21 Hats Podcast, Special Episode, Part 1: All You Have to Do Is Be Better

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm Lauren Feldman your host today we have part one of a special taping before a live audience at the offices of blink UX in Seattle on February 13th you'll hear four of our five regular guests go a little deeper into the challenges they faced including how they get started in business and what's gone wrong at times when they've pumped a little too hard on the gas in part two which we'll publish next week we talked to Brian Canlis co-owner of the renowned Seattle restaurant camless but first here's my conversation with Karen Jay Dana and Laura and joy I am Lauren Feldman host of the 21 hats podcast we pride ourselves on having conversations that you don't often hear in public we try to get beneath the surface not just talk about the the spin the PR or we talk about what it really takes to run a business and our riff our five regulars have been amazingly candid willing to share talk about what actually works and what actually doesn't work and we're gonna put them on the spot tonight and have them prove to you just how how candid they can be Karen just tell us very quickly what the business does and give us some sense of the size employees range of revenues sure hi hi everybody we're a user experience consulting firm we've been around for twenty years we started in 2000 with just Kelly and I so we in the first year we doubled in size and we were four people and those two people are actually still with the company which is pretty awesome and now we're about 130 but were 20 years in about 30 million in revenue we've got five offices Seattle's the headquarters we are in Austin Boston San Diego and San Francisco as well the kind of work we consult with with Clarke clients as complex largely digital products and so anything where there's it's not an obvious interaction so a lot of back-end big enterprise systems we work on and we'll design everything from the the workflow the design the interface all the way through in some cases the actual implementation everything we do is based on research so we are we call ourselves a research and design firm Laura Lauren tell us about your company hi my name is Laura and I'm an alcoholic my name is Laura I started a yarn shop about 18 years ago I was actually a software engineer in San Francisco during the whole combo 97 98 99 and then moved to Lake Tahoe to ski and mountain bike and play and decided that I could make a living through a yarn shop and then building a website so my husband was also a software engineer anyway so we started this little yarn shop started a website and it just grew and has grown for now eighteen years we have made a couple of acquisitions it sounds really fancy but we've taken over a couple of brands to expand from just retail I'm sure how many of you guys have read retail seismic shift that came out last year seriously like it's a page-turner like really good you should totally read it anyway you know in August of 2016 retail took a really big dip for multiple reasons defragmentation all these kinds of things I wrote myself a little research paper that I can share with you if you'd like but we have had to transition and so have picked up a couple of our suppliers so now we have about 85 people forty-five of our people are in Reno now we have a manufacturing facility in Texas and then we are doing business in Vietnam and in China as well so like I make these bags which are available on Jimmy beans wool calm and sell lots of yarn your you have a brick-and-mortar store we do have a brick-and-mortar the bulk of your sales are online correct yes yeah we started the online shop in 2002 to supplement the sales Monday through Thursday because we lived in a second home community you know in Lake Tahoe so rough range of revenues um I don't know probably hopefully 1314 million so a little small compared to fancy-pants over here but the nice part is I can wear whatever I want you guys have to impress people Dana White hello I'm Dana White and I am the owner and founder of a chain of walking only seven-day-a-week hair salons called perrolli Boyd I have used lean manufacturing to solve the problems of no appointments and long waits at hair salon so growing up I would spend my Saturdays in a hair salon you know I was working overseas and you know I couldn't do it I couldn't stay in the salon all day so in New York there are places you can walk in and walk out but they just didn't pay attention to customer service and they weren't really delivered about their processes so what I did is I decided to become deliberate about it so talked to two engineering friends of mine and said I need to make a customer's experience in here as quick efficient and as quality as possible so the long and short of it is I've been open for seven years I have two locations in metropolitan Detroit with a vision to go national to solve this problem Nach nationally and and that's it I'm the small one how many employees I have twenty and rough range revenues less than a million yes less than a million Jay Gould's I started my business right out of college I've never had a job and this was 1978 no computers imagine that I got an accounting degree and I had the wisdom and vision of no accounting is no good I'm going to the picture-frame business and I can assure you nobody thought that was a good idea but I just want to make a living I like picture framing and I hated accounting so I opened up on a third floor walk-up loft in Chicago in what is now a very bustling Street my rent was $200 a month I figured if it didn't work I go get a job and business took off like crazy I did one hundred and twenty thousand the first year then I did 240 then at at 480 tonight to 710 then I did a million dollars the average picture frame shop