I Would Have Been a Sub of a Sub of a Sub

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week sha busy Paul DS and Liz picarazzi talk about when it makes sense to walk away from a client Liz for example is tired of dealing with bureaucracy and being at the bottom of the food chain in one instance she was so turned off that she actually recommended a competitor for a job she no longer wanted Paul has a simple test if it's easy work for a bad CL okay fine but if it's hard work for a bad client just don't do it of course there are times in the life cycle of most businesses when that's easier said than done when you have to accept almost any work offered those are the tough ones plus is it time for business owners to take artificial intelligence seriously and should owners care that a well-known economics firm is predicting a depression for 2030 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 when Jake 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 CEO of Paul DS cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Liz P gazi CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins the episode is titled I would have been a sub of a sub of a sub [Music] welcome Sean Paul and Liz it's great to have you here we spent a lot of time talking about marketing and generating Revenue today we're going to talk a little about turning work down saying no to potential Revenue Liz I gather you've done this recently can you tell us about it sure so I've had a couple of instances this year that if they had happened last year I would have been really frustrated that the deals didn't go through but because because these deals didn't work out this year I am feeling really relieved like I dodged a couple of bullets and in one instance it was sort of like a city project that had come up as potential kind of 2021 range it was one of these things where I would have been a sub of a sub and maybe even a sub of a sub of a sub and the distance between me and the decision maker was so long that the thing took a really long time and there was a lot of Confusion And I think it was you know it's a government it's due to bureaucracy but kind of when we reached the end of it we had put in our bid a couple of years earlier and at the time it was for 2/3 of what was in the RFP and we are very clear this onethird we're not going to handle you're going to need to find another vendor for it they went off they couldn't find a vendor for it they came back to us wanted us to do all of this new product development to develop something for them and we basically said no like we haven't been paid a dime we've been on phone calls with you for over two years you've had these teams just changed and the people involved different cast of characters so um I don't want to say they broke up with us or I broke up with them but I think it was M mutually understood that it wasn't a good fit and it was so much of not a good fit that I even recommended a competitor to them because I knew the competitor could offer that onethird that I couldn't and that actually was kind of the end of it because then they had the full like that other competitor also happened to have the other two-thirds of the stuff but it was a lot of time it was very frustrating and I think what's notable about it is that the starting from such incredible excitement wow this would land us into this new city agency that had we would be able to scale across this huge portfolio down to at the end like actually recommending a competitor like who in the world would have thought that would have happened when it first started up two years ago so another recent example especially in the last couple of months is we've gotten requests a lot of requests for a different type of trash container which I have thought that we might want to get into but when they come in I realize that we have so many other products that we're really busy with we actually have three product launchings which I haven't even talked about on here that I don't want to get distracted from and so I can feel more confident to walk away a couple of them are intriguing and I'll kind of keep it in the background as something in the future we might want to do but anything with government where there's multiple layers between us and the decision maker we've decided to stay away from because it can really suck up the time you know if there's a change in the guard or change in administrations the work that you've been doing can be essentially cancelled and it's just the cost of servicing and the cost of acquiring certain customers that end up to be high maintenance the problem is that you don't know if they're going to be high maintenance to begin with and so we're really kind of looking as we move forward for any sort of indicators that they're going to be a pain in the ass hey Liz is this a design issue is meaning like folks are asking you to design Solutions as part of an RFP and that takes work and communication Etc or is this a workflow issue meaning that you're selling to somebody who's selling to somebody who's selling to somebody or is it both of those issues it's actually both okay double whammy all right it's double whammy so what I hear you saying is it's like you want to get out of the like selling to people who are selling to people who are selling to people so that's one piece and then the other piece around folks asking you to do Design Services in order to get a job are you going to still do that or you know will you do that if it's selling directly to the end buyer I mean a lot of our Design Services over time have come from customer requests and almost like a prototyping relationship where we're ideating with them and