Reaching For Your Dreams: Hitting Homeruns On Product Returns With Spencer Kieboom
Reaching for your dreams isn't easy, but what's harder is walking away and building a new goal. In this episode, we listen and learn how a major league baseball player pivoted from his career and founded his own company. Chad Burmeister talks to former pro baseball player and now founder and CEO of Pollen Returns, Spencer Kieboom. Spencer talks about his childhood dreams and reaching these dreams and how he quietly walked away from these after years of hard work to start anew and build his company. Discover how he created Pollen Returns and what he has done to bring his idea to the forefront of the supply chain process.
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Reaching For Your Dreams: Hitting Homeruns On Product Returns With Spencer Kieboom
We're with Spencer Kieboom. Spencer is the Founder and CEO of Pollen Returns. It has to do with logistics. We're going to talk a little bit about that but before we get into that, we're going to get to know Spencer at a little bit deeper level. Spencer, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Chad.
I think Spencer's been reviewing a lot of contract documents and those things. We're going to try to take his mind off of that and ask him some things that are a little more personal and more relevant to the audience on the show.
This would be good. It's a good break. I'm excited to be here and excited to share whatever I can and enlighten in any way. Everyone goes through the same trenches so I'm excited.
You never know what you’re going to get when you unwrap one of the episodes. Let’s dig in. The first question I like to share is about when you were a kid, maybe 5, 6, 7. What are the first memories that you have? Do you remember what you were passionate about? Where’d you grow up in the country? What were you doing on a day-to-day basis in those days?
We had a great childhood. I have two brothers. My middle brother and I are 22 months apart. My youngest brother Carter, who still plays baseball with Washington Nationals, we're six years apart. At around six years old, my mom was pregnant again with Carter. We had a great childhood. We lived in the bottom of this hill in a cul-de-sac or roundabout, as some people call them. We had these woods in our backyard and I used to go back there building forts, lighting fires that my mom was probably freaking out about. We were doing that. My middle brother and I are probably out there on the pavement playing hockey to baseball to throwing the football to riding bikes to falling and getting scabs. We were always active and going nuts. It's 7:00 AM and you don't need an alarm clock where we lived. We were out there.
People like to bucket you right as an entrepreneur, but that being said, it's still the same concept.
Do you still have any friends you can remember from those days in the cul-de-sac?
I remember the people that were there. I'm not friends with them any longer. I don't have contact with them. I remember who was there. I remember all of it. I even remember we had some arm care tubing when my youngest brother was probably 4 or 5. You'd see guys you use it on a fence, pitchers when they get loose. We made like a three-minute slingshot and we didn't think it through. We had Carter go 100 yards down. He's four with the glove the size of his chest. I have a baseball. Trevor, my middle brother, is holding the other side of the slingshot.
The other side of that slingshot needs to be held. You technically need four people if there's somebody going to catch it but we hooked it up to the top of the mailbox. I remember slinging that thing at him and it came out like a knuckleball, probably at 100 miles an hour. Fortunately, it missed him. Unfortunately, I hit our neighbor's gutter, which fell. We ran inside and that was the end of it.
I can visualize that. My best friend came up to my door when I was five. It turns out he’s adopted. I didn’t know that at the time. He knocks on the door, “Do you have any little kids here?” I was shy, hiding behind my mom. We ended up playing basketball. We were at the top of a cul-de-sac of a street and ended up riding bikes together. He moved to Arizona and we’ve still stayed best friends to this day. It’s very cool those memories.
When we have kids of our own, as you and I do, those are the things to think about and remember of how our childhood was and how can we produce something similar or better for our kids. Is there any connection between how you were as a kid and what you’re doing now? Your brother who plays baseball, I think that story articulates a little bit about how he got to where he is. How did you get to where you are? Does it tie back to what you’re passionate about when you were little?