in the United States today does $200,000 years so it was quite the phenomenon and it continued to grow and then I eventually after ten years got opened a furniture store and then I started an art business and now I sell wholesale to frame shops around the country so to summarize the last 41 years I've got a hundred and fifteen employees my frame business is about twenty times the size of the average in the United States it's by far the biggest I'm not gonna let you get away without telling us how big your businesses employs I got one hundred and fifteen employees rough range revenue twenty million dollars but that's not all in the frame shop you also have a I have a very hot furniture store we do online business and so I got like four different businesses and it has its challenges with running to four different businesses and the whole technology thing it's not easy being a retailer today okay so here's where it gets real you've heard the the basics about what they do Karen why don't you go first is your business as operating the way you would like it to are you you satisfied with its performance yes and and don't pay attention to the fact that there are employees of yours in the audience they're not really paying attention they have other things to think about well the truth is that's all we got I mean we are a consulting firm and we are employees and so paying very careful and special attention to our employees is the only thing that's worth worrying about really truthfully and so you know and our employees are interfacing with our clients every day all day long you've talked very openly on the podcast about your attitudes toward growth and your notion that there are a lot of people buying up companies that do the kind of work that you do and it occurred to you at a certain point if somebody's going to buy up all those companies why not you and you spent a lot of time working to try to bring in the capital that would help you purchase other companies in the end that didn't work out the way you expected it to you also talked very openly you took us radical away from here for a couple of months two hours I'm going to answer that way how is that affected your your attitude toward the growth of this business having been through that experience sitting here today what are you thinking are your goals for link well so there's a lot that Lauren just packed in there but we are in a very fast-paced industry it's growing like crazy so if you think about user experience if you know anything about it it's on fire and it's it's important that that we are relevant in that fire so we need to be a certain size we need to continue to grow so that we remain that the you know the the best UX firm out there so that when the big clients come there's no question they're gonna hire us that needs to remain true and that means we have to continually grow at the times and we have to be up on the latest technology my co-founder Kelly is focused on innovation so that we know what's the new tech that's coming how do we bring it into our own practice how do we advise our clients how do we make sure that we're using technology know everything about it so there's that side of it that we have to continue to be growing and evolving but in terms of running the actual company you you know it's hard not to grow period for anybody there are a lot of missus that managed to do it I think it's harder to not grow actually because you have to you know the world doesn't stay still around you so how could you stay still in a world that's constantly changing I mean everything's moving maybe that's more true in your industry than some others yeah thing could be you think maybe hey have you had trouble not growing yeah I grow out as I get older but I'm not growing you're not not growing and none of us are not growing and so I can tell you I mean my CFO tells me all the time it's quite difficult to not grow you are living in your own Seattle high tech bubble that you think that everybody's growing and you can't stop but that isn't even close to true I mean there's lots of companies their markets are deteriorating or changing or feeling influences from other countries and there's a lot read the paper every day retailers are shrinking there's lots of companies that are struggling to - not only are they not growing but they're struggling to just state stay in business so it and I'm in retail it's it's not easy though all these people with the free shipping and the the companies like of Amazon I think no way uh well them too but Wayfarer Wayfarer they're doing billions of dollars and losing hundreds of millions of dollars doing it so it's Jason home compete with Wayfarer not much but enough I mean there's the play these companies just throw in public money it's stuff and they're losing money doing it it's putting a squeeze on everybody else so yep we have even that in a yarn industry like these guys got sixty million in funding they're losing last year they did twenty million in sales but they lost 11 million so most yarn shops are really small you know and if you're lucky maybe you take home thirty thousand so it's obviously a lifestyle business but you take somebody who pulls twenty million dollars out of the market they can price everything at forty percent off or sixty percent off because they just don't give a like they're just trying to get customer names and build that customer list so that they can sell it and ride off on their yacht it really damages things I mean it changes the whole ecosystem tell us about your attitude toward growth you you were ahead of your time when you went online don't make a face I'd be like that you know it's true yeah but it wasn't on purpose I mean we just got really lucky the timing was really lucky it was magic I figured out how to use YouTube as a learning and you built a