21 Hats Podcast, Episode 6: We’re at the Edge Right Now

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm Lauren Feldman your host every week I sit down with three business owners to talk about the challenges they're facing it's the kind of conversation you don't often hear in public our panelists address difficult topics like why their business isn't making as much money as they think it should why their digital marketing isn't working or why exactly they hired their brother-in-law owning a business can be a lonely and isolating pursuit but at least you'll know that you're not the only one facing these issues got a question you'd like us to address send it to us and follow us on twitter at 21:00 underscore hats or on our website 21 hats comm let's meet this week's 21 hats podcast lineup with us today are Laura Zander CEO of Jimmy beans wool a digital version of a neighborhood yarn shop that is based in Reno Nevada William Vander blue man who's CEO of Vander blue man's Search Group a recruiting firm in Houston that specializes in working with churches and other faith-based organizations and Karen Clark Cole who is CEO of blink UX a digital research and design firm based in Seattle Karen wouldn't start with you as I found out when you and I taped the podcast in Palm Springs at --u eyes strategic growth forum you've decided to take a sabbatical from from running Blake tell us what's going on sure it wasn't really me who decided it was sort of decided for me by some of the members of the leadership team who I work most closely with largely my chief culture officer who runs all of our HR and she's a psychologist trained for many years and so we should back up a little bit we've had a pretty rough probably 16 months in total you know the last sort of 12 months have been pretty stressful for me moat the most stressful in the 20 years the company for sure tell us why we decided to take on some outside investment for the first time and in order so that we could grow more quickly so that the UX market is pretty hot right now and there's a lot of companies trying to so a lot of acquisitions going on and we would get regular phone calls from some of these companies trying to buy us and my attitude was always well forget that we're gonna do the buying we're gonna be the world's leading UX firm and so I got busy fulfilling that and so in order of you know our strategy before we had acquired some companies was to buy and then using a line of credit and then gradually pay that off and then do it again and do it again the trouble is the markets moving too quickly for that and we needed to actually get some outside money so we could get some jet fuel and go on a buying spree basically so with similar kind of companies so it's essentially finding great talent and they because when you acquire a company they come with revenue so the people are billing and so we don't have to worry about hiring a whole bunch of people having them sit on the bench while we get the work and the sort of cat-and-mouse game the acquisition strategy avoids that so there's other you know it's expensive obviously but and you have to integrate the people and really pay close attention to the culture but it's a fast way to try to dominate the market so the problem is though that we it was long and sorted path of trying to find the right investor and because we're not a dot-com company we're not a hockey stick kind of profile we're a services company and we don't have a bunch of assets besides our people so it's not you know there it takes a special kind of investor to want to put money into our business so we were a focused on family office type of money you were putting a lot of time into just searching for the right investor yeah we had hired a company to help us do it but they you know required a lot of my time and a lot of my CFO's time so between the two of us we were completely absorbed in this getting all the due diligence materials ready that is an order 't amount of time for not only me and my CFO but a lot of our senior leadership our sales team different folks in the organization at various points having to give provide a lot of data so which is interesting to do actually I mean that's it's a good exercise and really understanding everything about the company we also to hire do an external audit of the company which is just good to have anyway it's expensive and consuming for everybody in terms of time for sure but but it's great to get some validation that yeah things are looking really good and then you know and then we've got to find a right match in terms of somebody that you like that you want to go for dinner with that you want to have on your board potentially and that you want to be in partnership with because that's the reality of what happens and so so it took a long time to find that that person and that those people had group and and we finally did but then it got complicated because the way they'd like to invest there's some debt involved with her bank and so then we had to basically go through the whole thing again with her bank and a long long long story short in the end it didn't work out for several you know a variety of reasons but we were very close to closing like his in for a couple months we were closing on Friday Wow so we had all kinds of things in motion based on that including you know my job was to go out and find these companies that we could buy right away and so I had been you know searching the country meeting with lots of people getting all of the terms together negotiating getting in some cases actual letter letters of intent in place you were so close you thought this was almost a done deal and you were you were out looking for ways to spend the money buying the companies you wanted to acquire yes the deals that they wanted to you know to invest in us and have the money go out immediately to these other companies that was part of the plan and so I had to have these companies lined out because it takes a really long time to do this you know it's like dating it takes forever and so I was spending you know I spent the whole year doing that and found some really great companies that we were really excited about it so then you get to know these people and you have a real relationship with them did you start the transactions with them we were you close to closing with them well getting the letter of intent in place is the beginning of that so yes yeah for sure and in you know in one case we bought a company and with everybody knowing what the situation was including the seller of that company and you know the money was coming on Friday so it never came you bought a company you had the money from the investor coming in on Friday and it didn't come yeah and everyone's looking at me going well no kidding he said you know it's never