What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Business

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul Downs Jennifer Karen and Liz picarazzi discuss the challenges couples face when one spouse is building a business Liz says it was important to let her husband know that she spent years working on a business plan before leaving her corporate job to start her first business Paul explains why when times have been tough he hasn't always shared the bad news with his wife and Jennifer says too many couples planning for one spouse to start a business focus on best case scenarios rather than the more likely worst case scenarios she also suggests some important questions for couples to ask themselves including this one will she still have faith in him if the business fails plus businesses fail all the time of course and Paul explains why he thinks it's usually for one of three reasons and 4 years after the pandemic arrived we take a look back what was each owner's toughest this moment what was their best decision how have their business models changed 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 wi 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 of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul down CEO of Paul Down's cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables Jennifer Karen who is CEO of SB Expos and events an events management business that serves trade associations and is based near Baltimore and Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins the episode is titled What to Expect When You're Expecting a business but before we get started I want to play a snippet of an interview I did with Mike Cassy who is CEO of total solutions group an architecture and engineering firm in Central Florida this is one of a series of interviews I'm doing for our sponsor the great game of business with business owners who practice open book management I asked Mike if he's had to raise wages in recent years especially given that his competitors tend to let their people work remotely a practice Mike refers to somewhat skeptically as quote unquote working from home here's what he told me yeah so this cost us more money I to you know to hire people now uh which really shouldn't uh in the industry uh but people people are using that uh you know that little carrot out there that if you come with us you can be remote yada yada y you know and so uh we just try to bring them in you know and talk to them about our culture and how we run our business with open book management and one of you know the big questions we ask you know most the uh recruits that we get in here is that as any other company that you ever worked for or the other companies that you may interview with will actually show you a p&l you know every Tuesday during their huddle and of course you know the answer to that and is no you know and so we let them know Well you know you get to know the health of our company you know every week you don't have to guess whether you know we're making money or not making money so we think that kind of helps on our recruiting side how much value do you think potential recruits put on you know that transparency versus the the potential of I guess you probably have a waiting period toward becoming an employee owner right well yeah there's a vesting period you know in that but uh and even a short term you know 90 days or so before they could participate you know in our companywide bonus plan we have but it does kind of open their eyes you know they they don't you know you see see them take taken back a little bit when we tell them that you know we're we're actually showing them a p&l you know so we think it has a little bit to do with it so yeah how about when you're talking about somebody who has an offer to work somewhere else remotely do you do you have a sense of um is there a price that you could put on that do you how much more do you have to pay to convince somebody to come into an office well you know I don't know that answer Lauren but I'll tell you that uh we did have one applicant come in last year for us very very talented architect and you know we we put her through the whole interview process and then of course told her about the open book management and our bonus plan and and how we operate and she was still pretty adamant about you know working remote and we just said well you know that's just not going to happen you know but she's been here for a year now so you know she she saw the value and she was smart enough to understand the the total value that coming to work for us and what value that has you can read a text version of my entire interview with Mike Cassy at 21h hats.com and now on to Today's Show [Music] welcome Paul Jennifer and Liz it is great to have you here we've just passed the 4-year anniversary of the uh arrival of covid and the pandemic in our conversations here we we often note that much has changed since then but we rarely go back and talk about the upheaval that Co brought at the time and with with that in mind I'd like to ask each of you three questions one what was the most difficult moment for your business business two what was the best decision you made during that period and three how's your business model different today than it was four years ago anybody want to go first I'll go um I remember hearing the news that Italy was kind of closing its doors and shutting down and going huh and then when I heard the NBA canceled their season I was like oh this is for Real and then shortly after that I realized that in a world people staying home the likelihood that they're buying huge conference tables is going to go way down and that was my worst moment thinking that the business we do is simply just going to be shut down like no one will want my product ever again if nobody's going into an office there's no need to buy a conference table right and fortunately I was completely incorrect about that last one our business went down about 20% in 2020 but actually March and April were the two best months of the year we continued to get orders and what changed about my