What It Means to Break $1 Million in Revenue

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Liz picarazzi and Sarah seagull talk about their attitudes toward growth including how they set goals the tension between revenue and profit deciding when growth requires additional bodies choosing between contractors and employees and how they would use the money if someone were to give them a million dollars to invest in their business plus what will it take for them to consider themselves successful 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 same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report whichi 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 Liz picarazzi who's CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and Sarah seagull who's founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled what it means to break $1 million in Revenue but before we get started let me remind you we do have a couple of slots left at our 21 hats live event in Chicago in May if you want to meet the 21 hats podcast regulars if you want to participate in the recording of a podcast this is your chance if you'd like more information just shoot me an email or check today's morning report today being Tuesday February 28th and now on to Today's Show welcome Liz and Sarah it's great to have you here today I I want to talk a little bit about your attitude toward growth and how it may have evolved over time but first I I just want to note that you've both already beaten the odds uh we've all seen the numbers that indicate how hard it is to break a million dollars in Revenue I think fewer than 5% of businesses one in 20 actually do that it's a huge milestone both of you have done it I'm curious were you conscious of that was it a goal was it a big deal H how about you Liz yeah it definitely was a goal for me and I remember on the day that it happened I was really excited but I was kind of by myself I was working from home that day and I felt like well who do I talk to about this you know besides Frank and so for me it was like a weirdly non-eventful day for a milestone that was so important to me another reason why the million dooll Mark was significant for me is that when I worked at American Express in the small business division we had a program to help women entrepreneurs achieve a million in revenue and they did like seminars all over the country and I remember I took note of that wow this is a very hard thing to achieve like less than 40% of businesses are owned by women and something like only 2% of women-owned businesses achieve a million I mean that was a stat from like five or six years ago but I think it's still pretty significant Sarah how about you were you uh of it was it a goal a big deal no it was never a goal it was actually when I was acquired the person that facilitated the acquisition basically handed me the goal said this is your Revenue you should have this goal for the end of the year honestly it gave me anxiety it gave me stress like I had always just focused on profitability um and not that million dooll goal but the the problem since then has you know meeting that goal um that was handed upon me but now you know working at moving beyond that goal and so that's kind of where I'm in a holding pattern we'll talk some more about that we should point out that you were acquired but recently took your business back and are uh running independently again Liz once you hit that goal how did you reset after that did you come up with a new goal did you feel like you know you could relax a little bit or did it kind of rev things up for you I think it revved things up for me actually you know I really wanted to get more Millions like most people do so when I hit that million I set the goal the next year to get two million and I do think it's significant um I don't think I reset I mean for me it was less about the money and it was more about the brand and a establishing the business as the go-to in a category that quite frankly I'm kind of creating you know luxury trash enclosures was really not a thing until City bin came along so for me success is also you know to be that go-to like you know canva was for easy graphic design or Spanx you know was for shapewear or chabani yogurt was for Greek yogurt I mean those are all gigantic companies but part of the reason they became successful is that they were category creators so for me it was like Wow we've achieved this Revenue Mark we've got great momentum we're headed towards being this category creating company let's just keep going in that direction how' you pick the goal of of doubling your Revenue after you hit a million was that based on anything in particular or did it kind of just seem like the next logical step I mean it looked like that's where it was trending and it did also I saw the types of clients that we were getting and they were bigger and the order sizes were bigger and we are really moving from residential to more commercial so I really saw it as an attainable goal how about you Sarah I think you told us at one point that uh your goal going into last year was to double your Revenue how did you uh come to think about it that way I don't know it was just a number um you know it just seemed a natural step I mean it was a it was a reach number for me and like I always kind of plac that as it um because I wanted to grow in a way that I can maintain that is not going to get me in trouble because you know as we've see we saw during the pandemic is that you know clients go away and they're a lot of different factors that can cause a client to leave it can be you know VC funding drying up or um you know change in the market place in general um so I just don't want to my growth to be dependent too much on one