Somebody’s Hiring All of These People

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Jay goz tells Liz picarazzi and Laura Xander that he's had a revelation about the great resignation yes he's lost some people but not necessarily his best people it shook the tree out he says which is why he thinks businesses should be careful right now about hiring too quickly meanwhile Liz talks about her latest product a bear prooof trash enclosure and why introducing it has been challenging and Laura tells us what happened with the salesman she tried to send around the country in a souped up van plus is this a great time or a terrible time to be in business even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast our regulars Jay gz whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and Laura Xander who is CEO of Jimmy beans w a digital yarn store based in Reno Nevada and meline TSH a a yarn supplier based in Fort Worth Texas the episode is titled somebody's hiring all of these people welcome Jay Liz and Laura thanks for being here Liz let's start with you you've been doing some uh traveling of late tell us what you've been up to so last week I had one of the best weeks I think in my whole time in business um and that was I had an opportunity to travel with my team out to Aspen and to install our very first bear prooof trash enclosure so so for several years we've been getting requests um from folks out west uh to Bear prooof our units and you know we haven't done it up until now we didn't know if was demand is enough in addition of course it's an R&D big R&D expense for us so this beare prooof enclosure has been in the works for 2 years it started actually just before the start of the pandemic and it was really exciting to install it um and to meet the client in person and to hear their stories but also just launching a new product into the world that meets um the needs of a a whole new market it's kind of like Westbard expansion for City bin what did you have to do to Bear prooof your existing uh enclosure product so there were two major changes that we needed to make our enclosures our cabinets are normally made out of sheet aluminum and we switched it to Steel um it's a lot heavier it's a lot more durable it's really the standard for bear prooof inclosures and then the second one is bear prooof latches and all the hardware that opens the door so if you've ever been to a national park and you've seen a bear prooof trash enclosure you know that there's a special latch that you need to use to open it that you know bears claws can't open so those were the main two changes there you know there were some other small things with other Hardware pieces but those are the main two changes we needed to make so as somebody who lives and who has had a bare enclosure for the last 20 years how's yours different than the ones that like we have in our driveway so do you have a a bear prooof trash can or an enclosure that holds cans it's a enclosure that holds cans okay so that's what we're doing as well so the biggest difference yeah so it's like a box mhm the biggest difference is how it looks so it's it's designed like all of our other enclosures to be to really have Curb Appeal and to blend in with your house and to be used as really a piece of outdoor furniture that you're going to have forever you know not unlike outdoor furniture for your patio or whatnot so it's very durable and they're also modular so you know if we if someone has four or five cans we can easily accommodate that whereas the other bins on the market are usually just for two cans I imagine years might be that yep so the modularity really accommodates a lot of different properties especially bigger properties multif family that need more than the two-piece unit oh very interesting I can't wait to look them up Liz how did you test it okay so here's the deal on this we've been trying to test it on the East Coast Pennsylvania Connecticut New York on Facebook for several years I've put out inquiries to friends and family to allow us to test in their in their homes near their homes and understandably we didn't have any takers I I almost had one taker but then his wife was Furious that he had agreed to it they live in New Jersey and he understands we would be baiting a bin for Bears to come near their house I don't know what I was really thinking by asking but I needed to anyways so they haven't been tested actually they're going to be tested in Colorado we felt all of the guidelines of the I think it's called the inter agency grizzly bear Community they're in Montana so in last August you may remember Lauren we were supposed to be testing the enclosures in August in Montana but were delayed due all due to all the supply chain issues so we're going to be doing the testing in the spring how significant a market is this for you so I don't I should have the number I should Market size it like a a proper uh business owner does but you know really it's just all West wter states where bears are an issue um we all know what's going on with Hank the tank in Lake Tahoe area um making headlines Laura do you know Hank the tank no I don't know Hank the tank I mean we have Bears we've always had Bears we've had bears in our driveway we've had bears in our backyard I mean I we come across Bears when we run yeah like she said Market size I mean you have to have a bear enclosure for your trash I think you like literally have to can I assume that you can outrun a bear since you're here today um they don't want to chase you not the ones here I mean they they don't want