There’s a Thin Line Between Confident and Delusional

[Music] hello everyone welcome to what used to be the 21 hats podcast and is now the business Advantage TV podcast but might be the 21 hats podcast again don't worry we'll get this figured out one of these days and I'll explain it all in an upcoming episode meanwhile I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week our business owners talk about whether their businesses need another round of government support whether in the age of covid they have started monitoring their employees Behavior away from the office and whether there are aspects of running a business they would like to be better at one thing they say they have all mastered is taking action when an employee has to be shown the door as Jay goz puts it if we didn't figure out how to fire we're not on this show because we're out of business at this point plus Paul Downs tells us whether he kept the promise he made in our last episode to see if he could connect with someone at Google to discuss his AdWords campaign spoiler alert he did not even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will if nothing else let owners know they are not alone in facing these challenges this week's lineup features Karen Clark Cole who is CEO of blink a user experien research and design firm in Seattle Paul DS who is founder and CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Jay goz whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home the episode is titled there's a a thin line between confident and [Music] delusional last time we spoke uh Paul we we talked a lot about digital marketing and we gave you some homework to do you were going to see if you could make contact with an actual human being at Google and uh see if you could figure anything out about your uh your AdWords uh campaign through the years no um I I can't blame Google because I actually didn't really try to dig up a number and call somebody and talk to Google what I did was I checked with my AdWords guy and said hey what do you think about this whole concept of there's a Google person and his take on it was that that was true for a time that he ran an AdWords uh agency with multiple clients in a big spend and he used to have a person who came down from New York every month and uh that stopped a couple of years ago and now and the he took he said I have no way of verifying this that Google outsourced all their support and a lot of their uh customer relationships to India and it's been pretty bad since then and uh so I started looking into other things besides just Google trying to take a look at my entire digital campaign and think about the things we could do and I'm sort of in the middle of that process right now so um you could call that a failure on my part if you want I think that would be fair okay I will what would be terrible would be if I call Google and there was a helpful person on the other end who immediately fixed my AdWords campaign and then I would just look stupid so uh I suspect that won't happen but I haven't tried it yet are you going to uh possibly um after these conversations on the podcast I tend to uh sort of retreat like a whipped dog from whatever plan I had going in so maybe maybe you guys will actually get me to do it I think you should do it one thing I didn't really bring up in the last conversation was that every every interaction I've ever had with Google uh was from there in designed to get me to get more clicks from Google and that's how they C Victory like we gave you more clicks you know what's the problem and uh there's nothing about any of the discussions I've had since since the last podcast that led me to believe that their goal is any different so as I said rather than just dive into that and have an interaction with Google I'm thinking about my entire digital marketing strategy I've been talking to my adwards guy I've been talking to my web guys my SEO guys and we've engaged not engaged but we asked for rfps from two different digital marketing uh agencies because I'm more interested in yay you're Outsourcing listen to that see what what could be done because I knew that there were more things than we were doing and we heard about things like Geo fencing which are very interesting where if you don't if you're not familiar with the term you can uh identify Target addresses uh that you're interested in and and then identify all the people who work there through their mobile phones and then serve them ads uh so that's an interesting strategy because we could go after architecture firms or anybody we thought was a potential client and there's like a whole there's a whole world of these kind of dark arts approaches that I'm just getting my head around before I decide to do one thing or another and so I'm sorry that I I haven't been able give you a lot of news of of progress but that's sort of how I roll with these things all right well we'll uh we'll pick that up with Laura again next time so I want to talk about what I think is kind of the big news today for uh business owners which is that negotiations in Congress about um another stimulus package that would help individuals and business owners uh seems to have those negotiations seems to have broken down uh Marco Rubio the senator from Florida tweeted uh that Congress isn't going to pass more covid-19 relief before the election uh I think that's what most people uh believe is the case at this point I'm curious uh what you guys think about that you know we already got ours and so we're not regardless of what happens we're not planning to apply for more but um I think there's a lot a lot of companies that need it for sure Jay what do you think um it was a lifesaver I shudder at the thought if I wouldn't