Can Jimmy Beans Wool Sell Yarn on LinkedIn?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Sean busy and Laura Xander discuss what exactly Laura's job should be she's CEO of course and she's been focused on Acquisitions and growing the business but she's never really found someone to take over the big role she used to play which leads to some interesting questions should she go back to being her own Chief marketing officer or does she need to go out and spend real money to hire one and then toward the end of the conversation Laura actually devises a plan on the spot to sell yarn in a surprising and creative way which perhaps answers the very question we've been discussing plus Sean explains how having the right partner can make a business in the beginning and break it over time as he celebrates having made his final payout to his own former partner 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 our 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 which Jak magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and [Music] interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Shan busy CEO of kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy and Laura Xander who is CEO of jimy beans wool a digital yarn store based in Reno Nevada and meline TSH a yarn manufacturer and distributor based in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled can jimy beans W sell yarn on LinkedIn welcome Sean and Laura it's great to have you here you were both part of the first episode we take this year uh along with Paul DS who told us that his New Year's resolution for 2024 was to make some damn money um I think you both echoed his comments that the previous year 2023 had been pretty tough and that you were hoping for better in 2024 we're already about 2 months into to 2024 I'm curious how it's looking how about you Sean how's it going so far for you uh you know it's going really well yeah that's good to hear we're having a really good first quarter um you know the projections at least 3 months out um look really good and then if I go 6 months out um those still look pretty good too so the funnel has finally got good opportunities in it yeah it's a 180 from especially the third quarter last year which was really really dark ooh interesting yeah interesting on the third quarter being hard ours ours was the first and the second quarter so I guess that probably trickles down to being third quarter maybe were you expecting the third quarter to be bad uh you know we started to turn on the red lights of like freak out around the end of the second quarter we're like uh oh this isn't looking good but the problem is is that historically the summer is always a slow time for us um so it's hard to know is this seasonality or is this uh same page turns out it wasn't seasonality it was just bad do you attribute your turnaround uh so far this year to the campaign that you've told us about of getting your whole team to reach out to more people I think you spent a 100 days trying to make new contacts is that what this is a turnaround is about in big part yeah you know we took it really seriously and we took action um and that's really encouraging that you know you can change the trajectory of your business in a pretty short period of time if you take the right action so that was good the other thing we changed was was Shifting the responsibility for business development from mostly just me um and maybe with one other person in the past to kind of a team sport so we kind of made it you know hey this is the expectation of the job if you're within these roles and that made a big difference we also changed our offerings a bit so we brought some new products product services to Market um that were a little easier for people to buy a little smaller price price tag and that was I'm finding like just a lot easier to sell can I hijack this just a little sure yeah I'm so curious because we you know last year for us was one of the hardest years that we've ever had and for us it turns into like an emotionally difficult year and so you know postmortem I'm looking back and you know the first quarter doesn't really go as well and we're trying to dig in and we're trying to like identify what is it is it us is it the market you know is it you is it you you know is it somebody in particular and we actually did find a couple of instances of things that people were supposed to be doing that they weren't doing so that in some way was actually um validating that and it was something we could fix we're like okay great problem solved you know we know what's going on you were supposed to reach out to these customers and you didn't and second quarter you know the yellow light was on and now we're in the red light and we're like holy crap like what what are we going to do it's not getting better so do you start to think about laying off people do you just write it out like what happens when cash flow is starting to burn up and how do you not and I I'm asking you cuz you seem so much more levelheaded than I am how do you not kind of emotionally freak out and just I mean it's not that we go into panic mode but like what are you guys doing what are what is the marketing team doing like how come you're not doing this and then you start to nitpick and you're like why aren't you sending the newsletters out three times a week and instead of two times a week and why aren't you doing this and why aren't you doing that and I don't go at it quite that uh obtusely I guess but that's what's in my head you know is you start to like try to figure out one what's going on with the market but two is this team doing what the team is supposed to be doing do you kind of go through that you know then then of course like the team starts to spin and we're all kind of struggling I mean I think it's important to know you know you you have a bigger