And Some Days the Bear Eats You

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Liz picarazzi tells Jay goldz and Sarah seagull that her trip to a bear sanctuary in Montana to get her trash enclosure certified as bear resistant did not go precisely as planned because of a logistical snafu she has not yet obtained either the certification or her real goal a marketing video of the Grizzlies attempting to crack open her baited enclosure fortunately things went better for Liz in a more traditional marketing venue a trade show in Chicago where she promoted her rat resistant enclosures meanwhile Sarah follows up on how things are going since losing two big clients and having to lay off three employees and Jay explains his new catchphrase let me not sleep on it plus we discussed the owner of a 2-year-old construction business who wonders how long he should keep going if he doesn't start to make a profit he also asks why no one ever talks about how hard it is to run a business why while we can't know for sure what's happening inside his company we can be pretty confident of this if he thinks no one ever talks about how hard it is to run a business he's not listening to the right podcast even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by a principal sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report when Jake magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hat.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars J go CEO of the golds group whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Liz picarazzi CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package pins and Sarah seagull who's founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled and some days the bear eats [Music] you welcome Jay Liz and Sarah it's great to have you here Liz contrary to some of the advice you've received on this podcast you've been putting energy into the bear prooof enclosure idea that you want to sell out west you took your team out to Montana recently to see if your enclosures can stand up to Grizzlies how did it go so I have to report it was um unfortunately a disappointment we spent a lot of money and a lot of time both in preparation and traveling to the testing it's done at a test facility for grizzly bears and due to a couple of tech technical issues most importantly being the leveling of the bins the testing facility determined that they were not going to be tested with the grizzly bears and instead they're going to have a technical test which is just basically a ground test without Bears it was very disappointing because of all of the expense but also we felt really I would say pretty disempowered to fix the situation with the leveling it really had to do with a misunderstanding with the center about who was going to assemble the bin on site it was our understanding that we were going to ship it there and we were doing the assembly but it turned out that they did the assembly and the leveling was not done correctly which was the reason that it was not put into the test so very disappointing we have a very very strong reputation for being rat proof and the goal was to also be basically our Westward Expansion is going to be through being bare resistant and we do not have that designation at this time we didn't fail the test it still will have this technical test but for me I really want what's a technical test what does that mean so basically they're looking at kind of how it operates um the sort of the measurements of you know the doors the gaps between a frame and a door what they know about the ability of bare claws to be able to open up you know this facility primarily tests trash cans and coolers so although they have tested trash enclosures you know mine is a 750 lb enclosure of Steel which you know whether or not it's leveled I at least don't think the Bears would have penetrated but we didn't have that chance to test it okay wait I I want to understand this you're telling us there's a business that all they do is test coolers and garbage cans to see if Bears can get into them it would seem to me that like you'd run out of customers pretty quickly I mean how many coolers are there in the United States and how many garbage cans that they could keep a facility open a whole year how does that work well it's a nonprofit and it's actually like a sanctuary for grizzly bears that have been taken out of the wild okay this is just an act ra yes this is an extra they have wolves they have otter they have many other animals there and the grizzly pears are probably the biggest attraction but it's a sanctuary and it's a really big tourist attraction in West Yellowstone Montana so is your is is your product still out there or is it shipping back what are you doing so I guess I skipped the uh the lead here it's still out there and it is going to be tested with the Bears tomorrow apparently the center is is the the the bear Refuge yes it's um it's it's part of like the inner agency grizzly bear committee and they are the one it's called the grizzly bear committee it is were the people Grizzly were they hungry what was going on there did you not feed them before you went there you maybe I should have bribed them with some food but um the only food that should have been involved was baiting the bins for the Bears so that's what they do is they get the most Del ious food that the grizzly bears want they bait it and it's in this area where they just you know there would have been five Bears over the course of the day that try to penetrate the bin how long do they leave the bin out there for so they leave them out for shifts of one hour so each bear gets one hour and so there were supposed to be five hours of testing one of the things that is a little bit tricky though is that it requires 60 Minutes of bare like hands on time where the bear is actually trying to get in so the the bear wanders off and does something else that is not counted as part of the 60 minutes so over the 5 hours cumulatively you need to get the 60 Minutes what unfortunately often happens is that the Bears get tired or they give up and that's why they have the technical test to fall back on so you're saying if the product is too successful and discourages the Bears and the Bears give up you don't get certification