We’re Still Buying Inventory

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Jay goz tells William vanderlan that even with an inventory glut a cash Crunch and a weakening economy he's not going to stop buying goods for his home store it's kind of like cutting Samson's hair Jay tells us I don't want to mess with telling the buyer stop buying stuff because that's the business we're in all of which has Jay feelings and pressure but he's very very glad he took the advice of lending expert Ami casar and has been maintaining a credit line equivalent to 10% of Sales Plus William explains how hiring can go wrong even at a staffing company and how he managed to raise his prices without actually raising his prices even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our principal sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challeng Alles same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Jay gos CEO of the gos group whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home and William Vander blumen who is CEO of Vander bluman Search Group a houston-based recruiting firm that works with churches and other faith-based organizations the episode is titled we're still buying [Music] inventory welcome Jay and William it's great to have you here so we're just about done with another quarter uh somehow I I think you both came into this year feeling somewhat optimistic how's this year been going for you well we were recording on the day before the end of the quarter so I'm a little reluctant to say things that might ruin the end of the quarter but you're expecting a big day well I we in a lumpy business but yeah there are a few things that should come in today and tomorrow but but even if nothing comes in today or tomorrow I think q1 is better than last year's q1 across the board nice how was last year though was it just cuz last year was slow no last year was our record Year good for religion will we finish 3% ahead of last year's first quarter or 12% that's what I don't know and I'll find out you know in about 36 hours wow that's a that's a sizable range well that's why I said I'm looking for wood to knock on and do you think you're having a good year for reasons that are related to your own business or the labor market the economic climate what do you attribute it to well I I'm not an economist so I don't know how to comment on you know know fears of what the economy may or may not do a couple things have happened for us that are really pretty interesting we do searches for all kinds of organizations that are values based but it all started with the question could we help churches find their Pastor faster and better do we could we fix that right and it was a new idea for churches and churches are not best friends with new ideas you know not not the most in ative organization as a whole so just the idea of even calling a church to say would you be interested in us helping you find your pastor that would be anathema and so for 15 years I thought well maybe by the time I'm done doing this in another 101 15 years it'll be a more normal idea and we were getting there it was starting to become more normal I think Lauren that the pandemic actually accelerated that Trend several things happened in the Church Market that that got accelerated by the pandemic online giving was already a trend that was happening but now it's just de facto right whether or not you can have services online it was happening and it was going to eventually become normal for everybody but the pandemic accelerated that right I didn't foresee it accelerating the trend of churches hiring a search firm but it seems to have U because now we're much more proactive uh we actually have outside sales which we've never never had when did you start that in August of last year and it's gone well better than I ever thought it would you know now that you mention it I think it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase we've always done it this way that's right yeah no that makes sense and rightfully so you know if you're a lay person if you're looking for the person you feel the weight of responsibility like this is a holy task and I've been asked to do this and if I ask for help that's like first time clients for the longest time I'd say you know what you sound like I felt the first day I went to counseling why am I here I'm a little embarrassed I don't need your help and and that's shifted and changed and I think the pandemic accelerated that it's too early to call it we've only been doing outside sales for six months but I I really believe the biggest lid to our growth is not having more salespeople right now there's definitely a shortage of rabbis out there there's far less graduating than there used to be is it the same thing in other religions well I can speak most fluently for for the Protestant Church in the United States we work all over the world but but that one particular Market I know better than others and I I think there isn't quite yet but there will be um you know by birth rate you've got Boomers still retiring which will probably happen for another 10 years or so and then the group right behind them there just aren't as many there weren't as many babies born and then you get to Millennials and genz and you know the average age of a Seminary graduate in Protestant us right now is about 35 years old it's usually a second career choice so we don't really know yet what the Millennials and gen z's are going to do so I foresee it being a huge supply demand issue there there already is in like student Ministries and children's ministries which are usually much younger people but more than that I think there's just a normaliz the concept has been proven right that you can hire outside help and it's not faithful and it works and it's worth the investment and uh I think that's some of what happened uh and and Lauren the other piece is not just the sales side but actually the delivery of