Should HR Advocate for the Business or the Employee?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Karen Clark called J gos and Sarah seagull talk about hiring an HR person first how do you handle HR issues before you can afford HR people is software the answer and what size does a business need a full-time person do you hire someone who has experience but who might not be used to getting his or her hands dirty or do you hire someone you can mold to fit the cult of your business Jay who likes to say the entrepreneur is often the worst person to interview candidates is currently interviewing candidates to be his head of HR and he's a little surprised at how few resumés he's been getting plus Sarah's looking for office space and not finding much that would be acceptable and how are Karen and Sarah doing now that technically they have been employees in their own businesses for a 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 newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which in magazine recently named the best newsletter 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 regulars Karen Clark Cole who is CEO of blink a seattle-based user experience reseearch and Des design firm Jay Golds whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home and Sarah seagull who is founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco and please take a listen to my quick chat with Rob Levan co-founder of our sponsor work better now the episode is titled should HR advocate for the business or for the employee welcome Karen Jay and Sarah it's great to have you all here Jay I want to start with you today I gather you're looking for a new head of HR that opens up a lot of interesting questions let me start with this did did your previous person leave she's leaving tomorrow she was here six years and she is basically my second full-time HR person I had over the years so I finally feel good that I understand the position enough that interviewing for the next one I I'll have better questions and I have a better understanding of what I need for the job with her leaving who's running the search for her replacement well my CFO and I and now my cfo's having knee surgery today so it's kind of back on me which is okay I'm we're watching the resumés come in and some people are extremely overqualified meaning they're not going to want to get their hands dirty doing the actual work they're used to having a staff I got 130 people they they got to know what they're doing so I'm I'm trying to find the person that's just got enough experience but not too much Jay is she leaving on good terms can she find her own replacement uh you know what she gave two and a half weeks we've been putting the ad she help she did put the ad out there it's just you know they're not it's tough out there we're not getting a ton of resumés back in the old days I probably would have gotten a 100 RS I've gotten 20 so and it's okay I just as soon have my hands on it so I'm not that busy I I I'm getting into like I said I have a much better handle now on what the job is than I did the last you know couple times how many folks are you uh getting resumes from who are asking whether or not it can be a remote position not being here that's not possible they they need to be here yeah they need to interview people here oh here's the other part that's a little frustrating so we did send out emails to about 10 people and three end up calling you back which you know I understand in a lower level position but like why would you bother to to apply for a job like this and then someone reaches out to you and you just blow them off I really don't have an explanation for that Jay did you make clear in the ad that the person has to work in the office sure well um I don't know that it doesn't say anything about okay to be no I I didn't make it clear but I think if you read it it doesn't say remotes okay I this is a job there's you got to council employees you got to go to the Factory once a week and sit down with people go over their benefits it's it's not something that uh would be good on the phone and then interviewing people I don't think anybody applied that thought it would be okay to be remote what's your toughest question you're asking your your candidates what is the question that really matters to you when you're when you're going through these okay that's an excellent question and I have it here's the answer I asked them it's a trick question I asked them so do you feel do you feel you're an advocate for the employees or for the and the answer yeah and the answer should be both that's the answer it should be both I mean you have to you know to one person we interviewed she said oh I always fight for the employee well that's concerning yeah that's concerning how about making a profit don't we have to balance those two things so yeah that's my big question because the problem with this job is I need someone right in the middle that will be concerned for employees and look out for their best interest but also recognizes that the company needs to be profitable and they need to to try to keep a and Pay Market rates and try to keep things competitive and uh the right person should understand that Karen you seem to react when Jay said what his uh key question was did you think it was a a good question or or no yes it's good and it's a it's a no-brainer like that just kind of what Jay's saying it obviously should be both if you don't take care of the company then that you have no employees because you go out of business so yeah it should be both this one woman like I said she said oh I always f with the employee and I thought wow um so they come in and they say listen I need a $30,000 raise cuz I've got you know I can't