anything to do with you they just want to scare you and well and the other thing is they usually give up so if they try to get into a can or an enclosure and they can't they're really smart they remember that they don't go back they're kind of like rats as we've learned in New York city so once they try to get into a city bin and they're unsuccessful I'm hoping that they're not going to come back but we will see well and tor's point to ities municipalities are requiring bear prooof enclosure so where we installed which was basically just at the base of the mountain and Aspen they have a requirement of city ordinance that everybody uses bear prooof trash enclosures so that sort of legal mandate Works in my favor yeah there's huge demand I mean and you know where we are in the mountains recognizing that most of these areas you're targeting or resort areas I mean people really care about curb appeal in the HOAs even you have to get your bear prooof enclosure um approved by the neighborhood Liz is your Market in New York City where you're located close to being saturated is is that why you're reaching out well what's the thinking there in terms of selling in your backyard versus selling around the country so it's a good question because selling to Aspen and Out West has been sort of difficult from an implementation perspective the deployment of this product is very intensive you know the shipping involved the costs involved taking my team out there to install it all of that is very you know expensive so it really got me thinking of the overall cost of doing this product I'm still I am very very excited for it um but there's a lot more involved and um in the New York City Market we just have such a strong presence um you know I I don't know what the percentage is but I would say among property managers which is our biggest customer in New York City we probably only have like 5% of the market and we're growing and growing so that's like my bread and butter that segment in New York City with property managers but I do think that the market size for the bear prooof is huge and I also think it fits in well with The Branding and allowing me to have a portfolio of different versions for different situations if I recall Liz you uh offer your customer is the alternative of either taking your product and installing it themselves or you have a team that'll come out and do it for them are you planning on offering that around the country so we would have to for bear prooof at least to start because it's so much heavier you know each module is 365 lbs so like a two module is over 700 lb wow that's not something that the average person can put together even if it's a couple people so I think in the near future we would have to do the installation service with it until it could truly be like a DIY ready to assemble kit like our other products are so those are very Ikea esque where there's an installation manual and there's a video that they can watch but we don't yet have that for Bear prooof one of the things that I'm doing that I hope to do in other cities is I'm making contact with local handy people so that if anything goes wrong with let's say a hinge or a hydraulic arm that I have someone locally to help out because you know with Aspen at least to fly to Denver and then to drive four and a half hours into the mountains to fix something you know it's it's a it's a big risk and to kind of mitigate that I feel like I need to have some local people the local people also could actually be resellers and they could be installers so a couple of the handymen I made I made contact with there were really excited about the product and they also incredibly connected so if they're working in all these resort areas as handyman and they see people that need trash enclosures that's an opportunity for them not only to get a commission on selling it but to also get uh fees from the installation so how do you ship these if even if they're broken down I assume they are over UPS's weight limit or not um yeah they are we use like a private trucker and I I I should know more about it as I've talked about on this program I hate anything having to do with Logistics so if you ask me questions I'm probably not going to be able to answer them well you probably know something about what it costs I'm guessing because you probably had to factor that into what you charge for this how much more expensive is this than your your standard enclosure so it is probably about 40% more than our standard enclosure and then the shipping costs are a lot higher they're double um and the installation also includes all of the travel so this one we had a we charged a lot less because we the feedback that we get is so important we needed to have some in the field so this was more of a break even or even at a loss I mean after I get the credit card bill from all the fancy meals we had out there it may not have been worth it I mean I'm in the furniture business so I know where the line is between easy and extremely difficult and the problem is once it gets past UPS now you've got to ship it and then the question is do you have to put put it on a pet and then all of a sudden you can't deliver in a big truck to a house you got to get white glove service and now I'm writing huge checks every month for this white glove Ser huge tens of thousands of dollars a month yeah what do you mean by what's a white glove service Jay White Glove service means that they take your sofa or whatever the way and they deliver in a truck with a hydraulic lift on it and they they walk it into