I Want to Double Sales This Year

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week we introduce another new member of the 21 hats podcast team Liz picarazzi who talks Shan busy and Paul DS through a series of challenges she's facing at her business City bin among those challenges why she outsourced her manufacturing to China why she's trying to bring it back why she struggling to find an American fabricator that wants her business why she thinks she wasted all of the money she spent last year on digital marketing how she managed to double sales anyway and where she found the right person to handle the aspects of running City bin that she doesn't think she's good at 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 joining me this week on the podcast are 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 where it makes custom conference tables and Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins the episode is titled I want to double sales this year welcome Shan Paul and especially our newest 21 hats podcast regular Liz picarazzi it's great to have you all here Liz you're the new kid this week uh let's start with you tell us about your business City bin what do you guys do Lauren it's so great to be here so City bin makes modern trash enclosures that hide trash and keep out rats we also make package delivery lockers um due to the rise in package theft as we all know and probably have experienced um package theft is on the rise so we adapted our trash enclosure to become a a package Locker um and now we sell those two products along with some other outdoor storage products um as part of a portfolio of City bin premium outdoor products and how do you sell do you do you sell to stores sell direct to customers so we sell direct um about 80% of our business is direct um selling to property managers and residential homeowners in the New York area and about 20% of our business is online our bins are pre-fabricated and ready to assemble so they can be shipped Nationwide do do you make them yourselves no we do not so these are all pre-fabricated they're made out of um sheet aluminum so the cabinet is made out of a sheet aluminum that doesn't rust and uh the boards are a bamboo composite that's typically found in decking so it's really good for outdoor use uh we manufactured in the US for several years um and we moved it over to China about three and a half years ago and how did that work out so I'm a little bit in limbo right now um due to all the supply chain issues was it working well before the supply chain issues and Co yes so that's a good question Lauren and I I don't love answering this question directly when I'm asked but it actually was going very well uh before the pandemic Manufacturing in China you were happy with the manufacturer and with the price you were paying and the service yeah I was happy with the quality which a lot of people don't think about with China um I was very happy with the price and also with the timing I'm sometimes able to get product from China faster than I could get it from Connecticut prior to the pandemic all right so what happened with the pandemic so with the pandemic really all of the raw materials that we use from you know aluminum to Bamboo you know those all get shut down in China all of those factories so the raw materials that go into our product was really backlogged um and then once the factories opened up and they were manufacturing again we were in line yet again you know and we're a smaller company so we're not usually at the front of the line we're usually in the back and probably continually pushed back but then the biggest issue was that um you know getting a getting a container to come over in the sale date you know and the price so we used to pay about 7 to 9,000 for a 45t container and you know we've paid between 23 and 25 at different points during the pandemic so our freight costs have increased a lot but I say that I'm in limbo because we have found um a couple of factories in the US including one in New Jersey that we're going to start working with because we want to really diversify the risk that we experienced and continue to experience in the supply chain have you got a deal with somebody to to to make your stuff in the US we have a proposal and it is to do a small um small run of our trash enclosures and we're going to be doing that probably starting in February kind of as a test as a test yeah and I mean the way that I view this is I'm not choosing China or New Jersey I'm diversifying so I'm going to produce in both we'll see when it comes along we have certain business that I think it would be very good to have a US manufacturer especially if you want to do Government Contracting is there a huge price difference there is um it's significant um so it's still about 30% difference even when you consider the increased Freight and the tariffs we ran uh highlighted a story in the morning report this week about what it's looking like in China because of Omron they're expecting it to sweep through the country and expecting a lot of factory shutdowns and ports having to close are you worried about that I'm actually not so worried about it because we just made a gigantic order a few months ago that is arriving in a couple of weeks and we ordered three times the inventory that we normally do because of the pain of the supply chain and we just had to suck it up you know even though the freight is so expensive we still knew that the higher need was to get the product over here so that's looking like a pretty good decision yeah I think that we're going to get through and not need to worry about closure with any of our suppliers did you ever think about buying or building a factory and making your stuff yourself uh maybe for about three minutes ask Paul about that yeah Paul what would you have said had she asked you I'd say owning a small Factory is the easiest way to make a gigantic pile of money that anybody's ever figured out for those who don't know you Paul uh I think that might have been sarcasm might have do I think that that if you if you can avoid it don't build your product I mean there's a ton of things that okay we make stuff but I don't dream of making my own nuts and bolts and screws and what have you and there's not a whole lot of difference you just decide where you want to draw