we're coming up with a solution that's how we came up with our package Locker our mailbox we just launched composting actually yesterday in Boston and that's something where they essentially fund the development so if we're taking like 80% of existing product and we're developing a new module for them they'll essentially be paying not a design fee per se but the cost per unit is a lot higher because they're more like one-offs do they agree to buy it in advance or is it speculative they buy it yeah they do agree to buy it in advance Co okay but with one of them it was it would would have been incredibly speculative and it was weirdly speculative while we knew that a competitor had like exactly what they wanted so then we thought well why would we put our funds toward developing this if we don't know that we could definitely develop something that's better than that competitor when in many other areas we dominate and we're better than that competitor why try to get into their space well there's reasons uh if the competitor has a product that on paper looks good but everything else about that company is a disaster then you have the opportunity to eat their lunch cuz product development is is an indication really of customer service you have to be communicating back and forth with the client and you have the opportunity to demonstrate the intangibles of working with you I guess they're fairly tangible but they're not just the product and that can be a real distinguishing element when you're working with clients we're doing this every day that's what we do we get all kinds of requests from people and we have to decide whether there are any or not and a lot of well I would say 100% of the time the people who approach us have easy to access cheaper alternatives and so if you're going to be working developing new products you could sort of make it a thing you do and not just be scrambling now I don't think you intend to become a custom maker CU your manufacturing is actually in China and I don't know how you handle that when you just need one of something but you know it's just like a business decision about first do we want to deal with these people second are we the kind of company that can do that now if you got 15 inquiries for a composting bin that's an indication people need composting bins but if you tailor Your solution to any one of those people you may not really be making the market acceptable product you may be too custom to roll out for the whole world so again a decision I'm hearing people want this they're calling me for it do I want to just create the offering that I think is the best fit for the large this number or actually become a custom manufacturer and if you don't have in-house manufacturing it's really hard to be a custom manufacturer in terms of your process somebody comes to and says hey I I'm an architect I'm you know developing this you know floor plan for this you know big fancy Corporation and we need a we need a giant conference table you know there's a design element to that do you do that as part of your Discovery process do you charge for that how does that work in your business we we do it for free and uh we do a lot of work for free because we are as I said we're never the cheap alternative and we're never the fast alternative so what we have to do is show right from the get-go that we're the best alternative and that means that my particular selling process is about giving away a design more or less but what's more interesting is the process we had to set up a process by which we can produce designs and we do that all the time so we're good at it but the process by which you share the designs is really customized and a lot of what we will give away or not give away or show or not show really depends on the configuration of the client and what they're likely to do with if we just handed them hey here's some ideas and so with some clients you just give them the whole package here it is say yes or no and that's usually when you're dealing with a decision maker directly and then with some other clients where you're dealing with say a mid-level corporate buyer you don't want to do that you want to show them that you can solve the problem but you don't want to give them the stuff because they'll just take it and send it to somebody else for pricing and so we have to decide so what what's the difference there Paul how much what what do you show if you don't want to give it all away well it's not necessarily what you show it's how you show it so we have ways of of showing things that don't put end up with a easily sharable file in the client's hands and that's usually doing a screen share showing them animations like giving them the whole pitch but not giving them the files and then in other situations like suppose we're dealing with a uh an executive assistant to the CEO of a billion doll Corporation we will give that person everything because what we find is that the CEO is not going to be looking at any of this during his workday or her workday and so we want to give it it to them in a format where at 4 in the morning when they've done everything else they're like oh yeah I got to look at the table it's just there for them everything and so we've learned through hard experience just how to analyze who are we dealing with and exactly how do we want to uh how do we want to share do we want to do a complete you know like here here it is or a slow strip teas or you know whatever there's a lot of different ways to do it and it really depends on on the buyer and we learned a lot of this from sales training which is to not just give away complete Solutions but to think carefully about when you might