I Am Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Jay goz Lena Maguire and William Vander bluman talk about their best days as business owners and their worst days not surprisingly it's the worst days that often Remain the most Vivid both for the pain they inflict and the lessons they bestow for Lena it was the day she felt so exhausted and overwhelmed that she knew she had reached her breaking point and had to do something different for William it was when the pandemic hit and he had to lay off almost half of his staff in one day over zoom and for Jay it was realizing that several young employees he tried to lift up were just not going to make it of course the most inspiring part of these stories is what the owners did to learn from them and to rise above them and then there's the day Lena returned from spending most of this past January unplugged to find that a whole bunch of things had fallen into place during her absence my business she tells us was running without me for the first time in my life it felt so good 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 in fact that's the whole idea behind the 21 hats Community engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another owner can offer if you're interested in learning more step one is to sign up for a free trial of the Morning Report which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners so you don't have to go looking for it step two is to get on our slack Channel where you can ask questions get vendor recommendations and tap the wisdom of a very impressive crowd just search the 21 hats Morning Report to subscribe joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Jay gos CEO of the gos group whose companies in Chicago incl include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Lena Maguire CEO of spoka kitchen and beath which is based in Camis New York and designs and manages Home Remodeling projects especially for those looking to age in place and William Vander bluman CEO of Vander bluman Search Group a Houston based recruiting firm that works with churches and other faith-based organizations the episode is titled I am comfortable being uncomfortable welcome Jay Lena and William it's great to have you all here Lena you made your first appearance here a few weeks ago for anyone who missed it can you remind us what it is you do I am the owner of spoka kitchen and bath a boutique kitchen and bath design firm soon to be a showroom in the central New York area and I specialize in a demographic that is nearing retirement or in retirement and I help them with wanting to stay in their homes forever so I am a certified caps which is a certified aging and place specialist so um I try to make people's homes a happy place for them and a safe place how's it going so far uh well the New Year's been great I signed three new accounts uh just last week which was wonderful wow congrats can you give us a sense of what your goals are for this year what what are you hoping to accomplish I would like to get into a showroom situation so I'm currently looking to Lisa space I'm right now in a 370 foot um professional office building and I want to get into a showroom model so that my customers can see what products they're going to be buying I have an administrative assistant right now but I'm going to be hiring um some support staff like a cad drafter uh I need to hire a receiving Warehouse things like that so getting ready to grow and hopefully increase my income I would say this um something's happening in Chicago I presume it's happening everywhere um Dental practices are being bought up by private equity and as a result you're starting to see storefronts all over the place including my father's old dime store now is a dental practice the private Equity guys know oh put it on the first floor in a store CU it's worth paying extra rent so what you're describing is pretty much the same thing yeah it makes sense you shouldn't be in an office you should be in a storefront because the amount of business you'll pick up from being in a storefront should easily justify their rent so I think that makes sense yeah I think the first floor makes even more sense because you probably get people that don't want to navigate stairs or elevators that's true and right now the building I'm in has a a ramp on one side and some small steps on the other side so I can accommodate people who want to get in quickly and people who need to use their Walker or wheelchair so that's a little bit of an issue is trying to make sure that we have that zero clearance entry for some of my customers I've got a store right there in the Design District right by the merchandise Mark and down the block there is a designer showroom that does something with kit I don't know what they do is the point they've just got their name on their front window with nothing else and I think it's critical if you have a storefront to figure out what your tagline is so that people go oh that's interesting maybe I'll stop in this place I've been down there for five years I still have no clue what they do and all they have to do is put designer kitchens or or Europe I don't know I don't know what they do so I can't even make up their line but there is no line so I think when you do get the storefront you really need to take best advantage of the front window and come up with a very tight poignant get it you know right across tagline that when people drive by they think oh we should stop in there Jay last time you were on you told us that you thought you were going into a bakery and it turned out it was a dispensary well it was a dispensary Bakery it was both maybe you're not paying enough attention to the signage at these places it didn't say anything on the outside they looked at me and they felt the need to immediately say you realize this is a yeah so no but I'm just saying people that