How do I actually scale my customer relationships? with Julius K?hler from Sennder

How do I actually scale my customer relationships? with Julius K?hler from Sennder

You can listen to the full podcast interview here.

Julius K?hler on growth, delegation and nurturing customer relationships

In 2016, Julius K?hler and his two roommates founded the startup Sennder. Seven years later, with nine locations, over 1,000 employees and over $300 million in funding, the company has not only grown rapidly, but also achieved unicorn status. And that's despite the fact that the company was literally founded out of a living room:?

"At the time, we didn't even have a kitchen table; instead, the three of us lived together in 39 square meters,"

Julius K?hler recalls of the company's founding:

"The guys knocked on my door and left me no choice."?

The idea for Sennder sprang from an MBA project that met with only limited success:?

"My roommate started a same-day delivery network. However, it was difficult to scale that business. We stayed true to logistics [when we started Sennder], but we thought about how we could grow more in the long run. Then we said we wanted to do full loads throughout Europe, primarily long distance. So bit by bit we delineated our territory and then we consolidated in the market."

And that's how Sennder, a start-up that brings together small and medium-sized freight forwarders with companies that need to ship goods, came into being. Thanks to the Sennder network, trucks on the return leg of a shipment, for example, can also be freighted with goods from another customer. This saves both business customers and trucking companies time, resources and money.?

"Our marketplace includes two groups of customers. On one side are large corporations like Coca-Cola, and on the other are smaller freight forwarding companies. We wanted to bring them together,"

says Julius K?hler, explaining the business model in one sentence:

"We started very actively on the shipper side and established contact with major customers like Coca-Cola.?On the carrier side, we didn't actively do this until later. Instead, we gave many carriers the opportunity to grow with us. Many started with one or two trucks and grew bit by bit."

To attract large customers, the founding team used a simple trick:?

"We sold ourselves bigger than we actually were in the beginning,"

reveals the young entrepreneur. He also advises other founders to respect the maxim "Listen more than you speak."?

"We listened carefully to our customers and tried to understand what their problems were. That's how we tailored our services to our customers step by step." ?

Because even though Sennder also worked with small companies in the beginning, winning major customers was high on the agenda from the start:?

"We focused heavily on enterprise seconds from day one because those are the only ones that bring the volume. It also allows you to standardize certain processes more easily," the founder explains. In short,

"It's significantly easier to grow with large corporations."?

As the company scaled, delegation and onboarding new employees in particular formed a major challenge:?

"In the early days, I was very active [operationally] and built a team in parallel. I then tried to hand over more and more work and instead focus more on coaching the team and acting as a mentor. I probably should have done that earlier,"

reflects the young entrepreneur. He has learned that you can't start building a team early enough:?

"There are times when you develop faster as a person than the Company, and sometimes the Company develops faster than you."

When the latter happens, you have to hire people who bring the necessary skills you lack. Still, many founders have a hard time delegating in particular:?

"I can only suggest it to everyone to start very early to build a team next to you and to pass on your knowledge. Because only when the growing team takes over your own tasks piece by piece are you free to tackle the next task."

Meanwhile, immensely grown companies have also systematized the onboarding process:?

"As part of our Sennder Academy, new employees not only get to know Logistics 101, but also our founder story and the entire company on the fly,"

explains the founder. Various networking events as well as a visit to the head office in Berlin were also on the agenda of every new employee before the pandemic broke out.?

Although Julius Koehler has increasingly taken himself out of the operational business, he still tries to stay as close as possible to the needs of his customers and business partners. For example, he recently accompanied a truck driver for a week to get a better idea of his reality:?

"We slept together in the truck and spent 24 hours a day together. Because that's the only way you can understand what their real needs are and tailor your product for this customer group accordingly,"

says the Unicorn founder, explaining the decision.?

Although the start-up now has a large network of customers and freight forwarders and also maintains them over the long term, problems and delays are still part of Sennder's daily business. Here, proactive communication is the name of the game:?

"Everything is half as bad if you identify [problems] early on and communicate accordingly to the customer. We now have GPS installed in most of our fleet and are notified by the system if any problem cases come up. It's a very active interaction."?

To find out what else the fast-growing company is doing to attract and retain business partners and customers large and small, You can listen to the full podcast interview here.