because they haven't tried hard enough long enough no you can get the certification but it's through this backup of the technical test you know this feels like when I listen to NPR and they have these three outrageous things like which one of you think this is a b or c and they tell this bizarre story and you have to guess which one of them is true because this is a bizarre story that there's wait wait don't tell me yeah wait wait don't tell me yeah that's this is what this feels like so do we really believe you went out to Montana and went to beer sanctuary and we're disappointed cuz where there was a committee of grizzly bears of grizzly people who didn't give you enough time H what's the next choice wait wait how do you find a place like this are they like advertising online we're we're Sanctuary yet we test things no I mean this is for for big Brands like Yeti or um brute uh rubber made any sort of trash cans Coleman they all get their products tested here so for me that was something that was also discouraging because a lot of these brands that probably have tested dozens of times over the years with dozens of products you know if they don't pass or if it doesn't work out yes it's disappointing but it's not like you know me I've got like my house mortgaged against the business and if something like this doesn't work out it's a pretty big deal you know if I'm just an employee at Yeti and the cooler fails like yeah I'll go back and I'll Improvement and I'll go again but it's not going to affect my paycheck so was this going to be videotaped yes so I had a videographer lined up um I even have my marketing campaign which was to launch in January all lined up where the video was the primary content for that so I still have tomorrow I have a videographer who's going to be there um and I who knows I mean maybe the next time I'm on here I talk about how wonderful it went but I'm just feeling a little tempered I work with a um an animal not it's not a sanctuary but it's a animal um uh facility in Montana it probably not very far from where you are I'm just curious how much you're paying them for this thing o o let me guess let me guess $3,500 less oh that's a bargain it really it was only $1,000 okay it was $1,000 but then on top of that I'm assuming so your flight your hotel stay the videographer the shipping of the product this is probably all all in seven or eight grand right easily yes plus our time you know time taken away from sales I took you know one of my technicians who also happens to be our top salesperson he was out of circulation for about a week for this are you confident that the trash enclosure is now properly leveled and set up no I would say this episode should be called if you thought you had problems you really don't you need to hear Liz's prise do you have your marketing plan all set what what are you going to do with that video if uh the grizzly bears do in fact fail to uh bre your enclosure so I mean the the videos that come out of the center do tend to go viral because the Bears like on coolers and on trash cans they get on top of them and it's like they're giving them CPR they're pushing down over and over and over it's really interesting to watch I don't think that would have happened with my 750 lb steel container for our rat video which we did about 5 years ago we hired an actor who played the role of a rat scientist who talked about the experiment how it went you know what what was baited and it was really funny it was very um it was very popular and it actually became a pretty big part of our brand when we advertise as being rat proof um we put that in the signature line of almost all of our emails and that's really part of what we're known for um in terms of who we were going to be targeting um it would be a lot of Resort towns in the mountain states Resorts themselves homeowner associations we do have a pretty strong um presence in Aspen we have about 10 or 12 units there and that really kind of through Word of Mouth those bare enclosures have sold really well well there I don't need to have a certification to say that we are bare resistant because they are bare resistant and practice they've been in the field so that's the thing is like okay am I going to be hurt that much if I don't have the certification I actually think I might be hurt more by not having the be video quite frankly that was what I really wanted I hate to say that even more than the certification I wanted that bare video I think there's a way to get that bare video after the fact but I love this because I think get the great case studies for other businesses like Jay could you put a couch somewhere and put a whole dog bunch of dogs around it and see which dog likes that couch the best yeah yeah you got me thinking now it's a very specific um thing for your industry I worked for um we had a client for a long time called relay who um make basically nice walkie-talkies for hospitality and they had a video that where they took the walkie-talkie and they drove a car over it a couple times to show that it continued to work and was never damaged and it would did well I mean it showed that it would withstand abuse which I think is really important for a lot of businesses who want to invest in products or enclosures or what have you where they're going to be manhandled or bare handled see I would have liked to have seen a video of you you sitting in an airplane next to some stranger and the person turns you go oh where you going and you explain oh I'm going to a bear sanctuary and watch their expression waiting to see if they're like on Candy Camera or something can you send a you should send a picture to Lauren so at least he can U if you have a photograph of you and the bear is put it in the newsletter because I think everybody would love to see that with a 21 hats hat on the bearer we want to see you appearing before the grizzly bear committee and making your case um for the approval okay well I had nothing going on this week compared to that but actually Lauren I do want to say one more thing in terms of the marketing so this would have allowed me to have two to three different products for different populations so we've got the rat version we've got the bare version which has different handles it has