Are There Enough Hours in Your Day?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul down Sarah seagull and Laura Xander discuss their daily routines how those routines have been affected by the pandemic whether they think they're working too much or too little and whether they would join a peer group where they would be exposed to other owners who might be working harder and having greater success plus Laura places her bet on influencer marketing Paul says his new marketing campaign has already paid off and Sarah explains why not one of her employees has ever asked for a raise even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats War report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.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 Paul DS who is CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables Sarah seagull founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco and Laura Xander who is CEO of Jimmy beans wo a digital yarn store based in Reno Nevada and meline TSH a yarn supplier based in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled are there enough hours in your day welcome Paul Sarah and Laura it's great to have you all here I want to talk today uh a little about how you manage your time uh starting with whether you have a basic daily routine let me start with you Paul you have a a very methodical approach to how you manage your business and I wouldn't be surprised if you take a similar approach to managing your day do you maybe I am sort of a routine kind of person so my day starts pretty early cuz I like to have a very extended morning before I do anything much so I get up 5:30 6 read the paper blah blah blah I don't Scurry off to work because I'm in kind of a sweet spot right now where the company's big enough that there's a lot going on it's interesting to be here but it's not so big that I'm overwhelmed and I've been able to offload pretty much all the minute-by-minute operational responsibilities to my employees so I just have to keep an eye on things I have in other years been extremely busy overloaded house full of little kids and all that and I think I've now entered the happy Golden Years where I just don't have to do a lot of that and I'm enjoying not being super busy so my morning routine is just come in check my emails walk around the shop see what's going on we have a number of of scheduled weekly meetings but they take up maybe six hours of my week and I spend a lot of time slowly working on projects or just waiting for someone to come in my office and drop some problem in my lap but that's just me I'm not super busy at the moment so I'm totally jealous and kind of hate you at this moment don't hate me I don't make as much money as I could because I'm lazy like that I mean there's a cost so wait a second what you just described isn't necessarily laziness uh I suspect it's not laziness at all delegation and it's probably the recipe for making more money not less don't you think Paul it's easier money yeah I don't know I'm with Paul you know like I make something on the order of 150 bucks an hour and half my day is just reading the New York Times and Reddit so wow yay I'm happy with it I think that my business it struggles it sort of bounces back and forth between wanting to be a lifestyle business and wanting to be something else you know let me stop you there because I kind of hate that term lifestyle business it kind of suggests that you're not really serious and you're just sort of doing it on the side what do you mean by a lifestyle business Paul well one where my my business life is integrated into a lifestyle that I find genial and uh when things start to get out of control in business I change it and that means sometimes choosing not to do things that someone who was in a different stage of life or had different Ambitions for how they wanted to dispose of their business or you know how many years they plan to be in it they would probably take a different approach than I do but I've been basically doing the same job since I was 22 years old and I anticip doing it another 5 or 10 years and there's no pressing need for me to change things today if I don't see the need to do it so that's my lifestyle but it's not like you're it's not like you're trying to spend half your time traveling or no I don't like to travel but one thing I do that affects my hours at work is uh I take time to exercise pretty much every day sometimes I ride my bike to work sometimes I go to the gym but I always make time for that and then the other thing is I get home early like I don't like to be here after 5 or 5:15 I just I'm done with my day so I go home are there people still working when you leave some of them because we have Flex time I've got usually there's one engineer here who comes in about 10:30 after he gets his kids off and stays till 6:30 or 7 and sometimes there's people out on the production floor working on something later but as a general rule I'm one of the last ones in and I'm also one of the last ones to leave but it's not that late like I never work after dinner I just refuse to do it and you feel obviously like this is is working for you uh I could throw a resume down there and you guys could evaluate whether I've been successful or not well that that's not what I asked I me I'm I hear what you're saying let me qualify that I'm in a vistage group and I'm the least successful guy in it and every time I leave a meeting I'm like shoot I should be doing more and then I go to other contacts and meet people who've tried to do same industry that I'm in and didn't achieve anywhere near what I achieved and then I've experienced Strokes of good fortune in my life that allowed me to be successful at some other endeavors like being a writer and I have a lovely wife and nice kids and so yeah I'm pretty successful but when you leave Visage meetings thinking you should be doing more are you thinking that you should be trying different things different strategies different approaches or are you thinking you're not working