Paying the Volcano God

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul DS tells Jay GS and Laura Xander why he's come to view Google as the volcano God he's not sure what it will take to keep the volcano God happy but he's obsessed with doing everything he can because the consequences of failing would be so great we also talk about Paul's content marketing strategy the pricing lessons that emerged from our recent attempt to monetize 21 hats and why Laura even in the midst of the labor shortage now has a waiting list of people hoping to work at her yarn manufacturer in Texas 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 episod episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul DS who is CEO of Paul D cabinet makers which makes custom conference tables outside of Philadelphia 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 Bean wool a digital yarn store based in Reno Nevada and meline Tosh a yarn supplier based in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled pay being the volcano God welcome Paul Jay and Laura it's great to have you here I want to start talking about marketing a little bit Paul you dropped something last week you mentioned that you've got some marketing people working inh house we haven't talked about that kind of thing with you in a while what's your current marketing strategy well we have we have relied on Google leads for quite a long time and I came to the understanding possibly flawed a couple of years ago that that means that Google is actually my biggest customer and the most important relationship I have uh with any anybody is to try to keep Google happy because if their algorithm decides that we're not the best choice for conference tables at some point in the future then we're screwed and I don't think that there would be much in the way of uh appeals we could make to get our former position back so thinking about well what is Google want from me first thing do they want money so yes so we just keep an AdWords campaign going with a budget about 2500 bucks a month for no reason other than to make sure that Google is getting some money from me we track that you don't think it's having an impact on the business I can prove it it's like tipping the Mater D you don't know why you do it but you just think it's helping it's like tipping the local mobster is how I see it that okay it costs money but the alternative could be way worse so we do that uh but the other thing that Google appears to want is for the website to have engaging fresh content and so I decided that I wanted to have an in-house content person so that we will be constantly able to update the site with fresh stuff and we're expanding into trying to do more videos and newsletters and anything that might be digital content going out that indicates that we are a busy and Progressive company and so I have on staff right now a graphic designer SLC content person who works four days out of five and in order to coordinate efforts between her and the rest of my sales team I have a consultant who's sort of a 10 15 hours a week kind of person who oversees My overall sales efforts and then also the marketing as well and the graphic design person cost me on the range of 40 some thousand a year and the uh consultant cost me maybe about 35,000 I've also in in past years spent much more than that just straight to Google I mean we used to have a $122,000 a month adwards budget for many years Paul I think at one point you told us that you stopped paying Google at all and went completely organic why did you decide to go back to paying them Google guilt Google's like the volcano God as far as I can tell the volcano's outside the village and you know that at any given moment it could erupt and destroy you and did something happen that triggered that or did you just get worried about the volcano I just was thinking about it from Google standpoint which is if if I'm handing out number one organic rankings what do I want in return for that and I know that they tell you that this has nothing to do with it but I don't believe it I can tell you is someone doing it that I totally cut it off and I'm ranking right up there I think you're trying to think like them which is like you can't think like them I think I believe them now in your case compared to mine I would think that it might help to pay for some Google AdWords because it's National and it's a unique product and blah blah blah locally for me I cut it off completely and I think we're good oh that's great Jay glad to hear it because you know it may be that I'm entirely wasting my money but when the volcano erupts then you look back and you say well what could I have done do you have these guys that are working for you um create make sure that there are lots of inbound links from other websites and maybe everybody that you've done something for they mention you somewhere and Link back to your site like do you go go into that kind of SEO we don't do backlinks I don't think that that's all that important for us and a lot of my clients won't do it okay um but what we do try to do is gather reviews we've placed a huge emphasis on making sure that clients give us a Google review that's another thing that I think they Google is looking at to see whether a business is uh legit we push people towards giving us reviews through Google and we post those on the website as well as the Google you know like whatever Google does internally now that is an interesting subject because I went to a a trade show and there was a company pitching a thing where you pay them money and they they can they'll they'll send an email to your customer saying give us a review and I everybody that works for me including me was just really turned off by that now I think in your case you're selling an expensive product I think it's perfectly reasonable and I don't I wouldn't mind getting it but you know you're selling a frame job for $300 I just don't know that I want to start hassling customers because I don't like it when they do it to me well we do it we do it a slightly different way we send a link to our clients that says here leave a review and the link actually goes to an intermediate this service I've hired which will screen the reviews and if there's something that's not five star it gives us a chance to respond to it before it hits Google and so it's it's just a little bit of a you know watch out for the wackos out there CU we did have one one star review up from someone who apparently thought we were a local restaurant and once it's up like you can't get rid of it would you you reach out to the customer and say hey we noticed you gave us a two star review can we talk about it I would do that if we got two star reviews I mean we we haven't had one other than that mistaken one um and then in that case it was like well what are you going to do we we actually got a a review last week which was a fourstar review which in these days and age it may as well be a big middle finger in your face and and uh but if you read the review the client was absolutely delighted with the everything so they said it was just that that person didn't believe in giving five stars so then we like okay what are we going to do about that and I thought about it and then I thought you know what nothing I'm going to have to trust that people who read reviews are actually Savvy at this point to what these reviews consist of and aside from the number of stars there was nothing wrong with the review I wanted to ask you about your content uh creation you know content marketing is such a a Hot Topic has been for some time I talk to people like William Vander bluman for example who've kind of built their company on it and I also talk to people who think it's a total Croc uh what's your strategy and and how has it work for you I don't think it's a total Croc because I've seen well Williams a good example and I've seen a couple of other companies who are really good at content creation who have benefited from it and so I'm trying to do that without really throwing resources at it the companies that I've seen most was successful with it like William put a lot of people on it so that there's a significant team producing content every day now he has everybody in his company do it is is my understanding the other companies that I've seen that have been successful like one has about hundred and some employees right now and they have a team of five who are full-time content creators doing nothing but making video uh content and Twitch streaming and doing a bunch of things but that's a pretty significant that's a pretty significant budget in operation and I'm trying to do it a little bit cheaper by just having one person and the the goal that we're trying to do is just explain to people what's happening in our Workshop because we do really cool stuff it's hard to do and I want to be able to show it better give us an example what what type of content uh what do you show can I just interrupt for a sec I'm a I'm confused like I am looking on Google right now and I look at custom conference table and you're number one like organically you're number one from an ad standpoint I think your ads um I think it makes a lot of sense from a user standpoint because now I'm seeing you twice looks like it's you Chagrin Valley and then popping um but I see you twice I see from a branding standpoint I'm seeing your um website address once in the ad and then once organically so whatever from my perspective whatever you're doing you're doing really well and you're doing right well great good glad to hear that you just cost someone a job now he's going to go fire this person now nice job no she's exceeding that's that's the whole point exactly I don't know about you but spending 70 grand a year on the resources to do what you're doing that doesn't seem cheap to me thank you it's not it's it's in line like my overall marketing expenses tend to run 3% of revenues over the course of a year and that's relatively low right like we shoot for about 5% um so sounds like we should all be taking a lesson from you that's for just the marketing not the sales effort like my sales team costs me more because they're on commission sure and they're doing a kind of selling which is not simple so what we're trying to do with content is to is to explain to people why the stuff we do cost so much money basically and that's by showing hey when you come to us we are actually listening to and then building this thing which is not easy and so it's not a Chinese Factory we're not just a boatload of stuff and cardboard boxes we want to show people what's going on so that they understand the complexity of our our process and why it might cost something and you're obviously using like the words custom conference table in every page you create and every you know and you're using americanmade and every page you know multiple times right yes no we I have this battle going on all the time with my with my content creation team about whether we write copy that's aimed at having a robot read it or having a human being read it now I'm a pretty experienced writer and I like to write a lot of the content on the site and make it to be something that's enjoyable but that does not really go along with making it SEO friendly because as you said you got to pack in a bunch of awkward phrases yep we've always kind of said like we're serving two masters we serve Google and we serve the customer and like you know the science and the art is how do you serve both and how do you write copy that makes both people happy I don't think you can so you you you you pick your poison and so what we do is we have certain parts of the site that don't actually get a ton of traffic but but are really loaded with the keywords and then we try to make the site itself useful and because one of my one of things I strongly believe is that Google is looking very carefully at how much time people spend on sites and their user experience and where they travel and whether it looks like they're enjoying the content so there you got to aim it at the people but just the the straight robots they they need something to Feast on too so we've tried to design the site that has pockets of robot words and pockets of human words and put the proper pocket in front of the proper ER person Paul I'm on your website right now I don't see where the content is I see um marketing copy about your beautiful tables uh but I don't see a a Blog to click on or there is but we we don't have it up top and it depends on are you looking on a phone or on a on a desktop I'm on a laptop okay we have all the blog posts and we actually some of our blog posts are very a lot of people read them but we're not putting that in front of at up top on the page because the theory of the site is that someone is looking for a conference table they're not looking for Paul Downs they're looking for a table so we want to put all the tables up top and just show them a million tables and get them to call us and all the other kind of content where you have long descriptions it's on there um we could we've experimented with making things like the blog more or less prominent and we've just settled on what we've got at the moment but I'm willing to listen to that feedback and think okay maybe we should make more more of the content content uh up top I don't know I mean is it work it seems like it's working well that's that's another thing you you get what you get and so you know that you're working with with who calls you but what you don't really know is who just turned around and went away for whatever reason it's hard to pick that out well you're looking at the metrics right of how many people come to your site and what your close rate is yeah do you know what that number is uh the close rate on people who contact us about 30% that sounds like a lot I think you're suffering a little bit from Google anxiety you should join a group and try to it's 30% on qualified customers it's about 10 on 10% on all all contacts well how do people find the blog how do people find the blog we actually are aiming most of our blog posts at a general woodworking audience and hoping to lure them in so uh somewhere I mean I got to open up the site I think that the blog link is down at the bottom somewhere you scroll all the way down and very tiny type on the far left you can see the word blog yeah it is I found it yeah so we we have at other times had that right up next to the phone number at the top and it didn't really change much you know people would look at it up there but not many people would click through from that spot but do you have the impression that people are going from the blog to buying tables no what they're doing is there there's a couple of of posts on the blog that got a lot of traffic uh one in particular about buying slab tables or Live Edge tables which are the sort of the stylish thing and I wrote a series of blog posts about how you buy those slabs and what you should look for and those have been really durable popular content on General searches for Live Edge tables but the number of people who want that and the number of people who want a boardroom table the overlaps very small but what we're doing is just like putting some content on the site that people like and again this is a Google aimed strategy trying to come up with something that's useful information put on our site and hope that Google sees that people keep clicking in on this see I do have a similar I got people that Google Believe It or Not framing wedding dresses which was to everyone's surprise and we do very very very few of them but people like going to that site so there is something to be said for having something that maybe people are interested in it doesn't mean it's going to result in it gets back to playing to the Google versus to the people I guess yeah and I also had some strong opinions about certain aspects of what Woodworking and I put them in the blog and then let people get all excited about what I said or didn't say this reminds me a lot of an article that we probably all read a couple years ago about a guy who builds pools right and then all of the work that he would do you know and all the Articles he would write and the videos he would do and you know it's probably a relatively similar price point I don't know 20 to 50,000 bucks or something well he was so good at it he ended up going into the he got rid of the pool business and now he is a consultant apparently oh seriously yeah Lauren you know about it you're talking about a guy named Marcus Sheridan uh and it's a story that I edited for the New York Times he was in the pool business and he learned uh some interesting things this we published this you know 10 years ago he realized that nobody talked about the price of pools and he decided he was going to do it and he wrote a blog post just put it on his site that you know he didn't tweet it out he didn't put it on LinkedIn he didn't do any of that he just put it on his site and it shot to the top of Google rankings because nobody else was talking about price um and he didn't say exactly what they cost but he gave enough information he gave some round figures and then he did something where he ranked all the best pool builders in his area in Richmond Virginia and he left his name off the list he just put the top five and left his name off and figured that anybody who clicked on that would give him some credit for objectivity and check him out as well and that did really well on uh rankings we've run that same strategy for years of putting pricing up and I used to have very explicit prices for every single t you saw on the website that did become kind of unwieldy because people would invariably you know someone would go to the site and click on the coolest table and then they would see a number that was more than their house and they would be like oh this isn't for me so we just have general pricing information now but none of my competitors put pricing up in a way that makes any sense and that's a Furniture industry thing no I think there's an opportunity there cuz nothing gets me more aggravated when I call a vendor for something whatever uh and you say well how much going to cost to do the sprinklers well you know it depends I go well you do this for a living I don't so I don't know whether this is $2,000 or $200,000 I have to believe you do know so could you give me a Range a big range like 50 to 100 because it depends is not a great answer we've got that conversation on our site right now and we're the only people that put up any information as far as I can know about the big complicated tables so laori you mentioned a couple of other competitors who showed up when you Googled for custom table and I'm familiar with those companies and they're doing a different product the the things they do are considerably simpler than the things we do so we do have to say it depends but then we we give you enough information without making the call to to come up with some concept but we really do need to talk to the client to give them a real estimate we do it for framing we say oh uh a medium-sized picture yeah it's probably going to be anywhere between you know $100 and $500 depending on you know how extensive you get with it because people have know some people think that a frame picture is going to cost $40 and it's just not so we're going to take a break here and then we're going to come back and talk about pricing some more in the the context of my efforts to turn 21 hats into a sustainable business uh we'll be right back I'm here with Rob Levan co-founder of work better now which provides businesses with highly talented virtual assistance Rob I've noticed that owners tend to have certain questions about virtual assistance for example what exactly can they do yeah Lauren we get this question all the time uh because people really know deep down that they need an assistant but they're not exactly sure how it works and what they can do for them I would say that our clients use our assistant in one of two ways they will either use them much like I've been using my assistant for the past eight years as an executive assistant handling my calendar which takes up so much time email management database file management personal tasks creating documents for me and then a lot of our clients basically operationalize our assistance so we have assistance with titles like project manager marketing associate operations manager and customer service representative I think some owners worry they'll spend more time managing their assistant then it would have taken them just to do the test themselves how do you respond to that right right right this is a deadly tra not only with assistant but really with any employees which is oh I can do it faster myself and the reality is you might be able to do it faster yourself of course it's impossible to grow your business if you're doing everything yourself I was very much uh of a similar mindset what I did with my assistant is I basically told him what needs to be done and had them document it I hate documenting tasks but I know the processes are so important now we have a manual full of my uh tasks I only had to tell him once that he can follow time and time again and and if he's out somebody else can follow and also think about it this way if you're a business owner making something like let's say $200,000 a year which is about $100 an hour you're basically paying somebody to do administrative work at $100 an hour if you're doing these tasks yourself that makes a lot of sense what does it cost the cost is $1,900 a month and as you know Lauren we are offering 21 hats readers and listeners $150 off per month for 3 months just by mentioning the word Lauren there are no contracts also very important for people to know can you promise a return on that investment if you're not getting a return something's not going right all of our clients are not only getting a return with the first assistant they've hired but many of our clients are now on their second third and fourth assistant where can we learn more work better now.com and again when you sign up for a 15minute consult just mention the word Lauren we'll make sure to give that $150 off for each of the first three months thanks Rob and we're back so as all three of you know I finally managed to introduce a plan for monetizing 21 hats uh I'm asking people to pay to be part of the community and I offered two choices for $140 a year you can be a paid subscriber and get all of our content uh including this podcast and The Morning Report or for $480 a year you can be a founding member and get all of the content plus an invite to a monthly Mastermind session where you can connect with those other smart owners talk about common issues advise me on Building 21 hats and and hear guest speakers actually there was a third option you could also do nothing and and so far that has proved to be quite the popular option uh which is why I want to try to get some free advice from you guys I'm a little bit surprised I got more than I expected who signed up at the higher level and fewer than I expected did at the paid subscriber lower level and I'm wondering uh two things one did I price too high at that level or two do I need to put up a pay wall because I asked people to pay voluntarily I said this is a test I said that I'm asking you to pay I'm testing this if it doesn't work I'll probably have to put up a pay wall do you guys think I have to do that and compel people to if they're going to read it well the other option is maybe the 140 needs to be a little lower what I curious of of all the people that signed up what percentage signed up at the 480 and what percentage signed up at the 140 it's actually about an equal number a little bit more signed up at the lower level um but I was expecting a lot more to sign up at the lower level keep in mind the higher level they had to to pay to get what you were offering I think that might be the key point there was some urgency there I told people number one that I was going to limit the number of people who could be part of the founding member group um and if they wanted to do it as you just said they had to pay there was no choice so there was urgency with the paid subscribers at the lower level it was kind of the opposite of urgency I said you can pay me if you want but you could also just keep reading it and you don't have to pay me I think that the it sounds to me as though the the lower level offering it it's allowing you to to figure out of of the total basket of things you're offering which ones are most attractive so maybe the newsletter is not the thing that moves the needle and the chance to get real help from people at a higher level is is what moves the needle I keep thinking of it as you know as a Kickstarter or you know the transparency of can you please just contribute whatever and here are the different levels and making it super transparent that like this is how many people have signed up this is what my goal is um and and kind of tapping into the competitive nature of all of us that we want to hit a goal we want to help you hit a goal well I Laura I think it's interesting that you brought up Kickstarter because I've been watching another company I do business with that's that's extremely Adept at kickstarters and that whole aspect where everybody who's thinking about joining can see how many other people have joined is I think extremely powerful and what they do is they they have their Kickstarter which is hey we're offering a thing but if we get to a certain number of people who joined to get that thing then we're going to offer more options they call them unlocks and as more people go on the the total choice of things that they could possibly buy gets bigger and then at the end of the kickstarter campaign then they figure out which choices have been unlocked and they go back and they offer those choices to everybody and there's a significant increase in the from the pledged revenue in the first round to the actual realized Revenue in the second round how much would people pay again if made it kind of transparent and there are the different levels and one of the levels is an advertising level right is the sponsor level and you make that very clear that for $5,000 a year you know not only do you get to be a member but you also get you know this this and this but you could also if you auctioned off you know a dinner with Jay you know so this level includes dinner with Jay or this level that's an interesting thought I I will say this one of the nice aspects of this by being open about it and talking about it I have had a number of people reach out to me with interest in sponsoring both the uh the newsletter and uh and the podcast so it it has um you know created some interest there but I I like your ideas of um you know maybe creating some other kind of way to reward someone well you kind of did though the 480 the you are rewarding them that's the point but Bor suggesting doing finding more ways to do that good thought yep fig figure out what worked and keep going and make it kind of a co-op like we're all in this together and how do we all support each other together let me ask you about the pay wall it's scary because you wonder are people going to be willing to pay or are they just going to go away uh will you be able to keep growing will you be able to attract new subscribers if there's a pay wall up all of that concerns me one suggestion I got that I'm kind of intrigued by is that I put up the pay wall but I create a mechanism for referrals so if there's a pay wall up if we create this referral mechanism somebody can introduce me uh to someone they think another CEO or business owner someone they think should be getting uh the Morning Report or listening to the podcast and I could give them you know three months free uh as a way to to try it do you think people would do that kind of referral for someone who's making a good living I just have a hard time believing someone's going to to go out of their way to go oh to save $30 oh I'm going to go send this to my friend well and I think it over complicates it can I throw out a different thought which is that I think that that one of the issues with the pay wall for you and this is just a problem that I I don't know how you're going to address is a lot of the things you link to in the newsletter are behind a pay wall themselves so that when the times was instituting a pay wall if you paid the money you got to see everything on the times whereas with the morning report if you link to a Wall Street Journal article well it doesn't do me any good because I don't I don't have the subscription yeah let me make the larger point which is that we've struggled with the idea of a lowcost offering for years and well I I constantly tell my sales team who are like can't we just have some simple thing we can just sell in two minutes and I was like no because then you're just competing with huge well-funded operations that are always going to beat our brains out on that product and I'm thinking that for you the newsletter may be that which is that you can't actually compete with the New York Times The Wall Street Journal you're aggregating that stuff and that's fine but your your clients are starting to tell you with the subscription signups that your actual value proposition is in a much higher price higher touch offering than just firing out a newsletter and I think you just need to hear that and think about that and you may come to come come to whatever conclusion you want about that but that's something that I see happening here that hasn't been addressed let me address that quickly uh first of all as your far as your larger point I think you're right on target with that I mean one of my goals with this was to you know to test things and figure out what the business model should be and I think you're absolutely right the responses I got are pointing me in a slightly different direction than I expected um so I agree with you on that exactly yeah as far as the the links in the morning report it's that's a a little bit complicated I'm glad you brought it up because a lot of people have questions about that it does frustrate a lot of people frustrates me uh but but here's the way I look at it and I think it it works for some it doesn't work for everybody uh first of all the The Wall Street Journal is not a good example because the Wall Street Journal is actually uh very kind about this they've created something uh called a share link which I always am careful to include when I link to them and a share link means that they're making it possible for someone to share one of their stories with someone else I include the share link and that means if you click on a story that comes from the Wall Street Journal you do get to go through it um so I I that's one of the reasons I link to the Wall Street Journal a lot because even though they have a very solid pay wall they have created this one exception and people can get through there can I just make a comment on that which is a lot of people will check a link just by hovering on it before clicking it cuz that's basic uh cyber security protocol and if it says Wall Street Journal on it I don't even bother because I assume I won't be able to see it so that if you're if you're linking into something that superficially looks like it would be behind a pay wall you'd be doing yourself and everybody else a favor if you said this is not behind a pay wall right front of the link you know I hadn't thought about people hovering and looking to see and then choosing not to we're training every single one of my employees to always hover and check it because of the prevalence of fishing attempts and and cyber security threats I've shied away from saying there's a pay wall or there's not a pay wall because it's not always black and white uh for example there are a lot of uh Publications that have a pay wall but will let you have a certain number of uh clicks per month um and that means it it becomes a you know a individual situation where you might be able to click through but someone who's already hit their limit wouldn't be able to click through one larger overall point here is you're right with the New York Times if you pay you get everything but but it's not tailored for a business owner I'm providing all these stories in one place that are tailored for a business owner and it saves people who are primarily interested in that kind of content time they don't have to go looking for it I do it for them and if if they find that they're clicking on a link for a particular publication often and can't get through maybe then they do decide to subscribe there but I'm hoping my service is still valuable because I'm pointing them in the right direction I would just like to say better I say it than you you are a unique individual and your background your interest your engagement in small business is so far far far above the typical person that's working at any of these other Publications that they can be assured that the stuff that's in in the report in the morning is stuff that a lot of it's going to resonate and that's why you're doing this because you're not just somebody that you know came out of Journalism school and it's doing on the side this is it's it's it's good stuff and I would ask everyone listening right now if you didn't pay give Lauren the courtesy of send them a quick email and just tell them you know I would pay tell them whatever's on your mind just tell them I don't think it's worth it tell them well if you put a pay W up I will pay help them out here cuz let's be nice before this turns into an NPR pledge Drive we've already crossed that line I think we have crossed that line haven't we um thank all of you I really appreciate it this was really helpful a lot for me to think about here I want to hit a couple more things uh before we completely run out of time uh Laura you told us last week about your SBA loan approval everything going okay with that for buying your building in Reno yeah it's crazy it's all coming together when do you move um next week wow that was quick uh yeah we're shooting for just one down day um that's the goal I'm going to say for the 100th time SBA Loans are the greatest thing the government has ever done to help small business no it's I mean this whole thing is fantastic and now I'm through you know I I used that wedding analogy last time you know and it's in the beginning it's the honeymoon it's really EXC you know in the beginning you date somebody and you're so we're looking for the building and it's really exciting and you're kind of dreaming about it and then all of a sudden like it hits that oh like maybe this is going to be real and it's a little dis concerting um and so now we're P to that and now we're starting to get really excited um so yeah no it's going to be great I know in your uh original location your retail location you used to do things to try to encourage people to come from around the country and I know on your social media you would post pictures of people who were visiting and you know making a point to come to Jimmy beans wall um in person um are are you going to try to do something to encourage that absolutely yeah and this actually lights a fire under us um and kind of I don't know why maybe it's really silly but just the pride of owning the building and having this be ours makes us all want to double down on like advertising budget locally you know really pushing um the local and the travel um and getting people into the store and like Jay said you know I mean if we can increase our sales in the retail store and that could pay for our rent each month or you know our mortgage like how cool is that it just seems really rewarding that that money would be going into the building as opposed to going to our land lord here's something that a lot of people don't understand there's only one reason that buying real estate works one word inflation that's why buying real estate Works inflation keeps going along your rent would have kept going up whereas when you buy the building it's frozen so it's pretty difficult to lose money on real estate if you're the tenant if you lose a tenant that's a whole other story but if you are the tenant it's it's just extremely it's hard