Rule No. 1: We Will Not Have Civil Wars

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Shan busy Paul DS and Liz picarazzi talk about why it's so easy for tension to break out inside a business Liz's tension Brewing between her people in the office and her people in the field Shan often sees friction at businesses between sales and those who have to deliver what sales sells Paul says there's always the potential for tension when a project gets handed from one set of work to another and he's created a very deliberate process to address it we have he says really tamped down the Civil Wars and started solving the problems as opposed to letting them Fester plus are Shan and Liz going to hit their numbers this year and have the owners seen their health insurance rates for next year 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 news newslet the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21 hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Sean busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Paul DS who is CEO of Paul DS cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and please take a listen to my quick chat with Rob Levan co-founder of our sponsor work better now the episode is titled rule number one we will not have Civil [Music] Wars welcome Sean Paul and Liz it's great to have you all here Liz I'd like to start with you you told us uh a couple weeks ago that you had put an uh an idea in front of your EO group whether to pursue investment capital or not you also told us that you were going to a big EO event has that happened yes it has um I had a big dose of EO over that two weeks and um the EO event is it's called nerve and it's basically all of the Northeast um chapters go down to Virginia Beach and have two and a half days of speakers and you know various pundits activities lots of social events um and it was my first time going to EO nerve I had a really great time and it was coming at a good time too because I was discouraged and Confused a about a lot of things with the business and there's nothing like spending two and a half days with a bunch of other insane entrepreneurs um to make me feel better that was the context you brought it up you told us there are times when you feel kind of alone as an entrepreneur and that it helps to talk to other entrepreneurs did did it serve that purpose it definitely did and the other thing that those events tend to do for me is make me feel a little bit less crazy you know so um oftentimes when I go to these events I may be kind of out there entrepreneur very dreamy very creative you know very grandiose definitely grandiose I feel very self-conscious about being grandio a lot of the time in in my normal life but when I get around 600 entrepreneurs who are all grandos it's amazing so you felt less crazy because everyone else was crazy too exactly yes who is the craziest person you met oh boy that's a good question I'll just say that there's a bunch of people that are just all over the map with businesses they're in and that always makes me am someone may have made their living in manufacturing sold their business and then they start investing in real estate and they get into crypto and next thing you know you're talking to met cocktail party and they have four businesses going in totally different areas and those are the people I always find to be especially fascinating just how far their brains can stretch and um just have such a wide range of activities some of them are pro probably profitable some of them not but they're trying a lot of things out like an investor would do with having a diversified portfolio so that may not exactly answer the question but for me to be able to have like six balls in the air and they're all pretty different is very crazy you mentioned crypto I I I don't even know how to deal with that I try to avoid it mostly was that a significant portion of the event was that something that was on the menu no I just find that a lot of entrepreneurs particularly if they've sold their businesses are into crypto even if they're skeptical because they have the means to play it's like gambling and they're really fascinated with it so um I definitely would not say it was in terms of the programming but when you talk to people there's definitely groups of people that are real really nerds on crypto and you know I have eight Forum mates and I think all of them are very well vered in crypto some of them are active investors and I've done nothing on it I have a a barrier from trying to get into it or learn about it I feel like it's just um maybe it's above me or maybe it's just a distraction but it's not for me right now oh but you're you're curious interesting Paul Sean either of you uh putting money into the crypto no I have no interest in it I'm sorry yeah don't don't be sorry my son has been involved in it in a way that I don't understand and somehow he made a fair amount of money doing running a server that does a particular thing for some particular type of crypto but it became irritating he's trying to sell it and it's just a giant pain and he's done with it he assured me it's the whole crypto thing is is crazy don't get involved all right so to talk about something that might actually be of value to someone listening to this podcast Liz we communicated before this a little bit and you talked about some tension within your business between I think people who are working in the office and people who are out in the field can you tell us about that yeah I'd love to and this is actually a problem or a challenge I should say with my previous business my handyman business so in both of these businesses City bin where we have installers and checklist Home Services where we