pay my bills okay go for it I you know it's it no I think it's a very telling answer and you can also tell just the way they respond so I've only interviewed a couple people because like I said we sent 10 emails out and only like three responded does anyone have an explanation for that we're seeing the same thing on the in on our agency side where we put out an ad and we got way too many people that were overqualified and then of the people that were qualified we were like okay well what range are you looking for and it was like literally double what we normally pay somebody for that position it's just it's I don't know where all the employees have gone but yeah it's a very tough Market you know we use zip recruiter and it says what is your salary expectations how do you feel about if they just put negotiable I mean is that turn I mean this job just to be clear I this person if I get a junior person that will groom which I built this whole company on finding diamonds in the roof I've got people that were dropped out of college didn't go to college started at 23 years old and are now 47 and they're running the company so I've I've been really good with that I don't know if I can afford to do that in this position so I would say the range in this job is going to be somewhere between 55 and $100,000 depending on you know are they going to just take this whole thing over or am I going to have to you know you know Mentor them over the years when they say negotiable I don't know who I'm talking to I mean it's problem what about giving them the range in the phone interview when you first talk to them that's what we do just tell them this is the range no no we can certainly do that if they call you back that's kind of the joke I mean if they call you back yeah but I wouldn't pay much attention to what they enter into the forum just get a get on the phone and say this is the range does it work well that's a big range though yeah but whatever it is but I wouldn't put a number down on a because then you're just shooting in the dark you don't know what the world of opportunity is yeah I'm not eliminating them because of that I'm eliminating them if they came from a company where they had three staff members because I know better than that they're not going to want to do the grunt work of calling people interviewing $17 an hour employees for the factory they're they're not going to want to get their hand dirty so I know that that person's not going to work out the question is does the green person who's 24 that's worked hard that has a nice history can I afford to put them in this job and get supervision SL mentorship from the CFO From Me Maybe maybe um I'm leaving that open that seems 24 seems very young yeah no believe me I 28 would be much better but that's all I got so far what about going to um there's still be young but what about going to some of the colleges universities that hire or train people that you could hire right out of school and then they'll be cheap and diamond in the rough well they almost describes the one I just talked to she's only she just graduated but she's really had a good job at a restaurant where she's worked her way up and that kind of describes her uh the problem I've learned is well for instance this is kind of appalling to me we asked her if she's a member of Sherm which is the association for whatever it stands for she's never heard of it and I just think how does someone graduate with a degree in human resources and how does the school not have someone a representative there come in and talk to them Jay have you posted with Sherm like that seems like a great resource you know what that's a good question I I think they did but I'll I'll follow up on that that's a good question I know that when I speak to people um about potential positions we're not allowed to ask them anymore about what what they made previously right same in Illinois is that National or is that state no no it's per state but but that's the same thing in Illinois you can't ask they're trying to take care of the women and Equity Thing by not you know which okay I understand I mean it's a good intent I it make it a little harder no question when I was going through this a while ago what I did was and and it's a little bit more painful but I I put down on a spreadsheet I review like industry standards like what everybody else is paying and then kind of how we pay our folks uh comp competitively for our area versus the the the industry standard and I literally just like that was the number that I had and you know it does result in people us missing out on people like we we offered a job to a person and they got offered a job somewhere else for $30,000 more quite honestly I think we were at a more interesting position than the one that they took but if money was what spoke to them most honestly it's not a person I would want on my team CU I was looking for people that cared about the projects were interested in growing within the business as opposed to like working for some big Tech Giant where they would have like two tasks and that would be the responsibility yeah no we're when I said 55 to 100 I'm very confident that's that's the right range if someone's 23 24 25 and has been doing a good job with parts of this but needs to learn the rest of it that's not $100,000 but if somebody comes in ready to go knows what they doing yeah it would be worth it now I've had people asking for $1 150 I don't need $150,000 your HR person I mean that's a whole another animal what about like a time HR person could you do that or no no I my person's busy I got 130 people she's already she got a lot of work there's a lot of lot of interviewing there's a lot of it's it's absolutely I wouldn't have said this five years