How to resolve AdBlock issue? Sarah started talking about supply chains – today her multi-media company talks even more about them
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
SUPPLY CHAINS are now so important, with businesses having to balance extreme global disruptions with rising consumer demands, strict environmental rules, and new digital tools.
Sarah Barnes-Humphrey, the CEO of Let’s Talk Supply Chain, has been in the business since she was a teenager. She has now set up a supply chain media company to help businesses deal with this issue.
“I started right out of high school in the family business,” Ms Barnes-Humphrey told Talking Business. I was the receptionist and worked my way up. I did sales, trucking freight, air freight. I did warehousing, I did customs.
“As a teenager when I was 16, I was doing filing at the family business – so you can say it’s in my blood because I’ve been talking about supply chain at the dinner table when I was nine. 
“I did eight years of operations, eight years of sales and then I was director of sales and marketing,” she said.
Podcast told the business brand story
Realising that the company had to tell its story, Ms Barnes-Humphrey set up a podcast for the business to tell its brand story and other stories of other companies in supply chain. There wasn’t anything like it at the time.
When the family business closed down she found herself keeping the podcast going. Because she no longer had a team, she taught herself graphic design, social media and website design.
As a result, Ms Barnes-Humphrey now runs a supply chain media business.
“We’re essentially content creators in the industry with the focus on digital content, podcasts, case studies,” she said.
“We do top-of-funnel lead generation, we do LinkedIn Live, I host webinars and we record.
“We also record content on site at conferences.”
It is all about innovation
Ms Barnes-Humphrey said innovation is really important in the business.
“It’s really important. If you think about where we started in media, there wasn’t really a supply chain media and you think about all the innovations and how we’ve moved through the industry in a variety of ways,” she said.
“And look how far we’ve come. Everybody’s talking about AI (artificial intelligence), they’re talking about LLMs (large language models), they’re talking about efficiencies, and how do we use these different tools.
“I think that, nowadays, innovation and technology has to be a foundational piece of a successful organisation.
“So innovation is not only at the forefront of myself and the business, it’s also at the forefront for all our team members as well.”
A lot more than a ‘content machine’
Ms Barnes-Humphrey said she does not want to create content for the sake of content.
“I want to be able to create a user experience for the leaders in supply chains,” she said.
“Leaders with inclusion, so they can actually learn from the information and the content that we’re putting out there.
“One of the ways we’ve been able to do that is we released an AI interactive supply chain experience on Let’s Talk Supply Chain in partnership with Google Gemini.
“We did the exact same thing with our podcasts. So you can go to our website, and you can click a button, you can get an executive summary, main points with time stamps and you can even ask the episode a question.
“So we’re meeting leaders and we’re meting supply chain professionals where they are at, so that they can consume the content to know and understand a lot more easily and (it’s) a lot more interactable.” 
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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