the same opening handles as you see in national parks with those trash en closures so we outfitted it with that and we made it in steel instead of aluminum so there was a lot of product differentiation that also you know in terms of our marketing it would have been two different Target populations and like I said it really would have helped and will help with our Westward Expansion it's just going to take longer than I anticipated so you also had a more traditional marketing opportunity you also recently attended a trade show in Chicago how'd that go so that went wonderfully that was the week after my disappointing air trip to Montana in Chicago and this was with my main kind of Target customer which is downtown districts commercial districts they're sometimes called ssas sometimes called business Improvement districts and it's a yearly convention where all of those executive directors from all over the country come to the city to hear various speakers but we were an exhibitor so we were able to interface with a lot of existing client ients who were already installed with to kind of get their opinion they're very happy some of them even like provided live testimonials to other people coming into the booth but also get to meet prospects who we may have connected with through some sort of cold emails so that was incredible um there was great interest great connection and um that felt felt really good afterwards then there's also a lot of you know more volume selling that comes from that if we usually in New York for you know rat proof often times it's single family or small multif family this would be for large cities like we have a New York City city bin is installed in 22 different business Improvement District 60 different locations we're also in Philadelphia in Boston and Newark in Hoboken and growing so that's our biggest growth area for the business and that is like the biggest con concentration you could possibly have of that population all three of us that were there we felt like we got incredible leads great face time with clients I guess those clients are you just explained to us are business districts I imagine it's kind of a long uh sales cycle with them so maybe it's too early to know whether you actually made any sales is that right yes too early but setting up estimate visits so for those that we con connected with who from New York we out this week doing V visits in their districts and then the other thing we heard is that the city is going to be mandating not just suggesting the business Improvement districts containerize their trash so right now we're in 22 of the 76 business Improvement districts in New York City and this just makes the opportunity that much greater to install in the rest I assume not in Chicago right we have ssas except we have alleys we don't have garbage sitting out the sidewalk so I can't imagine we did we have a big proposal out to one of your ssas Jay that we reached out to ahead of time and then we are there we meet with him again we took measurements and so I have a feeling that one is probably going to move ahead wait for where though where is this unit going to be because we don't put garbage on the sidewalks in the alley this is for public use so this is for public trash that normally would be in a trash can like in a Corner basket no that's a problem cuz they're overflowed all the time and they don't get picked up enough Corner baskets but Liz has a solution for that right well and for these Corner baskets in cities that often overflow we now have a product that handles the Overflow that's called the basket plus so that's something that is really like a before and after visual of what we can make happen in cities on a corner we can take like hundreds of corners and get the trash um lifted off of the sidewalk and into the bin so that was also really validating that there was specific interest for that product in Chicago you've explained this to us before I think the idea is you have the trash can that's available for public use but then you have a bin uh with it so that before it overflows the trash can be thrown in the bin and you don't have to wait for a truck to come and empty the uh trash receptacle is that right exactly did you uh stop by and see Jay while you were in Chicago well I did I stopped by his warehouse but I didn't see Jay and it's a good thing because I had covid at the time and I didn't know it um so he actually was really instrumental in helping us get our exhibit our our booth in and out of the trade show as most small businesses know that do trade shows um there's a somewhat of a racket around getting your things in and out of the hotel you know using the elevators even if all they do is help you put something in the elevator and they push a button I've gotten bills for $4,000 just for that one action so we were able to avoid that by shipping to Jay borrowed Jay's minivan took our stuff basically snuck it in to the hotel and did the same on the way out so we definitely have a lot to owe to Jay for that that was great that's really interesting that you were able to avoid that we're going to have to raise this with our Trade Show expert Jen for Karen next time she's on and see what she thinks of you sneaking into the hotel and then well here was an interesting part they were going to rent a van and they won't allow rental vans or trucks to go to the facility and you could say they're being jerks but I got to tell you my guess is people back them into stuff all the time because people are not used to driving trucks and vans so they might have a legitimate reason for not allowing rental vans there H that makes sense but that's pretty Universal I mean we sneak in in in New York still occasionally too in some of the trade shows we do here but you know it's it's one thing if they the union people really really help you move things but I found that they actually don't you know there was one situation in New York a few years ago like I said with the elevator and the button I knew I was about to be extorted so while I was in the elevator with this guy I pulled out my camera and I took a video of the action he took was to push the button and I still got a bill for $4,000 being somebody who's had work had to work with Union organizations there