had handymen in the field there has been kind of a Schism that is always there sometimes it's better sometimes it's worse um around probably do we understand each other do the people in the office understand the schedule that they're putting on us in the field do we understand you know how how long it takes to drive from you know Southern Manhattan to Northern there's definitely an a thought that we're out of touch with what the field experiences and needs and no one has said it to me in that way but I do recognize the sentiment from my previous days in the handyman business where there is just the different skill sets there's different needs typically in the office we're client facing we want to say yes to client requests we're not always going to be as realistic about how long things will take because we're going to do whatever we can to please our customer and that is not something that we then feel in the field because we're not driving the truck we're not dealing with the gas and the lights and the tariffs and the unexpected things that come up so this is just to kind of paint what it's like as we grow everybody in the field feels that we're out of touch in the office and it's it's kind of come to a head because one of our most valued employees is going to be leaving and it's largely he's quitting because this just feeling like he's pulled in every direction all day long and he just gets exhausted um the other thing I should say about that employee is that he does tend to work in Times Square a lot and he hates it like he can't he feels like it's a hardship and I have to agree with him because I've been there with him a few times with just the noise and the smells and the garbage juice and everything we've talked on here before so you know I've had to look at what what are some changes that we can do and I think there are quite a few of them to bridge the gap but it's come up for me pretty intensely recently and for years I haven't really felt it but this divide is very apparent at this stage of the business to what extent Liz is it a sales issue I mean I think this is pretty common in businesses where the sales people who are incentivized to sell sell more than can be delivered is is that part of this not really this is a lot more about like Logistics and moving things from one place to another making sure we're staffed correctly on the installations if a last minute request comes in do we prioritize it and drop everything else or not and you know to my installers credit we have been dropping things to be able to do something higher priority a lot since the city work started so if I hear about something in Time Square that needs to be addressed I'm literally going to get someone there the very next morning and they probably think I'm being a little bit hyper about it but um you know I want to do great with these City contracts so it's taking people that used to do Residential installations day after day after day to going into various neighborhoods commercial neighborhoods including Time Square where there's a really strategic imperative that we do it right away and so you know they feel like their schedule has been upended Paul or Sean have either of you experienced anything along these lines uh I have in a wood shop operation there's a couple of natural Civil Wars that want to form all the time and one is between the guys who were in the shop building the work and then the finishing crew who are applying the finishes because the build guys build it hand it to the finishing guys and the finishing guys often discover problems or just issues that that should have been addressed on the shop floor and the bill guys often are thinking well you know we'll just let the finishers fix it if there's a ding in it or or whatever and I have experienced that situation sort of drifting out of control and in recent years I've implemented a number of things to really prevent that from happening because I think it is extremely destructive I think that the first thing that I did was just think about where the natural schisms are going to form and we have a sales team we have a project management team who also does quality control we have an engineering team we have the shoplow guys building the work the finishing crew who finishes it and then a delivery and Logistics operation who are packing shipping and installing and that means work is getting handed off from place to place throughout the process and uh at each one of those handoffs there's the possibility of miscommunication and finger pointing and my Approach has been first of all to make sure everybody understands that these are natural uh points of contention and that we have to manage it and rule number one from Paul Downs is we will not have Civil Wars I do not want to see it nobody really enjoys these things they don't do a company any any good but the boss has to be crystal clear I think or that's what's worked for me at all moments that when the the when the conflict starts it needs to be addressed immediately and everybody needs to understand that the worst thing that can happen is these things flare up and get out of control and then in order to prevent that from happening there's a number of things that we implemented that have been effective and the first thing is that when we try to address problems we get everybody who's involved in the same room to have the discussion that is critical that you can't listen to one side of the problem as the boss and hear all about that and then 20 minutes later listen to the other side of the problem and then try to come to some kind of decision that just really doesn't work whoever is more persuasive is going to persuade you and that may or may not have anything to do