I Don’t Pay for Podcasts. Why Would I Pay for Yours?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Caren Clark Cole Paul DS and William vanderbloom and start with a discussion of how 21 hats might finally take the plunge into monetization we also discuss Karen's decision to disappoint her salespeople by forgoing a chunk of low hanging Revenue Williams Grand experiment in unplugging for 7 weeks this summer and Paul's need to balance his ownership responsibilities with his personal responsibilities plus we consider the impact of the great resignation and we look for lessons to take from last week's discussion about mental health 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 Morning Report which highlights the most important news of the day 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 one programming note we're going to take a little break this week which means we will not publish a podcast the day after Labor Day but we'll be back as usual the following Tuesday joining me this week on the podcast our regulars Karen Clark Cole who is CEO of blink a user experienced research and design firm in Seattle Paul DS who is CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which makes custom conference tables outside of Philadelphia and William Vander blumen who is CEO of Vander blumen Search Group a recruiting firm based in Houston that works with churches and other faith-based organizations the episode is titled I don't pay for podcasts why would I pay for yours welcome back Karen Paul William it's great to have you all here this week I want to do something just a little bit different and start with well me I'm uh as you know very fortunate to have these weekly conversations with actual real life experienced successful entrepreneurs like you guys and uh I kind of feel as though I might as well take advantage of that and get a little free advice so if there are no objections I would like to give you a quick update on where I stand with 21 hats and see if you have any reaction any suggestions for me the quick update is that well the good news is I'm getting a lot of really positive feedback from exactly the type of people that I was hoping to get it from the bad news is I'm not a whole lot closer to figuring out how to monetize this and turn it into a a real business uh I have made a little bit of Headway with some sponsors I've got a couple of small deals going both with the podcast and with the Morning Report uh but my real inclination has never been to focus on finding sponsors I feel like I've worked at a bunch of big media companies that learned how difficult that can be and I would rather charge subscribers who get real value sub subscribers and listeners um if in fact they do get real value from this and obviously that means I have to figure out well what's what's a reasonable price to charge uh for that so I thought what I'd do is give you a quick reminder of what my value proposition is it's this podcast obviously you guys are familiar with that it's the uh daily email newsletter the morning report and on top of that well I also do uh a couple webinars uh a month where I bring in people for oneoff conversations somebody with in the news somebody with an interesting idea but uh on top of that what I'm really hoping to build is a sense of community that the 21 hats uh brand stands for something so there's my update Lauren I don't want to pay for that I don't pay for any podcast why would I pay for yours why not have the sponsors pay because that does Take You Down a tricky path uh and I like I said I've I've worked at companies that have certainly gone down that path and the danger is you end up chasing clicks you end up chasing traffic to satisfy sponsors because they're the ones footing the bill and there is often a Divergence between the needs of the sponsors and the needs of your uh listeners your readers well I think you should do what guess what I'm going to say you should do some user research and find out what your listeners want and and I I listen to so many great podcasts that I wouldn't even dream of paying for it because you just don't do that I can't imagine I disagree there's plenty of podcasters that support themselves with subscriptions Sam Harris comes to mind and I pay stitchers so I don't have to listen to ads so I'm paying something for podcast so that I have the experience that that I like you can decide that right Paul so you can say I'm going to I'm going to subscribe so I don't get ads or I can keep the ads and have it free yeah although they sneak in ads anyway on a lot of these things so you end up skipping but I would say that it's not asking your audience for direct support is not doomed uh other people do it and it succeeds so I don't know what the answer is I do think that Karen's probably right that asking in some way that gives you a reason large sample of your people uh is the first thing have you done that no I haven't I have done it anecdotally but uh but I have not done real research okay why not that's my question because I'm afraid I might get an answer I don't want to hear oh boy that'll kill you well I I sympathize because we don't make any real effort to go back to our clients after a couple years and see how happy they are are because it is scary it's like probably the the single scariest thing that I confront and I it's defeated me every time so I don't I sympathized with you on that one I appreciate that if I was Jay I'd tell you to get over it the best the best way to improve and to have a successful business is to gather feedback all day long from your employees from your customers it's how you improve that makes sense I can't argue with that I've been through a few evolutions of thinking and that's part of the reason I haven't done the research not that that's an excuse the the the research would have been helpful at any point and and perhaps that that should be my next step um I do have to try something and there is one lowrisk strategy that I am thinking of trying and I think this is a more serious answer to to your question Karen um I you know it's one thing