Listen to Victoria and Sean Talk about Veson Nautical, Maritime Shipping, and More Here:
Discover the unique complexities of maritime and chemical shipping with Sean Riley, President, and COO of Veson Nautical. Sean and host Victoria Meyer delve into the nuances of regulatory compliance, risk management, and data integration, essential elements driving competitive advantage in today’s maritime logistics sector. The discussion covers how Veson’s expertise distinguishes client relationships, turning them into collaborative partnerships to ensure alignment with ever-evolving regulations. Victoria and Sean further explore the shift towards more proactive supply chain management, emphasizing the critical role of data and collaboration.
Sean offers valuable career advice, stressing the importance of curiosity, self-confidence, and a willingness to take risks and exceed expectations. He shares personal insights on the significance of feedback and highlights Veson’s journey to enhance its data capabilities through strategic acquisitions. Victoria and Sean also address the industry’s pressing challenges, including supply chain disruptions and the imperative of sustainability, presenting a future where data sharing and connectivity are paramount for operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.
Join us to learn more about the following topics this week:
- Challenges in the maritime industry: geopolitical conflicts, weather related impacts, and new regulations
- The 2020’s: the decade of supply chain
- Biggest trends chemical shippers are facing today
- Veson’s platforms: helping chemical shippers manage risks
- Sustainability and regulatory shifts in the maritime industry
- Finding success in the maritime industry through leadership skills
- Veson’s future: data, artificial intelligence and collaboration
Killer Quote: “Finding what you like doing and doing a bit more than expected is key to career success. It’s about being reasonably curious and confident, not fearing failure, and understanding feedback as perception, even if you disagree with it. Ultimately, it’s not about whose fault something is, but who’s willing to take responsibility and solve the problem.” – Sean Riley
Thank you to our sponsor Veson Nautical:
From multi-jurisdictional regulations to geopolitics and decarbonization, the maritime ecosystem is more complex than ever. This is creating unprecedented levels of risk exposure. With trusted maritime data and built-for-purpose workflows from Veson Nautical, you can confidently make decisions to better manage risk and maximize profit.
For over twenty years, Veson has been co-innovating with the world’s largest buyers and sellers of bulk marine freight.
Join their client community and find your decision advantage. Learn more at veson.com.
Watch the Episode with Sean Riley on Youtube Here:
Maritime Trends and Strategic Supply Chains with Sean Riley of Veson Nautical
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, Where Chemicals Means Business. Today, I am speaking with Sean Riley, who is the President and COO of Veson Nautical, where he leads sales and marketing, professional services, and all the things that you would assume go into operations. Sean’s going to talk a little bit about Veson, and we are also going to discuss how to gain a decision advantage in this increasingly complex world of maritime and marine shipping. So we’ve got a lot of things to cover today. Sean, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Excited to have you here. So let’s just start with you. What’s your origin story and how did you get into this world of maritime?
So my origin, I fell into maritime but I’m Boston based. I’m also Boston born and raised. So I’m local as local comes, and I started my career working on the strategy consulting side. So working with both private equity businesses, private equity companies on due diligence, as well as operating businesses on big strategic initiatives, and then joined a supply chain software business.
There was software and data to the power and oil and gas industry. And I spent a number of years there and along the way I came across this company, Veson, that was looking for someone. And it turned out the founder, went to the business school here in Boston that my sister went to. And I said, do you know him? She said, it turns out I sat next to him for six months in class. So she made the intro and, next thing I know, John Veson and I have been working together for 12 and a half years.
That’s very cool. Serendipity sometimes, right?
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about Veson.
So Veson is a, I think with a little bias, a super interesting business. We are a software and data business that focuses exclusively on the maritime space. So the roots of the business are in an enterprise software that kind of runs the business of bulk marine freight. So buyers and sellers, managing their business on a day to day operations from a chartering perspective, vessel operations and then financials and all the different machinations that go into managing that business. Along the way, we have partnered with all sorts of natural resource businesses, from mining businesses to chemicals businesses.