over till the fat lady sings right but at the time everybody was absolutely you know they had the routing numbers and everything you know like it was going through on Friday and so in particularly this last final Friday there was no question and so you know in retrospect of course I would never do that again but at the time you know there were it wasn't just me there were many of us who were certain it was happening why didn't it happen it was complicated on their end with a bank relationship their bank pulled out we had then they went to a different bank and that's why it took so long originally and then that bank had questions and they had a complicated structure on the back end of how they did other investments and other deals we weren't the only one it became too complicated and too far away from the original plan so in the end it wasn't working for them and it wasn't working for us and so we we amicably walked away and agreed that we should not do this and so but that wasn't until April of the following year I mean we continued on after the New Year's so or so that was you know eight months later and so you know going through all of that is that you know the problems the stress for me is the is that is the waiting and then not knowing and the expecting something that's not happening and trying to run the company based on that every week for months and months and months and you know we made decisions internally about our operations and people to hire to make sure that we're ready for this influx of people coming in terms of systems process as well as culture and so a lot of things we were doing internally to prepare for this to make sure it was going to go well because that was really important obviously I am so grateful to hear that you have just gone through a similar experience to us and that I'm not the only one I say ambiguity it's the yeah I'm trying to predict like three different paths if it goes this way this is what we're gonna do in six months if it goes this way this is what we'll do and it's like it fried my brain Laura are you talking about the the lead-up to your acquisition in Texas yes yep exactly yep and the every Friday we thought it was going to close oh it's gonna be this Friday well it's gonna be this Friday it's gonna be this Friday now we're at a 20% chance that it's gonna happen now we're at a 30 and like trying to plan for all of that was it's exhausting I mean right while you're running the company at the same and William are you sitting there thinking boy am I glad I'm not doing any of this oh my gosh yes I know so so I'm a little different though Lauren I to me the the the whole point of this the exercise of earning is so I have some measure of peace insofar as you can ever get it financially and that makes me feel very unsettled I don't know that I'm made for that kind of risk kudos to you for trying it and and doing what you're doing but I it's not my it's not much dick well and I have a pretty high risk tolerance but I tell you I saw the I saw the edge of it right now my husband is not sleeping like you know with the acquisition that we just made we have invested way more I mean women brought anything in you know and we're just finding out more and more of these expenses that are coming up and ya know where we are right at that line of you know about to have a nervous breakdown so I guess you figure out how strong you are we'll see check back in a month so Karen it sounds like you actually made an acquisition thinking that the investor was gonna come through and then it didn't did did that acquisition go away or did you keep it no in San Francisco right now is in the office yesterday we've got them and they're great and we love them you know there's a reason why we wanted to buy them did you have the money to buy them without the investor no we did not have a lot of money on hand and particularly after you know like Laura's describing all of these things cost a lot of money the legal fees the accounting fees you know doing a queue of a ya know we didn't have any money and so we've spent the better part of the next year it's hard for me to say this out loud actually because it we still haven't finalized the deal with that owner we've all been you know we I was at a the holiday party with him last night we're good friends we respect each other but we and we're confident we're gonna work it out but it's a very different deal than what we started with and so we're working on a long-term payment plan with him right now you know it's funny Karen on the the hard costs of the acquisition you know like you said the lawyers and the accountants and all that kind of stuff but you know in my case I'm so involved in sales and marketing or have been that there's the opportunity cost you know and the distraction cost has almost been more than the financial part of it I totally agree that's exactly the case particularly for my CFO well you know he's running the day-to-day finances of the company and he was absolutely could not provide reports for people because he was being hounded by the bank all day long just to try and add something to the conversation he we are kind a pretty close to acquiring a smaller company and they're you know not in a great place financially so it's not a lot of cost to us I mean it's really really affordable would be the nice way to say it but you know I talked to our CEO about it he said I don't fool with it why because it's gonna take your time it's gonna take your energy and nobody ever thinks about opportunity costs of you're not gonna be focused on being brand ambassador and spreading the company because I my job is to wake up every day and think about how to spread our brand and taking an eye off the ball to acquire even if it didn't cost anything costs us and and I wouldn't naturally think about that I don't know if that's something that you guys were born with or if it came through experience but it's a it's a lesson I'm having to learn for me it has not just been the time as well in terms of opportunity cost but almost the emotional energy like it's hard for me to be that brand ambassador and to go to an event and just be like yeah we're the you know we're great we would love to work with you when all I want to do is just crawl in a hole and sleep you know and I don't want to talk to anybody which is actually what you need to do in order to survive so oh nice segue into the sabbatical Carrie tell us what was your reaction when the we've realized the deal finally this is it no more Fridays it's just not going to happen honestly I was so relieved I just couldn't take any more you know it's just exactly what Lord as the uncertainty which is so incredibly stressful you know I'm used to running a business I'm driving it you know I know where we're going I'm in charge and it you