretty linear where I stayed in consulting. But where it breaks off for me I can distinctly remember. 

[00:02:19] Justin King: It is 2006. I was at a conference and the speakers that were up speaking the really good ones, they just intrigued me. It was something that, I felt deeply that’s what I want to do. Yet I had no idea how I get there. It’s not a career. Speaking is not a career path that’s taught.

[00:02:43] Justin King: Communications is, but speaking rarely is. So in 2007 I started reverse engineering a bunch of the speakers that were out there. What I saw from them was they had expertise and they had blogs and they wrote about their expertise. I looked at my life and I realized I’m not an expert at anything. I’m not a very good writer. But it didn’t stop me. I decided to really examine my skill sets and what I was passionate about and good at what I was doing. See if there was anything there that I could maybe become an expert at. So at the time we were working together, I was part of the leadership team of the B2B group that wasn’t doing e-commerce. We were just doing websites. 

[00:03:25] Justin King: And I looked at that intersection, that passion of e-commerce and B2B. And said, okay, eventually one day, I believe that e-commerce is going to come to the B2B world. When I say B2B, I really mean manufacturers, distribution, electrical, industrial chemicals, that, that part of B2B, the nitty gritty B2B. Someday it’s going to come there. And I decided I’m going to start building a point of view on that topic when it’s not cool. So I started a blog called ecommerceandb2b.Com, a pretty clever URL. Great for SEO, but bad for anything else. From 5:30 AM to 7:00 AM, I wrote every single morning.

[00:04:08] Justin King: I wrote on that blog and nobody came to that blog. My mom, my dad came to my blog, my brothers. If you like looking at real time analytics and four people on your website and it’s like Akron, Ohio, Akron, Ohio, you’re like, damn it, mom, get off my site. 

[00:04:23] Justin King: So nobody came to my site. It’s a little bit of an exaggeration. It just wasn’t a cool topic. It wasn’t a relevant topic at the time. I gave up 4,000 times during that period of time. For five years I wrote on this blog giving up multiple times on the way always come back coming back to it the next day.

[00:04:42] Justin King: Then in 2011, 2012. Granger, which is a major distributor in the US launched their website and they called it B2B ecommerce. People went to Google and typed in B2B commerce into Google. And my little tiny little website dominated the first five pages of Google, not the first five listings, first five pages of Google.

[00:05:06] Justin King: So what was cool about it. I didn’t realize it, but what was cool about it is I actually had thought through, had a point of view that was actually pretty relevant. It was actually pretty good. I’d spent a lot of time researching. I spent a lot of time talking to customers, distributors and manufacturers. It turns out that what I had written was actually pretty good. At the time I was working for a software startup called Endeca and we were sold to Oracle. I had started speaking and Oracle made me Chief Evangelist for all of e-commerce.

[00:05:41] Justin King: I had a point of view now to talk about. They sent me all around the world from 2012 to 2015 speaking. Probably hundreds of different places over that three years. It really, really started my speaking career and, gave validation. 

[00:05:58] Justin King: It’s funny though, because I remember I did an interview like in 2015 and someone said, man, it feels like you just popped out of nowhere. I’m like, I’ve been writing on this blog for eight years and nobody cared about it. Yeah, it took me eight years to pop out of nowhere. So that started a speaking career and speaking is really how I’ve built my own personal brand.

[00:06:22] Justin King: I do a lot of speaking, a lot of writing. I eventually turned my writing and my speaking into a book in 2018. That book became the playbook for lots of distributors and manufacturers. As I kinda honed in on what my core message was, my core message has been how do you work with executives and digital teams to help them work better together? That’s just a unique approach. So all my writing, all of my talking, my speaking, my videos all are centered around that approach about change and change management and organizational change.

[00:07:00] Justin King: It’s really kickstarted. It’s funny to think about in 2007 thinking back to, okay how do I do this? What do I do? And then watch it unfold over a decade, which it really did. But that’s how I got my start. 

[00:07:15] Ron Laneve: And the thing to me, especially in the age we live in now that I think it’s easy to take for granted is you didn’t have ChatGPT to punch in a few to help you generate ideas and help you generate content.

[00:07:29] Ron Laneve: This was brute force. Like real mind, real hands on keys, pumping out content.

[00:07:35] Justin King: Really what it means is it’s generating a bunch of crap, right? Just bad stuff, writing a bunch of bad stuff and then honing and editing into, Oh, okay, this is the real idea behind it. That’s what most of writing is, 80 percent writing stuff that isn’t relevant.

[00:07:53] Justin King: And then. Then realizing, okay this is a real part of this that should be talked about. 