Then over the last few years, we’ve recognized that it’s not just software that our clients want, it’s data at the point of decision, right? It’s data in the evaluation of decisions. And so we’ve acquired four businesses that focus around the data of shipping and each one of them has a unique proprietary set of data that they have. We’re now in the process of combining all those data sets, but then folding that into the software platform so we can deliver that to them as they make their decisions.
Very cool. And I think, we’re certainly living in the time of data and not just data, but getting information and intelligence out of data. So it sounds like you guys are in the right place with that. Time will tell.
Time will tell.
The maritime industry is probably better than many others, but is still facing a number of disruptions and challenges, right?
Geopolitical conflicts, weather related impacts, new regulations. Can you talk just about what you guys are seeing?
You’ll have to pardon the pun here a little bit, but what we say is there’s waves of compounding complexity hitting shipping. I feel like I’ve been saying that for a number of years or we’ve been saying that and a lot of people have been saying it. But I also feel like now it sounds like now really is waves of compounded complexity. And that’s all of those create risks, right? There’s environmental risks. There’s business risks. There’s geopolitical risks. Those environmental challenges, and weather related things. All of those are risks to the business and their risks if you’re on the ship owner charter side to your business and profitability. If you’re on the chemical manufacturer, chemical producer side, They’re risks to your supply chain, risks to your factory or plant viability or plant operations. All of those things. I like to say we’re not in the business of eliminating risks for our clients that’s where the money is, but it’s around managing that risk, understanding that risk, and eliminating the surprise risk.
Yeah, I could see that. I think the risk management is critical and I’ve even talked about recently, I’m calling the 2020s the decade of supply chain because supply chain was really boring up until the last several years. Maybe not to people that are deep practitioners in it, but really there’s this whole benefit of creating steady state supply chains.
And, there’s just so much flux going on that there is nothing steady state. And as you call it waves of compounding risk and compounding change.
I think a lot of people saw supply chain as procurement only. So like the purchase of X. As you said, to those who are in it and live it, it is way more than that. But I think you’re right in that in the last few years, whether it’s a ship sideways in the Suez Canal or, all the container ships lined up off the port of Long Beach waiting and waiting to come in. All of a sudden people are seeing those, as like business critical issues. We can’t run our business if we can’t keep our supply chain going, and you add in some of the stuff. Where it gets really interesting is when you have a lot of traceability concepts going on in the supply chain as well. That’s finding its way back to the raw material sector itself or the chemical sector itself. And that concept of visibility and data and supply chain management and active supply chain management is a really cool place to live.
Is that something that your business’ systems can help with? Is that traceability? Is that kind of an element of what you guys do?
Yeah. There’s a few ways to address that. There’s a data component, in terms of the sort of purchase of data. And then there’s the software piece of it, which is, if you’re a chemical manufacturer you understand where all your feed stocks are coming from. You know exactly who shipped those right? What ships they came in on, what part of the world they came out of, all that sort of stuff. You can absolutely trace that all the way back to, in some cases, the ground.
Makes sense. So, let’s maybe talk about trends and what are the big trends that chemical shippers are facing today?
So I think there’s a few. There’s the risk trends around those environmental risks, around geopolitical risks, around volatility risks, supply chain risks. And then there’s the business opportunities trends. So I think a lot of people talk about the risk piece of it and managing that. We’re now starting to hear more conversations around the opportunity and thinking of the concepts of collaboration and partnership with your suppliers or your vendors or your maritime partners and supply chain providers rather than acting like we’re counterparties against each other. We need to work together to make sure that our businesses run right. There’s positive benefits for both of us if we work and we collaborate together.
I think that’s right. And I think that’s part of this whole shift in supply chain moving from a bit of a utility function to something that’s more value creative.
