I Need a Vacation

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week we talk about what we were thinking almost exactly a year ago as the Contours of this Crisis began to emerge it was this week that the who declared a pandemic the NBA suspended its season and toilet paper started to disappear it has all taken a toll this is where it gets tricky Jay tells us just because everybody shows up every day and looks like they're happy go-lucky they're not people have stresses in their life whether it's their kids whether it's their aging parents whether it's their financial situation whether it's their physical well-being any of the above this is just layered on top of whatever was going on in their lives before plus Karen's company goes to Mars Dana gets a smart question about expansion from a retailer in Canada and Jay discovers that ESOP companies don't have to pay federal income tax even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will if nothing else let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which collects the most important news of the day for business owners in one place and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes this week's lineup features Taran Clark Cole who is CEO of blink a user experienc research and design firm in Seattle Jay Golds whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home and Dana White who is CEO of paraly Boyd a chain of hair salons based in Detroit the episode is titled I need a vacation before we get started one of the recurring themes of this podcast is that marketing is hard for smaller businesses one reason it's hard is that we are all besieged by self-appointed digital marketing gurus who overwhelm us with outlandish promises on the other hand there's Steve craw co-founder of B found online a loyal listener to the 21 hats podcast Steve understands the business owners who listen to this podcast because he is one he knows his stuff but he's also a real person who you can have a real conversation with and if you tell him I sent you you can get a free consultation with Steve himself just shoot him an email at Steve befound online.com to schedule your talk that's Steve befound online.com now on to the show welcome Karen Dana and Jay this episode will be published on Tuesday March 9th which is almost precisely one year after the four of us got together on March 13th Friday the 13th um and taped an episode just as the Contours of this crisis were beginning to emerge um that was the week that the who declared a pandemic it was uh perhaps even more shocking that was the week the NBA suspended its season uh it's hard to believe I don't know if it it's it's hard to believe it's been a year it's it's hard to believe it hasn't been 10 years I went back and listened to that episode again um just to get a sense of what we were thinking at the moment it was episode 8 in that episode Dana told us that uh she was concerned that some businesses were not going to survive and that she was worried paral Boyd could be one of them uh Karen told us that um she was she was terrified not so much about the business uh her business specifically but about the economy overall and people she was close to especially people with uh high-risk Health profiles uh Jay was not quite ready to uh accept how bad this thing might get uh he told us he wasn't going to participate in the hysteria uh he told everybody's going crazy he made a reference to I think that morning he had been in a Costco and was trying to buy toilet paper I bring it up now after a year I'd like to talk about you know what is this year done to us and also to the people we work with and I'm especially curious about your employees um you know it's been a year like unlike any other um I'm I'm wondering where their heads are at what uh how they're holding up uh it's it's such a a tricky relationship between an employer and employee I mean especially with m mental health issues you know what do you want to know what are you allowed to know what can you ask uh to go a year without even seeing people it's it's it's such a different situation maybe Karen start with you I know you do regular surveys what are you hearing from your employees we do them usually quarterly but during Co we did them monthly which is a just a check-in on stress levels mostly um and for Co we our HR Director our chief culture officer she added a few more questions in there around um just sort of the state of your living conditions and you know trying to find out if is there anything we can do to help and you know in some cases it was they needed a better chair and so we would ship them a chair and just different things like that that we actually can do do you think they were honest with you about how much they were struggling oh yeah for sure yeah we we had and we have a very supportive culture anyway so we know that managers were checking in with their people and um colleagues with each other uh and so we had a lot of really coming together and helping everybody um and Linda is a psychologist as well our chief culture officer so she was able to actually really help people in ways that go far beyond her job description it took a long time to for everyone to get their heads around it but then towards the end of the year we had a bunch of people you know when when they could travel somewhere like go to Mexico for two months or go to Hawaii for a month and just work from there instead of um uh you know being in an apartment in San Francisco for example where the where our offices there were