the line and what you control and why you want to control it Liz just a kind of a question about your manufacturing process so um sheet metal you know I'm guessing they're using CNC brakes and folding things and doing that are you doing the final assembly you know with your team so it's shipping over flat and then you're building the boxes there or yes yes so they all come over as components so the whole line is modular so if someone has three trash cans they'll get a three module you know if they have seven they get a seven module and they all come in boxes with the boards already riveted on you know all of the cabinets and panels completely made and then kind of like Ikea we have a very good instruction book where you know people on the other end can put it together um but in the New York City area probably over 90% of our customers do our installation service um and our guys can put these together so fast I mean it's been freezing here in New York and the other day they did like three installations in one day um that you know a Layman would would take a lot longer right so I'm I'm imagining tell me if I'm wrong or right on this so I've seen a lot of CNC Machining move back from China because the parts are relatively small and they're being fed through really expensive Machinery that you know you can either Buy in China or you can buy here in the States but sheep metal is kind of a different Jam right like in terms of the equipment that's used for it and sort of the human capital that's necessary to um to sort of move it around and put it in crates yeah um I think that is true I mean really the human capital factor is is really like the labor cost yeah it's like the machine shops in the states have optimized around Automation and machinery and so they've reduced their human capital costs but the sheet metal stuff it's still super human intensive so so bringing it back to the states is a really hard proposition uh I imagine for for somebody like yourself yeah well the gulf between our current price and the US price is it's really deep and we haven't made any sort of severe moves because we are waiting for everything to level but I just know when's that going to be Liz well we're going to do this small production run in February and you know we're just going to make a bunch of samples that we're going to sell the customers at a discount at a as a test run um and really see not only the quality and the price but also the relationship so you know we we need to trust our all of our suppliers and feel like they're going to prioritize us and they're going to be excited about the product um and in my prior attempts in the US to manufacture I didn't always find that you talked to uh a number of different uh possible uh Fabricators is that right I did and did you have a lot of options or were was it tough to find a place that met your needs so I did a pretty extensive search and um a lot of places just didn't reply at all to the inquiry and then those that did you know you go through a process of getting a proposal and getting them all the drawings okay I'll just say it I didn't really experience the level of enthusiasm for what we do than I would have liked but I'm always sensitive to that especially when I'm thinking about a relationship with a new vendor do you think that's because of the size of the business yeah I do um and I think this is so weird it almost found sounds like a romantic relationship but I think they know that I still have China as an option so they're almost like insecure about putting too much into it because I always have that as the option again that's just the me projecting what they could be thinking but I do that a lot in my life well they have to know that it would be attractive to you to bring it back yeah well you got to put yourself in the shoes of these guys gals that own these these shops right they have been like kicked in The Shins for the last 30 years with you know partnership-based relationships moving overseas that's been their life and and so I I can appreciate their skepticism it's sort of like oh yeah you need us now but as soon as things normalize you're going to take the stuff back overseas so why should we invest all this time money and energy in something that's going to be a fly by night that thought crosses my mind a lot and the best I can do is try we'll see I'm not I don't have a lot to lose by doing this test run and you know there are certain contracts government contracts that I wouldn't even be eligible for if I didn't manufacture in the US so you this diversification needs to happen in any case I think there's another Factor at work too which is that we've seen a an arrangement of the entire world of economy that developed over the last 25 years or more Suddenly upended by Co and it's not that easy to shift a factory from doing one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff and American particularly machinist were all encouraged to go much higher Tech much more Precision I mean I happen to know two guys who own a machining company and they've concentrated on Aerospace and medical and that requires a level of precision and and investment and training and a certain kind of Workforce that's I mean no no offenseless but it's Way Beyond what your product requires and so asking them to take a guy who could be making them a th000 bucks an hour making medical devices and make them 100 bucks an hour I mean this is the all-in price not just the labor price uh making a city bin they just don't want to do it it's not that simple for them because one of the hardest things to do on any Factory floor is to maintain two different quality levels so we run into this all the time we trying to offer Products that come in at a different range of prices and we do that by managing the complexity of what we build but what we can't do is have like the Tyro crew over in one corner and the expert crew in the other corner it's really hard to manage that because it causes a ton of internal problems oh my gosh Paul that's so insightful we've tried to do that on the service level you know where we try to go down Market to smaller businesses it just doesn't work we can't we can't have a factory that Services both of those businesses at the same time I'm not going to say that every boldline American manufacturer is really fantastic at