Yeah, a well run supply chain is a strategic asset to a business. Poorly run supply chain, poorly run logistics function, for us poorly run maritime logistics function. Function is a real massive cost center, right? And it’s a massive risk to the business, both P&L wise, but also business continuity wise.
We’ve certainly seen that recently in particular, just that whole aspect of risk and business continuity and cost. I think that is the number one thing that people I talk to talk about is just the increased cost that’s taken that we’ve seen over the past several years.
And then also the fluctuating, right? So we thought there was going to be some resonance and some steady state and leveling out and that doesn’t hold true for very long.
The volatility piece is something that’s really critical. In maritime there’s always been freight rate movements fairly significantly. Historically some of that stuff was always tied to supply and demand, and companies were okay managing their way through supply and demand price movements, because you understand that these are all right. Most chemical manufacturers are pretty decent size businesses, they have thoughts on macroeconomic trends and how that’s going to impact their business. Things that they couldn’t manage, or that were harder to manage were things that were injecting volatility that they couldn’t forecast or control or understand. Everybody can understand interest rates and a rate drop or rate increase and how that impacts their business. But like a sideways ship in the Suez Canal, what, I couldn’t have predicted that!?
Yeah. That was not on my bingo card.
It was not on my bingo card, exactly right. A missile off of Yemen was not in my bingo card, and those type of events are just increasing.
Yeah.
There’s more and more of them. And unfortunately you don’t see a path where they slow down.
No, not in the near term. That’s for sure. So a lot of Veson’s platforms are working to help chemical shippers. Is it helping to manage risks? Is it doing something else? Why do they work with you?
They work with us for a variety of reasons. One is the risk management and the active risk management. The second is, one of the things we found in chemical shippers is that across their businesses prior to working with Veson or prior to having a sort of standardized system, not everyone in the business was singing from the same song sheet. And so when you have disparate data right there and you think a ship’s going to arrive on Monday and I think the ship’s going to arrive on Friday and it actually arrives on Wednesday. It creates a lot of challenges in the planning and logistics of your business.
Then the other one that I think we see is, to the point of collaboration between the counterparties. Between the chemical shippers and the shipping companies. That transparency of communication so that everyone is understanding, talking the same language, understanding what the risks are, like merge risks or claims type risks. Making sure that we’re negotiating from a common visibility into the events at hand. Those kinds of activities are really critical to both your profitability, but also your ongoing operations.
Yeah, and are you guys providing services like a freight forward or a 3PL agency would? There’s so many 3PL agencies that are providing some of the matchmaking. Are you guys doing matchmaking and paperwork and stuff?
No, so we don’t do that, we’re the systems and infrastructure. We like to talk about, our vision for Veson is to be the platform that propels maritime commerce. In bulk shipping, which is where we spend most of our time, the facilitation of transactions is really done primarily through a broker led engagement, and Veson doesn’t get it, but we get involved in the evaluation of deals, meaning our software helps our clients evaluate deals.
It helps us understand scheduling, it helps us understand drivers of price or drivers of cost. But in terms of matching a buyer with a seller, that happens not through us.
Let’s talk about sustainability and regulatory shifts. That seems to be really critical at the moment in maritime and with the shipping companies. Everything from new fuels to new regulations, particularly in Europe, what are you guys seeing here? And what are your customers responses?
So it’s one of the largest both trends and challenges in the industry. And one of the big challenges in shipping is it’s such a global enterprise that ships are calling ports in Asia and leaving ports in Asia and calling ports in Europe and then leaving ports in Europe and calling ports in Latin America and moving their way around the world and all of them have different regulatory profiles, and that’s just an array of complexity that is so hard to manage. Europe seems to be taking the lead on a lot of that, part of that is they tend to be a little more forward looking around some of the environmental stuff. Part of it is also they’re very central in terms of global trade. And then what in terms of what are we seeing? We see everything from very active management of these new rules and regulations and planning for it, all the way to people who are just putting their head in the sand and hoping it goes away.
