Maybe It’s Not the Marketing

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week we introduce a new member of the 21 hats podcast team Shan busy who tells Jay goz and Laura Xander about an intriguing challenge he faces 22 years ago Sean co-founded a marketing firm called kesis but now he's trying to convince clients that it takes more than just marketing sometimes it's not enough just to drive more leads sometimes you have to step back and take a deeper look look at your business which not every client is ready to do in fact it took sha 10 years and the Great Recession to do it with his own business 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 works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy and is based in Portland Oregon Jay goz whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home and Laura Xander who is CEO of Jimmy beans wo a digital yarn store based in Reno Nevada and mateline TSH a yarn supplier based in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled maybe it's not the marketing welcome Jay Laura and especially our newest 21 hats podcast regular Shan busy great to have you all here Sean let's start with you tell us about your business Kinesis what do you guys do so we specialize in working with small businesses and really helping them realize their untapped potential often that's in the areas of brand uh marketing and culture and how long have you been doing this um let's see LinkedIn just told me congratulations on 22 years so whoa oh my gosh congratulations so you can drink wow I've been doing a lot of Dr I've been doing a lot of drinking in the last two years how small are the businesses that you're talking about is it like five people 20 people 50 people you know in terms of headcount I'd say probably about the smallest is maybe in the kind of 10 to 20 range um you know in terms of Revenue they're usually in that 2 to three million is kind of the very small end of the scale and then you know up to I don't know maybe 10 to 30 million is sort of the top end you know after after you hit that number things start to get a lot more um complex and and just not in our sweet spot or someone has the staff internally that's doing so some of the stuff that you're doing I assume yeah some sometimes that I just I find that like a lot of it's just my personal desire to work with owners directly um and you know kind of have a really strong impact and once you start to get into the larger size it becomes more uh just a little more bureaucratic um you know more political and so I just I just like having a strong impact and that usually means working directly with owners all right I totally get all that well said the only thing I'm I'm wondering is I got the brand thing I got the marketing thing how does corporate culture fit into what you do yeah that's gosh that's a great question so um we were what I would call a brand and marketing shop for about a decade you know our first you know decade of existence and you know mostly our client was an in-house marketer and we would you know help them be successful so you know building websites um logos brands that sort of stuff and then in the recession most of those people lost their jobs um and that's really tough if that's your customer so we realized that there was probably it was really tough for you you're saying for your business it was tough for me yeah yeah um you know so we just we started asking the question like well if it's the job of these people to help the business grow why are they the first ones who lose their jobs um so um so we really started examin in that and we started we kind of flipped the idea of hey how do we help a business Thrive instead of just doing marketing and and when we started looking at that we we realized that the lowest cost opportunities were often doing things like changing the hiring process um you know getting smarter about recruiting you know looking for really great contributors um and that became the culture the culture play you know getting clear on Mission Vision Values wait wait wait so you're saying I think the missing link for me is simply you're talking about hiring people that have something to do with marketing in the company whether it's being a salesperson or whatever you got involved with helping them staff their company to help execute some of the marketing stuff that you think they need all positions Jay well okay that's where I don't what does that have to do with marketing Sean can I jump in here for a second before you answer that it it so happens Sean has written a really terrific book about marketing taking a kind of taking a holistic approach to it and in it he describes uh anecdotally a dental office uh that had uh exactly the experience you're asking about Jay this was a a dental office that thought its problem was marketing and was trying to figure out how to Market better to bring in more leads but the real problem was right yeah the real problem was the front desk person so um you know they they kept asking us for more and more leads and you know we looked at the data and it was like well you should have enough business it just didn't make sense and so we just started asking the question who's the first person that a lead talks to and you know I can't remember the person's name it was like Sally and I'm like tell me more about Sally and you know Sally was a misanthrope basically every lead that would come in the door would talk to Sally and Sally wasn't very friendly wasn't very helpful and so they were just losing business kind of you know out the door as the result of really a bad culture problem and and so that's when we started realizing gosh you know how about if we put our energy into to making sure that the entire team is aligned that everybody in the company is focused on the same thing that the owner knows what they stand for so they know who to