ago it's absolutely a full-time job now Jay why did she leave um she said it's been a rough six months it has been a rough six months you know what she got a job that is more of an administrative doing a couple of Parts it sounds like it's a better Suitor for what she wants to do it's all Pleasant I'm you know wish her well I was surprised Jay to hear I think I heard you say that this is only the second HR head of HR that you've had in all your years in business did I hear you right yeah this one was here six years the other one was here I don't know five six years so you went a long time without an HR person yeah yeah and that's a problem what's the right size of a business to have a full-time HR person I've been told it's 100 people and in my experience that's about right that doesn't mean that you don't have a problem when you got 60 people though cuz who's doing it the boss and like who's taking care of the administration thing who's taking care of the office manager person it's a problem and yeah so I've only had a full-time person for maybe she was here a little more than five years for for you know I don't know 15 years Karen how how big was your company when you hired your first head of HR I'm just trying to think about that but it's been a long time I mean we have a whole HR team now we've got in-house recruiters we've got a head of HR we've got HR generalists we've got someone does benefits and then we have a chief culture officer who does a lot more than just HR but but we have a pretty big team now and we're kind of like Jay I mean we're we probably stretch up to 200 people with contractors but um it's been 10 years anyway so it's it's kind of like Jay but we have a bigger team now well on top of that you're doing recruiting we don't do recruiting we put ads out and we don't go hunting for people and you know pulling them out of other jobs which is different that begs the question so I know that you're focused on hiring one person so the one thing that we do consciously on our team is uh we make sure that every you know kind of division has a partner in crime would you ever consider like hiring two people at $50,000 that way you have somebody who is very good at X and then I have a person that's been with me for 30 years since she was 17 years old she knows this company she knows if I hired someone for the 50 some thousand I will take her and she's happy to do it she will work with the person and that is how we would do that that she would take part of the job and uh so yes that's absolutely a possibility because the problem this is just like accounting the problem is if you don't get someone big enough in that job they don't understand all and can't do it if you get someone too big they don't want to do the grunt work they want their assistant to do it and they're you know so if that person exists I I have to get somebody that's got enough experience but doesn't mind doing all the day-to-day stuff so that is a possibility that we split it into two jobs administrative and maybe the interviewing is a separate person let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor 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 cours 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 three 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 Sarah how do you handle HR that's a laughable question um so I don't we're not big enough to have a full-time HR person it is something that is discussed uh on a regular basis um but I don't feel like that we've hit that threshold so we have um divided up certain responsibilities um into people that are have roles as operation managers in lie of HR we do have general counsel which is a priority for us so that person um oversees any you know employee related um issues or or or questions but we don't have an official like HR HR person that's walking through your benefits the head of our accounting actually is the person that currently deals with that very capably so how many employees do you have how big are you guys uh I am a business unit of a larger company the larger company is about 40 50 people don't hold me to that number um but uh yeah so we share all of those resources um quite nicely um and we just we haven't gotten to the point where we're like we need an HR person we just don't think that uh right now it's being dealt with so seamlessly um uh across teams that it's not going to be it's not our priority hire I think we have other priority hires before we do that I'm in a business group with someone who is oh I don't want to get an HR person it's just adding overhead and like you know what HR people do something they're not just overhead not having un HR person is an exposure and the fact that you have 40 people yeah you're in that in between I get it I I I didn't have one either but there are some critical functions that if you don't have an H what's the most important one Jay what's the most important function that you're concerned about how about they don't understand the legalities of hiring and they say the wrong thing to somebody on an interview and they get sued I mean how about just the benefits 401k plan administering how about just the skill set of knowing how to interview people I mean just because you're a good manager doesn't mean you know how to interview people um so there's a lot of things that could be that could be a whole in one system and maybe the I always say the entrepreneur is frequently the worst person to be doing the interviewing because a they love their company and they talk about it too much two they're probably nice and they like people and three they got 14 other things to do that day or 21 hats on and they want to get through this process as fast as possible that is the recipe for disaster