The trend is more towards the active management of it. And we have a number of tools within our software platform and within the data to understand the impact of different types of fuels that you’d be consuming on a voyage or the impact of the cost of calling on different European ports or things like C.I.I. data, which is carbon intensity index around, how polluting is a vessel? What’s the efficiency quality of a vessel? Our clients are using the software and data. We have to make all of those assessments both at an individual voyage level, and then all the way up to on the carrier side of the shipping company side to the fleet level, or on the chemical producer side, all the way up to your scheduling and deliveries and things like that, and understanding the impact of all that on your inventory and your costs.
Yeah, obviously there’s a lot of data that filters through you and I know there’s an abundance of firewalls and all that. So understanding data security, I’m certain, is a critical thing to you and your company. Are you able to discern any specific patterns?
Are you seeing that shippers are making more carbon conscious choices? Is there enough data to demonstrate that?
Yes and no. I would say, we haven’t dove fully into the data to say, how does it compare today versus what it was. But we absolutely see our clients making carbon related decisions 100%. Now, it doesn’t mean every decision is made with the lowest carbon consumption.
Our clients typically are thinking about it at the portfolio level. So they can consume or produce less carbon on one voyage and that may allow them to make a different decision later on so that on average they’re within the range of what they want to be. But if you compare that to five years ago, or longer, it’s like night and day. People are talking about it today in ways that we weren’t five years ago.
Yeah. For me, that’s where it all starts, you have to start talking about it first. And then you have to figure out, every business has a set of operating principles and risk profiles that they’re willing to accept for their business, and then they have laws and regulations that they have to layer in to try to manage through that.
Our job is not to set the risk profile of the business, it’s to help enable their competitive advantage, whatever they decide that would be, and through that we have to deliver a product that captures new regulations on a regular basis. So we’re constantly updating to make sure we have the latest built into the platform, as well as providing new data so that they can optimize around that, risk profile or P&L profile or whatever their competitive advantage is.
Oh, cool. One of the things we talk about a lot on The Chemical Show is, the customer experience. Ultimately at the end of the day, that can be a key differentiator for companies. So when you think about your customers and how you serve them, why they do business with you, what’s unique or critical about Veson’s customer experience?
So I would say a couple of things. First, I think one of the things that’s unique is a lot of people talk about customers. We talk about clients, and it’s a super small differentiator or super small nuance in the word. But there’s an implication of partnership that I think comes with the word client or an implication of a level of service and commitment to them, versus the customer tends to be a bit more transactional in nature.
First and foremost, it’s that we view our clients as clients, and as partners and we advise them, but they advise us. So it’s very much a two way street. Almost every product we’ve ever built has been in deep collaboration with our partners. As we add in enhancements to the product to handle new regulations, we go to our clients and we say, hey, how are you handling this regulation? What’s the timing by which you need to have this in play? Because oftentimes a regulation goes in January 1st, but clients are making decisions in July for 2025. These are not instantaneous things. So we need to have that stuff built in. So that I would say is the first piece of it.
I think the second piece is, we’ve been focused on maritime for 20 years, and that’s all we do. So we have a level of expertise within our team, we have an amazing global services team that has a level of expertise in this world, not just shipping but chemical shipping and those are different. A lot of people from outside of the shipping world talk about shipping as one monolithic entity or industry and we know it’s not. Maybe they understand a container is different than a bulk carrier, but we know that a chemical partial tanker behaves and operates very differently than a VLCC, which is carrying crude oil. It’s not to say we’re the only ones that do that, but we understand the level of depth and the specificity of how our clients work and the nuance of chemicals that’s different than bulk.
Yeah, and I think that’s a great point. It’s so critical. People take it for granted, to your point from the outside. If you’re not embedded within an industry, you assume maritime shipping is maritime shipping. But it’s what’s inside of it that matters. Different treatments, different decisions and processes, different regulatory frameworks, et cetera.