really shut down and they still are we had people just do things that they would that they love doing but it just wasn't really possible before so so that's been um a a plus for sure how about you Dana you your employees don't have the the option of working from home or working from Hawaii right what's it been like for you I re listen to the podcast as well um and I you're right I didn't know what I was going to do uh I didn't know if perly Boyd was going to survive and then if she did um what it would look like on the end of this my staff has had to do what they've needed to do in order to survive um because their survival isn't comfortable if that makes sense you know they're not salaried positions they're you know they are young men and women who um are hourly um and they're hopeful they're watching to see it turn around and they're seeing the business start to pick up week by week more and more customers more and more customers how about you Jay you have uh a mix of employees who've had to come in and employees who stayed home here's a little anecdote just give you a picture I sit in my office in the back of the second floor by myself I mean no one's coming to my office almost never and every 3 hours some woman with a mask on who's from a third part party company comes and is cleaning my door knob and wiping the the light switch and I'm sitting there thinking to myself wow I'm just spending money to have someone walking around wiping my door knob every three and she's going through the whole place so I I very casually say to my manager who's been with me for you know 25 years in framing I said uh God Nelly I'm sitting upstairs and every few hours this woman and she just she cut me off she said Jay people really appreciate it and you know what that's all I had to hear I said thank you I whatever it's costing which isn't insignificant if it makes people feel better nothing to think about I'm glad and and she knew that I will tell you though that this is where it gets tricky just because everybody shows up every day and looks like they're happy gol lucky they're not I mean people have stresses in their life whether it's their kids whether it's their aging parents whether it's their financial situation whether it's their physical being of any of the the above this is just layered on top of whatever was going on in their life before this hasn't helped any and lots of people have anxiety about a lot of stuff so it might look like everything's okay I recognize that everybody's not everybody probably most the people are paying a toll on this whole thing and unlike Karen situation which I'm glad there's been some upside I can't tell you I got a whole lot of upside from this whole thing I can't tell you that oh wow look at people were able to work from home I want those people back here the other shoe's going to drop at some point and that's going to be when this is quote unquote over and we want these people to come back to work and I'm going to start having conver well why can't I work from home and this isn't going to be a this isn't going to be a party I this is a problem and I I'm sure that some employees work better from home and it's worked out great I'm not arguing any of that there's going to be some people that are going to want to maybe still work from home and like that doesn't work for us and it might in some cases but it's just opened up a can of worms that I wished it wouldn't have are you open to some kind of hybrid maybe maybe maybe in some cases but then it's going to get to well wait why can she work from home three days a week and I can't and now we're going to have to start it'd be like telling your kids well I like you better because you never give me a you pain in the ass and know well you can't do it because once in a while I noticed you're not but you said you only have eight employees yeah but that's enough so then one of them what do you do I can't make make a blanket policy there's some people who have been with me for 15 years that I know will work just as hard at home and there's other people that I think they'd be getting more done if they were here and it's going to be a really difficult situation figuring out how to handle that and then some jobs you would just soon have the person here every day because things come up as the day goes on so we've made it work it hasn't been horrible it's worked better than I thought for sure sure but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be better if they were here it's difficult to keep a corporate culture and brainstorming and ideas and everything when the person's not here I I mean I have a couple of people that I literally I haven't seen them in 10 months and um Jay are you doing Zoom calls with those people at all no no and because I really have nothing in particular to but the but even if you don't you know just having like all of our phone calls our Zoom meetings which seemed Overkill at first but that saved us because I I feel like interesting I haven't not seen anybody like I see people more than I do normally and I say you know like see in quotes because we've got five offices and so I there's a lot of people that I just wouldn't see very often and so I but I see them all the time now and I feel like we are all closer together because of zoom and it's made everyone more accessible no that's interesting I'll have to think about that I have someone who is pregnant like somebody could have gotten pregnant and had a baby by now think about that and you would know about it they could have