hire and in that organization what you're saying is there's you can't I'll just speak for myself like a CFO you you could you're arguing I think that even a CFO has something to do with marketing simply because they're coming up with budgets of what you're going to spend so you're saying everyone in the organization has something to do with marketing therefore corporate culture including the hiring and management of those people is all going to contribute to the marketing effort because everybody's in the marketing business is that what you're saying and actually it's bigger than that Jay it's that even the CFO should align with the values of the organization so if you know you say hey I want a culture where everybody leans in and helps if the CFO is the type of person who stands back and you know kind of throws bombs at everybody they're actively harming the culture so let's just set aside the marketing piece entirely for for the time being what what I'm saying is that we need everybody rowing in the same direction whether that's towards marketing or towards Finance or towards operation and and where marketing comes in Jay is that you can actually do a lot of work in the recruiting and the hiring and the interview process that is kind of like marketing right it's communication right it's it's talking to candidates about what makes a great player on the team it's articulating that in the job description it's having a website that talks about what it's like to work with that culture it's using social media to talk about why this is a great place to work so that when people apply you're you're already getting the kind of the right shape of employee so it's all of those pieces are shaping the culture of the company independent of whether that culture is being applied towards marketing okay I 100% understand what you're saying because that's exactly my company yeah my only disconnect is I wonder whether you've outgrown your your when you say I'm in the marketing but I just think that you're in the I think you're in the business development business or something I think it goes beyond marketing and I that's why I was thrown off I totally understand what you're saying that that you know one of our core things is our our corporate culture I actually have a definition for it and one of them is how far will you go for a customer and how do you treat each other and what do you expect from your employees and that defines what my company is so I can't put that under the banner of marketing though I would put it under the banner of healthy business or Business Development so yeah I think you got to buy another word you're not just marketing you put your finger on probably my biggest challenge right now is that you when we we're in 22 years of business 10 of which was marketing and brand and the last 12 or so um we basically used marketing as a as a way to get in the door with clients they would say hey help us with whatever build a new website create a new brand new logo whatever and we come in the door and be like hey what's your mission and purpose in life you know for your example Jay right like it sounds like you care a lot about customers how do we articulate that through everything we say and and they kind some would be kind of confused by that and and the ones who trusted us would go through our you know kind of inside out process and we'd start to touch lots of areas of the business that weren't in marketing and and we would have a a really great impact and so we would keep clients forever but the challenge we have today is that we have such a legacy of talking about marketing that people like yourself are confused right from in the beginning because I'm talking about culture and and and business strategy and business development and all these things so do you get push back from potential clients along those lines like I want to talk to you about marketing I don't need your help with X Y and Z yeah gosh that's a great question um so so today what I found is that when we start talking holistically in the sales conversation if they start nodding their head like I think Jay kind of does right like Jay saying oh yeah I get that the the interconnectivity of those things are important then they are great clients on the other hand if they're like well we just want to hire marketing they're usually not a great client um or they're not going to become a client because there's a whole industry that will do do marketing for them right websites and so forth if we were whiteboarding this here's the words I'd stick on the Whiteboard I think you're doing marketing in in execution or integration or consistent integration meaning you could have the greatest Marketing in the world but if you've got miserable salespeople because there's a manager it's disrespectful to them or whatever what good is all your marketing going to be so I do think it's marketing plus something another word execution mission mission yeah yeah Mission consistency execution Mission driven Mission alignment because it's alignment alignment there you go good word with all your customers with all your stakeholders customers employees boy I got to tell you if you did nothing more but we're do marketing branding and Alignment oh what does alignment mean and then you pay it off that I'm right there I get it what good is putting a big engine in this new car yeah if you find out that the tires are not align you're you're not going to go anywhere right yeah yeah it's you know the real challenge is there's a there's a thing out there I call it the marketing industrial complex that uh essentially is trying to sell you stuff right they're trying to sell you websites they're trying to sell you logos they're trying to sell you brochures whatever and they really actually don't want to look at those deeper issues because that that gets messy right it gets messy