your house versus you know UPS drops a box at your front door well ours were all on pallets they all are on pallets and they're delivered outside which is a difference my product doesn't go inside of a home right but they still have to have a truck then that is not going to a dock it's got to have a lift on it a lift gate which means a typical semi Tru doesn't have a lift gate it's supposed to be going up against a dock so it definitely changes the cost of and and changes who you can have deliver that so then they got to get there with a hydraulic lift and then they got to literally plop it down and wear Street I mean it's it's an issue so are these running for like 10 grand I mean this sounds like a $5,000 or a $10,000 thing well so the one that we installed was about 6,600 retail price and that was for two modules but again I mean we we're looking at this as a piece of longterm outdoor furniture and something that's going to add curve appeal so the pricing reflects that as well as really the materials so something that's made out of all steel bamboo all stainless steel Hardware you know I don't know lur what your bear prooof enclosure is made out of um but you know typically the materials on those that are more mainstream are not they're not very attractive and they're also not very expensive yeah I think ours was a couple thousand bucks and what I mean they're very very plain but it's the colors like they have to be like chocolate brown or you know these kind of desert dirt colors you know the homeowners association says it can only be one of two colors sometimes it can be green like a cedra green but yeah no they're not beautiful at all I mean I would make my enclosure whatever color the HOA wants and we can do that there's an economy of scale to if you had a community was buying them to ship an entire truckload of these there and then unmad them into aware I mean I think that that's worth pursuing because this one off thing I just can't imagine how that's not going to be thousands of dollars just to get it to their door well and it's it's Al the opportunity cost because when I pull two people out of my team to go out to Colorado for a week it also means they're taking away from all the installations in New York which are already backed up quite a bit so there's there's an impact all over Liz are you you mentioned R&D are you working with your um accountants to get an R&D credit a tax credit every year do you file for that we do yes okay great I mean that's been huge for us that's how we ended up with our accountants is they did a presentation on R&D tax credits and you know you can take salary a percentage of your salary if you're spent you know if Liz is spending a bunch of time developing new products I mean I bet 80% of her time is R&D so obviously you can't take travel is my understanding um but you know or skiing or skiing yeah um unless you're I guess doing ski stuff yeah no I would highly suggest that people look into it if you're developing I can't remember exactly what the litmus tests are um maybe Liz has better information but it's if you're creating something that doesn't already exist in the world basically or doesn't already exist in the market you know so for us we're developing new colors we're developing new techniques um we're developing new products all right uh Laura I want to ask you what you've been up to but but first 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 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 assistance 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 than it would have taken them just to do the test themselves how do you respond to that right right right this is a deadly trap 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 and 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 if he's out some 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 it cost is $1900 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 3 months thanks Rob and we're back Laura we haven't had you on in a little while how's it been going it's been going really well I've been traveling a ton um I went to Vegas for a day was that for business or or pleasure no went to Vegas for a gift they have a gift show so we went to go look and see if there were any kind of yarn related gift items that would be good in our retail store just went there for one night I pulled into the parking lot you know my flight leaves at 6:00 a.m. so I pull into the parking lot at about 5:45 cuz it's Areno airp important it takes like 6 minutes to get on the plane and I was fumbling with my keys and I close the door and I hear the door lock and all I had in my hand was a banana and my phone and my wallet and I had dropped the keys in the front seat of the car and it had locked the car so I couldn't get my laptop out I couldn't get my bag out I couldn't get anything so I'm standing there at 5:15 in the morning freezing cold don't have a coat um cuz it's in the back seat with my car completely locked and I'm like like so do I just get on the plane and like Doug will come and he'll bring the extra key and unlock the car later no suitcase no nothing I had just gotten this new like phone wallet combo thing so I had everything I needed it was just overnight I'm like I can use a washcloth to brush my teeth I guess and my coworker is already on the plane right cuz she gets there early so I'm like well I guess I'll just roll with it you know I'll just wear the same clothes I can just turn those underwear inside out you know one night so I go and I get on the plane and I'm like all right this is