category so it's kind of I'm trying to be a little bit more methodic about about our growth and not just go you know of course it'd be nice to have you know extra funds but I also am not just going to take a client because it's going to add to our our um bottom line are you still thinking about profit the way you did originally Sarah yeah 100% like profitability is important to me because the way that I've set up my company is so most PR agencies are in around the 20% profitability range that is that is and they end up with a checking account with 20% of their revenue at the end of the year and we give out pretty sizable bonuses when we can when we have a nice pocket of funds and that also helps us maintain our employees and makes people happy and it's a nice way to end the year Etc you know I've been able to maintain that as a minimum but you know it's always nice to to reach towards a 30 or 40% profitability um which gives us that nice um bucket of cash to to play with at the end of the year either giving it away to um staffers or reinvesting in the company how do you try to manage profitability what's the key point there that you focus on oh that's the million-dollar question um I have a p&l that I literally look at every single day I'm looking at expenses I'm looking at how much it really costs to hire a person I only have one person on staff who's not billable everybody else is billable and it's literally I it's like you're balancing your checkbook every day and that's how I make sure that at the end of the month you know we're not zero balance in our checking account like I want to make sure that there's a buffer and going into this year you know January 1st I started with zero dollars in our account because we we left um which was really really hard because I had you know payroll two weeks and and had zero dollars in my account thankfully I actually had one client pay their monthly retainer early so that helped but I also invested some of my own money temporarily um just to kind of get going um my hope is to eventually have a nice little buffer that I can rely on uh throughout the year but you know the first I knew going into this year that the first quarter was going to be a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul what do you think of as being the the key moment when you have the most control over your profitability is it when you sign up uh a new client and set the terms of a deal the price and you know what's expected of you it's a really weird dance because you sign on a new client so so you can't have more employees than you have work right but you can yeah but you don't want to right so you don't want to underuse your staff but you also don't want to overwhelm them with work which will burn them out so it's this weird dance of okay this new client is going to be uh a retainer and they're signing on for 6 months to year can I take that risk in hiring another person to support the account is this going to be um but I need to look at all of my other clients and see you know how are they doing are they in a good place um are we delivering on what we're supposed to be delivering on and do they have monies to continue working with us so it's it's a tap dance um pretty consistently Liz you have the added complication of buying raw materials and Outsourcing manufacturing all that Beyond labor that you have limited control over do do you see in part because of that that there's a tension between revenue growth and maintain profit margins there is but luckily it's worked in my favor in the last year so our shipping costs and bringing you know containers over from overseas was so expensive before it was like between 25 and $30,000 per container 40 foot container during like the height of the pandemic and now it's 3,000 so it went from like 30,000 at times to 3,000 in the year and so that's helped us obviously with profitability I mean with us with profitability and you know expenses I think we've done pretty well at putting the right amount of work on staff but people do wear multiple hats and as we grow that's going to have to change we're going to have to have more specialized roles so that's something that when I do take those steps and I haven't taken them yet to kind of hire some additional kind of beefy roles that's going to definitely impact profitability but like Sarah I'm going to have to look at you know is this additional client that I brought brought on does that Merit an additional you know employee to support that so those will be some pretty important decisions I think I'm going to have to make sooner rather than later but in terms of how I'm feeling about profitability I felt pretty good about it last year and it was because a lot of our huge pandemic related costs primarily shipping went down Liz can I ask you a question so before I own my own business you know I always heard business owners lament about how expensive it is to hire people I'm just curious your perspective on that is do you see it as a really expensive process um no I don't um but I also don't have many benefits for employees so you're moving in that direction you you've told us right I am moving in that direction but like the process of like an from HR going through lots of different things and bringing in you know 20 candidates for a role like I haven't really had to go through it yet um I mean the cost of hiring an employee with all of those benefits and needing to have administration of those benefits I think it will be a lot more expensive and I kind of dread it why do you ask Sarah well you know it's I always read about like people like that was the biggest complaint and that was the the biggest burden for companies and this and that and yeah we have a a really nice benefits package