Shipping ethylene is different than shipping Nike. Like it just is. And I think a lot of people coming from the outside don’t necessarily appreciate that at a high level,
Did you understand that when you got into the industry?
Not to the level I do now, I think I understood at a high level liquids are different than dry bulk kind of thing. I had done some work with some chemical companies before, so I understood that the same stuff that makes Barbies makes plastic explosives, right? If you go way back 9/11 changed the chemical shipping world massively. So I would say I understood it at some level, but probably not as appreciative of the nuances. We have people with investment who understand at a level way more than even I do.
Absolutely. There’s the leadership and then there’s the practitioner. The practitioners are always going to be SME, subject matter experts. They really know it in and out, in ways that others can’t fully appreciate.
I’m consistently reality checked by our team with ideas I have. They’re like yeah it’s not going to work. And I’m like well it’s a good idea. I’m testing you guys. I would say not all my ideas are good ideas. They’re just ideas.
Talking about leadership and your career experience. what advice do you have? What advice do you have to individuals that want to achieve success in the industry, such as you have, what’s the difference maker?
There’s one thing that you can say. I think everyone every path is unique. I think things that I would say about myself is find things you like doing and do more of them, find ways to do a little bit more right? So when I was a strategy consultant, the client would come to you and say, here’s a set of questions that we would like you to answer. And one of the partners that I used to work for a lot was like, one of the things that we always want to do is answer one or two more questions than they asked. And we’ll uncover what those questions are throughout the course of this project and study or whatever, but we’ve got 12 questions. We want to answer 14. What that’s going to do is they realize we’re going beyond just what they asked. We’re doing more.
For people that are starting their career or up and coming in their career, doing just a little bit more. And that’s not like a little bit more than the bare minimum. usually you’re not asked to do the bare minimum, you’re usually asked to do something substantial, but do a little bit more. And then, I would say I’m a generally reasonably curious person. I like learning about new things. And so that serves you well, but also, I have enough self confidence that I’m probably not afraid to fail at things. So I’ve screwed more things up than I’ve done well, and here I am, but being not afraid and finding people who will tolerate that. The mentors who will push you to screw things up and then will back you up is a really important piece of developing yourself.
Absolutely. And that’s something you earn in some ways because you’ve gone beyond, you’ve answered the 14 questions instead of 12. You’re not afraid to take those risks and recover.
Yeah. And if they’re a good leader, if they understand that okay, you meant well, you were trying to do the right thing. You were trying to move forward. That helps and you do learn stuff. I think everybody wants to work also for the best boss ever. But I also learned, some of the best things I learned were from people I never want to work for again because I was like, oh, don’t want to do that. if I ever find myself doing that, I better stop.
Yeah. I think it’s great. We’ve all had great bosses and crappy bosses. One of my best bosses that I’ve learned the most from was the guy I was most afraid to go work for because he had a bit of a reputation. But people said, no you can handle him. And I understood, what it took to be successful and man, I grew so much from him. It was awesome. You have to take those chances.
I also think people are afraid a lot of feedback, right? And one of the big keys to success is like, whether you agree or not with feedback, feedback is the result of a perception. And so you have to deal with that. So you can choose to be like, you know what? Victoria is wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Or you can say, wait a minute, Victoria thought this, and she may be wrong but could someone else think that, and how do I adapt to that? I believe being able to take feedback and find the one thing that you can do a little bit better is a real key.
It’s a skill. Some people maybe do it naturally, but it is definitely an acquired skill, particularly when you don’t always agree with the feedback you’re going to be getting.
Yeah, I agree with that, but I like your approach that it is a perception and you have to be aware that if one person has that perception, somebody else may as well.