the service um our coo is just doing a phenomenal job building a great team and she's had to change a lot of people out but she's just done a really great job tell us about the approach of your outside sales people what are they pounding the pavement what are they doing it's probably more like waiting into the water so like as you know from when we met everyone at our companies required to produce content for our blog and the sales that we've had traditionally have been people who read our Blog then attend the seminar maybe they listen to this podcast and eventually on our site they get to the point where they're like I'm feeling out a form please contact me I'd like to talk about whether or not you could help us so it's all inbound right so the way we're currently dealing with outside sales is okay we've got three pretty solid Le needs in Atlanta whatever pick a number five 7 three whatever would justify flying a salesperson there while you're there go pound that pavement so it's not purely cold it's it's I'm already going there anyway for these things let's see what I can rustle up while I'm gone and it's been if I send will out to Denver with four leads he comes back with eight contracts it's been kind of like that wow that does sound good yeah yeah I mean and and as you know I'm not chasing meteoric growth I mean you've known me a long time I think you know 5 to 15% growth is really underrated these days I think it's just such a solid compound interest to Chase and the whole you know fake it till you make it and we tripled this year but we're not making any money I I just I think that's a house of cards well if nothing else it's extremely demanding to have if you grew at 30% a year when you add in just a people leaving on their own you're going to be replacing half your staff every year like how do you do that that's right you hire a good search firm Jay yeah I'll make a note to that let's talk about what's changed since the last time I used the search firm which was about 25 years ago I recognized that the world's changed dramatically and that perhaps being a search firm now has more advantages than it might have been 25 years ago because 25 years ago they were just sticking ads in the paper just like I was and getting people and sending them over versus now they're probably more not probably they're more skilled at going through Linkedin and figuring out how to actually recruit people can you speak to that um well I I'd say they different advantages than there were 25 years ago okay you know used to be you hired a search guy because of now I hope that we have listeners who don't know this word okay my staff don't know this word but you would hire a search Guy because he had a great Rolodex right we know that word yeah I have one on my desk with my daytim you don't have to share everything Jay full disclosure that's how we are on this show so I mean that was the value it was oh I'm gonna hire with him because he knows people and he can go talk to him offline I mean like every show and movie where there's a search guy it's always in a dark alley or a smoky room or you know it's pretty clandestine and frankly Savory so the the reality is now unless you're dumb everyone has the same Rolodex it's called LinkedIn and it's not a matter of finding people it's finding the fit and frankly I think that's why we're growing it's not because I know people they don't it's like no will this fit and if you hire this one you you're going to definitely get these things but you don't know about these things it's more of a uh I when I talk to people now it's like we we act more like a Sherpa like you're going to Summit this mountain and we we've been up and down at 3,000 times so we can tell you don't step here do step there Jay here's a cleaner way to say it we survey new clients you what do you think you're going to get out of this what are your expectations blah blah blah blah top expectation of a brand new client every time is you're going to bring us names we don't know you we finish the search we say okay what happened in the search do what benefit do we bring what value did we add D number one answer almost all the time is wow you managed the process and helped us understand who would fit well you mentioned that your coo had to make some changes in in your own shop especially given what you do that's kind of intriguing was there a theme to that uh was that an issue of fit what were you talking about there boy I don't know how much I want to share publicly W without getting into details which you I completely understand can you tell us if you learned any you know as a recruiter did you learn any lessons from what your CEO went through what uh what do you take away from it yeah well our our prior coo who did a nice job for us and really did a great job steering us through the pandemic had hired a lot of people and I I think I was negligent in delegating that hiring to him without looking at it more closely because he is great at getting tasks done but I think he hired some people just to fill spots and he h hired hastily and we got some people who were nice people who had a lot of talent but you know frankly had no business working for us and we didn't run through our normal hire for culture it was just done hastily it's in the middle of the pandemic you know we're all working remotely we had a staff who frankly had not met each other and um as we came out of the pandemic it just got clear like man we we these not all these pieces fit together and so uh you know we didn't have to go firing a bunch of people but uh Jen our coo did a really great job of raising the bar enough times that some people just sort of said I don't know that I want to jump that high and that could be around culture it could be around performance it could be around How We Do one-on ones and she spent a good bit of time in replacing those people she took her time she hired around cultural values and it's not like