This week, on episode 78, Jay Goltz, Diana Lee, and Dana White talk about how they manage their financials—what reports they get, what KPIs they track, and how they make sure the sales team isn’t going rogue. We also learn of a new wrinkle in Dana’s growth plan. She’s concluded that—along with rolling out franchises and installing hair salons on military bases from Texas to Germany to Okinawa—she also needs to create her own software platform to manage her salons. “Cha-ching,” responds Jay. Plus...
Sep 28, 2021•54 min
Every Monday, Loren Feldman and Gene Marks discuss the issues business owners should be monitoring. This week, Gene explains why Intuit’s purchase of Mailchimp is going to lead to you stop sending out your boring monthly newsletter. Plus: Are you still screening job candidates for drugs? Couldn’t the public companies that got PPP money have at least paid it back? And how technology is improving performance reviews.
Sep 27, 2021•18 min
This week, in episode 77, Jay Goltz and Diana Lee discuss the dangers of mixing entrepreneurship and parenting. Years ago, when Chris Rock was asked in an interview about his relationship with his children, he responded, “My kids are rich. I have nothing in common with them.” Obviously, that’s an extreme example, played for laughs by a comedian, but you don’t have to be a celebrity to wonder about the differences between your upbringing and your kids’ upbringing. As it happens, Jay and Diana wer...
Sep 21, 2021•41 min
Every Monday, Loren Feldman and Gene Marks discuss the issues business owners should be monitoring. This week, Gene explains why he’s changed his mind about the president’s vaccine mandate. Plus: how smaller businesses can compete with Amazon’s $3,000 signing bonus—and get the government to pay for it. How some restaurants take advantage of their tipped employees. And are we finally done with business cards?
Sep 20, 2021•20 min
This week, in episode 76, Stephanie Stuckey talks about how she’s been winning her biggest retail accounts for Stuckey’s candies without a sales pitch. She also explains her latest manufacturing snafu, which she calls, “the case of the squishy pecan log rolls.” Laura Zander, meanwhile, tells us about the supply chain challenges she’s faced getting products from China, Vietnam, and South Africa. Plus, she talks us through how her latest price increases have resulted in a doubling of orders.
Sep 14, 2021•35 min
Every Monday, Loren Feldman and Gene Marks discuss the issues business owners should be monitoring. This week: the president’s vaccine mandate, the expanded EIDL, mitigating inflation, preventing ransomware attacks, and getting creativity from a remote workforce.
Sep 13, 2021•24 min
This week, Karen Clark Cole, Paul Downs, and William Vanderbloemen start with a discussion of how 21 Hats might finally take the plunge into monetization. We also discuss Karen’s decision to forgo less-profitable revenue, William’s grand experiment of unplugging for seven weeks, and Paul’s attempt to balance personal and company responsibilities. Plus, we consider the impact of The Great Resignation, and we look for lessons to take from last week’s discussion about mental health.
Aug 31, 2021•40 min
Because our core group of business owners has been talking to each other pretty much every week since before the pandemic, we’ve gotten to know each other. We’ve come to trust each other. And as a result, our conversations sometimes take unexpected turns. This week, our conversation takes an unexpectedly dark turn. We start out talking about Laura Zander’s efforts to manage personnel conflicts and Dana White’s visits to potential salon sites on military bases and Jay Goltz’s bizarre battle with ...
Aug 24, 2021•49 min
This week, we have a very special episode. It’s the dog days of August, and the only regular available was Jay Goltz. So we reached out to a bunch of loyal listeners who we happen to know have listened to every episode of this podcast, and we asked them if there was more they wanted to know about Jay—or if they’d heard enough. It turned out, they had some great questions, including: What he thought of Dana’s “Jay” iImpression? What exactly he does all day (turns out, he’s not sure either)? How h...
Aug 17, 2021•50 min
This week, Paul Downs makes two seemingly contradictory points: One is that his business is on track to have its best year ever. The other is that he expects to claim another huge government subsidy, courtesy of the recently enhanced Employee Retention Tax Credit. As Paul says, if you don’t know about the ERTC or if you don’t know that its requirements have been relaxed, you probably should check it out. Meanwhile, Jay Goltz tells us what happened when three employees found out what the others w...
Aug 10, 2021•42 min
This week, we delve into some specific hiring situations, including Jay Goltz telling Diana Lee and Dana White that he thought he had two terrific candidates to replace his retiring chief financial officer. And then, after conversations with each of them, Jay had no candidates, which led us to some interesting questions: Has there been a more challenging time to hire for cultural fit? How risky is it for a smaller business to hire a candidate accustomed to working at larger businesses? And what ...
Aug 03, 2021•47 min
This week, Laura Zander, Diana Lee, and Dana White all share big news. Laura tells us that she and her husband/co-founder Doug put in a bid to buy a building for their business in Reno—and she’s not sure how she feels about the fact that their offer was accepted. Diana explains why she’s decided to pay a fortune to take over space vacated by glitzy magazine company Conde Nast in Manhattan’s Freedom Tower, a move that required her to put down a $2 million security deposit. And Dana tells us that ...
