We Have More Work Than We Can Handle

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul DS Jackie Russo and Sarah seagull talk about how and when they start planning for next year and here's one happy challenge that they've all confronted what do they do when they don't have the capacity to handle all of the work that's coming their way do they staff up if so what happens if the work subsequently falls off do they create a backlog do they miss deadlines do they raise prices plus Jackie shares an AI tool she's using to learn more about the decision makers her agency targets and the three owners respond to a case study in ADA compliance litigation taken from a Reddit post what are we supposed to do about this a business owner who has been sued for having a non-compliant website writes in the post I am trying not to overreact but having my savings and my income taken from me this way is just devast stating Jackie whose agency builds websites says there is a way to protect against those lawsuits even in Good Times owning and running a business could be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges in fact that's the whole idea behind the 21 hats Community engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another entrepreneur can offer if you're interested in learning more step one is to sign up for a free trial of the Morning Report which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners so you don't have to go looking for it step two is to get on our slack Channel where you can ask questions get vendor recommendations and tap the wisdom of a very impressive crowd just search the 21 hats Morning Report to subscribe joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul down CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables Jackie Russo CEO of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana and Sarah seagull CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled we have more business than we can handle before we get started just a quick reminder that we've scheduled the third in our series of entrepreneurial fishbowls for this Wednesday the 25th at 1 Eastern Time as you may recall in our fishbowls Chris Hutchinson of trebuchet group leads a business owner who is confronting a specific challenge through a brainstorming process it's a great opportunity to be part of the podcast to maybe learn something and to definitely help out a fellow entrepreneur in this case that would be Bailey waldrup who is trying to decide whether to buy the family business from her parents just reply to any 21 hats morning report and I'll send you the registration link now on on to the show Welcome Paul Jackie and Sarah it's great to have you here the main thing I want to talk about today is we're getting very close to the fourth quarter of 2024 uh and I'm curious when do you guys start planning for 2025 and what kind of process do you go through to budget to forecast to think about what you'll invest in and what your goals are anybody want to take that on [Laughter] no um I can just tell you one thing that I'm working on so in my industry and I'm sure other Industries like December and January are just horrible in terms of new business um and you know you have a lot of contracts that kind of near their end at the end of the year or you know are coming to a close and it's January is just a very tough month because so many companies are working on putting their budget together so like I'm working tirelessly on planning for those two months in particular what are you trying to do well I'm trying to drum a drum a business that will start in January so like getting things kind of in track making sure that any our contracts that are set to expire um are renewed for that period of time um and and just making sure that like we have any wasteful spending that's going to give us a tough time during that that period but it's the same thing every year for us we just we just get slow do you go through any kind of budgeting or forecasting process well um I so I've had since I started um my company I've gone through a variety of different bookkeepers um I recently just let go a bookkeeper and and hired a new person who is not a bookkeeper but they're a fractional CFO um and so that person is going to help me kind of do projections and be able to plan a little bit better for my business because it's it's a very much a weakness of mine like I'm fine with numbers but I wouldn't say that I'm like the best person in terms of doing projections have you had the fractional CFO long enough to have a sense or how it's going I'm really excited about them um but they also one thing nice about what they do is that they work with other PR agencies so they understand um my business they also used to work inhouse at a larger PR agencies so they're very familiar with the the you know the process and the and how the book should look um so I'm super optimistic about this person I don't really do annual planning because nothing nothing much changes for us on January 1st other than it's a new year now that does mean yeah you're going to file taxes on whatever happens in the next 12 months but the the nature of my business is that in January we're doing work that we sold two or three months before and so what I'm watching at all times is just like what's the rate at which sales are coming in and I'm looking for various metrics that I keep in mind to decide whether to hire that um I have a lot of expenses that are more or less fixed you know like my rcet be my rent and uh I've developed a sense of what ratios of Revenue to certain types of employee that we have the most variable thing every year has just been the number of sales we make and I