know good or bad and in this case it was completely out of my hands and and yet I still had to drive the ship what happened to the business over those 16 months we had a rough year I mean without you driving that's not true we had a good year we're profitable and we've got lots of great clients lots of great work and lots of great employees so on the outside nothing but you know there were some meetings and many meetings and not just for me but the entire leadership team where we are all under so much pressure that you know people are you know you're not your best self and we're acting in ways that aren't helpful for everyone else around us you know particularly me and you know that that's hard on everybody for the year for sure and so we lost some really good people because all of a sudden they're uncertain about what's happening with the company they think oh we were doing this thing with complete certainty everybody knew oh yeah we're very transparent about this in the company everybody knew exactly what we were doing and then and then it's not happening it's not happening what's happening everyone's in limbo and you know I have to be careful about how much I'm communicating or not communicating and because I don't want to cause any kind of alarm and besides I thought we were moving forward nothing to worry about and then all of a sudden you know I make an announcement that we're not doing that and that were totally changing course and that we have to lay off a bunch of people who we had in place to support all these acquisitions on the operations side and that looks like trouble to most people that must have been painful I felt good about that actually that was finally a decision that I knew had to be made and I knew how to do it but everybody else was absolute pandemonium and that was to me the tail end of the whole thing so I had I thought I had survived because I had met it survived all of this year of stress behind the scenes and then and then when it becomes something to me that it's great we're moving forward now we know what we're doing that's when the pandemonium hit in a company and it was really really traumatic for a lot of people when we laid off a bunch of people because we've never done that before so in 20 years all of a sudden they think like oh god I don't know if this is stable and so we've had some people leave they want to work for a stable company even though we are and in the future is bright it's just different than how it was for that year so it's tricky as a leader to be communicating the right amount of information because we are a transparent company I'm very open about what we're doing because I want people to be behind it and to be excited about it because because I am and so I you know I can it's easy for me to get people excited about it but so it has a result it's people see when I'm not excited so have to be careful so that in itself is really stressful it's like I can't even be myself because I have to be a strong leader for people to see that and feel confident about the company what did you do when the it became final and this investor was not going to buy in and you knew it for sure did you sit down with your team and reassess all the options did you think alright we're gonna find another investor do you think we're gonna go in a completely different path what what happened then yeah we engage we engaged the original company who was helping us find investors and we were gonna look for another one but quickly it just became clear to me that that we were done we had to stop we had to get focused back on the company just just look internally you know pay attention to what we've got right here and take care of it and so so quickly we stopped that as well and then and then I made the announcement that we weren't doing any and so we haven't since that was about that was in June of this year so quite a bit of time has passed half a year since since that point and you're taking the sabbatical now well after that is when we had to do all the layoffs and the cleanup of okay what do we got to do internally now to become profitable or to get back to being profitable because we had a couple of losses which is actually pretty normal for us in this in slow season in the summer but we had to make sure that we were gonna end the year strong and we had a lot of overhead people that we were paying for that aren't billable and for us that's very expensive and we didn't need them you know while we loved them we didn't need them to run the company anymore because we weren't doing this massive growth so I had to figure all that out can I ask you a kind of a personal question a personal professional question yeah who do you vent to like do you talk to your husband about this you know at the end of the day or do you have a number two that you work with I mean how are you offloaded you have a therapist talk to three times a week yeah husband I would talk to him but I don't I'm single well I'm a single mom and so that that's important right so I come home at the end of the day and I'm focused on my 11-year old and I think that actually saves me in a lot of ways because I can't stew on it all night long I turn off my phone and I'm with her and that is such relief for me in so many ways I mean it has been my whole career and it allows it teaches me to be focused on what's in front of me and so I'm really good at that at being able to parse things out and so there's a lot of that going on but that doesn't help digest and process so you know that's just distraction so my my chief culture officer Linda who I mentioned at the very beginning she's she's the primary person who has helped me through this but truthfully there's not there are not a lot of people I mean I have a couple of friends who are very close to me that I talk to but it's you know it's certainly not five times a day like I need that was a great question Laura and it and it's really interesting in that both you and William work with your spouses and I'm wondering how you deal with that because I'm sure they're pluses but I'm sure there are also some minuses because you are bringing it at home with you I'm guessing yeah I am and I would say for us I mean it's all of the pluses outweigh any of the minor there are a few minuses in during peacetime I'm reading bin hor I don't know if you guys have read Ben Horowitz is the hard thing about hard things but he's talking about peacetime CEO versus wartime CEO and how it's hard to find somebody who is a an effective leader in both times and so that's the transition that we've gone through as being in peacetime and now we're in wartime and Doug and I actually perform much better together in wartime than we do in peacetime we should clarify it by wartime you mean because you're going through acquisitions not because