aren't used to retail don't realize that putting something in your front window is critical to taking full advantage of your retail space and I see it all over the place all the time like the new thing now is oh it's sunny so they put a shade down and cover the entire front windows when they're closed so you don't even know what they do you know people hundreds of cars drive by every night that they should have the windows open it's just kind of surprising and there's lots of that around Chicago Lena is there a lot of commercial space available there is took some time this weekend and drove around town and I looked at a few towns the surrounding areas and there are probably five or 10 places that would be suitable of course I have my preferences and I'd like to be closer to home and have an affordable rent and space that has a couple of front windows that I can use for displays because like Jay says it's very important to show and display and even when you know we're not working there I still want people to see the kitchens and the bathrooms and get an idea of what's going on behind that door well you hit the word there you said a four able rent that's a tricky word affordable it's not really about being affordable it's cost effective meaning if you find a great location that's right near an extremely busy thing it will absolutely be worth paying another $1,500 a month to be there so you have to calibrate what what affordable means like it needs to be cost effective so I would frankly change the word to cost effective because there's some locations that' be well worth paying twice the rent if you're you know right by where the customers are going right and that's one of the calculations I'm trying to figure out with the square footage how much do I have to earn per square foot to to cover that and for me this is very scary you know being a basically a startup it's like okay the difference between $2,000 a month and $5,000 a month is pretty significant but this is where people get themselves in trouble they talk to their adviser who's an accountant and the accountant will go oh you should do the two a lower overhead you know what that might be the worst advice in the world because in that example $36,000 a year might make the difference between doing a million dollars a year out of there or 300,000 it's really insignificant so yeah it's about traffic flow neighborhoods who else is down there and It's Tricky but like the first instinct of many people listen it was me I opened up on a third floor walkup Loft I was paying $200 a month because I didn't know if it was going to work so that came out to like a dollar a square foot now I'm like paying $35 a foot I own the building luckily but still yeah we're at about $25 a square foot here so it's not too bad for me it's a mindset shift yes because I do understand the value of having the space and I've been working on that for the last few months as I've made the decision to to move out into a bigger space where I can have more displays I know I have to do it it's just pulling the trigger and really being comfortable with it so I'm comfortable with being uncomfortable and I'm moving forward hopefully I'll have that least signed within the month that's funny you took the words right out of my mouth I was going to say it's about being uncomfortable so you figur that out all right you're making good progress William how are you doing how's your year getting started you know our business is a lumpy business right we don't sell 50,000 widgets a year all that's to say we got off to a really really great start in January but that's kind of like being ahead if the Cubs are head in the first inning who who cares all stop picking on the Cubs there it's just for you J I know really robust here and for a lot of different reasons I have a dashboard that I look at every day and it's kind of like how we compared to this period last year you know like uh incoming marketing leads uh proposals sent contract sent sales made phone calls all this how are we against this week last year this day last year this quarter last year ET ET I either get a green or a red on all of them and everything's green right now so it's early in the year but I like to start all right well here's the main thing I want to talk about today uh we recently did an episode where Paul DS talked about knowing he was going to have to lay off some people and you could really hear the pain in his voice um not something he was looking forward to uh but part of what we all recognize is what it means to to own and run a business it made me think it would be interesting to kind of compare notes on our best and worst days owning and and running businesses you know those days tend to stick out they're the ones that we remember they're not always representative but I think it's meaningful and I think to our audience hearing what you guys have been through um and and managed to keep going and what has driven you to keep going could really make a difference so Lena could we start with you you you you've been in business for a shorter time than than William or Jay but I'm guessing you already have had some ups and downs do you have a day that you think of as your worst day oh I do uh yeah U the day that was probably closest to ever having a nervous breakdown um I was absolutely totally overwhelmed I had too many projects going on I didn't have them timed out so that I could do them in a in a good amount of time so I was working with deadlines that were practically impossible I had been working for two or three days straight with very little sleep skipping meals um like I said nearing a nervous breakdown I just had too much on my plate and I had no one to help me so I had to call clients and I had to tell them that I was behind and that I would have to reschedule their upcoming appointments because there was no way I would