all she's like that's all you've got I'm like Yep this is all I've got we're going to do this so slept in like the bathrobe that they had in the hotel and wor the same clothes two days in a row it was very exciting you know my car will not allow me to do that that's because your car wasn't from the last century yeah no if you I leave my keys in the car it won't lock um I guess they've figured out that that is a great safety mechanism for people like me this never happened to me before I was just like wow but you had a banana with you right so I had a banana okay you're good to go yep I had my banana yeah so went there and then 2 days later got on a flight to Peru so we went down to Peru for about 8 Days um to visit the Mills and develop some new products do some R&D um we visited some leather factories uh to investigate doing some moving some of our production from China to Peru the prices are unbelievably different like five times the cost to do business with leather with a small leather manufacturer in Peru versus in China so it's just not doable and then then a couple days later headed down to Texas um took Huck and we went down there um went to Austin and visited with a customer went to San Antonio went to Fort Worth and visited the Factory and then just got back a couple days ago the most important in most interesting part of the story is I just want to know your mentality so you locked car were you able to just shut it off and go all right it is what it is and just let it not bother you see that's a sign of maturity that takes discipline to do that because I think 20 years ago maybe you would have been torturing yourself and aggravated like at some point I I I made the turn to where like whatever happens yeah whatever well it makes it it's like it's a good story you know I'm like okay all right I mean like this is going to be an adventure what's this going to be like this is an experience I've never had before to just get on a plane with just my phone and to you know go to a professional for 2 days and wear the same clothes you know like how I don't know I kind of looked at it I was like all right this this will be this will be fun you are an entrepreneur as an entrepreneur would do I was thinking the same thing you roll with the punches you roll with the punches but you know what um what it really did is it enforced as I was about to go to Peru that I didn't I don't need a bunch of stuff like I had this whole set of luggage with all of this crap and I was fine with nothing and so when I went to Peru for 10 days yeah you don't change your clothes anymore like what's the point no I went to Peru and I managed to just take a carry-on to Peru for eight days or nine days however long we were gone cuz I realized wow I really don't need as much stuff as I'm taking like I can wear the same underwear for four days and it's fine you are a warrior wow I'm just kidding on the underwear those don't take up much space we know you're not though but okay Laura there's been something I've been wanting to follow up with you on for a for a long time you told us many months ago about how you'd hired a friend and somehow outfitted a van to let this friend drive around the country doing sales for you and you were it was a good friend you were really excited about it you spent a lot of money uh on the van how did that work out oh God why do you have to ask this you know how it worked out no I don't you don't I don't oh yeah yeah so we spent $100,000 on this van it was bless his heart I mean great salesman we've been friends forever he had this van on his vision board for the last like five years it's you know what he's really wanted to do was Van life and go around the country so we had it upfitted it's all like super perfect exactly the way he wanted it I had pretty much no involvement other than like writing the check an important involvement yeah so we decided we even spent we spent $5,000 to have somebody do the artwork to wrap the van to make the van look beautiful was it yarn related the artwork yes yeah yeah yeah so it says we dye yarn um hand dyed yarn y'all um on the side so you know it's this great van and he takes off in April because it took a while to get the wrap done so it took almost like 6 months he was driving around just with some magnets on it so we get the wrap done and it was another five grand just to get the wrap done so 10 grand you know to get it all like wrapped and everything so it looks you know very yarn specific I I swear to God it was like the day after the rap was installed he quit so six months in exactly six months in and he's just like you know this just isn't working out it's not what I thought it would be you know as part of us agreeing to do this we like okay you create give me a proposal you know if you want us to spend $100,000 on this put it like on paper how much money is this going to save in hotels how much is it going to save in food you know what kind of sales do we need to do to support this you know we're looking at like a two or threeyear plan I put together kind of this whole p&l about how like in year two in the middle of year two it would pay off I mean and he put together the budget he's like here's how much I'm going to spend on food here's how much I'm going to spend on hotels well once he got on the road he realized he didn't like to cook as much you know and so he wanted to eat out more and he realized he didn't like staying in the van and he wanted to stay in more hotels and so he used up his like food and hotel budget you know halfway through the year um and then