Managing Your Tasks, Your Credit Cards, and Your Anxiety

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Jay goz Jackie Russo and Sarah seagull talk about whether it's finally time for Jay to enter the Brave New World of task management software that's in fact what his two kids in the business are encouraging him to do as it happens Jackie and Sarah have tried most of the project management tools out there Monday base camp aana and they kind of love them but with one caveat they can be a lot of work which is all Jay really needed to hear after that we talk about the challenges of managing company credit cards and points and Jay explains why after 40 years American Express is no longer what's in his wallet plus the owners tackle a question posed by an entrepreneur with a very new startup when does the anxiety of a new business subside asks the Newbie which prompts some laughter and this answer the anxiety sides in the 42nd year says Jay who's been running his business for years 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 a 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 which 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 Jay gos CEO of the gos group whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Jackie Russo CEO of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana and Sarah seagull who's founder and CEO of seagull Communications a Public Relation firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled managing your tasks your credit cards and your anxiety welcome Jay Jackie and Sarah it's great to have you here as usual this week we emailed about topics we would like to discuss uh beforehand and I have to say I I almost fell out of my chair when I saw Jay suggest that he wanted to talk about technology Jay is your daytim acting up or something what's uh what's going on no my children are acting up and um they said Gee I want to put you on to-do list so that I can keep track of projects you're working onit is that to-do list to-do list oh todoist that that's software it's like a task list yeah so then they started sending me so now every day I get did they did they realize they were talking to you Jay no they never do so they went now I'm getting these every day and I keep deleting them and I just thought hm I wonder if this is the right wonder if anyone has any input on it so my daytime is working just fine though what what was their goal what why did they want you to be on it well there are projects that that they're working on and they want my input on what do you think about this and I do not have any technical connection that on a daily basis where I can go back and forth so I figured if I'm going to do it I might as well see what everyone else is using basically just a stall tactic because I really don't want to do it a whiteboard seems to be the best option here but so I'm just trying to get some input but it's not like you're putting a bunch of managers on it with you it's just for you and two sons right yeah Sarah what do you think so I love technology I love systemizing things and getting projects organized and I have literally I've probably tried every system out there from monday.com to ass to todoist to notion like I'm I'm All About like finding the magic solution in terms of project management and you know and some are better than others but I actually like todoist todoist seems to be one of the one of the few that is really integrated with um Google um so you can it just Blends into your data activity so I have it but I use it mostly for like kind of my personal to-do list but what's interesting is that despite all of the programs that we use really what it comes down to that works best for my team is every Monday we have a meeting and we have a a doc a Google doc that we update with the current status of things and that tends to be the Bible for our our things to do and while I do um love those task management um systems the problem is is that they actually take a lot of time to manage and you need somebody who's dedicated and has the with to make sure that okay we're putting in all the to-dos and we're signing them out and we're following up with the people to make sure that they're doing it you really need to have a project manager behind all of those systems so if you don't have those it's really hard to take full advantage of them that's my perception of them that's just exactly what I wanted to hear basically you're telling me Jay you should use a whiteboard just said you need a project manager to manage it like I really don't want to be a project manager well it depends I mean if you have a big company like if you're you know a 500 person headcount company you know you need to have those systems but you also probably have invested in a number of project managers where their sole job is to make sure that people are checking things off and I think that's fantastic but if you're just doing it for a department or you're just doing it for a small company like I think that it's something that you can start using but it's a lot of work for people Jackie what do you do well I love technology so you may have put the two wrong people to help Jay through this I actually just finished an office Purge because we really went primarily paperless about 10 years ago and somehow turned into hoarders when we bought this building in 2005 so I assigned myself the task of cleaning out the upstairs storage and found our old paper folders where we had a physical project manager who there's a piece of paper stapled to the back of the folder and she would walk it to the desk of the copywriter