literally I have a when she comes in she's four months pregnant I didn't even know she was pregnant and if she was here not that it makes a difference but it's just they're not here but I some of these people I really would have never had a normal meeting with but I would have seen him in the hall I would have walked through the office I would have conversation about something I even started setting up meetings called hallway chats with the people who I would typically have those kind of important conversations in the hallway mostly the executive team but we would just every day something would come up in the hallway and we would solve it so I started I have a I had a twice weekly hallway chat and you would just come if you could and it was meant to be you would chat about you know what you're having for dinner or you would chat about something really important if if just like trying to simulate a hallway but I got to tell you I don't think I'm sleeping as well and and I and I have to layer on this isn't just Co this whole political situation and the social unrest and all the stuff that's messed up with this country is really disturbing and I think I'm gonna stop watching CNN and MSNBC and all of because I gotta tell you I think it's adding to the whole thing because I think you've told us that before Jay I think it's time for you to stop I work out on the elliptical in the morning for 40 minutes this morning I didn't turn it on I turned it on for three minutes and it was already too much I turned it on and I had to hear about inflation's it's like there was no upside to it so yeah I'm telling you today you can hold me accountable as of today next time I'm on the show you ask me I'm not watching TV for the next whatever because it's not helping my head any because it's really messed up the world's messed up I've turned out I think if I've learned anything through this pandemic um it's about leadership even leadership of my life Leadership of my time leadership of what I allow in my space I have a filter on my phone I get no more than 10 minutes a day on Facebook and it shuts off and you can't go back on it unless you override it which I don't do um because I've learned that leadership is what has gotten me through this pandemic leadership is why pely boy is still open and I can honestly thank this show for that if you remember listening to that e that that episode a year ago I concluded by saying in panic I don't know what I'm going to do I don't know I didn't have the confidence I was afraid right and so no I I decided the beginning of April or mid April what I was going to do after talking to my mom after you know even talking to you Jay um and deciding that it's up to me even in the expansion of my business you know with the things I choose to do I've chosen to be this type of leader in my personal life this type of leader in my business and this type of leader does not have time to count and calculate what everybody else is doing on Facebook this type of leader doesn't have time to allow for the television show of news to engage my anxiety to determine how productive I'm going to be because I'm worried about what may or may not come next I want to get back to the uh employees Karen I'm curious with your situation you have a lot of employees uh doing that survey if I were one of those employees I don't know how honest I would be on on that kind of survey I'm curious what you've turned up and and what's the what are you allowed to do as an employer have you had a situation where it is uncover I'm I'm sure it's an anonymous survey but if you have somebody with real mental health issues is there something you can do oh it's not that kind of survey and why wouldn't you be honest Lauren well because it's you're admitting vulnerability to an employer no not I mean it is anonymous and we're we're just doing things like gauging stress levels it's things like you know do you feel like you need to work longer hours on this specific project that you're on it it's meant to get a pulse of people's workloads and then you could talk and then I think it talks about external factors of contributing to your stress but it's it's not specific like do you list your name have a mental health issue but you have to understand the the kind of environment that we have which is very supportive and um and I I that's not lip service like it it really is we're really busy in that towards the end of the year um there's a high percentage of people who had high stress due to workload and so we we look at that and we we pay attention to it and we're like you know yeah so what we do is we start you know messaging broadly to the company like hey this we see this ending this Spike ending in the next two weeks um we're bringing on contractors just to let people know what we're doing to alleviate that and that we're not just ignoring it and expecting people to um sort of quietly suffer away so it's more like that but we do have loads of people who have been working with their managers and in some cases working with Linda to figure out you know how to how to get you know more real help outside of the company and there's a problem with that we have an employee who's been here for years that was having some anxiety and we were trying to accommodate this person by giving him some FMLA treatment you know so they could have some flexible time and they can't get an appoint ointment with a professional because they're overwhelmed um they couldn't get an appointment for 3 weeks or something so the health care