was just like yeah I'm done and what was this history before you start what did he do his whole life he's been a sales rep so a traveling sales rep and he's an excellent rep I mean really gifted really great at going and opening new accounts um not so great at followup or you know he wanted to do business development but that is just not his strength doing like the work work is not is not his strength his strength is going and talking to people and getting them to buy stuff so yeah so now we have a van that uh now is broken in a couple different spots so it's just sitting in our front parking lot and as soon as the parts come in to be able to fix it which it's been 4 months now then we will fix it and we'll sell it well listen nothing ventured nothing gained uh totally I mean you know it it served a purpose it is what it is um the market is such that these Vans are in high demand so we'll probably get pretty close to our money back and at the time there was no travel we weren't taking on new accounts because you know our capacity was just not there so it was really it was just a marketing effort you know for him to get out and visit these shops and spend time with people so I don't regret it it just was a little frustrating I mean it was very frustrating so what's he doing now uh he was taking classes to be a business coach or a life coach and I think he is moving to Alaska to work with kids who have had substance abuse and teach them life skills bless his heart love him I mean really do as a person you know really really like him just as an employee and as a cooworker just you know not so much Laura what's your sales plan instead of this how do you reach the people you thought he was going to reach um we're just you know G to go to trade shows and then we're between me and a couple of other employees we just go and visit some of the shops you know we can fly there instead of driving there the impact that it had was not um over the last year or so was not actually new opening new accounts um and what we've done is we have transitioned one of our employees to being an in-house salesperson so she's going to be reaching out and really working on connecting with these different shops and these different customers did what he was doing show any promise while he was still doing it you know it did um and I think that we could have we absolutely could have figured out how to make it work really really well but it was still kind of it was actually kind of in the R&D phase like figuring out is it worth it to drive around to all these different stores um and to visit with them to have a traveling sales rep that does this full-time so yeah it was super interesting Jay what's going on with you I've had a revelation that after two years of the pandemic this whole um the whole resignation thing um I'm calling it a realignment because I've done the math and I realized that I've had n nine people have left out of 130 which isn't a lot and um half probably quit and half ref fired and I'm just in a great position I I don't know why or how it's definitely harder to hire how now there's no question trying to hire a delivery guy would drive a truck very difficult but I've hired people for internal things like doing the web support for the home store and salespeople for the framing business we have found some lovely half Happ wonderful people that are thrilled to be here and are thrilled to have them and I think this whole dynamic has shifted that I think if you try to run a nice company and treat people well I think you can attract good people and I don't know at the end of the day I'm in way better shape I am today than I I was two years ago it's like shook the tree out basically shook the tree out in terms of the people you lost it shook the tree out that people that were like on the edge listen you always have you know you've got the 10 players and you got the nines you got the eights and then you got some people that maybe are teetering or maybe just holding on or just barely holding on and like some of them were stressed out about they were already had anxiety and frankly the pandemic pushed them over the edge and they didn't want to work in retail anymore and it was okay and they quit and they left did they find other jobs or did they what did they quit to do they did a good job the problem was they called in sick a lot because you know they had some issues and and now they move down to some I don't know where they went I would also say a warning to business owners out of the nine people how many PE how many references do you think I've given out me or any of my staff zero so you know somebody's hiring all these people that are leaving their jobs and frankly some of them just are not the are not your a players that are leaving um my good people are all happy in here and um it's just it's worked out okay and then I made a couple of difficult decisions with some people that you know yeah it's it's it's okay it's kind of an opportunity to reassess your staff your Staffing and realign you're issuing a warning to people in the in the midst of this the great resignation this labor shortage that the people they're hiring may not be the best yeah based on the most dangerous thing in hiring is adding some desperation into it and I'm telling you I had one guy just quit it was because of the situation we're short of people we didn't want to we didn't want to fire him but this is not a good employee this is someone who would have ultimately been fired he just quit he's going to work somewhere they think they hired this great guy and