and that person would do their task and then it would go in the outbox and then Ashley would pick it up and bring it to the designer I mean we're an 8,000 foot building we could have walked to each other's desks I don't know what I was thinking love it I love it can you just talk slower I want to make notes on this because I like that system it sounds great I'm sure Jay I'm sure it's your dream and so we still had some of those old project folders and I sat there and just thought for a long time about how far we've come and we we've been through you know base camp and Monday and assana you know we've made the rounds everybody else has made we're on Monday currently yeah and how much happier I am with a Technology based solution because I travel a lot and so I can access the work I need from the cloud from the server from wherever I am you know I love the Google suite and Michael my husband and business partner and chief creative officer of this company he still can't figure out how to use his real email to check his Gmail um for his things that he's been shared with him so we're not on the same end of the spectrum with this I think the systems only going to be as good as you want it to be Jay and if you don't like the technological aspect of it which is totally fine then find a low Tech version that makes you happy so that's but that is exactly my question so what is the lowest Tech version I can tell you yeah please that's why I want to know so I'm I I've been married my husband for two decades plus and I love him dearly but technology is not his strong suit so Sarah is his name Michael Roo because we may need to talk the best way to do to-dos is the notes app a shared notes and putting a checklist on a shared Notes app it's the most simplified version you can look at it on your phone you could look it on your laptop you can check the box to say that you're done but a shared notes um stock is I think the simplest way to-do is amazing I think it's a really great system uh Jackie my question for you on monday.com we use Monday as well but like do you have a project manager managing it making sure it's up to date we have done that a couple of ways one the three of us that use it most often each have our own pieces of ownership and then we've got our research team when we're not working on a strategic brand plan where they researching and they're deep into it when a project moves out of them and and so they have a little breathing room they go in and do accuracy checks and updates so that we make sure that the information stays up to date so Jay are you going to give it a shot I mean I don't think I don't think for for the technology that's being forced upon you to- do is is is actually not that bad it's Monday is much more complicated okay I that's why I asked no no that's why and maybe I will do that because I it's not like I don't use my computer all day long I do and I I you know you can laugh about the daytim it kind of works it's okay but I I'm certainly open to I just wanted another opinion on the the I I'll try that out and we'll see how that goes I have to get perspective to people when I started in business there were no computers so obviously my I know but obviously it's different for someone like me than someone who grew up with a keyboard in their hand so I don't usually use this phrase well you know getting out of your comfort Zone I don't really have I kind of always have been out of my comfort in this case this is a comfort zone thing I you know and I have to decide whether it's worth the trouble to get out of it well I I feel your pain like at the beginning of this year I was like I have an iPad I'm going to start taking all of my notes um on the iPad I'm going to start using that as opposed to a paper notebook and that's going to be the way that I'm going to do it and I can't keep I can't keep up with it like I need to have that pen to paper um experience to be able to take notes and if you look around my office at my team every single one of them has a paper notebook and they're like they're super organized and clean and the writing is beautiful that I like I'm kind of jealous of their their note taking skills but like it's that pen to paper notebook that really keeps us going forward and making sure that we don't forget anything and some of those systems like Monday and um to-do are are kind of redundant um but they're great in terms of sharing tasks and kind of the status to projects with the rest of your team Jackie I have a question for you you said you've tried almost all of these things you're on the Monday now uh in terms of project management systems that the thought of changing systems just I I can't even contemplate that it's a nightmare isn't it incredibly painful to go from one system to another it is both incredibly painful and feels in a lot of ways like a snake shedding their skin there's some good to it because you have to get in there and really double check and verify all the information you get a chance to look at it through today's eyes and the systems we set up three years ago and the tags we implemented and the process we thought was right probably isn't right anymore and so it's it's the purge that you neither need nor want but really benefit from would you recommend like starting fresh the beginning of the year or like at the beginning of the quarter or something like that and like not necessarily transferring over all your old stuff but like archiving it and then just starting fresh we've done both and I think now that we're talking about this and I'm thinking of all the times we've changed software