can't always explain why that happens for instance this year we're up almost 55% over last year wow last year we did about 4.2 million which was within the range of normal for the last 3 or four years since the pandemic and this year we're on track for about 6.2 million right now nice and so the planning decision I had to make was what do you do about that because you can only move stuff through the factory at a certain rate without changing something adding more people adding more space adding more equipment and because the increase in sales is so unexpected I've decided that I'm going to do nothing other than let the backlog grow and so that that's the kind of thinking that I'm doing more than oh it's 2025 you know I don't have contracts from the client end that need to be renegotiated or renewed we're just sort of waiting for people to call us and spend money and my surprise this year they're doing it like crazy I assume that you have abs and flow of business but when you get too many orders at once do you space out when you could start a project I was talking to a a web designer the other day about a project and she was like oh I can't I would be able to start your project on October 15th like do you ever do that oh yeah I mean that's we have systems that allow us to see what what the pile of work ahead of us consists of quite precisely and so what we do is we let the backlog EV and flow in order to handle surges in sales and we can tell clients like hey you know right now as of to today it's going to be 16 weeks and I'm sorry we quoted you 12 weeks but that was 8 months ago and people are pretty cool about it if there's a critical date we usually find a way to make it happen no matter what the backlog is but a lot of it has to do with having systems that first of all we sell based on predicted amounts of of labor hours that's built into our pricing so when a sale comes in I can add that chunk of labor hours to the unused chunk that we have ahead of us and I have software that shows me those vies very very precisely and a lot of it it too is just like shoot I've been doing this 39 years now and I have a pretty good sense of what that feels like and so we just explained to the clients you got your order in but a million other people got in ahead of you and this is the way it is the nature of our work is that clients can accommodate that and then the other thing is backlogs become self-correcting at a certain point because there's a perception among buyers of what would be reasonable to wait for custom work and let's just say for the sake of argument that under 16 weeks everybody's fine and if you say when someone Rings like hey right now we're at 20 weeks half them will just put the phone down and so that if you sell too fast you're going to run into a situation where then while you're backlog is high then fewer people will buy and that will correct itself and I've learned not to worry about that what I'm watching to see is whether there's some precipitous drop in the number of people who are likely to call us like Co being a good example uh we were on track for our best year ever in February of 2020 but by April it was pretty clear there was going to need to be an adjustment so a lot of it is just experience and records and and having a model for selling that gives you some sense of what do you have to do if you sell that thing Sarah I think that your web designer and I may be wrong but I'm guessing they might be a freelancer or a very small team yeah they're independent yeah so bigger companies like my agency we have a team of people so we can always increase capacity as necessary so that we don't have to have clients wait let me just add one thing different businesses are constrained as to how they would increase capacity sure so if you're in web design you guys can go out and hire Freelancers and all you got to do is find some freelan whereas I have to equip every uh person I hire with square feet equipment and management capacity and those things make it quite difficult to suddenly scale up sure when we hire new people there's a period of about two years before they're even fully trained so that makes me feel like running the backlog higher and lower as opposed to just adding or subtracting I mean like yeah there you can say that you can just hire Freelancers I don't feel like that like I um I've worked with a lot of Freelancers um over the years and while I like a lot of them personally I don't feel like they deliver to the level the same level work of the people that work are on staff and so if I hire a freelancer it's 100 % for a temporary and then I plan on replacing that person with a staffer like I much rather have somebody on my team permanently because I I think that the output that they generate is a lot better like right now we're maxed out like we have just enough clients for just a mount team but I still want to you know I want to make sure that we're good in January February because some of those projects that we have end in the end of November but if I add anything else now I'm going to be in trouble because I don't have the capacity to surfice that but I don't want to hire a freelancer so it's this weird kind of in between space well that's That's a classic problem in scaling up is do you add capacity before the sale or after and I can tell you that in my experience it's a lot easier to deal with it after because at least you know that the money is coming in yeah whereas if you if you build capacity and you just hope for the best uh you can be you can be badly surprised and then you're carrying all those costs adding capacity quickly is um in service-based Industries like mine is is harder than you think