What Are Your Goals for 2024?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Shan busy Liz picarazzi and Jackie Russo discuss what they learned in 2023 and what they expect from 2024 after a tough year Shawn is optimistic that his clients having survived the turbulence of the past few years are ready to spend money and try something different Liz explains why she's been willing to discount her products as much as 40% on Cyber Mondays and tells us about some new products she has in the works early in the year Jackie thinking she was going to have to staff up to handle two big new clients dove into remodeling her offices but those clients have yet to sign on I might have jumped the gun a little bit says Jackie plus Liz talks about her Midwestern mom who can't understand how Liz can charge so much for her trash enclosures and Shawn raises the issue of how much money business owners should spend on marketing 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 challenges and by the way I've just published an interview with Josh bur CEO of keep Supply who practices open book management which is one reason he and his wife who have six kids decided early in the pandemic to sell almost everything and move from Missouri to Europe where Josh has been running his refrigeration parts business remotely once a quarter I publish an interview with a great game practitioner and this is that story you can find it in your morning report and at 21h hats.com joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Shan busi CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Liz picarazzi CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and mix trash enclosures and package bins and Jackie Russo CEO of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana the episode is titled what are your goals for 2024 welcome Sean Liz and Jackie it's great to have you here before we get going today I just wanted to note in case you missed it in your 21 hats Morning Report we've got another 21 hats live event coming up it's going to be in Fort Worth at Laura xanders um meline Tosh Factory it's going to run from Wednesday March 6th to Friday March 8th and it's going to be your chance to meet Jackie Sean Liz and pretty much all of the 21 hats podcast crew if you want more info you can just shoot me an email at Lauren 21h hats.com all right now that uh 2023 is just about in the books I want to ask you what was this year like for you did it go as well as you hoped did you learn anything Jackie suppose we start with you I feel like it's always a learning experience and the big lessons that I learned this year we had some huge project uh new clients lined up at the beginning of the year was going to require Staffing up and we started a remodel to make room for the new people well we are completing the remodel tomorrow we move into um our current team into that new space and it's gorgeous and exciting and the two huge Global clients still haven't signed 10 months later and so I've learned a lesson about moving faster than my circumstances allow and so that's been a valuable lesson um it's a good year for us it's going to end up being in our 23 year history it's going to be our our third biggest so you know I I have no complaints there but I've got big plans for 24 well we'll get to those are you sorry you're moving into the new space or no not at all so we bought the whole building in ' 05 and we only occupied two-thirds of it and um it was inevitable that we would take over the final third eventually the tenant had moved out we used part of it as a a workshop rental space but the other part of it was going unused and so I am excited I think for the most part our um philosophy which has held true for 23 years it's always cheaper to do it today than to do it tomorrow and so um and we we got a great rate so I can't complain about that so I'm glad we have room to grow into the new offices are so nice my creative team is so happy it makes them want to come into the office and another reason um that we have provided to create more internal collaboration and actually being in the same room together so it's good I just I might have jumped the gun a little bit but you know I'm all gas that's sort of my speed hey Jackie tell us a little bit about the financing side of things so you bought an ' 05 when rates were not particularly amazing but I'm sure you've refinanced it since then where are things at now we did refinance I want to say the building is at 2.6 and U this remodel is a little bit more than that but still sub four so you know that feels like free money yeah especially today yeah how long does that does the term of that note last 15 years oh that's fantastic yeah so we'll have the building and this remodel well paid off before I think about retiring wow so Jackie it was your third uh biggest year but uh you had expected to do more when the when the year started is that correct correct we expected it to be the biggest year and I you know acted accordingly so I'm very pleased that we have um had the growth we've had we have improved so many processes this year we are doing so many things smarter we've um you know upped our game from a technology perspective even more so I feel really good about it I'm just you know I'm never satisfied did going ahead with the ring model while not getting those two big clients did that have an impact on your profitability for the year oh it did very much did it kept those two clients single-handedly kept this from being the biggest year we've ever had uh because that's how big they are and I think the lesson in that is you know we've never tried to have any one client be that much bigger than the others we've had that once uh years ago and when after our four or five years together it came to a natural conclusion and it was a huge impact to us and so I think in a lot of ways I'm spared um from having my business be lopsided and this has given us a chance to add on some regular siiz clients so that when the big ones do say yes next year because it still looks like it's happening we'll be more balanced just quick question Jackie to you what's a big client say in terms of annual Billings or Revenue to your firm um you know our our