want to do that when you might not want to do that and once we started being more discriminatory our sales doubled because we weren't just handing away you know we weren't doing free Consulting is how they used to how they used to call it and you attribute that doubling of sales specifically to that issue yeah wow I mean it's really about understanding who you're dealing again this is as a custom manufacturer so if we customize the product why wouldn't we customize the process now for Liz she's in a different business she's trying to amass orders large orders or multiple orders for one thing and then send them off to another continent for manufacturing and that's not a nearly as flexible as I can be but it delivers product at a much lower price than I can so I would say her problem is more about just identifying whether she wants to work with someone or not just like a yes or no decision yeah I was just going to say that I actually am often able to prototype really fast with my factory like surprisingly fast try this lock try this handle let's try it this way can we have a you know smaller gauge and I can sometimes get things like within two weeks in your hands that's amazing yes yep and they just fly it over how do they get it over we Airship them over we go and pick them up at JFK a number of new product like launches and components that we're doing in the next month is that's how we developed them and then we usually have a small production run before we go into tooling and do mass production but especially with some of the city work we were doing where we were iterating and improving we were able to do rapid prototyping in a way that I think people like you would never have imagined yeah I didn't imagine it well that's amazing but we have a great Factory and we've been with them for six years they know what we want things just they work all right I take it all back well you know what Paul's value shop so essentially he creates custom Solutions and solves problems for customers and Liz is more of a value chain meaning she's connecting together complex things and supply chain to create value but what you might be getting into Liz is more into the world of the value shop which is where if you start to solve problems for municipalities and unique ways and you build like a skill set around that it it's it's really interesting because I think there's there can be much higher margin and much more difficulty in comparing price if you add that as a component if you think about businesses that that have those components but they can both manufacture but they can also do custom Solutions sometimes you can build good compliments to one another yep and that's really the direction that we've gone because we already had the modularity with kind of the size of the trash enclosures but then we started adding on different modules and that was based on requests and and they were fairly easy and it's part of it is because fundamentally we are a modular product we very rarely although I have to take it back for Boston we did develop a totally differ sized cabinet but it was a modification on what we already had of several components and you know we were able to meet their needs without having to develop a whole new product Liz there was a lot in what you initially uh told us I'm curious about a couple of things one you you mentioned that this discrepancy that you had with the government entity where you uh thought you had submitted a bid for two-thirds of the project they thought you submitted a bid for the whole thing can you tell us more about what that third was and how that happened right so the first 23ds were product that we already have that was just a little bit enhanced the third that we didn't it was essentially parking for trash carts so sort of like one to three yard carts that often times large you know housing uses other buildings schools and whatnot they essentially wanted like a shelter or parking for that and that is something that's something they wanted you to build this yeah they wanted us to build that we they gave us the schematics and um you know if I knew I would have a PO I would have done it but it felt very speculative and this sort of not realizing for over a year that they didn't have a third of what they needed like why did it take them so long to figure that out did the client even have an idea that they misunderstood my quote like that was the part that really bothered me was like I felt like it was kind of thrown under the bus and that the customer who I would someday like to have as a customer is now potentially thinking like oh City bin they were weird with the quoting or they had confusing quoting it's like well no you had a 24 year-old over there translating the information and it was a very slow contract as well so I mean and then overall I I'll just say I mean I don't like the idea of these huge contractors that have gigantic contracts with the city that are allowed to just not move like they just sit there and then when they move they want you to move fast and I had this feeling of I realized we were going to be be miserable like as a team we were already so confused that we thought well this is just not going to work out so I don't know if that answered your question but um I'm I'm glad I may I may sound like disappointed I guess what I'm disappointed out is that it took so long to figure that out yeah you wasted time you can't get back again this is a problem we have to deal with all the time we have in our in our mind a pretty clear picture of different types of clients and different configurations of deals and some of them are good and some of them are bad and any time you're working as a