be prepared U it was embarrassing my business was a mess my personal life was becoming a mess um and I was reaching my breaking point I just kind of got into the fetal position and was crying because I just was exhausted and overwhelmed and didn't know what to do how long ago was that uh that was about a year and a half ago and how did you get out of it um I vowed that day that I was going to change what I was doing I hired a business coach I uh learned how to to use my calendar I learned what my capacity was so that I know not to schedule more than six projects at a time and to start them one per week so that I use the calendar to know when things should happen when they shouldn't I hired an administrative assistant as a 1099 person so not somebody I had to pay full-time but somebody I could pay to work as the work was required so yeah I got my act together can I guess you learned how to say no through this period I did learn how to say no it's my new favorite word yeah that is part of the learning process can't do everything for everybody the other part was um qualifying my customers so I uh have a good fit meeting so we have a discovery call to find out if what they're what they are asking me to do is something I can do is it in a time frame that I can do is it in a budget range that can be accomplished and is the team able to be pulled together to accomplish this so just getting the answers to those four things has been night and day so now I work with customers who are good fit and I don't work with customers who are not a good fit because it just everybody is unhappy I would think one of the major things in your business when you say you're going to help people you know renovate their house to you know so they can stay in it forever I don't know whether that's $50,000 or $500,000 so I have to believe you have to get rid of the people who think it's going to be 50,000 because you can't do it so as far as qualifying that seems to be a critical piece I would think it depends on what they want to do because if they just need to make it so that that they can bathe you know we can do a shower conversion for like $8,000 but it depends on what their plans are uh and how much has to be done so yeah we work through those details and figure it out William how about you do you have a day you think of as your worst day as an owner yeah that's easy um goes back cash five years ago now when we had the lockdowns with pandemic you know very early on so so for those listening for the first time we're an executive Search firm and uh we help teams that are values based find their sea suite and we started by saying can we help churches find a pastor faster and better and then it grew to schools and then to nonprofits and then values based for-profit businesses like the chick-fil of the world sort of thing five years ago the easily the majority of our uh client base was churches and schools and that's uh Diversified a little bit now but then it was it was real well when lockdown started it was it was actually oh you're on spring break we're just going to take one more week off that's the way most schools happen and it was right around Easter and I was like well we're still going to have Easter but then it got serious and we realized oh we're in this for a little while and I read a paper that was amazing business owners should go read it now for for the next time something happens it's called leading beyond the blizzard it's written by a group called prais p r a x i s very very important paper don't read it right before you go to bed I did and I didn't sleep and basically to ask the question uh when these lockdowns started you need to decide right now small business owner do you think this is a bad winter storm that's going to have us staying at home for you know a week or two is it a blizzard where we're out of commission for a month or a couple months or is it a mini Ice Age which historically those last you know about a year and a half something like that and you need to decide right now which one it is and then build your in around that so I thought about it and and said well I'm going to go with the mini Ice Age this feels like it's going to be here a while and then I sort of intuitively ran the numbers and decided uh if if we're really shut down if churches and schools are shut down for a long period of time that's going to affect our our business I called a few clients and long story short I decided my gut told me we have to cut 40% of our overhead uh we don't have Supply chain like J we don't have you know hard Goods so overhead is people for us and that's painful so my CEO who's Harvard Business School and actually knows business said let me go through some calculations and some formulas over the weekend and then I'll come back and we'll decide he came back and said I've studied it I think we need to cut 39.8% of our overhead I said oh that's a great number let's go with that which is a whole another podcast on the founders gut versus science right but uh we landed on 40% and we made the decision for good or bad that we would rather just do this all at once then do a little bit of firing each month for months on end and so that Thursday we sent word to our team say hey Friday is going to be a hard meeting but um we need everybody there and that's when we do our all staff so that Friday probably the last Friday in March we said uh we're cutting 40% of the staff we're going to have calls with people of course we did try to package people out well but it was a very very very sad day because these were all friends and we didn't have any underperformers at the time we really it was all good people but it was really hard how big was your staff at the time I think we were about 42 full-time staff so you had to cut about 10 people no more like 18 that was hard that was really hard and honestly we should have just shut