I Just Cut My Pay

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul Downs tells Shan busy and Jay gz that his year has not gotten off to a great start this was supposed to be the year that Paul Unleashed a bold new marketing campaign that would put his business on an entirely new trajectory and perhaps it still will be but for the moment his Revenue has fallen considerably short of his expectations which has presented him with an unwelcome choice should he hold off on the marketing campaign or should he cut his own salary along with discussing Paul's decision we also talk about the process of rethinking a website how best to make use of LinkedIn it's a gold mine for both Business Development and recruiting says Sean and why Paul and Sean continue to perform their own HR chores 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 Wii 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 interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Sean busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Paul DS who is CEO of Paul DS cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Jay gz CEO of gos group whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home the episode is titled I just cut my pay welcome Sean Paul and Jay it's great to have you here first of all Paul you were out for a while I believe with covid how are you co was just part of the fun I started by screwing up my knee playing soccer then I got Wicked Co that lasted for a couple weeks and in the middle of that completely threw my back out oh jeez it was great it was great it was a way to have a nice break from work and sit around feeling miserable and intense pain which is what all bosses dream of you could have done that at work you didn't have to be home for that yeah but I'm all better now so thank you for asking glad to hear that um how did the business run while you were home being miserable it ran very well I mean we we are having a little issue which is that I planned my manufacturing operation for 5 million a year and we're off to a 3 million a year start so that's bad uh cuz we're running through our backlog but I think that we're going to pull it out right at the last moment we've been able to run on the factory at full speed and uh this just a question of the backlog shrinking but we have some orders coming in and people have been calling us so it's just one of those boss clutch moments when you have to get up in front of everybody and giv them an inspiring speech about how things look terrible but they never are as bad as they look and I gave that speech and the people seem to buy it and uh I think that we are going to get out of it okay I seem to recall that you've had uh struggles in the early parts of the year and and previous years is this any different than that yes in that it's an unexpected slowdown in orders unaccompanied by any other indicator that that should be happening so usually what we would be looking at would be okay how many people are calling us that's like the Baseline metric if x number of people call you in all other years that's correlated with x amount of sales and this year I I'm not quite sure what's going on but the best I can see is that we are heavily dependent on being the last ones into a construction project or a corporate move and usually what happens is those projects take a couple of years to initiate and execute and they don't want the table till the very end so people often don't call us till the end of that project and I'm thinking that it's possible we may finally be seeing a CO lull in my business now it should have appeared the minute people started working from home but it just didn't but if there were projects that would have been initiated in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 that would have been finishing about now and just weren't initiated that could be part of it that's the external possibility internally I can't put my finger on it because we're doing all the same things that we did last year and it was our best year ever you know what I could ask the reverse question I could say how could that not be affecting you because I got clobbered last year in my corporate art business because the offices were close whose's hanging out working offices are close and I took the hit on I think what you just said makes perfect sense I don't know how you couldn't be suffering from some covid backlash from two years ago and it begs the question as the boss it's not like you can just turn off everything I'm not going to start laying people off that are good solid people that I've got years invested into so sometimes you just got to at least as far as I'm concerned sometimes you just got to take the hit well I agree I mean that's that's what I'm doing I had planned to make a bunch of investments in marketing and I'm going to continue to do that and I've also put a lot of effort into building relationships with other companies that are in uh similar business with us but maybe sell a different way and we are getting some orders from people who are very busy just selling through other channels and don't have the manufacturing capacity so it's kind of an tight run thing but compared to other moments I've had this is nothing this is just this is just a little bit you know the backlogs down low but it's not something where I think oh I'm really dropping the ball here now when we last had something like this was actually 2012 and I ended up writing a book about it but when I was weeping in my beer to my vistage group about oh our sales are down and you know I think it's the economy their advice to me was doesn't matter what's happening in the economy you got to look and see what you're doing cuz that's the only thing you can control so yes I'm looking very carefully at all the things we're doing and I'm I'm planning on a counter punch and the way I'm going to pay for