are good ones and there are bad ones there are ones where the employees do the bare minimum and there are ones that where they go above and beyond so I think that it it really depends on on what organization we're working with well it also the city figures out that they're scaring away trade show business so I they are sensitive to this because a lot of people will just stop having trade shows there because they don't want to get extorted from so there is a price to pay for them and I think Chicago years ago had a little problem with that I think it might be better now but that that certainly is a regular topic right well and then the other factor is what is the product you're displaying so I'm not just taking some tables and like a little booth and some brochures I'm taking incredibly heavy aluminum and steel cabinets and there's a different rate for bulk and heavy things so that actually spikes it even more yeah that's why it was now not that that's a good price but I do I was thinking why would they possibly charge $4,000 well it must have been that's still way too much money but I've never gotten a bill like that for anywhere well it's too much money if all they do is press a button yeah it maybe it was a really big button could you send us the pictures of that button so we can analyze us on our own so Sarah last time you were on you described uh having to go through the painful process of laying off uh several employees how have things been going since then well I'm fine actually my the people that remained all stepped up to the plate and actually found the opportunity to kind of take on responsibilities that they hadn't taken on before and so things are great my p&l is fantastic I'm feeling a lot less Financial stress um I have been working my tail off to um try to find employment or opportunities for the three people that I did let go but it was really heart-wrenching and it took me a long time to be able to I probably should have pulled the plug earlier just cuz I didn't want to do it um but I'm feeling a lot less stress now that said we're a smaller team and we our our days are very full of work um I am not working on the business I'm working in the business currently part of the reason which is that we have two major projects that we're working on that will be done at the end of uh November one is the Apec conference which is an International Conference that comes to San Francisco 21 economies the president will be here we're doing all the media relations for that and then the other one is this thing called Fan Expo which is like a Comic-Con style conference and those both end at the end of November and then so December we're going to look up and be like what are we doing but what's interesting about the current climate is that I have probably about 15 prospective clients that they're like um we want to hire you we're just waiting for a couple boxes to be checked internally so um I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll have a quieter December which I think we all kind of are hoping for um and we do take some time off in December and then January we'll have a lot of new business starting up um as well as the continuation of our long-term clients so things are good I'm busy is all hack but you know it's it's a better situation for sure have you made any changes are you doing anything differently uh that results in you getting those potential clients lined up um no um I do a lot of this where um I make acquaintances and I talk to people and uh I'm building my referral Network where um we make an agreement where I say okay you send me you refer us we land the business I'm going to give you a nice little Kickback or something and so I have a couple people that get a lot of business because either they used to run their own agency and no longer do it but still get inbounds or marketing agencies that don't have a PR and social media um component or what have you so why not instead of just saying no to those potential clients is saying hey we know an agency that would be great for you and they send them our ways the one thing that we did are doing that I have to say about this Apec conference so we've applied in the past for these like government rfps which I'm s Liz knows all about and our biggest hurdle with that is that we had never had a dotg as one of our clients and when you don't have a dotg as a past client or a current client nobody's going to look twice at you so now we've been able to check that box so next year I'm hoping to be able to do a little bit more of these long-term how did you get the first one we got the first one because I had become acquainted with the anchor of the um PBS news interview show here in San Francisco and um she U was appointed to be the Press Ambassador um and they were the the city was like here's the really long list of all the things that you need to do and so she called me up and said hey I know you're work um we've worked together in the past would you be interested in being my team for this and so it's been a great experience I mean the interesting people that we're meeting is just worth the price of Entry like we're putting together this whole video series where we're interviewing and um doing kind of preview welcomes for these countries with notable people in the Bay Area so like myself and my team got to go down and interview Tyler Florence like and it just it there's a lot of really cool experiences that we're getting out of this in addition to having the check mark of a dotg and we're not being paid enough for it yeah not only paid enough I wonder how long it'll take to get paid that's the other issue no but here's the thing is that sometimes these things work out in a really positive way like we worked for um a an a organization called agu the American Geological Union um which is a huge nonprofit in DC that basically funds smaller research um on projects across the country so studies into a local areas aquafer why is this area flooding and we did this great project for them and it was a lot of work um and it came to an end and we wrapped that up put a case study together and we submitted it and we won an award for it last week so like sometimes these projects that you end up doing more work for than you should have um have a