that we offer and and that was something that was when I was acquired like they they had a really nice benefit C package and we kind of adopted it because we really liked it and so we continued with it and I don't see it as a burden I see it as a that's how you treat human beings um I I read uh an article I think Lauren you probably shared as well in your newsletter about a a gen Zer and kind of their perspective on work and there was a statement in that article that said you know not interested in giving her life to a company when companies can literally just drop you um on a dime right and so I see the benefits package as my part to prove that I'm not going to drop them on a dime because I put a lot of time and effort into making sure that their work life balance and their benefits and their is is reasonable and matches their value to me one other thought I just had on this too is that if I need to hire let's say a marketing manager which I do right now some of the great candidates are also going to be looking for jobs at like Amazon and so if we're competing for those same candidates I'm always going to lose I don't know that you're going to have that like it's interesting like I worried about that we we just hired a person and we did have some candidates that were like oh well I work in a for a tech company currently and they pay me an absorbent amount of money and we're just like we can't match that that's not us but then we also had people that were like you know I don't want to work for a big Goliath like that because I'm not going to have the opportunity to to do as much right so you hire a marketing director for you they're going to rule the roots they're going to get to do a lot of stuff they're going to get to make a lot of decisions if they're a marketing director for somewhere like Amazon they're going to have a they're not gonna be marketing director at Amazon no they're going to have a lane and they're going to have one job that they do and they're they're going to be have a very defined role and some people don't want that because that's boring I agree I used to do that do you really think you'll be competing with Amazon uh for a marketing person Liz or or the just the equivalent you know I'm in New York City there's a lot of major companies here and if I've got my job up there on indeed and so does you know like I said Amazon or Google has a big office here um I don't think that if you put them next to each other that my offer would look very good but I do think Sarah there are people that they want it to be something that's really enjoyable where they have agency so yeah trying to find those candidates that want to feel that a agency is important because then they're not going to be looking so specifically at at all the numbers well and also you know the those two companies that you mentioned they just had layoffs right in December and it's so their track record from um keeping employees with more to come almost certainly yeah you know so you're probably a lot more slower methodic and thoughtful about the people that you hire you're not just putting bodies in seats like a lot of those companies are and so you're going to make sure that it's the right fit for the right role and your team you know we look a lot somebody can be great on paper and interview with us and they just there's no connection and it's half of it is just you know personality and we're we're back in person and I want to like the person I'm breathing next to every day um so you have a draw that way um and I think a lot of people will specifically look for that because they don't want to deal with the the machine that is you know Amazon or Google I I almost think you wouldn't want to hire someone who would rather work at Amazon than help you create a brand new category I mean that it's just a different kind of person it is it's definitely a totally different flavor of person and this is something that a lot of people struggle with because you do have to decide between hiring someone what's the best person you can get to bring in to work for you as an employee versus spending that money with an agency have you given a lot of thought to the trade-offs involved in that decision oh please do tell us I'm very curious how do you how do you decide whether because I see openings all the time for like head of communications I'm like we can do that they don't need to hire somebody inhouse and we have all the resources and tools that they would need at least for PR not for traditional marketing yeah well I mean I so far have mostly um had agency or myself do all the coms and in a couple of situations when I did hire that out sometimes it works sometimes it didn't you know overall I think I got a good return on investment and like marketing in PR work that I paid for but I have often had good success for me doing it on my own and that's the issue with like needing to grow the company is that if I don't get someone else to do those functions I'm not going to grow as I want to yeah and you know that's some work I need to do is is finding that right person and letting go lately I think I've been a little bit more Hands-On because of this new category of mun ipal where I have to I shouldn't say I have to I plan on rewriting everything about in the marketing you know in the newsletters in all the sales material and it has barely crossed my mind to hire someone to help me with that and that's probably something I need to get over um because I am feeling really overwhelmed you're reworking all of that because you're going after a different kind of client yes exactly you know but Liz sometimes it's easier to like you're not going to find somebody who knows your business as well as you that's never going to happen but you can