average size is about 25300 and this would have been about 750 800 wow wow okay it's a big big difference yeah Sean how are you thinking about this year what's it what you hope would be looking backwards um I mean I was very very realistic at the start of the year I knew it was going to be a really hard year for us our Market sector we work with owner operated businesses that's it we don't we don't work with large corporations or even mid-market corporations so there's just a lot of uh within our Market sector there's just a lot of uncertainty right the constant drumbeat of like oh are we in a recession yet are we in a recession yet that really gets to folks and what it causes them to do is to tend to play defense and and and to not take action you know kind of like Jackie's example of even at a larger larger firm size so growth for us this year this has been probably our first year where we've actually not had positive growth in h 13 years um so so it's been a it's been a real challenge I um feel very Greatful that all the things we've done up until this moment have really positioned us to kind of handle these kinds of situations so we have a really great line of credit we have really long tenure with our employees with our customers a lot of it's been rebuilding our marketing and so that's that's taken a lot of effort you also are uh moving into remodeled space a new office that you haven't given up your previous one uh early in Co how's that going that's been a real bright spot you know for two reasons one is that the commercial office market right now is is assist in a lot of pain so our ability to negotiate a really fantastic deal was like unbelievable it's like nothing I've ever seen in 20 years you know the willingness of the landlord to accept the terms that we had were just kind of amazing uh so so that's great and then you know I think the more important part is just the opportunities that are being created by coming in and and working in shared space face it's just you cannot replace that I I really believe that um both from a sense of camarad and collaboration and the I ideation creativity that are happening versus remote and then also from a client perspective just having prospects and clients into your space it just it just has a different impact than when you meet with them on zoom and I should have done this sooner probably probably a year earlier but I'm glad I did it and it's it's really been it's really transformative for us did you get any push back from employees who had gotten used to not commuting not coming in none at all no I if anything I got a lot of folks expressing how grateful they were especially folks that have kids at home I think the the home office environment with kids in it especially during the summer or we just had a teacher strike recently oh my God parents were miserable you know because their kids weren't in school and uh yeah they're they're just really excited to be coming into office I will say this we're not heavy-handed it you know we're not telling folks hey you've got to come in this many days a week there's there's much more of an organic approach to when we work in the office and and I think that creative flexibility and freedom is really well-received I I don't know Jackie what's what's kind of been your approach to that I'm curious you know because you run a creative shop too so I do um we've had you know we're kind of half creative half strategy and so I I run the Strategic team which includes the research team and the what I think of as the doers uh PR social media account management uh that's all my group and then Michael runs the creative team which are the graphic designers the copywriters videographers that's your husband right yeah also known as husband and father of our four children so that's that's a whole podcast to itself Lauren like that's marriage counseling we don't probably don't want to get into on the air we've hit on that a little bit in the past but we're going to come back to it anytime you want it's one of my favorite topics we actually our two-hour professional development that we do every month we bring in a therapist who's a coach who guides us through different exercises and and today's session was on effective communication and it did probably turn into the Russo's marriage counseling session at one point but we managed to turn it around and make it very positive and and professional to answer Sean's question eventually for the three years of we've been in business you know we started the company when I was eight months pregnant with kid number two number three was the next year number four was the next year so we've always had a very flexible um when you work and where you work approach we hire adults it's not about their age it's about their ability to self-manage and uh we just expect the work to get done and if it's not working the way you needed to or we needed to let's have a conversation and find a way to make it work better but if you need to not work in the morning cuz you're going to your kids thing at school then my expectation is you're going to work faster or smarter or a little bit more at the end of the day to get it done and as long as everybody gets it done we're fine and that's worked pretty well for us there's a couple of occasions where that's fallen off so in 2020 when everybody went home we were like okay we're already set up everybody had server access from their houses everybody has highspeed internet at their houses so that didn't throw us for a loop as we've come back to work you know in the past two years we've just done a better job of explaining we need to have some connection so we have these professional developments everybody's responsible for an open or a close at some point during the week so they at least touch base they come in the building we see their faces we get to know they're okay uh but then otherwise we work on Zoom Sean are you trying to get people to come in on specific days or is it completely uh open you know one of our team members did something really interesting just spontaneously and he started doing a ha kind of at the end of the week on slack saying okay here's Monday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday next week uh raise your hand who's going to be in on what days and so people would just start to like put their little Emoji next to the day of the week or multiple days of the week and it was kind of interesting to sort of see that manifest and how you know certain folks would come in on certain days and some folks would come in together on on the same time and that's been pretty cool I think a really really powerful lesson I've learned over the years in terms of leadership is that the best kind of uh engagement and buyin is when folks kind of create their own path forward instead of it being imposed on them and so watching this happen has been pretty exciting to see we we' talked as a leadership team about you know hey should we have a dedicated day or certain times and and then this thing has kind of popped up and then to also see things like we have a client coming in a prospective client coming in next week and the team raised their hand and said hey let's make sure as many of us are in the office as possible so they can get a sense of who we are and you know that we we have heft and horsepower and I didn't say that that that came from like a designer that came from a graphic designer you know you read these articles about corporations forcing their people in or not or whatever and I think a lot of these problems are due to the fact that they don't have very high Employee Engagement the employees actually don't really care that much about the businesses they work for so you get a lot of that so I don't know I'm I didn't expect it but I'm really delighted by it because I have a tendency to want to be like a benevolent dictator I'm like I'm letting I'm letting go of those impulses as I get older and it's pretty exciting to see what's happening Liz how are you thinking about 2023 um so I feel really good about it not as great as I would like to um but I think most people feel that way so this was our biggest year yet Revenue wise growth-wise it was not we didn't grow as much as we wanted and it's interesting that Jackie says that part of her year was that she didn't get retained a couple of important clients we really had that concentration as well with some of our Municipal clients and particularly New York city so while we were able to recover the revenue that we had in government contracts last year it still was something that we were a little bit surprised by and and um I think really the climate in New York City with trash is rapidly changing if you look in the New York Times any other week you're going to see something about trash or rats but the sanitation department is experimenting with a lot of different things and City bin was just one of them so there we still are all over New York City we're in five burs we continue to get business from business Improvement districts you know that have their own budgets but in terms of like getting a big city contract it's actually not even something I'm pursuing anymore so in terms of the finances from 2023 I'm feeling good but not great about it you know I am a grandio entrepreneur so every year I'm going to say I want a double I I'm gonna double I remember that you were GNA double at the beginning of the year and I'm like wait a minute yeah well you know well you have done it right yeah but last year not this year so right but that is about about really the concentration of clients in Municipal in terms of also 2023 in our mission um we have kept thousands of trash bags out of sight and contained in New York City and many other cities many other public spaces our work just looks incredible when I look at photos of my own work I have to say I'm very proud of the bins and how well they beautify um a lot of neighborhoods commercial corridors so that's really gratifying also feeling good about some of the new products that we've developed um some of which we haven't even rolled out yet so we just did the photography for some of the new products that we that we're pushing out and that's you know in January that's going to be really exciting can you give us a hint what's uh what's to come sure so um we have a couple of different sizes where we can either go vertically or horizontally with the bins and we're going to be marketing um a double depth is what we call it a double depth bin that will fit twice as many bins in it and we've been using that a lot in New York City of course um where there's such a space constraint that many especially many large buildings they're not using their space efficiently unless they have this sort of a double depth configuration because they don't have um the width to um have enough trash cans in the areas and we've done a couple of these over the years but they've always been custom projects and it's actually something that we're going to be fabricating um on a mass uh production level and then the other big one is composting so we have modified a bin that we're going to be using for composting we haven't started marketing it but we are piloting it Boston now um and that's gone really well so that those will be a really big Focus next year I think that we're poised for a really great 2024 so uh from a composting perspective are you seeing that growing in other cities because like here in Portland we've been doing it a long time and it's it's uh it's actually pretty cool but there's not good answers for uh like I just our new building like they have this composting situation is not pretty uh so I'm just sort of curious is that a you feel like that's a growth area I do not for residential but for public Community composting I mean the bins that we have in Boston are for Community composting and I I think it's probably not a huge group in New York at least for residential we do have our own composting bins I just restarted composting a couple months ago because the city restarted in Brooklyn and I can attest to how gnarly the cans can get even after a couple of weeks you know if you're not if you don't line them if you let rain get into them the maggots I'll say the gross word there are maggots but you know if you look in a lot of trash cans you're going to seem too but it's uh it's so important and it's really hard to get people