hard enough and not putting in enough hours probably the latter I mean I just see people working so much more than I do and not that I there were many years when I did all that and I just I just can't do it anymore I'm just not interested that's what I would ask Paul like all of those guys that you're talking to and seeing how long have they been doing it I mean you know you and Jay and I I mean this is 20 30 years like we've put our time in we've done the 80h hour weeks we've done everything that we needed to do and worked our tails off so that we could you know Coast for a little while yeah that's where that's exactly how I feel and and those people in my group no they're different they're younger they're smarter they're hungrier they're they're this they're that the other thing they're just not me and and so and they haven't had to they haven't experienced the The Arc of my life I mean I've had some personal issues that were definitely affected my ability to work long hours uh I have an autistic son and raising him was no joke so everybody goes down the path they go down I'm I'm not apologizing for it but but being in that group does certainly open my eyes to different ways of running a business and different ways of thinking about how it integrates into your life you know it's funny I got a phone call yesterday and an email just kind of out of the blue from a vistage chair who's trying to put together a group here in Reno and I tried EO probably about seven years ago for a year I've been thinking about doing vistage and I know you do and and Jay does but part of the reason I don't want to do it is because I don't know that I want to be surrounded by people and like constantly walk out of these meetings and feel like I'm doing a crap job or feel like oh I should be doing what they're doing or oh if only I were you know working harder if only I were more successful and like do I really want that right now do I really want to look around and you know pay to compare myself to other people all the time well I say yes I mean yes I find it very valuable and that the there's a there's a couple of aspects of Visage for me one the peers like I just have guys that I've known now for 10 years and they're a tremendously useful resource So you you're wondering like okay who's got a lawyer who can do this particular thing you can ask around and also it gives you insight into what problems are uh particular to whatever industry you're in as opposed to problems that everybody has and then the other thing is we get a lot of outside speakers who come in and give you sort of the management theory of the minute and some of those are good and some of them are horrible and so it again makes me think about okay well I want to do this is this a good idea is this a bad idea other people are are treating their employees this way that way they make money off it is that something I personally stomach or not so having that group has given me a ton of perspective and made it easier for me to sit in my office and read the paper because I'm now aware of what I'm missing what I'm giving up what I gain from it and it's just that that outside perspective that's very very hard to well I never had access to it until I joined vistage maybe it's just easier these days but the first 20 years of my business like there was no internet there was no nobody no nothing I I had nobody I had no idea what I was doing so I like having that outside perspective I want to ask uh Sarah in a second why she hates Paul uh but before I do Paul one quick question for you you you told us earlier this year that you're hoping to double your revenues over the next couple of years to improve the chances that you would be able to sell the business should you choose to do that do you think setting down that path making the decision to try to double your revenues will require you to change your daily routine and adjust some of the thinking that you just explained yes but I'm going into it eyes wide open and uh the thinking about the different options of how to do this and taking into account what I want personally for my life like for instance we're looking or I'm exploring moving out of our facility which we've been in for 20 years now into a place that would be bigger uh and more adjacent to sort of the center of where my employees are on Tuesday when I looked at a building and it was it was like many industrial properties when you're looking at them it was in terrible shape but uh just imagining okay now I got to get in a car and drive to this place and now I got to sit in this particular office as opposed to one that has Windows and do I really want to do that and it was part of my thinking like hell no this place is is horrible and I don't really want to be there so that's off the list and so yeah I'm thinking about bigger goals and now it makes me think how could we accomplish those Revenue goals without moving any boss who makes a decision and somehow doesn't factor into uh factor in how it's going to change your personal life like I can't imagine making decisions that way all right Sarah why don't you tell us a little bit about your daily routine well I aspire to be like Paul I'm just not there yet and I think PR is just uh the way that the business works it's really hard to kind of take yourself out um until you're a much larger company so yeah I have I have a lot of goals in terms of growth so then I can eventually step back and be a more of Paul's role and uh be the person that's uh the resource to solve problems or looking at bigger um decisions to be made for a company um my daily routine just to preface this I have two teenagers so um life is spent uh sometimes throwing in a a ride here and there until uh they get their driver's licenses and then everything gets really easy oh I know I know I have discovered that if I get up at the kraad dawn in the morning and spend that time reviewing documents my brain is sharp I'm drinking my coffee I usually have my laptop in bed and I'm literally just reviewing any client facing documents