the business down all together if I were really thinking clinically but we decided we' cut 40% and then try and serve these people that were trying to figure out the world and uh do it at no cost you know things like PPP and that sort of thing and if we die we die with our boots on and uh it worked out fine but that day I don't ever want to have to live through that day again it was horrible did you actually tell them all we're going to have a really hard meeting on Friday did you actually tell them that beforehand yes and I'm just asking why because it seems to me that would make them not sleep weren't dumb churches were cancelling Easter that's the first time in Christendom that's ever ever ever happened I mean that's that's un I the word unprecedented is tired it's like oh crap they're going to be closed and they're certainly not going to be hiring and they're certainly not going be paying a firm to help them hire so this is bad how are we going to deal with it so by telling him that you felt like you were giving him a little warning and they wouldn't be okay I guess and then we had a very brief all staff meeting we're going to drop everything on the agenda let me tell you what's going to happen and why it's going to happen and then your team leaders are going to contact you each of you to let you know how this affects you personally and uh yeah it was hard how many of those people did you bring back since then well that's a good question I don't think we brought anybody back W as a person we brought positions back uh we're probably twice as big now as we were then maybe a little more than that and we're at like right at 40 full-time headcount so we uh have learned the what is it uh Necessities the mother invention right so through that and and the people getting used to using virtual meetings and that sort of thing we've figured out how to do our work more efficiently and U it's kind of a whole new day fortunately most of those people found good jobs and I don't know that pulling them out of a job to come back would have been the healthiest thing I find that fascinating that not one of them so you think the case is most of them found jobs that suited them better and my next question is or do you think some of them just were a little pissed about the whole thing I'm sure they were all mad about it right well that explains yeah I and I don't think they were mad to the point of I'll never work for him again it's kind of like you get mad when a relative has cancer but you don't blame the doctor you know it's it it was what it was and I mean 2020 is the only year we've not had Topline growth ever and it was terrible I don't know how we got through it but that day where you're talking to people where we're we worked together pretty closely and had really great culture um that was hard you knew you were doing what you had to do um is there a particular moment that sticks out in your mind as being most painful I think honestly this is going to sound drama or is going to come out the wrong way but I think the hardest part of it was that I wasn't with any of them we were all locked down so it was a zoom meeting that was the hardest part for me I could see that although it's interesting it sounds like you're saying you have a stronger business today as a result of that lockdown yeah we do you also said that maybe you should have just shut the whole business down if looking back on it if you had it to do over again is that something you would seriously contemplate let me say it again and try and get it a little better I think if I were purely in my business for having the most profitable efficient business that made the most amount of money then the smartest move would have been to say hey guys we know nobody's going to be hiring for a year and a half so we're closing our doors we'll reopen when this is better and just let everybody go that would have been I would have made more money that way probably but you know I didn't start the business for the money I started it because people that are trying to do good in the world mean great staff and you know I'm a recovering Pastor I guess I I still have that in me and I saw these churches that were flailing trying to figure out how to help really hurting people in a really hard time and I thought you know let's keep what we can we're going to completely pivot another tired word and we're not doing searches anymore but we'll help people figure out how do I do online Church how do I do online school how do I do payroll protection plan for the very weird tax code that clergy is and we kind of just got on that and and said we're just going to serve and we're going to do it because it's a good thing and then secondarily if we get through this we will have a lot of people that are very close friends because of what we've done the fact of the matter is though maybe you did come out better doing it this way I know we did I know we did I'm just saying you said you would have made more money if you just closed down but maybe not I mean maybe not J you're right I mean of the 90,000 faith-based organizations that receive PPP money any faith right 30,000 of them came directly to us for help and only about 2,000 of them were people we knew so if you help people get 10 weeks of free payroll during a crisis they tend to remember you and call you when they need things in the future but we didn't know that we made the decision that we're going to do what's right and we'll trust that it'll work out and then it's it's been maybe the best decision we've fallen into in the history of the company Jay what was your worst day that's a tough call but I can think of one when I started in my $200 a month third floor walkup Loft I was 22 my father had a dime store around the corner and he knew all the neighborhood kids so he sent the neighborhood kids by me so I hired these three kids that were