because there's this trend of people working in public relations and then they work in the inhouse or they work for an agency until they've hit a certain level of seniority and a lot of them go and become independent contractors or Freelancers so for me to hire I can I can hire junior level people like by blinking and they'll show up and I'll have a tee right but I can't hire anybody that knows what they're doing it's very difficult to find a skilled worker at a certain level in the industry at least in the Bay Area which is where I am and we like we have a hybrid work policy is that because of what you're offering in terms of salary or even if you pay more do you have that problem no even if I pay more I still have that problem we just don't have the quality applicants oh it was funny though like last year I was like okay you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to call this recruiter I know who I've worked with in the past when I worked for a different company and I was like hey do you have bandwith to help me find this kind of this level human and she was like no I don't have bandwidth I have too many people looking for people so like even the recruiter was like I can't do it for you well a lot of those are self-imposed constraints and they're not I mean I'm not saying that you're not correct about about the difficulty but I mean I can think of strategies that based on utter ignorance should work you know like implementing more AI to do the initial drafts of things to get productivity up and I'm sure you can tell me all kinds of ways to run my business better too I'm really good at saws I'm just gonna say that though that every business owner chooses what they what they do and how they do it and sometimes those things are real constraints and are going to get affect your ability to suddenly scale up or down you know and I I I put in these constraints based on experience uh you know having hired Freelancers in the past and them not doing what I needed them to do you know um or hiring somebody who was remote who literally did the bare minimum for their job and I that's why I set my company up the way is because I need to have a relationship with the people that I work with um and then to see how hard I personally work at my job so that they em like they they mirror that well I think that's an absolutely legitimate choice you know good for you well I want to ask you about your constraints what would it take for you to decide you no longer wanted to just manage the backlog and you did in fact want to adds square footage people management whatever it takes to take on more capacity probably the biggest constraint right now is management capacity on the shop floor and so that on planning for dealing with that but it's not in the nature of an annual plan it's more like hey this is the constraint at the moment that my shop manager uh got four new employees who were trained in school but not trained in real life in the last six months and has been busy trying to just digest that CU When we add new people into any part of our operation they have to learn a lot about what we do nothing we do is exactly like what you're going to find in the next shop over and so what I'm thinking about is and I solve that problem by developing some kind of Lieutenant for him and we have some people in mind and you know it gets very complicated when you talk about trying to get people to do this or that because they have schedules and families and this and the other thing um but I am not at the moment looking to hire outside which would be the obvious step because I know that the disruption that a new player presents when you drop them into any part of the organization and we're not quite big enough to have excess capacity to absorb new people but we may need it now what I'm going to do is wait till about March next year and see whether the current rate of sales coming in is looks like The New Normal or whether it was a blip if it was a blip we just let the backlog fix itself if it's a new normal I'll probably be looking to hire again but not immediately so we're fortunate in that we have a have an industry where backlog goes up and down everybody gets it and it's not an extreme problem for me to let it let it balloon a bit can you expand in your current space if it continues in March do you have the the space to do that we kind of do and we we ran into that a couple of years ago where our existing shop was just like completely crammed and we rented a space in an adjacent building that we have it's not difficult to get from one shop to the other they they one elevator ride and then right over the floor but there's constraints with that new space it's not a very pleasant place to be so we use it mostly for storage so we're conly looking to maximize the space we have and then also what can we Outsource now the one thing that we haven't done that's fairly obvious is to just run the shop for more hours and this is why factories often have a second and third Shi because when you can't expand anything else you can always just have people working more hours but that requires a management capacity that we don't have at the moment what we do is very complicated every job is different and it's not like you can just be running another ship and you know run the same machines doing the same thing so there may be a day when we run a second ship and develop a second team to pick up the projects after the first team leaves and continue to work on them you're just getting more hours per day and that would be in my case probably the best way to deal with it but it's a daunting task to develop a whole another team and then figure out how they would interact on