sub it's already bad but if you're working as a sub of a sub it's bad squared and if you're working as a sub of a sub a sub and it's bad times 10 or whatever we're going have to check the math after the show to the power of 10 how about that exponential bad it's exponential bad double Plus on bad so so you you just like okay if that's how we have to work it might be better to just say no or explain why you're saying no right from the get-go cuz that's our thing is we always do way better if we can get in touch with the final buyer but frequently we're working through an architect and a furniture dealer so if they want to keep us at arms length from the final person it's like okay you could do that but this will all go better for everybody we promise you if we can just talk to the final person and that's the person who ass signs the check that's your client why wouldn't you want them to be happy and they either accept that argument or they don't but if they don't then we're often like you know what bye to hell with you we don't need you we got other things to do that are that are more likely to work because what you're looking for all the way along are signs that they're willing to participate in the process that you've set up not necessarily that they're going to try to force you into the process that's convenient for them and I'm not sure we can just describe this on a podcast but if you think of a of a of a cartisian coordinate set with a vertical axis and and a horizontal axis the vertical AIS starts at the top with a good client who does what you want to do and at the bottom it's a bad client who's maybe a jerk or just won't participate in your process and then on the right hand on the x-axis you have easy work and on the left hand you have difficult work and what you want to do is stay out of that lower left quadrant where you're doing hard stuff for bad clients and it sounds like in your first example you brought us that's hard stuff for bad clients just don't do it now you can do easy stuff for bad clients with the understanding they're going to be bad clients but at least what they're asking you to do is falling off the log and you can charge them extra for being jerks or not and then the the other two quadrants are more like yeah you want to do easy work for good clients that's a no-brainer doing hard work work for good clients requires some depends on the particulars but that's a very easy a very easy Matrix to think about clients and work and what do you want to do and what do you not want to do yeah well the other thing is like looking at the team and how are they going to be if they're put in a place where it's like bad clients bad pay all of it like that's really discouraging and I've got some great employees that I would have deployed on that that then wouldn't be working on the great profit Mak projects that they're now doing so I was kind of fast forwarding to this being thrown under the bus like imagine being thrown under the bus and lose money on it that's a major kick in the balls like that would really suck hard work and bad clients make for bad situations bad work unprofitable ties up your team leaves them discourage exposes them to abuse from people who are horrible like why would you do that it's much easier to just walk away from that now when you first start a business and you're desperate for any kind of client you end up doing that kind of work and or if things are tough and you just need to get dollars in the door you may end up doing that work but at least you'll have some idea of what you're heading for which is trouble all the way through so Liz it occurs to me that this is at least tangentially similar to issues you've raised previously about I guess the the really the focus of your business should you focus on uh where you've had the most success with trash enclosures or should you try to expand and do other things should you do bear prooof enclosures for different markets should you expand geographically even though there's lots of opportunity in your hometown of New York City do you see these issues as as being related I do and we're actually already doing all of the above against the advice of many on 21 hats we are moving ahead with our bear um proof en closure we're doing the test proud of that Liz I'm you know I'm looking forward to it Montana late September the Bears are going to be attacking the bin this is a new bear proof version of the bin and we've already actually started selling even before getting our certification so I'm looking forward to the marketing on that I'm laser focused on that I don't want to work on the stupid government stuff with waste wasted time on meetings when I can be working on my be marketing and the bear video that I have planned and hopefully the viral videos and stuff that really lights me up so that's happening as well as um Nationwide expansion so we're going to a Conference in October called the international Downtown Association and it's basically downtown areas for all major cities business Improvement districts the same sort of customers base that we have here in New York now we're going to be working in other cities so we we have some some work moving ahead with those so yeah I mean we we've got other things in the pipeline and definitely a lot to focus on and stuff that I think will be really profitable eventually but the marketing for like the bear proof is going to be a lot different and it's going to be very regionally based like even though we have bears in the Northeast I'm not going to be targeting the Northeast with the marketing we're going to be focusing more in the mountain regions Resorts you know homeowners association I'm