have gotten that where I'd be today so it did work the PPP that you that you did get yeah the first round was was was it worked and it did what it was supposed to do and um my businesses are open we're doing fine so I personally would not uh try to take more money because I I don't need it and I don't there' be no reason to do it but I certainly know there's lots of businesses that are in the entertainment business the catering there's lots of businesses through no fault of their own need more more money and I hope that they can help those companies out so um uh the whole thing with the payroll deductions not having to pay your uh payroll taxes to me is just insane I don't know who's going to do that who's you know they're saying don't don't collect this the taxes for the rest of the year and then double up after the first like why would someone do that so I don't know how that's help we were wondering we cannot figure out why anyone would do that it just seems bad yeah yeah terrible yeah I I didn't even mention it to my employees because it's so stupid yeah yeah same with us and something's got to be pretty pretty stupid before you you know you don't mention it to your employees this one did fit that category yeah Paul what are you thinking in terms of further rescue loans or stimulus well I I I am glad that we got it uh I think it's kind of miraculous that for one moment the two Waring sides were a to agree on something that that helped a lot of people um in retrospect I think we probably would have survived at least until today without it but it made my life a lot easier uh and I have more cash on hand right today than I've ever had in the business um but I'm not sure that can you explain that Paul because the purpose of that loan obviously was to keep people employed um and a large percentage of it had to be paid out uh at least under the initial terms of the loan paid out to employees how did it result in you having more cash than ever mostly because we were about to have more cash than ever anyway we it was just a we were coming off a string of of good months in terms of profitability and then the receipt of a couple of payments for very large jobs where we we basically got all the money at the end so I probably would have had about 400 Grand on May 1st and I ended up with about 700 Grand on May 1st because the PPP loan so that gave me that has given me all the way through the summer uh the ability to ignore the danger signs that I see for my business and commit to keeping people employed today I've been much less conservative about employment than I would would have been because I've got this huge cash cushion and some of that is like I could pay back the whole PPP loan I got $347,000 and I've got 700 and some in the bank right now and prior to 2020 I would normally have anywhere between 150 and 300 on any given day so much more comfortable cushion now part of that is because I stopped paying myself and part of that is because we were lucky with the timing of payments and part of that is the PPP loan and uh so it all looks great today now my business is going to be affected in the medium and long term by the covid situation so would I take another PPP loan I mean if they offered it to me and said do you think you're going to be affected by covid I would say yeah and I would take the money and then if it turned out I didn't need it I'd give it back but um I would be willing to get more the other thing they could do would be to make the expenses that we had associated with the first loan actually deductible which I believe was the intent of Congress and then the IRS issued a regulation saying no no no no no so the PPP money that we have forgiven ends up being taxable to the owner in a way and I haven't really figured out how much it is but that's a little bit of a dark cloud in my thinking so correct me if if I'm wrong the reason why you have cash is because unlike my business that was absolutely door locked business stopped for two months so I was paying people with that money because you're not a retailer and you're working in a factory you didn't have any complete shutdowns correct well we never completely shut down because the sales and engineering project management was able to work from home the factory shut down for 6 weeks but then when we came back we had work to do and the PPP loan really encouraged me to get those people back into work as soon as we possibly could but did you use that money to pay them while they were home um I didn't get the money till April 28th and that's the day we opened so okay so the answer is and the difference between you and I on this category is I took my employees off of unemployment and paid them to sit home you're you didn't that's why you have the cash and that's why I use the cash um right the the day we got the day we got shut down by the state I told everybody who was who wasn't able to actually work you're now laid off go get unemployment and they did and then when they when they came back on then we started paying him out of PPP fund I'm guessing I got the money sooner than you did that's why I was able to use it and take take them off unemployment so I I didn't get it till the day after the program ended right that's the difference so people who have the money have the money because they didn't use it to pay their employees at home the people who don't have the money to use it used it to replace unemployment so it really depends on whether your business was shut down and now that Paul mentioned it I didn't think about it the timing of when you got the money so there's all kinds of scenarios out there some people used up all the money some people are sitting on the money some people are going to pay back the money it's it's