the same project with the previous team Paul when you have a big backlog do you try surge pricing do you raise the rates well we stopped giving discounts that's for sure so one of the other weird things is that we're frequently working on projects that were quoted more than a year ago and a year ago we were actually running through our backlog it went down to six weeks which is sort of a flashing red light so I was telling the sales team like hey just make some sales quote this stuff very tight and uh and now those jobs are hitting the shop floor some of them and they're so we're working on reduced margins on Revenue but I am for sure not letting any discounts happen on the sales app because it seems like people are eager to buy and they're accepting the the higher prices were we're proposing to them and we have the advantage that nobody really knows what our product should cost so it's not like anybody has memories of buying you know like oh I've been buying a 20 foot conference table every week for the last you know 40 years or something like you would with the price of eggs it's just not like that people come in and sort of one deal so we can present prices to them knowing that this is as low as you could possibly go and they can't get anywhere else so they're going to come to us or hey too bad everybody else is backlog too we're going to discharge you I think that's common across all three of us is that customers don't necessarily not know how much things are going to cost if you were like hire a PR agency do you have any idea how much it would cost no but people think they know of course they do because they do they Google it right um Jackie so when when you have bigger projects or like too many projects for your current team do you have a an arsenal of of Freelancers that you tap into or how do you manage that and when do you decide to actually bring some on full-time so we you know we've been through these evolutions and the backstory is necessary to understand so when we first started we were a media buying company period I was a media buyer we did media buying as we um placed media for people those people needed creative so then we became media buying and a creative shop luckily I'm married to one I think is one of the greatest graphic designers in the country so that helped a lot and an excellent copywriter and so you know I was getting media clients he's kicking out creative and we start hiring because we need more capacity more people we learned quickly that the project life was not conducive to my good mental health because the ups and downs of that everything y'all been talking about stressed me out so we did a few things as we you know evolved from media buying into a full service agency that was doing all these projects we built a pretty robust intern network and so we'd pull them in as University students training train them up they'd come on as part-time kind of in their senior year we'd pick the best of them and turn them into full-time employees but Sarah to your point we're missing that middle level of experience where they've worked in other places and they're bringing knowledge to us I want to hire people smarter than me and if I've trained you your whole time you've never had another job we have two problems one you only know what I've taught you so you don't know more than me yeah and two and and I say this with all the ego that it sounds like I have you don't know how good you've got it if you haven't worked somewhere else you don't appreciate having a 401k and paid health care and a four-day work week and flexible work conditions and top-of-the Market pay and incentive profit sharing and all your favorite snacks in the kitchen that you can just help yourself to at any time as long as no one's name is written on it sing to the choir like 100% agree with you on that right and so we then evolved our next Evolution not just because I wanted people to appre at snacks but because I didn't want to be a project shop anymore and so we don't do projects we haven't done projects for probably I'm going to say eight years but I could be wrong it could be 10 at this point it feels like a a century and so we have retainer clients so this way we don't get a project higher lose a project fire we have steady growth and my whole job is to add to that over time because you know we're going to lose people with attrition but our average client rate right now six years wow so we keep our clients Jackie do you have an annual planning process do you go through budgeting how's it work what do you do so we do a couple things we have a core leadership team that gets together and talks about who we want to be when we grow up uh Michael and I uh as the two leaders of that leadership team went to this is new a new piece to the puzzle we went to an eir which is an entrepreneur in Residence the Edward low foundation in Michigan in July and we did it for two reasons one if you're from Louisiana you want to be in Michigan in July like I just can't even tell y'all enough how much being in Michigan in July is great for people from Louisiana um but two it is an incredible program that Louisiana businesses have the privilege to be a part of because the state of Louisiana's economic dep Development Department is in partnership with the Edward low Foundation to help small businesses grow and so there's a ton of resources and programming and a lot of it paid for by the state to help small businesses get up through that second stage and continue to add payroll um I saw the numbers yesterday for every $1 that the state of Louisiana spends in these programs the companies that they support get $20 back in revenue and growth so it's awesome right so