when you start a 100% but they also don't know the skill set to deal with it and they don't yeah you're totally right Sean I know that you have talked to clients about uh directing their marketing not just toward bringing in business but also toward bringing in employees um is that something uh that you've found people asking you about more so during the last year or so of the uh the great resignation yeah you know gosh it's such an untapped potential right so the the clients that we're working with that are really embracing you know get clear on your mission talk about who you are articulate your vision really you know be a remarkable company the companies that do that like they're not having a problem recruiting or retaining employees um that they're just not and and I you know even us you know we really haven't lost anybody over the the last couple years years when we go to market for an open position we'll get hundreds of applications you know so really applying the kind of engine of marketing to recruiting is super powerful and and and I'd say underutilized and and most most companies what they do is they they treat it like an afterthought um you know they'll hire a recruiting agency or they'll place a bunch of ads but they're actually not telling a very good story about what it's like to work at the company um and they're not really painting a picture of remarkability and so I think if the business is really remarkable that's the untapped opportunity you just gave the word so what you do is we do marketing and we help you become remarkable boom that's what you do that's interesting I get it can any company be remarkable you know I think it doesn't matter what industry you're in I mean we've helped plumbers we've helped absolutely folks who do really you know things that you wouldn't think are like wow that's so exciting and and and sometimes I actually think there's an inverse relationship I think that businesses that do a a quote unquote more mundane thing often can do a better job of of focusing on culture and being a great place to work and being remarkable 100% right it's interesting we have very few I mean Laura you probably have some insight into this we have very few clients over the years that have been at in the software industry as an example right so Cutting Edge high-tech all you know kind of advanced advanced advanced and the whole thing in that space is like move fast move fast move fast and I found that often they're they're not really thinking so much about the people they're thinking so much about the thing that they're making and whereas like a plumbing business like everything is about the people right the Technology's been around forever so you know it becomes more about the people than less about the technology Sean you described um kind of the transformation of your business as a result of the the Great Recession switching to offering a more holistic approach to what you do did did that pay off for you for the business yeah um it was I mean we were kind of muddling along for the first 10 years and and and a lot of that honestly was just that I think like a lot of entrepreneurs I never worked for a great employer I I worked for a really bad employer and and so I built the business as a reaction against that and the problem with that is that you don't know what to build towards in the beginning and so you're just kind of stumbling around and and our business was you know nothing to talk about for you know it's first 10 years of existence and that's because I you know I didn't have any formal training I didn't have good mentorship um I hadn't worked for somebody who was really great you know and I think that's the case with a lot of entrepreneurs right I'm with you two out of three I don't believe there is formal training from what I mean it's laughable people say oh I didn't go to business school yeah I did go to business school and it was pretty worthless other than the accounting one one or two classes it's I look back on it was a long time ago but I don't think you get this in college mentorship absolutely working in a great company absolutely but most people you're right are not exposed to here's the way a company is supposed to be run right right SE where are you based out of we're out of Portland Oregon okay yeah and and and for me like I I I I'm with you Jay you know even though I'm a recovering academic you know I was I was a an art Professor for number years wow for me that the pivotal moment was I joined an accelerator program through um EO the entrepreneurs organization and um it was like a it was like a training environment for entrepreneurs and there was peer mentorship there was coaching um and and and that was transformational you know it exposed me to things like Blue Ocean strategy you know more kind of business thinking um and and I just like ate that up and and from that point forward we just grew super fast you know 30 40% a year um year-over-year you know fastest growing 100 for 5 years in a row um so really getting the business model right um you know learning and getting help from others um and figuring out what was important and get kind of getting out of that messy marketing space and more into like hey we want to help small businesses be awesome like that's that's really what we want to do and it's it's freaking great work it's really fun how big is the company now so we're at about people um you know we do couple million in Revenue a year give or take and pretty much have grown every year since that transformation 2020 was was low hard let's focus on marketing for a second what do you see most often as the problem with most businesses what's the typical situation you walk into I think the number one challenge right now uh is that it's really easy to commoditize a business model um it's it's really really hard to have something that somebody else