with the actual problem cuz some people are just more persuasive so I learned the hard way put them all in the same room when you address problems second when we're addressing problems we have a set of Behavioral rules that everybody is quite familiar with that uh talk about how you can have a discussion about problems what is okay to say and what is not okay to say is yelling okay no yelling is never okay is are insults okay no insults are never okay we're going to have a a model before we even start of what this discussion is going to look like and I make all the participants actually read out loud what the rules are before we even have the discussion just to remind everybody here's how it goes you don't interrupt somebody and then that person has the duty to not repeat themselves and there's a bunch of them and so that you're really imposing the will of the owner on the on everything that's happening here in order to solve the problem but then another thing is that you actually have to try to solve the problem and listen carefully to what the solution is and then have regular means of people giving further feedback and further followup so we have regular meetings every four to six weeks where we just go over issues again everybody involved is sitting there and we it's like a release valve so that people know there's a way to address problems that isn't just fighting with your co-workers though those things have been pretty effective for me and we have over the last last last three four years and we've implemented these rules really tamped down the Civil Wars and started solving the problems as opposed to letting them Fester now Liz with your crew some of them being out on the road all day the other ones in the office how often is everybody in the same place so that's a good question um we're typically only in the same place maybe twice a month and for this recent kind of I don't want to call it an upheaval but it feels a little bit like that we did have a get together on Monday where we all got together and discussed perspectives and solutions and there's a number of new things that we're going to implement but it's also interesting that you ask because we're in the process of moving right now and we're deciding whether we want to consolidate everything into one space so it would be our office showroom warehouse and wood shop or if we just put the warehouse in the wood shop Consolidated into one space and we keep the office showroom in its current place the reason I bring that up is that that is a big sort of a cultural decision of do we want to have physical divisions between where we work or do we want to have it all in one place and I've been going back and forth for the last couple weeks we're going to be making a decision tomorrow about the news space but that sort of having people report to the same place in the morning is something I'd really like to have I just don't know if it's going to be possible well I would recommend the do that if at all possible because one of the ways that we manage our our conflicts is just by a we're all in the same place so rule number one is when you have a problem go talk to the person involved about it so that there I constantly see my people walking back and forth from wherever their normal workstation is to somewhere else to have a discussion with the other people and I think it would be much trickier if there was a physical like if you had to get in a car and drive half an hour so that the phys physical arrangement of the space is either going to emphasize or deemphasize the potential for Civil War the second thing is really just to be crystal clear with your people that you don't want this to happen you don't want to see the behavior and we're going to do things about it and you're going to do them on a regular basis because if you just treat it as a one-time flare up with a onetime fix there's no release valve it's just going to be another 6 months and then a war will break out again so I try to have all my people together for a Monday morning meeting where I just give them updates on the status of the company but we have other meetings too where everybody who's who's in a position to make a a a decision about these kinds of things is in the in the same room all the time so that they're seeing each other if the people in the office never actually even see the people on the road it's a much trickier problem now I know other businesses like I know a guy who owns a plumbing company where he's got the same situation there's an office crew and there's the plumbers who are in trucks all day and he has the same problem you do this which is that you get this natural division between the people in one place and the people in the other place and as far as I know the only solution is to get them in the same place fairly regularly and to set up uh procedures that are about releasing tension and solving problems and discussing these things now not everybody I know has the rules that we have about how to have the discussion um but I find that that's just just makes the discussion so much more fruitful if we agree on how we're not going to do it which is a lot of finger pointing and blame and yelling and screaming and whatever so so that that's been my approach to Civil Wars and I would say it's been pretty successful Sean have you had experience with this either at your business or it's businesses that you work with yeah um a lot of what Paul just said I've seen action and it's funny you mention a plumbing company we had a client that was a plumbing company and it was horrible like I would say probably I would say it's probably one of the top five or 10 um business threats to an organization and what I've noticed is that is that it