it since we're don't have as much cash I mean normally we get 50% of our cash comes from deposits when people place orders so if people are not placing orders I don't have as much cash I just cut my pay which I haven't had to do for many many years but I just did it because that's what we need to do right now so we're not out of cash we're able to run the the factory profitably we haven't run out of work I don't think we're going to run out of work although the backlog may get very low and we're just going to ride through it when you had the lull in 2012 Paul do you feel like that was like a lag from the recession no um it was two things one there was a seasonality to my sales uh patterns that I did not understand at that time because I hadn't kept the data and the second thing was I had done a configuration change deep into my AdWords program that basically destroyed the whole thing without any real indication there was failing what happened was and I'm going to spend very little time on this CU it's complicated but we introduced a new product we supported it with AdWords it was aimed at a particular target market Google started showing that product to everybody on Earth and getting clicks that's Google's idea of success what was happening it was using up my daily budget early in the day on people who weren't going to buy when previously our AdWords had been uh aimed at a lot of people but the ones who tended to click were very late in the day and those were the bosses who actually buy stuff who were looking at tables after their day chores were complete so the ad was running and get and the budget was being used up at the wrong time of day by the wrong people wow it took a long time to figure that out and there was nothing about how Google presents information that made it even possible to understand this and then there was nothing about how AdWords worked back then that made it possible to easily fix it either it took a long time to to dig through and figure that out well is always one of the problems is this isn't your only hat you're wearing to marketing hat so if you or I or Sean or anyone else had nothing else to do but work on this maybe we would figure that out but when you're trying to run a business and you don't have a chief marketing officer it's just one of the many things you're juggling so it's not a surprise it took a while to figure out it did but but there's more to it than that the actual solution I only arrived at and was able to zero in on this issue because I happened to own a wide format printer that could print out the Google statistics on one sheet of paper that was about 60 in long you couldn't see that on the screen you couldn't look at two periods of time and look at what's going on and check all your stuff and it was just because I happened to have this capability for other reasons that I spent a whole weekend just staring at a long print out of a bunch of things and then came to the conclusion that this might be happening all right I take it back for me that would be the case but not for you because you seem like some kind of Savant that does that stuff I would have never had the patience or it's not Savant it's when your it's when your clothes are on fire you have to do something that's it I yes water wasn't available and so I had to figure something out I don't even know whether that story is true but that's what I thought and I changed around the campaigns and shortly after that things sorted themselves out whether it's because of what I did or something else I actually have no idea very impressive story either way so back to the current situation you do happen to be deep into a marketing campaign that you've already spent a good bit of money on and that you've told us about C can you quickly recap for us what you're doing and then tell us where that stands and what your current thinking is yeah so the idea is at the moment most of our buyers come to us just through Google searches and that's fine but that puts me entirely at the mercy of Google and it appears after having been Google Starling for almost 20 years now that the size of that market is let's say it's 4 and a half million bucks a year now there's a lot of people buying and selling the product we make just different ways and we identified a piece of that other supply chain that we want to be involved with which is Architects and interior designers we currently don't have any real outreach program aimed at that group and so the marketing campaign was designed to put us in front of those people was designed is designed to put us in front of those people hopefully it will work and we're in the process of just building out all the content that we want to show to this group because they have a different let's say aesthetic than our average buyer and so that the website that we run for people who just are know nothing about interior design or tables or Furniture just looking for something we have a website for those people but it's not a good fit for how Architects think about the product so we're in the process of Designing this campaign which included a lot of research talking to Architects and interior designers and then a lot of content production where we're making videos and documenting what happens in the shop and we're in the process now of building out a second website that's aimed specifically at that target audience and has a look and feel that's more amable to them we just got the back end of that website completed and we're going to start loading content into it and I'm hoping that we have the website pretty much completed and ready to go first week of April or so I think what you're saying is because this is the world I live in it's a much more sophisticated Market they're used to looking at ads that have been put together by $300 million companies so you do need to raise the game I mean that's that's