we go up for three days and it is light programming there's a guide there are meals three times a day that they make for you and otherwise we were left to our own devices to work through the guide book and really have some real conversations about growth not just next year but 3 years 5 years 10 years you know what's it look like is there an exit strategy what's the next Generation how do we continue to build this thing that we've been doing for 24 years so that was awesome and now we bring back the knowledge that we gained and the thoughts that we've had and so usually it's the first week of October that we get together and we start mapping out next year but we have to do it after we finish doing all of our clients plans for next year and so we tend to have those finished right about the end of September and what's the budgeting or forecasting process like are you trying to decide whether you're going to be investing in the business or just maintaining what you have what do you go through we do all of that um we look at um our own growth in terms of the team uh professional development resources you know we're picking up uh a new client it looks like that's in the Pacific Northwest super excited about it and so they have some specific needs that we will want to accommodate so we're either going to do this one particular piece of work in house or we will leverage a team on the ground there because it's like we fly there and do it or somebody does it there and and gives us some things back so we'll work through that and we'll plan out you know for the clients we've had for four six eight 10 12 years who are they growing in to be next year and how does that impact Us in terms of our resources and then we look at our own growth you know the clients we've added last year this year the ones we think we'll be adding next year and I'm I'm the capacity manager that's my job is how do I continue to say yes to my team and my clients and make sure that everybody has what they need I think that's what a CEO does is manage Talent what does it look like you're planning is it end up being just a document that you kind of a live by and you check in un quarterly or like what is the what do the actual output look like it's I think of it in terms of campaign and so we're looking for ourselves or for our client because it's the same answer we look at yeah okay so for ourselves I still think about it in terms of campaigns we're looking at it in terms of and this is going to actually I think answer your question Sarah about growth so who do we want to have you know we have a database of people that we would say yes to if they wanted to hire us and that's a big distinction um there's not we're not saying yes to everybody we say yes to people who fit our criteria how do you generate that list Jackie is are these companies that you've had some contact with or are you just picking companies out wish list yeah wish list so it's um yes and there are companies who have reached out to us there are companies that because we're category exclusive if we H don't have a client in a certain category we have our eyes on that category to see who's in that space and what are they doing and who would be a good fit for us it's not going to be the biggest and it's not going to be the smallest it's going to be a company that's probably in the middle and growing and so we have some um listening tools that keep us locked into who those companies are and when we see them starting to make moves it's like oh hi it's nice to meet you and so we get to know them uh oftentimes it's people who I meet when I uh speak at conferences because I do a lot of that it's people who uh see the videos I put out online and reach out to me and we'll put their company unknowing to them we put their company through our screening process to determine that they're a good fit and then we put them into the database so the database it really are companies who meet the criteria that either have reached out to us or we've had our eye on and we're now building a relationship with Jackie you've talked here a lot about making the effort to integrate AI into all sorts of processes at the company have you found a role for AI in terms of identifying opportunities or strategic planning or any of the things we're talking about oh absolutely there are a number of tools that have gotten better because of AI and one of them is definitely prospecting we use uh chap gbt you know just like everybody else I think in terms of brainstorming partner and first draft of things and stuff like that which is great but there's a a really cool tool called Crystal that helps I think with understanding our prospects and it integrates into LinkedIn and a few other uh resources and it'll tell you not just you know I think all the tools could be like hey you should try emailing them this message no it's a little deeper than that we subscribe to the theory that people are not one- siiz fits all and so if you you know believe in inogram and disc and all of those different personality testings this takes it one step further and matches it up to kind of how you should approach them and I think gives really solid good feedback and so those are the kinds of tools that we use to make sure we're properly uh courting the people that we want to be in relationships with can you give us a little bit more of a sense of what Crystal tells you oh yeah sure sorry so for example in LinkedIn it will uh give you a profile of that person and so it'll tell you what their personality type is how they wanted to be Market to how much information you to send them up front it'll tell you how you know lead with this in the email or you need to earn trust first