Hi everybody, I'm Jay Hartzell.
I'm the Dean of McCombs School of Business
and soon-to-be interim president of UT.
And I'm really happy today to be joined by Brett Biggs.
Brett is an ardent supporter of UT and of the McCombs School
and is the Executive Vice President and CFO of Walmart.
So Brett, thanks for joining us today. - My pleasure, thanks for having me.
- So we wanted to catch up a little bit on what you've been going through but,
just real quickly, high-level -- and I joke that this is a big place but
Walmart is a different scale -- how many people, stores --
give us a sense of the scope of what you're dealing with.
- Yeah, so we have about 2.3 million associates worldwide,
a little over $500 billion in revenue and over eleven thousand stores globally
so that keeps us -- keeps us pretty well busy.
I think UT is one, though, that can probably compare with us on scale.
- (laughs) Thank you. So, we were talking before we got started today that
probably none of us expected to be facing what we are facing now
a couple of months ago.
Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen from Walmart's side?
You're Executive Vice President and CFO
and so what are you seeing in terms of, whether it's purchasing patterns
or supply chain, what have you been facing since this happened?
- Yeah, everything changed so quickly and globally -- it felt like almost overnight
we were, up until -- we said this in our earliest release -- up until early March
everything felt fairly normal and then, if you went into a Walmart store on March
or early April, you saw the stock-up of what people were doing in our stores
and how that -- those buying patterns changed. And so, us having our --
pretty much a dedicated supply chain helped immensely
in getting everything that we needed into the stores and keeping communities moving,
which is what we needed to do.
And then the stimulus dollars hit in mid-April and people shifted,
purchasing more discretionary-type items versus
food and consumables and so it -- how our merchants had to deal with that was
just changing constantly -- still continues to change, but we've never --
I think everybody's used the word unprecedented --
an unprecedented amount of time but we've never seen anything like it as a company,
really as a world, I guess.
- And what about the way that you are working as a team together,
thinking about as one of the leaders of the firm.
We're trying to manage or lead or communicate by Zoom now and
so, how have you found the leadership role?
- It's been so amazing. One, we have our associates in the stores and clubs,
which are doing -- and distribution center is doing an unbelievable job.
And so our job really here is just to support them.
But it's -- in ways, I see my direct reports and I see my team
more than I did, at times, because we're more intentional
about getting on Zoom together and spending time together
but we've also gotten to know each other I think more as humans,
and as people with kids and dogs and cats running into the -- into conference calls.
I think we've gotten to know each other a little better, which is --
I think will help us coming out of this, and those relationships will deepen.
- And are you able to do all these calls with a Texas flag in the background?
Is that -- ? - (laughs)
- You're on-brand for us? - Any time I can.
I'm actually in my office, I had investor calls today and so I was in my office,
which made it a little easier and I haven't been in my office much
in the last two and a half months but I thought having a Texas flag for this call
was really appropriate.
And I have the '05 National Championship football in the background too.
- That's great. Well, I hope we can add another football to your shelf
sometime soon. - I would like that.
- When I think about a CFO's role, I think often it's making big investment decisions
and capital market decisions, how has this changed or helped your --
where is your mind at today in terms of investment and capital?
- Yeah, early... I'd say mid-March, the early days in the capital markets
in this period felt a lot like 2008. I was Assistant Treasurer in 2008 and
it felt very very similar, very rocky.
Funding was a little more challenging than one would expect.
And we kind of got through that in a reasonable amount of time
with the government coming in. But as we think about our company long-term,
first we always want to invest in the business.
We spend around $11 billion a year in capital toward growing our business
and I expect that to continue. We want to lean in,
and we'll lean in harder in some places
coming through this as the customer changes.
We're very committed to our dividend. Share repurchase has been a big part of
what we do going forward so I don't see our capital decisions changing that much
other than we'll lean in some places that are really strategic for us,
like online grocery, and there'll be places where we come out of this and say,
"Hey, project X maybe wasn't something we should have been doing anyway,
"let's delay it, let's stop it," and those decisions, I think, right now,
are getting made more quickly.
- And you talked about the capital side.
And another big input, obviously, is people.
And we like to try to produce great people that you want to hire and you get to hire.
- We hire a lot of them, yeah. - We appreciate it.
So, how do you see this affecting your talent strategy as a firm going forward?
- One of the decisions we've made as a company was to continue with small things.
We continued with our intern programs this summer, we felt like that was a way
to differentiate ourselves, and with universities too,
to show our commitment to hiring the best and brightest out of the schools,
UT certainly being one of those, McCombs -- a big part of that.
So we want to continue that process and I'm excited.
Internships will be remote, it's going to be different. But we'll --
I think they'll be great.
So we're -- from that standpoint we're just going to
just keep going and we're going to need the talent.
- Yeah. Well, thank you for sticking with us and we'll stick with you all and --
I think our students are going to be facing decisions
as the next couple of years about
if they're trying to look in 5, 10, 15 years out, post-COVID,
how should their training change, how should they think differently.
Do you have any advice, if you think about were we might be as a society
in several years, that could help our students?
Yeah, you know, I felt a little bit of the same coming out of 2008 and '09
but I think even more importantly now, the things that we're faced with,
you don't learn in school, necessarily, you don't -- there's not a playbook
for what we're trying to do, and so it really heightens
the need that you have for people that can solve problems,
people that can develop relationships across the organization.
We have a lot -- we have a big organization,
we have different parts of the organization,
and being able to work across the organization is so important.
And then being able to communicate. You can have the best idea in the world,
but if you can't communicate the idea and you can't get people behind it,
it's not going to be as good as it would be otherwise.
So, it's these softer skill sets, or what we consider softer skill sets
I think that are going to be real differentiators for people going forward
because there will be times when you have things you've just never seen before
and you have to lean on those skills to work through it.
- Yeah, we had Brené Brown out to speak on campus and she mentioned that
these things that we think of as soft skills are often the hard skills,
they're hard to do right, they're hard to do well.
- Yeah, and really important. - Yeah. And one last question,
I've heard people talk about this crisis is increasing digital disruption
and your business, obviously, is one that people think about
as front and center in this question about how you get goods to consumers
and that kind of thing. Is this -- How do you think about this?
Has this accelerated the pace of change in your world?
- For sure. And it's primarily because the pace of change with customers
is going to -- you can see it.
You can see over this eight-week period,
did we accelerate trends towards e-commerce and other things
by two times, three times? It's hard to know how quickly it changed.
Our strategy of being an omni channel retailer,
having stores and having e-commerce,
we've always thought it's the right strategy.
I think now that is clearly the right strategy,
that customers are going to want to be in stores
but they're also going to want to shop online.
And technology is a huge part of that.
If you look our technology spend, Jay, five years ago it would have been,
let's say, 10-15% maybe, of our budget. Now it's north of 20-25% of capital.
And so it's really important what we're going to do as a company going forward.
- Yeah, we're talking to the university about -- this has accelerated our pace
of investment in technology as well. Just having to --
there's some short-run stuff we had to do but now, more strategically,
I think we're all going to be spending more in that direction.
- Yeah, for certain. - Well, Brett, thank you for taking time
out of your busy schedule, you said you had investors all day and --
so thanks for giving back to the UT community,
we really appreciate all you do for us. - My pleasure.
- And wish you all the best at Walmart and thanks for all you do.
- Congrats on your new role. - Thanks a lot.
And maybe just -- can we get a Hook'em to close?
- Absolutely! - All right, take care.
- All right, take care. Thanks Jay. - Thank you.