all over the place well there's also the issue of forgiveness Paul do do you expect to be able to get the entire loan forgiven did the calculation and we would get about 300 300,000 forgiven as far as I know although you know nobody really knows how these calculations will work out so my bank is supposed to be setting up a calculator that we would use but they haven't really done it yet because the law kept changing so um I don't know when I even have to make the first payment on this thing you have to apply for forgiveness and I think you can do that now can't you yes and no I just got a notice from the bank yeah no I'm with the big Bank bought my little bank and now they're telling this just happened yesterday well there's a line it depends when you got it it it's it's it's still not orderly I can assure you it's there's still a lot of things up in the a so yeah my bank just said don't do anything just we'll tell you when you can apply yes ours pretty much said the same thing and so I'm like okay it's 1% money at the worst case scenario so I'm not worried about it and doing nothing is always something we aspire to so when someone tells us to do nothing grab it Karen where do you stand in terms of getting your loan forgiven we're the same so we're we we believe that we fully qualify but we're again doing nothing which is um happy to take that as Jay points out the easiest thing to do there's plenty of other things to do yeah Karen is your business still holding up yeah we're um yeah we're fortunate um but we are you know we've we had kind of a delayed um uh effects of all the shutdowns um so our uh August July uh have been slow and losses for us they're typically slower months for us anyway but um they were bigger losses than we would have liked for sure um and plan for so now we're just trying to you know what we see the day after Labor day is the beginning of the year essentially it's the um we call it the 100 day March and so that's when everything just starts firing Up full cylinders for all of our clients um for the rest of the year so we are really focused on closing business um watching our you know making sure we've got the right balance of employees and contractors and work uh that's always our biggest constant moving Target um to balance that so we don't have anybody what we call sitting on the bench I want to ask you guys about one aspect of this that I really haven't se discussed a lot what kind of approach have you taken with your own employees about their behavior especially their behavior away from the office which presumably is something you wouldn't have had any interest in discussing in uh in the old times but now uh if somebody's going out to parties or or or traveling or not being careful that can have a a huge impact on your company H have you addressed that with your employ I'll tell you how we do it is um we can't control their lives there there's no way but what we do is we control what we can which is our office environment so we've only got one of our five offices open um California is not allowed to be open yet so in Seattle we are open we're still encouraging everyone to work from home whenever possible um and most are most I mean majority of people are um but we have some inperson research studies that we need to keep running and so you know the whole office is set up according to the protocol of our governor and the the state uh with plexiglass and dots on the floor and signs everywhere and capacity in each room and sanitization stations everywhere and then we take everyone's temperature when they come in and they have to fill in a health form and so that's our way of protecting ourselves and you know of course it's not foolproof but it's that's the most that we can do uh and then we have all kinds of protocols in place if somebody um is sick or they feel sick or they're waiting for test results or any of those things we have a shutdown protocol Jay how about you if if one of your employees wants to go to a motorcycle rally in South Dakota are you okay with that yeah we had that and uh I had a long talk with all the key managers because Chicago put out a notice saying if anybody's going to the following states they need to quarantine so we went through the whole are we supposed to interrogate them every weekend where they're going and we came to the conclusion and we all felt good about this conclusion after 30 minutes we're having them sign off a thing that says if you go to any of the following states you are to quarantine for 2 weeks it is your responsibility to tell us if you're going to these states I don't want to turn my managers into interrogators and if they're dumb enough to go to Wisconsin as an example and then come back you're in Chicago so Wisconsin is right next door yes it's 30 minutes away so 40 minutes away so um we're putting it on the employees to self-report and getting the managers out of the middle of it and if someone comes back and tells us they went there we're we're we're quarantining them cuz uh we're following all the rules because if it gets if anything happens uh I want to be able to say we follow the rules and I'm trying to keep everybody safe so um we've had numerous not numerous we've probably had three people that have stayed home for 14 days because someone in their family got it I think out of every I got 110 employees I think we only actually had one or two that actually tested POS positive the rest were precautionary so knock on wood 6 months into this we're holding our own but it has brought up issues that you never had a deal with before about are you there I mean are you the parole officer are you supposed to do interrogate everyone Monday morning what you do this weekend and we decided that that was on them