as good a way to think about it as any yeah no I think you're exactly on it I I know that that most big projects almost all of them have a design firm that's behind them and it makes sense that uh I think what you're doing makes perfect sense and it could actually end up being much bigger than the Google search thing I hope so I mean that would be that would be the win if we can successfully put our message in front of the right people and get them to start thinking about us when these projects come up and uh yeah that's what we're trying to do and at the same time I'm also trying to build ties to a couple of of uh peers in the industry who sell through the old Channel but have manuf facturing capability that we could be a supplement to because a lot of those guys maintain like a lot of what we do is very very complex and in order to maintain the ability to do super complex work you kind of have to be doing it all the time and most companies that are making my product don't do it all the time and as a matter of fact they're trying to set up factories which are doing just simpler stuff in huge volume and then when something really complex comes along then they don't know what to do so we're trying to uh make ties to some of the other industry players in order to offer ourselves as you don't know how to accomplish what your client is doing or you can't get it through your factory because you don't have the skilled labor or whatever you need will be those guys and so we're in the middle of of working on those ties with a number of companies and I think that that's going to be helpful too I anticipate that by the end of the year we're going to be back running it 5 million a year or you know hopefully more so I just got to get through this patch and I'm Prett confident that we're going to do it without much trouble so your Outreach to those uh new buyers that you're hoping for is dependent on your uh website work correct well the website is where they go so what we have to do is get them to go to the website have you built the website or is that what you're working on now we've mostly built the website in that we had we hired the firm and they showed them a bunch of stuff we liked and they came up with a version of that it's just a question of loading each page with content now and fixing the text and doing all that stuff were you happy with the process I mean that's a complicated aspect of it and people struggle from you know the beginning of hiring the right person to getting it done did it go smoothly uh it did because it's not my first rodeo and uh I Rely heavily on recommendations and people I know I wanted to hire someone local and so I interviewed four or five firms I actually already have one website firm that's running my existing site but I didn't think they were a good fit for this new site because they're just not so are we talking about $100,000 website no website's going to be about 30 grand all right well that's not a lot no I mean one of the things is I chose a firm which is just two guys and got references people I know know them but I'm not paying for fancy offices or anything yeah I don't need to I these guys are just down the street for me we could communicate that's fine they've been good and were they recommended by business owner you know or well they were recommended by several people and uh including our current web guys uh one of the guys used to work for them so they know each other it's a community correct me if I'm wrong you said you have the web guys so these guys are more of the graphic designers and they're working with the guys that are actually doing the website is that how it works no this web firm has two guys one's the looking feel guy the other guy is the backend support guy so that's all you need you want someone to help you figure out what your your website should look like the fonts you know what is how many pages so he is a graphic designer he's a web designer that includes graphic design okay and then the backend guy is tricking out WordPress to sort of do the things we want to do and to give me a administrative portal that allows me to do the amount of content uploading and changing that I want to do which is a lot there has to be a photographer involved right well the marketing company that we hired uh to sort of design the marketing part of this the the content that we're going to try to put out the messaging the positioning where do you put it on social media they also have a let's call it a photo photography and movie unit that is providing a lot of the imagery but we have a ton of imagery ourselves you know like a lot of what's on the site it's just going to be pictures of stuff that we made and some of that was taken by us some of it comes from the clients so yes there's a second firm involved but they're they're the marketers and early on in the process I when we started getting feedback from the marketing company that was doing market research uh I was listening to what they have to say and I'm like you know it's pretty clear that if we if we go to the trouble of contacting our target audience and we send them to the current site it would be like inviting people to the met galala and then actually sending them to Burger King or something it's just like it's just like what our current website works great for the people who see it but that's it will not work for the people we want to drive to it so why wouldn't it work for an architect they've got a trained eye they're used to looking at ads and Communications that are made by by billion dooll companies it's just a different aesthetic the the the mindset that that makes to an architect is different from the mindset that most people have I'll just say that it's just a different aesthetic and if you show them the wrong thing they're very they react hard in a negative way listen I'm in that world I've been