business model was nothing except the clientele has changed a lot that nowadays we do a lot less of customers in the Northeast sort of the Boston New York Washington corter with the exception of government but the Private Industry in that area has really slowed down and we've seen significant growth in a set of clients who are from Western States Southern States but also ideologically more conservative in other words people who did not react to the pandemic first of all they didn't react at all for the first couple of months and second of all there has been an emphasis I think in other client Els of of just like Hey we're going to continue with our office life the way it was and so yeah I never really had a terrible moment because as soon as PPP came along and I got some of that money I never was short of money for the next three and a half years so it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be but in March yeah it was pretty crazy Paul you've Spoken Here uh in the past that a lot of people told you initially when you were concerned about your business falling off that you should get into the business of making tables for people setting up home offices everybody who talking about the pandemic pivot you came to the conclusion that you should not make one of those pivots was that your best decision I think that was a good decision it's a decision that I've had to make continuously for the last 30 years which is we have a shop that's got a lot of tools in it that could be making a lot of different things and the constraint is not what you can make but whether you can shoulder your way into a functioning dist distribution Channel and then compete with the people who are already in that channel and as it turns out custom conference tables is not a heavily populated Channel there just aren't very many people who can do it whereas when Co came along all the people who had been doing home offices suddenly had a bonanza but it was going to be I mean I suspected and I still believe that it was going to be very difficult for me to Pivot into that space because most of the people who suddenly needed a home office are not necessarily the demographic we serve when we're making things so I'm not going to be able to compete for and deliver a $400 sit stand desk I just can't do it and that's what looked to me like the main Market was going to be for the next year is people trying to spend their own money to outfit their own home office and that's a much more budget constrained customer than I normally have Liz Jennifer yeah sure so when I look at my most difficult moment it was the feeling of quicksand or of spinning my wheels that I had for probably 8 to 12 weeks when covid first hit and we were in lockdown so my business my sales went down very quickly I had a very large shipment of inventory that had just come over that was about to be put into a warehouse where I didn't have a very good relationship um to be nice with the warehouse owner he tried to extort me before putting all of the bins in the warehouse basically raised the price on me and that was really difficult because I knew that I wasn't going to be selling that many of those bins and I was going to have to start paying rent on all of them and it was a huge amount of money one thing I remember from that time is attending seemingly endless webinars with banks chamber of Commerce the SBA The Business Library like you name it every webinar that was available I went to because I had it in my mind that there was some bit of information I would hear about PPP that was going to put me at an advantage when it came time to apply that turned out not to be the case um when PPP checks first went out and I was not in the first tranch as most small businesses were not I was really devastated and so I can remember I think it was the Saturday after those first checks went to like Shake Shack ruce Chris I know that the treasury secretary Stephen manan's wife who had a business painting pictures of his ties that he wore to you know big meetings in the White House or wherever it was he went he tried to use that as example of how well PPP was going and that made me literally Hyer erical like crying hysterical I was so bothered by that whole thing and then really the last draw was I felt like with my bank and with other financial institutions I was not getting the responsiveness that I wanted I was feeling sort of desperate and I remember one day not being able to log into the bank because I had like forgotten my password or my password was changed and suddenly like I just had no access to get into my finances and I had to just unplug like for a week completely like I had a complete breakdown okay I'm now in the bad spot and the worst part of it I also had laid off my small team of employees so once PPP came around I hired them all back luckily as we headed into later in spring and summer people started thinking more about their trash when they're at home they're working from home they've got their kids at home if you see mountains of trash out front some that's not being picked up you're going to think about it more so our sales went straight up um we sold through everything that we had in the warehouse and um you know it ended up being really positive but for a little bit of that time I felt doom and I felt like I was in quicksand and for an entrepreneur that as we're all used to trying to solve problems and get past them I felt like nothing that I did was going to help the situation and that was a feeling of powerlessness that I don't know I guess entrepreneurs don't feel that as as much as the average person because we're optimistic about what we can do was there any particular decision you made that you look back on and think was an important right call yeah so one of them was to like look at this Municipal Market that I'm now in in a way that was very sort of long-term and strategic thinking so shortly before lockdown there was an article in the New York Times about how Department of Sanitation was going to be rolling out a big trash containerization effort and I zeroed in on that and I