what you can what you get back in research is another thing when you actually ask people to pull out a credit card and I think what I'm leaning toward at the moment is using the email newsletter as the vehicle it's very easy for me to uh to add a subscription fee to that and I would pitch it in the email newsletter as a subscription fee to All Things 21 hats um but what I'm thinking about is not putting up a pay wall making it voluntary at least initially and saying essentially to my customers if you're getting value out of this please pay me for it I want to keep it available to as many people as possible if you can't pay me if you're not getting value I understand but I need to I need to make a living doing this so I'm asking you to pay and have that cover the podcast webinars and the newsletter and see what happens so you're gonna guilt them into it well that's that's such a harsh way to put it I was going to put it exactly that way it sounds like a church to me Lauren or NPR yeah I got I I can't stand it when they do that maybe the best yoga studio in Houston does just that oh just leave a donation if you'd like to pay for your class and I don't know what their p&l looks like but I would walk away feeling bad about it even going there did I give should I've given did I give enough did I not give enough are people getting paid and it just feels like a charity and I don't think you should be that bashful about it I think you should decide where you're going to charge and charge frankly I'd go The Advertiser route I don't pay to listen to any podcast and probably wouldn't two to one we got two to one this is not a democracy you know so straight talk here you're run you've been operating a particular business model which as far as I can tell relies on growth by percentages and so it's going to take a while to get to a substantial audience and you can do whatever business model you feel like as a boss for as long as you have money so if someone was asking me how how I was doing and you know in the in the spirit of honesty I would have to take into account what my Runway looks like like how long can you continue to do what you're doing today without changes what's going to happen if you don't do anything and that's that's a big part of it that if you for some reason could just wait around until lightning strikes then that's that's going to inform your answer of what what to do next and if you can't you have to make a change that's also going to inform your answer so I think that you would probably want us to talk about these things this way uh again in the spirit of honesty as as a boss to boss so are you willing to answer that question but you're suggesting though Paul that he self-funded and I don't think even if he had all the money in the world he should you should come up with a business model that's sustainable right what do you have to do and what do you want to do are two two relevant points in in any conversation like this well first of all uh I'm happy to answer those questions I you're right I ask you guys those kinds of questions all the time and I hardly feel as though I can run away from them so uh I have kind of been hoping for lightning to strike thus far I've probably got a few months of Runway left uh but I can't keep doing this indefinitely so Lauren what I I would encourage you to look at your limiting belief which is that all advertising is bad and that all advertisers expect you to get CS where you don't want them because what if they have the same Mission as you st let me stop you U that puts it a little more harshly than I would put it uh I don't want to be totally dependent on that kind of Revenue if I can avoid it um if if it's if that's the only choice I'm willing to give it a shot and stick to my guns and do this the way I think it should be done as long as I can but um you know the the New York Times for example where I used to work has been tremendously successful shifting their business model to being dependent on subscription uh money as opposed to advertising money but they still take advertising money that's what I would hope to do here and I quit reading them the minute they did that yeah I'm the same way I'm with William there 5,000 other newspapers I don't need the times you're obviously you know not alone in that but it's been tremendously successful for them it it it has worked they've brought in dramatically more Revenue doing that than they expected despite losing the two of you and what newspapers have successfully deployed a different model um you know more and more have gone that way yeah exactly but I would encourage you to not compare yourself to the New York Times and compare yourself to a podcast well I mean come off it we're talking the main value I think is the podcast and then you've got I mean you described it right then you've got your daily newsletter but you know I'm not sure you're right about that I don't think that's the case for everybody there um there are people um who pick one or the other and you know I have a lot more subscribers to the newsletter than I do to the podcast either way all I'm suggesting is that you're not you're not a newspaper I wonder if you could test to see kind of as has been mentioned what value are people getting from each thing and where could you create premium value like you know is it okay we're going to sell a membership and with that comes a coaching call with X Y and Z or a cohort or an experience or something other than just pure content because I think content has just gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and charging for it getting harder and harder and harder I think that's a good point I do anticipate uh figuring out some kind of uh premium offering especially around events or um you know office hour uh phone calls or Mastermind phone calls uh you know there Zoom calls but I'm not able to offer that right now and I need something to get me there what if you got one sponsor to cover all that well that would be okay too you I've got 5,000 plus subscribers to the newsletter it's a little little early for me to you know go