that really need my my visibility so that's kind of where I spend that time uh one of my staffers who runs our social media department on ping me yesterday and was like do you need to look at our social quarterly social media reports for clients and I'm like only if you want me to because I I trust her and I trust her ability to to have somebody else on the team double check it so I'm trying to take myself out of kind of that micromanagement I was like if you want me to micromanage by all means but uh there's a level of trust I have on my staffers so um and then I really dive in we I think I mentioned this probably on another um uh podcast but um we've set up our our schedule with our meetings with our clients where we only meet with our clients every other week not weekly a lot of PR agencies do weekly calls we discover that people are kind of over Zoom uh and exhausted by calls we also like to have that week where we can just be heads down working on content for our our clients so right now we're in the middle of meetings week and it's exhausting I mean it is like by the end of the week you are ready for a very large glass of wine but everybody loves it and I've definitely asked everybody if they're if on the team if if they're still want to continue to do it and hands down 100% everybody likes to be able to have all right next week is just going to be a focused creating content and U driving results week um and not being distracted by um preparing and recapping meetings I am more involved um just high level reviews I'm also really busy with new business I spent a lot of time pulling together proposals and presentations because we're starting to do um not just PR but creative campaigns I'm happily married to a creative director ctor and um we get a lot of startups that say we really want to do PR but you look at their content you look at their website and you look at um their creative campaigns and you're like yeah you're not ready um maybe you should talk to Ben um before that so we ended up doing kind of a creative campaign PR program so a lot of time on that lately but I have to say that I push put a lot of pressure on myself to kind of grow in the company increase profits all of that but um I am very black and white about making sure um my employees have a good work life balance because I worry about burnout because you can just keep going with this stuff like I could I could literally work on the work that I have 24 hours a day um because there's always something else that we can add to the fold but the last thing I will add to this is that I have discovered that because I have that need to kind of work all the time and drive the company forward I signed up and I have been doing this for a while to to coach an athletic team at the end of the day I go over onto a field with a bunch of high school kids and I coach an athletic team Monday through Friday what kind of team I coach cheerleading ah and I have been for years um and it stops me thinking about work and it it boosts my endorphins and it brings me back fresh so sometimes I'll come home I'll eat dinner pull out the laptop again throw out throw out a couple more pieces of work and feel good about at the end of the day but like my day to-day is kind of frantic right now do you feel like you're doing something wrong well we're in a weird situation where we have an imbalance between our Tech Team and our consumer team we need more people on our consumer side we have like 15 proposals out there for pending work it's a hurry up and weight situation where it was like oh we're really interested we need to do PR um fall is really important because people are shopping and and that's where we go into the black and then it's nothing so well there is a concern that all of a sudden we're going to be hit with all of these people wanting to sign on the dotted line um and so it's we're trying to find potential people to join the team it it's just it's a really complicated time right now got it how about you Laura what's your routine like so I don't have a routine just because of my travel you know every week every month is different like in August I'll be home for three weeks in a row and so by like week three I'll start to develop a routine but then I'm on the road again and I'm in a different place than I normally am are you still spending a couple of weeks in uh Texas every month no um I was in Texas in June the first week of June and I'll be there the first week of August um so now it's kind of every other month but then it's just random you know we had a trade show um we've been taking a couple of vacations you know we were in Costa Rica last week um Friday we're going to go to Idaho for vacation then we come back for a week then I go to Texas for a week and then I'm back for a week and blah blah blah so is not having a routine working for me um I don't know any other way I mean I've never really had a routine you know I've moved my whole life I've never lived in a house except for the last house longer than two years in my entire life so I don't know what it's like to have kind of that stability so it is what it is do you struggle with finding enough hours in the day or are you at a point where you feel comfortable with the amount of time you're putting in um now I'm kind of with Paul now now that this whole acquisition thing has passed without you making the acquisition right yes exactly exactly so that was definitely like a bubble of crazy energy and crazy time but since that P and I think that was May and June no now I've got plenty of time I'm running again you know I've got a kid in middle school so you know spending time with him you know I talked to Jay and I'm like Jay you know sometimes I wonder like what's my job and he's like your job is to be a mom you know your job is to spend time with your kid while you can because we've gotten the business to the point where the business can kind of take care of itself so right now I mean my like semi routine is when I'm home for a week we're all in the office Tuesday Wednesday