was like there's a huge Market here and I'm going to go after it then when Co hit that whole program and many others shut down but I kept my eye on that and we actually built a couple of web pages devoted to containerizing New York City street trash for a program that didn't even really exist yet and we had that kind of program and the marketing for it locked and loaded for when things got back up and running in that City program was resuscitated we were ready to go for it and that was sort of a decision that when I took it I think my team was like oh this is so speculative is this thing really a thing you know it was just in the paper and that was it and that decision was probably one of the best that I've ever made and it was just the optimism that that opportunity I saw preco would come back into play and it did and that reflects the the changes in your business model since then as well I would think it definitely does so probably I would say over half of our businesses now with cities and municipalities and not just in New York so that was a gigantic shift um seeing customers where I previously didn't see them so for the first almost 10 years of City bin I didn't really think of cities as a potential customer just didn't really cross my mind it was so focused on homeowners and so that was gigantic change um to our business model definitely for the positive and that's really where my biggest growth areas now so Jennifer you're in the event business I'm guessing you had a difficult moment uh in the early days it did but when I hear Liz's story I think our outcome was in in many ways similar uh the event industry shut down pretty quickly and we spent the first four months refunding millions of dollars from exhibitors and attendees and at that time I definitely thought my company was probably going to be gone if this extended for a year but in the similar ways with Liz said and maybe a little bit of Paul we leaned into the technology aspect of virtual events and virtual conventions in our association clients became a big thing and so instead of a lot of Meeting Planners out there so threw up their hands we definitely leaned into the technology and we have had exponential growth since then in a whole not a new market it's the same clients but a new service and so CO as much as I hated it those first four months it opened up all sorts of possibilities for us it also made me stronger as a CEO that whole phrase is you know adversity can make you stronger unless it kills you and I really thought it was going to kill me but it has made me a much better CEO by living through that time is there anything in particular you would point to I think the prioritization right the prioritization of um what's on fire right now what needs to be done and then the taking advantage of an opportunity and so simultaneously dealing with a fire as well as seeing okay once that Fire's put out what's our next steps so in the present dealing with the present but then also looking a year down the road we had um a war room every every morning because it was events were just you know going away every second and and bringing the top leaders into that war room every morning figure out and getting rid of the fires and then setting a plan for the future It's Made Me much stronger as a CEO with events closing what was the purpose of the War Room what fires were you putting out so there's a lot of contracts you can't just cancel an event when you have 5,000 people coming to a city what happens to that contract what happens to the people who spent their registration dollars to get there or the exhibitors to get there what do they do what if they Shi their equipment and sitting in a warehouse so even though the events were cancelled there's still a significant financial component to unraveling that so when when customers are booking are they depositing money with you you said you had to deposit uh refund millions of dollars do you generally have an enormous amount of cash that you no no it goes into our association um's bank account but were the conduit the information the customer service the communication to the exhibitors so the association clients it was in their bank account but we had to figure out how it was going to be done how much it was let's say you paid $1,000 for a booth but you had only sent in the deposit which was a th000 it was a full amount can we roll that over to next year can we convince you that let's keep this money for next year it's a cancellation term so it wasn't our money at and no stretch of it was the our client's money but walking through that process and trying to get as many people was possible to roll over to next year was a big part of those first few months for us how many did I mean I would have been like hell no who knows what's going on most exhibitors did really most exhibitors wow I guess everybody was happy the PPP showed up if you're not scrambling for every dollar back I think it was more that they had already accounted for spending that money and so they didn't know what the future looked like so they thought well they're still going to exhibit they might as well just put it in the future cuz who knows if they would get funding to exhibit next year was there any particular decision you made Jennifer that you look back on and think was particularly good one the technology aspect by far virtual conventions are here to stay especially with ones that are education and nature trade shows are perfect places for exhibitors but also if there's a significant education component to the conference is they have gone into a hybrid State and now we have really we've built an entire department to provide technological services that had not existed before him I think that might surprise some people in the sense you know events are back people are going to conferences why has virtual continued to be an important part of what you offer so if you think about the average Association let's say they have X amount of members and they might have anywhere from 2% to 20% that come to the event there is a significant portion of an association's