customer relations either because we've run into the same issue of you're trying to find a vendor to do something and it seems like they don't even answer the phone they don't read their emails if they do they put the guy who hates everybody on customer relations you know it's like what are you people thinking I don't know if you if you let people own their own companies and run them their own way you get a certain amount of that Liz let's take a step back for a moment you were not always an entrepreneur in fact uh you had a corporate career uh not too long ago uh tell us about that and how did make the leap sure so um when I first moved to New York in 2002 I had a fresh MBA and a lot of MBA debt and a lot of motivation to get a corporate job to pay off that debt and to move on with you know getting married and having a baby and house so I was very motivated to get a corporate job and I did um so I worked at American Express for seven years um I worked with small businesses and the small business division um I was a marketing executive and uh we did a lot of customer research um you know focus groups I did a lot of those um they had a lot of events where they brought in entrepreneurs to speak in a big Auditorium and whenever I was in that a Auditorium I wanted to be on the stage like not performing but I knew I was an entrepreneur and I shouldn't be in the auditorium in the seats I knew I should have been up there being that entrepreneur I was in this environment where I wanted to be what my customer was but I did tell myself I'm not going to start a business until I feel that there is a true need um because working in corporate you know you often work on things for which there really isn't a customer need so you know after having worked on many projects that were multiple months and didn't end up going anywhere you know I was kind of left with the feeling of in my next Incarnation I want to do something that I can start and finish in a day and I'm going to have a tangible result so I thought I'm going to wait till I have a customer need that I feel myself and that came along when I bought a house and was doing some Renovations and experienced with what most of us experience with home contractors and that's that they're very um unreliable and untrustworthy and um it can be very discouraging so I had the idea to have a handyman business which became called checklist handyman services um and it was New York's um largest uh women-owned licensed insured five-star um handyman company in the city and uh what happened with that business is a story for another day well well tell us first how hard was it for you to make a leap from a secure well-paid executive role at American expr press to starting a business so I think my transition both in terms of like finances and planning was I was in a pretty good place because I had been working there for like seven years I had a little bit of savings but then most importantly I created a business plan I wrote a business plan for the handyman business so that then when I was laid off which was in August of 2011 I had this business plan in my back pocket and I had already been working on it I already had you know rented a desk at a shared office space to to make myself like start this company because I was paying rent somewhere in terms of what the transition was it was it was a little bit rough culturally because I was used to kind of a lot of MBA types and a lot of strategy and Marketing Executives and I never felt entirely comfortable in that world but I functioned pretty well in it but then when I brought that approach to my group of handymen they kind of were like who is this woman who has a few tools thinking she can start a handyman business and that cultural shift was a little difficult but I actually really liked the cultural change in some ways because in this team we really work together and got stuff done it wasn't like meetings meetings about meetings and meetings about meetings about meetings and that's what can happen in corporate I loved American Express and I feel so blessed that of all the Departments that I was working in the small business department um because I learned a lot about small businesses and and also really had the had the appetite for becoming a small business owner myself what led to the leap from your first business to City bin so that was another case of me having my own need that turned into a business um so I live in New York City and like most people I have an attached home without a driveway or garage so we keep our trash cans right in front of our homes the handyman company we had customers that were asking for custom trash enclosures and so we started building them and then I'm a marketer so I started marketing them and we got more business and more business and then I realized I want to create this and spin it off and make it prefab and make it into a whole brand and ended up selling the handyman company and focusing entirely on City bin what's been your most effective marketing the product itself referral the product itself so you know in New York if people are walking around you know my product is not a light fixture inside of someone's home it's a trash enclosure right in front of someone's home that has a big branding plate on it that says City bin how about paid marketing this is a a bad subject for me but I have some resolution on it so I dabbled with paid ads in 2021 as I always have in previous years and finally in looking at my 2021 results on different things different things I spent on marketing um I made the decision that I'm never going to do a Google ad Facebook or Instagram again the only way I would do it and I'm actually open to this and maybe even some 21 hats listeners can convince me of this is that I would need someone to tell me how do you do this right because I've paid people to do it I've tried to do it myself there's definitely a lot of snake oil salesmen out there um so I just I made this decision and I felt like it kind of took a lot of spending in order to come to that decision which I don't like but it was a firm decision and I declared it to the team last week were you putting most of your money in payperclick or some other type of AD we were doing remarketing otherwise known as display ads so anyone that hits the city bin website is cookied and then we serve