can't copy and so as a result most businesses um aren't focused enough I'd say on being remarkable in some way um and and they often Focus their what they think is remarkable on the thing that's actually easy copied by easily copied by others amen amen amen amen I mean that's I was gonna I was thinking of my answer to that question and it's so formulaic and soulless you know I mean and people are just so scared for the most part and again this is based on kind of the advice that we get but they're so scared to just be themselves yeah I have a different answer and this goes back a long time big companies have professionals quote unquote that know about marketing they go out and they find the best place to advertise and do all that the small company doesn't do that they have someone call them back in the olden days the Yellow Page rep would call you and that's what you were advertising in or the radio rep but they don't go out looking form it's whoever called called on them is getting the business and as a result most of the quote marketing the small business does is not really work and it it's just it was driven by a salesperson they said oh I've got this newspaper in the neighborhood everyone reads it you should be in here okay and they don't have the expertise or knowledge or background to go out there and look for the right places to advertise am I wrong I think that's true you know I I I should add Jay you know one of our our focus is is almost entirely on the busines to business uh landscape really yeah so so like business to consumer um that's its own monster right it's so complex you know are you doing paid advertising are you doing social media what are you doing there like I I can handle those things but like as a 14 person company I would rather be really really good at businessto business marketing and just let go of the businesses to Consumer stuff but so to your to your point I think you're absolutely right that um it used to be pre- internet actually buyers had a hard time getting information and so they relied on salespeople they relied on Advertising to inform them and what the internet did is it basically made it much easier for buyers to evaluate it made it easier for them to compare made it easier for them to shop around and so now we're inundated with marketing stuff all over the place all the time it tracks us on the internet right Facebook constantly trying to track us down to feed us an ad and so if if anything what buyers are doing is they're trying to be defensive they're trying to not pick up the phone and not get that email and and and so that's why my the point I maintain is that the most important thing you can do is be remarkable because being remarkable helps you stand out in a crowded landscape and actually reduces the amount of money you have to spend on advertising or other channels that are commoditized in my case that means getting more referrals keeping your keeping your retention rate of customers very high that's how my company got big there's no question about it I always when I do speeches I always look at I'm 5% better than everyone else do that for 42 years though and you end up with a gigantic business you know 5% a year over it's the different that's it I'm just 5% better but the so let me cut to the chase though let's assume that you got the remarkable stuff done you got the right people great product service all that good stuff so my question is every day I get 20 emails from hi my name is Josh I can help you grow your business with SEO can you cut through the color a little bit and tell us what do they know what don't they know can you just give us some buckets like I'll just give you my buckets and help me with this there's social media which we do a lot of I don't know that it's helping any there's payperclick I don't do it anymore I think it's gotten too expensive and it's not worth the money then there's SEO we're coming up really well now at least in framing we come right up so that's good what about is there is there such a thing as a list I did a speech one time with a guy who's an expert in this he made this the comment that when you buy those lists it doesn't work it's like yeah did that I did buy the list and it didn't work is that what's going on with that whole thing in five minutes no three I have a short attention three go I I feel for you Jay I I mean I get the same 20 emails except they're advertising something different you know but but same idea right and and and I think the the real challenge to marketing is it's a moving Target so yeah 10 years ago email marketing wasn't amazing thing super cheap you could totally maximize it get lots of great business you know build relationships and today it's like everybody's running away because they get so many damn emails every day um so that's the challenge is like what what's the thing you know and and I I I I get back to you know I think about your business Jay and you know you're not going to win on 10% off right you know that right that's that's that's a losing battle um you're probably not going to win on SEO um because you know maybe locally yeah locally no no I'm doing well with you know for sure locally my magic thing is yes I do the SEO and I I have I have a good presence when it comes up so I think if you're in retail that's the first thing the problem is I don't have the second thing yeah I I think the thing I can think of is that you know like I um Lauren and I had a a podcast a while back with uh a really cool automation engineer and that's a crowded space tons of people do automation engineering and the kind of stuff he's doing is just totally different the advice I would give is what can you do that's not just incrementally different I think the 5% play is good is actually really a great strategy for customer service get 5% better every year but I mean from a positioning and Marketplace