intrigued Liz you've chosen to go in a number of different directions not just you know against the advice of your friends here at 20 W hats and not just doing the uh the bear prooof enclosures you just told us that you've got three new products coming how did you think through this is it working so far are you at all concerned that you you had T you mentioned earlier that this government thing you were concerned about moving uh employees from profitable work to unprofitable work how are you doing all this and making sure that you're sticking with the profitable work so luckily the new product development is within customer work it's not just like a you know on its owned independent so with the composting program in Boston we work with them specifically on some of what they needed is that something you hope to turn into a regular line that you're going to offer to to everyone definitely yeah so we got a lot of Photography from that this week and and it's not major modifications that we need to make but significant enough but also enough that it could be marketed as a separate product then there's the bear prooof and then the third one is called basket plus and that is essentially a combination of trash collection and trash storage so if you're ever in a city where on the corner basket is overflowing and there's bags on the side of it what this is is a combination of the corner basket and trash storage like a regular City bin so those will no longer be sitting on the curb next to the basket so that's something like let's say in Philly I went there for a show this past weekend they loved it they loved it way more than people in New York have liked it I'm not sure how does it solve the problem of an overflowing trash can on the corner because the bag that otherwise would have been on the sidewalk is now inside of a bin that's like a side car it's not a collection bin it's an actual like a regular City bin trash enclosure one module of that yeah so you you don't have to have both the person emptying and a giant truck at the same moment you can have sort of like uh a local five block area cleaning crew that just walks around makes sure everything's okay but they can be stashing it until the truck shows up cuz that's a whole different operation well in downtown associations where they have sanitation ambassadors which is what they're normally called they are taking the trash out of the can and just tying it and putting it on the sidewalk so this was de veloped as a response to that we've piloted it in Brooklyn and it's gone very well in fact they ordered a bunch more but for a number of reasons which I don't want to go into some great detail but like sanitation in New York doesn't love that product because they are launching you may have seen in the New York Times yesterday a new trash can of the future which is replacing the corn basket so we've basically been prevented Liz what is the trash can of the future I mean you can check out the times it's it's like upgrade from the corner basket it's definitely more modern looking it's just Aesthetics it's Aesthetics and it also is not it's rat proof or I would say rat resistant I don't know if it'll be rat proof or not but it was designed to be able to just keep Critters from getting inside and it's also lighter than the standard Corner basket which is definitely a big Improvement for sanitation workers that have to hurl the trash it sounds like you are very busy how are your numbers looking for this year so we are probably going to be up 40 to 50% this year is that what you were hoping to do no I was I wanted to double every every entrepreneur says that at some point in their Journey you guys wait I've got a little more time I've got some things in the pipeline we'll see are you hiring people are do can you handle all this so we are uh all really busy right now and I'm looking for a couple one additional salesperson and additional marketing or operations person it doesn't sound like sales is a problem well with sales mostly we haven't we don't have any Hunters on our team I'm not a hunter Believe It or Not Frank's not and our other main salesperson they're all more Farmers so people are coming to you this is all inbound our work so I want to hire someone that's doing completely hunting outbound sales who would they target though business districts right you're going to go after business Improvement districts oh there's there's got to be an association of them right of oh yeah there is that's where I'm going to the conference in Chicago in October we in exhibitor with all the business Improvement districts yeah there you go how do you become a speaker um I'm not sure but I was planning on trying to find a way to take the stage what just rush the stage maybe not but I plan on having a webinar shortly after that conference with people that we've met so I can create my own stage even if I'm not you know a big Platinum sponsor there this is our first time going there have you checked to see if Jennifer Karen is the person responsible for this association's conferences yeah that's what I was thinking you might want to look into that just in case and she might have some suggestions either way you could be dressed as one of her workers to get up there and then just like peel off like sorry it's trash and close just now no a lot of it is going to be I'm going to observe because then I can see what sort of speakers they do have and then when we go to it next year I can let them know way in advance that I'd like to be one of those people yeah and you can tell your bear story maybe I mean you'll have some cool material I want to hit a couple other topics Sean you had your Catalyst event