to change their behavior Liz as your business moved more in the direction of Municipal than residential in the past year or two definitely in the last two years in the last year I would say we've moved more to like 5050 whereas before it maybe was like I don't know 10 to 15% so it definitely has shifted and a lot of my priorities for next year are in the municipal realm how does that change things for you we really want to replicate success that we've had in New York and other cities and we've already done a good amount of that but it is going to take kind of Perpetual marketing to continue to be that the brand that we are known as for municipal container ization so I want to keep that going um you know we do have a couple of competitors in the space and I know that I've beat them um into you know some of these cities um but they're probably better funded than me and so for me especially in the early part of the year to be really hardcore on the marketing and the reach outs to cities is going to be important I assume the marketing is very different if you're aiming for business districts as opposed to residential it very much is and Lauren with you as a writer you'll probably appreciate that I wear many hats when I write copy for different audiences I love it when people say that Liz thank you yeah well I mean sometimes I'm writing for the bare audience sometimes I'm writing for the city audience sometimes for property managers of multif family buildings sometimes of single family homes and I do have a writer that's helping with a lot of that but I still do write a lot of the copy and I'm happy I've got a lot better at it but when I first started having new segments I did struggle with it and would drag my feet but now it's pretty easy to sit down and know okay I'm sending this postcard to Aspen what should it say uh Liz I'm kind of Cur we've got three marketers on this this is kind of funny so we have three folks who have marketing or marketing adjacency so how much energy time money do you think you put into marketing I don't know express it maybe as a percent of Revenue or yeah I'm kind of curious how you think about that have you ever Quantified your time and your cost I'm not going to speak on the financials of it because I am not close enough to know if it's like 10% or 25% it's not wouldn't be that much but I would like to be more accurate in terms of my time on it I would say if you bundle kind of lead generation Business Development and marketing that it's probably over half of my time yeah yeah and then what other resources do you have to support you in it so I have kind of an internal um person and a half um and then I also have three external contractors some of them are very they're not full-time like I have one person that literally just does renderings for our proposals he's amazing we can take a picture of Any Corner New York City anywhere that has trash bags you know on the corner and we superimpose the bins on them and those go into both our proposals that have been requested but I've also been known to send unsolicited proposals to people and that is that's been a really great resource you know anytime we have a brochure another has that worked I think so I can't say for absolute sure because with some of those business Improvement districts we had several touch points but I think they do appreciate that we've taken the time to do that and it's really a super effective way for us to show the difference because if you're in charge a commercial Corridor and there are trash bags on every corner that's actually a pretty big burden on you to solve a problem that can be solved with City bin so yes so you said one and a half you're at least halim so you're talking at least two internal people plus a team of part-timers on the outside so maybe three FTE equivalent something like that I I overstated it some of the people that are internal are not 100% so one person is probably only like 30% she deals with a lot of other things so what do you think the FTE equivalent is once you add all that up I would probably say one and a half and your company size number of people we have seven actually if I include everybody it's nine nine okay so about uh 10 to 15% of your Workforce give or take y yeah probably yeah yeah Jackie what do you think that's your you might have more been you're a little larger so have you Quantified this more for yourself like how much time money effort you're spending on marketing well I mean on the oneand like you Sean everything we do is is marketing all day long whether we're doing it for our clients or doing it for ourselves I think that like most agencies we probably have had patches where we didn't spend nearly enough time on ourselves because we were really busy with client work and I didn't like that Peak and Valley of it and I I'm never fond of that cobbler's kids have no shoes kind of philosophy cuz you should be your own best client and so we got really serious about three years ago of saying we're going to practice what we preach we're going to test everything on ourselves and we're going to make sure that we have a real plan in place and I think over time we've gotten better and better uh this past 23 was our best year yet in terms of making sure we had a Content strategy and we stuck to it we honored our own podcast we you know made sure our blogs were at on time you know we did the things we're supposed to do and we've seen the benefits of it so I'd be crazy not to we don't have any one person 100% dedicated to the marketing for our agency our PR team treats Russo like a PR client our social media team treats Russo like a social media client and so everybody has Russo every team not every person has Russo assigned to them so we make sure that we get the same amount of attention and quality of work that we need uh you're what a how many how many people are you 20 30 something in that range about 24 24 yeah yeah I I you know this is all kind of a leading question and part of it is you know Lauren you're asking to look backwards and then look forwards right and I was on a call the other day with my Financial Consultant and he has what he calls his 100 company model and it's a hundred businesses