manifests in for two reasons I think reason number one which might be lizz's situation which is growth and so the business has new needs than it had before so you're having to change very quickly and folks can not understand the needs of different folks within the organization so the operations people this is really classic right the operations people are desperately trying to get things to a predictable system that they can repeat over and over and over again while the sales and marketing and Innovation people are like ah There's an opportunity over here and they're constantly changing in Reinventing and so that friction is is really kind of a growth oriented friction and then the other reason for it happening is within an established organization it's much more about sort of politics and foms and power and I think Paul's insights into this are really smart because the tendency as you become a mature business is to organize by silos so you can be efficient and it's those very silos that are also can be the undoing of the business and so you really have to actively work to break down those Tendencies of tribalism and foms um and I think empathy for each other's jobs is critical in that and so having folks do the work that they're not normally doing or sort of sit with the person who's doing the thing that they're not familiar with can be really helpful I I felt it myself too in our organization it's been really detrimental this happened maybe five or six years ago we hired somebody who really tried to build that they really tried to create the division and it it harmed us it was really bad for us cost us probably hundreds of thousands of dollars um so I think you have to approach it like it's really important Liz what's the impediment to having the single space is it just a question of the rent's going to be too high or you can't find the right place or what well so we're in Industry City and we would be cons everything would be at industry City explain what that is what what's industry City industry city is a large um manufacturing creative space in South Brooklyn that used to be like all factories and warehouses and now it's a gigantic kind of entrepreneur complex and for creatives it's really an amazing place and there's I think there's 20 or so buildings on the campus and we're in one of them and we're thinking about putting everything else the the warehouse in another one that's literally a 10-minute walk away so it's almost if you imagine a college campus those two buildings are about 10 minutes apart um but if we were and we can we can afford it actually to consolidate all in one space we would want to do it but it's like moving our it's kind of comp complex with moving our office and everything but it it it would be possible but it also like if we couldn't be in the exact same space we could be on the same campus whereas now we have you know a warehouse that's two two hours away in New Jersey we have our wood shop in another area of Brooklyn and then we have our office here at industry City so you know that this is a complex also that wants to work with us to be able to consolidate everything together they know that I currently have three checks going out to rent to three different places and then I would really like to just write one check a month so they're working with us on that they've been really generous with you know negotiations so I do have a good opportunity to I think make a decision not only about our space but about culture and that's part of why I I thought wow this the situation the the Schism between the groups could be I don't know mitigated a bit by having a common space I think it would be and and I would reiterate that as the boss it's your it's one of your main jobs is to first of all acknowledge that there's problems that the problems are built into the nature of the business so it's not just because Joe does this or Jane does that it's like there's always a problem and I'm constantly talking to my people about the things that are happening in our shop and just telling them that everybody has these problems and they find that very comforting because otherwise it seems like we're uniquely stupid or that person is more more irritating than anybody else on Earth and if you just say to them listen I talk to a million business owners everybody has this problem and the only way to solve it is by continually working on it you have to acknowledge that it's going to be there and not you can't you can't say to them hey we're never going to have tension anymore and what I say to them is no we're going to have tension what we do is hard and there's always going to be these issues and the question is what do we how do we manage it so that we can maintain team spirit and collegiality and no one has to come to work afraid of somebody uh and that's my goal not that you can eliminate these things you can't but if everybody understands that it's just part of the day then it becomes much much easier to manage I think you see it too a lot in um you you mentioned this Lauren is the sales versus delivery side of things and um it's I'd say that's probably one of the worst areas because the sales organization connects directly to revenue they have a lot of power and they can sort of like get their way and then the folks who are doing delivery can feel very power less I see that a lot too it's it's tough that's one of the natur natural Arrangements of Civil Wars is that there's a class issue baked into it um one of the other things that we do to discourage this and this is probably easier in my situation than in yours is make sure people do each other's jobs as often as possible so I can't get a shop floor guy to be on the phone with a client and sell