industry is being is being burdened and I just did a little research before the podcast they think suicides in the United States are up 30% this year I mean it's there's people that are being pushed to the edge and you don't necessarily know it and um that's concerning and troubling and um it's not something that the typical employees going to necess walk into the office first of all I'm bigger than most companies I mean most companies don't have 100 employees most companies under 100 employees don't have an HR person so if you've got a company with 40 employees there is no HR department frequently and like who would they go tell that to it's it's really a problem in business at least I an HR person and I've had to learn the hard way whatever they do they keep me out of it now I made the mistake of thinking well I own the company I should know what's going on and boy was that a mistake so I realize now I've got an HR person she's competent um Karen's got her person there who's who's who's also got a psychology degree which is great if you don't have that and you've got a 20 person 10 person 30 person company and there's no one designated to do that who are they going to tell the owner of the company Dana so here's the thing again and this was what I struggled with during the pandemic there's a lot of layers when we're talking about how we as owners interact with our staff and what give us and what they give back right and and and all of our staffs are operating at different places so no we we don't have a um we don't have somebody you know with u mental health expertise on our staff to be there to talk like I I was listening to somebody last year and you know they called me after their podcast and said well Dana why don't you do a Dueling Piano Bar via Skype or or Zoom for your staff that's not what my that's not my staff right my staff when is my next check coming they might appreciate that but their mindset is Dana aren't you going to pay our checks through this pandemic aren't you going to pay for this because you're a business owner you're rich right there's a fine line that I'm willing to balance with my staff not because they're black not because you know they're hourly employees but if you come to me and that's the culture I have the culture at per boy is you are enough you are here to be kept here and not to be fired and so so we create a culture of open door but we respect that not everybody's going to be willing and comfortable to walk through that door because of what their own restraints are I'm very careful as to how personal I want to get with my staff also because I do have staff that sometimes doesn't understand the difference between Dana being my friend and my managers being my friend and being a good boss so there are these dynamics that are that are hidden that at larger companies or at at companies that have a different barrier of Entry than my company they're like well Dana why don't you do this well okay they're not Engineers these are 22-year-old women and men who are went to cosmetology school from McDonald's and they're not and I'm not saying we can't do it but I'm just saying that I'm very cautious I've been in that situation where I was that boss bringing that corporate culture that I was used to and and I I was a an employee leader and the breakdown that happened in my company because I was an employee leader I was involved I learned that distance at per Boyd was healthy because at the time my staff didn't know the difference between a good leader and a friend so I would get a text message at 2 o'clock in the morning saying my boyfriend just cheated on me are you up can we talk I don't think either any of you guys have had that text oh Dana don't think let me tell you something I've bailed several people out of jail in the middle of the night so don't think that I'm I'm there and and believe me I'm not at all telling you or anyone else you should have this ler I totally hear where you're coming from it just illustrates there is a huge bandwidth of different kinds of businesses and Karen is very much almost to the left or right whatever side at one end and you're very much there's a huge difference between having a bunch of whatever 6080 $100,000 people and doing what you do and I'm in the middle somewhere because believe me I've bailed people out of jail I've L the money for lawyers so I know what you're saying I don't disagree with a words you're saying Jay you CH I'm not saying you choose it but you put yourself in your company to be that leader I don't want my staff calling me asking me to bail me out of jail I don't want to guide a staff member through right and so that's so so that's the difference right yeah yeah no I get it I do I do only because the world's not a fair some of the stuff they got I mean one guy for instance I don't know if everyone knows this if you have a drink and you fall asleep in your car and your car is parked and there's keys in the car you can get a DUI so anyway I no is there's I'm not saying anybody should be doing anything I'm saying it's just a mix bag out there and there's there's issues out there and I personally I don't want to go around every employee say how I don't I don't want the responsibility of of you know Lauren I think you said do you want to know there's something I maybe don't want to know some of it there's only so much I can do at this point so um I certainly the biggest fail the biggest joke in business I think is the phrase oh we've got an open door policy great you know the bigger