It does. My middle brother was always into video games and I never got into them, not because I have anything against them. The guys I played with played baseball. We’re out there and I’m out there for 3 to 4 hours and we lose a game or even if we win the game, all I could think was like, “The last thing I want to do is go back and play a video game where I could potentially lose ten times in an hour and be pissed off,” so I avoided those. In the backyard, I would be building stuff constantly. Not from Legos. I like putting trees together and building forts. Even if I was digging a hole, who cares? I had to be doing something and trying to build something.
Reaching For Your Dreams: You're going through the minor leagues; it's a constant battle. You have highs and lows. You're sitting there, and you want things to move quicker, but they move at the pace they're supposed to be moving at.
Going into baseball was building a career in how you navigate those waters. Now obviously, you’re building a company, which there’s even more overlap from the baseball side into what I’m doing now. People like to bucket you as an entrepreneur. That being said, it’s still the same concept. You’re going through the minor leagues. It’s a constant battle. You have highs and lows. You’re sitting there and you want things to move quicker but they move at the pace they’re supposed to be moving at. It is a ton of overlap from growing up to where I’m at now.
From then to now, there's always stuff that happens to us in the middle of life that feels like, "How am I going to get through this?” Have you had any of those times that are almost impossible where you're like, “How am I going to do this?" Maybe our audience may be experiencing it. Is there anything you're comfortable sharing on the show?
In 2017, I abruptly lost the hearing in my right ear. We’ll save the details but essentially, it was not expected. It was not necessarily warranted. I didn’t make a mistake myself or fire a gun off or do anything like that. It was something that it happened. From that experience, I would say you don’t realize how much you use your hearing. Let’s put it that way. You’re sitting in a restaurant and you’re going, “It’s loud in here,” or you don’t hear anything.
You also angle yourself at a table differently. Especially in baseball, it’s amazing what the sound does off the bat. You’ve correlated the sound of a ball of a bat off the direction and potentially the distance from where that ball’s going. It is something where if you put an earplug in somebody’s ear, it makes a big difference. You’ll be like, “What’s going on? How it’s happening?” It’s a painful memory, but a memory or an experience that, although traumatic, is something that you build off of as an individual because life goes on.
We have the long punter at USC who went blind in one eye and he met Pete Carroll somehow. He sent him a note or something and this was when he was young. He was still in high school. He said, “I’ve always wanted to be a long kicker. I want to play for USC.” Pete follows up with this kid, takes a liking to him and he’s getting closer. I don’t know all the details but they’re going to have to have surgery on his other good eye and remove it so that he can still see but he knows within a week or ten days, they’re going to do surgery and he will never see again.
When he spoke to us at this event, he said, “It was the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s life. It’s what happened.” The reason he said that he’s like, “I met Pete Carroll. I got to play. I got to kick in the USC game. I played for USC, which was the dream of my life.” He’s wearing glasses and can’t see. It’s interesting to go through those experiences and end up making it into your strength. It becomes part of who you are.
When you're in the dream, you set new goals and then new milestones. Then who knows where necessarily the dream takes you.
I would say I have supersonic hearing, though, in my other ear, let’s say. At the same time, it happened in 2017. If you looked at my numbers, statistically as a player, in my career, in 2016, I was placed on the roster. I was called up to the big leagues at the end of the year. I didn’t even count it. Wilson almost tore his ACL. I was already sent home. I had the worst year of my career in 2016. Coming into 2017, I was gung ho. This happened three weeks before spring training kicked off. I’m not an excuse person. You’re fighting, crashing, scratching and clawing to prove to everybody that “That was not an outlier of a year.” You get sat down in the office. You get DFA-ed. Nobody picks you up, which is pretty standard at spring training. If you do get picked up, you’re probably going to get DFA again then you get picked up by somebody else and get DFA again then you’re stuck there anyway.
Get called in the office and told, “You’re not a big leaguer and you’re playing for 29 other teams.” Now I’m sitting in Double-A. I'm playing once or twice a week, trying to make the most of opportunities and waiting to capitalize on what comes. I got one and capitalized and found myself in the big leagues in 2018 for most of the year and it was awesome.