neighborhood yarn shop on the Internet you didn't have any competition back then you were growing very quickly and you thought you were going to take over the world at one point what happens well I still kind of think I'm gonna take over the world growth wise I to your point so we went through so we started in 2002 I'm the only employee I have a little 500 square foot shop I've got an espresso cart cuz I've built a website for an espresso manufacturer and he traded me for an espresso car built a website for a yarn manufacturer they traded me for yarn so I have look urine and espresso and let's just roll the dice I got a 50-50 chance beans wool yeah wool is for the yarn and no we carry other fibers just in case you ask but then the online stuff started to kind of take off and I opened a second location and none of it was strategic I hadn't maybe there was a little bit of strategic intuition that I didn't realize I had but the internet business and the world of Internet of e-commerce you know really started for some of you some of you guys probably weren't born yet but in the year 2005 before like Facebook people started to get more comfortable buying things online and so then we couldn't help but grow I mean it was growth after Girt like we could not I mean we really couldn't you know so we didn't have to worry about inventory I didn't have to worry about cash flow I didn't have to worry about anything cuz damn if the money was just coming faster than I could count it but so then I start to swim into the growth you know I mean if you've ever been rafting or you ski or whatever and you start first you just kind of let yourself go into it and then you start to really power into it to see if I can get a little more speed and a little more momentum going so I started to really push got myself and some magazines cuz not many business magazines were writing about knitting at the time so I thought that it might be a career I would pitch myself and I'm just like look yarn how many people here know somebody who knits or crochets it's like almost everybody right which holy like if you can get an article in a magazine it doesn't matter what genre the magazines in you're gonna reach somebody is gonna look into I always wanted to be in card driver cuz I'm like the dude has a wife or is he's got a mom or at least had a mom at some point biologically I was really really pushing getting in magazines getting in Forbes you know ended up meeting Lauren being a writer for the New York Times with Jay and trying to go for if anybody here does anybody here want to have their own business okay well I don't blame the rest of you because it sucks most of the time but don't mean that she's mixing up the a meeting again with this whole thing this is the business thing we're happy being business owner the 12-step program life is a 12-step program so I start I realized that if I started to apply for awards that I would get some press and get some notice and maybe I could convince people that I was actually legitimate even though I didn't feel like it inside if enough people thought that we had a legitimate business maybe people would start to like buy from us and they would think we were illegitimate so it's like the emperor's new clothes so I applied for a bunch of a war blah blah blah I got one through ernst and young and became part of their winning women program with a bunch of like really successful women swell you know the woman who started swell the woman who started Spanx like all these people like her so all these super successful women so i'm all of a sudden surrounded for a couple years with all these people who are just kicking ass and takin names and they're pushing grow grow grow you know just fast growth grow as big as you can keep focusing on having a hundred million dollar company like you should be able to have a hundred million dollar company and i'm relatively competitive I've been told you're an athlete I'm a I I have been an athlete before right now I'm more of an an athlete eater but I yes I always want to go faster like how can I go faster so how can I grow bigger how can I get to a hundred million all right I can you know I can open 50 shops we can do this we can do that and I was so focused on growing that I kind of blew it up you know I blew the whole business up by by hiring people that we weren't ready to hire for I mean we were probably doing five six seven million dollars in sales I didn't need a $90,000 a year social media person ten years ago I mean I just didn't but I thought I listened to what other people were telling me I started to wear dresses I started to wear like heels I started to try to fit the part to fit in with what all of these people were telling me I should be and you know really lost my way I mean that sounds so cliche but and I thought long ago is that about seven years ago six years ago and so the growth kind of stopped and I think a big part of it was I quit doing what came naturally to me and I started doing what I thought I should be doing so it's that nasty should word so the growth stopped as soon as you decided you were gonna focus on growth totally yep yep it absolutely did and then at all you know the hits the fan and it all falls apart you know my dog dies my mom dies you know blah blah blah I mean the truck broke down all these things happen and it took us a couple years and we finally just now in the last probably 18 to 24 months have gotten our back together but now it's more difficult because of the retail apocalypse you've got competition yes what's your attitude toward growth today my attitude to earth is that I just want to have fun I would really like to be able to ski again I'd really like to be able to get on the trails again I'd like to be creative again I would like to grow again if I can do it because it's fun but not for the sake of growth what has also changed for us in the last 10 years and it Jay probably has experienced with us that he can talk about when I'm done talking well tomorrow the next day probably is you know 10 years ago most of our employees were passionate knitters you know retired people college students now almost all of our people this is their career it's their full-time job and so part of the growth and you and I talked about this before you've made some moves this way part of the growth has been to keep the people that we love and that work that are kind of part of our team to keep them interested and for them to be able to grow and for them to find things that they can learn you know to develop new skills so that's a part of it okay I'm done goodbye Dana you you said something before about your your aspirations you you do have the smallest business of the four businesses here but in some ways the the biggest aspirations you would like to go national tell us what's your plan how do you do that do you know you know I don't because the plan has changed and we've talked about the plan changing you know people come to you and say oh I want you to meet this investor and I've said you know on the podcast you know I'm not willing to give up the first-born that I don't have yet to that investor so that's not gonna happen franchising has been an option you know I think for me right now I'm with Laura I want to have fun I want to grow slow I think slow and Steady's gonna win the race because you know when we're talking about you know the growth of a company and my direct competition is the individual hair stylist and she cannot see 15 women on Sunday morning standing outside of her salon waiting for her that's a typical Sunday morning in my salon right and so you know and then the salons that are big or that are national your Great Clips your super cuts your beau rakes they're definitely not catering to my market so I believe the field for me is why exactly who's the market you cater to well right now it's african-american women between the ages of 17 and 70 right because I felt the pain and and a lot of people just don't know what it has taken for us to get our hair done and I think products and tools have evolved but the business model around the hair salon for this market hasn't so I went ahead added some math did some science and and in trying to evolve it so we cannot not grow because there isn't a walk-in only seven-day-a-week lean manufactured hair salon so the growth and the speed in which it's done is up to me aren't you worried that someone else might come and do it and beat you to it you know what yeah I was until my mentor sat me down and said you have seven years on them they have to start from zero right they have to it's also a big country it's a huge country and there's plenty of space right but you know there's McDonald's and Burger King are not suffering right and there's room for five guys in burger fight but he said even Burger King needed ramped up time by by then McDonald's was McDonald's so consider yourself you know in your ramped up phase yes well one of the things that you know kept getting pounded into me was you got to be afraid you got to be afraid like all that somebody else is gonna come in and they're gonna do this and I'm just I'm sick of it like I'm sick of living in fear what's for me is for me it's already done what I do you may be able to do better or maybe not but you'll never be able to do what I do the way I do it because I mean and maybe nationalism for me maybe it's regional and I'll learn that as I grow and get older but for now I am extremely passionate about our time and how it's being taken for granted the kind of anecdote we talked about is you know what touched me was a mom came into the salon and she said my daughter just got a partial scholarship to Purdue on the swim team and I said wow that's amazing Wow and she said because we were able to walk in after practice on Tuesdays and after meets on Saturdays and be in and out in time to go home to have dinner and that is something that is just not you know something that we do in Mass right and so the fact that perrolli boyd is there and she got a partial scholarship to Purdue that's why I said it's a national solution it's about hair health right it's not just get you in and out but is it growing and is it getting thicker and are you able to be versatile with it can you go super curly and then decide to go super straight so again growth for me is you know it's what you want to do until you decide you don't want to do J did you ever go through a stage where you thought you're gonna take over the world in my 20s I was surprised just because I had a successful business that was doing millions of dollars which that wasn't the plan I don't know stinking plan you know what that is right so 20s I was then 30s I figured oh I'm gonna take over the world now then I hit 40 and I realized gee what did you do wrong you're not worth 200 million dollars and cuz I'm not in the computer business cuz everybody's everything you read about in Forbes it's always the computer business or real estate I wasn't in that then I hit my 40s I figured out by the end I by the time I hit 50 I figured out I've done just fine I'm actually happy now I don't have this this albatross on me you're not doing enough you're not growing fast enough and I realized that success is not about the income it's about the outcome and my outcome is way better than most of the people I read about in Forbes almost all of them their lives are messes if you read the stories closely you'll see these aren't happy people so I figured out for myself the Nitra preneur ship is about for me it's about having control over my destiny I don't have anybody to answer to and I have happy employees my average persons with me ten and a half years and I have three good kids that are married with nice daughter-in-laws and life is good and I'm trying to put the message out through the world they know you just don't have to become the biggest place ever and grow it in and now if I grow it 5% here I'm perfectly happy and I'm afraid that now when people hear the word they think entrepreneurship means raising money No raising money is raising money and entrepreneurship is starting a business and there's tremendous the outcome you ever tempted to take investment money no you know I told you the story when I was growing up in small giants I went to the book thing and the book signing and there was a guy who you know that was doing a speech about his business and he was in the boutique hotel business and it was going well and he started taking in money and now he's doing three times now he's doing like five hotels a year and I'm sitting in the back thinking boy that guy really thinks big I just don't think that big and then by the end of his speech he's telling us how there was the crash and I'll never forget this he said I had a wife call me from one of the investors going you son of a you'd better figure out how to fix this my husband was up all night crying because of you and I thought yeah I don't need to think big like him I think medium and and I know Rees I'm an I'm at a good place I think medium like I make a really good living and buy what I want and I've realized that's not a bad place to be but you don't hear about that stuff you just hear about the the ones that are going crazy and growing and lots of them disappear one day I'm trying to get people to understand that entrepreneurship is about being happy at the end of the day and there's a lot of unhappy entrepreneurs out there and that is that is the ultimate irony they went in business for themselves to control their destiny and they controlled it to where they're miserable because someone else is more successful where someone's bigger god forbid someone's bigger than you are or they got written up in the magazine or something and it's a little out of whack at the moment so Karen has you're thinking about taking investment capital evolved over time yeah well we tried and it was difficult because we're a services company we're not a we're not a product companies we're not gonna do a big hockey stick and we're not a start-up so that it's hard to fit into the right place to actually get money from a person or a group who we like again there has to be synergy there so so is it after a year and a half we'd sort of put it to rest and now we're focusing on fueling our own growth which is where we were before I mean in 20 years we've never taken any investment so it's not like we can't do it the there was just a big opportunity all around us to consolidate the UX market and rather than having somebody else do it I wanted us to do it but you know as a lot of people know around here it's not that easy to pull all that off and so it became it became not worth it because it was it was causing too much hardship for too many people I listen to all you guys and I'm thinking wow you can serve a lot of people in this country and you can have a lot of happy employees and you should grow so that you can do that I mean that's kind of how I feel I mean not only can we serve more clients if we're bigger but we can have more happy employees and I think if we can have a great place for people to come to work in more cities you know with more client work to do then then wow that's a pretty good reason to do it for me it's not as simplest and it's certainly not a greedy thing I made way more money when we were four people and I have never worked so hard in all my life and I don't want to do it again and so I always say hey Laura like get bigger it's easier because you can hire really smart be able to help you which you can't afford to do when you're small we're gonna open this up to questions in a second but before we do I just could Laura tell us a little bit about what what's working for you in terms of marketing and generating growth you were ahead of your time on YouTube that was a while ago you did really well on Facebook for a while I know you're focusing on Instagram now what have you learned what's what's working right now I've learned that the rules are just constantly changing you know I mean it's really were whitewater rafting you know and the river is just never the same and you never know how long the rapids gonna be and so we want a facebook global marketing award I got I got Hugh Jackman to do a knitting video for us when was this two years three years ago he had a movie that we helped him promote you know we just wrote it and wrote it until the wave Crested I'm if anybody surfs so you just ride it out and then got to figure out what the next wave is and the next you know to my and my I feel like you know like the Facebook stuff has kind of died you know Instagram is obviously very popular I think we're kind of at the tail end of that so we're keeping keeping our eyes open right now I believe now that we wholesale which means that we sell to a lot of yarn shops I think that that's our sales force and that we're really spending the next year or two years dedicated to you had mentioned that growth you know you want to create lots of happy employees I want to Superman kind of the Knitting industry in the yard industry and I want to create a stronger industry and I want to do whatever I can and I know it's a little arrogant a narcissistic to think that I have that power but whatever I can do to get as many people knitting and to get as many people buying yarn and walking into yarn shops I think that really gives me a high and a buzz and so I'm trying to do everything that I can from even financial education to marketing education to make stronger yarn shops so that our ecosystem is stronger and that it feeds itself which then you know even if we just as a as one of the main retailers even if we maintain the same market share I don't want to grow my market share because I don't want to take away from other people if I if it can grow the whole pond and we maintain the same percentage then everybody wins you know they're trying to take away from you don't you I know but I don't care it doesn't it doesn't matter and I'm I live in my own little world you know and I like to pretend that everybody likes me for me who buys any of this do you buy that that she doesn't want to take anymore Marcus here I really don't I really don't there's so much room and there's it's not a zero-sum game it's just not judging from this room though you're already hitting a lot of people but they didn't say I didn't I mean how many people have ever heard of Jimmy beans but they've heard of yarn yeah yeah okay all right yeah no I mean I want to grow the market share of yarn and of hobby and DIY but I don't you know I don't want Jimmy beans or our personal thing I don't want to take business away from somebody else I want you guys to spend more on all of us do not try that at home do not try to grow a business without trying to take some business from your competition that all I can tell you you with me that Karen actually not I we're all so similar Laura we're in an industry where there's there's plenty of room I mean that and my feeling about competition is the more the better because it raises awareness it floats all the boats if you're in a growing industry like that you can do that if you're not you've to take business from other people the percentage of people who hit custom frames is if there were 25,000 frame shops 15 years ago now there's 8,000 industries dropped by about 30% so in my business if I don't figure out how to be better and make sure I continue to get more market share then my business won't be there yeah but if you look at the math it's like if you do it look at it from a math perspective you actually just did gain market share just through natural attrition you know I'm a big fan of natural selection so I can see this other shops just disappeared and where did that what to do is just be better it just exists but they they disappeared because the market shrunk used to be a three billion dollar industry now it's probably a 2.2 billion bee and part of it is just because baby boomers are not framing pictures like they used to do you have any questions just in the psyche of keeping this thing going if you've got a an expanding business you don't care about share but if you've got a declining or stagnant business the only way you grow or even stay the same is getting more share right yes and no I mean that's exactly where we're where we are our industry is going through the exact same thing or very similar things so our industry is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking explain that though there are people knitting less and buy and less yarn as a whole people are dying knitters are tend to be older they're humans yeah yes there are more humans today than there were but they're aging out so it's a baby-boomer thing it is it may be boomers so the baby boomers have just passed in August of 2016 past their prime spending years so they're spending less they're dying off they're not being I mean literally dying off and they're not being replaced the Millennials are or whatever this youngest generation is they are minimalists and they are very niche focused and there's a ton of fragmentation and so the buying habits are not the same but and then there's a glut of available product so now any of us can go on Alibaba any of us can go on Etsy you know everybody you can buy anything that you want from anybody basically in the world so traditional retailers we are losing we are losing market share to everyone you know it's not just Churchmouse that's on Bainbridge Island which if you've not visited please tell Kate and John I said hi they're really great and it's a beautiful spot but it's not them that we're losing market share to it is the fragmented it's the Etsy lady and she sells a thousand dollars worth of stuff per year well you take a hundred of those and that's one yarn shop that just went out of business and I'm sure the framing is very similar you know there's lots of DIY framing now the people are more if there's the baby boomers kids are not framing pictures like the baby boomers did but to answer it to be more specific and answer your question what we have done is we have actually taken a step back in terms of the things that we were the the primary things that we were selling kind of the yarn if you will and needles and stuff and have tried to we've just been inventing I've been inventing new I have a knitters watch coming out you know I've been patenting things I made some knitting needles that have marks every one inch and patented that so I'm creating I'm trying to I've always taken an additive approach like you know we don't discount things either instead we charge more but we give you things that make you feel like you know you should pay more so we've started inventing like we're gonna have toilet paper that says Tosh is the new brand Tosh's the and then we're gonna go to trade shows and we will you know put our toilet brand of toilet paper and we'll get toilet paper with little sheep on it or like a little knitting pattern you heard it here first then instead of doing a knit along we're gonna do a along and people can all knit the same pattern together on the toilet we think it's gonna be great but we do stuff like that which there is no competition nobody's ever done that before I don't know why you're not taking that business away from anybody exactly well but that's I mean I got to get creative