Dallas Counts Podcast Transcript
Dallas Counts joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dallas Counts. Chief Operations Officer, Dallas Counts champions Vendormint’s mission to revolutionize supplier compliance, operation and deductions management. With over 15 years of experience in retail operations, merchandising, and supply chain management, Dallas brings deep expertise and strategic leadership to the team.
Dallas’s professional journey began with Walmart, where he led numerous leadership roles over nearly a decade. Starting as a customer experience, project manager Dallas quickly progressed to key positions such as senior merchandise, financial planner, senior buyer, and merchandising director. He later transitioned to Sam’s Club as a senior merchandising director, beverage driving significant category growth through data-driven strategies and operational excellence.
Before departing, Walmart Dallas served as senior director two of site merchandising leading the entertainment, toys, and seasonal site merchandising and operations teams. Under his leadership, the team grew from 14 to over 45 associates while navigating Walmart’s platform transition and the challenges of COVID-19.
Well, good afternoon, Dallas. Welcome to the show.
Dallas Counts: Thanks, Brian. It’s great to be here.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate it, my friend. You’re in the same time zone today, hailing out of Bentonville, Arkansas. I’m in Kansas City, so just a quick stones throw away and I appreciate you making the time. And Dallas, I’m gonna jump into your first question if you don’t mind.
You’ve had an impressive trajectory at Walmart and Sam’s Club. How did those experiences prepare you for your leadership role at Vendormint?
Dallas Counts: That’s a great question, Brian. Yes, I did spend 15 years at Walmart and Sam’s Club. You know, I held a number of different roles within merchandising, uh, and leadership and in e-commerce.
And, um, you know, I really think a couple things that, that really helped prepare me. One is it gave me a great understanding of how retail works as my time in merchandising. I spent a lot of time working within supply chain category, performance, customer experience, understanding the p and l of a supplier, which really helped me be able to understand what our, our customers are going through.
’cause I lived it every day. But also, you know, the other thing that maybe isn’t touched on as much and the people I. Don’t necessarily relate is my time. There really helped me understand what you know, a culture of accountability, understanding how to make data-driven decisions. And then one thing that we used to always say was, you know, a relentless focus.
And so for my time at Vendormint, that’s that relentless focus on deductions and revenue recovery and then operational excellence. All that really stemmed from, if you’ve ever read Sam’s book stemmed from Sam Walton. He brought an incredible culture, and so that’s one of the things that I’m looking to try to replicate and bring with me to Vendormint.
You know, kind of going back to that first point though, inner workings of retail, working with suppliers day to day in merchandising. You really got to understand the p and l or trade management pressures that they were under. And in retail today that has increased with the demand of need for investing in retail media or potentially buying additional data or, you know, some of the things that we’re seeing in the recent macroeconomics with tariffs.
And so being able to relate and kind of have that empathy of what our customers are going through has been really important. And so with that, I think it’s really gonna help me navigate that complex supplier business and help them continue to make sure that they’re successful. I.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Certainly a lot there to unpack. You know, there’s such a great history, Sam, starting Walmart many, many, many years ago, as you know. But it’s become this powerhouse, and I know you had a lot of exposure. Obviously your roles in leadership, e-commerce, supply chain, you understand retail very well. The customers, but really what I heard is that great culture there really set your foundation to learn this business in retail.
And you’re able to shift and be agile to things that change in the economy. And tariffs is just another example of where you’re able to be ready for those changes. So I appreciate that. And Dallas Vendormint is focused on transforming supplier compliance and deduction management. What are the biggest inefficiencies in these areas today, and how is vendor meant solving them?
Dallas Counts: Yeah, that’s a great question. So deductions in recovery haven’t really been innovated in, and even within the retail segment, it’s pretty old. And anytime you come with a old system in a modern world, you see the fragmentation of data or non proactive processes and oftentimes very, very manual workflows.
And so what we’re really focused on is how do we solve those? So ways that we do that is, you know, we’re working within our platform to create a. I call it a centralized intelligence hub, which brings all the different data pieces together. But in order to do that, we also need to be able to collect that data.
And one of the things that’s really complicated within this business today can be just getting the documentation you need in order to dispute or look to see if a claim that you’ve had is valid or invalid. And so we’re rolling out automated document collection so that we can automatically go in and collect your.
Pos, your invoices, your bill of ladings, your proof of deliveries, anything that may be needed in order to put the case together to show whether a claim is valid or invalid. And so that’s also helping solve that problem. And then we’re working with some industry experts. So we’ve hired in a few indi individuals that have been doing deductions for.
25 plus years. One of them actually even ran the deduction team at Walmart for about 12 years, had a team of 104. And so being able to understand what the processes are is really important and be able to see when processes change. So as we work across a large set of clients, it’s easier for us to see when a process may have changed but may not have been communicated.
And that can get really complex and tedious and time consuming for A CPG to keep up with. And their processes are always changing. And not just the processes, but the goal line of what the retailers are looking for, for success is always changing. And one of our goals is you’re not just doing this across one retailer.
Most of these of our clients are doing this across numerous retailers. So currently we support 56 different retail fronts in the United States. In Canada, and we’re working to expand that even beyond and into more retail fronts in Canada and Mexico, and then eventually even Europe. And so not just working to fix the fragmented data, the old reactive processes and manual workflows, but also be able to do this at scale across multiple retail fronts so that our clients have a one stop place that they can come so that they can work with one customer to solve all their needs across all their retailers.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really do appreciate that. We talk a lot about inefficiencies here on the podcast. Of course, you know, technology automation, but you’ve really, uh, hit the nail on the head here, uh, with these inefficient workflows, manual processes that you’re trying to automate and make more efficient. But I liked how you talked about the centralized intelligence hub, getting the information you need to make those data driven decisions.