[00:07:59] Ron Laneve: It’s probably a good lesson learned for any aspiring writers or content developers is, and I’ve read that a lot, is just don’t overthink too much what other people think of it or the reaction or the interest you get from it.

[00:08:10] Ron Laneve: Just keep writing. 

[00:08:12] Justin King: Just right. By the way, it doesn’t have to be for public. Writing has done amazing things in my career. Even just my day jobs. It’s done amazing things in there where. Because I’m researching and thinking through, I’m in a conversation with a customer and I’m able to then, communicate a concept that I’ve thought through that maybe nobody’s seen before, but I thought through it, I wrote it, I edited it and now I’m able to communicate this amazing concept and I just think writing is a, an incredible tool for anybody to be able to use. 

[00:08:46] Ron Laneve: I’m jealous of you that you get to get paid to speak in front of people and you get and people reach out to you and ask you to speak in front of them and pay you for that. That’s great. I’m curious when you worked at Oracle and you traveled all around the world. Did you get paid for those engagements or was that all just part of your income at Oracle?

[00:09:04] Justin King: Like a lot of the things that I’ve done, Ron, I’ve learned along the way. I remember I was speaking about halfway through my Oracle career at that point. I was speaking at an association that they asked me to come. But, I was representing Oracle not on my own and I was not getting paid for any of the outside of being paid for Oracle and after speaking the person that was producing this event came up to me and said.

[00:09:30] Justin King: Why didn’t you charge us for that? And I said, what are you talking about? Charge? What what does that mean? She’s I would have paid X amount of thousands of dollars for that talk. I’m like, wait, back up you get paid for this? And that day I went home and wrote my first contract and said, next time I go, I’m going to get paid.

[00:09:53] Justin King: It’s a good piece of advice. I’ve been so curious about things, asking people questions, asking what do you mean not acting like I know it. Tell me more about that. And how would someone go about something like that?

[00:10:08] Justin King: I’ve been so curious. That curiosity has led me to uncover so many things in my career that I just never would have found out on my own. And I think curiosity is such a key thing for anybody, especially as they’re looking for a new career. 

[00:10:23] Ron Laneve: I agree that’s also a common theme in most of these conversations.

[00:10:26] Ron Laneve: I think what goes hand in hand with curiosity is also having humility. Because you actually said in there, Hey, I didn’t act like I knew everything. That’s really, to me the basis of curiosity or the, or what allows you to be more curious. 

[00:10:40] Justin King: I actually don’t think people like people that know everything. Whether it’s in humor, self deprecation, or just admitting you don’t know something, it humanizes you so much and it makes you more relevant to them. 

[00:10:54] Ron Laneve: Take, I’m gonna digress a little bit, yeah. For me, what was your book called? And can you also tell me what that process was like? What, how did you decide to do it? I’m sure there was a big part of building your personal brand and, tell me how hard that was. How long did it take? 

[00:11:10] Justin King: I cheated. The book came about when someone told me that they got paid more money for having a book and I decided, Oh, again, one of those kind of one of those moments where you realize that you’re able to do something you’re not.

[00:11:23] Justin King: So I came back and decided to write a book. I had, by that point, I had thousands of words that I had written. I had YouTube videos and transcripts. And so I had a pretty good construct behind what I might write in this process, and I was consulting and doing a lot of advisory work. So I felt like I had a good outline.

[00:11:43] Justin King: I had a director of marketing at that time, a VP of marketing working inside the company that I created. So I left oracle and started my own company in 2015, had my own company. Eventually I had my VP of marketing who knew how to write and I knew how to talk, she knew how to write. And so I talked my book to her over the course of a couple of months and we literally wrote the chapters that way and I was able to voice it to her and I, and obviously I had thousands of words that I’d actually written as well and we were going to take the words and the things that I’d written and things that I spoken, constructed this outline and basically wrote the book.

[00:12:21] Justin King: It took about, it only took about nine months to write it. Because of all the words that had been written by that point. So it, it didn’t take that long. And then it took a couple months to produce. We did it on our own. We didn’t use a publisher or anything to do it.

[00:12:34] Justin King: We put it on Amazon, created our own website. For the book and it’s been the number one marketing tool that I’ve had in my career I don’t see it as a money maker I see it as a great marketing personal brand tool that kind of coincides with everything else that I’ve done and I’m definitely working on another I’m trying to rewrite that book right now I’m working on another book because of how valuable that is.

[00:13:00] Justin King: Just the process of going through that process of writing and constructing it and formulating your thoughts and putting it into simple language that someone else can understand on the written page versus spoken, it was, it’s worth the effort, even if someone, even if no one ever bought it.

[00:13:15] Ron Laneve: Oh, I’m sure it tees up your speaking engagements, too. 