in high school still to help me with the framing in the beginning and you know the two of them were brothers and the father abandoned them and they were going to get thrown out of high school and I went to the local high school and I talked to the counselor there and said don't throw them out blah blah blah and they said to me which at 68 means much different to me back then he said thank you for caring and I didn't realize I'm sure they were thrilled somebody cared about these kids so I was going to drag these kids up with me so this goes on for a year year and a half two years and then one day there was a big order he had to get done and one of them started to flake out on me he had a girlfriend who actually worked for me and it was put a whole big mess and an order didn't get delivered when was supposed to and I can remember like yesterday which surprise me sitting in my office off and I just cried and I realized that I put my heart and soul into this and I failed now one of those three kids is now 60 years old and still works for me and is you know he's like my little brother but the other two just flaked out in the business lesson from it if I had the mentor the business coach somebody would have said Jay just because you want to make something out of somebody doesn't mean they either want want it or have the ability to do it and I was trying to dragged them along with me and I just I put everything I had into it and I failed now Flash Forward 20 years kid shows up it's 20 years later and I barely recognize him because he was twice as size as he was when he left and I was able to get an opportunity most people in this life don't get I was actually able to ask him I said to him I go I got to ask you now keep in mind at the time this all happened I was 28 he was probably 18 now I'm 48 and he you know 38 I said did you recognize I was trying to drag you up with me as we were growing the company and I was looking out for your own best interest and blah blah and he looks at me and he goes yeah I realized that I go why didn't you come back he goes it was too late what do you think he meant by that I think he had screwed up so bad that first of all I probably would have taken him back had he come back but um just because you want somebody to this is a problem in small business it is unlikely that those few people you hired when you first opened are going to be helping you run your company when you have a 100 people it is just unlikely they've got the skill set to grow along with that so that story about oh so and so he started on the loading dock that absolutely happens for sure but for every one of those there's three more of them that you know it didn't work it was an important life lesson that um especially when you're dealing with kids just because you want somebody to be successful and you want them to take more responsibility and you want them to be part of your qu unquote management team doesn't mean they have the desire or ability to do it so that was that was a bad and like I said I was surprised in myself cuz I just I just was by myself I remember like yesterday I was sitting in the office by myself and I just started crying and I realized I was spent Lena do you have a best day I do have a best day but I have to tell you these guys are scaring me because I'm not to their level yet and the hiring and firing as worst days yeah I have those ahead of me I'm I'm not looking forward to that too much but good coaching and good good camaraderie here so we'll get through it best day I have to tell it was quite recently I only worked seven days in January I uh went away for the holidays and then I came back for two days and then I went on a two-e vacation and when I came back my business systems and processes were working I had three new client checks hit my checking account so I had deposits for three new um projects I had cabinet orders come in for two large kitchens they had been scheduled and confirmed for home delivery coordinated with the warehouse the client the contractor added to my calendar so that I could be there for delivery day if I wanted to be there my Administrative Assistant scheduled me for three speaking engagements at the local library in April and is had confirmed some dates for September for three more and we heard back from another library to do some additional presentations at uh this place that I hadn't been at I had an inhome consultation appointment coming up later in the week that had been confirmed and a new appointment set for later in February all this happened while I was on a cruise with my sisters my business was running without me for the first time in my life it felt so good you need to take more vacations apparently yeah so all the stuff that I'd been working very hard at to get those systems and processes together and get the right person in that admin um position all that came to fruition and I can't tell you what a great feeling it was to just check my email when I came home and see oh look you you had a deposit in your checking account you weren't even checking your email while you were away I was 100% disconnected yeah when I'm on vacation I don't answer the phone I don't check the email nothing I need to vacate so all this was happening without me I was kind of proud of myself uh and very relieved that all the hard work I'm putting in is actually paying off so I believe that the business will continue to grow because something is working there's little Greater Joy than watching an employee that you hire Ed and trained and mentored to see them Blossom and do wonderful things I have it on a daily basis here and I hope everyone that has good employees appreciates that because it's a beautiful thing William when was the first time you were able to work only seven days in a month that's been a long journey a lot of search firms consulting firms are are personality