Thursday so I go to the office at about after I drop Huck off around 9 or 10ish and then I'm there till about 2:30 and then I go pick Huck back up and then you know I'll work maybe an hour or two at home um I get up at 5:30 or so 5:30 or 6 and I usually check email and do probably stuff for an hour or two before I'll go for a run or something but it really depends I mean it also depends on the weather you know so like right now it's starting to get hot so my routine has changed and that I need to get outside you know at 6:00 or 7 in the morning versus in the shoulder seasons is it hard for you to leave the office when other people are still there working are you conscious to that no not anymore like I'm past that I mean we have such a good team and they're taking care of everything I'm kind of like Paul said kind of in these Golden Years um and I'm really enjoying it so I I feel like as long as we can continue to grow the business slightly but more importantly if I can keep growing the people then they will continue to grow the business and and that's really what we're looking for and sometimes I feel like I don't have enough to do but I'm enjoying that and I'm appreciating it because I know that that's not forever I mean something could change one of my key people could leave you know one of my key people left a couple of months ago and so for about a month like I had to go heads down to pick up her work and figure out how to redistribute it and really figure out what she was doing and and what she was working on but we adapted pretty quickly it wasn't as long of a slog as it has been in the past so I think we're just I'm getting better at it after 20 years do you ever struggle to turn it off at the end of the day not now but we don't have anything like any huge big Acquisitions or any big huge things so I've had to really it took me a while to transition into this uh lifestyle if you will that I've got right now but again really following Paul's lead and Jay's lead I'm setting goals for myself to read a chapter of a business book every day you know and to focus on really trying to learn and observe and and read more you know and think more have any of you changed your routines uh because of the pandemic and are you happy with the change I have to be a little bit um more rigorous about finding a place to stop so that I don't burn my own self out cuz when you before the pandemic you'd be going into an office and at you leave the office so you leave your work behind when you're at home your work is still there in front of you um that said my team is actually going to be going back to the office starting in August um just one day a week you know just to kind of get people back in seeing each other breathing on each other but yeah it's really hard to leave it behind so um we defin I definitely had to make changes in terms of uh leaving leaving my office and closing the door and just having some time with my family when the pandemic came along it was a great excuse to not jump in a car and go see people for things that really didn't deserve it I've altered my my medium distance travel quite a bit and uh taking a lot more zoom meetings as opposed to going to see people and a lot of times those meetings really weren't worth an hour or two in a car and so I'm very glad that that we haven't uh haven't resumed that as an ordinary practice now my shop never really shut down other than for a couple of weeks so I've always gotten up and gone to work and people were at work you know like we don't you can't run a factory from home so a lot of the pleasures of seeing the work being done and interacting with the people I've never really had to give up but I I really do not miss driving mean I probably cut 10,000 miles a year out of my driving easy and that's been great cuz I don't like to drive wow yeah we used to do our pitch proposal presentations in person we'd like go and we do our our dog and pony show you we'd all travel there um it would be a day out of our work life um to go do those proposals and we have not done one inperson proposal uh since the pandemic started has it affected your batting average I don't think so um because I think everybody kind of acclimated to it I mean I do think that there's a benefit doing in person because half of half of what we do in terms of getting selected or finding work it's it's about uh whether or not we gel with the client if you have a good personal Dynamic with them you're going to get the job when it's just a video call it's it's really a transactional experience so you're not necessarily getting to that next level um and I think it makes it harder for the client also to choose what agent to go with because they're not they're not seeing these people in person they're not like getting to that kind of colleague Zone with them for lack of a better way to describe it are you hoping to return to doing your pitches in person that's a good question um this has become such the norm now that um we would if somebody wanted us to for sure my team loves getting on a plane and traveling but it hasn't hasn't been requested but that's a good idea I mean we might start we're saying hey we'll pop on a plane and come do this in person if you're open to it um just because I do think um that Lauren that it would help our batting average because um people are ready to meet in person and and that might be a good way to boost our our win rate all right next topic um in the uh podcast we just published I asked everybody uh Sarah was there to uh tell us what you would do if I gave you $10,000 a month uh to spend on marketing we've talked to Paul a good bit about his new marketing scheme but I did want to ask Laura um Laura I I imagine you're spending quite a bit more than $10,000 a month on marketing but if I could give you $10,000 in addition right now to play with what would you do with it ah it's a great question and I was thinking about about it and I was actually dreaming I'm like I wonder if he's got somebody who is really going to give this money to us like