they're going to find out they didn't hire this great guy at all and that would have been a good case of calling a reference because nobody would have said too much if they called here but nobody would have given I I'm telling you they almost never call somebody should asks why are they leaving the company after after 12 years they should they should ask themselves that and then they should call the reference and go hi uh we just we were we were offering a job to so and so and we're just curious why were they leaving and like I'm not going to make up an elaborate story and I say yeah he quit and then we I wouldn't tell them anything I mean that's they they should have checked um and I'm sure that people are so desperate for employees now that they've thrown out the rule book and they're just hiring somebody if they got a pulse and that is just disastrous long term back when I had the handyman company it was always very difficult to hire and I did find that when I was rushed I made a lot of bad decisions including not calling references so um I know as they always say the best time to look to hire someone is when you don't need to you know the best time to look for a job is when you don't need it I think that applies here um we're going to be hiring a lot in the next couple of months um but we're going to have like the ads out probably for a couple of months before we start doing a lot of the interviewing because we want to have the candidates kind of see the flow of candidates coming in because it's not that urgent that we hire right away and the reason I'm doing that is that I've hired in the past out of desperation and um that can be a very expensive mistake we've had really great success at hiring when we're not looking and you know just kind of keeping an open mind again uh and we're kind of doing that right now we're just kind of you know like if somebody shows up if you know if somebody that that works for us now is like you know I've got this friend who's looking for something are you hiring no I mean kind of always you know if we can obviously you know that's a luxury to have but our social media and marketing manager she's been with us for four years we weren't looking for her she just showed up you know she was a had worked with one of our employees and she's turned out amazing my higher range success 30 40 years ago used to be 20% and now as a company I'd say 80% of the people we hire work out really well maybe 85% work out really well and it's all because of a disciplined hiring approach stop hiring whoever shows up stop hiring your neighbors's brother-in-laws cousin but Jay there are a lot of companies I think that are struggling with that right now they feel like some of those rules have to go out the window because they just need people uh what do you say to that I say there is so much EXP exposure to to owning a business that if you hire somebody you're hiring a driver they could kill somebody with the truck I mean there is so much horrible exposure to hiring somebody who's Reckless or or is disruptive that maybe you're better off being sure to help and maybe maybe your service has to slow down a little bit maybe you have to just you know tell people as in my case we did one week framing for all these years now it's it's a week to two week I would rather slow my service down a little bit and do a good job then just go hire a warm body and then have a problem because I've lived through those days and I'm not going back to it all right we're running short of time I want to hit one more thing which is I I read a story in the Wall Street Journal recently and it quoted a bunch of business owners who were kind of making the case that they're having as tough a time right now as they've ever had which I found interesting because you know in one sense in many ways the economy is booming this article ran before Russia invad Ukraine and added another issue to worry about I'm curious how all of you guys are are are processing this right now well I've got an example um of supply chain if you want to hear it so we moved into a new building in Texas in um January of last year and as you might guess Texas can get pretty hot in the summertime and you know our business is over stoves we've got 16 women that are working in this kitchen and and part of the deal with moving into this building was to provide an air conditioned environment um you know it's very humid in there so you know we moved into this building it was supposed to be air you know air conditioned HVAC all that kind of stuff well the air conditioning didn't work very well they didn't do a good job um it's not they didn't do a good job but you know it it's not what we needed so we've had to go through phase two of cooling this kitchen so last March we sat down with the HVAC company and sketched out plans for how to get the air moving and to get the temperature to where it needs to be so the quote was about $41,000 to get these units put on top to get all the stuff put together so $41,000 okay great well not great that sucks but um you know we know what it is budgeting for it all that kind of stuff so we thought it was going to be installed last June then it turned into July then it turned into August then continue continue continue cuz these parts have not come in yet so it is now February of it's now 11 months later the parts have still not come in or a couple of the parts have still not come in so now we're like and because it gets so hot and there in the summer we're losing employees and we have this new great manager down there who has we