and so far so good have you had anything with employees uh snitching on each other no though that was the concern they come back and they start talking about oh I was in Wisconsin and I I hope we made it clear enough to them to uh you know speak up themselves so I'm I'm happy to report I've always said from the beginning I'm trying to control collateral damage out of aund we haven't had any collateral damage every single employee out of 110 is here and some of them are quite nervous and some of them have anxiety but we' we've gotten through it and we've got the Plexi up just like Ken was saying we're doing everything right and so far so good but it's it's been challenging to say the least are you using the approach of trying to educate them on where it's safe and where it's not and what's okay's not and telling them exactly absolutely we're telling him what the whole story is um and then have you had anyone on staff who just thinks the whole thing's a hoax and what do you do about that shoot him um no I no I'm just kidding can we it's it did did humor leave us too um well Laura's not here I'm trying to be like her but I'm not funny all right nice I was okay um um um no I don't have anyone here that has that would be a little difficult to deal with frankly given that um I do know I have a friend who's whose mother who who died she's 67 years old went and died yeah we as a company I think most of the people here take this very seriously I have not heard about anybody that was mocking it I haven't heard of anybody that's rolling their eyes I is well you know they're out there though right I mean well they're out there I don't know they're here and I yeah they certainly are out there you can turn the TV on and see it every night I I don't think there's anyone that works for me who has made that clear um um that wouldn't go over well with anybody because this is very serious and there's 193,000 dead people now so and I wonder though how that hold like we have to be careful of when you fire somebody you have to have um well actually we don't legally have to have cause for dismissal but it doesn't hold up in court very well so I I would hope that this would if it's a reason for dismissal yeah haven't had any of those problems luckily so um I feel for someone that does cuz I don't know how that would be a difficult thing to deal with that in the situation that somebody is is not uh being respectful to the situation because I got to tell you the opposite most of my employees are the ones I've talked to were the one everybody's very concerned about this Paul how have you uh approached this with your employees um well first of all we're a much smaller company and so it's it's easier with 20 one uh working in the office in the shop um our policy has been that if you want to work from home and you can work from home you can do it and if you're concerned about covid uh you can modify your schedule to the extent possible the shop we're also wearing masks all the time whenever you can see another person you should be masked if you're in your own office with the door shut like I am right now you can take your mask off and my guys seem to be uh pretty serious about the masking I mean we've just gone through a whole summer out on the shop floor when it's been pretty hot and they're working with tools and sanding and what have you and a mask is it's it's uncomfortable but I didn't see anybody scoffing at it uh in terms of a policy we just we just say if you're going to go to something that's risky some big Gathering you need to notify us and then we sort of figure out what to do about it I haven't been been notified by anybody that they're about to go to sturis or any of these things um I don't think any of them have uh we've had a couple of people who said oh like one of my guys this week said oh his daughter was at a sleep over and it turned out somebody there was exposed so he's home for the week and got tested just in case but we I haven't really been as Vigilant about it as I could be I'm not following whatever the Govern Governor has to say uh because we're not traveling much for work and my guys drive to work the one who used to take a train is now sharing a car ride in two days a week with one of the other employees and I think that we've kind of settled on we're g to sort of act as if everybody might be sick while we're here and then not get too much more excited about it and that may be a mistake but so far it's worse have to add I forgot my entire accounting Department's working from home which is you know three four people and you know not great it's okay but it's it's like I'm I'm literally the only one here sometimes and there's times where it's it's it's inconvenient or problematic with invoices it's just it's okay but it's not great I would say that the biggest effect for us is just that it's it's much harder to talk to people when you're wearing a mask depending on particularly depending on what kind of mask we've got one worker who insists on like one of these homemade cloth ones with a coffee bag inside or something and she already is not a native English speaker and it's just really hard to understand her but we're we're trying to make the effort and accommodate just like we would anybody who's got some kind of impediment and uh and it's it's like a 5% degradation let's say five to 15% degradation and communication efficiency at any given moment but we're working around it it's just everybody gets it all right so in the time we have left uh I'd like to try something a little bit different I'd like to ask each of you is there something when it comes to running your businesses that you wish you were better at anybody want to go first I think Jay should go first there you go uh