and then come in with that it it just really I think helps us not just talk to people the way we want to be spoken to but communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with and so I think it's just believing that there's not a one-size fits-all I would love to know what it says about me yeah me too I I'm very curious about that I'll send yall the link no I want you to just do me oh like right now Live While We're on there I'm not yeah I'm just curious because I mean I I have a public presence I got a LinkedIn profile blah blah blah blah blah sure and I'm was curious about whether these systems are actually any good at at susing out the things for taking I mean there's no way I could but taking into the account the things that I don't necessarily put in public right and uh so I'm just very curious about that well I tell you it nailed me if you if you were approaching me I mean I'm a growing company if you had a PR pitch for me I'd be very interested to see it right right well it it nailed me like 100% which is what made me feel like oh this is worth the time and I think it's about finding tools that you have confidence in and light so when I look at some of the things that we do in terms of um you know how not just we do our our prospecting but how we maintain our relationships how we do our reporting to answer Lauren's original original question all of those things have been enhanced through different AI tools our reporting is so much better than it used to be because we're not just saying you had this many clicks on the website we're able to dig a lot deeper now into who those people are where they came from where they went and what we need to do with them okay I just did me already okay it says Sarah is likely to thrive in an unstructured environment and tends to act on intuition Sarah is most likely an optimist who stries lives to to um leave a positive impact on those around her she may appreciate spending a lot of time talking to others there's a chance she may um occasionally be late to a meeting when she rise when she arriv she will likely bring a lively colorful story I love this is that accurate um yeah okay oh this is hysterical how does it know you're likely to arrive late I have no idea um that's really creepy I do this thing where like I I know I have a meeting coming up right and I'm I have like three minutes before that meeting I'm like okay I can do something before that meeting I'll start doing it and then I'll look up and it'll be four minutes past the start and I'm like uh it's not a good thing um but I I I tried not to to to do that very often but that's really interesting that it knows that yeah I want to ask you your wish list obviously goes beyond just identifying a potential client you're identifying decision makers at that client and learning about their personalities and how to pitch them how do you figure out who those decision makers and a potential client are good research so just by title you're looking for the we look for titles I mean you know in my uh area marketing directors and chief marketing officers and VPS of marketing are typically it sometimes it'll be community relations sometimes it'll be uh you know some some other invented title but for the most part it's marketing and can you give us an example of something you learned about a target's personality that allowed you to hone your pitch to better appeal to them well I think that um it it reminds me that not everybody is as straightforward direct get to the point make a decision and go as I am it keeps me in check for lack of a better word and makes me remember to be human and you build relationships I'm a better marketer when I am focused on who I'm talking to and how they want to be communicated with and what their needs are rather than my own agenda and so tools like this I feel like help me do a better job of that Paul I'm guessing you found your profile what have you learned it's sort of like going to a fortune teller I think that that just you could have gotten 40% of this just knowing that I on a small business right sure and so there are certain things that they're saying about me which I actually don't agree with and there's certain things which I do agree with for instance there's they're putting me the opposite of an analyst which is dead wrong like I analyze everything to death and I've been keeping stats and and data on things going back 40 years I'll vouch for that I mean I don't know but I don't really show any of that on anything I've got on LinkedIn it's okay but I don't think it it would be a magic key to unlock me to somebody trying to make a sale even if they're imperfect I think that what Jackie saying is it gives her or reminds her that not everybody is going to appeal like talk in the same way or process information or make decisions in the same way and like whether or not this stuff ends up being accurate about the person you're reaching out to it leads makes you more sensitive to how they process information correct you know like the they're saying that you should present a kick-ass story to me and I would actually be much more interested in in a 10 tab spreadsheet about how you're performing and it's not catching that so um is that because I hold that close to the chest in my public profiles I don't really know the answer to that well if they found the blogs you wrote for the New York Times they would know that you have an analytical bent well did they I mean that's part of it like I I've certainly put plenty of of uh portraits of me as a person out there in public and I don't think there's any if you read everything I wrote uh you would have a fairly good idea of that yes I'm extremely analytical