find somebody who's eager to learn the nuances of your business and you know for some people I don't know about you it's easier to edit than to sit down and focus on writing that book you know yep at least you have something to work with so shorter using chat GPT it's like you you hire somebody even just a writer right they interview you they ask you a billion questions they get your Baseline answers to that and then they formulate that narrative for you and then you can go back in and edit it and and tweak it to and it just it's a timesaver and um sadly enough writers are not super expensive to work with because uh we pay writers terribly in this industry I often recommend a book called No Man's Land by Doug Tatum I don't know if either of you are familiar with it I recommend mend it because it's it's not as well known as it should be the basic thesis is that every company that grows and you can choose not to grow but if you if you choose to grow as both of you have inevitably you hit a point where what's worked in the past stops working uh it could happen because you get a big order and you just don't have the infrastructure to fill it or you don't have the capital to fill it you may not have the talent to fill it it at some point you're going to realize that someone who has worked really hard who's been loyal who's been there from the beginning is not really capable of doing the job he or she is now doing it worked for a while but but it's not working anymore could be a friend could be a brother-in-law could be a spouse could be you given the the amount of growth you've both had I'm wondering have either of you run into this at all so for me in the past I have made some you know decisions with employees who kind of hit a level where I guess they call it the Peter principal where they hit a ceiling where just like their talents are never going to really exceed that and they've worked so hard to get to that point that I assume that they want to be promoted and get a title and get a another salary to be able to have that responsibility and feel having that promotion and in a couple situations it really didn't work for me so in my first company I had like the best handyman ever who still is probably the best handyman ever who did such a great job I eventually promoted him to be like a director over all of the handyman and I gave him a title it was called field success director and Frank always laughs at me with that title because these are like kind of blue collar handyman workers and I'm giving them these like very corporate titles well he didn't really want that role he wanted that salary and I gave it to him and I gave him that title but ultimately he was really just a good handyman that's kind of a classic situation I mean it happens in sales all the time somebody who's really good at sales may not be good at managing sales people yeah right well and then the second instance was with City bin where you know our first designer who really you know created most of the product we have today was really into that one trash enclosure and when I wanted us to shift into package lockers he didn't want to innovate that way he wanted to just keep perfecting that first product and I saw in the market there was a huge opportunity for package lockers so one year for like his bonus and his performance review I thought well the way I'm going to stimulate innovation in him is I'm going to give him a new title and he's going to be called to innovate it was the director of innovation and he was not Innovative and and that was okay I mean he was so good good at what he did but the problem was that then when he did not behave in an Innovative way I thought well damn he's the director of innovation I'm the one that gave him that title because I wanted him to be that he ended up leaving and a lot of it was that Clash over my desire for more product development and growth and his desire to really perfect what we already have and so no title change is going to change that I learned my lesson on that so so yeah that's you know I would say those were a couple of the mistakes that I made and you know with current employees I'm a lot more careful you know if they if it's obvious that they're not good at something instead of continuing to push on it I'll either get them trained or I'll just take it off their plate and give it to someone else yeah I agree I agree with you on that in my industry there are there are there are people that are independent contributors and they they like their focus and they don't really want to do anything else besides that focus and you know I'm a person that I want to do everything I want to be a generalist I want to learn how to do everything I want to continually you know um push myself and educate myself and try new things and I have to remind myself that not everybody really wants that not everybody is looking for a career and some people are just looking for a job so there's that and then on the other side you know I really try to listen to my staff and figure out kind of what they're interested in doing because I feel like if if there's an opportunity where they say oh I really want to do more content and more video and we have clients and we can offer that service and we can build that then I want to leverage that natural interest because they're going to put a lot of energy into that so really trying to build our offerings based on individual interests yes there are things that are like necessary evils that we all have to deal with and right now I have uh a staffer who I love who is you know she's ready to to transition out of some of the day-to-day stuff that she does but we don't have anybody to take over those duties yet and I need to I I basically was like I want to relieve