a wholesale change but the changes she has made are just visible the culture is as good as it's been in a long long long time and uh yeah I mean we're still figuring it out but uh she's just done a really nice job probably because she went to Princeton wow I don't have anybody working for me that graduated from Princeton I'm really envious wow how' you do that yeah that's the funny thing search expert how' you find the great coo do you know this company Lush Cosmetics sure yeah so she ran that wow for North America yeah ran the whole thing for North America left there several years ago uh started her own company developed some some uh a sports FR that had a particular appeal that wasn't on the market built that up until it was time to either build manufacturing plants or sell she sold it and she was sitting around saying gosh I wish I could use my uh education and my business sense to help build something for the church and she lived about a mile from our office and she found us on LinkedIn [Music] and yeah so you she found you on LinkedIn yeah okay well it makes sense she wanted to do something for the church so you have a little advantage over that yeah but I mean she Chicago business school Princeton undergrad run a $500 million company lives a mile from me and I can't find her so so much for me being the expert she found us Jay what kind of year are you off to there's no question that the Market's a little soft if I was to go back over the years and chart the stock market to sales there's clearly a a relationship it's a little soft I'm suffering the end of the pandemic problem which is my guys were out there buying all kinds of cool interesting things for my home store and it was all tied up and couldn't get over here and then who it's all coming in now and I've just got a tremendous amount of inventory and uh it's going to take me the rest of the year to get it back under control but uh is it you say it's still coming in oh yeah I mean they just you couldn't get stuff the supply chains been have been cleaned up for a while now haven't they um to a degree but you know my buyers literally go around the world looking for cool and interesting products and they got to fill a container and as you know the containers they were tied up and I'm not saying it's happening today but like just a few months ago the stuff started coming in and I just have a tremendous amount of inventory and I got a ton of money tied up in it and it's going to take me the rest of the year to work down but to make anyone feel better who's got a cash crunch even after 45 years it still is a problem and I'm going to work through it as I always have but it's still I I can tell you it's it's just it weighs on you subconsciously just I just it just weighs on you and I'm not afraid of Bank debt and I've always I've had Bank debt for many years but um using up big lines is just is just a wears on you a little bit lines of credit yeah and it's like we're fine we're paying our bills on time it's just very easy to get inventory out of control when you're buying the way we buy and uh and I don't want to mess the you know it's kind of like cutting you know Samson's here I don't want to mess with telling the buyer stop buying stuff because that's the business we're in we're into buying cool and interesting stuff so I'm not going to put the hold on it but I I do have to work through the uh the glut and I would also tell you that the pandemic definitely wore on people and you can still see small signs of it here and there that it it's been a difficult few years on everybody with the inventory Jay what's the bigger issue is it finding places to store stuff or is it the money that it's tying up well I'm lucky in that my kid happens to be he does development and he buys buildings and then he either eventually bulldozes them and puts up a new thing or he converts it so my son has a couple of empty buildings that I was able to stick stuff in but without that I would have definitely had a problem with storage it's both um it's where do you put the stuff you know Jason home is a it's gotten to be a pretty big business it's very easy to have a lot of money tied up in inventory and it's not like I'm in the you know ice cream business where you just order your gallons of ice cream and you have X them out in the back I've just got a lot of interesting cool stuff that they bought on a bunch of trips and it comes in and it takes a while to cycle through it is there something looking back that you could have done differently or was this just the inevitable you know that's an interesting question um no I mean I have my son here now who comes in and says you know the inventory is high and blah blah blah blah blah I said yeah I'm well aware of it I and I sat down and I said here's what our cost of good sold is here's how much volume we should do this year and I showed him if we just use up 30% if 30% of what we sell comes out of inventory it's going to write itself but but going through this I realized my son's been here for a year and a half I've been doing this for 45 years it's going to take some time before he gets his SE legs because it's not like this is the first time I've been through something like this and from the outside Observer you think you can turn some dial and fix it and it's just not that simple like I said the last thing I would do is go to my buyers and say okay everyone stop buying for the next few months it doesn't work like that I mean there's shows there's there's places they go to they're yearly they need to go there and buy the stuff and it's certainly as the year goes on there's going to be less of that happening but we're GNA have to use it up but no in hindsight I don't know what I could or should have done tell them be careful what you're buying I mean they're already careful what they're buying so there's really you know just is what it is it gets down to something that Amy said to me a few years