Team Spotlight: Meet Steve Rosen, President of Flywheel Sourcing
From time to time here at Flywheel Sourcing, we like to highlight a member of our team so you can get to know us better. This time around, it’s Steve Rosen’s turn in the spotlight!
Steve has been president and owner of Flywheel Sourcing since its beginnings in 2009. When he founded the company, he brought more than 25 years of experience in buying, sourcing, and product development to the table. Fourteen years later, Flywheel is thriving, helping their clients manage and grow their businesses with end-to-end support for their overseas supply chain. This has resulted in a portfolio full of successful clients.
Read on to learn more about Steve and what makes the Flywheel Sourcing team unique in the industry.
Tell Us a Little About Flywheel Sourcing. What’s Unique About the Flywheel Sourcing Team?
A Different Perspective
One of the unique things about Flywheel Sourcing and the services we provide is that we come at things from a different point of view: All four of us on the team here in the U.S. are ex-Target executives in buying and sourcing. Our history goes beyond Target to include different retailers, but we’ve been in the consumer goods product development and sourcing space for most of our careers.
Lightening the Load
Our passion is serving our clients. We love nothing more than bringing a concept to life and seeing it sell on the shelves! We provide the resources our clients need to move from concept to delivery, including merchandising, engineering, cost engineering, quality control, factory audits, and more.
What we see over and over again is that our clients wake up every day to a mass of emails that bog them down and prevent them from doing the things they really need and want to be doing. We believe that bringing the full picture together — our services combined with our unique background — really helps lighten the load for our clients so they can focus on what’s most important to them, which is sales and innovation.
Overcoming Obstacles to Growth
The other thing that’s really important about our vision and how we serve our clients is that we believe our job is to help our clients overcome both vertical and horizontal obstacles. The vertical obstacles are within the categories of products our clients are in today: helping them get through the quality issues, pricing issues, factory strategies, and so on.
But equally important, if not moreso, are the horizontal obstacles. This is where we help our clients expand their offering by providing all the resources they need under one umbrella. By lightening their load and helping them overcome these obstacles, we can help them grow — and grow quickly!
Strengthening the Relationship Between Our Clients and Retailers
Our experience with retailers has given us an understanding of what retailers’ needs are, as well as what it was like when our clients and others like them came to us when we were in the buyer’s seat. It’s made us sensitive to our clients’ relationships with their buyers. I think that understanding, cherishing, and protecting those relationships is of the utmost importance.
So that’s what Flywheel is built around. It’s all about transparency, service, and helping our clients become more and more successful at a speed they haven’t seen before.
What Do You Love Most About Your Job?
Quite honestly, I love seeing the success of our clients. Our clients’ success equals our success, and being able to open up our clients’ time so they can grow and expand is something that has been very rewarding, to say the least.
I always say that the biggest compliment we can get is if our clients forget our name…that we have become so integrated into the DNA of their company that they don’t even think of us as an outside entity. That’s the biggest compliment of all! When we can achieve that we know we’ve done something right.
Also, I love when we can bring solutions to problems our clients have and not just point out problems we’re seeing. It’s very rewarding to say “here is a problem, and here are three different solutions to choose from.” They never lose control — we just make their lives easier.
And in the end, we’re taking stress off their personal and professional lives, and that is incredibly rewarding.
What Are the Biggest Obstacles You’ve Overcome in Your Business?
I think the geopolitical aspects have been the most recent obstacles we’ve worked through. Whether it’s the tariffs put in place during the Trump administration or the need to look at diversified countries of production to have a healthy strategy, I think being in tune with the fast-changing world has been key to our success.
For example, being in touch with the way COVID affected everything has been crucial. COVID brought many challenges, but at the same time it brought rewards. Some of our clients were stronger coming out of it!
At the beginning of COVID, we didn’t know what to expect. Then, throughout the next few years, some of our clients’ businesses grew significantly as the spending habits of consumers changed. Keeping that momentum, meeting their needs, and allowing them to grow through a difficult time was definitely a challenge but one that became very rewarding for everyone involved.
As an Entrepreneur With a Lot To Juggle, How Do You Stay Focused (and Get Re-Focused)?
Process, process, process. We are very methodical and diligent about our process. We overlay that process onto our clients’ needs and communicate that in our daily, weekly, or monthly updates (whichever cadence the client prefers).
But it’s the process we use to manage daily events and tasks that always keeps us focused, and we don’t stray from that. That’s how we make sure we’re keeping all the balls we’re juggling in the air.
Do You Have a Favorite Business Book?
Absolutely. Dan Sullivan’s book, “Who Not How” was a life-changing book for me.
As entrepreneurs, we tend to want to go out there and say “How do I do this/How do I fix this?” and those aren’t the right questions. The better question is “Who do I need?” It might be me, it might be a team member, it might be someone else, but recognizing that you have to play within your strengths and you need a team with a variety of different strengths is game-changing. Coming from the perspective of “who, not how” as we approach any decision has been incredibly helpful.
I send copies of this book to clients all the time, and I think everyone in business should read it. It really can pivot your mindset, particularly as an entrepreneur.
What’s One Important Thing You’ve Learned About Business Development and Outsourcing?
Trying to anticipate the unexpected. The more experience you have, the more things you see that could happen in a project. Identifying where the risk points are, and planning for them, is one of the best things you can do.
You can never catch everything, but I think clear and concise communication, transparency, and collaborating with our clients are of the highest importance, and we live by that.
Anything Else You’d Like To Add?
At Flywheel Sourcing, we are truly passionate product people. Seeing our clients win — seeing their success, being a part of it, and helping to drive it — is one of the best feelings we have. One of the greatest parts of my life has been being able to serve and support our clients this way, and to build these relationships that are so much more than just business.
When we connect with our clients, we connect very personally, and I like that. The whole concept of “it’s not personal, it’s business” — I couldn’t disagree with that more. It’s always personal, and it’s all about over-delivering on our clients’ expectations. When we do that, our clients really start to see us as their team and only their team.
We want every client to feel like we only work for them…that’s the level of service we want to provide, and what we’re trying to achieve at Flywheel Sourcing.
Want to learn more about the Flywheel Sourcing team? Get a quick introduction on our About page, and watch for more team member highlights coming to the blog soon!