and this profile is saying no you're not so much you get one of the things said I will get bored with a detailed presentation no I'll probably be asking for more so you know whatever it it's it's a system and it's probably better than no system so if if you if you're getting use out of it go for it all right the clock's ticking and I want to run a a situation by you guys this comes from the small business subreddit let me just read this post to you from a small business owner my small business has been sued for having a website that is inaccessible under the Ada we're all familiar with this issue sadly we use an official Shopify theme and only ever added apps that were approved and marketed as accessible we never altered any code and ran a program to make sure our photos have alt tags our business is very small but it is my only income and we support a few families the lawsuit has already cost thousands of dollars that we couldn't afford the firm suing never made any complaint to us to ask us to fix anything they just sued their client in quotes has sued dozens of businesses this year alone our lawyer says our only options are to pay or fight both very expensive this is heartbreaking to be scammed out of our money and our employees lose their incomes I contacted Shopify and they said to use an a quote accessibility app which the lawsuit says actually makes things worse I asked Shopify to support us because we only used what they provided and they showed me their terms of service make them not responsible there is nothing in the lawsuits that we could have avoided by creating our website more carefully I've now talked to a number of web developers and they said there's really nothing you can do to make website immune from this sort of suit what are we supposed to do about this I am trying not to overreact but having my savings and my income taken from me this way is just devastating I suspect we've all heard about situations like this anybody got any thoughts I'll go first um I think it is heartbreaking and I I have great empathy for this company because I've been hit with unexpected tax bills for a city where we don't um have a location that would have merited us paying tax and it costs a lot of money to go fight it and so I appreciate how out of the blue and sudden and impactful that can be at the same time I believe strongly in Ada and websites being accessible because people who legitimately need to have the computer read the website to them it it I've seen when websites aren't built right and that becomes an impossible task I I think that there should be probably better standards and education and so when someone who is not versed well versed and trained on how to build websites the right way this is going to happen and it is an unfortunate situation I don't know that I necessarily agree with the middle part about uh web people saying that it can't be prevented because there are tests that you can run there are tools that you can use there are fixes that you can provide that should keep a website completely ADA Compliant and in your experience is that enough I don't think anything can prevent a lawsuit I think anybody can sue anybody for anything it's part of our system but I think that you know I have read both sides where people had perfectly um created websites and fought those lawsuits and the um Law Firm that was suing on behalf of there I'm using air quotes clients because they just file suits non-stop right and left they lost and they had to pay and so that's great when that happens maybe it will train these firms to uh stop filing nuisance lawsuits and really focus on helping actual people who need ADA compliance to function in their worlds you guys build websites have you had this problem with sites that you've built well I for sure don't want to put us on the radar uh with companies like that but so far no we've been very fortunate we do everything possible uh to make sure that what we're doing is fully compliant is there any distinction between a site which is engaging in e-commerce and one which isn't well the ADA compliance tends to focus on things like when the computer is reading the website is there enough space around links does the link have a descriptor so they know what the link is going to do the images have alt image text so that the computer can tell the visitor to the website what that is a picture of and those are all things that a trained website professional should do foundationally is the ADA compliance only in terms of e-commerce platforms or is it no every website every website yes I had a client who was telling me about this and she was explaining me that how much money was costing her to basically redo her entire website because in in the the the fear of being litigated but I've never like thought twice about this um for my website which is super simplistic yep every website the other question is okay what are the possible paths after you receive this this lawsuit one is I'm sure that what the law firm actually wants is for you to just write them a check to go away so what kind of amount are we talking about would 5,000 bucks do it or is it something more second what's the jurisdiction of the lawsuit and third they file the lawsuit what if you just ignore it like what would happen are they actually willing to go to the mat or somebody you know who's just like not playing their game because obviously the business model of the of the law firm is to send the summons get a go away check easy peasy off to the next one so uh I I just wonder whether anybody has any experience with these other paths to getting rid of it I don't know um I feel like it really would be great if it was built the way that