you're at war with your spouse am i right correct yes yes great clarification yes because the last couple years we've had market transitions and retail and in our industry and we're fighting we're fighting competition we're fighting profitability on multiple different levels so yeah I mean for us it's great because you know it gives us we have that and we have a ten-year-old son together and those are our things we don't have any friends we have no social life we exercise I mean it just is what it is I hear that from so many entrepreneurs the friends thing it's really interesting people don't realize what people give up when they choose this path gonna say we have no family I mean it's just us like Doug has you know his parents are six states away he talks to them once every few months I have a father that I didn't grow up with so so in some ways it's nice because there aren't a lot of phone calls to make you know we can really focus but on the flip side of it there's there aren't a lot of people to vent to and there's not for me as an emotional person there aren't a lot of people that I can talk to that know the true know me better than I know myself if that makes sense and can be really honest with me and if I make a mistake they can forgive me there's not a lot of unconditional love through either friendships or family so that's a kind of a scary place to be sometimes anyway so that's why I was kind of asking like who do you have that kind of unconditionally loves you that you can say god I really screwed up at work today that isn't gonna say yeah you really did you suck has it worked for you William you know I think we're learning as we go Lauren the conversation we continue to come back to and and we hear from others is that we seem to try and be aware of boundaries oh and what I mean by that is boundaries for when are we doing the work thing and when are we not and and it'll we don't get it right all the time but we have seven children and we have extended family around in fact we host family dinner for 25 or 30 people every Sunday night had several of them working for us at one point Oh which is a whole different podcast we may have to get back to that yeah but I think it's the boundary thing and Laura the thing the the two biggest pluses you hit on one of them Adrian knows me better than anybody I mean there's just no hiding from her I can't all all the crap or you know facade I want to put on she'll see straight through that so if it's going well great if it's not going well that's you know she knows and she knows if I'm doing something on the fly rather than prepared she knows if I'm like she has a strong gut towards some parts of our business that I will never question hers is more operational risk management keeping things in order should we hire that person or not which is kind of ironic oh I'm not the better one at that she is but on the on the sales front or the expansion front if I say no I feel it my gut she we have a very clear boundaries like okay well you're usually not wrong about that so knowing each other and keeping the boundaries is is trying to keep boundaries helps us knowing each other really really really well is the single biggest plus to the business and frankly the staff appreciates that so we started the company together actually I said I'm gonna start this company and she said well if you ever get a client I'll send them an invoice so giant cheering squad and and she was you know we the decisions we've made together have been the best ones but but as we grew and we didn't need somebody to send the invoices we actually had staff people to do that she backed out of the business and then she came back in about three years ago and we were in the middle of this part where I needed to no longer do any searches and the staff had been trying to tell me that visit you know we started we'd do a search and I just did it all and all of it lived in my brain well that's great if you want to be as a company of one person but once we start putting systems in place if I got involved in a search it just created more messes than solutions you know the staff have been trying to say well maybe we can take that off your hands right Adrian's back for one meeting and she said William I don't think you need to do searches anymore I was like okay that sounds good and the statute I think you could hear their jaws drop like we've been trying for three years to tell him and you took one meeting so so the the staff I think sees the plus of if they really need to get a message to me they'll go to her and same way if need to get message to her they'll come to me the minuses I mean there's just the messiness of you know if things are not good at business you can't run away from it by going home it and I don't know how you get around that but I'll take the pluses with the minuses over not having it all day long that's really funny on your staff will go to Adrian if they need to get something to you and vice versa cuz that's exactly the way it is here like they'll text me and be like so could you talk to Doug about blah blah blah you know I can filter it I can soften it back in a previous life when I was a pastor I had a guy come to me he was being considered for a CEO position at another company he wanted my advice and Here I am a 31 year old pastor like why are you coming to me for it and I just want your advice I said why would you not take the CEO and he said we mean if he never heard the old line the first day you're the CEO is the last day you hear the truth never heard that and I was like oh that's not true my staff tells me everything and I was needed you know but now with Adrian in the office regularly I do hear the truth and it's made a world of difference around here Karen let's get back to your sabbatical you told us initially that it wasn't really your decision what did you mean by that well it certainly wasn't my idea and Linda would say to me well we have a sabbatical program in the company that if you've been with the company for five years you can take three months off and she said to me when this is all done you should go on sabbatical and I just sort of thought oh haha wouldn't that be great and yeah she kept saying it until eventually it's funky and I'm like I'm like you're serious about this aren't you she said she said yes you're you may not recover if you don't take this seriously the amount of stress that you've been under and then she went in to explain the brain science behind it and all of a sudden I was listening and and then it took a while to plan for it and I kind of was planning for it but not really thinking and it got very close I got to like two days before it was supposed to happen and I was still not really telling anybody and but meanwhile I was sort of shopping the idea around with the