them ads in other places well my experience a huge percentage of my business comes from Google and a lot of people have asked me about okay how do you manage that and I've come to the conclusion that the the way we succeeded was to have started back in 2003 and that Google just simply chose us one day to get a top organic result and that's been the best thing like spending money more money or less money the question is who's in the top organic position for your product and if there's somebody who's doing a reasonably good job there already you can give Google all the money you want and it still won't move the needle because somebody's there so I think it's it's much it's not really discussed much how the whole system of online advertising favors the incumbents and uh but that's a critical part of anybody who's on a journey from being utterly obscure to trying to be known you just have to take that into account yeah on organic search for trash enclosure we actually come up number three behind Amazon and Home Depot which isn't a surprise so I'm feeling pretty good about that actually yeah we're doing really really well in that we're able to track who finds out about us both kind of on the website because there's a lot of reporting but we always ask people and I don't remember anyone ever saying that they found out about us through some sort of Instagram add Sean any thoughts I guess my the top thoughts that come to my mind are that very few service providers will ever tell you that they can't succeed um with what you want to do um so you know it could be that there's not enough people searching for terms or that the market is super expensive or all those there could be these huge barriers and to your snake oil comment it's it's rare that you'll find somebody who will walk away and and say you know I'm not going to take your money because it's not it's not going to produce anything it's just a tough space and I and I empathize and sympathize with you I'm kind of Cur the kind of thought that goes through my mind is you know it's it's not what you make it's what you keep and I'm kind of curious you know is your product the same as these other products that are out there is it like so radically different that the price point can be also radically different that you could charge more and afford to do things like produce it in the US and then I'm also super curious about your package delivery pivot and how that's going so those are I have more questions than answers so we're premium if someone wants a Rubbermaid trash shed they're not going to want mine our customers know that they want something that's going to last that's going to look good add curb appeal and you know for people in New York City keeping out rats um we launching an enclosure in the spring to keep out bears as well so we're really different New York City Bears it's a problem um Montana well that'll be fun I'll have to share that on the podcast because we're getting certified as a bear prooof product and we're going out to Montana with our bins and having grizzly bears attack them and uh they're bait with food and of course could we do a live podcast from that test that needs to be video that has to be video it is going to trust me I've done a lot of rat marketing and this is the bear marketing and there's eventually going to be probably squirrel others but the main two need to be the Bears raccoons exactly I do have an observation which is that you're you're born and bred New York City and if you wanted to take the message of American made to Market that I would be looking at a different geographic area because we do a lot of business with people who specifically are interested in americanmade I mean you could map it uh it's not necessarily the northeastern liberal enclaves and so that if you can make sure your product can be shipped and assembled easily then you can hit the entire country as a market and start talking about the things that you know the reasons why you're americanmade and and sort of ride that but you'll have to stop Manufacturing in China I mean it's an interesting idea Paul like Liz you know to like really pivot your strategy to a kind of video and storytelling Centric one of hey here's the guy or gal who makes your thing in this Factory and here it is being tested in Montana with grizzly bears and you know like really compelling connection to the product and then you charge more for it I'm sure you charge a premium already but just even more of a premium um I I don't know you're a marketer so I'm sure these thoughts have crossed your mind well they definitely have we have probably 60% B2B and 40% B Toc so we work with a lot of property managers Architects developers um and really want to build out that business and you know need to look at their price sensitivity too because they're already paying for a premium product like they know too they're paying a lot more than any of the Alternatives so shifting that price up a bit in order to get the American made feels a little risky to me have you set sales goals for this year Liz so I want to double sales this year as we did last year um and that would put us at 2.6 million that's great you doubled sales that's what was the driver to that was it the package thing or something else no I wish it was the package thing cuz I'm so so passionate about that package locker but it just doesn't sell as well as our trash enclosures um I would say there were two reasons for the growth um one of them is that people invested a lot in their homes outdoor living in particular it was something where there were there people that really wanted to spruce up their outdoor space um the second reason is actually that my husband joined the company as coo and he's really good at the things that I'm awful at for example anything having to do with Logistics operations inventory planning um you know he comes from a background of kind of logistics and inventory planning and um I don't like that I'm not good at it and you know so he was able to take that off my plate but then Additionally you know everybody reports to him now I only have one direct report and it's my husband he's really also talented in sales so he at first when he joined was very reluctant like I'm not that sort of a person in sales I've never done it before and then I think as you saw all the