Kais Makhlouf, Vice President of Digital Solutions at Thinkmax Consulting, leverages his decades of hands-on experience developing and refining digital strategies for retailers. Focusing on their needs, priorities and pre-existing digital ecosystems, Kais helps retailers navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape. Today on The Voice of Retail, Kais lets us into his world of digital strategy development. We talk about Kais’ experience in the industry, changing trends and impacts of the pandemic.
Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada
Kais Makhlouf, Vice President of Digital Solutions at Thinkmax Consulting, leverages his decades of hands-on experience developing and refining digital strategies for retailers. Focusing on their needs, priorities and pre-existing digital ecosystems, Kais helps retailers navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Today on The Voice of Retail, Kais lets us into his world of digital strategy development. We talk about Kais’ experience in the industry, changing trends and impacts of the pandemic.
Lastly, Kais shares his key pointers on creating resilient digital strategies, what to learn from the past and how to prepare for the future.
Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of The Voice of Retail. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes, industry news, and insights. If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a rating and review, as it really helps us grow so that we can continue getting amazing guests on the show.
I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company, and if you’re looking for more content, or want to chat follow me on LinkedIn, or visit my website meleblanc.co!
Until next time, stay safe and have a great week!
Passionate about digital technology with a strong acumen for corporate and business development at the international level, Kais has a proven ability to generate opportunities, establish relationships and manage cross functional teams to implement technology solutions and marketing programs at an enterprise level.
Today, Kais is Vice President, Digital Solutions at Thinkmax, responsible for fostering and leading the practice with a mission to provide clients with technological and creative ideas and solutions to help them achieve their business digital transformation.
Thinkmax Digital Solutions leverages the company’s long standing experience and deep expertise in implementing enterprise back-end systems (ERP) to empower clients in their journey of digital transformation. Thinkmax builds digital solutions, experiences and programs optimally leveraging enterprise data and services.
Thinkmax has a specific focus on retail, distribution and manufacturing sectors, providing state of the art unified commerce solutions leveraging all customer touchpoints.
Prior to joining Thinkmax, Kais held the position of VP, Strategic Partnerships at Nurun (a global full service interactive agency) and Orckestra (Commerce Cloud Software), where he led and managed major multi-million dollar international accounts in the travel, retail, distribution, media, manufacturing and CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) sectors. In these positions, Kais has also developed new offers and established long standing partnerships and alliances with world class technology organisations such Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Sitecore and many others.
Fluent in 5 languages, Kais enjoys traveling the world and exploring new cultures.
Strength & Specialties:
unified commerce, digital marketing, mobile, partner and alliance management, international development, business development, account management, business strategy.
Michael LeBlanc is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and the all new Conversations with CommerceNext podcast.
Last but not least, check out my new YouTube cooking show, Last Request Barbecue!
You can learn more about Michael here or on LinkedIn.
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail, I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
Kais Makhlouf, Vice President of Digital Solutions at Thinkmax Consulting, leverages his decades of hands-on experience developing and refining digital strategies for retailers. Focusing on their needs, priorities and pre-existing digital ecosystems, Kais helps retailers navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Today on The Voice of Retail, Kais lets us into his world of digital strategy development. We talk about Kais’ experience in the industry, changing trends and impacts of the pandemic.
Lastly, Kais shares his key pointers on creating resilient digital strategies, what to learn from the past and how to prepare for the future.
Kais Makhlouf 00:46
Capabilities technologies enabling today that retailer need to leverage quick so they can improve the experience of the customer and make them more loyal and build on that. So that's, that's what that we see the most important with, with the retailer in general. To your point about cybersecurity, it's, it's kind of I should say the elephant in the room but.
Michael LeBlanc 01:12
Let's listen in now. Kais, welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. How are you doing this afternoon?
Kais Makhlouf 01:18
Great, thank you Michael pleasure to have to, to be on this podcast.
Michael LeBlanc 01:22
Yeah, nice, nice to hear your voice where am I reaching you? Are you in, I think you're in Montreal, yeah?
Kais Makhlouf 01:26
Correct. I'm in Montreal today.