leadership team that I worked most closely with and what was most surprising to me is not one single person thought that was a bad idea [Laughter] yeah so I just thought okay okay I'll go you know and then of course I'm worried like what if they what if everything goes better without me and they don't really need me and then I don't have a job and my first natural reaction but it turns out that they do need me and they like me serious question what happened how do you know that because they've told me for one and and I truth truth be told I'm I'm not I can't really check out entirely but I am NOT in the day-to-day I'm not going to the office and those two things are a massive difference for me in terms of my ability just to to stay out of the weeds and out of the stress of the weeds and so but I am you know I meet with my CEO probably I talk to him once a week for a couple of hours just to check in and help sort of guide him he's new on the job doing a great job and it's kind of it's actually better for him just to sink in without me there so I can let him sort of work through things in a timely way instead of with me always breathing down his back so so that's sort of good timing for that which is partly why I did it but you know people will check in I've said to people like please it will be way better if you need me just to call me and I'll give you a quick answer I'll help you with the direction to go in then for me to come back you know in two months and have to unravel something or you know change course of the ship you know I've put the autopilot on and if we need to change that for any reason you need to call me and but but otherwise you don't need to call and that's exactly people get that right away they're like ok I get it it's also the time of year is important so we don't want to make any major changes in terms of process systems how we're doing things right now this time of year anyway we're just busting it burning hot everyone's very busy until the end of the year so it's kind of a good time for me to get out of the way because I'm constantly trying to refine our process look at you know new opportunities externally like how can we grow and right now everyone doesn't really need that they just need a break and they want to just work hard for our clients for the rest of the year so it's actually a good time for me to get out of the way did you have a goal when you went off was it just the idea of clearing your head for two months or is there something you want to accomplish Linda has put me on marching orders of rest reflection and rejuvenation and so that part of it is I'm writing so I'm starting to she said what's really important is that I actually process the year that's gone by and I'm very much a forward-thinking person so my job is to figure out the future of the company and that's where I live I'm very much in tomorrow I don't even know what happened today I'm already in tomorrow you know as a result the downside of that is I I do a terrible job of looking at our accomplishments and seeing what has gone well and you know what I'm grateful for and so try to be more aware of that but but it but on the I think about the Grateful side more but I don't think about hey I need to process the things that didn't go well and understand why and know why I've gotten into this state of stress and really because I've kind of forgotten truthfully I mean and how I'm doing it is I'm going back and I'm looking at my calendar so I'm saying oh god this time last year I was in this kind of meeting with this investor and this bank and I was like flying across the country and meeting with banks and I'm like oh my god I forgot about that like I really have a terrible short-term memory and I have forgotten most of it yet I've got the residual effects of it all still very much and so so what I'm doing is I'm going through my calendar and I'm Brown I'm writing about it and so and this you know this is therapy for me right now I'm talking about it and help yeah so that's a big part of it and sleep is really really the most critical piece of it so I'm getting a lot of sleep and you know doing things at a right-brain left-brain you know trying to balance them so that I'm leaning gardening and I'm trying to like do things that are you know using a different part of the brain to try to balance it back out it would be better if I could completely check out but but the reality is I I can't so I'm she may tell me that I need to take longer and we'll see about that when the time comes but if something's lost with technology speeding up our lives and and it's the forced rest and out just not to go too deep here but my morning studies right now I'm studying the life of the Apostle Paul who wrote in two thirds of the New Testament but beyond that he's an incredible entrepreneur he planted churches all over I mean the Romans finished those roads and he took advantage of it to build a network for the first one so it's an amazing entrepreneurial story but I was thinking of the day as he was I was reading a letter that he wrote to one of the churches looking at the map of where he traveled there was a lot of time that he just spent sitting in a cart or on a horse and he wasn't able to do anything and and that's just not our life anymore we've got our whole world in our pocket or purse on these smartphone and there is no forced down timing more and I'm just wondering how much creativity I'm losing by being on all the time 100% I tell my staff like my only downtime is taking the dogs for a walk so we actually bought a house that's right on the trail you know so that I can just go out the back door I go in the woods you know and if I'm lucky I'll go for an hour or two hours and sometimes I'll spend the first hour sometimes I'll go for five miles and I'm on my phone the whole time doing emails Laura but at least I'm outside but when when things are going well and day to day is going really well then everybody knows I don't come to the office till 11 or 12 because I'll spend the first two hours sometimes I listen to a book on tape you know or sometimes you know I can just I play it by ear but that's my creative time you know it's by mile three or four my brain starts to let go and I can start to problem-solve you know and I can start to like forward thinking I can really tell when I haven't had enough of that and 30 minutes of the gym is not enough you know walking around the block is not enough like it has to be an hour it's got to be two hours could you imagine taking a sabbatical Laura oh absolutely yes that's what I'm working towards I mean I'm working my ass off right now as hard as I can with that insight you know how do I get two months off how do I like how do I get this back and so I'm trying not to stress about the fact that I'm not working out a ton I'm not eating super well but it's okay because it's a temporary thing and I'm doing what I need to do so spot on says so good the whole work-life balance thing is such a myth and I just don't believe it if you're in a if you own a business if you're running a business there are times where you have no life and that's just the way it is and you buckle your seat belt and go and the trick for me is then after that's over okay now I gotta let go for a little bit because I'll lose my creativity I'll lose my ability to be energized I'll lose my ability to make hard decisions I'll lose my edge and the only thing that is non-negotiable even when I'm just when I've got my seat belt on and I'm just going and I'm working as hard as I can the only thing that doesn't suffer asleep I still get 9 hours of sleep that's amazing and I like to have a slow morning so that you know I'll lay in bed for 30 minutes and just let my brain process you know that's kind of like my meditation is just sitting there you know I kind of see it as I don't know it's like all the sand in a jar and it's got to just kind of work its way through and settle well I know this doesn't apply to everybody and I don't want to sound like you know CEO problems but there is something about the role particularly if your founder like I think all three of us are I'll founder CEO that that you get stuck with stuff that nobody else wants and you better be recharged for I was meeting with a founder pastor the other day of a very very large church and we were doing our podcast of with him and he said you know what am I think I I think I preached for free now what do we mark he said well I mean I like doing it and it's fine and I know I'm supposed to be doing it and I'm pretty good at it and people like it but the reason they pay me is to make about four or five really hard decisions every year that no one else wants to make and if I'm not ready for those I've not earned my salary I thought wow that's not just pastoral that's like CEO gold right there I don't know if that's the case for you guys but I get stuck with four or five things no one else wants to decide and and if I'm depleted it's not gonna be good yeah I talk about my job every day is to make decisions and preferably good ones and you can't do that if your brain isn't functioning so I want to move on to some other stuff but before we go Karyn obviously we will come back to this in future podcasts and check in with you of how it's going but what I would love to do is can I read you what I what I sent out to all the employees of why I'm doing this and what what how why it's important go because it's important to me that everyone understood that I'm not just going off to hang out in Mexico and that I'm not going on vacation actually I'm going to be at home and so you know and this is through the teachings of Linda of understanding what's happening with my brain I said this to everyone when the brain is under elevated stress for prolonged periods of time the executive functioning of the brain the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down and the brain goes into survival mode dominated by the sympathetic nervous system especially the amygdala so the job of the amygdala is to constantly scan our environment looking for potential threat in our modern work world this is everything from deadlines disgruntled employees poor financials in the meantime our attention and memory creativity innovation problem-solving which are under the control of the prefrontal cortex are diminished so that's exactly what William is just talking about this causes tunnel thinking and the inability to see a big picture or put things in proper context or perspective it also causes heightened sensitivity and overreacting moods become more dramatic and small things can seem big which is really what was happening to me regular stress reduction methods such as which also build resilience such as eight hours of sleep regular exercise and taking breaks are not enough when the brain is under elevated stress for prolonged periods of time if this goes on for months or years the neurons of the prefrontal cortex actually become damaged by the constant exposure to the stress hormone while the neurons of the amygdala actually thrive and grow the amygdala becomes more dominant and it's harder and harder to shut the stress response off it becomes very difficult for the brain to recover to its normal state for those neurons to recover from their damage unless there's a real break from the stress hormone over a longer period of time exercise sleep social support are all essential for the neuron recovery and in my case it's the job it's my job to define the corporate strategy set the big vision for the company and move us towards it if my thinking is impaired and I can only see narrowly what's in front of me this is a dangerous place for the company as I'm not able to do my most important work so this became my greatest fear as I realized with the help of others that I had to take the recovery of my resilience seriously and with the hope that after two to four months of reduced stress rest and reflection I could be renewed and get back to my big picture calm self and returned to being the leader that everyone in the company wants and needs for our company to thrive well that was a little scary but the science of it I actually read this to myself regularly because I'm like what am i doing I should go to the office and then I'm like oh you know I shouldn't go to the office can you send that to me sure Karen went when the sabbatical is up how will you know if it was successful question I don't know I guess I'll feel more relaxed I suspect you would just know you'll know it when you see it I think it's gonna just be very obvious yeah alright so I want to move on to the point in the podcast where I asked William and Laura in this case what they've learned lately what's working what's not working but if you'll forgive me I'd like to go first this time cuz I think I've learned something surprising and maybe I'm the only one who didn't know it but I I'm curious at 21 hats we're going through a web development project and we bid it out to a bunch of developers and we picked actually the low bidder and then went through this process of thinking through what exactly we wanted our website 21 hats to be and coming up with the designs and going through wireframes and and then we're gonna we're gonna build this thing and it just occurs to me at some point we did it all wrong there was no reason to bid the whole project out to everybody we should have talked to firms just about doing the design think through what this website was really supposed to be what it was supposed to accomplish take it through maybe the wireframes stage get that all down and then take those designs