There’s a great book that I highly recommend you check out. I played lacrosse in high school and college. It was a club sports team back at Colorado State. We traveled all over and had a lot of fun. I never attached myself to sports. I attached myself to being competitive, whatever it is whether you’re a CEO or a seller or whatever. Daryll Stinson was supposed to play in the NFL. He had back problems with a slipped disc that was very terrible. They gave him drugs for two years and got to the point where he was addicted. He was ready to end it all.
Two different people came into his place where he was in the psych ward and said, “God told me I needed to talk to you.” One was a lady that didn’t even work in his ward but was in another area and goes, “I don’t know why I’m here but God told me I needed to come to talk to you.” Anyway, the long and short is, God saved him. Now he wrote a book that’s fabulous. He’s more happy now than he ever would have been as an NFL player. It’s called Who Am I After Sports? A good read that anybody who’s in sports and makes the pivot into something else. This book helps you go, “Got it. That’s why I did what I did.”
It’s different but for myself walking away, wasn’t easy, to be honest. I never met a 35-year-old guy playing Triple-A baseball who was happy, to be honest. They may be a happy person but deep down internally, you have accomplished the dream. I bucket things. This is after baseball. I realized it because something that I do that I like is I do like to give back in the game of baseball, which is enough for me. I do lessons with one kid. He’s going to Mississippi State. He’s talented, has a great family and is a great individual. I volunteer with the summer ball team I used to play for when I was 17, 18 and also an inner-city group down here in Atlanta called LEAD, once a month with those guys.
At the same time, if I ask a 17- or 16-year-old kid, “What’s your goal in baseball,” they’ll say, “To play in the big leagues most of the time. I want to go play Division I baseball.” I’m like, “I’m worried about you if that’s the goal,” type of deal. At the same time, I’m going, “That’s not a realistic goal. That’s the dream.” You have to find ways to bucket everything up. A goal should be, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to achieve these milestones, then what I achieve milestones, I reach a dream." When you’re in the dream, you set new goals and then you set new milestones. Who knows where necessarily the dream takes you? If I ask a seventeen-year-old kid, “What’s your goal,” and they say, “The big leagues,” I’m like, “That’s a dream. Let’s set some realistic goals because you’ll never feel whole because you can’t accomplish anything if that’s the case."
Reaching For Your Dreams: Maybe the dream doesn't even pan out how you think. Maybe you find yourself living in another dream that you didn't even realize was actually happening. But it's about constantly trying to get better.
If you ask a seventeen-year-old, you ask a five-year-old little league baseball player or tee-ball player, “What’s your goal for baseball,” and he says, “To play the big leagues,” you’re going to pat them on the butt and say, “That’s a nice goal.” It’s the same concept. It’s how you look at it and what the perception is. It’s about bucketing all these things up to reach these milestones to then achieve a dream. Maybe the dream doesn’t even pan out how you think. Maybe you find yourself living in another dream that you didn’t even realize was happening but it’s about constantly trying to get better.
Kris Dehnert is now a friend of mine. I’ve known him for about a year. He’s the CEO of Dugout Mugs. If you’ve probably heard of that in baseball. He’s the CEO. He joined when they were doing 50,000 in sales. Then he put them on the map. They’re going to do $20 million in sales in a year. He loved collecting baseball cards, getting to know baseball players, loves the game of baseball and likes to drink beer. He’s like, “Now that I’m the CEO of Dugout Mugs, I get to meet all the players. I can call any club and say, ‘I’d like to come. Can you give me a box?'” They’ll give him a box.
He’s the most happy-go-lucky guy you’ll ever meet. At age 33, before he got into all this, he was about to die. He was like, “God, if you save me, I want to do something big in the world.” He was saved and now he’s doing very neat things. He’s got an amazing daughter and a wife. He's a cool guy. He’s a perfect example of no one could have told him that he would be the CEO of a $22 million company and get to be drinking beer at any baseball stadium he wants ever.
The best part is he probably doesn't even care how much the company's worth. He's enjoying what he's doing.
Now with your current work with your organization, what excites you about Pollen Returns? How did you get into that business?