to lose money on this deal so she's going to be good well and I I'll throw out the other word um from an emotional standpoint is pride our staff is so excited and so proud to be able to say we own this building this is our building you know we can decorate it the way we want we can plant flowers outside if we want so it's really creating a sense of ownership and you don't to worry about your lease coming up what's going to happen cuz the owner died and their kids took over and you don't know what I mean this is what happens every day in business eventually the owner dies and the kids end up with the building and now you've got a whole another Dynamic there or even if the owner doesn't die they just decide that they're not charging enough rent so they Jack it up 20% it happens every day it's funny to think back on the conversations we've had because we we talked about you know you're trying to buy a building at your Texas location and uh the Heartbreak that went into that you've told us at various points how much trouble you've had during the labor shortage keeping your uh operation in Texas staff anything new with that yeah yeah so we hired a factory manager production manager um about three months ago and he as it turns out is a hiring god um we now are not only fully staffed but we have a waiting list of people who want to come work for us down there which what's he doing what's the secret God maybe I don't want to know um part of it is we have improved the conditions there so significantly we've improved pay um that we're getting a fair number of people who used to work here um years and years ago that had left and so they're coming back so that's one big part of it and then the other chunk is we started using he's using a staffing service that he has used for years and years and has a great relationship with that and and just knows how to navigate that um and the service you know we've obviously done the math um it pays off it works out you know for people that want to stay after three months they can come on full-time um and that's been working out really well and he just he's got the experience and knows how like which kinds of people to talk to which kinds of people are going to work did he change the ads at all are you putting ads out or not we're not even doing ads anymore okay so really the Crux of it is he working with the the staffing agency and it's the staffing agency and then it's the referrals so you know 99% of our staff is Hispanic and it's a small community in Fort Worth so the we're getting a lot more referrals because you know the energy is really good because the pay is good um so it's a combination of those two things does he speak Spanish he does yeah he's hispanic as well that's a critical piece yeah and he's a great people people person you know really great people person Paul how are you doing with Staffing uh no problems I mean we haven't lost anybody I actually had one employee who moved across the country because his marriage fell apart uh that was the only quit we've had and we've hired a couple people and it's it's not easy it's never easy for me to find people because we're looking for a very particular skill set that's just not that common but we've got some and I'm not really sweating it at the moment you told us a while back that you had develop the strategy of if you found somebody you wanted to hire if they came into the office you asked them how much they wanted to be paid and then you offered them more to try to get them to sign I mean I don't I haven't even tried to hire anybody since spring but I would do that because I think that it shows like to me the interview process is mostly about me trying to sell the company to an employee as opposed to vice versa we have a set of uh tests that we give right at the beginning and I kind of score every applicant before I make a phone call to them to um have an interview so I have a I have an idea of who I want to go after and if I'm going after somebody yeah I want to take them off the job market right there in my office and then have the Leisure of having hired them if I think they have potential to see how it turns out and I haven't found any other way to do it in my industry because we need we need to hire people who have a certain amount of experience but mostly potential because what we do is so particular and we will be training them so we got to get them in to take a look at them and I think that a lot of applicants are very surprised to hear someone say hey I'll offer you more if you'll say yes right now and uh I've had pretty good success with that tactic interesting commentary on how the leverage has shifted from to to the point where you're selling the employee more than the employee is trying to sell you J you feel the same way it it's been difficult we're doing okay my question at the moment since it's almost November has anybody been going through budgets for next year what are you doing about pay increases for next year because the Chicago Tribune yesterday or the day before said that the average company from what they've seen is doing 3% increases and I'm just wondering whether you're dealing with that I am not contemplating any automatic increases yeah pay increases were actually doing another round of them next week I mean if let's just be specific cost of living increases for you're not changing your I just just someone's been there for years absolutely of course I think people are given bigger raises than they did because because inflation's higher yes 100% And then we're trying to figure out bonus stuff as well that's an entire show I would like to just vote bonuses that's just a very very interesting complicated not simple conversation that's a great idea we're going to do that but I think we're out of time today my thanks uh especially for the free advice to Paul DS Jay goz and Laura Xander really appreciate it wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n@ 21h 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 podcast 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