something that doesn't really work but the guys who are selling are on the shop floor quite a bit my Engineers are on the shop floor I'm on the shop floor and so one thing that you might consider Liz is have Ride Along days where whoever's in the office particularly the salespeople are actually out there playing with the garbage juice so you deliver the the message that nobody's too good to avoid the bad parts of the job and you know you at least have to understand what they are and that that could do a lot to to lower the the temperature of everybody hey Paul I'm kind of curious so like what Liz described as one of her tensions I think is that she's making decisions that she thinks are really important for the company and are like right in the moment you know like we we got to do this thing because it's an opportunity it's going to pass Us by it's really important and I also understand that right it's like we've got a pivot here and it causes friction within the organization have you have you worked at resolving that piece of it yeah a a big part of it is my Monday meetings I tell people when we have when we're about to do something different you know like okay yesterday I was in the Pentagon and the work we're doing there is for the very highest levels of leadership so I may say to the to the company hey we're working on this on this job it's for these people and this is critically important to the health of the company in the future and here's the problems I see might come up but I want you to understand that we may need to to Juke and jump in order to solve these problems and it's this is why we're doing it and so we're doing various Mar marketing initiatives with uh reaching out to new kinds of customers and I have that conversation with my sales team like okay we may get a call from this kind of person don't treat them like the regular thing this is this is a whole new world we're opening up maybe whereas you would normally just send it through the process no you got to send this one to me and or whatever just tell people what the bigger picture is that makes those decisions in context so like uh Liz I hope you told everybody that you thought that being in Time Square was you know a big feather in your cap and and the path to Future prosperity and then you have to kind of repeat everything that you say all the time that's so true I think this is the the most non-intuitive part of being a boss is that you think you can say something once and you know okay that's settled never the more important it is the more often you got to say it y Paul I got to ask did did you try a version of this technique as a parent and did it work oh yeah I mean it it work definitely I mean when you teach your kids to say please and thank you you got three or four years of saying say please or thank you right I wish You' told me about this a few years ago no I mean it's it's not dis similar to that with with one except your employees are not children so they have the ability to understand more complex situations and also they're not your children you can't treat them like children what what I'm trying to do is treat them like people who should know why they come to work and what the effect of the things that we're doing and it's more like a courtesy to the employees to inform them what the bosses are thinking and where the company is going and I think that that's helped us a lot with uh what just with employee retention and happiness on that point Liz I'm curious you you mentioned that you lost a valued employee over this I'm imagining you tried to keep that person what what kept that from working well so he's actually still here he gave us a month notice which was really nice um I am working on him a little bit because I think that we could balance out the schedule with him doing less of the dirty work quite frankly um the other thing that this situation has brought up for us is that we currently don't bonus the field team and I hadn't honestly thought about that a whole lot before and I realized if I'm asking them to all do things beyond what they ever did before we got the city as a client shouldn't I recognize that through something other than just you know thank yous and maybe an increase in your salary but an actual bonus I feel like Frank and I did decide we're going to bonus the field team this year based on how they've above and beyond and I actually he didn't hear that yet but I think if that's communicated to him that could help as well I may have sent him a text that said you're so good at your job period and then nothing else he didn't reply to that yet but um you know he's very valued and um he actually have to say he did quite quit once before it's like a weird relationship but um we do have a history of sometimes having installers leave and then come back um so I'm hoping he won't actually leave but we'll see I mean he he honestly he has been doing a lot of the work in Time Square and he's so revolted like he can't even think of touching you know going there again well you got to listen to that he's over the top he's he's he's sort of uh you broke that one so I don't know Paul I don't want to say it's broken yet what you said is not how I would manage my Workforce one thing I try to first of all have individual conversations with people on a regular basis and tell them they're doing a great job and uh just be a cheerleader walk around the shop uh you know here's a new guy how's it going that that that personal relationship it's effective for me I mean I can't comment on the personalities involved but I think that everybody enjoys having someone say I I see you I notice what you're doing you're doing a great job and it's important and thank you like those are basically