Michael LeBlanc 01:29
Fantastic, I miss Montreal. I'm looking forward to getting back it's been probably one of the longest times in my entire life that I haven't been to Montreal so I really miss I miss the city and I, I miss the people so this is the next best thing so it's great to have the opportunity to chit and chat with you. Well, listen, let's uh let's jump right in and tell me a bit about yourself, your background, I mean looking at your, your profile your LinkedIn profile you've been in technology, looks like for most of your career. Some great names and tell me what, what you do and what you do at Thinkmax.
Kais Makhlouf 01:59
Sure, I, I kind of tell people I'm a digital native.
Michael LeBlanc 02:03
Mm hmm, yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 02:04
So, I started my career basically in, in a digital agency world implementing digital experiences digital e-commerce. Ten years working that in that capacity to a to more a product company where we wanted to create a first kind of e-commerce platform for in the cloud. This platform as a service and that's where I kind of met the, the Thinkmax people, partners and, and joined them in 2015. To basically bring to the market, and to the retailers and some CPG companies a solution that unifies their channels and e-commerce operations, and, and meet more the, the new customers digital behaviors and needs in terms of Omnichannel and Unified Commerce. So that's, that's been my background basically working with large brands, large retailers and implementing digital solutions across, in the past I should say 15-20 years.
Michael LeBlanc 03:20
Now as your role is as, as the Vice President of Digital Solutions, tell me what that encompasses? What do you, you know, when you get up in the morning and you got a cup of coffee in front of you what, what do you do during the day? Is it, is it obviously you thought leadership because that's why we have the chance to talk today, but how do, how do you implement that? Do you go, do you do some Biz Dev as well? Or is it implementation? How do you spend your time?
Kais Makhlouf 03:43
It's, it's a bit I, I help the, the sales team here at Thinkmax, but also most of my time is spent with existing clients, helping them in defining their digital strategy, their roadmap, prioritization. Based on their current contacts, their status, their technology ecosystem, and how we could basically together help them get to, to the business objectives they are aiming for at the, the fastest possible. So, it varies from, from a client to another of course. At Thinkmax we work with small medium and large organization in the retail industry. So, it's quite compelling it's we it's a learning mode every day we learn from the client.
Michael LeBlanc 04:32
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 04:32
We learn from their customers and we learn from our own people and the technology solutions that, that we see on, on a regular basis.
Michael LeBlanc 04:41
And tell me all about Thinkmax, scope of the business, where you operate, the type of clients you operate with, and, and, you know, a bit of scope and scale. And where you, know what makes you different? Why, why do people and retailers choose to work with you?
Kais Makhlouf 04:57
Absolutely. So Thinkmax was founded in 2009, basically to help retailers, manufacturers, and distributor wholesalers to implement ERP and business applications. Grew, it started with four ex-Deloitte partners to spin off like the digital, I should, I should say more the, the, the Microsoft Dynamics ERP Solutions. And it's been growing successfully for the past decade, I should say.
And after, in 2015-16, when I connected with the, with the team, Thinkmax was very successful implementing, as I said, the ERP system for retailers and manufacturers. But it was missing something for them. Lot of the client were asking, you guys are great implementing our business applications, but now, the online and the e-commerce part is becoming, or even the point of sale, is becoming very important, how you could help us? And at that time Thinkmax went out and tried to find solution partners to help the client. But, at certain point, then when we met, we, we kind of aligned on the fact that there was a gap in the market. There was really an issue with the market in terms of technology solutions, where, and vendors where, there was no solution that brought the business application of retail operations, with that front end experience and customer experience in e-commerce. So that's where we said we need to develop a practice around e-commerce and digital, to help our existing clients and future clients in providing them with that unified view, that vision of unified commerce. And that this touches retailers, but also manufacturers that are going direct or, or through a B2B platform [inaudible].
Michael LeBlanc 06:57
Now you mentioned, you mentioned Microsoft Dynamics, are you part of the Microsoft ecosystem exclusively? So, if we turn to you, those are the solutions that you're going to offer? Or are you agnostic? Or how do you play, how (inaudible).
Kais Makhlouf 07:10
We play mostly in the Microsoft ecosystem. We could say that we are quite exclusive on that front. We, we appreciate a lot of what Microsoft has been doing in the retail, specifically from, from in terms of their solution. And, and it's, it's, it's driven a lot by the Azure Cloud infrastructure.