business coming in and realizing that we pay a commission to anyone else who sells for us that makes him want to pick up the phone before anybody else which he does and he's he really likes sales now um so he does sales and then he also manages the sales so one thing I never did in the past which I'm almost a little ashamed of is I never really had a list of um opportunities that we were working like even though we have HubSpot and other crms over the years like I've never been one to manage sales and he actively does that we're running a little short on time and there are a couple other things I wanted to to hit today uh one Sean I wanted to go back to something you mentioned last week which intrigued me you you mentioned that the the real Turning Point uh for your business was your experience in in EO the entrepreneurs organization could you just tell us a little bit about what EO did for you yeah sure um and I mean probably should probably Express a lot of gratitude for the organization because it was a really affordable mentorship and learning program that put structure to running a small business so they had a curricula you know they went through different units on finance strategy marketing you know all the kind of core elements of a business and you know i' never had that framework before and so as kind of a recovering academic you know once I was like oh here's how to here's how I can organize the business that was I think 50% of it and recognizing what are my areas of strength and weakness was huge recognizing for example I'm probably a lot like Liz you know I I didn't thrive in finance I didn't thrive in operations you know I thrived in areas of marketing communication strategy sales actually I I kind of grew to love sales once I understood that it was actually helping people find answers and so that combined with the other element which was mentorship and peer learning really accelerated my development as a leader and my thinking from a strategic standpoint um so it it it helped me shift from being an artisanal Craftsman for for lack of a better word to thinking about entrepreneurship in a structured way and that was you know really transformative and then they helped me by handing me a lot of great books that accelerated my learning as well you know the concept of Blue Ocean strategy which I've mentioned before you know getting out of highly competitive marketplaces and being remarkable in a in a space where there's a lot less comp ition I hear such mixed things from people about uh peer groups yeah you know and actually despite the really great experience I had the accelerator program I had a not awesome experience in the EO um kind of core program um yeah so I graduated up into um the manio group and and that in in retrospect was a function of the group that I was assigned to so they did they didn't have a really wonderful way of match people to groups it was kind of a free-for-all and so ended up in a group that was kind of in chaos and disarray so I didn't have a great experience there um but others in the same chapter have had wonderful experiences and I've come to learn like it's it's really all about the the folks who are in the group and how they structure the group uh I did a vistage stint for a while that was okay um but I learned pretty quickly that it's so important to get the right values alignment and and I was in a group that largely was you know kind of older business owners who were ketching about how their employees weren't working hard enough and I was like well this is really not my people um so and and and the the the leader of that group was trying actively to change the mindset of the group but like any culture you know it's kind of like turnning the Queen Mary um I don't think he was willing to get rid of um member who were really not going to change their attitude about employees being the problem but trying to bring in new folks like myself who are like no no no it's the employees who are everything so so I think that's my message is you really have to vet groups carefully I also have been a member of EO and I'm not an active member right now um partly because I was in the Brooklyn EO chapter and they closed so then I was deciding whether to join the New York EO chapter and that was during the pandemic and I thought why pay all this money if they're not meeting but I'm thinking of joining it and what I can say about it is that any hour I can spend with another business owner is worthwhile like whether we go to lunch or we sit together in an EO Forum or we you know talk through 21 hats you know it the relatedness that you can feel with other business owners is different than that you feel with other people in your life and that's part of the reason why entrepreneurs get so lonely is that they lack that relatedness so for me eo's done that but it also I have some like really big decisions business decisions that I made through consultation with my EO mates you know everything from selling my first business you know to Manufacturing in China so my my China connection came through EO as well so I feel like it's been worthwhile but you do need to be careful um I have had a couple of groups where I go and I'm really excited about the topic or the content and then I get there and it's 20 new business owners like I've been in business for 11 years now that that course is going to be very different for someone that hasn't launched their business yet Paul does that match up with your experience with vistage no I think that I was extraordinarily fortunate to get into a great group with a great group leader and it's been it's been interesting because we were all sort of of a piece when started and several of the members have gone on a growth and uh growth path that's way way more impressive than anything I've been able to accomplish uh but I've been able to observe that and and and have good relationships within the group and so it's really hard for me to comment on the broad you could end up with anything has been my my experience talking to other people who've been in groups Sean you're you're talking about a bunch of crusty old guys and that didn't feel like a fit for you although I would challenge you like you think in 40 years you're not going to be a little crustier oh I'm already crusty Paul I haven't felt the need to go looking at