because I'm the oldest well I recognized years ago that I'm 75% entrepreneur and 25% manager which means that I get distracted and I like figuring out ad campaigns and writing copy and figuring out new ways to make customers happy and the the every day having meetings and following up on reports is just that that's why I didn't go into accounting so I I it's a regular little struggle I I once not long ago I said to my production manager who's been me for 23 years I said you know Dale I'm 75% entrepreneur and 25% manager he goes no you're not you're 100% entrepreneur which which and I appreciate him saying that because there was some truth to it so have you hired somebody to to be the manager what I did is I think I have five key managers and every last one of them has been with me for more than 20 years so I think I made up for that by having key employees that are in charge of their thing and and keeping him around and it you know it's working um would it be better if I was more of that person uh yeah sure but I've also gotten to the point where I I um I don't want to you know at some point in life you just say you know what I could make more money if I did this this and this and I just decided yeah I probably could but that's okay I it's okay you mean you would save money in the business and therefore you would make more money um um that if I was to discipline myself more to be a better manager maybe I would make more money but that would require me doing more than I really want to do and it's okay so I asked you if there was something you wish you were better at and it sounds like the answer is no no I just said I you could be better at it but you're you're okay with the Way It Is Well when you talk to someone like me if I wanted to I could so I I I could if I wanted to I I would like to think whatever I would need to do WR like like you can't make someone better at writing you know um creative advertising copy you know but but could I dig in and make myself be a better manager if I wanted to be yeah sure um I just have decided that um it's good enough and there's a breakthrough it took me many many many years to figure out in business at least this is my personal opinion that there is such a thing as good enough that good enough is good enough and that if you don't accept that you can spend which is what I used to do your whole life torturing yourself with trying to be perfect and I've accepted that yeah I'm not and I'm good enough at it and you know what I'm a much happier person now much yeah and I always say that you want to focus on what only you can do and that's being an entrepreneur because not everyone has that in their blood and so you want to Outsource everything else so the minute you get a chance to hire somebody hire somebody else who's really good at that thing that you don't super love and chances are they love it and they're really good at it and the entrepreneur Albatross is torturing ourself about everything we should be at and I'm suggesting to people like if you're making that's what I'm trying to do Jay that's my job and you failed miserably um I would say in this particular case that if you're making enough money if there's if and I believe there is such a word as enough money and you're happy like you know what it's good enough um we don't have to answer one of the beauties of being I don't have to answer to a board of directors that's going to you know tell me I want you to have those meetings it's like no I'm not going to because I don't want to like that to me is the number one aspect of being an entrepreneur I'm going to do what I want and I don't have to answer any Paul you with me yeah yeah okay I mean the whole question is sort of a weird one because I agree like I don't know I'm you know it's like it's it's premised on on you wanting to get a different result than the one you're getting or a better result yeah like so I'm sort of with Jay like I'm fairly comfortable with where my company is okay Co is sort of a meteor strike from out of nowhere but other in other respects I'm pretty happy with the way things are going and uh so that if I wanted to fix myself it would mean that I would be heading in a different direction you know more growth or bigger car or whatever and that's just not me so but Paul even in the the last episode that we taped you brought up the issue of digital marketing and I don't think you used the words that you wished you were better at it but you expressed uh you talked about the Evolution how you've handled it different differently through the years and I think the implication was that you're still learning and that you would like to do it better is am I wrong about that well that's but getting to Karen's Point that's not a question of whether I have digital marketing skills it's question of whether I how I see uh how I see the your time whether I need to be performing The Specialist functions that the company needs to do or whether I'm comfortable with somebody else doing it and I'm usually very comfortable and uh and I I don't think it's necessarily a problem or something I need to fix it's just more you know this I'm picking certain battles just because of the scale we're at Karen has a different resource base than I do to hire to hire people and I have a re different resource base than Jay and we all have I mean we're just in different places so we do different things I wouldn't mind being able to type 120 words a minute with no errors how about that there's a just straight out skill that everybody would benefit from or I don't even think typing I can't do the texty thing for for anything if I could figure out how to do that it would save me minutes a week and I would be much happier Lauren I walk around with a stack