kind of in that you know 5 million to $10 million range you know probably some on the smaller side you know in that 2 million but I really like their model because it captures a lot of different Industries and you know like a realistic small business size and he said it's it the model has started to massively bifurcate meaning there's about half of the companies in there are declining and about half of them are growing he said that the growing group is spending on average 8% or more on their marketing and the shrinking group is spending 3% which I was like wow that is such a tiny number and and I it just kind of goes to my thesis that you know I know this is going to sound self-serving but I think most companies massively either under spend or undervalue the amount of marketing they're actually doing you know like to Liz's case right she is the most expensive most talented person on the team and she's spending half of her time on marketing and I I think a lot of owners don't recognize just how complex marketing has become and as a result how much energy you have to put into it I think that's an important lesson as to thinking about the future I'm thinking about that myself because like you Jackie we went through periods of time we're like oh yeah Kinesis is a client of Kinesis but also like the lowest priority clients you know so Liz I get your uh company emails and I saw that you did a big Cyber Monday sale I'm curious did that work for you it did and it actually does every year we only do that big sale once a year and for only one day and cyber monday it was like 10 to 20% off wasn't it it was actually 20 to 40% off but only one product was 40% off and it should be no surprise that it was the package Locker that Frank hates and it's trying to get rid of so he's trying to fire sale them and get us out of the package Locker business but then interestingly we did get a lot of requests we did get a lot of purchases of that so what does that say to they buy it because it was 40% or because they've wanted one for a long time because they think it's great and they would love for it to continue one thing that's interesting with it is that we do use HubSpot for our email marketing and when we send out a mass email like that we do them twice a week just during the regular year we don't often look at the specifics of who's opening it and how many times are they clicked you know did they get into the Shopify basket or not but on the day of the sale we basically have the HubSpot open all day and we see who's clicking it the most who uh got to the basket but didn't finish checking out and if there people that we've already been working with and we know okay this person's opened it 30 times in the last two hours which can happen and did happen then we know to get in touch with them to do a one-on-one with them the other interesting thing with our sales here is that each year we've actually gone down on what the percentage um promo is so a couple of years ago it was actually 40% and we figured we're going to do it really high because it really is only once a year and maybe we're not going to be profitable on it but we're going to get a lot of buyers that otherwise wouldn't buy that was way overly generous and especially because it's it's their biggest uh Revenue day of the whole year um and then last year we put it to 25% and then this year we decided to put it 20% and we still feel that that's a really generous discount um the only other people that get that discount is if it's a you know property manager contractor or city that's buying in a large volume that's really our our deepest discount with with those groups this is so interesting I'm just suddenly realizing you've built like a pretty significant B Toc thing so do you know what your breakdown is between B Toc customers and B2B customers or B to G in terms of government I actually did that calculation probably a year ago if I and I don't even remember what it was then but if I were to guess what it is now I would say it's probably 30% B to G 30% B2B and then the last 40% B Toc sometimes moves around and the other thing it's like do I classify a property manager which is a business as residential or as B2B and sometimes I kind of conflate those and it's hard to disentangle but that is definitely going to put that down as something we should do yeah that's really interesting because it's just been experience that bet bet to C takes a ton of money you know it's just like a really costly customer acquisition process whereas B2B is more tends to be more strategic and that the wins tend to be bigger and long take longer yeah that's true and and I also I did more just like online marketing be to see not too much but over a couple years I spent probably I don't know 10 20 ,000 on it which was was a lot and I barely got any conversions and then finally I realized you know online marketing is best if you're selling like a sweater it's not great if you're selling a $4,000 aluminum trash enclosure people are not going to make a spontaneous decision based on an Instagram ad so we just stopped it completely we were doing you know AdWords we did some Instagram we did some Facebook so for B Toc you know we're just relying on people that come to the site and sign up for the newsletter which is substantial because they also get the discount for it um definitely a lot of Word of Mouth PR get a lot of PR I mean that's your thing yeah I mean that's kind of your driver right I mean because why would people visit your website it's probably because they saw an article about you right A lot of the time yes because we can see from where they came in from too Jackie if aside from realizing that you were a little too generous with the discount did you have any concerns about discount at all just in terms of the potential for it to to cheapen the product in some way you mean Liz yes I did mean Liz thank you like we don't discount our services waren I am opposed to that morally yeah and I'm sure Jackie would say that um I wouldn't be spending 50% of my time on marketing if I work with someone like her actually no you know I I really feel like there's there's three ways everybody should be going with their marketing