you driving without your driver's license is you know you'll get a um a fix it ticket as I would call it because you are a licensed driver you just don't happen to have it on you at the time and so as long as you can prove the a licensed driver you're fine and there's no expense um I do uh have been hearing about some changes in a few jurisdictions where now it's not for being unlicensed it the ticket is for not having your license on you or not having a proof of insurance on you so you can't just fix it by proving you had insurance at the end of the day you didn't have proof and that was the violation I think that um the law firms the two that I'm aware of they are not necessarily focused on making the world more ADA Compliant they are focused on finding companies who have websites who are not compliant and winning lawsuits against those companies I believe there is legislation that's currently stalled uh in Congress that uh contains a proposal that would give a business 30 days to fix whatever problems there are before they could be sued that'd be great yeah I mean that would be fantastic I just this is another Shakedown and small business owners are are exposed to a lot of them the employee you fire who then comes back with a discrimination suit and I think that it's very difficult to to sort of get beyond the anger of being trapped in these things and then just do a really hard cold 30 seconds to write a check for x th000 and this goes away and then I can fix it at my leisure as opposed to getting caught up in the battle because the battle is mind dreaming and uh yeah I mean if you settle one suit that probably doesn't give you any protection from another suit but maybe there's some finite number of of uh law firms that are actually running this scam I mean it sounds like the patent litigation thing patent trolling and the real goal of these firms is to just get that quick check so maybe there's an opportunity to say hey I can't you know I can't pay you I can't pay whatever but I'll pay you 4,000 what do you say and just get rid of it that way and there's a lot of things that you're going to run into when you're running a business or a version of that where you just got to be like okay got to pay some money and it goes away and if I let it live in my mind I still going to end up paying the money plus now it's damaging my psyche and part of being s of a crusty old business owner is just learning to make those calculations I'm sure that if Jay was in on this uh conversation I mean there'd be some smoke coming out of his ears but he would also say at the end of the just write the freaking check move on according to what Jackie just told us you can also write a check just to make sure that you are in fact compliant and that there's a good well that's the service that this podcast is performing today I'm going to go check with my web guys and say like hey did you ever think about this but uh you get caught in stuff and sometimes all you can do is shrug write the check and and move on well I think that going into compliance um for some businesses who have I know 10 pages on their website is one thing but for another like a e-commerce site like think about Amazon like how many pages of content how much content they have from outside vendors I'm not going to lose any sleep over Amazon's proba no I know but they're they're a good example like you know a large company um you know with so many different landing pages like I just they probably have teams at this point like working on beinging compliant well to that I was surprised that the attitude expressed by Shopify toward this you'd think they would be oh I know I think that they're like they put they found that out early and put it in their terms of service that we're not responsible like they they they knew that this was going to be a problem and they protected themselves that's not surprising there were a couple of comments uh on the Reddit page that I thought were noteworthy one was uh a suggestion that you try your local SBA that it's possible to get uh either free or inexpensive legal advice to help with these situations um I guess it varies by location and I also said someone who was a little more combative suggested checking to see if the company suing you uh I guess the law firm they're referring to has a website and then countersue them using the same guidelines that's smart that would be awesome if that happened yeah but then you're you're now you're now heading off in a different direction than running your business which is your best chance to recoup your money you if somebody hits you up for x amount of dollars figure out how to get your your business to generate x amount of dollars that's that's my advice right I think this was a feel-good suggestion it would be good for the the Hollywood version of this problem right you know like justice is a very nebulous concept and when you get down to situations like this you kind of have to abandon it there there isn't going to be any justice just get out of it as quickly as you can would be my advice all right well on that note we are out of time my thanks to Paul Downs Jackie Russo and Sarah seagull one thing before you go everything we do at 21 hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us all learn together so if you get something out of this podcast or out of the morning report please tell a friend tell an enemy tell every business owner you know your word of mouth entrepreneur to entrepreneur will always be the most effective way to build this community for all of us thank you it means a lot this episode was produced by another entrepreneur Jess duon founder of blank word Productions thanks for listening everyone