I might have a problem so that may be a whole session I have to have later because we've changed accounting systems we've changed our project management system we've changed our email database and I would say we really do kind of every few years cycle somebody out so it feels it's a December thing for us in December we're analyzing all of our current systems and saying you know oh did this software management platform rais their price five times in the past three years who's the hot new one that's back at where the price should be and we're going to them and then okay what's that that change going to look like do you suffer from Tech bloat at all I think we have at times Jay would think we definitely do I don't even know if I think about it enough to know that so I yeah um I work really hard on making sure we don't have overlap and we don't have Gap and that is almost a full-time job um we had a little bit of an overlap in our accounting department at one point and I realized that we had brought in a piece of software because of its AI readability so it would uh read the invoices in an email and automatically import them into our um so it was bill.com and it was automatically importing them into to QuickBooks and then QuickBooks finally developed their own a I reader and so we were able to eliminate bill.com because it was redundant Jackie one of the last times you were on you told us that you were systematically going through pretty much every process that your business uses to see if there is something you can do with artificial intelligence to improve the process have you changed anything in terms of how you manage tasks as a result of that um procedure well you know it it is still ongoing and one of the things that I have figured out is you talk about redundancies there's so much redundancy in the different AI platforms and so we're really developing what I think is going to be a fairly comprehensive list until lunchtime and then it will be out of date of where all of the overlaps are because so many of them do such a similar thing two things have really come out of it one we're finding ways to improve our process and we know it's ongoing and so we now have um some people permanently assigned to staying on top of every time there's a new AI launched announced talked about how does it fit into our system is it something we should consider and knowing that we have to go back and evaluate the ones we're using because new ones come and somebody could get replaced and secondly I'm starting to develop classes around it I I find that one of the best ways for me to learn something is to have to go teach it and so now I'm thinking okay well all this knowledge that I've developed in terms of which platforms I use for what thing and which prps work really well and what processes I should use I could save somebody else months of time by just telling them what I've learned and giving them the cheat sheets that we've created and so we'll start doing those uh in the next couple weeks so what's your Tex deack order of favorites like what do you what do you like love using in your in your uh systems you know I I it kind of goes back and forth the Google Suite is shockingly uh userfriendly to me and I like the way that it works I love that I can roll in and out of my things and shared things so seamlessly but that exact quality is the thing that makes our shared husband crazy so it it really does make a difference just about anything Apple puts their fingers on has become my favorite and it's it's really a strange thing to say when I married Michael I was all PC and he was all Mac mixed marage for years oh was well that's what the Catholic church called it too because I'm also Methodist um and I think the technology mix was harder for people to accept than the religious mix plus he's Italian and I'm Irish so there's a whole lot of mixing going on you know I think I want to start a support group with your husbands could you have both of them call me on the telephone so we can talk this out I don't need y'all to have a majority in this relationship actually no what ended up happening though was you know as I mocked him for these super expensive computers that had to be replaced all the time and couldn't be customized and personalized the way a PC could over time and it was really the iPod and then the iPhone there was a big switch that happened and so I think you know I got the iPod first and I got the watch and then I became the tech person who always had the first piece of technology and I would test it out and tell him if he should get it or not and then you know so I had the iPad and but I'm still using a a a desktop regular old PC at the office and so finally when I upgraded to that a couple years ago and realize that they all talk to each other I was like who did not tell this to me how has this been a secret and so now that my laptop and my iPad and my watch and my phone and everybody can share one document across all platforms anywhere I put it it's on the desktop of where I'm going to be next that stuff is what really makes me happy Jay any questions I'm happy for you um I'm trying to find I I I'm certainly not dissing technology I certainly use it and I certainly know it's a great thing I'm just trying to figure out getting the right return on investment of my brain cells on it and I will tell you I am extremely confident that the world if you want to be effective in this world you certainly need some new school stuff but there's still some old school that works and I see on a regular basis these people that are all teched up that think