and they have to evaluate what's right for them on a lot of reasons obviously on the one hand hire an agency but you've got to be the right size and have a real need for growth and be willing to invest to Sean's Point earlier if you're not looking at spending 8% don't spend it on an agency because you're not going to get enough return on that investment to have the growth you need the second are the people who need some help but don't need a full agency and that's why we build brand State you and we have a whole online education platform to teach people to be better marketers because they have to do it themselves and then there's the group that's just out there on their own trying to figure out and God bless y'all I mean I agree I agree with Jackie on that one Liz let me ask you did you have any concerns when you did the the first cyber um Monday discount uh about the impact it could have on the brand I did um I did at the time but then I experienced that it didn't have an impact because it's in terms of the communications it's really only several days of communications that go out the pretty isolated we also do a targeted list we don't do it to everybody and now I will say that there are several people that have the email blast from three years ago that say 40% off that will still try to redeem it you that beond that's ridiculous right and which is funny because the sale was literally only for one day three years ago so it's isolated it's isolated to one day and to one year and you know it doesn't happen too often I guess if I were the consumer I might try to do that too but it's funny when it happens it's okay for Liz to be cheap but her customers better not be yeah well you know I should see if my mom's listening to this because she always she's a midwesterner you know like me you do not spend that much money on anything and definitely not on your trash she's always like Elizabeth I don't know how you can get so much money for those things oh my God lovingly yes but you know it's probably why I'm not spending anything Marketing in Wisconsin well can I can I provide some unsolicited feedback which is usually criticism I have learned but this is not this is to uplift what you just said I think you need to do a whole ad campaign around mom Ser you know I was thinking the same thing as you were doing the voice I agree I want mom talking about how ridiculous it is and how expensive it is and no one should waste their money like that I mean there's a whole family Dynamic there that may send y'all to therapy but it could also be hugely impactful because you're going to cut through the Clutter that's the last thing I expect you to tell me I want to see photos of mom shaking her head disapprovingly I want to see videos of mom talking you know tapping her finger and just like no it will drive sales I will consider that although you know Jackie we haven't known each other that long but you know Lauren and Sean will tell you that I have like 300 ideas right now that are competing I'll add that as the 31 I'm fine with that letter that order of priority I'm last to arrive um but I think there's something here we should play with at some point yeah Jackie you told us before that you're really excited about next year uh I want to ask all of you this uh tell me why are you excited about next year I'm excited about next year for a lot of reasons Lauren I don't think that I'm ADHD I feel like I'm very kind of on a path and so I'm not usually squirrel chasing but I got a lot of irons in the fire right now and they're making me equally excited and so that's kind of fun for the agency every time we make a a a shift a change an improvement I see the result of that so I feel really good about some changes we're making currently in elevating our content are you going to get those two clients uh well yeah they're coming too so that makes me excited and there's there's two others who have pushed us to January but they keep calling us so we feel really good the January is the lock so we should start with four new ones in the first two months so that makes me happy the brand State you that I referenced earlier I believe firmly in collaboration I don't think there's competition that's for the lower level big picture thinking should have big picture collaboration and so I've brought in four other uh Trainers for lack of a word professional development employee uh Talent uh retention and recruitment sales like people all in my world but don't do what I do and the five of us are putting on a conference kind of similar to what you've done Sean in my research I realized be fun we're calling it growthx and it's for small businesses in the area and we've got Chambers of Commerce from different towns who've lined up for us to take our little show on the road and bring it to their Community Sean how are you thinking about next year um I'm actually maybe a little more measured person just in general but I'm actually feeling better about it and in a weird way because I actually think it'll be hard for a lot of businesses it's an election year you know we've just seen a lot of chaos right war in Gaza war in Ukraine keeps grinding on but I was thinking about this the other day we went through a period of time in 2012 is 2011 2012 through 2017 where we grew really fast 30% a year 40% a year and uh kept you know winning all these Awards fast growth fast growth all of that growth as I reflect back now it came out of the Great Recession in other words Hard Times encourage people to think differently about their business and kind of shakes up this kind of status quo thinking and that's actually good for us and so I'm I'm optimistic about next year in terms of people wanting to try something different I think a lot of us have been in this defensive posture from the pandemic like Hey how do I survive this thing and I think the free money has run out I think the recognition that you can't just sit around is there and I think I want to speak into that so so I'm optimistic from that that respect such a great team best team we've ever had hands down no drama long tenure just a ton of talent so I'm I'm I'm excited about that yeah how about you Liz um so there's a couple things