membership that can't always get to an event and it's for all sorts of reasons budget is one part of it but that's not the only part there are many reasons why people can't get to a a meeting and so an association by its nature is trying to fulfill obligations to all of its members and so if you have an in-person event fantastic but but then if it's education especially if it's Ed accredited education you can reach a whole section of your membership that maybe you didn't know how to do before and especially with the rise of Dei initiatives there is all sorts of Equitable aspects to a virtual conference for people who are unable to get to an in-person event that doesn't take away from the Fantastic elements of an in-person event the networking that face to face that you just can't duplicate the exhibit hall floor but the educational side really helps um support Dei initiatives of associations and so the virtual convention side when it comes to the educational components are still moving it's a startup in the events industry basically because it didn't exist until a couple years ago and it continues I find that so fascinating Jennifer because you're saying like between two and 20% of a membership would go to a trade show every year what about those other 80% that also want to get those accreditation or those education credits if they didn't have the money or for whatever reason they couldn't go then do they just wait until the next year to hopefully be able to take those classes now they have the opportunity to do it virtually so I would just think there's so much more inclusion in this absolutely it's it's really very impressive and pretty exciting too and associations have years had some sort of accredited education like a library they had some sort of Zoom meeting like a webinar webinar have been around for a while right the issue is at a conference you are creating incredible content and it's only getting consumed once the keynote speakers the motivational speakers the day-to-day practical key um concurrent session speakers that now doesn't have to only be consumed once you can capture that content that's what we call capture content and use it again and again throughout the year for the members who couldn't make it pretty cool can you in any way quantify for us jennif for how big a portion of your business you see the virtual side of things being going forward I think it could take over the size of my company it could by far go over my current annual reviews now honestly it's it's a whole section that I have not leaned into enough from a marketing standpoint this is one of my for the past couple years is as you wear so many hats you can't wear them all at the same time sometimes and so I have focused on infrastructure the last two years sales has G but I think if I put some more money and it's coming into marketing that department could take over the entire size of my company right now well thank you I I think you you kind of made the point that I was hoping we would make which is that even a horrific event like uh the pandemic can lead to all kinds of unexpected outcomes and many of them oddly positive which I think is the case for all three of you so let's move to another topic I read an interesting question that I saw posted on the small business subreddit and I I was intrigued by it and wanted to hear what you guys think let me read it to you it has to do with people who are spouses of entrepreneurs the question is my fiance will start a business some point after we get married I'm highly risk averse how can we build in resiliency and communication during the tough startup years my fiance and I have been together almost 4 years years and are planning for the future he's an incredibly business savvy engineer with a life dream to start a business everything he does is well researched and thought out I Am Naturally risk averse my life goals are less ambitious and more in the here and now but we have dreams together so the two sets of questions the first one is how can couples set a business up legally to protect their personal finances particularly the finances of a spouse that is not legally involved things like setting up an LLC avoiding sole proprietorship putting pre or postnups in place anybody have any uh advice on that on that particular question well we're not lawyers so I don't know but uh I didn't do any of that stuff if that's helpful I I mean on the face of it a lot depends on what phase of life you're in when you start a business I started when I was very very young and had basically nothing dragging me down I wasn't even married although I was living with my girlfriend the time we later got married so I started a business kind of on a whim and it all worked out but if these people are viewing their marriage as a merging of two asset classes you might put it uh then sure I think it's it's important that they Define what's hers what's his what's theirs and consult with lawyers to make sure that if the business fails then it doesn't spill over anywhere where it doesn't need to be and I think also that communication wise if he's going to be committing his assets or possibly their Assets in order to get lines of credit or anything that needs to be a discussion between the two of them and I mean I would also I have never reached this point myself but I think that there needs to be some discussion going into it as to what failure looks like so you know when the day arrives and you can pull the plug at that point but I think I'm going to defer to my co- uh podcasters here CU I think both of them have much better experience with this than I the followup questions she has that I want to get to are about communication which Paul touched on do either of you Liz or Jennifer have anything to say about kind of the infrastructure aspect of this how you set things up no no we can move to communication for me unless Liz does yeah I think I can touch on this but I want to hear what Jennifer has to say first oh okay well let let me read the question about communication how do couples with a business owner spouse manage hard discussions