organization than I do you know so I'm sure the Dynamics there are different you know we're in that like 11 13 14 person siiz company so you can all talk about it together you know everybody feels it we can talk about it we can really recruit everybody to the effort and since you know the team I have is pretty high level um you know I was going to say you're all professionals right they're all professionals I mean salaries are ungodly High yeah but you know it means you can talk a profit and loss statement with the team and and they get it and and and we do and we look at like profit and loss together and go holy [ __ ] and and and also by the way our first quarter was terrible too we just had a terrible year um it was so so so so bad I haven't had as bad a year since the Great Recession okay and does your team step up and like work more I mean are they kind of motivated to fix it very motivated yes okay I mean I got people who don't want to work more than 39 and a half hours a week you know is it working more or is it working on the right things uh a little bit of both you know yeah and that's you know one of the problems is our leadership in certain areas maybe isn't as we discovered is not as strong as we had ex as we had thought you know Laura that that theme you just shared there I've heard that more than I have in a long time like oh we thought our leaders had things and that they didn't um like kind of that middle management layer um it's exactly that layer and they just fell apart why what's your what's your thought on like what's going on so I have two different you know obviously we have a Texas business and we have a Nevada business and they're very different and the drop in sales affected both of the teams extremely differently you know the team in Texas really dug into expensive and our sales were lower but our expenses were lower than our sales were lower so we actually had a better Financial year than we had before because we dug in you know under the line but on the Nevada side which is primarily e-commerce I think we got this false sense of security and Confidence from the bump that the pandemic gave us as an e-commerce business and so I think that you know the team probably felt like we were Superman they were Superman and could really do anything and all we have to do is put new products up and talk about them in a newsletter and Bam you know cuz we got this huge bump um in customers during that time yeah so then I think that you know what my general manager and I talked about a bunch was for us you know we've been in we've been working for 20 30 years and so we've seen ups and we've seen downs and we know there are just down years you know and when there's a down year you got to again our team is so young that they haven't experienced that you know and there's uh not to stereotype but you know there's a little bit of the 20-some work life balance you know don't want to work past 5 o' you know it's this is a for-profit company and I don't know Laura I'd like to throw another POS kind of a related possibility at you which is this both today and in your last time here I've heard you talk about not being aware of things going on in the business in a way that I haven't heard you uh suggest in the past yes and I'm just kind of wondering how much this is related to you not being uh as involved in the day-to-day as you have in the past because you've been involved in doing other things including in Texas buying other businesses yeah um I think your spot on on and and I hate to even say that I mean I have been for the last 4 years kind of on a path of to semi-retirement when it comes to the Nevada business and you know had been working with our general manager for her to just take on the business I can handle the financial side of it and you know do kind of the CFO role but she would manage everything else so managing growth managing the marketing managing blah blah blah and you know the discovery this year was just she doesn't have strong enough team underneath her and so she was doing and I didn't realize this I I don't think either one of us really realized how much she was doing that her team was supposed to be doing so you know when they couldn't do something she would step in and take it on herself so she was working probably you know I'm sure 80 hours a week you know all year to kind of compensate for the work that wasn't getting done wow so back to your question I for whatever reason you know I don't really think that I add a ton of value on the Nevada side on the Jimmy Bean side but maybe I do because I've been way more involved in the last 3 months and four four five six months I mean as Sean said once the red light really was flashing I jumped in and you know as a tornado and I'm like all right [ __ ] it this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to fix it and I know I'm going to create some issues and I'm going to cause some problems but you know this is our business and so I I should say I've been way more involved in the last 6 months in the dayto day and I like to think I I mean I guess it's making a difference you know we're up again and yeah did some major course correcting this year is looking up yeah yep on the e-commerce side absolutely yep it's looking way better way way better Laura last year I promoted Anya Taylor to the president role in Kinesis it's part of my transition plan one of the best decisions I've made in my business I'm really really delighted before she worked at kesa she worked at a um it's it's called kind of like a you know whenever you go into a store and you see like the Nike section of the store and they have all these displays and all this stuff they were the company that built all the displays I don't know what that's what the industry is called merchandising yeah something yeah so really she supervised people who are