ago companies should have a credit line that's probably 10% of your sales and that's good advice for everyone if you are running a healthy business that's some good advice luckily I had changed Banks and got a bigger credit line and I'm glad I got it now are you debating whether you should have a big blowout inventory sale I do that once a year in November it's extremely demanding we have at the warehouse literally I think 1,200 people showed up last year there's literally a line before we open that goes you know out and around the building it's like a big deal and I just don't see doing two of them plus my buyer swears to me that the stuff that we have inventory is not stuff that we got to sell at the warehouse sale at a big discount it's new stuff so it it comes down to one just has to you know play the course you know I just got to get through the end of the year it's just a lot of stuff to be sitting on in it's not food it's not perishable but but it's just a lot of stuff to be sitting on but you know it goes under the category of it is what it is is there a pricing issue related to it I don't think so I I would say to add to that the framing business got soft at the late part of the year I believe most people in the industry felt it like The Hangover is over with the pandemic people were buying stuff and fixing up their houses and I do believe things started slowing down at the end of last year and now I believe there's a lot of people going on vacation now I mean I know it just anecdotally and I just know it from watching the customer account there's a lot of people that hadn't been on vacation for a year or two and they're on vacation so when you're on vacation you're not instead of framing pictures yeah frame exactly and you can see it so that didn't help either so if there's a business lesson from this which I already knew and I known for years it's really good to have credit lines that are open and available that you can use if you need it because sometimes you might need it so I have in refined because of that but uh it doesn't mean that I'm happy about it and I you know I read the book about Ray croc from McDonald's years ago and I'm so envious of this he claimed that he had the ability when he went to sleep to like take an eraser on a Blackboard and just erase the Blackboard clear so he went to SLE sleep with a completely clear brain and I envy that cuz I wish I could cuz I think about it when I'm sleeping you know I mean the old expression what keeps you up at night it doesn't keep me up but it definitely I feel it there's no question it's it's always there and uh I mean it's not making me nuts or maybe You' say I am nuts but it's not the reason I'm nuts it's just it's a little pressure that I'm absolutely dedicated to making sure I'm gonna get out of this and make sure that I don't get in the situation again that's the plan you talked a little about the mental aspects uh The Hangover from the pandemic are do you think you're feeling that yourself no I mean I'm kind of a soldier I just keep going on and I'm extremely extremely thankful and appreciative the fact I have lovely wonderful people to work for me and and we're in really good shape with that because at the end of the day in my mind that's what it's all about if you got good solid people with you you can withstand anything and I do it has been a long few years but I don't think I'd say I'm worn out from it I can definitely see though that it's taking a toll on you know Frontline workers that are working with customers all day long I think I just noticed yesterday I think for the first time that my framing salespeople just started taking their masks off now which is odd because there's a couple of them that have only worked here for a year or two and like I've barely seen them without their mask on so it's it's kind of weird to have an employee that their mask is off and it's like oh that's what they look like it's kind of an odd thing I'll tell you where it has worn on me I haven't had many meetings in the last two three years and that's not great I mean I used to have a production meeting every Friday I used to go talk to the salespeople every you know whatever and I've gotten away from that because of the pandemic and I need to get back to that and avoiding meetings is does catch up at some point so I am trying to get everything back to quote unquote normal but uh it's been a long three years William how does that look from your perspective do you see uh a hangover as well in terms of people's attitudes I think everything Jay just described we felt as well but sooner and shorter for us it was the I'm sure there's still voodoo dolls of William from when it was no we're going to come back to the office in person for real but that's subsided now and um you know we we don't carry inventory so we don't have the same challenge that Jay might have of having to buy it and then not being able to sell it we're totally cash based operation we even do our accounting on cash basis and not a cruel so we're really old school but we keep a line of credit that's roughly equivalent to 10% of annual sales so oh that was our guest now I know it's what we're supposed to do because I listen to the podcast well that's what Amy said and I have to tell you I think who who writes for 21 hats right so I don't know you know we we we're just people so it we don't have a supply chain we don't have warehouses we don't have a lot of the things that a lot of business owners have to have so we're we're a far simpler structure and that might mean that the hangover came to us quicker and shorter I guess you do have content inventory right your business relies on yeah yeah producing a lot of that I guess that's right yeah a lot of our content though during the pandemic was pandemic specific how do I set up online Church how do I get PPP money how do I get an employee retention tax credit and that all sort of is a has proven to be a