Michael LeBlanc 07:31
Right.
Kais Makhlouf 07:32
Today, like for retailers or other kind of businesses. The cloud and the infrastructure are key for scalability, for reliability for security. Which becoming a tremendous risk, I should say, for many companies. So having that ecosystem and having platforms and applications that run in that infrastructure is a is a game changer.
Michael LeBlanc 07:59
It's funny you took, you took the words right out of my mouth, I was just about to say, I've heard from retailers and, and you know, it's a game changer, the cloud-based Azure, you know, it, it is. It allows you to do things you never imagined or never, you know, would certainly never have the budget to stretch to do so. All right.
Kais Makhlouf 08:17
It's a, it's a very good point, because I, I remember in 2000, when digital solutions and ideas are coming, it's a lot of the ideas and marketers have all the good ideas, but there was limitation and constraints in terms of implementing them and the infrastructure that supports these ideas. So since now, 5-10 years that the cloud is enabling all these ideas, and when we talk about personalization, when we talk about AI, when we talk about analytics, all of those are more and more becoming kind of a commodity to, to all companies, small, medium, large. Thanks to the cloud, because you put an application there, and you can leverage the whole infrastructure base.
Michael LeBlanc 09:01
Yeah, and more horsepower than we could ever have imagined. Last question about the business just so we understand context, and listeners understand. The size of the organizations. You've talked about small, medium and large, like what what's an average, you know, where, where does it fit best? Where do you find the best fit in terms of, you know, I don't know how many stores they have or sales. I mean, there is a certain scale that you probably worked best at. What would have would about that about that size would, would? What size is optimal for you guys?
Kais Makhlouf 09:29
Yeah, absolutely. So Thinkmax today that we, we operate on an North American geography or scale. We are about 150, and with, with the 50 partners and like we can have a capacity of about 200 people across North America. The, the in terms of who we work with, it's really, we aim in terms of size of retail, if you go by store size, like maybe 25-50 minimum stores. Because, it's really how the Microsoft platform fits.
Michael LeBlanc 10:00
Right, right.
Kais Makhlouf 10:01
That that model the Dynamics 365. So that's, that's the minimum kind of size we, we aim for. We work sometimes with, with some new models or like we call them e-tailers that are pure online, they have no retail stores. But they or they start adding stores, we work with a customer in the States, Gardeners Supply. They basically, it's a catalog business legacy, but they are moving most of the business is online today, but they're also opening stores. Right? So.
Michael LeBlanc 10:36
Store, this is funny eh, a note, they didn't get the note that stores were out of fashion, all these .com brands that that are turning to stores for growth.
Kais Makhlouf 10:44
Yes.
Michael LeBlanc 10:44
Let's, let's talk about, and this is not a history lesson. This isn't a history podcast. But let's talk about the past 18-20 months of the COVID era. And I'm curious, because you guys have been in the mix, you know, I'm sure taking calls, both from existing clients, and new ones just trying to adjust and adapt. And, and I wanted to understand what priorities your clients had during the COVID era and, and later in, as in our discussion, we'll talk about the future. But what were the priorities? What were people working on? And how did you help the industry kind of get through? What were those, what were those calls like and what, what and how did your projects kind of change or adapt over the past couple of years?
Kais Makhlouf 11:25
Very interesting period, I think our history period, I'm sure a lot of movies, documentary will cover that.
Michael LeBlanc 11:32
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 11:33
These, these past 20, 20 months, I think it went I should say through various status, or various from, from we're gonna shut down everything and wait what's going to happen and maybe next week, everybody's gonna come back.
Michael LeBlanc 11:49
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 11:49
And we, business as usual to, okay, this is gonna stay forever, and we need to adjust our systems. We need to be able to give access to, to our people in the remote way secure way to, we need to think about new ways of fulfilling from the logistics perspective and fulfillment and delivery.
Michael LeBlanc 11:49
Like curb-side, that kind of thing right.
Kais Makhlouf 12:04
Curb-side pick-up etc.
Michael LeBlanc 12:18
Yeah, yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 12:21
And recently more and more we our talk talking about the touch less store. So, it's, it's been quite, quite something, in terms of all the ideas to. Some ideas like two years ago, who, if you talk to my mother or to, they, they never thought about one day doing some video conferencing.