Whoever has the best answer uh so Laura you never know who's going to listen to the podcast so that's not out of the question exactly so whoever's listening please choose me you know I was thinking about so we spend a lot of money like you mentioned you know mostly on Google Google AdWords um Facebook Instagram you know and various other things um we actually spend a fair amount of money as well on and this is sure very specific to us but creating samples right so we're creating samples of the products that we sell creating samples of the products that we produce and we spend a little bit of money on influencers and so I think that that's where I would really Double Down um and I you know I was really thinking about it and you know just the way the world is right now um post pandemic I'm just I'm really focused on spending money on people um and like real people not people with an LLC at the end of their names so I would double down and come up with some better programs to support upand cominging designers who would design things using our Yarns using our products on bloggers on influencers basically basically on men and women who are independently run businesses small bit micro businesses micro influencers um to help them create a business out of what they do and that's really really where all of our businesses are headed is you know in our mission statement for instance for the Texas business it's we're here to help strengthen this industry and we believe that strengthen we strengthen the industry through helping [Music] creatives have successful small businesses and be able to make a living through their art and so that's where I would put it you know I'd Grassroots it I'd put it right back into the industry and right back into the people have you had much success with influencers uh thus far yeah absolutely I mean and again no pun intended or maybe I do intend it but I mean we're a close-knit business right I mean it's a close-knit industry um and people really are the lifeblood you know it's funny you ask this question because we did just double down we just hired somebody who was an influencer um as a part-time contractor to help us really participate more in the community so you know how do we help sponsor micro events that are out there you know events with 20 people 30 people 40 people so how do we get our name out there and rebuild our brand and make sure that that everybody in the country knows who we are and that they know that we're a real supporter of the the community is kind of our goal I don't know what the ROI is going to look like on that you know and that there's going to be like really super measurable Roi so it's a bit of a PR play can I ask you how you like how you've worked with influencers in the past like are they all paid relationships how do you find them um what is your what is your process been with that um it varies you know it's a small industry so in terms of how we find them uh I don't know that it's like intuitively obvious I mean you just you just know I don't know how to describe it it's just the popular kids right is it so it's just kind of people that you become aware of uh as opposed to instituting a search where you totally you know go looking through social media channels to try to find the right people yeah I mean it's a small community so it's just not that difficult what do you ask them to do once you've you know connected with them it depends it depends on you know are they a nano influencer are they micro are they macro are they influencers because they're designers are they influencers because they're just personalities are they up and cominging so some people we work with and we ask them to design things for us and you know maybe post about it some people are more personalities and so we will collaborate with them and partner with them and maybe give them a percentage of sales based on products that we've co-branded have you thought about how you will try to determine the the return no you mean for the $110,000 that we're not actually going to get or in general the money that you spend um you know our social media manager she just allocates a certain percentage I mean for the affiliate sharing it's really easy you know you can obviously see that it's tracked for the stuff that's a little softer you know a little more on the pr side the community building um it's a very intuitive approach I don't even know if if stuff like clout exists anymore no um but I'm sure okay yeah I mean I'm sure there's something out there where we could measure our our amplitude if that's a word you know we can see by you know Google search results you know is as we do this more people coming to the site and comparing that to our competitors but you know you you just can kind of tell you know you can to tell Sarah do you take a particular approach to trying to assess the return you're getting when you set up uh influencers for clients yeah 100% I mean we we first of all work with the clients they have to identify with us what is the goal are you looking for um brand awareness are you looking for um uh people coming through and purchasing your product are you looking for um people to engage with your with your with these posts we create kind of a a measure of success that we're kind of we're constantly working towards so I mean I could talk an hour about the different tools out there that are available to um even the smallest businesses um and and just tips and tricks about how do you find the right influencer because they may have a beautiful beautiful page but if they're only getting like 25 likes and they have 50,000 followers um there's a discrepancy there and that's just a there's a lot of red flags out there in terms of influencers that are not going to be worth your time um there's also best practices I think we talked a little bit about this last week about what are the things that you want your influencers to include um in their posts that are going to be the most beneficial to you you mentioned um affiliate links which is fantastic but um are is