When I knew I was done playing, I’m laying in bed and I can’t sleep. It’s September. There’s a lot on my mind. I’ll spare everybody the details or the thoughts. In college, I used to, not in a cheesy way, have an invention like a notebook. You had to do study hall as an athlete at a club set and you had to do 10 or 12 hours a week. If you had over a 3.5, you could get out of study hall. I’m like, “I got one goal for preschool that’s to get over 3.5,” because I don’t want to be doing this in the spring, I’ll tell you that much. I’m like, “I got to make good grades.”
Nobody's looking at the area between consumer and drop-off, which is actually the slowest part of the reverse supply chain.
At the same time, I got 3 or 4 hours a lot of times where I don’t have anything to do. You sit in a large room and there are probably cameras now with all the updates but this is 2009. You have the archetype of the angry librarian sitting there like, “You can’t talk.” YouTube was the platform at the time. You can’t watch a YouTube video. You can’t watch a movie. If you are watching a movie, you have to have a show like the fact that you had to watch it for school. I would sit there, drop different diagrams, make different inventions up, try to source who I’d want to buy the materials from or how much it would cost and do all these different types of things.
I almost did Packaging Science at Clemson. It’s one of their unique majors. I took a class and they’re always talking about the last mile is 50% of the cost. This was when Uber was relatively new to the scene. I’m like, “Why isn’t Uber delivering these goods at a fraction of the cost?” We go by these DCs constantly. I never thought about it during my playing career. I’m laying in bed and I’m like, “I can’t stop thinking about this.” Every night I’m like, “This is pissing me off that this is not being done.” I started exploring it, going down all these avenues and that’s where it started.
I happened to meet somebody who said, “This is a good idea.” I haven’t dumped any money into this yet. It was more preliminary and drawing out maybe the initial concept. He’s like, “I think this is a good idea but you have two people to sell this to.” I’m like, “Yes.” He goes, “If they say ‘You’re done,’ there’s nothing you can do.” On top of that, I will say, being a part of a union myself previously with baseball, I guess still technically you’re still there, although I’m not active, you’re not going to get anything done with a union especially on that front.
You’re going to take away the actual items they deliver for their income. I’m like, “That’s a pretty good point," but he mentioned, "You should look at returns.” I started diving into that. I’m like, “This space is huge.” It’s like the underbelly of retail where, as a consumer, we all think, “I returned it. They’re going to put it back on the shelf or put it back somewhere to be re-fulfilled at an eCommerce warehouse fulfillment center.” It’s not the case. There are all these different solutions out there, from customer interfacing to where do the goods go to being more direct and expediting all those supply chain sides. It's like what is in the supply chain by 5% or 10% or you have other companies who take on these returns and resell them, which is a huge market. It’s like $300 billion on the job or market.
At the same time, nobody’s looking at the area between consumer and drop-off, which is the slowest part of the reverse supply chain. Twenty-plus days is the average time it takes a consumer to bring or return it and place it into the FedEx, UPS, USPS supply chain. If you can expedite that process by 50%, what you can do to inventory turns and how they increase, what you can do to inventory purchase where now companies can retain more capital. I can still serve the same amount of consumers who are also in the same growth levels but I can purchase 25% to 40% less inventory in order to accomplish this. Now they don’t have to spend $50 or $200 million on the capital worth of inventory sitting there. They can spend, keep that money, retain it, don’t put it against their credit line or you get interesting accrued on it. They can hold onto that money and do what they see best fit.
That’s interesting because I worked for FedEx early on in Los Angeles. I flew to Hong Kong, China, for an international meeting for FedEx before they opened the lanes there and everything else. I worked with a guy named David. Dave was a previous advertising guy. He printed up on a big ad chart an Excel spreadsheet that talked about inventory turns. His whole mission in life was he helped co-invent the Dell Direct Distribution Model. We would go in together to all these different companies and say, “How much inventory do you have in your warehouse?”
