Do things the right way, the first time around

RCS Influencer Randy Chaffee says that it's important to have a clear system in place to communicate and collaborate with all stakeholders.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with RCS Influencer Randy Chaffee of Source One Marketing. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Alex Tolle: Hello, I'm Alex Tolle with RoofersCoffeeShop.com and I'm here again with Randy for another influencer question. So our August 2025 question is, how can project stakeholders collaborate effectively with all parties, including manufacturing, distribution and any other trades, to reduce miscommunication and ensure a seamless project execution?

Randy Chaffee: Man, that was so long, I forgot the first part. But it's a great question, and an important one. I think it all stems back to how a lot of things are, I guess, is that you got to have a culture and a desire and a belief that it's important. And I think I come from as a manufacturer's rep world, as you know, and I joke about it sometimes that if I could just put a deal together and not tell anybody, it just happens, that would be Randy's perfect world, right? Then I can move on to the next thing. Understanding fully well that none of that works, right? And every time I haven't taken the extra four, five, six steps to make sure that, in using your terminology, all the stakeholders involved that I've got is all on the same page, it always goes wrong, a little at least, if not a lot.

And so, I think it's really important culture-wise, whether it's individually or as a business that we develop; not only the culture that we need to inform everybody, keep everybody informed, but in today's world, Alex, there's so much technology available. There's, you know, from anything from all the AI options that you can do that can actually do that for you. It's a plug-and-play in a lot of cases, and the CRM systems that you put in one time and it goes to the proper people. Or even just — back to if you don't have or want to use all that technology right now — have a plan, have a whiteboard, have something.

But I think if we operate under this assumption, and I've been doing this a long time, if we don't tell everybody and then rethink again, who did I miss about every one of these steps of the way, it is going to get screwed up. And the fault has to come back to the originator, right? Because if, in my case, if I'm the rep that sells the deal, I can't expect my manufacturers to know. I can't expect accounting or credit or shipping or manufacturing to know what goofy thing I came up with here, right? There's only one person that knows it.

So it's really, it's a mindset first, which comes from a culture of, let's just do things right and do it without having do-overs. But thirdly, and probably the most important after that is, let's have the system in place. It's not that hard to do. In today's world, it's not that hard at all. I use systems for myself all the time because my mantra for myself is, if I don't put it in my system, in all likelihood, either it's not going to happen or it's going to be screwed up. And I'm not going to remember six weeks from now when something comes up, well, how come that didn't ship? Well, maybe because you didn't give us the order, Andy, right? I mean, it could be simple as that. Even though as a rep, I get paid for order strike. I forget a lot of things, but I don't forget to turn in orders. But you know, the point is still that, you want to do it seamless and right for everybody involved.

Alex Tolle: Yeah, and the communication, there's so many ways to communicate now. All digitally, there's so many ways to do it. There's no reason not to. Just over communicate. It's better to over communicate than to under communicate.

Randy Chaffee: Absolutely, because you know what? All of us in that chain, if you will, we can bypass the stuff that we don't need to know. We can bypass the stuff that I already know. Yeah, you told me that three times. I'd rather bypass it three times than to have not been told at all, right? And in today's world, like you said, there's so many tools, whatever the tools are. And even if your tool is your small business, you don't have the technology or maybe from a community that doesn't use technology, there's the good old chalkboard or whiteboard. I used to do it that old school way. I used to have meetings when I was a purchasing agent, you know, and you'd have a meeting with your team and you'd be writing notes on the whiteboard and everybody'd walk in look at the whiteboard a minute and go, "Okay, that's what I need to do next, right?" So I mean, there're ways from low-tech to high-tech to get it done.

Alex Tolle: Yeah, or a mix of all of them.

Randy Chaffee: Yeah, can be a mix of all. Most important thing is, like I said, my parting words on that would be, Alex, find this from your experiences. Man, if you don't do it, it's going to mess up on you. Almost every time, so just do it.

Alex Tolle: Thank you, Randy, as always, for the great words of advice. Appreciate your time and we'll see you next month.

Randy Chaffee: You got it. Next month we'll be here.