the company the less people come into the open door it takes far more than announcing we've got an open door policy I mean you have to actively go out there and talk to people and that doesn't fix everything I mean certainly everyone should have an open door policy but just because you have one doesn't mean that you've created an environment where people feel that they can come and talk to you so and I've been that leader I've been that leader where I'm the one Dana Dana Dana Dana Dana there's a lot of pride in my staff because Dana looks like me and she has this again there are a lot of cultural things that I stopped going to my salon getting my hair done because I was tired of going in and being the owner and then they come in and I'm trying to get a shampoo and they want to hear my life story they want to be inspired constantly and some days Dana doesn't want to talk Dana just wants to get her hair done and so the culture can be very different I was able to take the temperature for what did I sign up to do did I sign up to make an impact on these people's lives to this degree or did I sign up to make an impact on people's lives by by providing gainful employment a company that wants you to be there that will nurture you and your craft and pay you to do it and then if you choose to leave you are equipped you are a better operator because of it that's what I want to do and then I want to create economic opportunities so they can go back to their community and maybe open up a peral boy for themselves one day as a franchise I don't know but as far as Dana being front row and center and the personal lives of my staff I don't I literally was getting my hair shampooed a year ago and a young lady who had been working with me for 2 weeks walked up to me with her mother on uh on FaceTime and they wanted to ask me to be the Godmother of their daughter of their grand what and so no Dana's not going personal I think that that's a good illustration of how there's a huge difference and different kinds there a huge difference but as a leader but as a leader of the organization I'm committed to doing the things I just said I did that is how I do it work from home I don't as long as it's done my hair traffi controllers can't work from home but my operations manager can and as long as it's done I don't care if you're in Catman do because where you are affects how you produce I've been in that work environment where I've dreaded going into work right and loved getting stuff done from home because I didn't have to balance the Barack Obama questions right I didn't have the balance the can I touch your hair questions I Could Just Produce so for everybody Jay is you're saying H you know you like everybody around you but make sure you're getting the temperature and the culture that may not be completely obvious to you because you're the owner but try to make sure that it's working for everybody because not everybody is dealing with what you're not dealing with as an owner and this is a unique opportunity has to touch my hair so you got me on that one yeah it's not really something I I I like when people ask no I he no I'm not I totally understand where you're coming from I've asked you about your employees and some of your answers have have gotten into what this year has been like for each of you as well but I I i' like to ask that more directly H how are each of you doing um H how have you held up Karen um well it's stressful for everybody I mean all those things uh like Dan is saying is you it's a leadership moment you know for 365 days for sure um and um I miss seeing people and I breaks my heart to go in and see an empty office uh when we put so much energy into making that uh a really great space for our employees and our clients um and um yeah I mean it's managing kids school worrying about you know education and the worrying about the stress of the kids who are trying to keep up in school and you know that's real and big part of my life um and um um yeah but I mean I think you know again I'm trying to look for okay so what's what are some different ways of thinking and I'm going to get out of the city too so I'm going to I'm in the process of moving I have a little Cabin in the Woods in the mountains and um have always I've had it for a long time and I've always wished I could be there fulltime and um it just one day it kind of dawned on my daughter and I who's 12 that well why don't we we're you know she goes to school in person two days week right now and um and I can do the same with the office how far away is it it's an hour and a half from the city so you'll be able to do that on those two days a week yeah yeah and um you know in the rest of the time my neighbors are Elks and I look out at large trees in a little river and it's paradise and it was just never been an option before so um no it's it's a house it's a it's a real house um it's just it's all made of wood and it looks like you're in the I mean you are you're in the forest so it's at the it's near Mount rineer so it's sort of southeast of Seattle do you expect to stay there even once your office returns to being open full-time what in like 5 years from now do you think it's going to take that long it's well I mean going to it the the we are not going back to normal I know that for sure the world is different and employees are you know the competitors for us are are the tech Giants in terms of getting employees and they are changing the landscape never to never to return but you've talked to us about how much you