perishable good if that makes sense so that means you had to replenish your inventory yeah yeah we sure did but that's okay and a lot of the things we write we write Evergreen on purpose so you know we have 3500 resources for free on our website that are evergreen have you enlisted the help of chat gbt with uh that content production no I uh have around with it a little bit thoughts uh well the book I have coming out in November is like how do you make yourself Irreplaceable what are the things that the very best candidates I've ever interviewed have in common it's really pretty cool because we've done you know 30,000 face-to-face interviews with top candidates we've identified who are the best and what they have in common and a piece of that is how do I keep AI from replacing me a piece of it is they're five generations in the workforce for the first time ever so how do I stand out of the crowd and so playing around with that I put my book title in chat GPT and said can you think of a better book title for how to not get replaced by Ai and it actually came up with some better titles wow so I've not done it for content for us I do think Lauren that if I had started my business with the model I started it with today it wouldn't work because the content I wrote 15 years ago probably chat GPT could do interesting what's the difference just a higher level of sophistication and uh knowledge or yeah now the things we write are more nuanced and we have some measure of for the moment uh website brand Equity people been coming to us forever so they keep coming to us but if I were trying to get off the ground right now anybody could have done what we did just use chap GPT you know I'll tell you a good thing that happened that was just kind of surprised we had a little um little coffee and donut thing and I was talking to some new people that were here and one of them interviewed at a much bigger company four or five times they got offered a job and they took the job here instead and the other person said oh yeah I was also offered a job and I feel good that our corporate culture is such that there's people that want to work here that don't want to work at the big soless Corporation and want to feel like they're making a difference you know they're working with people instead of for them and I felt great about that I was surprised so feel like I'm doing something right I want to work for you here's some openings send me your resume and we'll do a video chat have either of you uh adjusted your prices in the past year or so William have you done anything uh we've raised our minimum fee I've absolutely raised prices because I gave everyone pretty decent raises last year and I mean it's got to come from somewhere and I just heard this morning a business owner being interviewed he owns a restaurant and he was talking about how he hates to raise prices and it's like get over it I I mean just get over it because you have to charge what you have to charge sometimes and believe me I'm just as paranoid about it as anybody but there's a sure way of putting yourself out of business keep trying to absorb all these increases my real estate taxes went up 20% did you raise prices at both the framing store and the home store or yeah I'll tell you the good news as the shipping container price the shipping charge was like double last year it's back down to where it was capitalism Works competition works the prices that whole thing is is over the prices are back down right where they were before the whole thing so at least we're not getting killed on the international Freight charges when you raised prices last year did did they take um did you get any push back you know what when you're in retail anyone who thinks they can tell like you can't tell I mean I've seen it talk in a frame shop ERS over the year I can tell you what happens you finally convince them that working and not making money is not a good thing and they finally get the confidence you need to charge more and then they go back and they raise their prices and then one customer comes and Mrs Jones says oh my God that's too much money and they freak out what they don't understand is she would have said that at the old price too so I I just don't think that a a five six seven eight nine 10% raise is gonna all of a sudden everyone's gonna run out of your store and think oh my God it just doesn't work that way and but you did tell us that your sales are a little soft are you concerned that that might be the result of the price increase absolutely not no here's why this is simple math if you raise your prices let's say 8% you'd have to lose 8% of your business to for your sales to go down I just don't think that you're going to lose eight% of your business so no I can tell you that is not at all what I'm thinking when business is soft that never crosses my mind but I certainly can identify and appreciate that people are worried about raising their prices but you got to charge what you got to charge at the end of the day you know William I'm not sure I've ever asked you how do you charge is there an hourly fee involved how does it work well the vast majority of our search work we have a few ancillary side services but search is our primary economic engine and the vast majority of those searches are a retainer that's derived as a percentage of the first year salary so I guess you could say we raised our prices because everybody's salaries went up interesting that so you get to raise prices without raising prices in a way I guess that's right yeah do you have any competition to speak of you know in Our Little World there are a few what do they say imitations the highest form of flattery there are a few people that have tried to start things similar to ours in the search World any can start search there's no barrier for entry you just hang a shingle I do search and it's frankly not real hard to get the first few searches because you can say you don't