Your automated document collection, which you dove into that a little bit, Dallas, and I appreciate that. Obviously the processes are always evolving across retail and you’ve gotta stay a step ahead of it, so I appreciate that. Dallas, how does vendor meant leverage data and automation to help suppliers recover loss revenue and optimize their operations?
Dallas Counts: That’s a great question. So, kind of piggybacking on what we were just talking about, you know, data is the core of what we, how we are able to do what we do. But one of the most complex pieces is just getting it together. And so many of these retailers have different data sources that you need to pull together.
So there’s a, the retailer’s gonna have a data source where you’re gonna have your invoices, your EDI feeds. Your AP and AR deductions, you’re gonna have your supplier otif or SQEP if you’re Walmart. So your compliance information, and even within the the retailer, those are all in different data sources.
And then outside of that, you may have an internal data source to show how you’re shipping. You may be working with a UPS or FedEx, or you may be working with a three pl. You may have a A three PL and a UPS relationship for returns versus your shipping. And so each one of those connections is a different source of data that’s needed in order to make sure.
One, we can help our clients understand within their deductions what’s valid and invalid. And then two, if it is invalid, we will need that information in order to file and dispute a claim and do it accurately so that we can get repaid faster than slower. So the automated document collection is really important.
And then the other thing I would say is we’re working to really make sure that our backend has stood up in a way that we can leverage our data to show trends and analysis. So we can start to see what’s causing certain types of disputes. Can we then work upstream with our clients so that we can avoid those in the future?
’cause ideally, we don’t want anything to hit a claim in the first place. We’d rather be able to help them prevent. That proactively. So using data in a way that allows us to do, you know, root cause analysis to understand is there an operational inefficiency that could be causing some of the deductions?
And we’ve, we’ve seen quite a few results within that already, with even just things that the supplier can do differently in order to avoid. But then there’s oftentimes some processes that are broken that are actually causing inefficiencies for both the retailer and the, the supplier that we’re able to identify within this data.
So data ends up being the central piece. That’s one of the most important aspects for us, so that we can identify, help them dispute, but then also proactively fix upstream. Some challenges that, uh, could be leading to deductions that we don’t have to have in the first place.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Data is certainly the center of what you do every single day in that space. Being in a, in technology for many years, I understand the various data sources from every aspect of the business and not everything’s just in one system, right? You gotta go to a lot of different places. Your shipping’s different than your ERP and everything all in between.
But to ensure that every data point has been covered to maximize those deductions and uncover operational efficiencies, I think it’s really important and you highlighted that, so thank you. Dallas, last question of the day. As Chief Operating Officer, you’re deeply involved in both strategy and execution.
What emerging retail trends are you keeping a close eye on and how is Vendormint positioning itself for the future?
Dallas Counts: This is a great question. I feel like we could talk about this all day. I would say there’s really a few different pieces that I’m focused on. One, I think that everybody’s been focused on for the last five to 10 years, and that’s omnichannel, retailing and understanding.
How is that going to evolve? I. And how does that change the complexity within the supplier and retailer fronts? Because with omnichannel retailing, you do actually add more ways for the consumer to shop, and that also means distribution of fulfillment also gets more complex, which could end up being important to our customers.
I think the other piece I. Two is the, you know, the evolving economic pressures with potential tariffs or other other things happening, and how does that change potentially your logistics as you may have had a international manufacturing facility that maybe you decide to reshore or maybe you switch it to a different country.
And as those pieces change, that also provides more complexity to our clients, which could be really important also to our business. But just understanding their business in general is really important to us. And then, I mean, the last one that we have to be able to talk about, I think that. Is really, really important.
Something that we’re heavily leveraging is AI and automation. So one of the things, you know, I think everybody’s leaning into is artificial intelligence and how can they do it to streamline their business? And I think some of these antiquated processes that we’ve talked about today will all be getting revitalized with AI in the near future because they have been so manual in nature.
And then there’s been a lot of need for hands on keyboard. And in the future, ideally we would like to be able to leverage ai. For us, one of the things that we can do with that is we leverage AI to be able to document scanning, to make sure that we understand how that document matches into a potential claim.
So that’s something that would’ve been a manual process and taken a lot of effort that we’re able to now do not just across one retailer, but across many retailers. And so I think understanding how AI evolves in the future is gonna be really important because we wanna make sure that we can tie in and help be the most efficient partner we can to all of our retailer and supplier clients.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, that’s a big thing we talked about here, retail and technology here on the podcast is omnichannel. Retailing is really important, obviously providing more options for the consumers, but it adds a lot of the complexities, and we’ve talked about that a lot here on the podcast. But the main message I took away today, Dallas, is that you’re understanding your customer’s business.
Staying a step ahead of those changes, whatever they are. And of course you’re doing the right thing, you’re getting in there early, jumping on and using ai, leveraging that technology because that is a game changer and that’s gonna make things more efficient for you, so you can provide more services or better service to your customers.
So I appreciate that. And Dallas, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Dallas Counts: Awesome. I appreciate it, Brian. It’s been a great time. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Dallas Counts Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