that the world has changed 100% and it hasn't maybe it's changed 70% the one that sticks out of my mind is I found this woman that's an attorney who does the state stuff and I got lots of employees need Wills done so I called her and I said Hey listen will you send me some business cards I'll shareing with my employees and she emailed me later and said I just want to get this straight you want me to mail you some business cards and I'm thinking wasn't that outrageous like I asked her to go to the top of Mount siai and chisel out some tablets I I just asked for some business cards she have shared her contact card with you instead and then you could have just texted that to people why would I want to not just have a conversation with a human being and go oh here's a card of a lady call her when you need to will why would I want to have to start making sure they got a computer it's just you know all my employees are not super techsavvy why wouldn't I just want to hand him a card save a tree this is between Jay and his therapist let's let's let this go here you are my therapist I I'm honored thank you yeah uh you shouldn't be trust me let's move on to another conservative Jay's Jay you've recently been having something of a badle with American Express where you've been a very active customer for very many years um this has kind of reached a boiling point of late I gather can you tell us what's going on I have like 35 employees that have credit cards for various reasons and it's a job I was out of the country and I got texts that they they all of a sudden started to put credit limits on my account the whole idea of American Express is there's no credit liit I've never missed a payment in 40 some years and I had hundreds of thousands of dollars going through there but every single month I paid it off and their algorithm must have tricked something and like L doesn't like me you know and like oh this guy's spending too much money so now they want to put limits on the cards which creates a nightmare like all of a sudden you got an employee somewhere trying to check into a hotel somewhere and their car doesn't work and it took me weeks to go through the whole thing with them and I've had it with other credit like you have to manage these credit card companies at the point I've got three American Express Bank of America and Chase and they all got different policies and they've all got different algorithms and they all different fraud alerts and it really becomes a problem when you're the card holder the main card holder and you start getting text out of the clear blue is this fraud it really becomes a problem so I've been managing it and I finally got American Express to they put a limit on my card that was lower than the amount I owed at the moment and I so here's what I've learned there is a lesson and all this don't go calling the number on the back of your card I mean you're just going to get the boy the room with 8,000 employee I actually found out who my representative was and called her and she intervened and she helped manage this and she helped get the the balances back to what they should be same thing with Chase I went over to the Chase Bank there's actually Banks where you walk in the door and you can sit down and there's a human being behind the desk and I told her and again she picked up the phone and found out who my rep was quote unquote and she helped fix it but calling the back of the card's not going to do it I've learned did they have a reason for doing it like were you getting too many you points or got me it's all the magic algorithm have no idea all I can tell you is I literally literally put through hundreds of thousands of dollars with it charges last year like I said never missed a payment on any of them and I don't know somewhere they have an algorithm that says uh oh blinking lights warning is it because I'm a retail ER I have no idea what it is but um you can't figure it out but it does need to be managed or causes you a lot of grief and American Express took so long to fix it got to tell you I already moved all my people over to Bank of America that was much better and I got better points and you know what here's the other lesson no one really cares you think someone in American Express is losing sleep because I just they just lost a $2 million a year no one's losing any sleep over this so there's no one to get mad that there's no one to send your cut up card back to I just found out the Bank of America has a much better program with points now and I actually it was a good thing that I moved it over so you've left American Express completely I still have a card with them but I basically stopped using the card and now I moved it when we had our last kind of inperson event for 21 hats you had mentioned that you really prioritized putting all most of your expenses on your card so you can get the points yeah absolutely I started doing that and so you know I'm our plan my plan is to take the team to this big conference that we want to go to on those points um and so I really try to do that and I I thank you for that advice it I'll tell you if you're getting a one point that's no longer good you should be getting um Chase now has a card on any invoice it's more than $5,000 they give you two and a half points that's a lot more than one point and Bank of America if you have an account there they give you 75 % more than the point so like for gas I'm getting like 5% because it starts at three and then you add on the 75% it's it's not insubstantial it's serious money it's tens of thousands of dollars a year to a company my size