of magazines like I'm not kidding you I take them in I put them in my bag I take them out of my bag I put them on the table in a nice place where I encourages me to read them and every day I say I wish I could read faster I wish I could read more and I literally just carry them around and I kind of hope that if by holding it something will seep in because I really want to know what's in there how's that working for you even on the airplane I sat I'm like okay this is the flight for the magazine and I couldn't even get through it because I'm a slow reader and I just thought I wish I was faster so that's something that torments me and I think it would make me a better entrepreneur and business owner and all that good stuff if I could get through more content yeah actually let me just add something that when I was a 17 I was a junior in high school my mother said you got to learn to type and this was back in 1977 uh and she said you're going to take the typing class and I did and I was the only guy in it and that's probably had more effect on my Outlook towards either doing stuff myself or not than anything else because I can actually type about 90 words a minute so I can do all kinds of stuff just self that would be way more of a pain to explain to other people so I think that there's there's something about having funny skills that really changes your outlook towards your own business if you if I couldn't type I would do it completely differently I'm gonna have to count how many words I type two fingered now because I don't even know I have idea yeah Paul I'm with you I I took uh typing in high school and I was completely bored by it and thought it was ridiculous and it was probably the most important thing I learned in high school I agree I say that all the time I I think it was seventh grade typing best class I ever took all right well I didn't take typing so that's one of those too late on my deathbed I'm gonna say my last words on on my death bed is gonna go if only I would have taken typing my life would have worked out differently you can still maybe you should take it as a night class wow all right I want to say something extremely serious for everyone who's listening who's an entrepreneur ambition is is our greatest asset and it's also our greatest weakness that that if you read the stories of some of these some not all of some of these super successful people they are tortured individuals that have messed up lives and I'm telling you at some point you can say you know what I'm doing really well I have a nice life and everything's just fine you don't have to spend your whole life torturing yourself yeah you can't stop the hamster wheel just like that it's not that easy but you you guys have taken this question it's really interesting to me to to the extremes either uh you know very focused smaller details like the ability to type or a big macro issues like are you happy with the way your business is basically performing and I I really thought I would hear from you something more along the lines of you know I I still haven't figured out how to fire people well I we're all really good at that yeah that's one fig that out okay good answer you want us to fire you right now stand in line you know what you've hit a core of something very interesting to what Paul just said and Karen yeah if you didn't figure out how to fire we're not on the show because we're out of business at this point so we've been in survival mode since the day we started we had to develop the certain critical skills to run your business and hiring and firing is certainly two of them and rest of hiring is a whole lot hiring is a whole lot harder than firing yeah but more fun no the only reason that you have to fire is because you did a lousy job hiring so probably uh that's not true I think it's usually true I mean you you can be you can be you can have to fire people I mean we call them layoffs but their firings for no fault of your own just okay it's a layoff but that's not fireing it's a layoff all right so so I'm gonna give you one answer that's probably more in the spirit of the question I wish I was less interested in facts and more driven by belief because I've seen it be very effective with other business owners people who can just they can just set a goal for themselves and like I'm going to get there and now all I have to do is figure out how do I get there and I'm much more caught up in what's actually going on and that gives you endless opportunities to think of why things are are going to prevent you from getting to any particular place so I tend to wallow in that That's Heavy that I I get what you're saying That's Heavy you me the it's really about confidence and it's about about oh I can pull this off and um yeah there's yeah that's another core entrepreneur thing and then there's sometimes where you have that confidence and you're plain wrong because you don't have the facts like you have so it there's a combo thing going on there there's a there's a thin line between confident and delusional and I've been on both sides of it that is a good point to end on I think as always my thanks to Karen Clark call Paul DS and Jay goz appreciate it guys thanks for listening everybody this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions remember we started the 21 hats podcast to help business owners feel a little less isolated to let them know they aren't the only ones fighting these battles if you got something out of this conversation please help us reach more people tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter at 21 1or hats and let me know if you have a question or a comment or a topic you'd like us to cover my email address is L Feldman at21 hats.com see you next time [Music]