Michael LeBlanc 12:44
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 12:44
Now retailers are doing video conferencing with their customers to help them choose products. It, it shows you all the, the ideas and all the, the acceleration that's happening through technology for retailers.
Michael LeBlanc 12:56
But let's talk about that for a bit. I'm kind of curious, you know, you know, we, we almost forget that we look back and the sudden jarring change of okay, everybody suddenly go home. And I've talked to other folks from Microsoft Dynamics team about how they were able to pivot, cause basically, they were ready for that challenge. They were kind of built for that challenge, right. We can suddenly get all your people working at home safely. How have you changed the way you've worked in terms of working with the clients? I mean, I I'd imagine in the before time, it was a lot of in person visits, a lot of on-site work. Are you finding that your, your retail clients are not just amenable but finding more productive? Or how are you finding that balance as an organization? And, and I'm asking this because I I think we're all trying to figure out what's the right balance of working with vendors, being in front of clients. And how are you finding that balance?
Kais Makhlouf 13:46
The toughest part, I think, is that there is no generic or standard way to look at it. Every customer, every employee is in a different context. And, and that took us some time to realize that. Because, like you asked the question, we were thinking what is the best model? How will we tailor our customer asking us to do and it's funny enough every, every organization was asking, or every client was asking different ways. Some they are completely remote. Others wanted to go back as, as fast as possible. Others are hybrid and same thing with our people, our teams. Some of them wanted to continue working remotely, they appreciate working from home, they saw.
Michael LeBlanc 14:31
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 14:32
They saw the productivities, others no they, they miss the, the office and being with other. So that's, that's the common thread. It's like it's every organization every people, and comes back to that to the retail personalization. If you start generalizing and, and things you miss kind of the boat a little bit. So, we are trying to be as flexible, as understandable as possible. And it's causing Some challenges, but at the same time, I think it's helping us helping clients.
Michael LeBlanc 15:04
So, if, if you reflect back on the time and again, the not a history lesson, but what, what kind of three lessons would you take away from working with clients and from listening to them and helping them solve problems or address opportunities in some ways? What, what would those top things the organization and you learned over the past, over the past 18-20 months?
Kais Makhlouf 15:27
It's not new, it's, it's adaptive change, [inaudible] be flexible. Those are the key bigger. The most important thing for our clients or our clients is to take care of our people. Especially through this period it was, it's still actually challenging to, to, to, to understand every person needs and every person situation and, and help bring help. Our clients are not different, we treat them as part of the team and, and they have their own challenges with their own people in teams. There is new opportunity that now we used to, and they used to hire locally, of course, by nature, now, we are hiring people from all over North America. And working remote, we have the tools. That's something that's been there for a while, we always been having the, the, the technology and the tools to work in a remote way. So that never has been an issue for us has just.
Michael LeBlanc 16:33
It's never been about the tools, right, I mean.
Kais Makhlouf 16:35
Correct.
Michael LeBlanc 16:35
It's it's not about the tools. Tell me about, you know, we've been talking about the people, which is great discussion, but tell me about the business, ideas about business? I mean, you mentioned agility, I have to think, given that we've learned, you know, learned the lesson that it's very difficult to anticipate what's coming next. And agility is very important, again, from a business perspective, did were there, were there clients who said, you know, we were kind of on the fence about whether we're going to do these things, whether we really needed to do CRM and integrated. Did you, did you see a and that's again culture as much as anything? But did you see a change, a C change with your clients and, and talk about that for a bit?
Kais Makhlouf 17:14
Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of the change, there was that re, reactivity to what's happening everywhere and how governments were, were kind of controlling or, or the pandemic and things like that. But overall, especially in technology and digital, the shift is, is tremendous. It's, it's a seismic kind of impact that that, that it's been for, for these retailers or organization in general.
In the past, I think it's, I don't want to say rarely, but rarely, I should say, a board would be interested in of knowing and come and understanding what is an e-commerce platform will do for them, right. Right now, it's every C-level, every board will know probably what technology solution is being implemented. And when it's going to go live, and what the impact of such or such solution, the acceleration of that it's incredible.