how'd it go yeah yeah it was great it's our fourth year second year in person I think we had about a 10% uptake in in attendees uh really great speakers this year my one of the favorite ones for me was um um David kale talking about building a $50 million ergonomic furniture company and then selling it and then kind of as the result of a lot of crazy things having it totally closed down by the acquirer so it it was it was cool it was just really exciting to have you know a room full of entrepreneurs and business owners that you know are doing remarkable and interesting things and you know really care about their teams and yeah yeah it was great did you hear anything that's surprised you anything in the air going on that you can share with us you know the interesting thing we had three breakout groups um one was on differentiation one was on the doing of the work and then the third one was on recruiting and it surprised me the smallest group was recruiting like by a by quite a bit so it was a self- select you know you could choose which group you wanted to be part of and I would say that the recruiting group was maybe half or less than the other two groups so I I don't know I don't know what that means but I you know I definitely have seen you know a lot in the news about the labor situation you know getting less onerous and you know people attending the differentiation one in numbers that that's sort of like how do I get more customers so yeah I you know I don't know what that says but my my hunch is that folks are thinking about customer acquisition a little bit more than labor shortage I was at a conference last week as well I would have loved to have gone to yours but I chose to go to the one put on by my sponsor instead I hope you understand uh the great game of business and um there there were a couple things in the air there that uh that took me a little bit by surprise I actually I led a conversation with a group of I don't know 150 CEOs just talking about what their concerns were and I kind of sheepishly said to them you know I put out this daily email newsletter about what business owners should care about and my sense doing that is that when we look back at this year we're going to remember this is the year of chat GPT and Ai and the start of something you know huge I said I I feel sheepish saying that because I've been fooled before and you know we just got past the whole metaverse thing that was supposed to change the world and I'm not entirely confident that's going to happen at the moment and I asked them how many of you think AI is going to have a big impact on your business your industries and every hand went up and I asked how many of you are playing around with it and looking for ways you can put it to use right now and every hand went up which convinced me that probably is the story of the Year there were some great examples there's one company that they do outsourced it for businesses around the country so they get tickets coming in all day long they've trained uh an AI bot to sort those tickets to perform triage make sure that the you know tickets go to the right place but not only that they've trained it on 20 years of their history so when the um when the bot sorts the tickets it also makes suggestions for what the solution to the problem might be I'm curious does that make sense to you guys are you guys playing with it thoughts I have thoughts I think that we may have reached Peak AI hype and so everybody's thinking about it and what we're going to see is people really figuring out particularly for smaller businesses is like what would I actually do with it so there have been some interesting helpful things that I did with it over the last few months but it hasn't changed my average day at all yet and I'm struggling to figure out how to how to make it have an impact on my company because what most of what we do AI ain't good enough we need actual ey and so that I just you know we're going to see how it all plays out but when you see it tagged on to every possible situation like need a cup of coffee use Ai and and uh that's that's just obviously nonsense but like any new technology it's going to take a while for it to really settle into whatever it's good at that's my opinion the other thing I found interesting and this kind of gets to Sean your point about people not seeming to be as interested in the topic of recruiting we we seem to have these two contradictory narratives taking hold at the same time on the one hand AI is going to take everybody's job on the other hand we're being told this labor shortage is here to stay well the the the the shortage of Labor is not necessarily related to what AI does like AI is not going to fix my toilet so even if the AI spit out instructions for somebody about how to fix a toilet doesn't mean they can fix a toilet but if it the the labor shortage will not be as acute if AI removes a lot of jobs which a lot of people expected to well I don't know if it removes the jobs are we've we've heard this story over and over again like okay you're not coal mining so soon you'll be a software developer no the people who are coal miners it's hard to turn them into software developers and it's going to be just as hard to turn software developers into plumbers or Carpenters completely different skill sets so well the the other narrative is that AI is going to handle software development too so right but I'm saying that the the where where where AI is supposed to be reducing jobs and freeing up people those people aren't necessarily suited to the kinds of jobs where there's labor shortages so that that's my experience we're trying to hire people who are good with their hands and typing all day doesn't teach you anything about how to deal with the kind of work we do so you're saying that there is a world where it does make sense that you could both have ai limiting jobs and absolutely oh absolutely oh yeah it's there you know AI isn't going to replace you know I mean sure you'll have robots picking fruits and food and all that kind of stuff to some degree but there's just a ton of jobs where it just it's either really hard for a robot to do or it just doesn't make economic sense and then what it's wiping out what I see it wiping out and I'm not too upset about this but I kind of feel bad for folks in it is is kind of Dum what I call dumb marketing jobs and there are so many of these like writing blog post that are just low value High quantity you know doing a lot of edits in Photoshop you know making a background different from what it was before like these are not jobs that require a high level of intelligence they just require a small amount of technical skill AI is going to just wipe those out it already is and I mean I'm thankful for our company because we've never liked to do that work at all anyway so great but there are tons and tons and tons and tons of Freelancers and firms I mean just for perspective my my my employee went to a Renaissance Fair he's a total nerd and he met multiple people who were like yeah AI put me out of work like already you know well I mean so they said that is that what actually put them out of work or are they just crappy employees and the boss is like shrug AI get out of here it's an easy I don't think they're necessarily crappy employees I just don't think that the work that they had been doing there was a good alternative for it even though it was not very high value right well and a lot of that work has already been outsourced to like overseas vas some of that so it's almost like there's three tiers of people that do that and the most expensive one is the one in the US who's paid a lot all right let me throw another one at you at this conference uh the great game conference every year they bring in economic forecasters from uh fairly well-known firm called ITR and they have a conversation about where the economy is going this is of great importance to the company behind the great game SRC because they view their businesses being tied directly to the GDP so where the economy goes they go that's not the case obviously for most business owners and you know my experience in talking about the economy is most business owners don't even want to think about it because they have no control over it they focus on what they can control but in this conversation they had on the main stage the guy from ITR said that they are predicting a small recession in the next year or so but nothing to worry about but they are predicting a depression in 2030 depression with a d and they predict it will last for six years can I jump in here please all right ITR send speakers to vistage and to some of the other trade groups I've in and been hearing the same basically the same Spiel with moving dates for the last 10 years which is that things are you know like things are what they are today tomorrow's most likely to be like it is today we may have some mini bumps and doom in six or seven years and nobody ever after listening to one of these things goes back and checks what the prediction was 8 years ago cuz I believe the first time I heard a speaker from my TR we were supposed to be in the Great Depression right now and it's just like okay a I was raised by Economist so I I'm skeptical you mean that literally in your household my father is very well-known and here's my short take economics is religion with numbers it's just about did that come from your father or did you come up with that no it's just an observation these guys make a living by getting up in front of people and giving a very slick presentation and they didn't see covid coming they didn't see any any of the stuff that actually happened big events that that appear out of nowhere have a huge effect on our economy the the Ukraine war Co B up up up these guys have got nothing in their models that that allows for that and but it's a pretty good living to just get up there and say okay you know Doom coming and uh button down your hatches now but you'll be okay right now you don't have to you don't ever have to do anything today you just get something to worry about for 10 years from now and it it has not arrived as far as I can tell I couldn't agree with you more Paul I I and I think so much is a function of you know it's very much religion but also in many ways a paradigm of thinking that was built around a period of time that was much much more stable in terms of global change and and today like these events say September 11th even how we responded to the pandemic like these are these massive Black Swan events and like their models don't they can't deal with that and and that's the era we're in we're just in an era of Rapid unpredictable will change they can swing both ways it can swing positive and it can swing negative but but I think they treat it like this like crystal ball that's predicated on what's happened in the past and the past is not a good guide for the future it's just not I agree what else have you got that we can scoff at Lauren I think I'm done you scared me off yeah we're we're pretty hard crew here all right my thanks to Shan busy Paul downs and picarazzi and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to build healthier companies you can learn more atre game.com thanks everybody 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 he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]