residual impact where you get a nice trophy you get accolades and then people find more people find out about you absolutely plus the team likes Awards it's fun did you actually I'm just curious did you ask them how long it takes to get paid who the the government government yeah see I don't care about that because they are paying the U media Ambassador and she is paying us and we haven't had any issues so if she hasn't been paid that's her issue not ours but yes I know that government is notorious but that's not just government my my husband works for a a private um brand and their pay period is like I want to say 90 days which is like who can run a business like that that's the painful well anytime they have a corporate payment system even though you would think it's very efficient it often means you're going to get paid later where you have to log into their system and put all your forms in then what they'll say is it's just 30 to 60 days for everybody and there's nothing you can do about it well that's not horrendous 30 to 60 it's when it's 90 120 you're talking about trying to fund a business how many startup or how many smaller businesses can afford to not get paid for three months not a lot no I know like and how do you but how do you circumvent they're like that's how we pay Tada and you you have yeah no the answer is you need to make sure you got some l L of credit somewhere because that's the only and maybe you charge a little bit more because you're going to pay some interest on the money you're you know not interest is no longer 3% so you say to yourself well I was going to charge 3,000 maybe I'm going to charge 3,200 CU I'm going to have to pay juice on the money that I'm going to have to borrow so everybody needs to always be working on having credit lines I just paid off my credit line it was very satisfying last week okay well that's good you have one though it's small I'm going need to ask for more just to have for that rainy day but I'm really trying to work on that rainy day you know the three months of of cost to be able to have that set aside so when there are lulls in business which generally for PR marketing it's January it's usually so you spend a lot of time at the end of the year trying to set things up to start in January because you can't really do New Biz in January because they're all trying to figure out their budgets all right I want to run kind of a case study you guys this is comes from a post I saw on the small business subreddit and I'm eager to hear what you guys think um so I'm going to read this to you after finishing my bachelor's in engineering I worked for a small construction company my dad worked for after I got a couple years experience my dad and I decided to venture out and open our own company we have been very blessed to always have steady workflow however with constant unforeseen expenses the last two and a half years have been a constant fight where I very often will go without a paycheck and the amount of times I've wanted to quit have been countless I finally feel now like I'm keeping my head above water and starting to see a steady profit a part of me is scared this is only temporary my question is how long were you in business before you saw a steady profit rather than just a continuous investment goes on to say I feel like no one ever talks about how hard it is to own your own business clearly this person has not found the 21 hats podcast hopefully someone who's listening will send it to him but the main question there is how long do you go especially in the beginning without a steady profit any thoughts I want Jay's answer first on this since he's been doing it for longer well the first thing I have to question if I was talking to him is what does that mean constant unforeseen expenses what what does that mean what does that mean what kind of unforeseen expenses do you have in business uh so that's odd itself like should they have been foreseen perhaps did he not know the rent was going to be due every month I I don't know what that means um I would say if you haven't pulled out of the hole after a couple years I think you might have a problem I was making money from day one but I had a little momentum cuz I was selling frames in college to artist and when I opened up I just expanded it I actually made 20 grand my first year which back in 1978 was what somebody graduated college went out and made as an accountant so I I didn't have that but I have certainly started business it to take two three years to to turn but um I question whether he looked at his quote unquote business model and knew what he was getting into given that phrase unforeseen expenses it it didn't strike me quite that way you must have unforeseen expenses that pop up from time to time don't you Jay not not many I mean what what wouldn't be you know the air conditioner braks okay well you should have figured the air conditioner is going to break eventually I mean there there no I I can't say I do have a lot of UN foreseen expenses um I don't I just if you just get the context he started an engineering firm I how many moving Parts is there to that you got a computer and maybe a printer and I don't know I don't I I'd be curious to name give me six unforeseen expenses I I don't understand he say it's a small construction company um oh so he's building things um okay that that certainly opens it up too he got some fines he a machine broke he didn't plan on breaking okay that that makes more sense I thought it was an engineering firm I would think after a few years you should be making money my first business my handyman business um it was probably 2 and a half to three years before I made any money and the money that I made I actually reinvested in creating City bin and ultimately spinning it off so with that business I never felt like I made money but what I got out of it was the business I'm now in which I love the business I was in before I hat it so I was able to get out of it in City bin in terms of profitability it probably did take me another two to 2 and a half years to be profitable um but I just kept how stressful was that at the time so at the time Frank still had a corporate job and we really were like as long as we're covering expenses and we're saving some money we're