dependent you know oh well we want William or we want Jay or Lauren to do the work and as founder and then again another podcast but with the name on the door which I didn't care to do but did my concern is that the thing dies with me so I call a sustainability plan more than more than a transition or succession plan but the company's got to be able to live and breathe and function without me now when I wrote my first book on succession which would have been 11 years ago now I started uh saying let's try to see how the business functions without me for a little bit more time every summer summer tends to be a little slower schools are closed uh a lot of people on vacation it's just I think all businesses slow down then so last summer I think I was gone 11 or 12 weeks I was supposed to have a once a week phone call with our CEO and we probably did that half the time and I think the longest one was 20 or 30 minutes so been a very slow intentional move toward me not having to be the Keystone in the archway if if that makes sense probably we could grow faster if I weren't doing that probably we would be you know booming a little bit more if I were just in the weeds and digging and because I've got more institutional memory than anybody here and and uh hopefully I'm still good at what I do but for sustainability sake we've taken the last 11 years and Link spread that time out a little farther where the company can uh go on without me and it and the first marker was can it function without me and we got there about oh I don't know probably right before the pandemic and then obviously 2020 everything changed but but in about 22 we got to a new market where the company can grow without me being involved and that's a whole different thing so we're still figuring out as we go but that doesn't really answer your question does it it comes close Lena I'm curious you William is obviously at a very different stage did you have any trepid about uh taking that much time away from a startup no because it's typically very slow for me from November till March um that makes sense and because I didn't have a full pipeline remember the last episode I'm struggling with that Pipeline and working with my marketing so I didn't have the new business coming in I was at that low where all the design work was done all the orders were placed we're just waiting for all the products to come in before the construction starts so I typically have an 8we low with projects like that so I had a couple kitchens coming in um so there wasn't a lot of design work to be done so it was a slow time for me so I could definitely schedule my vacation at that point well you may just be a lot smarter than I am because uh I I wasn't smart enough to do that as early as you're doing it when I was at your stage of the business I was taking every single call I was doing every sales call I mean in an unhealthy way I uh I remember we finally got to the point where we had enough frequent flyer miles and such that we took the kids to Disney we stood in line for the Dumbo ride forever with our littlest one who was probably I don't know two or three at the time and right when it was our turn a sales lead came in and I of course took it and started on the phone and Adrian looked at me and said what in the world are you doing right now and I said I'm doing the thing that paid for the Dumbo ride and uh that was a tense moment yeah that's hard so I I make a conscious decision so I don't know if I've said this before but I have calendared my whole year and travel is very important to me and seeing my family I have travel scheduled already so I know when I can work and when I can't and I've also scheduled my business so I work 20 hours in my business and 20 hours on my business because I'm not a young person anymore and I have goals for my business so I have to work hard to move it forward so I'm being conscious and this is my second business I I was a graphic designer for 22 years so I did run a business before so I'm stepping into this one with a little bit more EXP experience than the first one and I have bigger goals this time so I'm I'm working hard to achieve those William what was your best day was it the Dumbo ride the Dumbo ride was a great day it is really hard to distill what the best day is because I I don't know if Jay can Jay's got more miles as a business owner than I do but uh it feels Lauren like I've probably launched about seven different companies even though I've only launched this one because we've had different ations you know we expanded from churches to churches and schools we expanded from uh large churches to normalized churches anytime we've expanded the work into a new vertical those days are the most fun I think because I'm a Serial entrepreneur who's just started one company but added things along the way does that make sense sure does one of those days stand out for you well I you know there's a lot of satisfaction in finishing a really complicated search and that's more about the art of what we do than owning the business so that doesn't really help uh listeners so much but I I when we see a client like we did a a succession and search for a person that was going to replace a founding pastor at maybe the largest church on the west coast certainly the most influential that could have gone wrong a hundred different ways and it went well and that was pretty special uh some of the days during the pandemic when we were able to help people that didn't know what they were doing that was pretty special you know there there are a lot of lot of cool moments I don't know that I could distill it to one understood I'm also learning that I get far more out of an interview if I refrain from superlative questions and that may be a term I made up but tell me your best tell me your worst that really Corners candidates and it makes them anxious so that's a that's