out there and really try to sell that to Big Time advertisers I have people coming to me and I'm starting small and I'm hoping to build that while I focus on creating as much good content as I can all right truly enough about me Karen we haven't heard from you in a while what's going on what's going on uh continuing to grow and working hard at connect uh targets to actuals uh which is something that we never used to be as focused on but I'm not sure what that means connecting targets to actuals it used to be okay we have a Target it's kind of a lick your finger and put it up in the wind and decide how much you should plan to grow this year and then see if you do it and there's no real strategy connecting the two and so now as we're bigger we you know we watch it carefully we make sure we're constantly adjusting the dials every day to make sure that we can hit those targets cuz we have to do all kinds of other you know budgets and hiring to support those targets so if we don't hit it it's has a much bigger impact for us now than it would have when we were smaller so all that to say though some interesting side effects have come out of it that I wouldn't have expected which is and it's kind of all good it's a good problem to have but it's our clients are asking for services that are kind of on the periphery of what we would normally do so normally we do project-based Consulting work so we design digital products and and that is on a project by project basis so we go in we do the work and then we get out and so and that's been our model for two decades um but now our clients are asking us to do research which is more of a it's really what we would consider data collection our clients now want us to collect data to make sure that the product that we're working on is you know can can work in different lighting conditions can work in different heating conditions all things are important for the success of this product but it's not it's not research in our typical way that that we've normally done it Karen I think you said it was a nice problem to have what's the problem the problem is we have to turn away I'm I'm about to make a decision to turn away work because it's not in our sweet spot so a lot of people are making a case that we should take on this different kind of research because they want the revenue it's not nearly as profitable work and so it's a different gross margin but it still at the end of the day can contribute to the bottom line in a positive way and it contributes to the Top Line in a big way and so you know yet I don't I want to grow the company in our core not in these periphery and there's a couple of other examples like that and so I'm about to have to tell the salespeople you can't take that work anymore it's okay that it's 3 million we're not going to take it and there's a lot of people who are very upset about that including on the finance team so it sounds like it's the question is uh do you deploy the thing you're really good at and find new customers or do you add services to your existing customers is that basically what's going on uh yeah and it's not even a decision like that it's you know when I look at it I I say to the sales team so you know I want you guys to focus your effort over here on this on our core work and I don't want you to because it still takes energy for them to land this other work and so and they haven't been given clear guidance as to whether they should or shouldn't the clients are asking for it and like why not and so I'm like well here's why not and so but it takes taken a long time to get back to turning that into a decision that I'm going to make because there's you know so many days and people in between when it started and where we're at now and it's just kind of gotten out of hand we did one and now the clients want more and more and more it sounds like you've got your mind pretty made up on it was it a tough decision for you to reach it's it's been a lot a lot a lot of conversations a lot of talking to different people to find out making sure that I really understand it it has taken it's taken a while and you know I tell you it would have been way faster if we were all just in the office and I could have talked to 10 people in one hallway walk but because we're all remote still you know it takes I got to set up a zoom call with these three you know these three people then that one person and then these five people and it's just taking months instead of what would have been days or weeks is the issue how people are compensated is it because salespeople are going to lose opportunities for no they're not not on commission even they're just you know they it's just going to be a little harder for them because this stuff's in their lap and they have to say no to it and they don't like saying no to revenue they do have quotas William how are you doing I'm doing good man I uh you know just came out of a summer where we made a pretty large experiment with our company which is self- serving but an experiment nonetheless and the experiment is how necessary is William to the company and I uh you know I've tried to talk to all of our clients about succession is a huge issue and and particularly huge issue right now and for the next 10 15 years as the Boomers round out their time in the workforce and so one option for our own company and my succession is that I make myself less and less necessary to the growth and running of the company and so this summer uh we more than doubled my normal time away we went through about seven weeks um consecutive weeks of me being gone totally unplugged um I did do regular check-in calls with my coo but they were 15 20 minutes and once or maybe twice a week uh dropped into one staff meeting via Zoom but didn't lead it and things went really well and uh we didn't take a a hit in momentum um the summer is typically very slow for us uh whether it's nonprofits or schools or churches everybody sort of takes the summer off and then kicks back up in the fall July was predictably slow August is not over as we tape this but it should shape up to be one of our very