have to pay me unless I find somebody kind of like you know plain of attorneys here and there yeah uh we're not that way we're a retainer and you pay us regardless of the outcome of the search wow there's nobody that competes with this on that so that that requires a lot of uh lot of sales uh skill but it also just requires reputation and and body of work to look back at and references and so it takes a long time for somebody to build that it doesn't mean there won't be one so wait if you charge the percentage so what is the retainer is it's a half of the per what how does that work what is the retainer the full fee they pay you upfront for the whole search they agree to a schedule of payments that are enforced irrespective of the search wow so you divide it over an expected period of time for how long it'll take yeah yeah exactly yeah and with 3,000 repetitions under our belt I can tell you this kind of search it should take this long and so we'll bill it six payments over six months or whatever so 3,000 times you've done this I want to know how many of them you finally said this isn't working I can't deal with this this church I can't deal with the board I can't deal with out of 3,000 did you have some failures oh yeah totally totally no we've not given back money we don't we don't do that I mean we've done things like we'll credit you for a future search we'll do the search again for free but uh sure there have been failures absolutely failures where you had to like fire a client yeah yeah yeah you know when you're hungry and you need business no matter what you'll say yes to anybody now we we scream people we we tell people I just don't think we're going to be a good solution for you okay so that's the missing link because without that I was gonna say wow how could it be that nobody you finally said you know what here's your money back please lose my phone number and that's because you've screened them up front and you've gotten good at okay that makes sense we're getting better at it I I would say in the beginning you know I would say yes to hey William what if we pay you everything except the last two payments and we'll pay those when you find somebody and I just found I'm not very good at working with those people they're probably lovely wonderful people but but we don't match up well and if they you know and like if the first question a lead that I'm talking to asks is about price or how how cheap can we get this done I know in my gut this is probably not going to be a match if that's what's driving you then don't I'm not the right person to talk to we've been through a lot of turmoil in the uh in the labor market the last few years have your expectations for how long it takes to do a search held up through all of that turmoil it's certainly changed within the search world or Staffing world there's such a wide I mean you can go find a an administrative assistant and hire them temporarily and then move them to permanent and like high volume search that's not what we do we do the equivalent of a SE Suite so it's a very very different thing and usually if we're running a search is for a pretty cool opportunity so people won't just get flighty on us in the lower level or even the middle management roles my friends that do those searches are like man I'll have a candidate ready to present to a client and they'll call me that morning and say sorry I took another job it's just very volatile very fickle and we see some of that with some of the as we do where we probably have to speed the process up because there's a risk of candidates going elsewhere do you think leverage has returned to the Employers in your world it's moving back it's moving back but it's not there yet at all it's still an employees Market do you think that's also true in the labor market at large yes Jay do you see any difference it's still tight out there and you know I've seen different explanations and I believe it's a combination of there's no question the baby Baby Boomers retiring is is is affecting things there's no question the immigration restrictions are are are making a difference there's no question there's plenty of people that are staying home with their kids because child care has gotten so expensive they finally figured out you know what for what I make and pay taxes I'm better off taking care of my own kid and living off the spouse salary I think that's had an effect on things I think there's less people in the labor market with that being said we still get response but it's definitely less than it used to be well I think the article that I've gotten more feedback on that I've written for Forbes in the last year is uh on what to do if you're regretting your resignation wow yeah and and the number one tip I have is offer to come back to your previous employer at the same pay you left and offer to come into the office you know I've had two people left one of them went to the big company he needed to he needed to off of school loans we wished him well they paid him a lot more money than we were paying him he's back and I'm quite proud and I'm paying him more than he one when he left but like he's back I feel great about that I was happy to have him back another guy left at the beginning of the at the beginning of when things started falling apart three years ago he's back I'm fully in I don't think there's a problem bringing people back if it ended fine and I don't have that many people leave um but but in this case he's happy I'm happy everybody's happy all right my thanks to William vanderlan and to Jay goz and of course to our sponsor the Great great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com thank you both 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 at21 hats.com that's l r n at21 hats.com do a 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 21 hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Thon founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]