a a rabbit trail of of a bit but maybe it helps some owners out there don't say what's your best accomplishment what's something you're proud of you've done tell me about a day you went home and you thought that I we got it right that day that's a good question especially in a podcast where I'm asking you for your best and worse well you're paralyzing me La I can't I can't answer we've demonstrated your point right here Jay how about you do you have a best day uh you know it remind I hadn't thought about it just now but my father used to always say you put thousands into the business and you take it out in nickels and in this case I don't know that I could tell you the best day because I have good days all the time I don't know that I can think of one you know what you got one big sale I I don't know that I can think of one particular day not a day that you're proud of that you you know you told me I've told the story too many times so I'm afraid to tell it again my Lily moment where the employee that worked me for 10 years and was older came up to me she had a retirement party and she walked up to me afterward and she looked me in the eye and she said I've got to tell you something I said what and she said when you hired me I never thought I'd work again that was a life-changing day for me that I realized that giving people jobs can really profoundly help their lives and I never thought about it I was torturing myself all about the ones that I shouldn't have hired and should have gotten rid of sooner and I didn't realize those don't matter it's the ones that you hired that worked out great that you've given a nice job to a meaningful job so that was a life-changing day for sure yeah I think that's really important because if people are are biggest and most important assets then the hiring and the firing of them is super important and you know what it took me years before I thought and how nice of her to say that to me she didn't have to say anything that was such a gift but it really took the wind out of me I never thought I'd work again think of the power the boss has for giving someone a job for God's sakes I mean we always get blamed for oh they lay people off yeah there's stuff that the boss has to do that's not pretty but there's lots of stuff we do that is pretty we get people jobs we give them meaning we give them you know we give them confidence we do lots of good things if we're doing a good job William with me on that yeah yeah yeah yeah I you know um maybe the best day was the first day we got a contract sure when we didn't know if the business was going to work I remember we went and bought Stakes at the grocery store that night EA but but the longer I do this it's it's yes we want to run a good business and we want to you know make money doing it but it's not the money as much as as the are we doing something that's going to make a lasting difference and the times that we get that right is uh is pretty fun and I hate when they do commercials like you can't pick in anyone anymore which is fine except the boss that's like a running joke like the commercial with the streaming boss with his glasses bounce like it's not funny it's just being a bad boss is not a funny thing screaming at people's not a funny thing so I like doing speeches I like doing this podcast to just give people some perspective of I was screaming back in my 20s when I was completely out of control like there's something beautiful about running a nice company where you're a good boss and you can nurture and develop People Jay I certainly understand why that was a moving moment for you um did it change the way you did anything well it totally changed my head in that once I figured out the way business was supposed to work I tortured myself a little bit oh my God you were so stupid doing that or you shouldn't have done that or you shouldn't have hired them or oh you from that moment on it was I I didn't just go from half empty to half full I went from half empty to full like I'm telling you it was like a movie I looked over her shoulder there was a bunch of people still Milling around eating and I looked at every one of them I thought that's the 17-year-old kid I took in who's Now 37 that's making 60 Grand a year and that's somebody who yeah it gave me a whole new metric of feeling good about running a business it's also the kind of the polar opposite of your experience with the three kids you tried to absolutely that's the point that was the learning curve of yes that's the entire Spectrum on one hand you can't drag everyone else up you can't make people in what they don't want to be and at the other end you can that's the line we're on sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work all right we are out of time uh my thanks to Jay goz Lena Maguire and William vanderlan as always thanks for sharing guys one thing before you go everything we do at 21 hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us all learn together if you get something out of listening to these podcast episodes consider joining the conversation you can do that by joining the 21 hats sounding board a slack Channel where you can tap the wisdom of a very smart crowd or by becoming a founding member and joining our monthly Zoom Forum where you can be part of conversations much like the ones we have on the podcast you can sign up for both by subscribing to the morning report if you have any questions you can email me at Lauren 21h hats.com and if you get something out of this podcast or out of the morning report please tell a friend tell an enemy tell every business owner you know your word of mouth owner to owner will always be the most effective way to build this community for all of us thank you it means a lot this episode was produced by another entrepreneur Jess ston founder of blank word Productions thanks for listening everyone [Music]