this the that's the that's the essence of what I say to all my people constantly and again repeating it I mean I don't know I mean maybe I'm just convincing myself that I'm so great but it does seem like people like to hear it part of your job as a Bost is to be a cheerleader and that helps people show up at work it sounded like Liz had done a sort of tepid job of doing that with this person um I would not say it was a tepid I would say that um the thing with like kind of texting you're so good at your job was a little bit kind of humorous because it is like it's almost like he wants to leave but he's a little bit on the fence so kind of having a little bit of fun with it I mean I feel like announcing the bonuses at the meeting as well as adding some Saturday shifts in case they want to get paid time and a half um those are two things that are compl completely new I don't want to say that it's like a complete Schism like we hate each other I think we all get along really well but there's definitely a place where we're feeling that each side doesn't understand the other and the conversation that we had on Monday is just going to need to continue yeah it's got to continue it's got to be regular because the the feeling of of frustration is going to be constantly bubbling up and you got to find a a way to release it without having to get be personal yep and another reason why I really want um to work on this is that we've had a couple of really good salespeople come up through the field so they were installers they worked in the shop then they proved themselves really great at also working in the office and now my top salesperson is someone who you know started on the shop floor like five years ago and I would love to replicate that I have another guy that were kind of grooming to do the same but I often have thought I would love to be able to hire these installers with the view of getting them to eventually you know work in sales in the office and I think that was kind of um I don't want to say misguided but it's very presumptuous that someone would want to take that path and um I often assume that they do want to take that path um and try to groom people that way but some people may just always want to be installers and that's good who gets paid more office or or installers office by a lot um not by a crazy amount what does an installer make I'm just curious um my installers make around 20 between 25 and 35 an hour seems not not terrible although I don't I can't comment maybe New York 25 it doesn't cut it anymore but they're doing skilled labor where they have to make decisions and they're in front of customers not really these are all you know outside installations so they can go there with you know everything with the van everything loaded up and do the installation and not have any customer contact and I do have several employees that who don't speak English so we always need to be kind of careful about how that's scheduled to make sure someone if there is a client conversation would be able to have it I think the thing I would just raise my hand to say is it's been my experience that when there's a challenge with an individual employee for sure money has never fixed that problem for me I've always found that when I apply money to the problem that that person eventually leaves and not that long afterwards you know it's in like wow this person's working really hard let's move them up to the next pay scale Etc but they're really under a lot of stress um the money has never fixed it I would just be curious if I were in your shoes what you're trying to achieve with the money piece you know is is the is the bonus more of a holistic we recognize this position is harder and different or is it I'm trying to solve this one person's particular issue well in this case it's that we don't want only part of the company to be bonused and the other not it's not about whether in between different people it's that the principle of everybody gets bonus you know based on certain criteria right now only office gets bonused and if I were them I would notice that and you know no one's ever really said anything and actually no one's asked for it to be quite Frank Frank and I discussed it and thought this would be a really good thing to do and it makes total sense and why didn't we think about it before I think that that having a bonus program just for the office you're like you're like begging for a civil war with that no kidding yeah it's dangerous the other thing is that I I don't like bonus as as compensation I think bonus should be extra and so that if your guy was doing whatever he was doing for 35 bucks an hour and then all a sudden he's got to waight around in in garbage juice and Time Square and he hates it then he should have had a raise or there should have been combat pay or something for the times he had to do that you know some bonus in the future undisclosed amount undisclosed statee that doesn't motivate anybody yeah what triggers your bonuses Paul is it the overall profitability of the company uh i' I've gone through a lot of different formulas and I'm back at the one which is called Rich and happy uh which is when I feel rich and happy I give out money and now when I do it I try to do it on a on a pretty Equitable basis I'm keeping my company informed of what our profitability for the year or the quarter is you know basically every month they're they're updated on that and when I feel like we've got we're in decent shape I say I will now you know for the next payroll I'm going to implement a bonus pool of 40 Grand or whatever it is and here's how we're going to divide it whoever showed up however many hours they worked they came and worked that's your portion of the