because I don't wanna I don't go in other yarn shops cuz I don't want to see what other people are doing cuz I don't want to compete and I think that's the key right I think if you're going to not take market share you have to evolve right and so at perrolli boyd it's not a matter of don't go to your stylist it's a matter of go to her to get your cuts and colors come to us for your maintenance you might not want to take it from your competition but you are and if you are successful growing your business it's coming from you so you might not like that idea but that is what's gonna happen because it's offering more and she's offering differences I have another question and if you do we need you to go to the microphone because we want the people who listen to the podcast to hear it as young entrepreneur it's so nice to have this energy here can you guys talk to me a little bit about your own personal experiences both in each of your businesses but personally one a time where it was it benefits you the most when the universe was teaching you patients and secondly a risk that you took that paid off beyond when your soul had that okay you know I'm just gonna take this risk and they could be personally like I just wrote a book myself about my journey leaving law school and going to Mexico and Guatemala on a one-way ticket with $200 that's the same as starting a business you have a one-way ticket and you got 200 bucks it's the exact same risk and I think we all probably took it and I think for for me I didn't even know I was taking it it was it's really one foot in front of the other and so it's not like I was taking a risk to say hey I'm gonna but a thirty million dollar company with all these people and have five offices it's not like that right it's just oh I might I'm gonna do one job by myself and then gradually it comes on so I think the risk is tampered by that for me anyway I think my the yeah opening perrolli Boyd was a huge risk right it you know there was not had a successful career before that in corporate America and I was doing well and man Wow but you know I said you know I think I can do it and there were no associations where I could go to there are no conferences where there are people taking walk-in only you know collecting data using engineering notes using Kaizen to you know to work in their salon so for me it was that risk taking you know thirty thousand dollars of my own money signing a salon where a lady was you know leaving her current location taking that thirty thousand turning it into my first location and and you know seeing what happened next handing out flyers telling people about it the other risk I took was shortly thereafter that where I could either spend the money in pay rent or I could have spent the money and done a series of radio commercials and everybody around me not being entrepreneurs said Oh pay your bill pay your bill pay your bill but I thought if I bought the marketing I'd be able to pay my bills for the rest of the year and that's what happened I took the risk the risk question is all of us opening you know opening a business when you're in a society that says get up go to work go home have kids that's when there's a science to it but for any business owner the risk is opening and and the patience comes in with how you interact with people in managing the expectations of people around you quickly J um I don't think you have to be nuts to start a business but it does help and I will tell you that I'm not sure I ever did anything and thought about the risk involved I just thought it was gonna work and I know that sounds crazy but that's kind of I am and I've done some stuff that didn't work and it cost me a lot of money and I realized that optimism is the gift of the entrepreneur and it's also the occupational hazard and I've been on both sides of that so I'm not sure that you pick entrepreneurship I think it might pick you and I meet lots of people that are talking about starting a business and I called them entrepreneurs cuz it's just they just talk about it and talk about it and talk about it for years untrim minora preneur it basically yeah they're bullshitting I thought that's what you were going yes yeah no they just they liked the idea of it they want to tell all their friends about it but at the end of the day it's about signing a lease it's about quitting your job it's about not going it means you have to go and do something about it and it's and there's nobody to blame but you if it doesn't work I don't believe that opportunity knocks I think it lurks and I think that it's out there and you have to and I'm sure you did it you thought there was a market there and you jumped into it and it there was a market there and you made it work and I think we're all in the same boat and and this this idea of all follow your passion and the money will follow oh my god I know lots of people that have gone broke it passions not enough it's a critical part but the math needs to work thanks for listening everyone and be sure to keep an eye out for part two of our special live taping of the 21 hats podcast at blink you exit Seattle headquarters next week you'll hear our conversation with Brian Canlis co-owner of the renowned Seattle restaurant camless Brian tells us how he and his brother took over the third-generation business from his parents how they reinvented the restaurant and how things didn't go all that well at least not initially as always this episode was produced by just doober on founder of blank word productions and remember if you liked what you heard here tell your friends subscribe rate us review us you can follow us on twitter at 21:00 underscore hats and visit us at 21 hats comm let us know if you have any questions or issues you'd like to hear our panel of fearless business owners address see you next time [Music]