And this is good, because that's what I think the retail industry was, was lacking, in a sense to, it's a shockwave to, to kind of realize what technology could bring and how consumers that were. We're changing now, how the change happened and what was expected to happen in 5 10 years. It happened in in 20 months, 10 months or 20 20 months so that's.
Michael LeBlanc 18:47
Do, do, do you find that you went in some instances from being an evangelist to just everybody's nodding, and everybody's like, yeah, you're right, let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Like there's a little bit less evangelizing around the future of integrated digital? And it's more Yep, let's do it. Did you find a transition there?
Kais Makhlouf 19:06
So true, I mean, it's, but I'm still, I'm still sometimes surprised how some players or retailers still lagging. And what's what you see the most today, it's like the ones that were leading, they're leading even more because they were ready. And they are aware that they leveraged their technology through the past 20 months, let's say, and they continue to evolve. It's like, it's showing look what we've done or what we've been preparing for, is now working incredibly. And you see the others that didn't have that, say that digital maturity or the vision, or the people, or the financial background to support innovation to support change, are going to suffer even more.
Michael LeBlanc 19:55
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 19:56
And those are like that's the difficulty that we've been seeing. But in terms of yes, they want to acknowledge any e-commerce project needs to roll out as fast as possible.
Michael LeBlanc 20:08
How fast? Not how much? You know, not, not why, but how fast? I mean, it's, it's interesting, right? Because retailers with large physical assets, versus a, you know, digitally native vertical brand. You know, you have a lot of your capital assets and value tied up in physical assets. So, I guess that, that transition must be taken with great care, right? Because you're, you know, what makes you great. Is this, you know, this blurring of the lines, right, this, this integration. So, it's a nice transition to talking about the future now.
Let's talk about 2022 and beyond. And, you know, we're in late 2021, we were looking forward to pretty much hopefully the end of the COVID era, at least at the intensity of the COVID era. Hopefully, and, and what are you hearing, in terms of priorities? I'm hearing things like cybersecurity as a top priority. I'm thinking about you know, scalability, I'm thinking about customer, I'm trying to understand new customer behaviors. But you tell me when you meet with your existing and prospective clients, what are they asking you for? And what kind of projects are you looking to do for them to take them forward?
Kais Makhlouf 21:18
The retail sector specifically, it's really the most important thing for them is to be able to leverage the online channel, and to have what we can call a digital experience platform. So, within the Microsoft ecosystem, we leverage a platform called Optimizely, that is able to not just do e-commerce, but also manage content online experiences, personalization, experimentation. It's a platform that complements the that dynamics, business application back-end systems. And, and for them, it's, it's basically what I was saying in the beginning, the gap between, okay we are we have our retail operation running. Now we want to tie that to our front end, or to our touch points, being in the store, being in the online, web, etc. The, the, the most important thing I see is really, to, to the speed of acquiring and enabling these, these technologies. Like today, you still kind of I, I'm still surprised, like you go to any retailers and, and there are certain experiences or certain expectations that are not met. Like the experience you kind of benchmark to or compared to, if you're an Amazon Prime, like I want, I want to same day or 24 hours delivery. That there's not many retailers are able to do that today.
Michael LeBlanc 22:53
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 22:53
I want to go to a store and I want the, I don't want to use I want to use mobile, my mobile to pay for example. All of these small capability’s technologies, enabling today that retailer need to leverage quick so they can improve the experience to the customer, and make them more loyal, and build on that. So that's, that's what that we see the most important with, with the return on general.
To your point about cybersecurity, it's, it's kind of I should say the elephant in the room. But in our case, leveraging the Azure Cloud kind of answers a lot of these questions in terms of security, reliability, scalability. It's, it's less an issue. But it's still like, it's something very important to make sure you have the fraud detection tools in on your e-commerce platform and things like that.
Michael LeBlanc 23:51
You know, so, so talk about that for a little bit. So, moving to the Azure Cloud, does that inoculate you? We're all familiar with these terms like a vaccine, but does that inoculate you from, you know, the ransomware attacks that were, were. I, I you know, I was talking to someone today, and they were saying they were under attack from ransomware. And, you know, the ransomware perpetrators were actually providing references. You know, like, so it's a big, big problem. Now, is moving to the cloud, is that is that a one and done, I don't want to call it a solution, but, you know, minimization of that particular problem? Or to talk about that for a little bit.