[00:13:18] Justin King: It’s called Digital Branch Secrets. Okay. A branch in the B2B world is their store. They call their branches store. Their store is branches. It’s their digital store kind of secrets. It’s about 120 page, 120 pages.

[00:13:32] Justin King: Easy read written about third grade grammar which is about perfect. 

[00:13:37] Ron Laneve: So before we move on, I want to talk specifically about what you’re doing today. I know you’re doing a lot of speaking and consulting, B2X partners, as well as the B2B e-commerce association. Can you tell me a little bit about both those groups?

[00:13:50] Justin King: Yeah, so the company I started in 2015, I sold in 2019 to a software company and help them from 2019 to last year. I helped them build a B2B practice inside of their company. Last year I just had the opportunity to buy it back out. From that company and really leave with a, just a great partnership and relationship intact with that organization that I do love.

[00:14:15] Justin King: I’ve become, I’ve just decided to build a, an advisory this time, a solopreneur act, content videos, training and speaking, and then, meeting with some customers here and there along the way but, But for the last probably seven or eight years, I’ve had this vision of creating a community of professionals and people that actually do this work on a daily basis, practitioners, building a community for them that had great content.

[00:14:47] Justin King: That allowed them to network, had events that we were able to put great training and even professional certification in front of. So I’ve helped build what’s called the B2B Commerce Association. I have a partner in Australia who were launching a global effort. To build this association and that’s what it is.

[00:15:06] Justin King: It’s a place for practitioners to, to hang out, connect, network, get great information and training and really accelerate their own careers. That’s what it’s really about. Everybody else is so focused on the companies they work for. This is unique.

[00:15:23] Justin King: And we’re, we care about the company you work for, but we want to assist you in your future and in your job. So we see there’s lots of other branches of it potentially in the future, right now specifically focused on the practitioners in that world, no vendors, no sponsors, just the practitioners.

[00:15:41] Justin King: It’s a pretty special place. 

[00:15:43] Ron Laneve: The college student or the soon to be entering the workforce individual. What advice do you have for them? It could range from what the focus on degree wise, how to build their technical skill set, soft skills, how to, Differentiate themselves between their peers when it comes to applying and interviewing for jobs from your history and all the people you talk to what are your thoughts there? Any advice? 

[00:16:10] Justin King: First of all, just know that there’s just there are thousands of jobs out there that you don’t know what they are. My job literally didn’t exist when I came out of school and there are jobs that you could pursue. It just takes the curiosity to get to know what those jobs look like.

[00:16:29] Justin King: So don’t pigeon your self pigeonhole yourself into a specific field that’s built by your university or college. There’s just so many different opportunities out there. The network part of this inside even inside of your school or college. The network is just so critical.

[00:16:48] Justin King: Ron, you and I are connecting after 20 years. We’ve actually stayed in touch here and there over the last 20 years. The network you build. And that network is built through curiosity and being interested in people and building some level of personal relationship with people that I think that network is so critical.

[00:17:12] On the nontraditional side, man, I would always, I’d have a side gig, I think it was Steve Kosko that said this to me. And Steve’s a guy who worked with Ron and I in the past, Steve told me, he said, never put your career in somebody else’s hands.

[00:17:28] Justin King: So having something that you’re passionate about and learning from. It doesn’t have to be something that makes money. When I say gig, it doesn’t have to make money but always have something that you’re brewing on the side that you can connect with and build, really spend your time learning about that.

[00:17:48] Justin King: During blockchain, I built a blockchain app during this, a, era of AI, I built an AI app, not that they’re very good. I just did it to learn and figure it out. By the way, that’s train that translates into my career on a day to day basis. I still think tech fields are the hottest areas.

[00:18:05] Justin King: I think any area of technology that someone can get into. There’s so many aspects and there’s so many non technical aspects of working for a technical company marketing communications being able to sell obviously. Finance. There’s so many areas inside of tech.

[00:18:22] Justin King: Even though it’s been a soft year. I think any area of tech that someone can get into is better. If you’re the type of person that will actually be curious and learn about other people’s jobs and what they do and how they do it, I think it’ll open up a world that you never even knew existed.

[00:18:39] Ron Laneve: Yep. No, it’s very helpful. It always comes back down to building that personal brand and working on developing side skills, whether you to your point, whether you get paid. For that or whether it’s a true gig or it’s just building experience. That’s useful. 

[00:18:53] Ron Laneve: How about on the experienced side? As I talked to lots of individuals in the market, even though the job market appears to be really hot and unemployment’s really low. It’s still not easy in this softer space that you mentioned, whether it’s tech or marketing, et cetera, there’s still a supply and demand imbalance and it’s becoming harder for individuals to differentiate themselves in the application and interviewing process.