Reaching For Your Dreams: Why isn't Uber delivering these goods at a fraction of the cost? Because we go by these DCs constantly.
In some cases, we had to slightly change the packaging and the weight and the dimensional weight and all those things and say, “Instead of bringing it in, keep it.” It's like this one place in Beverly Hills. They shipped high-end mirrors like $2,000 mirrors. We said, “What if you could eliminate all that office space and ship it directly to the hotels?” We helped them collapse. We had a lot of customers like that. I remember to look at the inventory carrying costs and all those numbers you’re talking about. It was like when you make it simple. There’s a lot of money that’s hidden in there.
We see an opportunity on the CX side where you're meshing these two because, by the way, for anybody who's reading, Pollen is a software-enabled solution that facilitates pick-ups to the gig ecosystem from your front porch or the returns that you're trying to make. What that does is obviously, there's a CX value that happens too. Now the consumer has a sense of ease. The numbers that we have are crazy from our first run when we did the pilots. It's more hyper-local and truly insane. Seventy-five percent of consumers are less likely to leave an item in a shopping cart. That number is crazy, even if you hit 30% of that of all the items that are left in the shopping cart.
All goods that ever get put into a shopping cart, only 30%, make it past the transaction. Think about how easy we've made it to do it, where it's a fingerprint or my face recognition, etc. or log into my PayPal account. There are all these easy ways to do this but yet only 30% make it through the transaction point. That's something we're working on with our partners as we gather our KPIs to have that number hard in real numbers outside of the surveys that we have that we had taken by the consumers. It's cool and it's been a lot of fun. There's so much overlap where I get to dump the passions that I had in baseball into this.
There's an intro I should make and tell me if I'm wrong. Bench - Century is a company that has this thing you put on your porch and the drivers can get into it but the porch pirates can't. He's been selling the crud out of this. He's doing some pretty big partnerships. He's been at it for years. The former COO of BOA, where in your boots you tie them up if you're snowboarding or something like that, they've got a big-time COO that's helped them with all the design and everything. Possibly an interesting conversation.
I'm always interested especially with folks in the space, although it runs parallels. It's not a direct overlap and that's what's unique.
The last question for you and is usually one of my favorite questions, Spencer, is what role does faith play in your journey? You lost hearing in one of your ears and a lot of people could say, “This is terrible. My life’s never going to be the same,” and yet we’re here talking and you’ve got a smile on your face. What role does faith play in your journey?
I have an incredible family and there’s a lot to be thankful for. I got an incredible group of individuals, my team working on Pollen with me. The people that I got to meet during this process, the people that I met during baseball. It’s huge. You have something that’s special and you can fall back on. As we said earlier, things come to you when the time’s right. I think people come to you when the time’s right. For me, that’s how faith has played a big role in this. The people that enter your life and exit your life at certain times, it’s incredible when you look back and you can reflect or remove yourself maybe from a situation here and there to assess where you’re at. That special. That’s the faith aspect and how I look at that and what comes in and what leaves is what’s played the biggest role in my journey so far.
Thanks so much for sharing everything. If people want to get ahold of you or maybe someone's in logistics and have some ideas or could collaborate with you, reach out. It's PollenReturns.com. Spencer Kieboom is pretty easy to find on LinkedIn.
I'm there. I try to do my best. Thank you for offering this platform, too, Chad. This is great. It's a lot of fun. I'm going to probably go back to looking at some legal documents and wrapping those things up.
Best of luck to the rest of your family and Carter and everything that he's doing. It sounds like you've got a pretty cool family. Congratulations on all your success. May Pollen do exactly what it's meant to do. Thanks for joining. Thanks for joining Living a Better Story. Catch you next time.
Important links
LinkedIn – Spencer Kieboom
About Spencer Kieboom
I am privileged to have been able to pursue my first dream, baseball, and apply my passions to my second, Pollen. - It’s great to be able to give back to the game of baseball through mentoring and volunteering around the Metro Atlanta area. - What makes me tick is building relationships, seizing opportunities, cooking, family, love, and the energy of those around me.