to developers and have them bid on the actual the the actual project instead as I know happens all the time to other people the you know the project is evolved and what we bid out six months ago is not exactly what we're getting and that's good in a lot of ways and I think we're gonna end up in a happy place but but I think it could have gone a lot better you guys have a lot more experience with this than I do am I the only one who didn't know how to do this Lauren I just asked you why you went with the lowest bidder I was gonna I was gonna ask the same thing we didn't go with the lowest bidder just because he was the lowest bidder it was somebody that who had worked with my parent company advantage Forbes Books previously and they had a really good relationship and he was the lowest bidder so the you know was it was a it was a good combination we were we were confident that he could do what needed to be done and and we were happy to spend less money our sales team lauren has learned and now instructs new members that if a lead contacts us and their first question about us is how cheap can we do this we just almost me they say we're probably not right for you we do the same thing you get what you pay for we didn't go out you know we didn't Herman initially that we were going to go with the lowest bidder we just looked at the options we had and decided you know what we're we're comfortable these people and they're the lowest bidder we're going to do it but but how about the idea of splitting the the project up into parts and thinking it through getting designs and then going back to web developers Karen obviously this is your business is that the right way to do a project yeah didn't I tell you to do that no you didn't yeah absolutely for sure but you know remember though you're not just looking at the design of your website you're looking what you talked about user experience who are your customers and what do they want from it and why would they come to it and what do they need that's what you want right and having that conversation obviously changed the you know the parameters of the project we wound up in a different place well what's stopping you from stopping it and getting it right nothing I think we will get it right but it just I think we we wasted time and it we it'll end up being a little bit more expensive than we thought because we're going to make them do things that we didn't talk about initially hopefully he's not listening to this conversation right now that's very normal I mean that's just the way it goes that's like getting married and expecting you just still be married to your girlfriend 10 years later when you both change and everything's different yeah it's pretty common for things to evolve and change as you go Lauren but that's that's sort of par for the course and your web services partner should know that and be expecting that in helping you through it well you know we talked to a lot of people nobody said to us why don't you do the designs first and then bid out the the build I don't know I think about I mean like when we built a house yep you get an architect first right now we did not know or somebody designed it yeah but we did but it was somebody that the Builder worked really well with because when it came time to building it sometimes things aren't gonna really turn out the way that you thought they were going to be in the original design so it was really nice to have that relationship so when we've built other stuff the guy who designs it as also the guy who codes it and we like that I mean it's no we're a smaller company but we liked the flexibility of being able to make those small changes kind of as we go and having a programmer it's really nice to have somebody who can code but who also understands the UX part of it so that they can make some tweaks as they go and they're like this doesn't really turn out the way I thought it was going to so let me adapt it the design as I go William how about you what have you learned lately what's working you know one thing that we're working through right now we're opening four regional offices over the next 18 months we've got one open and and this is a big move for us so I'm learning tons and tons of things but we were in the fortunate position of having a whole lot of people who want to be considered to be regional directors basically start an office and build it up from the ground up and I'm reminding myself of a painful lesson I learned when I really messed up a search early on was a client the church was a couple thousand people which is a big church and they needed kind of a second in charge a number two who can do right and there was a person at a much much much larger church that was one rung below the number two who can do and and it was a very fast-growing church and I thought this is perfect and we went through the interviews and the client thought it was perfect at every box was checked and and then the person really just didn't do very well at all and didn't make it and the lesson for me was just because someone's been a part of a growing company means nothing about their ability to be a catalyst for growth in another company and so we've got these people that are want to be regional directors and a lot of them have impeccable resumes but I'm having to ask myself how do I measure whether the growth they've been a part of is something they were the author of or were they just riding the coattails of growth that was already there and I don't have an answer that I would love for you guys to solve that for me before we can close the show that he can great have you gotten close have you figured anything that helps well you know it's questions like tell me about an initiative you led I mean you can walk through the mechanics of what kind of interview to run but but it is it's one of the harder things to discern I'm a recovering golfer and then Hogan you say the secrets in the dirt you got to get down in the dirt to learn how to hit the ball and can they get down in the dirt and go build out an office for me in a regional presence so I'm still I'm still figuring it out and I don't know if it's under the heading of what's working or what's not working Karen or Laura either of you have any suggestions we do this thing in our company it's a it's similar to sort of the it's a personality profile thing it's called a big five and it aims it's it's a sort of most modern psychology of myers-briggs but it's it's a different algorithm and it gets that people's hardwiring so what they're born with and what they're naturally good at and it doesn't mean you can't do something else but it means there are certain things that that you gain energy from and that you are it's your sweet spot if you think and if you're doing this all day long you won't burn out