and I know cuz I did it and you're doing it right now well I'm smarter now and I I know what I'm doing and I'm not anywhere near as busy as I used to be I I'm not wearing 21 hats anymore I'm doing a few things I have the time to put into this now 25 years ago I was taking care of customers and meeting with vendors and dealing with employee I'm not doing any what do you think the number is like in my mind it's between 50 and 75 people that's when you need to start thinking about bringing on HR specialist probably depends on the business but that that makes sense you're in the people business you're not you're not buying material I mean you're in the people business I would think that that person should easily be able to pay for themsel what if they're just better at hiring imagine the the change just imagine the effect it would have on your business they were really really good at at hiring and finding the best people for your company would certainly cover their salary yeah we don't have a lot of turnover thankfully well that's a factor then yeah people tend to stay with us because we have aett nice setup and we don't have very many interpersonnel problems like um knock on wood we've built a nice very collaborative Community where everybody seems to cheerlead each other on in a very positive way so but yeah like I think that it's it's something in the I don't know the product pipeline no what you said makes sense I don't have a big turnover either but when you have 130 people even with a small turnover you're still hiring one or two people a month so and that's pretty much where we're at I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday who has a business with about 100 employees and he eliminated his HR staff I think he had two people and switched to a software uh Suite called Rippling which I know is growing really fast we use Rippling that was my question has it worked for you oh yeah we love it I actually we talked about doing the pr for for Rippling many many many years ago and I believe they ended up going in house um with their team but we ended up using it and it's so fantasttic they do everything from like every onboarding thing you can think of is handled by them they deal with sending out new laptops to all of our employees making sure that those laptops come back if they end up leaving like they've figured it figured it out in a really nice way and their platform is super easy to use so I'm a I'm a big fan of Rippling what is the lowest level employee in your whole organization what's the least amount of money that anyone's making is that a question to me or Karen yes yes well Karen I know it's pretty high but what in yours do you have people that are making $40,000 yes we do um so if you're because we have greent grads who have like only ever G to college maybe had an internship who are interested in moving into public relations and um our sound range for those people is is anywhere between $40 and $50,000 a year but you probably don't hire anyone without a college degree right I would say yes um if we had people applying the big challenge with our what we do is you have to be a really good writer to be in PR and if you don't have that formal education it's pretty rare to find somebody who just naturally uh understands grammar an AP style I'm just trying to um illustrate I've got a factory where they're putting frames together and some people barely speak English so I I got a very different yeah I have a very different crowd that I'm dealing with and they need different things than somebody who graduated college and get on a computer and do all that stuff so I fully appreciate and respect I'm sure that software is great but it certainly wouldn't there's plenty of my employees that would not be able to deal with that that's a great Point yeah no that's a great Point Karen have do you use a uh a software platform like that yeah we have a big system but I can't even tell you what it is it's not I've never heard that I'm not very involved in it but yeah we use a couple of different systems Jay how do you assess whether an HR person that you want to hire is going to be good at hiring how do you get at that I ask him questions about tell me about your hiring process what are you looking for in a candidate what are some of the questions you ask and you can I think I can tell whether they figured out how it works and and they should be able to come up with a quick answer of oh I've really learned that my best question is blah blah blah and and then I tell them about the company enough that they should be able to reflect on and go oh well that sounds like what I do and see whether we're on the same page because I am very much collaborative company I don't have jerks working here I I tell them no one is screaming at each other here that's one of our I just and I and you can tell by their response as to whether they get it or not because the fact of the matter is most companies are not collaborative and um they they got to understand what the mission here is which in my case all of my employees get why they're here and they understand that we got to take care of customers and and they're together on it and I have to be careful to hire people who buy into that concept that can be you know uh groomed into the role and like I said I got lots of people been here for over 20 years I got 30 employees that have been here over over 20 years and that's a different mentality than a lot of companies so listen I've only interviewed two people in the last week and we will definitely want to hear more and keep track of this as you proceed I think it does get a lot at a lot of interesting issues for smaller businesses let's move to our next topic for today which is Sarah I gather you're