running table saws and maybe occasionally drawing things in drafting programs so like really kind of bluecar manual labor stuff she she oversaw you know maybe a dozen or more people what's interesting is now she's overseeing people with you know six figure salaries you know sometimes two degrees graduate degrees Etc really a very different type of employee and she kicks ass with both like she was so good at at at being a leader like she's one of these people who has wow you know the ability to just cultivate people around her yep that's my general manager and and I and I'm just like man that is such a such a valuable trait and I think folks underestimate how important that is um in an organization you know where she like empowers other people to be successful and that's exactly who our general manager was it's I mean she came from a merchandising um Furniture Home Decor kind of 20 years of experience in that mostly working with uh people who get paid by the hour and she came in five or six years ago it's been six or seven years now and just what she's done to our business is phenomenal but where I think I don't want to say we made the mistake but maybe we made the mistake is it's the marketing and the it's customer acquisition for me that's what really boils down to it's the sales funnel and I've been told that like I'm a marketer and that I'm good at that and you know I I don't know I have a hard time thinking that other people can't do it as well or do it a lot better than I have so I've let go of that for the last few years and just thought she could take that on with the leader that she has and I just don't think their skills are there you know they don't have that same intuition they don't think that same way they don't think huge you know they don't think about getting Q Jackman to do a video for them um and we haven't had that for a number of years and I think it's just catching up to us yeah and so that's where you know I'm kind of stepping back in and like okay we got to think big you know going back to like marketing 101 it's not just about marketing to our existing customers which our team is really good at it's about we have to grow you know literally our customers are dying off every year we have an older customer base and we need to get new customers in and we need to do it in a systematic way and our team doesn't think that way mhm and that's the hardest that's the hardest marketing new customer acquisition is 100% the hardest marketing you can do oh it is oh I love that oh 100% oh I think it's so fun see this is like your unique gift like anytime there's something where you think it's easy and everybody else thinks it's hard it's like that's the special thing right that's your unique gift yeah it's just door too I love going door too along those lines when you described it before as your team kind of lost sight of marketing uh 101 yes I think along the lines of what Shan is saying it really isn't marketing 101 no it's not you brought a a unique brand of creativity to it and just the the example you gave of bringing in Hugh Jackman to be part of a campaign yeah y not marketing 101 um yeah it is it's easy that's but no I this is actually very enlightening because and that is the mistake the oversight that we made is that I assumed that that stuff is just marketing 101 like it's not that [ __ ] complicated you know it's not that hard and so I let go of that and my expectations then obviously are set at the wrong level um and I'm expecting other people to just be able to do that and they and it doesn't come as naturally for them and so we're having to reset and reorganize and you know then you figure out like do I find somebody who that is marketing 101 for which is expensive you know or do I I mean it this goes back to Cliff Oxford but I don't think that's what you're looking for well that's what Cliff would always say he's just like you're never going to find somebody to replace you who's Cliff Oxford sorry I don't know Cliff oh Cliff was one of the he was in the um a blogger for the New York times he's been friends with LA forever and it's been was a good Mentor to me um in a lot of ways and he was a marketing genius if you will but yeah he used to always just he's like you're not going to find somebody else like you are marketing you are the marketing like person um and I resisted and have resisted and resisted I'm like I don't want to do it it's too easy it's boring I want to do other stuff but anyway you know maybe the takeaway here is and I love what you said Sean is that if I think something's easy and other people say it's hard then maybe that is my unique gift and that's something I need to lean into as opposed to trying to Outsource or Farm off and then I get frustrated cuz I'm just like dude it's not that freaking hard tell us about those two Acquisitions Laura yeah um well you know red lights flashing ship's going down ships going down um and we had a couple opportunities to basically buy some sales you know to buy some growth you you said the red light's flashing and the ship's going down tell us what is that really what you mean were you afraid that the business was failing no but um you know at a certain size you have to have a certain amount of Revenue you know to get above break even um and so you know last year was tough we were barely break even and that's not a healthy place to be and it was fine for last year but for me there are signs there that of things that aren't going well that you know if I project those 2 years out or three years out like we just can't have that kind of year every year so I guess looking around the corner trying to figure out okay you know it's June of 2023 what do we need to do now to set us up in 2024 so we don't have a repeat of this year knowing that it's going to take us 3 to 6 months you know to for some things to pay off so