awareness I think I think you need to do things that are like totally unseen before and I don't know what that is for your business I don't know I like I can't if it were easy I would just have it but I I think that businesses they they can't afford to think small um when it comes to positioning brand and messaging I think they have to think very different think about it um slightly differently in that what is everyone else doing and so how do I do the opposite um so I'm going to disagree just a little bit with email marketing we that has actually been our best growth Channel um for the last couple of years we have really refined it and refined it and refined it um and have whittel have really created and this Jay I mean you probably already do this but it's creating Community because there is so much noise and there are so many options um narrowing our audience down and whittling our audience down to people who really relate to us and we're getting more per transaction and you know more frequent purchases from those people and we're speaking more specifically to this audience that we've kind of narrowed down so we've stopped you know 10 years ago based on where the market was and you know eCommerce and all that kind of stuff we try we were everything to everybody and that worked at the time but now there are so many sites like you've said there's so it's so commoditized the products that we carry that we have transitioned to um really identifying our audience and being a lot more specific okay I got that part you're you're emailing your good customers but but my question is are you actually buying lists oh no no because those aren't our customers right no it's all referral now and it goes back to and it's longterm Laura what what are you doing what are you emailing people is it a newsletter M yeah we email newsletters and then obviously you know two months or two weeks after you receive your product you know your your order we ask you if you want to do a review and all that kind of stuff but primarily the newsletter stuff um and the returns are amazing so Laura it sounds like you've identified you know what we called in the book you're raving fans right totally which isn't you know new term but it's but it's something like hey think about your clients not as customers but as raving fans because it's way better to have one raving fan who buys from you over and over and over again because they are receptive to email marketing yes if a random person you bought on a list you just blast them with stuff about yarn they're going to be like what I don't you know so you're actually using it for amplification yes and and recurring Revenue as opposed to customer acquisition and I think just that idea alone is important for businesses to understand you know segmenting their marketing from acquisition to ification and recurring Revenue that's just one very important concept I'm guessing Jay probably does a great job with existing customers you know they keep coming back he probably has a way to communicate with them you know what because I'm in the frame business I actually have their name and phone number and address because I've got their artwork right so this isn't just someone coming in handing US money I've been tracking this for 20 years and my repeat business no matter what year it's unbelievable it's within 1% every single year for the last as long as I've been tracking it for 20 30 years so repeat is no question the most important part of the business next is referral and the rest is everything else and it's it's but I'm still trying to figure maybe you know the answer to this where are they getting my name from I get these 20 emails a day is it LinkedIn is that where this is all coming from oh there's just there's just a ton of service providers now Jay data Brokers and they aggregate things you know they'll put together like credit credit scores and your address and your like there's nothing is secret anymore there's there's nothing secret or sacred so yeah it's I hate it that's that's the part of marketing I don't really like at all here's the reality in my business at least you lose business four different ways do you know that 1% of the population dies every year that's just a fact right now I'm selling to people that are older meaning they're not 12 years old so in my case probably 2% of my customers are dying every year that's just harsh reality so that's two then you got how many people end up they framed as many pictures as they're going to frame the house is filled with it they're done um that's probably 5% you know there's certainly that people move every year what percentage of people move and then the last one is maybe they went somewhere else maybe they for whatever reason their friend sent them somewhere else they didn't like your selection whatever you add those four things together you got to replace that somehow and in my case I I replace it by the referrals and by trying to do some kind of marketing or if people drive by the store if you have a store but you do have to have something coming in because I don't care what business you're in you're losing x% of your customers every year through no fault of your own do you track these numbers and report on them or is this intuition absolutely no I get it every month no no no no no it's very simple oh Mary Smith so you know how many people died I don't know how many died but I know that that well we eventually might because stop coming in but but we say to them oh you're not in our computer oh where did you hear about us and it's either it's very simple it's either I was driving by my friend sent me in um I found you online uh maybe we heard you on the radio though very difficult I don't get a whole lot of it's pretty finite like I said I'm I'm a unique retailer in that I've got everyone's name and number in my computer so we've been