framing pictures for Architects and you're they've got a different aesthetic they've got a different sophistication level and I totally buy what you're saying you got to bring your big game to it they're they're used to dealing with you know Coler right and the the point of this campaign is to introduce ourselves as a brand to that group of people because as Jay correctly pointed out all my competitors are billion dooll corporations they have marketing resources you wouldn't believe and they've been around for a long time and yeah that's that's who people think of and I'm nobody but there's one secret weapon I have which is over the years we've amassed a Client List which is just stunning when you see who we've worked for successfully then you're like oh my God who are these guys and so and you've got the photographs to show them and we've got the photographs to prove it and we've got the testimonials and we got all that so I think it's credible for me to go in front of your average architect in Austin or something and say hey you never heard of me that doesn't mean because I I stink it's because we're in this Google world and you're not but I just want to show you what you're missing and what how we could help you you need to be the trusted brand versus just a brand and when you show them all that it gives trust right trust is actually the critical component and we the world we live in now someone calls us out of the blue they don't know who we are so we have to establish instant trust and we're pretty good at it but it's easy at this point uh because we can always say oh we worked for this we worked for them yesterday my people were in the Pentagon installing the new boardroom for The Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday we got a call from the White House people who have choices end up choosing us so I don't think it's hard conversation it's just that we got to get their attention and start the conversation that's the trick of this campaign I mean that's that's real you know I had a client a while back that was an IT company and they had this homegrown website and pretty much they would never get any lead inquiries through the website without changing any kind of advertising or anything that would drive more traffic to the site we just redevelop the site from a trust and messaging perspective it just looked more legitimate and trustworthy and they went from zero to four a month I mean it's crazy you know so they would get like four leads a month instead of zero like good leads and that's all we did and so it just tells you like that that there were people actually looking at their brand they were seeing it and going I don't trust this I don't uh see a connection here and then they were leaving and so you probably don't have the Architects looking at you right now some do some yeah probably some but but I but it's again if I was dragging someone in who's busy who's sophisticated who's dealing with people I don't want to show them the wrong thing like one of my sales tricks all the way along has been okay someone calls us they don't know who who we are and they don't know anything about the product cuz nobody knows how you get fancy conference tables and so my theory has always been you got to make sure that every second you interacting with a with a new client makes them want to be there for the next yes it's a yes you cannot have a single moment in anywhere in the process where it looks sketchy and so yeah we're putting a lot of money into tailoring messaging and content for these people because I anticipate that the payoff will be very very large like we we sell a lot of tables that are a quarter million bucks and and so okay I had to invest 100,000 to get there I don't care I would just challenge you're not putting a lot of the amount of money you're putting in is extremely real reasonable you could have told me you were spending 200 Grand I would have thought maybe he is so you're not putting that much money into it yeah actually here's a question for Sean which is that okay I have to do some upfront investment website 30 grand preparing the content doing the market research let's call that 70 grand so there's 100 mhm the marketing people are recommending a marketing campaign that relies heavily on ad placements on social media and you know like I don't know what else there is to do but I just wonder what your thought is given the current environment how easy is it to actually Target a small group of people using the the the current situation you know like with the privacy and all this like is this feasible or not I mean the good news is that you're not trying to Target them on Facebook because that's been just absolutely eviscerated by the um Apple updates so really I think you're trying to Target them on LinkedIn would be my guess LinkedIn and Instagram are my two thoughts and then maybe Pinterest at some point that might be worth looking at I don't know I mean you have I think there's two paths ahead for you the paid media is one and the good thing about it is you can test it and see if anything happens I've not seen that work super well for high dollar purchase transactions but at the same time you know your folks are looking for something specific so that's good the other path would be like social selling which I think is worth a lot of Investigation so that would be building relationships on LinkedIn creating connections you know doing Outreach and just building a network of people who are potential buyers and adding value to their experience um so I don't know if you've talked about that with your marketing firm but that's something I would look at pretty hard uh we've talked about it to a certain extent but we haven't talked about it like you just described it and I would say there's actually a third path which is this is old school Jay you're going to like this one cuz I'm