you of some of these these chores so you can do cooler things but we have to I have to kind of backfill and and find more business so I can you know relieve you of those duties so it's a matter of like listening to what people want but also seeing you know what their road map for what work means to them you know and if somebody just wants a job then that's a different path forward than somebody who wants a career not everybody is going to become a VP and go out and do client sales and pitches and this and that um some people can do that and some people just that will never be something they're interested in doing which is fine if you have an appropriate position for them but if they're if they're in a position where you need somebody to take on more responsibility then it can become an issue you're still it's still fairly early for you but yeah do you see the possibility of that evolving where you have somebody who's worked out thus far but the company has grown enough that you need to get somebody who who does want to handle more and take on more um you know what it is is PR is a very young person's industry so most people that come in are eager to learn and and you can tell when you're interviewing that they want to they want to expand their Horizons and do that so we've been lucky I guess in hiring we haven't run into that issue yet I suspect you will it's some point I'm sure I will I hope I will but not this week um I have I have other issues I to do with this week Liz I thought about this uh in part because you were talking about the the marketing position and that seems like uh the kind of position where this could be an issue are you hiring someone who can handle what you're looking for right now are you looking for someone who can grow and you know that you hope to be with the business for for some time I mean I'd really like to hire some someone that can be with us um for the long term people that come in to kind of fill roles and come in and out it it can be a little I just want to have the continuity I think it's so important for someone in Communications or marketing to really understand the brand and the customer takes a little while for people to get that so I wouldn't want to hire someone and have them finally like learn that and then leave so having someone where you really see that they have aptitude yeah but that's that's looking for a special person it is well hopefully you have time on your like if there's an urgency to hire this person going to be a challenge just finding people while I said that you know we we definitely had people apply to the position we did not we were not overwhelmed with people applying for these position specifically the higher levels because you know we we get a a a freight train of you know junior level people applying to us which is great but it's those higher level folks which are I think are much harder to find specifically because a lot of those folks have paid their dues working for an agency or inhouse or somewhere and decided to go independent so there's a whole percentage of the workforce in marketing and Communications that are doing their own thing they're freelance they have a couple clients and that's all they do so it's like they've gotten so burnt out in their junior years that they don't want to work for the man anymore I think I need to find some people like that yeah having had the success that you both have has it affected the way you think longer term have you thought at all about what your definition of success really is I like the fact that you say that you're successful I don't feel like I'm successful yet I mean I'm just going to perfectly honest there well going back to where we started at the beginning you've done something that you know lots and lots of people try to do and and and don't get there particularly women not that that means they're failures it's just really hard to do uh you've managed to to at least get past that hurdle and I I don't mean to suggest that you've got it all figured out nobody does no but you have had a measure of success and you you know you should be proud of that I am I am and I love and I and I I think it's just the way I am I never I'm never satisfied with what I'm doing like it's it's a issue I have where I'm like okay I can do better I can do better I can achieve more I can accomplish more and that's my own mental but like we've talked about this in terms of when do you know whether you've made it or not right this is a related question but a little bit different I think um C can you sketch for us a little bit what what would success look like I want Liz to go first on this one so I can listen in you can think I have thought about this a little bit it's a such a great question I mean and it's often asked in terms of what is your exit strategy So my answer is kind of along those lines but I mean I'm 50 now I would love to at least have the option of retiring at age 60 whether or not I exercise that option I would like to have that as an option um and kind of to get there it would be well actually I should say part of the reason I would like to retire re early and I would love for Frank to be able to retire early is that we both have our own Hobbies outside of the business I love to travel and I love Home Improvement he's a composer and a performer and you know so he's a musician that since joining the business is practicing and performing a lot less so you know he was not put on this Earth to be a CEO of a trash enclosure company he's doing it really really well but like he was not put on this Earth to do that so I would like for both of us to at least have that option and really the way to do it is to make ourselves as attractive for acquisition as possible I've had a lot of potential