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Add mentionThis week, we talk to Leisa Peterson, who has spent much of her career thinking about money, risk, and the ways our emotions can interfere with financial decisions. So when Peterson and her family decided to launch The Gear Project, a peer-to-peer marketplace for used outdoor equipment, you might have expected her to proceed with unusual discipline and caution. And she did—right up to the point where the numbers started telling her that maybe they shouldn’t launch at Peterson built out her financial projections, she kept discovering costs she hadn’t anticipated. The margins got thinner. The transaction volume required to make the business work got higher. She was ready to walk away. Her husband, daughter, and son-in-law wanted to keep going. So they did. Now, just weeks after launching, Peterson is deep in the part of entrepreneurship no spreadsheet can fully anticipate: fixing shipping problems, refunding incorrectly collected sales taxes, changing developers, manually approving thousands of listings, and discovering which of the warnings she heard before launch were right—and which weren’ the way, she’s also confronting something more personal: whether a lifetime spent protecting herself from financial risk may have kept her from taking some risks worth taking. This episode is brought to you by Grasshopper Bank.
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About 21 Hats Podcast
The 21 Hats Podcast presents an authentic weekly conversation with small business owners who are remarkably willing to share what’s working for them and what isn’t. Unlike many business podcasts, which tend to talk to highly successful entrepreneurs whose struggles are in the past, the 21 Hats Podcast features a rotating cast of business owners who are still very much in the trenches fighting the good fight. Every week, our regulars gather to talk about the kinds of important issues many owners won’t even discuss behind closed doors: whether their businesses are as profitable as they should be, whether they are willing to give up some control to an investor in order to grow faster, why they had to lay off employees, how they wound up with way too much inventory, why they don’t have a succession plan, and even why they are concerned about their own mental health. Visit 21hats.com to hear all of our podcast episodes, read episode transcripts, and learn more. The show is produced by Jess Thoubboron, founder of Blank Word.
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