want to get people back in the office oh I do but that doesn't mean I'm going to I mean it's like what you know what Jay says what I want isn't necessarily what's going to happen and so yeah I want everybody in there you know stuffed all together having great collaborative meetings but the reality is we've got a lot of employees who are asking to move to cities where in states that we don't even have offices and you know we're like at first no we we don't we need to at least have an office in that state so we're at least paying you know the HR taxes and the corporate um you know the state filings the city filings all of the HR laws like all of that kind of stuff it's a big deal to it's not insignificant to just let somebody go somewhere and then they're not connected to a physical office and so we're just dealing with that what I think is going to happen is people are going to come back for um collaborative working sessions with their project teams they're going to come back to meet with clients who come into town or want to have a inperson collaboration and the rest of the heads down work which is majority of what we do is going to happen at home and people are going to have that flexibility and they're going to be really happy as a result because you know we're the kind of work that we do allows that and we have to think differently and I have to think differently as the vision for the company and so we're not going to give up our space cuz we do need the physical research facilities that we have in them but it means that we have a lot more capacity in each office you know if if let's just say an office could have you know 100 people sitting at desk working now we have the capacity for three times that if people are sharing desks now or they're just coming in a couple days a week so it's just totally different way of thinking and it's taken me the whole year to get my head around it honestly we're running short of time let me ask you a couple of quick questions uh have any of you taken a vacation ha my last vacation was 2008 you need a vacation Dana I need a vacation Bahamas 2008 I certainly haven't gone anywhere how can you you can't even get on a plane I people do a lot of people do well I'm not a lot of people do I'm not doing it Karen you've got on a plane uh yeah I went to Mexico at Thanksgiving um for but I went for a couple of weeks and I did some work from there um I I haven't been on a I'm not interested in getting on a plane just you know for a quick J here or there or unnecessarily but um cuz it was you know it was not very comfortable I mean we but we got there and got back and it's fine um but that's that's about it but luckily I have this cabin in the woods and so I go there for the weekend and it feels like I'm a million miles away I have a granddaughter she's 14 months old she's never been with another kid think about that we got an interesting listener question that came in uh that I want to deal with uh it it's in reaction to the conversation we had last week uh with Dana about her considering uh expanding uh possibly going to another city like Chicago Atlanta or New York uh the question comes from John Styles who says he's a lifelong retailer with a company called underground clothing in Canada uh he he wrote the subject of the expansion plans uh for paral Boyd were interesting I was surprised a question that wasn't asked was how expansion outside of the Detroit area would provide operating synergies to her existing locations it would seem logical to me that building out Detroit would allow her management team to focus on a single geographic area Things become much more complex when your operations are spread out over multiple cities possibly time zones sticking to one market and having better marketing and operational synergies would make things easier to run and probably more profitable the next step after building a solid base in Detroit would be to step out into into new markets um I'm curious Danel what do you think of that oh it's a great question and it's one I've I've been wrestling with understanding this Market is why I'm considering going to other markets um and speaking to other entrepreneurs in this market like 10 of them and we're all on the same page the Detroit Market is a great place to start your business but Detroit has been through a lot and one of the biggest things it's been through is an um population down down turn and it doesn't have the population density to test truly test what you can do um in regards to operational synergies it's a matter of making sure he's right making sure your operations are put together in your one location um and then bringing on people that have broad experience a lot of experience managing and operating you know especially salons and businesses across the country so that is the The Experience my operations manager brings um doing it by myself was never an option um and is also one of the reasons why the Southfield location Clos is because let's focus on one and grow it but I what I don't want to do is miss an opportunity because we're throwing so much money into one location when there are some things that are working against us we're still doing all the marketing you know doing the most we can out of this Midtown location but I think I'd be missing an opportunity especially as we're trying to turn the corner with Co um I'd be missing an opportunity in looking at other markets and testing the viability there I don't think it's a loss um I think I'd be I think if this pandemic has taught me