thinking about looking for new office space given the way the world is changing what's going on yeah when we were acquired um last year we inherited office space that was used by one of the other business units but all of their folks dispersed from the San Francisco Bay Area when um Co happened and they were able to continue without having people in one location based on the kind of the focus of their work which is fun things like crypto and crisis our team we need to be there and touch and feel and and hug and laugh and collaborate and brainstorm together in person and you know the the young group of people I have on my team they they like coming into an office so the office that we inherited has never been something that I've loved it doesn't reflect the the brand at all um it's a little bit too big we pay way too much money for it so we've been able to sublease it so that's off the books I actually literally talk about people that um do windows and Floors you know I went and packed up boxes and and met the movers on last Friday to put everything uh in storage until we find a new place but you know now I'm in this weird and between between space where all the current offices that are available in San Francisco are like God awful um and then I've been told about a couple collaborative spaces so I'm thinking about looking at those I've also talked about shared spaces with a couple people so we're just kind of exploring different options wait Sarah how much space do you need we need two offices with doors that can close and then an open space for the rest of the team and that's all we need um we we intend to keep growing and and having more needs for it but literally if you were to ask my team what everybody wants for their space the answer uniform it's bright and happy boy do I have the deal for you oh oh Karen you you have office space in San Francisco right yeah this is how we got our first office space so when we were first starting out um we couldn't afford to have a footprint but it was nice to be able to get all together so one of our first clients was the co-founder of Serena Lily which is a big furniture company it's textiles it's beautiful and so Lily caner who is still a mentor to me um was starting a new business and was a startup and she said well we have this great space um that's too big for us and we need PR we'll give you space in exchange for PR so that was our first space we never paid for office space it was this beautiful building I believe that was the the starting place for William Sonoma U or some one of those other brands and so we were really spoiled so I literally reached out to a couple people and I said we'll do free PR for you if you give us the footprint somewhere we can go so we are absolutely in that boat like PR is the only engine we don't have going right now so we should definitely talk we have a beautiful it's like I call it the white angel space it's so beautiful and bright and basically new we've redone the whole thing and it has a giant workspace it has a bunch of closed meeting rooms it's beautiful is anybody using it Karen are you using it no and that's that's what I'm about to say is that it's so depressing to me that it sits there empty we have an occasional couple of employees who go in but for the most part it sits there empty we love to go in and I and it's sad to me that there people like we get excited when we go in but also like you know we buy I buy everybody lunch when they come in and it's Yeah we actually you know we like each other so it's it's also a social occasion as well oh well make make no mistake we like each other too it's just that during Co all of our San Francisco people moved out of the city oh and so the cost of living is too high and so they've all just split and now the idea of doing a two-hour commute to go into the office is why would you do that it doesn't make any sense so yeah we have a couple people that are north of the city in um like the Petaluma area and you know they wouldn't come in every single day but we do have people that live in the city and have have have stayed there and are really eager just to be there on a regular basis um as well as myself because honestly like my office at home is fine but my dogs are very distracting Sarah I'm surprised that you've had trouble finding space I had the impression that oh it's awful I mean isn't caren's example fairly common people who have leases that they would love to get out of that's what I thought yeah why isn't there a lot of uh why aren't there a lot of options for you well because people aren't really sharing that this if you go on like I forget what it's called but it's like a commercial real estate um website so ages ago there used to be this um blog that would make fun of real estate listings that were just really challenged houses that were trying to like you beautiful backyard and the backyard the image of the backyard would be like of a mud pit you know Charming is the word they use a lot Charming exactly and so you look at these these things one of the pictures and I should send it to you all it almost looks like the the people that had this office were hoarders and they're trying to sublet this space and the rule no run of any property is that you want to make it kind of agnostic so people can see their business in there number one rule is don't look like a hoarder I would say that would be a good rule they're bad Sarah let's make a plan for you to come and see our space it's beautiful we'd love to and we can just share it even like we can figure out some creative way for you to get cheap rent all I want to know is it is it near Boudin the sour d bread Place uh I don't know I don't know the area well enough we're right by the um EMB barad