so it is a thing and if you're not paying attention and you're just getting one point you could be losing tens of thousands of dollars a year Jay those tens of thousands of dollars can you take those tens of thousands of dollars in cash or do you have to redeem them for gifts or something um well in this case as good as cash you can take a credit on your statement you can just go ahead and right wow is right it's changed a lot of companies are taking charge cards now didn't used to like my Freight bill I have big UPS bills big I you know between my home store sending stuff out and my wholesale framing thing I send out hundreds of packages a day it's substantial amount of money it makes a difference what card you put it on and they take credit cards FedEx FedEx takes credit cards uh UPS takes credit cards there's not many times you can say this it's kind of free money free money is a good thing Jake it sounds like you spent a a lot of time on this managing it of late am am I right have you put a lot of time into this I probably spent five hours on it in the last two weeks yeah but was it worth it yeah and it's a fair question because I did put time into it but one of my issues was I had to make sure that my credit limits were high enough because like I said I got 32 people out there charging stuff every day and like they could be standing at a gas station and all of a sudden the card doesn't go through so I got to make sure that I have high enough credit limits on all these cards and monitor it and um it takes a little effort who do you decide who to give the credit card to I'll ask that to Jay and Jackie like who what's the what's the um some Ro yeah for sure people who are in the position of buying stuff for the company people that are going out and parking and parking garages or buying gas I got 12 Vehicles so everybody's got to fill up the gas I will tell you you in all of these year and you put limits on the card I have never had a problem ever now that doesn't mean there aren't people that have embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars using a credit card but you know putting a $5,000 limit on a credit card like I I've never had a problem with that I would also tell you that I believe the employee feels good that they're trusted they have a company credit card if they H if they need one the idea they got to use their own personal credit card and then go get reimbursed I don't think that's right what about you Jackie um we we've done it both ways I agree with Jay that having someone have to shoulder the burden of that charge is just not fair and so it it all runs through uh my account I'm still pretty loyal to MX I don't take the points I use the miles and so I travel enough and we spend enough that I pretty much fly for free and and I really like that a lot and I appreciate the upgrades and I'm not bougie about a lot of things but I could get behind some time in a Delta Lounge I tell you what it makes me really happy to be special for sure and so we've used it that way and that's been very beneficial I am uh like Jay though having to look at it and it'll be one of the things that that's on the Block this year for review because in the olden days um when we were just mostly media buying and it was traditional media you know it was all invoice system no big deal well now that media is All Digital or for the most part and so all those media charges funnel through my American Express and so I too am looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars a month coming through and so I have to start to think is there a smarter way is there a way to get more value for the um for the card have you had a problem with the limit if you're putting that much through no I'm not but now that you're saying that it makes me very nervous so they don't have a limit on your account at this point they do not well maybe you get a email one day and all of a sudden they decided to put a limit on it that's crazy and and we just I mean I pay mine off every Friday and you know we we make sure that you know we're never in AAR I can't even imagine if all of a sudden they put a limit on us I would be thrown because it's set up on all of our accounts all of our Facebook ads managers all of our Google digital ad accounts I mean it would be a nightmare if that happened yeah so do you have like one card one name on one card that you that everybody uses or do other people on the team have their own cards they're a authorized user with their cards and we've done it both ways where sometimes you know you didn't quite earn that yet and so you're literally physically using the card that's sitting on my desk and you've been here long enough and I know how you handle your business and so you've got an authorized user card it it's a kind of thing we work into yeah no I I'm right there with you like I've had an authorized user in the past um that employee um has moved on to another position and I just haven't added anybody else so right now it's just everybody uses my card which is fine but um I've been thinking about adding a couple authorized users to the the system just to to make their expenses they don't have a lot of expenses but um just to make it a little bit easier and and I agree that getting that card from your company that's probably a feather in the the cap for some people you know especially younger employees that are like working there with they're like I got a corporate card you know that's kind of a big deal so there is a control Problem by having everyone on your card because you're whoever's paying the bills has no no way of keeping