anything is to stay on fire and plow ahead I think there's opportunity to consider in the expansion it's also about not the pandemic it's about pan pizza and the pizza better here let's just be honest let's just let's be honest Dana part of it's about the pizza you want to come here for I lived in Brooklyn so you know I don't know if the pizza is better in Chicago than it is in Brooklyn real quickly uh Karen you recently were in the news for a very high-profile client of yours can you talk about that NASA yes tell us what you did we worked with the internal team um called the eyes team based out of JPL which is the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena who who has this amazing data visualization tool that they developed in-house that allows you to see any object in space that that any of the missions that NASA is working on you can see the planets you can see um all kinds of satellites zipping around up there um using actual um da engineering data to actually see these things and so we worked with them on on their many of their systems on the um user experience storytelling aspect of it the interface the visual design all that stuff and specifically they created a a separate little Standalone for the Mars Landing um where any of the TV coverage you would have seen of the Sim the data visualization of what it's going to be like when the Rover lands of the the different um stages of descent where the different parts of the spaceship are coming off and the Rover gets let down very carefully by some ropes and then lands and then the rocket Zips off and crashes somewhere else we designed all of that with them for me the most fun is when we meet with them but well prior to co we meet down at JPL and we've watched over the last several years the Rover being built there's a viewing room up above the clean room where they were working on it um and so I feel like the Rover is my good friend because I've watched it being born so pretty cool lastly Jay I I just want to share uh you've talked on this podcast quite a bit about your uh your thoughts on succession and how the pandemic has changed your thinking a little bit you would love to figure out a way to uh keep the business going even Beyond you for your employees if possible um and this week I did a uh a webinar conversation where I had you on with two business owners who've gone uh Employee Stock ownership plan they have esops and I I brought you on as the uh to be the natural SK IC that you are and to ask a lot of questions and I assumed uh you would poke a lot of holes in the uh in the idea and that would be that but um somewhat to my surprise and perhaps to yours it sounded like you took it seriously and were kind of interested I have to say I heard the phrase I knew what it meant I knew no details and it was quite interesting that the big I just cut to the chase there were two things that came out of it from one from each of the two guys that you had on there one is you don't necessarily give up control you can run your company there's not a committee running it you run it and the second thing is there's no downside to the employees because and as you know laurren I talked to you about I said to you this can't be true it is true you don't pay federal income tax and if you're an ESOP and that money can go into a pool that helps the employees buy the company from you and it's probably not an overnight thing but if you plan it out over a period of 10 15 20 years you're basically taking advantage of tax laws to generate some cash to help the employees buy the company and there's not a lot of downside for the employees if any and I'm sure it's very complicated and there's there's 50 different variations of the theme but it does appear that it works extremely weal in the right environment to which the surprise is there's only 8,000 of them in the United States now that you know more about it do you have a theory as to why there are so few I believe that there's a bunch of technicians involved with it and nobody in marketing because if I was a law firm and spe and had a person who specialized in this which exists I would be doing some I would be doing some PR and I would be placing some articles and I would be out there more because because it's very interesting and um as I said I think it would work for a lot of companies and you know you know me I've been going to the conferences for years reading articles magazines I've never read anything on it you didn't believe me when I told you that the ESOP doesn't have to pay income taxes I said Lauren that can't be POS Lauren Lauren you got that wrong that can't be possible it's true you you don't pay federal income tax it's unbelievable so I think it's very interesting I will look into it some more it's not just oh look at what a good person I am I'm going to sell it to my employees it's it's it's really um of a tool to use to get your money out of your company period and and and provide a good thing for your employees at the same time it's it's a win-win for everybody I think unless I got it wrong but I don't think so we'll find out we'll probably discuss that more going forward uh I want to thank Karen Clark Co Jay goz and Dan white uh as we discussed at the beginning this has been quite a year I really appreciate you guys sharing uh a good part of your year with me and uh and with our listeners wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n at21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21 hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]