there a call to action on every post that they have what do you want people to do when they see that post um and that's usually the the first question we ask people what do you want to happen when we engage in influencer relations for you Paul I didn't mean to uh skip over you do you have any kind of update over how your new marketing plan is going it's going uh we we reviewed a bunch of interviews that my Consultants did with the target audience and they had lined up uh eight different firms and talk talk to people there about our product and how they go about buying it without identifying us as the interested party just like how do you go about buying tables and it was it was well worth doing like if I just stopped right here and I've paid whatever 20 grand there were some surprises in there can you give us a hint what kind of surprises what did you learn one of the things that we learned is that some of the some of the skills and approaches we developed in order to deal with a general public buying audience are not as valued by a more professional like we're trying to Target Architects and interior designers and a lot of our methods right now are based on just showing people here's what something's going to look like and The Architects and interior designers just don't care about that that much that's not their main priority they just they need information presented in a different format and we we never really thought about how some of the things we do just are irrelevant to one group of possible buyers as opposed to what we've been doing could you explain that Paul it seems counterintuitive I would have expected designers and Architects to be very concerned about what the product would ultimately look like they are and they aren't they they have a different way of thinking about what the relationship between what something looks like and what what its value is than our other clients let me put it this way and this it is counterintuitive because what Architects and designers tend to do is choose a company based on an image of something they've designed and use and I'm going to use some prejudicial language here sort of the most fcil level of analysis like oh I like this table because I like the way the bass looks and then they go down the road of of working with that company and then there's a lot that happens after that initial choice but that initial choice is very important whereas our other clients they don't know what they need and a lot of times people say to us like we don't know what we want we have we got an empty room we need to sit people and but we'll know it when we see it and then we make a huge effort to put something and a very easy to understand image in front of them and then also to explain what it is they're looking at because when you shop for furniture it's really easy to look at a photo and kind of focus on the wrong thing and the way Furniture choices are presented in 2D is often a photograph of of something that isn't really the most important part of experiencing it like the easiest way to explain this in a in a chair a chair can look really cool and then when you sit in it it's torture but people will still buy things because they look really cool and the professional Trad is more biased towards the will bu because it looks really cool and the person on the street who's paying big bucks with their own money wants to make sure the chair is comfortable so you end up with this Divergence in what the product could be that was a something that that was uh re-emphasized for me by this report we got from our Consultants so that's been good and now we're going to be crafting messaging and figuring out how to approach this audience using the information we've gathered so everything's working according to plan to me as a matter of fact we've already gotten a big win out of this because one of the one of the people that the Consultants approached the interview said wow we've never had anybody from a Furniture Company ask us why we chose we want to meet these guys so we've been introduced to a firm in Texas a big firm that could potentially be a very very valuable client and that in itself may be as good as I need from this whole campaign that's amazing because you you've told us that you don't need a a lot of connections here you're looking if you get five or six clients out of this you'd be thrilled yeah we already have the the that introduction that we wanted just by asking questions apparently that's very unusual in our industry all right uh we're almost out of time last question uh I want to ask each of you we're we're in this unusual time right now where we still have kind of a labor shortage still a little bit of the great resignation thing going but we're also hearing lots of reports about the possible recession and I'm wondering how that's affecting your employees are you are you still getting a lot of requests for raises for example and given the uncertainty of the time I'm I'm curious if you are how you're dealing with those questions has anybody been knocking on any of your doors lately asking for more I've had a couple but not not in any way the majority I would say I've had three out of 26 who asked for raise and one of them was somebody who wanted a raise for beers and uh um kind of cornered me finally did that employee get the race yeah she got a raise I mean she hadn't gotten a raise in four years so for reasons uh but she wanted a raise gave her a raise and then I had another employee who was recruited for another job and I had to give him a raise to keep him and a year ago I had another employee in the same situation but I would say in general no uh we're I'm not getting a million people pounding on my door anybody else we only do raises at the end of the year and you've been able to stick with that through the the great res resignation period that's worked for you yeah because we actually pay better than most agencies and um all of our employees get a cut of the business at the end of the year we do bonus and we bonus much better than any