an eye on stuff because it's on your card whereas if it was under their name at least you could say hey why does so and so spend blanky Mount I mean I have heard of nightmare there certainly are nightmare stories out there of people who took advantage of their card and I been get pretty careful of everyone's got their own card so at least we know who's charging it all right last thing today I saw an interesting post on the small business Reddit from a business owner who had a question that I think might be relevant to a lot of our listeners I'm going to read it to you it's titled when does the anxiety of a new business subside and uh this owner wrote we're laughing already yes I started my business Wilderness guiding and outfitting last year and things were very slow at first December got some business January a little more I was hopeful words started to get out but suddenly this past week I have been flooded with requests via calls emails texts forms submitted on my website and it's absolutely amazing I'm 100% not complaining just a week ago I was stressed about if I could even pay my bills but the sudden influx of customers and reservations has me feeling anxious and a little overwhelmed I am so worried about a customer falling through the cracks as I navigate getting back to this person or that person making this or that reservation for a trip or service it's just that it was so sudden as if everyone all at once decided they wanted to do a trip I am a one-person show he concludes thank you for any advice I'm going to clock out now and go try to do something nonwork related well that's an easy one the answer is the anxiety stops at the 42-year Mark so you're GNA hire somebody okay lighten up no I think it's about managing customer expectations that I think if whoever is emailing texting whatever you say I'm a oneman show I return all of the all correspondence between and just just let people know when you're going to get back him I think people are perfectly most will be happy with that and just when he gets home at night he she gets home at night uh you go ahead and get back I'm always happy if they just tell me when I'm going to get the return that's all I just would like to know where it's at I don't think there's anything embarrassing to tell someone I'm a onean operation but you need to have a system in place also like if you're going to start I mean whether or not it's todoist or or something else you need to you get the your person's name put it in a spreadsheet they came in you responded this is pending what's the next step and and just making sure that you're organized on all of those things and updating that spreadsheet every day so you can you know keep on track of everybody because yeah the worst thing in the world is to get a Yelp review oh I tried to go on this this Outdoor Adventure but um they never got back to me you you want to avoid that but you know you could probably if reservations keep coming in hire a freelancer somebody to help manage that there are tons of fol folks that are perfectly capable of just helping you know send out those email thanks for your inquiry we are you know we are a oneman show we will get back to you within the next seven days or whatever it is I think those phone answering Services make sense too I can't tell you how surprised I am when I call companies and we're talking about things that cost thousands of dollars and the phone machine just says the person you're trying to call is and here leave they don't even put their name on it for God's sake so even if it just said hi this is Joe SCH leave your name and num so I've learned that people in my experience from being the customer people are either really good at this or they're horrible at it and there's no reason to be horrible at it to your point have a system have a person answering the phone or have something but it's not brain surgery and I'm surprised at how many companies just dropped the ball on it I thought this one was interesting because it was so early in the process I mean as he acknowledges this is one of the lucky ones he he started his business it was slow for a couple of weeks and then boom that's a problem a lot of people uh would like to have I know I want to know what the secret sauces how did this person do that like tell me and I will I will emulate it you know it starts with a website also and it's seasonal you know so if you started in the beginning of the winter then it's going to be slow and now people are planning spring and summer trips it's going to pick up I sensed he was asking a deeper question it wasn't just about managing the sudden inflow it was about adjusting to life as a business owner and recognizing that even if he figures out this situation there's going to be more coming that he's going to have to live with yeah he's going to have to deal with the next step which is he's going to have to learn about hiring and firing and management which is not a simple thing and it's a he I think it's a he okay if he wants to grow this is you know I deal with this in the framing business all the time I I just was at the show and I said everyone you have to make a decision do you really have the mindset the stomach for growing a business or do you want to be a oneperson frame shop there's nothing wrong with that if that's where you're comfortable because he's going to have to make a decision does he want to grow this to have a staff and be a manager yeah when you're in to service based business you have to want to be able to manage people you're going to have to want to be able to figure out how to to grow