that I'm really excited about and a couple things that I just need to do that I'm not like hyped up about which are operational of course so I mean really the top one is as we expand Nationwide um we need to set up great you know distribution channels we need to have people to ship product to who will install so in Aspen and Veil we have someone that's going to be doing that but if that's successful then we're going to replicate in other cities and another thing is that with expansion Nationwide when I'm in other cities I'm spending more time looking at their trash and looking at their trash problems and I know it sounds funny but the thing is is like in terms from like an anthropology perspective I see that in most cities they have alleys and I don't really have a product for alleys people aren't going to want to spend a lot of money on a trash enclosure which is a big cabinet if they're trying to hire you know High dumpsters or trash can there might be an opportunity for something less expensive and less less like an enclosure so when I was an aspen recently I was like walking through these alleys and all the dumpsters there's such an isore in back of really really expensive homes so that's uh you guys will be like oh there she goes on another tangent but the word alleys is always the top of my head what am I going to do about alleys because I know there's something to do there and then the couple things that are less sexy but are important so as we've expanded our products we have been haven't been thinking a lot about product architecture they've kind of been on the- fly what do we call this thing and now we have like three different sizes of trash enclosures that don't make sense from a nomenclature perspective so our smallest one is called a standard we have a new mid size that was being called the 2.0 for a long time and I hated it and then we have the size extra large we call it so those three are a confusing to customers but also are confusing I think for anyone trying to cell city bin because if you've got three sizes why not just have small medium large so that's what we're doing we're shifting as of January 1 but that does create a huge project because every touch point or every area where we have the L product label you know from on the website to our email Communications to even the boxes with the bins in them with the factory there's so many places where we need to change that um and so that sort of product architecture is going to be a pretty important thing and I'm kind of excited for it it's a long overdue but it's just become more more important um and then the other unsexy thing that I'm doing is we're really trying to get more buttoned up on processes make sure everybody has job description we don't have an employee manual I'm kind of ashamed to say after 12 years in business we're finally going to be doing that and you know really getting buttoned up on the financials is also going to help with another goal I have in 2024 and that's to get evaluation and I want to be prepped for that I want to have everything in order we've never had evaluation done before it's not because we imminently want to sell the company it's that we just really want to know what its value is right now because Frank and I derive all of our income from the business and we're really planning on being able to sell it at some point to have a great retirement hey Liz I'm happy to give you our employee handbook and you can just cut it apart and use it however you want I mean I've spent a fair bit of money on it over the years but I do this all the time you know there's no reason to start from scratch yeah I will I will totally take that sure it would be great I'm sure you have many many more benefits than me so it'll be a shorter handbook it's I don't know it's less about the benefits and more just about you know how to how to kind of act within the company and values you know so I found that that's really really helpful to articulate that early and often and I'm sure you share that that value definitely Sean have you taken the values and also started to work on a list of behaviors to live through the values yeah so we're really big into the idea of how do you operationalize a lot of folks pick values because they sound good and then they put them on the kitchen wall of their breakroom and then in worst case then the employees kind of roll their eyes and laugh at them I mean that's like the worst case but but I think most people are in the middle ground which is they they pick things that sound good Unfortunately they pick Integrity excellence and quality or some variant of those that aren't actually that remarkable or unique to the business and so that's phase one is like pick something that's meaningful and then build an operationalization of those values and Define what do you mean when you say Integrity which I I would encourage people not to use that one because everybody uses it and it's like a cliche but so pick something that's actually really good like you know pick a value that's like care about what you're working on or think big you know that's one of our values so I I prefer values as verbs uh instead of nouns so make them action oriented Define what they mean like write a paragraph that talks about what is this value mean and you can include behaviors in that too I think the more uh blue collar your business the more you want to spend energy on being really specific and talk about those behaviors that align with those values you know you have a highly educated Workforce you can probably be a little bit more broad there yeah I think that's a great question what about you we did I I like the way you just phrased that I'm going to take notes and totally credit you later when I tell my team I had this great idea unfortunately we are out of time if you want to hear more from these guys come to Fort Worth in March my thanks to sha busy Liz picarazzi and Jacki Russo and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to build health your companies you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everybody wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's L ren21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]