have retention for the first time probably in the in the company's history of like four months nobody's left nobody quit you know um we're fully staffed for the first time and forever and if we can't get this air conditioning working this summer we might lose some people because it's just going to get too hot and uncomfortable so now we've had to I was down in Texas last week working with the HVAC guys and we're like look we got to do something um so he reconfigured the whole thing and now it's going to be $66,000 did you call another company possibly because I went through this a I had a company telling me Oh they couldn't get parts from carrier and I thought that was odd I called carrier myself and found out the company was on credit hold with them and that's why they couldn't get part that's not the case here I mean the guy that is doing the work is a guy that does work for one of the largest Warehouse guys in Fort Worth and blah blah blah so I'm I feel really good about who we're working with and the honesty there but yeah and it's just you know it's these couple parts I don't know I think I call another vendor just to see whether it's the same story cuz who knows maybe he's just got more business than he knows what the deal I don't know no he doesn't um because he can't get parts so is he going to be able to get the parts for the reconfig reconfigured version yeah and they're going to start next week um and they're doing it at Cost so they're not making anything because the original configuration didn't work Liz back to my question about how all of this all these cross currents in the economy are sitting with all of you um how are you thinking about this well so first of all um what's going on in Ukraine right now is is its humanitarian crisis it's just at the beginning of it and um you know I used to work in Ukraine in the '90s I majored in Russian in college and so I went over to Ukraine in 1997 and I worked on uh democracy Assistance programs that the US government did and we trained Ukrainian politicians on how to run campaigns in terms of how it affects my business unfortunately it does and the reason is that 6% of the world's aluminum comes from Russia and I don't think mine necessarily comes from there but in the last couple of weeks the price of aluminum has gone up 15% and that was before Russia invaded Ukraine so I expect in the next week or so um us to be very impacted by that and it's the worst time ever for us because we are placing the biggest order ever we've made with our Factory so I you know I expect there to be a lot of volatility in pricing with that but you know just back to just what's going on there um I mean I'm very cynical about Russia and about Putin but I'm still very surprised that this is happening you know seeing people in bomb shelters you know fleeing the city you know it's it's really devastating Jay let me ask you sort of the same I guess the question in some ways is you know is this a is this a great time to be running a business or a terrible time to be running a business that Wall Street Journal story seemed to suggest it's a terrible time it's usual I think that's exaggerated I I you know I'm in a business group with six other business owners I can't tell you that any one of us is going through a horrible time right now I certainly I've got some shipments that have been tied up and we're having troubles getting sofas out of North Carolina they're behind and people are waiting for them but and we have had some supply chain things but I wouldn't call a terrible time to be in business so I'm just afraid that sometimes uh the newspapers or wherever just want to create some story like oh look how terrible well they quoted people who were who are having tough times there's no question about it sure okay that's my point could you go find some people that I could go find some people that would say red lipstick ruined their life let me go find some people I mean you could do that with anything I so the fact that they found whatever three four business owners to complain no big surprise that not hard to find but is that really representing the small business Community I from my experience no Laura from your experience are you seeing a lot of struggling sure we're seeing shops closed but we've and I was thinking about it this morning I mean we see shops closed all the time you know so I don't know that it's really any different than it's been for the last 20 years some people are having a terrible time without the PPP money I think it's a whole another story and I fully I fully recognize and appreciate and ccept that but we did get the pp money though is the point and a lot of other companies did I feel bad about restaurants I think they've had an unusually difficult time I don't know it's always tough It's always a bad time to run a business isn't it yeah absolutely is it ever going to be a problem finding someone here let's do a story right now let's go out and write a story about Banks aren't lending I could tell you 365 days a year for the next 20 years you'll find five business owners are going to say the banks aren't lending any money won't be a problem to find those people does that mean that the banks aren't money no it means that there's some people that are not getting money from Banks it's it's it's that's the way it is all right thank you all my thanks to Jay goz Liz picarazzi and Laura Xander as always really appreciate you guys sharing 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 at21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone okay [Music]