old yeah okay I'm listening almost so we we spent a little time identifying the top 10 firms in each Target Market Austin Houston Dallas you know you name it any Nashville and then we send them something handcrafted customized and say hey we know you you're doing this business we want to talk to you here's a thing and try that and that's expensive at the front end and you know like each time you send one of these out it maybe a couple hundred bucks but we don't have a million people to try to attract so that's another thought and I may do that along with the social media we'll try the what the marketing firm is recommending for a while but they're asking for a monthly spend of 10 to 15,000 bucks which I've done before like that doesn't it doesn't horrify me but I want to make sure it's it's producing leads wait so what are you going to send everybody a desk what are you talking about when you say a handcrafted thing for $200 no actually a cutting board we make cutting boards that I may you know like I've been making them just for my friends and what have you and okay you buy a wood cutting board from anywhere a year later it's got a bunch of cracks in it cuz they always build them wrong I've got cutting boards I've been using for 25 years that are dead flat B so we could just send them one it's a nice useful thing and then have a little thing on it says hey this is guaranteed not to crack and here's why and here's everybody else does wrong and if you want this level of craftsmanship I'm just riffing right now you want this level of craftsmanship when you're demanding client wants a kickass boardroom we're here for you that's what I would do sounds good see I knew you'd like that I think given that I'm in a little similar business I think you've very clearly identified the three different markets I think that makes perfect sense there are design firms that are buying stuff all the time for their clients and then to your point going to some of these big furniture companies that have absolutely no desire or ability to go doing what you're doing so I think you got an excellent strategy I hope it works I'm looking forward to hearing the results it's gonna work Paul when you first started talking about this last year in the middle of your best year ever I think you positioned it as being something that you were hoping would drive real growth and better position your firm to give you the option to sell it one day day should you choose to do so is that still what you're thinking sure absolutely but I'm a little more focused on I mean last year it was an idea now we're two-thirds of the way through it so I'm more focused on the execution at this point and it'll either work or it won't and then I'll have decisions to make about what to do next do you think there's hope it could work quickly enough to help you with your current year and the sales issues you started this discussion with uh no I don't think it'll work that fast but I as I said I've got other things going on that I I think are going to work in particular there's a competitor that's not too far from me that has demonstrated over the years that they're much better at selling stuff than actually making stuff and I knew that for years because I looked into buying them and finally gave up for reasons but they just came back to me a couple weeks ago and said we can't make tables we just can't do it or we can sell them but we can't make them do you want to make them for us so that's got the potential to give us a couple million bucks of business right there and that should be something if managed correctly could fill in all of our all of our unused capacity and then some and then all the other things that we're doing on top of that so I think that we're going to get to the next level one way or another all right moving on Sean we were just talking about LinkedIn I follow you on LinkedIn you're extremely active there and and because I follow you there I I know you've been uh looking to hire some people can you talk about what's going on with that and what the market is like right now yeah sure honestly I think LinkedIn is just such a gold mine for lots of in lots of ways I think for business development and sales it's it's amazing we've gotten a fair bit of business that I can directly attribute to it I also think LinkedIn is just just powerful for recruiting especially if you're looking for a professional White Collar type of a role you know i' I found as we're hiring more marketing strategist and brand strategists that putting the word out is just getting us really great candidates and I mean it's the tool that all the recruiters are using so if you're in the market higher employees having a presence there is really worth your time I gather you're not just using it as a recruiting tool the way you would use indeed or zip recruiter oh no yeah you you view it the the results you've had there as a result of you're having invested hours and hours of time creating content and making connections is am I right yeah yeah right so both establishing a personal brand you know who is Sean busy what does he stand for what's my network and then a business brand what is kinesis what does it stand for uh and nurturing those things and what what I found is that you have to make those investments in both of those places in order to get a return on them you can't just like drop into LinkedIn and start trying to get new candidates to apply um so so you really have to nurture and build that is it working yeah I mean you know I'm getting a lot of really intriguing folks connecting to me direct messaging me saying hey I saw you have this position or or folks who said hey Sean I saw you have that opening I have a friend I told her about the position she's really interested would you mind connecting to her and you know etc etc and so you know then I'll take that person out to coffee or do a zoom meeting you know so that word of mouth you know and the network that expands from the word of mouth is just fantastic are you finding people who aren't necessarily looking for a job but are intrigued yeah I mean a lot of them already have jobs I mean that's the key right is like it's usually the person who's employed is the one you want to hire because they're valuable well nothing else statistically obviously you're better off that if someone's working it's much less likely they're a problem in anyway so there's no question hiring someone that's working is a better odds of success but even better is somebody who's working at a job that they don't hate and aren't necessarily desperate to get out of right yeah that's most of the folks who who work at Kinesis worked at jobs that they're like you know it's it's good you know then that's another indicator is like does the person throw the current job under the bus or or do they talk about you know it's not quite what they're looking for and they want something different you know what I got to tell you on interview I don't mind if they if there's something wrong there I I appreciate someone being honest and telling meisten I need to get out of there so you know I think people getting advice from whoever oh don't say anything bad about your existing job is not necessarily great advice because you want to know why do you want to leave there sure I I agree with that oh it's too corporate there what does that mean no I know but I I think there's a real difference between being reflective and saying you know this isn't the right place for me I'm not getting what I want out of it versus uh kind of blame casting yeah for sure for sure there's a big difference there and I've seen both and you definitely if somebody's throwing all the blame on the business it's like well you know you took a job there right no I'm gonna tell you my my question which really cuts through I'd say to them so that really bothers you did you say something to your boss and I want to hear yeah that's why I'm here I've told them numerous times it doesn't make vers says oh I don't tell them they they never do anything but I don't want to hear about how they didn't even try to fix it that's what I'm looking for so yeah that's usually a very revealing question and there's also something I found over the years of is the person a future forward Optimist or are they regretful pessimist you know and somewhere in between right we're all somewhere in between you know so I'm looking to hire F future forward Optimus like that's you got to have that to to work at Kinesis because it's a hard job and so you need somebody who has the resilience to to see what's possible in the future you mean Optimist just bordering and delusional no I'm not hiring to I mean you know more stoic more calm more emotionally uh mature that's that's what I'm looking for in other words don't apply Jay no that's I'm not I like to take inventory of that okay I would call it I have resolve so I am in the op I I have resolve I Forge ahead no matter what I have found children of entrepreneurs to be some of the best employees like it it's crazy and there's there's a lot of them out there because I mean half of our economy is built on you know small businesses and owner run businesses but children of entrepreneurs make great employees as a general rule because they grew up with a lot of uncertainty they they generally grew up not taking anything for granted uh appreciating hard work I mean they just generally make really great employees have you ever noticed maybe it's just my company a lot of my employees are from divorced families and I think they got a little tougher through that that's interesting yeah and I've seen this for 20 years that that they just they had a you know they had to fend for themselves a little bit and uh it I don't think that's a coincidence Sean before we leave the topic I I I want to get back to LinkedIn because you you talked about how you can't just drop in there and expect results that you have to put in some time you really put in some time could you give us an idea of what kind of investment you made before that led to the results you're seeing now yeah I mean shoot I've been on it since almost its Inception and I I applied a pretty rigorous um approach which may or may not be right I don't know but I've just done it and that is to accept invitations and to make connections with folks I've actually met in the real world or you know who who reach out with a with a thoughtful invitation and so as a result the network is you know I mean I don't know it's thousands of people but they're all like pretty legitimate connections and so what that does is that my feed is highly relevant you know so anything I see come up on there is probably somebody I've met and have a connection to instead of somebody just trying to kind of spam me and trying to sell me an insurance policy and and then in terms of your comment about like investment like over two years of the pandemic I posted about 400 times so you know okay tell us right now how many hours this week tell me per week how many hours per week do you think you're putting into LinkedIn I mean between scanning and posting I'm probably I don't know two to five hours a week something like that what's what's your favorite kind of post to put up what kind of content do you try to put out I've been experimenting with this idea of talking about the the importance of owner operated businesses and I don't use the word small business very specifically but I'm talking about hey what's an owner operated business look like and then I'll use an example of one that's doing something cool so I really like to highlight positive innovative ideas those tend to get a lot more likes views shares versus like critical posts like oh I hate what's going on here those kind of posts I think are really not very productive so thought thoughtful insightful and ideally eventually kind of points to the world that you're operating in so you know if I were in your world Paul you know I'd be like talking about Architects doing Innovative things talking about interior designers doing interesting things I you know I'd want to be part of that Community having those conversations and highlighting you know what I see as really great things so do you make a a consistent effort to I don't know what do you call it retweet amplify repost things that other people are doing in order to be part of it or do you not do that I do some of that you know but but I think just dropping and liking is not a very powerful approach I would always choose a comment over a like and I would do it with folks where I have a direct connection and I would say something trying to be more thoughtful just to create awareness of who I am and our connection and then occasionally I will reshare things but I'll add you know what is my commentary on this or what is my insight into this so that it's not just me reposting I think that that's important I think that's important that you have a point of view and you share that so people begin to see what you value and what why you're credible do you always accompany your your original posts with images I have found that images tend to perform better yeah that that folks tend to see imagery and and and you get just more likes more views more Impressions more shares when there's an image and the other thing I have found is that the more bespoke the image the better it performs so you know grabbing a shitty photo of two guys shaking hands you know like a really bad stock photo it doesn't do anything for the post on the other hand I some of my best posts have been like little sketches I've made and then I take a photo with my iPhone and I'm like here's an idea and the sketch conveys that idea that's really a it's really interesting it's super effective personal stuff like I share pictures of me doing stuff in the shop you know it has nothing to do with Kinesis but it's interesting because the people I want to work with are also quote unquote shop owners meaning they want to build things they want to create things they want to make things whether those are physical things or not and so that symbol of like Shawn is a maker Shawn is a Creator Shawn is a builder it's a way to say he's like me and that's I think really valuable oh The Artisan you is creeping out now now I'm hearing it yeah yeah the art degree the pottery yeah yeah yeah sure people love that stff revealed ourself Sean are your hiring efforts an indication that business is picking up uh business is picking up for us or just in general for you yeah it's interesting though it's it's up in a totally different way so uh pre- pandemic a lot of people came in the door looking for brand right so they were looking you know like hey our website isn't performing isn't doing the right thing our you know our visual presentation our look and feel it just isn't as sophisticated as we are and you know I could sell that stuff all day long we're really good at it there was just a lot of ask for that after you know the pandemic has really crushed that business it's just not coming in the way it has what is coming in the door is much more along the line of marketing and business strategy so hey we're not sure if we can do this what's the market opportunity we need to Pivot we can't get employees to fulfill the need so help us rethink our recruiting and employer brand strategy so it's a totally it's an adjacent work but it's they're not coming in looking for design you know they're coming in the the door looking for strategy and so it's it's forcing us to like reconfigure and and hire more of one and less of the other so so it's a different kind of work how many of you have a dedicated HR person I do I do it's me yeah exactly you're very dedicated I suspect well I mean why I don't have a ton of HR work to do but there's some they say at 100 employees you need one which I fully recognize and can tell you that it changes the dynamic of being the boss dramatically and that people then go to the HR person assuming that they're having a confidential conversation with the HR person so it takes a little of your Humanity away because you can no longer say to the employee oh hey I'm glad you're back after they had some issue because God forbid you knew about it so I have had to retrain myself but you did know about it well I yeah I knew about it because I mean it is my company I do have responsibility for lots of stuff and I told them I go look if you don't show one day it's back in my lap and I need to know what's going on but I certainly can't let everyone know I know because they think that when they go to the HR person they're having a private conversation and I made one huge error a couple years ago somebody had a problem and and I made the horrible mistake of being nice to her and saying Hey listen I just want you to know we'll be very supportive of you and blah blah blah and it was like I stabbed her with a knife I mean it was and I I I learned from that one I can't I can't go have these human conversations with people if they go to Human Resources I I have delegated my Humanity to the human resource department and it's just it is what it is I'm not complaining about it just I recognize it's a different expectation so it's it's yeah and if you don't recognize that when you get it you're going to have a problem like I did because it ain't the same does that make sense to everyone yeah yeah it does it's a sad it's a sad thing but it's sad yeah it makes me sad no I have to tell you I feel bad the the flip side is that I've got so many little side deals that I've set up with various employees just trying to keep track of what I agreed to as a nightmare so yeah when you get to a certain size it's just got to be different and the bigger it is the more bureaucratic it's got to be that's that's pretty clear there's something too I mean I'm really I think a lot about the um dunar number which is like the Maxum yes around 150 maximum number of relationships you can kind of maintain and I really think there's something to that that once once a business gets over that it's it's just becomes harder and harder to run it like a human- centered organization well unless you have people that you've delegated to you know you've got an hrps doing it you can't personally do it I mean I can't tell you I I'm embarrassed to say I don't know all my employees names anymore I I go to my you know production facility once a week and I I see people I I don't know their name but I do have people to do have relationships with them so I don't think it's necessarily the number I think in in my case I have relationships probably with 60 people you know but there is a limit to what you can do or at least in my that I've chosen to do I I'm not one of those bosses that walks around asking people how their vacation was and how's the kids I just not my thing Sean and Paul do do you guys get stuck doing kind of routine HR work that you would love to put off on somebody else well I do routine HR work but I want to put it off on someone else or I would I mean I don't want to hire someone to do this and I don't want to Outsource it to one of these organizations well I'm not necessarily talking about hiring or you know big or you know dealing with somebody who's got you know issues I'm talking about you know dealing with you know the more mundane aspects of HR yeah it's fine um by not having a bloated administrative staff I can pay myself more so every time I'm messing around with health insurance or something like that I'm like well this blows but at least I'm making 150 bucks an hour doing it so no your stage at your level it's fine the problem is it's not like a light switch gets flicked so you need one at 100 what about 80 employees I got to tell you running an an organization with 60 employees and not having an HR person I think you got some serious exposure and holes there between the health insurance and FMLA and all the other things like who's doing that stuff the boss is still doing it with 60 70 80 if I had 60 people I wouldn't be doing it if I had 6 people I would be a $4 million year company and I would be right I would easily be able to afford it no I no that makes sense at your stage it's also a very small amount of time I mean it's it's maybe eight hours at the beginning of the year to kind of set up the health insurance and then it's just whenever someone needs a change I could go right in and do it doesn't take long even small what I've observed I mean at least for us is that because we're now doing business in multiple States we have employees in multiple States it's getting really heavy well there's your problem no even that is true that is some of it but look at this I have an employee who Moved literally over the river from Portland into Vancouver Washington it's been a nightmare and I mean she's like three miles away from me and and so I think the problem is getting that it's becoming a more a greater administrative State and then you get into the issue of like what is a R's job and this is a whole larger conversation is that they start to mix this idea of coaching and development in with Administration rules compliance and that's why I think it's such a screwed up industry well I'll tell you what we we happen through the grace of God to be a manufacturing organization which doesn't allow it's just not feasible for me to have employees in 15 states but if I did I would just throw it all at ADP my payroll company cuz they're set up to deal with all the little local administr ative tax this that the other thing like sure I I wouldn't dream of trying to master all that but the actual tasks that I have to accomplish for my people are not particularly difficult I've been interacting with all these giant companies for so many years I'm just like I have a pretty good sense of how to do it and you know we have an insurance agent if things go really South but for the most part it's not that complicated I can tell you the problem is whatever that number is if you got 50 60 whenever one decide they're going to hire the HR person I'm suggesting that 6 months before they did that somebody's doing that that's probably not qualified and it's probably over their head and you've got some serious exposure for some serious dollars between the health insurance and all the law it's it's a problem and there's no easy solution to it but uh I did have an assistant taken care of it for years and I look back and I kind of cringe she wasn't hired to be the HR person and she was you know just filling in and it it was a problem well that's why I do it myself because at the end of the day I can at least understand whether there's something over my head or not like there have been moments and I like Jesus I need a lawyer and I just would go get one I think that as a general guideline probably at 30 to 40 employees anytime you're doing 6 7 million a year uh or more multiple jurisdictions sure get outside help cuz the the taxing and all of that that is a pain and uh but a a payroll company would take care of that all right this has been great my thanks to Shan busy Paul DS and Jay gz and of course to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses Implement open book management you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everyone wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren at21 hats.com that's L ren21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think 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 thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]