busiest months ever of any month um that was all good and it and it then creates a whole new set of um options and questions for me you know I guess I could go play more and more Golf and just take passive income and let the company run and it wouldn't be the old founder around meddling and things um and maybe maybe I don't want to put that to a vote um but uh the other option that's far more interesting to me and fun is it's almost like and I don't know if if Karen or Paul can relate to this but I think I've launched at least three or four companies under the umbrella of this company you know you go through an iteration and it's like and now we're to a new kind of company that we are kind of kind of like Karen was Str about as we get bigger and I'm more excited about uh launching another version of the company where you know my coo is very competent at running the day-to-day um I'm no longer needed in any searches or client facing things is that true William do you think you could have taken a seven-week break during your busy season instead of during your slow season that's a great question that's a great question and and by the way it was also during a season where uh we experienced our own turnover you know I've been calling this great resignation since all the way back in November and now everyone's dealing with it and it's the Hot Topic and probably should have gotten better PR to make sure people knew I said it but uh you know I I would say we this was a pretty good LM test one of the people that left and they left quite a while ago was our VP of marketing who's been with me forever and wonderful and we're almost to the point of replacing her and the as I'm interviewing candidates I'm like you know for good or bad if you come here you're saddled with me because I don't need to be client facing anymore I don't need to be running the operations anymore you can just leverage me as content producer speaker Ambassador whatever you want to do to push the brand forward and uh that sounds like that's that's that's the kind of work that gives me energy so I'm excited to see if that's where we can head and and uh you didn't ask answer my question though uh I said that's a that's a good question yes so I I don't know the answer to that Lauren but I know that you got to start somewhere you stretch it out a little bit more each summer and uh fair I don't really want to as you know as a a guy who was in this small Giant Community I'm not interested in just growing at lightning speed for the sake of growth but I'm also not interested in just being custodial about the next 10 15 years of my work here so uh it was a good litmus test and I'm excited about what it means for the possibility of how I can spend my time here going forward I always think about the company runs itself at this point you know I can go on vacation I remember when I took that 3 month sabatical and everything will will carry on uh great without me in fact um but what doesn't happen is the growth and so you know my job is to be looking at what's coming next and then get us there and so if we just want to you know maintain and sustain what we've got that's the engine is working and I think you're seeing that that's a great sign if you can the company can run without you that's a testament to your leadership and your ability to see that there's lots of smart people around um but it but the question is will it get to the next level if you're it's like the Laura on one of her podcasts you know Jay and Dana were talking about she wanted to hire a big thinker and it's like well you're the big thinker the founder of a company is usually the biggest thinker because they they dreamed up this thing in the first place and so you know if your job is just to think about what's next and then have others execute it that all of a sudden becomes it doesn't even feel like work in my mind it's super fun well we'll be eager to hear uh how you perceive with that William uh quick question for you you you did predict this year of turnover um where do you think we are now what are you thinking is the environment going forward I'm thinking every time I've tried to foretell what's going to happen with the pandemic I'm wrong so oh I I don't know where the Delta variant and people putting off go back to work mode and all that I don't know how that interplays but with that caveat I'd say we're not quite halfway through this great resignation more to come what comes next the great settling down nobody quits no no I think there's just more and more churn more and more people saying I can go do whatever I want I can work from wherever I want I mean and this is probably an entirely separate podcast but the shift uh this is going to sound critical or derogatory I don't mean for it to entirely but the shift to employee entitlement is everywhere from NFL quarterback saying actually I want to be get traded and I want to go play at Team X well that's never heard of before right that's a whole new thing and it's not just in the NFL it's you know a cohort I'm in of CEOs one guy saying to me he had a guy zoom in they've been remote work for a while and he zoomed in he's like oh that's a new background he said oh yeah I moved to Colorado Springs like what yeah no I decided I'm going to work from here from no one no not checking in with the boss and that I hear story after story after Story of that so it's not just everybody left their job and started something new and that's that I think it's going to be a very unsettled U call it 12 more months maybe even through the end of next calendar year before things um calm down a little bit the grand reshuffling right everyone's just moving around you know unsettled and they'll land somewhere and it'll be totally different I think it's exciting honestly well you know I I got to the office this morning and uh this week's Bloomberg yes I still take PR magazines um sitting on my desk and it's got a picture of a bunch of Millennials on Wall Street standing there staring at the camera it says 120,000 to start we'll think about it you know you know it's I don't think it's