about finances and difficult times particularly during that hard initial grinding year period Well I'll I'll take this question I think the person that ask the question is in the throws of excitement they are about to get married there's nothing more exciting than the engagement and honeymoon period the fiance is also about to start a business there's nothing more exciting than the thrill of starting on your own those two are a recipe for disaster for an honest conversation the passion and excitement will meet the brick wall of reality pretty soon and so what I would suggest to them is to talk to someone that has had a business fail and have an open honest conversation what I've heard people say is oh well in a couple I'll work now I'm going to work really hard but you'll have the day-to-day job with the health insurance and in a couple years we'll be able to figure stuff out and then we'll have enough money and don't worry we'll take the vacation then well that's best case scenario I want to hear worst case scenario I want them to have a conversation if you put all of your money instead of let's say you don't buy that house after the wedding and you put that money in the business and in 2 years from now that business goes bankrupt how you going to feel about your spouse is your marriage going to be strong enough to survive it what are you willing to do to keep that marriage alive don't think of best case scenario cuz we all want to live in best case scenario think about the the worst case scenario so that's my advice Liz yeah so when I started my business I had kind of sketched it out I had a business plan for it a couple of years before I left corporate and part of that was that I wanted my husband to see that I was prepared to launch the business that I wasn't just doing it impulsively so he had a couple of years to see my passion for what I wanted to do and to see the business plan so when the time came for me to be able to leave corporate you know I I had a severance I had unemployment that I was able to get at that point he saw it as this is your opportunity to go for it because we have this runway in front of us so it was kind of an easier decision if I had just decided to leave corporate to start a handyman company which sounds insane even now when I look back on it he would definitely not have gone along with it we probably didn't talk about worst case scenario and I could have had that because my first business I ended up selling and getting out of very quickly but there still was a messiness in closing that whole operation down that was definitely a strain on the marriage you know there was still some money involved even though I had sold it and that was a really trying period the lucky part of it was that the reason that I sold the first business was to focus on City bin my current business and that was doing well so the conversation wasn't like this thing shut down what are you going to do now it was oh it's a good thing you had this other thing going when the first one you know imploded you know and then current Communications as everyone knows my husband Frank is my coo so we talk continually about this as we grow the stakes definitely seem higher you know taking on higher like line of credit buying inventory in a much larger quantity that's Al always a big part of tension for us because he is risk averse and I'm like we need to prepare for Success stop you know having a mindset of preparing for failure Frank and that's probably a tension we're always going to have but I think we understand why the other has that perspective more than we would have a couple of years ago do you think it's a healthy tension that gets you into the right place I think so yeah there's a lot of angst there can be a lot of angst because you don't want to think that your spouse is preparing for failure and if I really boil it down when he's being risk averse in my mind I take it sort of personally and think that's what's going on but it's really he's just being protective of the life we have you know the house that we have which yes is mortgaged you know against our big Idol loan but it's a big tension and I have to say it doesn't work for many many couples regardless of whether you work together it's a very big area where a marriage can fall apart and it is really important for this you know person on Reddit to to have their eyes open the second part of uh This Woman's question is what do couples where The spouse's business failed wish they would have done differently in terms of communicating with each other Paul happily your business did not fail but you've been very open about how tough it was around the time of the Great Recession you wrote about it in the New York Times you wrote book that was largely about it can you tell us anything about uh how you handled that in your marriage at the time sure one thing about my marriage is that all that was really bad but it's not by any means the worst thing that's ever happened to me so my wife and I have a very severely autistic son and that's just a constant Challenge and we've been able to turn that challenge into something that binds us together so the business failing was a distressing prospect but you know it wasn't how can I explain this it just never got to the point where it was actually the worst thing because it didn't fail but we had over the years like we've been together for a long time we just settled into a pattern of how to be married that didn't require how to put this we didn't require any continuing Assurance on my part that the business was going to be this or that and part of that is because it started as just an effort to be a a a reasonably successful artisan and it quickly grew beyond that but Nancy's roots and and my roots in business are very humble and she just she just was not so worried about I or at least I I didn't feel that she was worried about a moment where uh income was down or whatever because a she grew up in a household where that happened a bunch of times and be we'd had a lot of years prior to them when I was starting the business where just really