Arrow it's beautiful oh okay it's a great area it's convenient especially for people like me that um occasionally will take the fery into the into the city yeah I just want to know if I get a broker's fee if you guys actually do a deal I was going to you on that actually let's have a podcast party in Sarah's new office you know I have something very interesting I learned years ago about why office why the cubicles got so popular all of a sudden and believe it or not part of it was the tax code that if you built out office space the depreciation was over like 27 years and if you bought office cubicles it was like over seven so there was a huge tax advantage to putting cubicles up instead of building out office space and that's what really set the cubicle thing on fire whenever that was 30 40 years ago there's probably still some people that are thinking about that cubicles are depreciable well it's it's kind of coming back actually Jay because now people are going into the office but they're on Zoom meetings all day long and so where we have all these open collaboration spaces with death it was awesome when everyone's there and now people are there but they're on Zoom half the time and it's really kind of a bummer yeah cubical aren't bad in some cases I mean they're they get a B you've never you've never sat in one obviously all right well that's true there you go okay fair enough all right we only have a little bit of time left while I've got both of you Karen and Sarah you guys are the two people on this show who have started and built a business and then sold it and continued to run it and I'm really curious to ask you both about that Ken I think it's coming up on about a year since you actually did your deal is that right a year minus six days yes wow very close so how has that first year being an employee again been for you uh great I mean I I wouldn't I never think about the employee thing actually it's no it's not a thing for me it's it's effectively no different I I know that's hard to believe but we run as an independent subsidiary I'm still a CEO very little has changed for most employees we could have not told them and they wouldn't know the difference it's that the same wow where it's changed where where there's a lot of energy spent and where we sort of I spend a lot of my time is trying trying to unify the sales forces so that the sales you know the sales teams so that we can have combined engagements so that was the whole premise of why an big engineering firm bought us as a design firm is so that we could work together for clients to do end to-end work and so doing that is is easier than it sounds because we have entirely different companies we work in different ways we sell to different clients and so in in these big organizations it seems like oh you work for Microsoft great you can just introduce us and will do engineering but what our clients are totally different in these big organizations so it's taken it's taken a long time for us to get it sort of like the whole year basically to sort of get to the point where we're finally getting a little bit of traction of working together and so and I and I think that's normal and we've there's a lot of smart people working on it so but that's that's the only difference honestly so it so and it's been great I got to ask Jay do you remember on the on the podcast episode when Karen told us about the sale I asked her a similar question about about how she was thinking about what it would be like to have a boss and have somebody telling her what to do and her response was that she couldn't wait to have someone tell her what to do do you remember what you said yeah I'll ask you in a year yeah I have to tell you what she describes I absolutely believe her I think in this case it was a smart thing and it works I just know for a fact that lots of times it doesn't work but in her case I think it was a yeah I think it's I think you're right Jay it's extremely rare and I consider myself to be extremely fortunate don't call it fortunate you were smart this was you did a smart thing you figured it out there's no luck involved here no really you figured it out and it made perfect sense there's other people that just want to get out of the business and they're going to and they hang around and they want and they pull their hair out for the next three years and that's a different story are there any keys to that success Karen that you would share any is somebody else contemplating doing something similar is there anything you would stress that leads to a healthy situation like the one you have you you absolutely have to like them the CEO of our parent company now I really like and you can't underestimate how important that is and that's that's but that's just my philosophy in life right like I don't I need to get up every day and like enjoy living right and so you want to be around people that you like it's just it's very very very simple I agree and it applies to everything that's how I run the whole company I would say in her case it's about Synergy she realized that oh look at what you have look at what I have those two things work really well together and in a lot of cases when companies get bought there is no particular Synergy they're just rolling them up and and there's some anti- Synergy there and that's what I've seen well and you're right Jay we talked to a lot of companies in the process and they some were just doing that and we're like yeah that's not going to work for us because we care about the company we want it to grow and Thrive and yeah the the Lauren the answer to your question is long and complicated and um the guine is I'm writing a book so I'll tell you you'll get every gory detail of how to I think you get a