we launched a new line of yarn um and then we did these two Acquisitions on the Texas side of things and it did these two Acquisitions for a couple reasons one was a brand that had gone out of business the year prior and so I had been talking to the woman who had owned this brand for about a year you know hey can we take it on can we take it on but we wanted her products not her brand and so it took her a year to kind of acques and we launched launched her products in December so when she finally said yes which was in November she said yes and I'm like we got to move on this let's nail this you know let's get it in the books um so that she can't change her mind and we can move forward for this with us so it was something that we as a team had talked about a little bit every 3 or 4 months but you know it came kind of suddenly so it was a little bit of a shock to the system and my team in Texas just they're freaking Heroes they jumped on it we were able to pre-launch you know these new products and pre-sell these new products within about 2 weeks of us buying this and we just got the products um from the factory in Japan last week we're shipping them out like it's going really really really well what happened at the same time is before this opportunity came up another hand dyed yarn business came to me and asked if we wanted to take take that on and we needed the work you know our facility in Texas you know our fixed costs could absorb almost twice the amount of work that we were producing so very little increase in fixed costs but an increase in revenue and so I'm like let's do it you know let's take this on their customer list would double our customer list so we would get in front of a bunch of customers that we don't already have you know from a financial standpoint we worked it out it would pay for itself in a couple years seemed just like a smart thing to do well we didn't realized we were going to buy the second company and so when that second company the one that took us 3 or 4 days to to close on when that happened we were too far down the line with this other handdyed company to turn back and really from a I want to say like an ethical or a moral standpoint the founders of this other business this handy business they were all in I mean they had already given me their passwords just a small independently run business and I just didn't feel right pulling the plug on it and really screwing them so we took the hit uh and went ahead and took this on even though we probably shouldn't have in some ways and then this handdyed the founders of the handdyed business we were supposed to close on January 1st and we were like look we need a couple of month months we can't transition this over to Texas right away we just don't have the bandwidth it's the busiest time of the year and they were like yeah of course of course you know we we put like a service agreement in place where they were going to operate out of Arizona for a couple of months well January 1st rolls around and they're like we can't do it anymore we need to transition it faster so they ended up only producing for us for a week and so we had to transition it to Texas the second week of January and they made the mistake of telling all their employees you know a few weeks before we closed and so half of them left and so we're in a really bad spot and I don't know what I I mean I guess we could have said sorry you know you promised us that you would take this on for the next month or two months but I don't know what that's going to gain you know I mean so we just decided to suck it up and work 80 hours a week and make it happen and do the transition so the month of January was unbelievably ridiculously crazy stressful um as we were trying to take on this new business in Texas during like the busiest time of the year training new people in new techniques new facil you know new equipment new products blah blah blah blah blah but we made it through um and it was about 6 weeks of utter hell and literally like crying you know Just sh shake like I would I'd literally in the middle of the day have to go lay down in bed for like 45 minutes because my brain I thought was going to explode from the stress now it's all good now I'm looking for our next acquisition I'm just kidding I'm just kidding you're not totally kidding though I am kidding I'm not I mean there is one more brand that I want to take on but not for a year see I think this is this is the challenge okay so here here's what's going on I think is you have a network business meaning large numbers of buyers potentially large numbers of Sellers and your instinct is to keep adding Brands which is actually really a good Instinct it's like you add more and more and more you can sell to that customer base and you keep expanding that customer base that increases the value and power of your network so I mean Amazon's a network right large numbers of sellers large numbers of buyers and so your instinct is to keep growing the network which makes it more powerful and more profitable that's a huge lift and so when you're doing that you're taking your eye off of the marketing ball or the leadership ball that's the fundamental tension is your instinct is telling you grow the network which is a good Instinct but then this other stuff isn't happening when you're doing that cuz that's your other unique genius so oh and you love growing the network like that's your passion right it is it's fun it's new it's different and right now so the other like um pivot that we made is in Texas you know we went from mateline Tosh being the brand in Texas you know that we had bought 5 years ago or four years ago now as of last month we have formed the Matty Tash Group which is a distribution group and so now we have five Brands underneath it to your point so that we can have a presence in every independent yarn shop in the country through one of our Brands and nobody in our industry right now is doing that nobody is growing on the wholesale and distribution side of things and I've got people coming to us and it's it's mindblowing who have worked for some of the most prominent brands in the industry if they want to jump ship and they want to come to us because they see us as the future you know they see our growth they see our passion and so I think you know the other Illuminating part of this year is that I always thought this Texas business and this Nevada business you know when we first bought it we envisioned sharing a marketing team we envisioned sharing a leadership team and things really blew up this summer like a lot of crying a lot of dysfunction and it really made us understand that we have two separate businesses businesses it just is what it is there are just two completely separate businesses with separate teams and separate goals and I got up to your point I need to figure out how to spend time in each business you know good material time in each business and what my role is in each of the two businesses and quit thinking about them as one CU they're just not you can't hire the m&a work you can't hire somebody who can figure out the strategic acquisition and to to manage through that what if you threw $200,000 at a CMO like a true highlevel marketer I know the New York Times gu is like no no no nobody can do it I just tried you tried tell us tell me about that what happened um I had been working with a woman for the last 4 months um to bring her on board almost exactly what you just described and it's somebody I've worked with for years and years years and years and so we've been working since September on a deal and she just decided just sent me a note this morning that she's decided to stay at her current place yes what was the what what it made her decide I'm sorry you were getting the bad news right and left what what uh what made her decide to do that do do you know and do you believe it um I do know and I do believe it um and there's a teeny part of me that's relieved in some ways because because there it's a little concerning that it's taken us four or five months and there's been indecision and um long story short she's in her early 60s um she's a little bit older she's I don't want to say paycheck to paycheck but money is um and security is extremely important to her at this stage in her life and this the place that she's at now she's only been at for a couple years and she's at a place that's run by a private Equity company really that is extremely stable till it's not yeah so it is and I mean I could go into that right right sure yeah we know what's going we both know what's going on over there um we have some inside information and so I don't blame her I think it makes the most sense for her probably to stay but it just felt too risky because she would have been you know one of our she would have been a big wig here that sounds like a terrible fit so I think it's great it's a terrible fit you need somebody who's comfortable moving fast taking risks trying new things failing like that's not her at all like you what are your characteristics right you're willing to try things even if they don't work right yes so go get that person they're out there yeah yeah I mean think about the the financial consequence right okay so say you pay them 200 Grand a year and that frees you up to do another deal or two you can do the math yeah well and I've done it we've done it and my general manager one of her unique gifts is product of development and so you know that was part of the plan is if we can get her out of the marketing side then we could recoup that money just in product development um so by freeing our general manager up and freeing me up the two of us could go out and get new business okay yeah I just and maybe we could talk online cuz I don't even know how to approach it you know and how to look for somebody like that it's it's tough I mean yeah it's scary I mean that's really scary yeah but necessary otherwise you're going to be crying and every you know it's just going to be so hard on you and the people around you too yes yes yeah no I make a lot of people cry I'd like to go back to the marketing 101 conversation uh a little bit you guys may be aware uh I did a dashboard podcast episode with genan Marx recently in which he described uh a little digital marketing experiment he did with Twitter or X as it's now called he paid just $50 to boost a post that highlighted a book he'd written about CRM software uh Jee has a big following on Twitter and when he boosted the post Twitter reported that he got more than 30,000 impressions for that one post whatever impressions are and uh 400 people Twitter reported clicked on the link and Jee was thrilled by that that's it way more than he was hoping for uh except for one problem which is that when he went to Google analytics and checked for his website none of those clicks actually came through um basically none what do you mean they didn't come through on the landing page he had set up nobody actually arrived there and obviously there were no purchases of the book whoa he he's gotten a lot of response since then from people saying you know what I've had the same experience you guys both have a lot of experience with digital marketing I'm curious what you think of this what you make of it so I have two theories on this one is that these these platforms basically lie to their users there have there has been that exposed in the past especially on Facebook that's fact one and then Fact Two is I think there's different criteria used for a click I think Google potentially is saying unless you are on this page for a certain amount of time we're not going to count that as a view because it's probably a robot and so I'd be willing to bet that actually Google is saying zero because if there were even any that did click it wasn't actually legitimate that that's my theory I don't know what you think Laura you're you're far more experienced in this realm than me well I'm pretty far out of it I mean I haven't paid attention in a couple of years but a couple years ago I do remember how burned I got um with Facebook and Google and you know going back just to attribution you know so Facebook will tell you you know you had a million people go visit your site and you paid this amount for this million people and then Google says oh yeah well we gave you a million people well it turns out they were the same million people so you're actually spending twice as much you know but both of them are claiming that we're the ones who gave you this lead um and I ended up just spending way too much money one year um unwittingly that was a hard hard lesson to learn how did you get out of that um you just I reduced our budget you know you reduce your budget and you just pay a lot more attention and you're just smart and you can kind of change the attribution stuff you know the reporting but you basically learn just not to trust anymore it just it's rough like super super rough because as to your point Sean you just can't trust the numbers you just can't trust them we're going through something right now where we have we've got an influencer that we pay you know a little bit each month and he's got he's on Instagram and he's got a huge reach but we get no D almost zero direct like no sales as a result and this goes back to that sales funnel thing um of trying to figure out when does it make sense to just have reach and when does it make sense to have sales to measure Things based on those clicks so in genan case okay fine 400 people didn't come to his site but if 30,000 people saw his name and they saw the name of the book is that worth the investment or is that wasted if they don't see his name seven times or 10 times right you know especially now it's so different than it was even five years ago with the amount of information that's out there does it even make sense if people only see your name one time is that just a waste Laura what's your conclusion with your influencer are you satisfied despite not getting any sales out of it I am I happen to believe very strongly in in the top of the funnel and in brand awareness I mean let's go back to the Hugh Jackman example and we had what 3 or 4 million people see his video um did we get any direct sales from that I don't think so you know maybe we sold $100 as a result but people still talk about it you know and so from a credibility standpoint from a again a brand recognition standpoint from a um look at us we're Innovative um and we do things that other people don't do I just think that that's priceless but my marketing managers who manage the budget don't agree you know because they want to see Roi they want to see sales attributed to the money that they're spending and so that's something this year that I've got to figure out is how to communicate and work with them and set aside a certain amount of budget that we are not going to get a direct return on um and how to do that smartly in a way that's not just wasting money I don't know if I'm right or wrong or I mean that's just my intuition honestly I think I think your business is really lucky to have your perspective because I think once organizations shift into this you know if you can't track it it doesn't exist it's just [ __ ] if you uh follow that logic though if you say you're not concerned about attribution don't you run the risk of kind of these platforms off the hook well they're not reliable like you're going to you're going to get Facebook to be honest with you no [ __ ] way man yeah I mean look at what you look like Jean's experience they're not to be trusted so so you have to yeah I don't know man I you know I what do you do is there a platform that you trust more than others uh I trust LinkedIn a lot more than any other for sure for sure interesting yeah I I well you're B2B and Laura's not I don't know the LinkedIn would be helpful to Laura no not really uh probably not not with her product um I I do think there are some consumer brands that actually could kill it on LinkedIn but no not at the same not in the same way not hers no probably not but I do trust I I trust LinkedIn more because of where they get their money from so here's the thing LinkedIn gets its money in large part through subscriptions recruiters who pay for their services like they're motivated to provide value for those paid Services how does Google get its money advertising right imagine if you paid a subscription to Google and the quality of the search results was correspondent to your subscription it would change their behavior but like fundamentally they they're not beholden they're beholden to no one because they're Monopoly um but at least with LinkedIn I think they are trying to give value to their customer who is paying them money and so I appreciate that and also you can see a lot more in LinkedIn than what Google gives you uh which I appreciate like you can see individuals you can be like oh so and so liked that post it's an individual it's like a one-on-one sort of thing versus large groups and extrapolations I'm still stuck on can I sell yarn on LinkedIn thank you Sean actually like I was just like oh boy here we go I mean 2024 we Lauren and I interviewed a guy he sold cookies you know he's selling cookies on LinkedIn seriously I mean it's our market like we a ton of our customers are professionals oh interesting yeah no I'm thinking B Toc are the owners of yarn shops on LinkedIn uh not a ton no no but I'm thinking about our super user like our ideal customer is a 45 to 65 year-old sixf figure professional lawyer you know uh engineer really yes absolutely oh wow yeah yep that's my ideal customer so engineer that's interesting Engineers are all over LinkedIn they love LinkedIn I have tons of connections there Sean I think you just made my you just made me excited about marketing again oh that's really cool that could be so fun okay wow I could see that yeah do those ideal customers Laura buy primarily online or do they're online cuz they're too busy they don't have time to go like into the yarn shop and spend 4 hours no engineer is Brick and mortaring you know I mean not that's not totally I mean some but yeah they're definitely and they're comfortable online obviously right MH so and this is my it's an unexpected place and so that's my favorite kind of marketing is to stick out in unexpected places what other yarn shops do you see marketing heavily on LinkedIn none so it's low hanging fruit yes makes it really easy and fun [ __ ] I thought I was going to take some time off here Sean we're almost out of time but before we go I want to make note of one happy occasion Sean you recently celebrated um kind of an interesting uh Landmark moment involving a former partner can you tell us about that yes so December 23 was my last payment to my former business partner and co-founder yeah yeah it's a big deal wow we yeah I mean we started it in 2000 it's just it's it it really has been all me for since 2017 um but the the deal we struck involved a really protracted payout um and and it actually was fine but it just symbolically it's really nice to be like okay there's no more obligation to the Past congratulations yeah we were partners for 17 years before we broke it up so yeah thank you I feel like that's the book that hasn't been written are you still friends not at all no no what's the book that hasn't been written the book that hasn't been written is is all about partnership and partnership Dynamics in a business the a ton of businesses get started with Partnerships and and that here's the Paradox I've seen is that it's a it's a well that's a separate topic but the Paradox is is businesses with Partners tend to outperform those Without Partners in the beginning okay sure that's CU you have two free employees you have two right yes yes two free employees like a family business right right and then what happens is priorities change people get divorced like outside of the Business Partnership people's skills deteriorate people's engagement waines you know and then the one starts to resent the other and pretty soon everybody forgets the contributions everybody made in the beginning and they start to tell a different narrative about well I built this and you were just kind of along for the ride and then yeah it's it's a business divorce and I think there's so much to be written about that and how to manage through it how to get to the other side and not blow up the business how to prevent it in the first place Sean do you advise people not to start businesses with a partner or do you advise them to choose Partners carefully I think it really depends you know if the person is missing a certain set of skills which most of us are you know so a lot of Visionaries don't have good execution skills a lot of good execution people don't have great Visionary skills I think it can be it can be really powerful the thing I really caution people against is not thinking about what the breakup looks like like build a prenuptual agreement you know have a strong have a good uh shareholder agreement so that when the thing happens which it will you just have a course of action that you can fall back on probably a shotgun clause in there somewhere um maybe some sort of an agreed upon third party mediator some kind of mediation process cuz man you can just blow up the business with legal fees I mean you can literally kill the business with the legal fees involved in this so how do you not cuz everybody's so happy in the beginning right we're all in this together and then when you start making money it changes people it really changes people and then I would also here's the last piece I would get really clear on each owner's individual values and what they care about and if there's not a strong overlap the skills benefit won't offset that if you are a win- lose person and your partner is a win-win person that will never freaking work you know it might it might work for a while might work for 5 years 10 years but it'll eventually blow up so I think knowing what your values are and knowing what your partner's values are is really important because that's the thing that will un be the undoing of the business I would guess the other part is being very very willing and aware to abandon the friendship or the partnership yeah yeah it's tough I mean I think a lot of people start businesses cuz they are friends like I said I'm not in contact with my former business partner you know and and largely because of the way the breakup went down you know like I really wanted to make it a everybody wins kind of situation she approached it as hard- noos negotiation you know and that's the problem when you approach something from hard knows negotiation often you leave relationships on the side of the road you know dead and bleeding you know it's it's a bummer but someday I can I'll talk about that you know how to navigate through that cuz it really depends on the other party yeah it's it's a lot and then boy think about people who are married boy Laura you wouldn't know anything about that a lot of people are in romantic Partnerships too and boy wow when that goes sideways my thanks to Shan busy and Laura Xander and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use 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 r n at21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you 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 podcast 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]