just funding come my way and outside investors and I was really interested in it for a little while but then I realized like I want to be wooed in a way where there's four or five options for me and I figure out which one is best when I'm ready and I pick it so I don't know if that's like being grandiose but I I want to be in a position to choose who acquires me and feel really good about it like feel really good about my employees being set up you know the amount I'm paid is fair but I I don't want to when I'm at 60 be looking for someone to acquire me I want to actually have them waiting in line so that would be ideal that would be success to allow me to move into the next stage of my life which might be at 60 it maybe at 75 you know who knows do you also think of uh the option of just trying to manage the business in such a way that you remove yourself from gradually from more of the the day-to-day and the business can operate Without You full-time and give you the the room to pursue some of the other things you'd like to pursue right now I'm actually able to pursue a lot of my hobbies you know we did Home Improvement and I like I can shop for hours for door knobs and just install them and take pictures of the my new bathroom door knob and feel really good about it like that's something that really like gives me joy and I don't know where that would lead me into my future future but I used to be a home contractor so maybe there's an opportunity to return to that while I'm still running my own business or you know potentially getting involved with real estate um aot I've noticed that a lot of entrepreneurs in my EO group who have you know had exits and have sold their businesses they're now in real estate like that's their primary business they're using uh the funds from the sale to kind of move into a new Direction so that's another I could see me doing but I I know that I don't want to feel as stretched thin as I do right now in 10 years like I just want to have a lot of options available and I mean it is I've got some ideas on paths to get there uh but you know that's even something now that I'm exploring if someone were to acquire me who would it be who would be motivated to acquire City Vin and I've got a list of like four or five companies that I think if I were them I would be really interested in it and so I'm kind of trying to be below the radar with them because I also don't want them to compete with me I want to gain more market share so then I'm very attractive for acquisition regardless of whether I agree to be acquired all right Sarah all right okay thoughts as for hobbies I don't really have any hobbies anymore my job is my hobby and I'm not saying that because to to sound like dismissive of hobbies but I'm still in that kind of honeymoon phase of really liking the the process of navigating all of this I turned 50 this year as well and by 70 I would like to be able to pass the rins off uh or have you know already done that in in a way I don't know if I would be interested in an acquisition again um I I'd rather pass along a healthy company to um you know the folks that are the running the show in some way I don't I don't know if that's employee ownership or what that looks like because I haven't even thought twice about it yet I literally just trying to keep the lights on right now neither of you mentioned numbers in terms of your thoughts about what defines success and I guess Liz you referred to the possibility of being acquired at a point which would allow to do other things is that you know more a matter of time or are you thinking that you need to hit a certain number um that would make it possible for you to do what you would like to do I don't have that number and I I mean part of it is I really like what I do right now so it's not like I'm fantasizing necessarily about retiring so young and I don't have the number but I guess that's my answer answer I don't have an exact number and it might be something I need to think more about I know that I am thinking about kind of valuation and what can I do to make my company more valuable I think about that a lot so everything that we we spend money on with R&D that doesn't have any Revenue attached to it you know sometimes I don't like that but I realize I'm investing and if I do get acquired like this new feature on a lock or whatever is going to add value or if I get these patents you know it's going to add value so a lot of decisions I make are based on growing our value which means you know a higher acquisition price Sarah do you think in terms of a number when you're thinking about what how you define your eventual success I'd like to retire and not have to worry about it it's an age number yeah well my my in-laws have an interesting story she was a hygienist he was a probation juvenile probation officer and they retired from those careers he got a p pension and then they started a um real estate business he got his broker license and would sell things but then they ended up slowly over time um buying buildings and uh now they all own you know a handful of buildings outright and they have paid them off and so yeah so they they they have like the perfect retirement they have ongoing sources of of income that they don't really have to do much to maintain which is like kind of the ideal how are you going to do that uh that's on my list of things to do Lauren all right the million-dollar question Ami casara a small business finance expert who has appeared in this podcast and writes a column for 21 hats likes to ask owners what would you do if if I gave you a million dollars to invest in your business how would you invest it Liz have you thought about that at all I have so 1 million I would invest in research and