didn't make much money and we just got used to not having money um so I think that it was tough to explain to her every every little in andout of what was happening in the business and I just didn't do it but we skirted disaster so I never really had to confront the consequences of whatever I was doing at the time Paul you and I met because you sent me an email when I was at the New York Times saying that uh you would like to write for the small business blog that I was editing and you thought you could provide a different perspective because you were running a business that was headed toward bankruptcy at the time you wrote that email to me did Nancy know that you felt you were headed toward bankruptcy I don't know I didn't explicitly say to her that way like at the time I wrote that email which was mid December of 2009 we'd already been through a pretty tough year she knew it was bad but she's not somebody who can really listen to the minute by minute oh here's how much money we have in the bank account and I think that that's partially because as I said she grew up in a household where there were some pretty lean periods and it would just be distressing for her and and the other thing is when you have a child with special needs one of the things you learn is that something happened to you right it just happened and then you deal with it and so with the impending bpcy I could see it coming but at the end of the day it did not happen so we never really had to get down and and and deal with it as the biggest problem of the moment because uh we just got out of it and it just made it possible for me in my marriage to to get through that without having that Frank conversation now that's my experience my wife my situation and I would never P that out is hey if your if your business is failing you should do what Paul did don't do what I did I not a not a good role model in this case so I think you should ask the the other podcasters I just thought of a situation when Frank was not in the business it was in my first business and I was really struggling I felt really lonely I felt like no one understood I was the boss no one understood me and I remember really I came up with this idea he was in corporate maybe he could work with me one day a week and kind of see what are the things I'm dealing with and be able to help or advise or at least know what's going on and really very forcefully asking for him to do that and he said no you know I need to focus on this job where we're getting the paycheck we're getting the health insurance it's paying for our life in New York City and he didn't want to do that and um you know I understand it but it also shows me now that we do work together all the time I don't feel lonely in the business everything that we're going through we're going through together and I needed to feel more supported um it wasn't that he was being unsupportive before but we just had our life structured in a way that he couldn't just tell his employer oh I'm going to go help my wife with her business one day a week which I thought would be an acceptable proposal to an employer and now I know that it's not but that was something just through talking about this I remember that the feeling of like oh I need to pull him in just a little bit so he understands more of what I'm going through a couple specific questions uh to give this person some really specific feedback one is if the company fails who's responsible to payback if there's any debt is this an assumption that the meritable couple will do it together or that the person who had the business business it's their responsibility second is how soon after it fails is the expectation that that person who's a business owner would get a job right and and not necessarily I don't mean like a employment but to bring in other cash whether that just means taking catering gigs on the weekend to bring in cash what's that expectation of a time period is it a month is it two years until they get their feet on the ground to start a new business you know everybody's different three is expectations of changes in lifestyle most businesses that fail at this level your lifestyle is probably going to change dramatically are you on the same path of well we still need to take that luxury vacation on the cruise or do we need to cancel it and then the final one I would say is where's the health insurance coming from if the health insurance is from the spouse that's not the business owner and they had expectations to do something of themselves another job stay home with children right there's all sorts of reasons is to relook at that because health insurance is a serious aspect in the marital side when a person wants to start a company and who's going to provide that so I would think those are just a couple questions I would have them really talk through it's something that um yeah I think that that would help them if the business failed those are great questions I guess another one would be do you believe in the husband's ability to start a business that I mean without knowing the particulars of this person's situation it's really hard to answer it because any answer that's generic just can't really account for the particulars of a couple a business an existing situation what the future looks like but you know like if you're risk averse and and the husband's like okay I'm a practicing engineer but I want to start a hot air balloon tourist company or something that he knows nothing about like that to me would be very important one thing that I enjoyed over the years is that my wife has never doubted that I could do a reasonable job in my business maybe when I very first opened it but we had no no mortgage or anything at that point didn't really matter if I failed but by the time we got to having kids uh the business was not particularly successful but she just had basic faith that I wanted to work every day I worked hard I tried you know I was reasonably good at what I was doing the business was growing even if it was slow and it wasn't very profitable so having someone who has faith in you is pretty