tracking it for years the problem is no matter what business you're in you're clearly losing some business every year so is this is the number one mistake people make that I've seen they think oh their problem is their rent's too high they think so what do they do they find a cheaper location that's off the beaten path yeah that's called suicide I mean that's not your rent is your cheapest form of advertising so they think they're helping them themselves by getting their rent down by $1,000 but they just shut off x% of new business coming in you have to be able to find new business every year one way or the other or you're going to eventually do you track how many sorry how many business you lose every year do you track that or are you intuitively guessing that 10% no no no no he's got the data he knows I know what percentage is repeat so I have to assume that that X that next X percent is ah got it got it got it I mean Jay is putting his finger on exactly the dynamic I see over and over again and this applies to B2B or B Toc so issue number one is businesses under optimize the value of their existing customer customer base so they don't actually keep going back to them and building a stronger and stronger relationship they focus so much energy on getting new customers that they take for granted the ones that they have um that's super common um that's problem number one problem number two is they don't actually build the model or the tools or the data to actually make that possible so like Jay's been running some kind of a CRM for years that's like amazing very few retailers do a good job of that um but like actually understanding where that business is coming from and staying in touch with those folks and then the number two issue is like forest for the trees right oh my God my rent's so expensive so we're going to move in the B2B space I see this they the owners have this crappy building in some Office Park somewhere that has you know wood paneling from the 1970s and then they go to market to try to hire talent and the talent walks in the door for an interview and they're like uh no I'm not working here you are absolutely right you know they they they lose a different type of customer right so the B2B people are suffering in a different way by not investing in the thing that matters uh to the culture right so same thing and the people that run the company this is what they say they'll say oh no one cares what the offices look like that's just not true and the number one you might put this in your toolbox the number one thing repels um new employees is bad picture framing in the offices that's funny okay so you Sean just totally segwayed into the one thing I was going to ask you ask you guys during this and that is we right now when do you decide to spend money or spend time to save money as opposed to spend time to make money so as an example we were just given an offer by our bank to change our merchant processing to the bank's merchant processing and in exchange they were going to give us two months of merchant processing for free we basic we pay about $1,000 a day in merchant processing so if Doug can spend a couple of weeks to do the programming because our computer system is completely custom so it's not as easy as just switching Shopify so it'll take dug a couple of weeks we'll get two months $1,000 a day $560 Grand plus better rates for the rest of the year so right now that's looking at you know maybe $60,000 $70,000 for the year I'm rounding numbers or he could spend those two or three weeks working on something so that we could you know to make the site better so that we get more Revenue out of our existing customers and or build new customers how do you decide no there's option three you're doing exactly what I'm talking about they happen to come to you and say oh we'll save you money the fact is there's 50 other companies out there to do credit card merchant services that they're probably going to be cheaper than your local bank um no that's actually I mean I've done we've done the research this has been something that's on our radar for years and years and years and this is a big Bank um yes and this is and we've got other bids and so your our confident cheaper okay yes so this dollar amount we wouldn't have made the switch just for the better rates but the fact that they're willing to give us two months for free you know and that's going to be40 $50,000 just in a chunk of change is it worth I mean $40 to $50,000 of savings just bottom line like how much do you have to do in Revenue to make $40 or $50,000 and so like the thought process was you know could Doug spend two or three weeks of his time and develop a feature on the site that would generate a half a million dollars in sales which would then net us 40 or 50,000 bucks oh boy yeah wait wait wait let's be clear you're you're mixing up gross profit with net profit you wouldn't have to do half a million if you did another 100 Grand you probably make the same amount of money with your gross profit your gross profit is not 10% yeah okay good point okay so the I think the answer is simple to get dug to work harder yeah you know I know he doesn't listen to this so it's safe to say that yeah get him to work a little harder than do both I've hey sometimes you got to choose between marriage and business oh oh man that's a that's I I get what you're saying Laur Laura I mean this this seems like a a slightly more clear-cut thing because you know on the one hand you're talking a known Roi right you're like hey I know I know we will get $50,000 out of this if we if we do this ever and then it will pay off ongoing which is great versus the unknown Roi of doing changes to the website and and who knows what'll happen it could be exponentially better or it could do nothing that's the challenge um but it seems like such a small investment of time