other agency that I've ever worked at or known about so no we don't get we pay them above market and they will be rewarded at the end of the year if we are successful as a business so I have actually never been asked for a raise wow for most of my people they're young enough where title is more important than money cuz I don't have anybody on my team that's full-time that is married with kids we have some contractors that I'll I will up their their rate proactively but I'm actually pretty good about that where I can see somebody is doing their job beyond what they're supposed to be doing um and I will recognize that um I think that that's actually one of one of the things I'm really good at is making sure that people are pay being paid um for their work uh appropriately and probably it's because I struggled with that when I worked for other people I would be asked to do things that were outside of my job responsibilities um but it was never rewarded at least from my perspective it never was so I make sure that that happens for my team how does your bonus system work are you diving up a percentage of profits or what what is it yeah I have a mathematic equation it took me forever to figure it out but in and I could talk a little bit that more I'd have to have in front of me because it's really like one of those things that you work really hard on for a couple months and then you forget about until it come becomes bonus time again but it's it's it's based on performance it's based on company you know what we have left at the end of the year and it's based on their level in the company and I put together a Nifty little uh spreadsheet that lets me drop in um that information after we've gone through the review process and then I can always tweak it if I I don't agree with the final numbers but it it's been pretty good Laura how about you are you getting uh asked for raises no more than usual nothing pandemic related but I think like Sarah we've worked really hard to be proactive when somebody takes on more talking with them when they're taking on more and saying okay let's give this 90 days and 90 days let's review your compensation see if you know these additional responsibilities have stuck um and if it's something want to continue doing no I don't you know we really haven't the proactive uh point is interesting it sounds like you don't think it's necessary to wait until somebody asks for a raise no I don't ever want somebody to ask for a raise I feel like you know unless they're extenuating circumstances and you know sometimes and this might be what Paul was alluding to but the times usually that somebody is asking for a raise it's because they actually don't don't deserve it why do you say that because some people they usually aren't good culture fits they're usually people who feel like they're contributing a significantly significantly more than they're actually contributing and so so yes we have had one or two people and they don't work here anymore because what they view their contributions um is significantly different than how the rest of us view their contributions so they're typically not a good culture fit or a good performance fit but for people who work their butts off so do you kind of view it as a red flag if somebody comes to you and asks for a race um no because we've already known that there there are so many other red flags that we're not surprised and it's not usually people they usually don't even come and like officially ask for a raise they passive aggressively say stuff like oh my gosh I worked 8 hours and 15 minutes yesterday did you realize that and we're like yeah we also saw you on your phone for four of those hours so maybe that's why you know blah blah blah so there's so many other red flags it's not them asking for a raise right that's just a symptom you know of a bigger issue I would be devastated if one of our really good employees came to us and asked for a raise because it means I didn't do a good job you know and I wasn't proactive enough and recognized you know their value I agree with you on all of what you said I think that's great I don't necessarily think it's a red flag but for me in my my perspective contractors when I hire a contractor I say okay what's your rate and that's that is on them to tell me how much they think their their work is worth right and then for me to negotiate what's going to work for us um but if not my job to proactively give a contractor a raise I feel like they have to come to me for that Paul how about you do you uh do you wait for somebody to come and ask yeah sometimes I mean I don't think there's a correlation between a good and and bad employee and asking for a raise at least that hasn't been my experience so there may be issues where I hire someone at a wage that today is required to get them in the door and then you look at the total compensation for everybody and there might be someone you hired 10 years ago who is more experienced and and just needs to be brought up to something so that there's not a disparity and in those cases I'll retroactively or just go in and say hey you're doing a great job and I want to make sure that you're being compensated fairly boom here you go and then I've had people ask and had every possible scenario it's just on a case-by Case basis with me and and I I try to at the end of the day understand how much people are getting compensated in in total a lot of these discussions for me play out in terms of whether we're providing health insurance or not because that's expensive and so that's a form of compens ation and I may volunteer to take a little more of the load or a little less of the load depending on the rest of the circumstances but I don't have any blanket rules about it all right my thanks to Paul DS Sarah seagull and Laura Xander uh as always thanks for sharing guys 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 at21 hats.com that's L ren21 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 Jess tharon founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]