important to success and just being able to manage the stress so I I would hope that this person who asked the question basically has faith in their partner that they can get through this and that the the marriage won't suffer because of it well Paul the interesting question is if she does have faith right she's in that honeymoon phas she not quite near at Mary but she's lovey-dovey oh I love him we're going to get married and he can start a business she's not thinking as smart as old married people like ourselves but the better question is will she still have faith in him if the business fails right what if it fails how does she look at him as a husband then afterwards well I can give her some advice for that which is having written for the times and heard from a lot of people whose businesses failed I came up with a theory of of why businesses fail and there's kind of three things the first thing is could fail because you just make boneheaded decisions you know like whatever you the business you wanted to start isn't all that smart or you you're bad at running a business the second thing is if the vast forces of the economy are against you you could do everything right and still get crushed and then the last thing is just luck that you could do everything right and have a Tailwind from the way the econom is going and just get hit by a bus one day so those three things are always at mix in any any given business story totally agree Paul yet so many marriages fail because of money and so the advice I would give that that woman is that you're exactly right Paul businesses can fail for a wide multitude of reasons that doesn't have to do with the character of the man you're marrying and so remember that because money should not be a reason in my opinion that people divorce but that's my personal thought just to keep that in mind for her in the future I got another thought potentially for her and that's is there any way her husband can test his business concept without leaving a job so is there any way he can take on a couple of clients that demonstrate and work through things and see is this viable because that could give her confidence in watching that that he can do it that's a great idea Liz great idea or like Moonlighting like I remember I did a little bit of Moonlighting before I left corporate and one thing I did was like instead of renting a big office somewhere I literally rented like a quarter of a desk at a shared workspace so it was low commitment in terms of rent but it put me in a discipline of well if I'm paying rent at that place I better get my business moving along and I was Moonlighting it but there could be ways for him to demonstrate where he's going with it without it being about should I leave my job or not you guys have provided some great advice here as I knew you would uh we're almost out of time I want to hit one more topic before we go which is uh Jennifer in uh emails before uh we gathered today you indicated that you're planning a staff Retreat and that you're excited about it I'm curious uh what you've got in the works yeah it's uh it's pretty cool for us we are a fully remote company and there is a lot of conversations out there in the small business world is how do you manage culture in a fully remote one now for us it's a little bit different because we go to different cities to travel for our conferences and trade shows so we get to see people but still there is something missing for face to face and so we are planning our first ever full staff Retreat 4 days at the wonderful National Conference Center in leeburg Virginia we're very excited for the different we've hired a facilitator we've hired Consultants to come in to do training we're doing a AR challenge where they're going to be competing against each other just the combination of in-person training and networking and collaboration as much as I love remote work I'm never going back to have an office uh I think that face to face is still needed and I'm pretty excited about it when is it it is in June well I hope we don't have another pandemic before that well and you know when you were in we were in person before the pandemic and so we had daily long like staff training but nothing like where we flew people in from different states to do four days of training so afterwards I'll tell you how it went you just explained that it's you're not like uh other remote companies and that you do gather from time to time at the events that you put on do you have people who haven't met each other though absolutely I have three people I've never met in person wow and they'll be there in leeburg they will they absolutely will what's the culinary challenge the center offers this but they give you different fruits and vegetables and you have to create a transportation type vehicle something on Wheels I guess and then you have to push it I guess which one goes farthest I don't know fun team building yeah it's just fun and then the next day we're doing a Mexican night where each teams have to make a Ceviche and a guacamole and then we're testing it who's is the best so just different team building things around food exciting stuff testing people who don't have experience working with raw fish is uh an interesting challenge I thought she was going to say they give you a cow and then you have to come no nothing quite elaborate just something fun to create a sense of a little bit of maybe departmental competition and pride across the Departments really just a chance for face to face that's both training and collaboration and and the best part about this Center is it's allinone the D is the food is part of the entire like hotel combination so you're really in an enclosed space not enclosed huge but you're in one area and hopefully that will breed a lot of collegiality I guess sure yeah we will be eager to hear how it goes uh especially the uh the cevich my thanks to Paul DS Jennifer Karen Liz picarazzi and as always to my sponsor the great game of business 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 Len at21 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]