Kais Makhlouf 24:28
It's a big minimization. It's for me, resistance is futile, like it's, it's, it's been, it's been proven, it will minimize it like the vaccine. And I know they're giving some percentages, I should say it said the Pfizer type of manipulation, if you may, if you want to say so. But still, still there are some other aspects that you can be in the cloud. But in terms of ransom could be ransomware I mean could be a good answer. Because then sharing the cloud, you have your backups you have.
Michael LeBlanc 25:04
Yeah.
Kais Makhlouf 25:05
The impact would be much more smaller then then then if you're not in the cloud.
Michael LeBlanc 25:11
And, and I imagine you've got hundreds, if not thousands of people working for Microsoft, just on keeping that secure. So, I'm sure there's a, an army of very skilled people kind of on your side behind the scenes.
All right, well, listen this good discussion. I mean, when you when you think about, let's sum it up, when you think about the conversations you're having, the experience you've had, what are your top kind of three pieces of advice for retailers who are listening to this interview, and, and me and my audience around how they should be thinking about technology, and the future? And I'm not talking the future is like, in years, because the future is with us now, we got to figure this out now. And you know, for many, for some, they've, they've gone through a just waves of incredible demand. For others, they're looking to bounce back from, from anything from limitations to a shortage of demand. So, I think 2022 is gonna be very interesting year. What are your three pieces of advice that they should be thinking about when they get up in the morning, around technology?
Kais Makhlouf 26:11
I think the first thing is, how you will rise to the challenge of this great acceleration that is happening in the, in the digital and the, the, the consumption of digital and how I'm going to offer my customers the experience they are asking for. Because put yourself in the, in the customer shoes and, and see what, what experience he's, he's expecting. It's not difficult to understand. I want to know information about the product, I want to know if you have it, I want to order it right away, I want to get it. So, a lot of these asked are very easy. And you can think about few examples like the Amazon Prime the, the Apple experience in store, so you can start and see what how I can meet that experience and these to so I can leverage the acceleration of that channel.
Then you need to be able to find understand what are the, the key differentiator so we can compete against the abundantly capitalized mega platforms of this world. The Amazon, the Costco, the Walmart. How, how you are going to compete, what's our key differentiator, because that's going to happen itself 80% of top 25 US retailers are controls 80% of the overall business kind of something like that. They are there and you need to realize.
Then it's like it's all about experience, experience, experience and building loyalty with a customer that's going to be very important. Technologies is there, how I have how I have the right people, the maturity to face that and, and deliver on that. So, thinking of vision to leverage acceleration through technology, having the right people to, to, to achieve that, and three is, making sure that I have the key differentiators to face the, the, the big players.
Michael LeBlanc 28:18
Right on right on? Well, I'm a retailer. So, I'll add a bonus. Find the right group of people and thought leaders like yourself to help them get there, right, find the right partners, whatever that looks like. So, listen, lots of experience you bring to bear your organization, where can listeners go to learn more and perhaps get in touch?
Kais Makhlouf 28:35
Thinkmax.com is the place to go. And we'll be very happy to engage and interact and give you more thought on your digital journey.
LeBlanc 28:47
Well listen Kais, it was a great discussion. I can't think of a more interesting time. I mean, I think back to the late 90s. There was so much change, but so little capability in some days, but now you've got this, you know, tremendous power. You've got tremendous change all coming together. So very interesting, very exciting time for all of us. So, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. It's it was a real treat. And I wish you, you and Thinkmax continued success.
Kais Makhlouf 29:14
Thank you, Michael. Have a nice day.
Michael LeBlanc 29:17
Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of The Voice of Retail. Be sure and follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy podcasts so you don't miss out on the latest episodes, industry news, and insights. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review, as it really helps us grow so that we continue to get amazing guests onto the show.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc., and if you're looking for more content, or want to chat follow me on LinkedIn or visit my website at meleblanc.co.
Until next time, stay safe and have a great week!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
retailers, digital, clients, people, technology, business, terms, customer, retail, implementing, cloud, leverage, commerce, commerce platform, podcast, platform, key differentiator, organization, experience