Within our business, I talk to our team a lot about this. A client comes back to you or a team member does something and it’s the concept of not my fault, but my problem. It may not be your fault, but it’s our job and it’s our problem, we got to deal with it. Your teammate may not be very good at their job. It’s not your fault, but we’ve got to deal with it. Clients may have outrageous expectations. It’s not your fault. We still have to deal with it, you can’t just roll over and say, that’s outrageous. We’ve got to move forward and deal with that.
Yeah. I like that. And I think that’s great. I think it applies to business life, leadership, your customers and clients. Yeah, that’s great. So what’s next for Veson Nautical? What should we be looking for from you over the rest of the year and into next year?
We have some really cool stuff coming. So we have some really cool products coming around, combining what I think are three big trends in the industry, and I think they’re trends within shipping. They’re horizontally applicable. Data, the use of data, and some artificial intelligence and collaboration. and you knew you couldn’t get through a podcast with a software company or data company and not talk about artificial intelligence. We’ve got some really cool stuff coming around that kind of brings those things together. We believe that the industry very much wants to connect and wants to share data, and share information. Not all data, right? Not commercially sensitive data, not strategic data, but there’s a whole bunch of just efficiencies that can be gained in the industry by us, as I referenced earlier, like singing from the same song sheet. And so we’ve got some really cool stuff coming in those areas, some between now and the end of the year, a couple of things in the early 2025, but I’m super excited. John Veson and I talk about this. We have such cool stuff coming that we’re really excited about where the product direction of Veson is right now.
I love it. I think this piece around data, AI, and connection or collaboration is critical right now, it’s definitely where the industry is headed, whether they recognize it or not. But it’s this whole aspect that we have to move past being an island and being siloed across each other. Still having, as you say, confidentiality, but we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. We can learn with each other to solve today’s problems and tomorrow’s problems and build that better future.
Absolutely. Collaboration is coming. how you do it and what you share and all that sort of stuff is TBD. And most people want it, the problem is I think a lot of people have is as soon as they hear it, they default to the whole idea of, are you sharing publishing prices? No, you’re not. You’re not sharing the most sensitive data. Are you sharing our strategy? No, you wouldn’t share your strategy. Of course not. But like, when’s the ship arriving? That’s pretty good information to have out there.
Yeah, absolutely. As we talked about earlier in our conversation, some of the challenges and the trends that we’re facing around environmental sustainability, geopolitics, the volatility that’s going on, people also want to understand, okay, so how are you approaching this? Because we all need solutions. And those better solutions may come from having more open conversations by sharing appropriate amounts of data and collaborating to get there. And frankly, that’s where the best ideas come from is they don’t come from a single mind or a single company. They come from that shared vision and collaboration.
That’s this idea we talk about. So the roots of this are in the owner and charter side. So it’s only in the last, 7 or 8 years that we really started pushing into working with the chemical producers. And through that segment of the market we started to understand the concept of a shared client base, right? A shared platform and collaboration that we see as a lot of the future of what Veson is, but it’s a lot bigger than Veson.
I think that’s right. That’s what successful companies in every industry recognize is that if I stop at my direct customer, I don’t understand my business. I have to go to my customer’s customer and my customer’s customer’s customer to actually understand the value chain and that impact.
It’s a really cool time to be in shipping and chemical shipping.
Thanks, Sean. I really appreciate you joining me today on The Chemical Show.
Thanks for having me. It’s a lot of fun. I like talking about vessels and I like talking about our industry.
I love it too. I like talking about the industry. I love talking about and learning about new companies and it’s great to share it with other people in the industry who are also interested, so I appreciate it. Thank you.
And thanks everyone for joining us today. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Sean Riley:
Sean Riley is the President & COO at Veson Nautical, which provides technology solutions to support global maritime commerce. Sean is responsible for driving and managing company operations including Sales, Marketing, Professional Services, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Veson’s regional offices. Veson Nautical’s platform is responsible each year for managing $122 billion worth of freight and moving 4.46 billion tonnes of cargo.