[00:19:19] Ron Laneve: You have any advice, for things that you’ve seen along the way that help make people stand out from one another? 

[00:19:25] Justin King: I had a college student asked me that question. So I think this applies to both sides. I asked the question to them of how are you applying to these jobs? And they’re basically following the path the application process or send a resume process.

[00:19:39] Justin King: We have these amazing tools in front of us of social media and LinkedIn and Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. You can create your own website. I remember when I applied to a job early on, I created a website. The website was titled my name plus the name of their company. I wrote a one page website about how to work there.

[00:20:03] Justin King: I got attention. I’m not suggesting you do that necessarily, but this often is about being able to, you said, how does someone stand out amongst your peers? My question really is, how do you not stand out amongst your peers? If everybody’s doing the same thing, applying the same way, why not take a different approach and try to stand out?

[00:20:25] Justin King: Even if it’s goofy and even a little silly. Hey, you get attention from that, right? There’s plenty of people that are doing that on Tik TOK right now. I’m not suggesting that you do that, but I am suggesting you get creative about your approach. 

[00:20:37] Justin King: I think when it comes to networking, people want to help. They just don’t want to be asked for a job. So as you network, ask people for help. I want to get to know your industry. How did you get the job you got? What was your career path? How did you get there? What skills did you need to learn along the way? How did you learn that? I don’t see any courses about that. 

[00:20:56] Justin King: So they’ll give you lots of information. Don’t have an ulterior motive to it. Take them out for lunch and coffee and get to know them and their industry and how they got their careers. You’d be surprised how many people at the end of it, end of that conversation, say, Hey, how can I help you? What’s a practical way? 

[00:21:16] Justin King: But so much of the time, the desperation seeps and oozes out of us when we’re approaching someone and just change your mindset. Networking is just so critical. 

[00:21:27] Ron Laneve: I guess the last bonus question is, how are you using AI these days? And what’s your outlook on, continuing to leverage it and the things you’re doing? 

[00:21:37] Justin King: Say that a different way. How am I not using AI? I’m using AI in almost every aspect of my career. Certainly personal life as well. I don’t have an email that I write that I don’t use AI. But by the way, when I say AI, I don’t mean like just generic AI. I’ve fed AI, my stuff, my voice, the words I say. So it knows how I write. I don’t craft emails right now without having it AI crafted. I don’t write a blog post without having AI rewrite the blog posts. All my images on my presentation are built by AI.

[00:22:10] Justin King: Even as I think about constructing talks. I was trying to come up with a story the other day. So I asked AI to find me some kind of crazy related stories to this topic. It took me a few minutes, but I found something really interesting that I was able to incorporate into a talk.

[00:22:29] Justin King: So I’m using it everywhere. In the last podcast I did, I used AI to edit my podcast. I removed words and inserted other words that I wanted to say. I’m using it in every aspect. I think it’s a critical skill to learn. I think there’s specific things you can learn.

[00:22:46] What’s more interesting is people that are interested in technology that know how to apply technology to their job more than their experts at AI. But if you can take a field and say, I use AI in my field to do this. To be more efficient, to be more scalable for myself. I think you have a really good opportunity there. AI is going to create business models that we have never seen before. Those business models are going to create jobs and careers you’ve never seen before. Yeah, that’s coming in the next year. That’s not coming four or five years down the road.

[00:23:21] Ron Laneve: Any tools in your AI stack that you want to share? 

[00:23:27] Justin King: Yeah tool I use every day is called castmagic. It takes voice notes from your phone, which I do a lot of. It transcribes them, build summaries, then build LinkedIn posts, blog posts off of the things that you’ve said in your phone. I’ve created full white papers from my walk to work in the morning. In that 20 minutes, I’m just speaking into my phone and looking like a crazy man. But I get to work, it’s transcribed and then I can create Instagram posts, LinkedIn posts, blogs, and then it’ll actually spit out pages and pages. Especially as you do it more and more than it starts relating it to other things that you’ve built in the past.

[00:24:12] Justin King: As you build this library, that the ability for it to synthesize it into something that’s meaningful and relevant to what you’re trying to do becomes critical. A lot of podcasters are using that. A lot of speakers, writers, content generators are using that. It’s my number one tool that I use every day.

[00:24:29] Justin King: All right. Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate 

[00:24:31] Ron Laneve: it. Justin, really appreciate the insights. It was great to see you again. I hope we connect soon and I ever get a speaking engagement someday, I’m going to, I’m going to send you a case of wine. Like you got before. So 

[00:24:44] Justin King: fun. So fun. This is amazing to do with you, Ron. Thank you so much. 

[00:24:48] Ron Laneve: Talk to you soon, bud.

April 22, 2024