because it's it's an alignment with how your brain functions and and so what we how we use this is for the exact kind of things that you're describing William is that there you know there's somebody who you think is the real shining star in the company could do anything you give them this job and they fail and then it turns out it's because it's actually not in their wiring they're really good at this other thing but they're really not gonna bat thing and so it just helps us get people in the right places in the company so they can do their best work and for themselves as well as for the company and I think you know it sounds a little bit like you may have somebody who's a great employee but not quite in the right position and and I think it's not safe to assume that everyone can do the same things Laura what's up with you what's working what's not working what's working what's working is that I have now two companies that are States apart from each other and they are supporting each other like they're family like they've been working together for ten years and so it's phenomenal so I guess the cultures that we've built you know are just strong enough and open enough that you know we we kind of have the mentality that you chip in when you can do you have any advice for William as he thinks about an acquisition how did you make that happen how did you well what's not working right now and maybe this will kind of answer is that I am completely overwhelmed I'm just way in over my head and have so many people asking me so many different questions and I'm recognizing you know how many systems I don't have in place and how much and you know and I've gone through this through the growth of the business and so we're in this you know in this growth period again by acquiring a new company where I really every day I'm at a breaking point where I have to figure out what can I hand off what can't at a handoff and then I have to take the time to figure out who do I hand it off to how do I train them you know and it's all piling on and I don't have the time to train them so I've got to try to figure out how to make the time and just a really uncomfortable freaking miserable place to be but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel so I know it's all gonna be great blah blah blah and but do you have a strategy for the end of the tunnel that you're moving towards I can see it yes it's just a matter of especially walking into a new company that does not have existing management so I'm playing manager CEO you know I am playing all of the higher-level roles in this new business with 40 people that is manufacturing that I know nothing about so yes you know the challenge is figuring out how it works as quickly as I possibly can figuring out where the holes are as quickly as I possibly can and then figuring out how to plug those holes so you know it's just a process before I let you guys go I as we usually do I like to bring up one news item the kind of thing that we often write about highlight and every day in the 21 hats morning report I just saw a report that the increase this year in employer costs for health insurance is the highest it's been since the Bush years I'm curious oh it's that time of year what are you guys seeing is this affecting your company's first year ever or finally went down this year Wow do you have an explanation for that I have an awesome benefits guy company here in Houston and we also you can't get into the Y's sub premiums cuz confidentiality but we haven't had many incidents this year I need your benefits guy William I'm gonna email you he's awesome for us this will be the first year that we've ever offered benefits because now we have 80 employees we've only ever had 39 FTEs I think it's kind of the max that we've had so this is all new territory for us so you just picked your first health insurer you're working on it right now Wow and how's it going do you have a sense it's not going well no you know the guys that we've talked to so far are not as responsive yes it's just it'll be okay it's a big shock because you know we're talking about six figures plus again you know bringing on a new company that was in our in a close to bankrupt spot you know there's no revenue being generated so it's just another added expense right now that we're needing to figure out how to budget in for and how to find you know not knowing anything about kind of the healthcare industry what are the good plans order they're not good plans and finding a good benefits guy that can help walk us through that and make life easier for us as opposed to make life harder is the challenge but it's like finding a good accountant or finding a good lawyer you know or finding a good husband I guess I'm just over three until you get to the right one this is probably more expensive just to be clear you have been under the the 50 employee threshold so you haven't been required now with these acquisitions you've gone over that you have to do this now suddenly you're gonna have a big new expense line to deal with plus you're figuring out just what you can offer your employees are they aware of what's going on yeah yeah and I mean and we knew obviously that it was coming I mean we knew that would be an expense you know a side of it we thought that we were gonna have a little more time you know to get back into a cash flow positive state before we needed to incur some of those expenses but we're gonna need to do it a little sooner rather than later but yeah the employees are excited about it I mean in our you know out of the 40 people in our Texas company only eight people take advantage of it you know and so we're kind of expecting the same thing and Reno you know it's not gonna be a huge number but they have coverage with the stock yeah exactly I mean for us it's the probably the third biggest expense in the company healthcare so we've got it salaries rent and then healthcare it's it's wildly expensive has yours been been going up recently do you know Oh every year it goes up astronomically it's sort of mind-blowing to me thank you all once again I so appreciate your being willing to to share like this you guys are so open and I have no doubt a lot of people are going to are going to appreciate hearing that the they're not the only ones going through these kinds of experiences so thank you very much for for another great episode thanks thanks for listening everybody this episode was produced by Jess Stuber on founder of blank word productions remember if you liked what you heard tell your friends tell your enemies subscribe like us and best of all connect with us follow us on Twitter at 21 underscore hats and visit us at 21 hats comm well it's not what questions or issues you'd like to hear our panel of fearless business owners address see you next time