going anywhere for a while or and so it's it's got a lot of people that I know are looking to us saying how' you do retention bonuses what can you do to incentivize retention I mean retention I think was already going to be a big part of the ball game given the way a millennial generation does like to jump from job to job but now it's even more important and William are you seeing is um being hybrid or remote a requirement now I I don't I don't know the answer to that I think it depends entirely on the kind of work you're doing but but in your world you haven't seen that at my company or in my world when you're placing people um well so churches have never been huge proponents of big office hours it's like no you need to be out in the community right we need to come back together to meet but they probably always function like hybrids uh schools on the other hand hybrid is no you may not do that uh of all the the different things that we all argued about with each other over the last year I think the one universal opinion I've heard from people on every side of the spectrum is virtual Elementary education does not work so like you know our educational institutions and our schools are saying you got to be on campus we've got to have on Campus Learning so it it depend the type of work I think will um be the the contingency around how much hybrid how much remote we we have somewhat of a hybrid but we always have we have terrible commute in Houston so you can pick which eight hours you want to be here and they revolve around as early as start at 6:00 in the morning or start as late as 10: in in the in the morning but it protects a core of the day from 10: to 2 where everybody's here well but hybrid means they can work at home for part of the time right I yeah I'm aware of that I don't I don't know we haven't seen that here yet it's hard to run a factory hybrid have you tried Paul um yeah it's called doing nothing um but the even in my Workforce that can take days off or it's work from home on on days tend to come in because there's so much more value to being able to have a quick conversation with the rest of the team that just I cannot see that happening virtually companies make it work but I can't see how it would work for us what is going on in your world Paul how are you doing well the company's doing quite well uh we have had some challenges just with people being out of the out of the out of the shop for various reasons uh some health reasons some vacations what have you and that really does affect our production but we've we've gotten past that my biggest thing right now is that I'm dealing with a number of personal issues that cause me to not want to throw myself into work um one is my father is in poor health and and then my autistic son the person who normally takes care of him is going to be out for 10 weeks so we're just Nancy and I are poised to Zig this way or that way in response to trouble and I'm very happy that my company mostly runs itself certainly hour by hour and I'm still doing things like managing the payroll and but I can I don't have to work all that hard right now and I'm just riding that I don't have any huge plans to become World dominating in my industry because I don't think that there's anything we could do to really change the basic trajectory of how we're growing um we've tried all of it but it really comes down to the people who buy my product are tending to go away from the old channels and go towards Google and that's where we are and so we're experiencing basically 10% growth every year by doing what we're doing now um so I'm just in a different place than William and and Karen and uh happy to be there at the moment although it sounds a little bit similar to William and that for unfortunate reasons you may have something of a break from the office too and something of a litmus test as to how your business runs without you yeah but that's not it's not even even if things get hairy on the personal side it's not like I'm going to be unable to come into work uh or to work as I pretty much as I do now you know like I consider going to the shop just to be part of my basic day and I don't necessarily when I get here have to do all that much A lot of times I sit around and just wait for someone to walk in with a problem and then spend 15 minutes solving it and then wait another four hours or six hours or two days and that's value to the company but I don't have any any immediate things to do on a lot of days and I'm perfectly happy with that we're running short on time um there there's one particular question I wanted to ask you guys um I don't know if you had a chance to listen to the podcast that we taped last week and published this week uh it was a pretty intense conversation Laura was expressing some of her uh challenges and Jay kind of gave her a a little bit of a push encouraged her to take responsibility that the problems were hers to fix and then we learned more about what Laura was going through and we all felt bad Jay in particular uh about that and I guess the the question I have for all three of you is I I think given what we've been through the last 18 months this is probably not an unusual Dynamic and I wonder if you've given thought to the notion of you know when you give somebody a push somebody who's struggling and when you give them a hug anybody have any thoughts about that I don't think anyone's allowed to hug anyone ever again in the workplace okay that that's Fair Point yeah I think it comes down to listening first you know I I listen to the podcast and it it's sort of the nature of it there's a lot of jumping in with advice Without Really spending a lot of time listening and hearing the full story and so I think if it was a different platform or format then hopefully in real life there would be you know more opportunity to just listen and find out what's really going on that's a good point I guess my reaction is that it it was a demonstr ation of the The Perils of advice and but what didn't really get talked about was the underlying message that is delivered to business owners at all times by the the the preponderance of the media which is that yeah it sort of like what Jay said you're the boss suck it up and if you're not succeeding then you own it and I think that that's really harmful advice the second thing is that what do you mean Paul what what what are you thinking when you say that's harmful advice coming from the media or well for many many years I sat in my office and readed Inc magazine and the New York Times and blah blah blah blah blah and wondered why my business didn't succeed and uh really put it on my own shoulders and did not make any attempt or or or find ways to get better advice and I think that just the suck it up advice is actually usually pretty bad because it's based on an incomplete understanding of the facts and I when I started writing for you I had to start to describe what was going on in my world and I realized it was almost impossible to deliver a full picture of what's going on around any particular problem uh in any reasonable amount of time like getting back to Laura's problem she was talking about conflicts between members of her team but we didn't spend much time talking about those team members and that that's critical information we didn't spend much time talking about her struggles or we didn't start by spending much time talking about her struggles with just general optimism and mental health and that was critical information and then there was bound to be a bunch of other stuff that was critical information that we didn't even get to and it comes down to nobody knows what's really going on like you do and you're going to bring to it whoever you are and it's complicated right Paul I mean what you're getting to is that everything is complicated and complicated running a business doesn't mean you you're not complicated right but then also the you know like oh here's a kick in the ass that's not often helpful I think that uh here's here's maybe how how you've dealt with similar problems or here's how other people have done it is the next level of advice but trying to actually guide someone to helping themselves what do they need to do that to me is is the is the the level that was missing in that conversation it was an acknowledgement that the thing was complicated and then sort of stopped there and yeah Jay felt bad about it because he had jumped in with the conventional wisdom to start with and conventional wisdom is often incomplete or or inapplicable to many people's situation uh those are all good points I I I will say that Dana and Laura have both thanked Jay in the past for jumping in and doing that um but obviously the situation was different and uh obviously you're also right about the limits of the uh the format there's only so much you can cover uh in a podcast we do hope to come back to it again in the future in that conversation what kept coming up is it's you know it's your fault and you have to go deal with it and I just think about it so differently I just think well no there's no one to blame it's just these things happen and it's a leader responsibility to to listen and to look and to evaluate every situation because every day is different I haven't had one day on the job that's the same and if I wasn't in the you know if I didn't come to work saying okay what am I going to learn today then then I how could I ever have learned along the way and so it's just a different way of thinking about it and I think that the thing that is true is it's hard it like running a company owning a company being a Founder whatever it is it's hard and that's it's not and I I always like to say it's not for the faint of heart like you have to be tough at the end of the day and it's never I mean it's not easy no matter what it is we also need to acknowledge that you're going to experience highs and lows even if you don't have that history that Laura had you know like I don't I'm not wired that way I'm a very optimistic person and I run through troughs and Peaks and and that's the nature of reality the the external factors can make the basic advice of suck it up and do what you need to do either harder or easier like I don't know how we would have gotten through in my company we would have gotten through the last year if it hadn't been for the government suddenly showering me with money well that changed everything and that had nothing to do with my attitude and so there are there's going to be a level at which you can do what you can do but there's a level Beyond it too I think what's important as well is to separate you know the the conversation started last week with talking about the issues and the problems that Laura was feeling and having in her business and then it ended in you know her her personal life which they're obviously very connected and I think you know running a company is hard enough and when when Laura has these real struggles and mental health is a is a real it's the real deal we have to all of us have to take care of it to one degree or another and there are folks you know like Laura mentioned where her chemistry is is different and she has to take great care and it's so it was so awesome for me to hear how she really understands it and she's really taking care of it and I think and on top of all that she's running a complicated business which has real challenges and so I think what she's doing is she should be writing books about it she should be up there talking and showing others it's you can have all kinds of things going on in your personal life and you can still do it because I think there's a lot of people who would be inspired who may say I have a really hard time getting out of bed so therefore I can't do all these hard things and and she's it it's not easy for her but she's doing it and she's really really successful at it all right my thanks especially for the free advice to Karen Clark call Paul DS and William Vander bluman as always thanks for sharing guys I really appreciate it 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 J 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 podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]