you know you say two to three weeks are there are there other risks that we're not hearing about no no no other risks I mean just the time wait you did you didn't tell us how much you're going to save on an ongoing basis it's not just the two months free you just so the rates lower you said yeah yes I did so maybe uh1 to $2,000 a month yeah you're not going to do a marketing that's like that's like a revenue stream to to your point I mean getting two grand a month net that's going to be tough to pull off doing some marketing right and then forever you know for years and years and years obviously ongoing but I mean the question I think it's I I feel like it's a good question because you know it's not just this it's like cleaning you know at what point do you stop cleaning the offices yourself and do you spend the money to have somebody clean you know it's these opportunity costs but Laura the thing we haven't talked about it and you've raised this in the past is how do you get Doug out of the cage that you've built him in well that's a whole different that's a different episode the issue is you know it does it make sense to just keep building the uh the system that he you know handbuilt starting 20 years ago or whatever it was uh or do you bite the bullet at some point and convert to Shopify or something else off the shelf no you don't no you have somebody buy it who has a you were considering that at one point have you ruled that out now yes because I think it comes with its own h of it's going to be the same number of problems just different problems just so you know we did go to Shopify and we're very happy for whatever that's wor um we have Shopify on our other thing you know with the mateline Tosh stuff but the volume is a lot different Laura am I correct that like um search and e-commerce is pretty significant for you all or is that not accurate yes search and e-commerce is about 95% of the business um of one of our businesses now that we have multiple businesses so now it's more like 60% so it sounds like I almost hear two two massive risks so one is Doug being like the the key to everything and then the the other massive risk and I I've seen this before where people switch platforms and then all of a sudden there's some huge SEO penalty um you know there's there's that risk too so that's oof man that's very astute and you you just nailed it so we think I think the solution is at some point to partner be acquired whatever and have a team take on this system that's built because the system is really robust it's it's pretty it's an amazing system and it's something that we can't replace off the shelf I mean maybe well no we can't we can't replace it off the shelf which is why we built it but yes that's a whole other show we're just about out of time here but before I let you guys go I just want to go around you know we got this Omron thing going and there's even talk now uh I read in the Washington Post this morning that there may be more uh government stimulus money coming toward businesses especially uh restaurants and gyms and and retailers uh have you guys been hit yet are you having problems with employees uh how's this affecting you Laura maybe you first um we haven't been hit in Reno um in Texas we had two unvaccinated employees and they both got it so they're out for a little while but they haven't been really sick um so you know I mean in general 2021 was a worse year for us than 2020 it was a pretty dramatic drop in sales but other than that why um because 20120 was a was a bubble for the knitting industry you know so many people were at home but no it hasn't affected us how about you Jay 10% of my staff is home either because they got it but they were exposed the good news is no one's gotten really sick and um I have a couple of unvaccinated one of them got it she's back today so I don't think getting sick today is I'm not a doctor obviously I don't think it's as bad today as it would have been two years ago so you know I just it is what it is I mean they're out and they'll be back and um they're the the Mandate they're talking about OSHA you're going to have to you know still is that unsettled still I guess by the February you have to make sure every you're over a 100 employees so it would apply to you right so we're we're watching that but um we're being careful but there's I I there's so many people that have been careful that still got it so we're just doing what we can but I'm kind of numb to it all and I just I have to tell you I'm just glad 21's over and I'm I would like to believe and I do believe it's going to get better soon I do believe that not just because I'm an optimist only because pandemics do go away they don't last forever we all be dead so it's they're it's going to go away that's my plan how you guys doing Sean you know we're in a really fortunate position uh being able to work remotely and and I'm just super thankful of that um we've been we've ALS also been you know taken it very seriously so you know our clients have been really aligned with that so they're they've been willing to meet on over video versus in person and we're starting to see it with the folks who have kids whether that's the kids are getting sick or or more commonly is the teacher gets Co and so then the school has to close so we're starting to see that and then the wave you know and I think this is all because of you know New Year's and and Christmas and all that stuff actually I'm glad you brought that up the real strain is my employees that have little kids at home it's I mean they thought they were going to school in Chicago boom they Clos school yesterday I mean they just it's it's a problem my thanks to Sean Jay goz and Laura Xander as always thanks for sharing thanks for listening 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 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]