bonus pool however many hours you worked compared to the total number of hours in the shop so vacation sick days don't count on this it's like if you showed up you for however many hours and you worked hard which is what my people do you're entitled to that percentage of the overall hours not based on salary then it's not based on salary if the guy who pushes the broom shows up the most then he gets the biggest piece of that chunk chunk and that actually has worked out pretty well as far as I can tell although I think that getting honest feedback about things like this is very difficult for a boss but nobody's complained to me about it because on the face of it it's fair in a way that a fourth grader would understand and that to my mind is how you want to give out goodies you want to have sort of the kindergarten idea of fair and so that nobody can say it's no fear you know well there's a lot of different ways you can you can sort of game fairness to make sure that the people who are at the top end up with the most but I like to just say we're on this together bonuses are divided not based on salary but just based on how often you are here working is that what you're imagining list I haven't thought through it enough well enough I don't want to say I think I'm going to have bonus pool that is going to be overall for the year and I need to sit down and think about how exactly it's going to be divided and how it's going to be communicated so in the meeting the other day I didn't specify anything because it literally like I had had only thought it up like two days earlier and I know it's a big decision all right let's take a quick break here we need to hear from our sponsor and we'll be right back I'm here with Rob Levan co-founder of work better now which provides top remote Talent from Latin America and the Caribbean Rob how do you know if your placements are working out man I love this question you know Lauren I've been in the small business world for a long time and I love to help business owners Thrive and many of my clients are friends so it Thrills me to no end when they say things like wbn assistants are among my top performers or my assistant has given me 20 hours a week back to my schedule or best of all when I hear an assistant who started out in one role and then has taken on much greater responsibilities I'm guessing though there are occasionally times when the fit isn't quite right what do you do then another great question it doesn't happen often but when it does got to remember that every client has a dedicated success manager who helps our clients with the best courts of action which sometimes means replacing the talent and doing so very quickly what does using wbn cost for $1,900 a month you get a dedicated full-time work better now assistant you can have a matched assistant who is perfect for your needs within as little as 2 weeks and there are no contracts if any of the listeners mentioned 21 hats when you have your free consult you get $150 off your first 3 months and that is for each assistant that you hire where can we learn more just visit workb better now.com thanks Rob and we're back Sean did you have something you wanted to say oh I just think the topic of of bonuses is a huge area of discussion and I think that uh folks do it for usually one of three reasons which is one they try they're trying to change Behavior which I don't think that works um um two they're guilty because they're making so much money uh and then three which is I think Paul's motivation which is like hey these people are contributing to the goodness of the company and I want to share in that and so I think it's important to to right try to figure out what your reason is for doing it and I would really steer folks away from the like changing Behavior with bonuses i' I've just not seen that work we should probably do a whole show about that yeah I'd like to move on to something else lately I've been asking uh folks whether they're going to hit the numbers this year or not I've already had that conversation with Paul who's having his best year ever Sean let me ask you you you've spoken about this being a difficult transition since the pandemic I'm kind of guessing you may not be hitting your numbers is that right yeah I mean we knew this would be a hard year um it's been a hard year from a from a growth perspective been a pretty good year from a customer retention but yeah the growth that I want to see and Achieve over the long term we not anywhere near it how is that affecting your thinking for next year are you starting to plan and budget for what you hope to do next year yeah I mean it makes everything harder you know when you're not um up and to the right because there are certain decisions that I feel like we need to make for the health of the business that are kind of in opposition to the financial trajectory so for example I've come to the conclusion not unlike Liz I think that having us all distrib uted is not good for the long-term health of our organization so we need we need a shared space that we come to at least some number of days a week so that's a lease you gave up your office during the pandemic so now you're thinking about taking taking a new one yeah exactly um so that's you know that's the tough part about being an owner is when to take risks that you can't really like say well what's the ROI on that right what's the ROI on togetherness and a sense of shared community and like the efficiency of communication you know all those kinds of things quite candidly our financials don't really support it right now but I don't know that we can afford not to do it we'll be eager to hear what you decide Liz I think you told us at the beginning of the year that you