commission on that too Lauren put that on your list Sarah how about you do you feel like an employee or an entrepreneur well I want to address Karen's um comment about trying to find that Synergy in terms of sales that's something that we are also kind of uh working through as well we finally have a number of clients that are cross business so the way that we're not an independent subsidiary we talked about the different ways of kind of setting it up and we decided that we would be a business unit within the company so we're really one big company we're just a business unit of it and it just for various reasons um works for everybody it has been amazing um I really like the people that um that bought me they basically kind of let me run my own ship but they are there as my backboard you know where I'm like hitting my head against the wall about something and I have people that are my peers um um in the other divisions that I can say how are you handling this and they're an amazing resource for me but we are also one big happy family where we do these incredible offsites twice a year with the entire company where everybody's getting to know each other and so we're still in that kind of beginning phases where we're figuring out the resources that we can a offer our clients or B tap into and provide services for their clients so you know I think that will take another couple years for us to really be in sync with what everybody does Sarah how long has it been for you so on paper we were purchased in January of last year but we didn't make the announcement until I think it was like June of last year and the reason why was that we were just redesigning all of our website and our collateral and stuff to make sure that it looked unified but it's been about a year and a half on paper and I can't say enough nice things about the people that I work with now it's awesome it's because everybody's invested in the outcome and there's a we we we don't have HR but we we do have people that do hire people really well and then they stay because they like it again I'm still trying to navigate like what exactly do you do with a couple of people but um we're going to get there we have a similar Arrangement where it's I feel like I have a peer group now which I never had before and it's similar we have offsites together but it's the leadership it's not the entire company because they are much much much bigger than us yeah well our ours is not that big so this year we went to um Boseman Montana which is where the the founder of TMG has a house um and I didn't realize that you can get Al altitude SI sickness in Boseman but you can and I did get it but it was an amazing trip we went white whitew rafting it was a great Mo bonding moment for everybody I should say that I think the reason why I'm left to my own choices is that I'm probably the hardest person on myself of anybody where I'm always looking at my p&l I'm looking at my client list I'm looking at our deliverables I'm looking at everything and I'm I beat myself up probably every day about what can we do better how can we improve and they know that Jay you've always wanted to Be Your Own Boss does hearing any of this I fully appreciate and respect what they're saying and I don't at all think oh I'll ask you in another year no I'm it sounds like that was a smart move on both of their parts but there's no part of it that I think oh I could do that I I don't have the same I mean I'm the biggest framing place in the country it's not like going in with someone else is going to give me some new I don't see any Synergy in any of the businesses I'm in that would make sense so it just it just doesn't fit what I'm doing but I totally can appreciate that from what they're talking about it makes perfect sense that they combined efforts with another company that brings a better product to the to the marketplace so it makes perfect sense and I'm sure will continue to be good for them so if if one of these larger kind of print on demand um uh places said oh we really want to add you to our would you sell no not a chance I get emails once uh probably once a month saying oh we've got a strategic buyer which is usually baloney no desire whatsoever to go rock my world I'm just in a happy place nice customers happy customers happy employees everything is good don't have any problems to solve I have absolutely no reason that I would want to open up some can of worms and go in with somebody else and find out that oh wow they're not doing things the way I do it and I no no there's no part of this that makes me think wow I wonder if I could do something no I'm just happy a worked out for the two of you and I'm also not just happy I I give you both credit those weren't accidents you both did a did a very smart strategic you know Karen said she talked to lots of companies there's there wasn't any luck in this this was a wellth thought out plan that's working good for both of you what's your golden parachute um I've got two kids here and I've got managers that have been with me for 20 some years that are in their 40s and I plan on the company being around he doesn't want a golden parachute Sarah right he wants to stay there to The Bitter End and if you say oh what if you get run over by the bus um like I think the company will be okay if not no one's starving I I own all the real estate everything's fine I I really don't have any compelling reason to entertain selling the business in any way shape or form good for you all right on that note my thanks to Karen Clark Cole Jay gos and Sarah seagull uh and to our sponsor work better now see you all next week [Music] wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's L ren21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone