Justin Smith is a 20-year industrial real estate broker at Lee & Associates who's currently pursuing a third Master's in supply chain management — which means he spends most of his days inside the buildings 3PLs operate from, and a lot of his nights thinking about what's happening inside those buildings. That made for a conversation that wandered productively, from the post-peak state of the 3PL market into the seat-by-seat history that shaped how I think about WMS selection.
The thread I'd point to first: the WMS market looks fundamentally different from each seat at the table — vendor, implementer, operator, advisor — and most founders evaluating systems have only ever sat in one.
The line I'd press play for: somewhere along the way I looked backwards across all of those seats and realized the pattern was the same every time. People buy, but they're not ready.