it's weird to start a business without a plan to grow like I I'm always like you people really want to start businesses just to be them one person in their business the answer is yes absolutely but but that's You' just described 50% of the people that are small businesses I know but do they I mean I guess but those are like most of those are like independent contractors I look at those people as different you know like they they present themselves as a independent contractor as opposed to I'm a Communications or PR agency right and if you start a business I guess you could just do it yourself but like to me that's just being a freelancer or a contractor and there's nothing wrong with that um gives you a lot of flexibility after talking to many people to do that I can tell you what the issue is they can't handle managing people managing people takes courage they can't or they don't want to either way right well can't turns into don't want to you know what whatever one of the two they don't want to or can't deal with as you all know being an Entre you have to be able the meek might inherit the Earth but they're going to go broke in business you can't be meek you have to have conversations with human beings and sit down with them and say Bob this is the third time I've talked about this and I decided that this isn't working today's your last day some people can't do that don't want to do that you got better at it as you got um as you for sure yeah I mean in the be it's hard for anybody to do that and I think you learn through trial and error like if you've had to fire somebody like you learn through that experience it was painful but you learned it you me you mess up on a customer's inquiry you don't get back to them in time and then they write a bad review for you on Yelp yeah you're going to learn from that so hopefully they don't learn that that that way but and they learn from other people's mistakes but like if you want your business to grow and that person has to make the decision that yeah I want this to grow then they need to either respond to people in a timely fashion and meet their expectations or they need to set say Hey listen I'm a onean show I'll get back to you when I get back to you and that's the way I operate and some people will be okay with that Jackie when did the anxiety go away for you well I I'm still a few more years away from The 42e Mark so I've just circled it on my calendar and I'm looking forward to it seriously I might say 10 years I five it's not a year I don't think still there and I'm 24 years in right I think I I can tell you I didn't feel like I finally had it together until but I started very young so you got to factor that in I started at 22 I think it took me till I was 40 before I finally felt like I had things under control and I grew super fast I was chasing my tail for 18 years I'm not saying it's going to take everyone that but what I've recently decided I believe there's four C's here the first is Clarity do you want to grow it I think have people should be clear do you want to grow do you want to go through what it's going to take do that the second one is courage it does take courage to grow the company whether it's it's borrowing money or firing people it does take courage three is it take commitment you're going to make some mistakes and you're going to get beat up and you're going to have to pick yourself up the next day and go all right I learned from that I'm going to keep moving on which finally you get to the fourth stage which is confidence you feel like you got it figure it out and you're good how long does the four steps take that depends on how fast you're growing and who you are but that's not a oneyear process that's for sure at least in my experience it wasn't anyone disagree with that no not at all and it depends on to your point about growing so I could have you know gotten to a certain point and said okay this is good and coasted there and then I wouldn't still be worried nervous concerned anxiety um stressed but because we want to keep growing and we keep reinvesting in the business there's no coast and I think that's where the the work comes from is the the maintaining and growing of what you're doing continuing to exceed expectations and making sure we're reinvesting in technology and improving the customer experience we get bigger our clients get bigger well that's a whole other set of challenges and opportunities we get bigger we hire more employees that's another set of challenges and opportunities so I could have stayed a oneman show but I like this better I do want to say a word in defense of solopreneurs like me I think the way how we've talked about them has has evolved I think there was a time when they were more just like Freelancers but in part because of technology and how the things you can do now as a one person um business operating from anywhere there are more and more solopreneurs who do very much consider themelves business owners they are not Meek they are choosing a way to run a business that that makes sense for them I totally agree with that and I say Meek you're not Meek you went ahead and took the chance to go start this and you're dealing with it I I 100% agree with what you just said technology has changed that there's plenty of very successful people that work by themselves my thanks to Jay goz Jacki Russo and Sarah seagull 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 at Great 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 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 you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]