other groups so I don't want to make any any pronouncements about the value of all business groups because I just don't have a wide experience mine has been good and it's similar in my mind to I've only been married once because it it was the best possible choice I could have made I don't need to look for another one another wife so that's how I feel about my vitage group yeah and I'd also add you know as much as I had some frustrating experiences we have some clients who are in vistage groups and other EO groups like have had amazing experiences it's just yeah it's sort of like asking how is marriage it's like well it depends I want to just jump on what Liz said that that an hour spent with another business owner in any con text is almost always well spent I totally agree with that and one of the things that I've done and since I started working with Lauren and writing for the New York Times was just completely changed my attitude towards looking outside the business for help and advice and now I will talk to anybody anytime about anything because there's such a wide range of people and businesses in this country and all over the world that it's just interesting what people do for a living is an amazing range of things and there's almost nothing lost by spending some limited amount of time anyway with with business owners because the shift in perspective is what informs me on my own decisions and getting back to your Cadre of crusty people I've heard a lot of people complain about employees and I've had a lot of employees and some of them definitely inspired complaints but just hearing that like well why do those guys think that their employees are terrible and you came to a conclusion I'm sure Sean that some of it was them but you you it's worthwhile to know why people end up in that state of mind what were they thinking where did they come from what did their parents teach them how did their business Journey go what was their Market was it an easy way to make money or were they being ground to dust right all those are great points Paul I this thing that that that I struggle with is you know I gave that vistage group quite a bit of time um and a lot of listening and over time recognized you know my time is finite so that's the other challenge is where do you spend that time um because it's it's it's an investment you know the vistage day they're like whole days or half days you know they're big Investments of time and so the challenge I'm facing with right you know is is finding where to go and who to listen to where I can get a lot of insight and and I think that's the advice I would give is um being thoughtful about that as opposed to just jumping into a space u that was my mistake honestly so before we go the last thing I want to cover is uh as we're taping this um we keep reading stories we're we're all being hit by a wave of Omron and a wave of inflation and I'm wondering if either of both of those or both of those things has affected any of you um H how about you Paul well we we had it hit uh the week between Christmas and New Year I had seven employees walk into my office and say oh someone in my family is sick or I'm sick or I'm going to get sick and so we had to do a little bit of a reset in terms of thinking about going back back to masks and encouraging boosters and all that but I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that we can't actually treat Omron the same way we we dealt with Delta and the previous incarnations of covid we just can't I can't lose someone for five or 10 days just cuz they were in a room with someone else who might have been sick now my employees are all vaccinated and uh I'm not worried about any of them dying from this disease so we actually changed our policy to CO as far as Paul Down's cabinet makers is concerned is just another illness we had policies prior to co that said basically if you're too sick if you feel like you want to stay home stay home we have personal days for that if you're feeling a little under the weather and you want to work work and I'm going back to that there's no no more special exemption because we simply can't afford to lose our Workforce and we're not a kind of business that you can perform from home so if the company's going to stay healthy that's what we got to do and that may not be the most woke of all covid positions but that's where I'm at Liz how about you uh has either inflation or covid hit you guys covid with our our team we've been fine um most people have had it in the office the place where it has affected us is at the warehouse because a lot of warehouse workers and truckers have been hit with covid and so um you know we normally go out to the warehouse once or twice a week and you know we would show up there and our stuff wouldn't be ready so that has had an impact yesterday we had a major carrier XO Logistics simply didn't pick up our stuff after several days didn't answer the phone at the terminal apparently the whole Philadelphia operation got Co and just shut down and so the biggest effect of Co on us has been just trying to get our product out of here and it's really it's causing problems Sean I asked you about this last week and I think you said uh working remotely you've been able to handle it pretty well uh with everybody remote that's still the case yeah I think we're all right the consequence for a service business like myself is I think cultural you know so like we had no holiday party um I we've not had many face-to-face meetings that I would prefer to have face tace and I just think there's a long-term um degrading impact on companies that can work remote you know I know of a business owner who had a party a holiday party and all members that attended it 20s something people got Co at the exact same time your business cannot function because everybody's sick at the same time so we're trying to be careful to not have everybody get sick because we think it'll probably hit everyone at some point or another but it's about not having it happen all all at once my thanks to Shan busy Paul DS and uh especially Liz picarazzi thanks for joining us this week Liz look forward to continuing these conversations 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 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 Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]