were hoping to double your Revenue this year are you on track to do that we are slightly under currently we're 51% over last year to September and then for the year we are looking to be 86% over last year so almost double and we could do a push at the end and make that you happy about that I am I'm very happy I'm very happy because some of the work that we thought we would do with the city this year is actually going to happen next year so although it's not counted in this year I'm going to feel that our effort made to get those City contracts would be would get us to doubling it's close enough what are you planning for next year you going to double again Definitely Maybe triple wow we end up getting an actual like beyond the pilot here we get a real contract for Citywide we're going to just blow it out of the water completely if we expand to more cities that also will be huge growth if you were to Triple how many more people how much more Capital how much more space what what does that mean I think that would take me a couple of hours to explain and think through but I have to get serious with that I know that with at least some of my EO Forum mates and other entrepreneur friends who have been in high growth mode I want to sit down and kind of say if you were me where would you where would you grow these departments and who would you put in where and when and how much you pay them like I am feeling a little over my head with some of those organizational growth decisions that need to be made or at least planned for but I also kind of feel like I want to I want to continue at this growth rate at where at right now to be able to somewhat more slowly make the decisions which I know sounds dumb but like I I don't feel like if I had to make a lot of decisions really fast that I would do a very good job can you clarify that g you want to continue the growth rate you're at now and you said you're at a 50% growth rate is that right oh we're at about well 50% as of now but to the end of the year if we're tracking we're going to be about 86% over last year so you want to continue compounding 80% yes that's a lot of growth I think I could uhhuh I mean if things go continue to go well it's possible I'm not no I'm not doubting it I'm just sort of like I guess I'm hearing part of you say I this feels really fast so I want to kind of maybe slow down but 80% doesn't feel like slowing down maybe I'm not hearing you right so where are you going to find the installers I am going to continue to recruit we haven't actually been actively recruiting much because we have like a friend group that is bringing in you know their other friends and it's actually never been an is where you have a friend group meaning you have installers who installers who know each other yes so I have a group of like six Venezuelan friends from the old country who all moved over here to New York around the same time they're all you know completely legal and working in various capacities but you know these guys have known each other for over 20 years they work really well together it has been great for me because I have not had to be like a team leader of a crew of guys I mean there's you know an obvious leader to the group but you know there's only so many great Venezuelan installers in New York like we need to move beyond that a bit so far it hasn't been an issue because every time we've needed to scale up we've been able to find people to to work temporarily but I need to tighten that up we're we're going to be recruiting on indeed monster and Craigslist we haven't done that in like over two years because we've always been able to get other employees through this friend group last thing I wanted to ask you guys this is the time of year when a lot of businesses find out what their uh health insurance is going to cost next year I'm curious what you guys are looking at Paul you've always been very thoughtful and done a lot of research into this what's going on with your health plan uh I haven't seen the numbers yet but it's this is It's never fun is that expectation based on anything other than it's what always happens 27 years of interacting with Independence Blue Cross I know exactly what's going to happen so yeah I've got no My Eyes Are Open here it's a totally broken system I mean we have no uh there's just I mean there's just no shopping around there's no well there is shopping around isn't there no it's it's utterly meaningless when we look at quotes from the two major providers in the area those companies are quite careful to make sure that you can't directly compare whatever they present to the other companies format of presenting you can't there's never an opportunity to put two pieces of paper next to each other and make sense of it they go out of their way to make sure that doesn't happen yeah it's I mean you know it's like you can have these incremental gains if if you know there's multiple plans available here in Oregon and you could like switch from this to that and you can kind of save a little bit in the switch but it just it's just inconsequential in the grand scheme of things and really what it boils down to here in Oregon is whether you you know just go the route of like the high deductible HSA or a traditional plan or um um I think it's it's uh it's an HMO here I I can't remember the who who it is but you know that's cheaper but it's also shitty it's just a broken system top to bottom on that note my thanks to Shan busy Paul DS and Liz picarazzi and to our sponsor work better now thanks for sharing 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 r en at 21h 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 just through Bur founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]