development and patents and how would you go about that um do do you know what type of research you would want to do yeah so on the research you know to further our Municipal line there's a lot of features that are being asked for that we don't currently have and I know that if I a million dollars in the bank and I could hire you know an amazing Industrial Engineer and a you know great metal engineer and experts in locks and various things that I could really evolve the product to a place where it has all the features that my customers have asked for and so that really is what it is and also wanting to do that before any of my competition um who doesn't have the benefit of working with sanity workers in four different cities I know what they need because we work with them I also am not an expert in most of the things that I sell which means I rely on other people to you know come up with a different latching mechanism or a different hydraulic arm for the door or a different way to level the feet or drainage being slightly different or having an electronic lock instead of a manual lock like those are all things that I could easily spend a million dollars on and probably doesn't even include the legal that would go with it to patent those features you know what your customers are looking for it sounds like the research is in how to solve the problems they've identified yes it's usability things that if you're really a Discerning customer you're going to notice that certain things can be improved so yeah that that's where I would put it so what's keeping you from doing that now is it just the money or are there other aspects of it it's really just the money one of the points that uh Amy makes when he goes through this exercise is to say to people you know if you have a really good use for that million dollars you can probably get the million dollars there there ways to do that have you been exploring that not really I mean I went down you know having an investor path for a little while last year and that was what I would have wanted them to help me out with and addition to a few other things and that I just I didn't like that direction I don't think I was ready for it and I didn't trust that what you know the VC said that he was bringing to the table would bring that you give up an awful lot in a situation like that have you considered borrowing the money well I haven't because I feel like I'm already like tapped on that I mean I have one of those idle loans and we're just not like even with our bank getting a line of credit raised even with our very greatly ear last year it seems to be a pain in the butt and I know that Jay often says oh you just need to walk into the corner bank with a PO from the government and they're going to give you a loan like no I've gone to many banks and they do not do that that may be how things used to be but you know I mean I could probably do some sort of friends and family loan you know and it could be potentially funded by a purchase that was big enough that it would be able to be kind of fortified with those features based on the size of the order right especially one of those Municipal orders I would think yeah Sarah how about you you have a a less Capital intensive business I you assume labor is a big percentage uh of your annual expenses what would you do with a million dollars I actually want to know what you would suggest I do like Liz and Lauren like what would you think I should do do with M million dollars and I rather hear your opinion that's not how this podcast Works Sarah I know but you know my business you know what I do I've chatted with you a billion times about it but like what would you do I you know I'd rather have an outside perspective I think that Lauren should answer first since you've spoken to Sarah dozens of times and I've only spoken to her four or five are are you at a point where you aren't aggressively seeking more clients because you feel you have as much work as your staff can handle if that's the case that suggests an obvious Direction you might think about that I mean obviously you don't have to spend it all at once let me ask you that do you have someone you consider a number two yeah um I do but there are different kinds of number twos like there's the person that knows where the bodies are buried and how how things operate and then there's the person I actually have two you know and then there's a person that I know that could run all the clients and they would be delighted so yeah so I have two number twos at some point I think you might want to be in a position where you have a true number two someone who can really be in charge of the business I don't see so the answer is I don't have good use for a whole million dollars I don't I'd love to redo my website right I'd love to do a little bit more um New Biz proactive hour Outreach you know and and creating a kind of a a pipeline that is consistent and yeah I'd love to have another person on staff to kind of help me you know devise all that but I don't know that that costs a million dollars I think I've mentioned before that most of our business comes from referral but you know we need to move beyond that and um you know I say okay I'm going to do it I'm going to work on I'm work then I get sidetracked and having somebody who's not sidetracked by things whose core Focus would be that would be lovely yes all right my thanks to Liz picarazzi and Sarah seagull and of course to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses Implement open book management and employee ownership 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 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 thubron founder of blank word word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]