fine cuz we're investing in this business which now you know we're both working for um so yeah I wouldn't I wasn't say it was crazy expens Ive also we only have one child and that was one of the decisions we made is cuz we knew we would be making some decisions with my business or with Frank's music career that um would make having any more than one child in New York City impossible not that that directly answers it but that always has been a factor in our family finances that decision just to have one child made it easier to take risks like to start a business if I look back at my business history the reason why my business grew so much is I don't lose a lot of customers I have a very very high customer retention rate and I see lots of businesses that open they lose business you know it's flow through marketing I call it they get people to come in the front door and they go walking right out the back door and that's a business cannot afford to only have half their customers happy they just can't and I if you look at the this is kind of a weird thing but think about it if you're just 5% better than somebody else that's the world if if both businesses started and did two $200,000 a year and one grew 5% more than the other after 40 years one could be a $10 million business and the other one could be a $300,000 business it's about customer retention you have to treat everybody like they are the most important person that ever walked through their doors we have a wide range of retainer clients but the the person that pays us you know a couple thousand dollar a month gets the same level of attention and handholding and um work out of us as a person that pays us you know $10 $20,000 a month so because we want them to stay and those smaller clients you know maybe they're not huge but they're interesting and some of them are a lot of fun and a lot of them turn into bigger clients eventually and can refer business right that's a huge thing so Lauren let's go back two weeks ago you had in the report the bagel place that had Gourmet Bagels everybody loved him and he's closing cuz he's not making money and if you recall I said to you Lauren there's more to the story and I looked into it how about this part of the story I look I went to his website he's only open four days a week you know pretty hard to stay in business if you're selling bagel and it doesn't open till 8: in the morning my bagel place over here opens at 6:00 in the morning pretty hard to stay in business if you're only open four days a week and you're selling something like Bagels yeah that that's somebody who doesn't want to work you know they want a business but they don't actually want to work but they wouldn't tell you that they would tell you that the I don't know I I've never heard anybody that's gone broke that actually understood why they went broke they usually blame it on the bank that's the first one I just I mean going out of business because you don't want he doesn't need to work either he could have hired someone else to work the other three days but he doesn't have the mentality to be able to deal with that probably well he did have employees but I suspect you're 100% right that there's a lot about that situation that we don't know Lauren to go back to your question so my industry is a lot different cuz like it's I'm a service based industry I made money from day one CU have laptop will work because our overhead is a bunch of you know software programs that are expensive but can be scaled Up and Down based on the size of your team well you have a lease now too I do but it's so cheap really no it's so cheap yeah I mean maybe it's not cheap for everybody but for San Francisco it's cheap we pay $2,500 a month we are on the corner of a very great area we're on the edge of the financial district Chinatown and the retail District so we're near everything and it's it's not fancy we don't have an elevator you have to walk up two flights of stairs to get to oh my God it's a perfect space for what we need and we don't have the burden of like an expensive office where I'm like everybody has to come in every single day it's more coming in let's incentivize you to come in a little bit more we're mostly here 3 days a week and it's a casual easy environment I have to ask the opposite question what made him think that going in business was going to be easy really where did he get that impression that he was going to go in business and it was going to be easy anybody who runs a business lays awake at night going through the lists of all the things that they need to do to make their business better if you're running a business you should be constantly trying to improve yourself improve your process improve your employee retention improve the product that you're doing and that's not easy because you're always on that kind of pushing yourself to do more I have a new phrase I just thought of this morning when I woke up at 3: in the morning the phrase is let me not sleep on that that's a good one I like that yeah because as you know you can be as calm as could be like I can't control my sleep patterns and like I got some things I got to deal with and it woke me up at 3: in the morning and it doesn't happen to me a lot but it sure did this time and there was no getting back to bed so I can tell you if you want to avoid traffic in Chicago during construction season 4:30 in the morning good to go there wasn't any traffic so I finally found a time there wasn't traffic yeah I mean I I wake up in the middle of the night on a regular basis but I I try to keep a notebook next to my bed so I can write it down because otherwise I I will just think about it all I lay there thinking about whatever it is for hours oh my God I could have used that notebook when I was thinking about the bears in the middle of the night for the last week we've got problems in Chicago with the Bears they haven't won a game so you're not the only one that's staying up all right my thanks to Jay goz to Sarah seagull and to Liz picarazzi and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everybody wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's L RN at 21h hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by just thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]