Jul 27, 2021•41 min
This week, we introduce a new regular on the 21 Hats Podcast team. Her name is Diana Lee, and she’s the founder of a digital marketing agency. In a conversation with Jay Goltz and Stephanie Stuckey, Diana explains how she got her business off the ground by helping car dealers target diverse communities within their markets, how she bootstrapped her business by convincing those car dealers to prepay 50-percent upfront, and how her first attempt at building a software platform ended with her spend...
Jul 20, 2021•49 min
When Dana White chose a name for her business, she decided she wanted a name that had meaning—both for her and for the women she hoped to reach. When Laura Zander picked a name for her business, she thought she was going to be selling coffee. And when Jay Goltz chose a name for his business, he very strategically chose the perfect name to rank well in—wait for it—the Yellow Pages. This week, Dana, Laura, and Jay talk about what they consider the most important decisions they made in building the...
Jul 13, 2021•41 min
This week, we talk about how much of success is making the right decisions. How much is being in the right place at the right time? And how much is just luck? “I think that's the thing nobody wants to talk about,” Paul Downs tells us, “because it implies that there's a lot to success that is out of the control of the entrepreneur, and we're much more attracted as human beings to stories of people who have agency and are like, ‘Oh, there's a problem. I did this, and I won.’ That's what we like to...
Jul 06, 2021•43 min
This week, we take another crack at some questions that don’t have definitive answers: Should business owners outsource their marketing or bring it in house? Either way, how do you know you’re picking the right agency or the right person? Is it possible to get someone great for what smaller businesses can afford to pay? Paul Downs tells us what happened when he hired a firm to audit his website. Dana White tells us why she dumped the agency she’d retained for $50,000. And Jay Goltz sums it up: W...
Jun 29, 2021•43 min
Once again this week, our business owners discuss things business owners don’t often talk about in public. Laura Zander says she feels guilty about taking vacations, about making more money than her employees, and about knowing that her husband is closer to their son than she is. Paul Downs says he recently reviewed 29 years of P&Ls and was reminded that he lost money in 18 of those years. He also explains why he routinely tells his employees (and us) precisely how much money he takes out of...
Jun 22, 2021•53 min
This week, Stephanie Stuckey tells Jay Goltz and Dana White about moving closer to the candy factory she recently bought to get a better feel for the people, the operation, and the challenges. Right now, those challenges include recruiting enough employees, absorbing increased supplier prices, and figuring out how much she should raise her own prices: “We can only give up so much of our margin, right?” she tells us. To which Jay responds, “Why give up any?” Plus: we talk about competing for labo...
Jun 15, 2021•43 min
This week, Dana White tells Paul Downs and Jay Goltz why she’s experiencing FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—over whether she’s really ready to sell franchises in Paralee Boyd. She’s concerned because her hair salon is having some issues with customer service. On the other hand, her head of operations, Ashley, is telling her, “If you wait to expand your business until every customer is happy and until everything is perfect, you will stay at one location for the next 50 years.” Plus, Paul resolve...
Jun 08, 2021•42 min
This week, Paul Downs, Jay Goltz, and Dana White talk about confronting inflation, raising their prices, what businesses owe their employees, and the venture-backed competitor who’s opening a store in Jay’s backyard. Among the questions we discuss are: Would you take back a rebound employee? Are unemployment payments the main reason owners are struggling to fill jobs? Is there anything wrong with taking business from another business? How many companies are truly disruptive? And do owners take a...
May 18, 2021•48 min
Is your office open? Is everyone coming back? Or are you going hybrid? Is everyone getting vaccinated? Are you offering them incentives to get vaccinated? When do the masks come off? Are you having a problem filling jobs? Have you had to increase what you pay? Paul Downs tells us, “The people who really seem to want the job and are enthusiastic about it don't have the skill-set. And the people with the skill-set don't seem to actually care about completing the process. So we did hire one guy who...
May 11, 2021•41 min
This week, Jay Goltz, William Vanderbloemen, and Dana White discuss whether Jason Fried, the embattled co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, has displayed courageous leadership or lost his you-know-what. Widely admired for building a tech company that didn’t take venture capital and didn’t pursue growth for growth’s sake, Fried is co-author of a book called It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. All of which made it somewhat disorienting last week when things did indeed get crazy at Basecamp. It started...
May 04, 2021•45 min
This week’s conversation with Paul Downs, Jay Goltz, and William Vanderbloemen was supposed to be about how the pandemic has affected sales strategies—and for a while it was. But it seemed Paul, Jay, and William really wanted to talk public relations. They talked about how to get PR and how to assess the results. They compared the merits of public relations to those of advertising. And they discussed whether you need to hire a firm or whether you can do it yourself. One concern all three shared ...
Apr 27, 2021•45 min
In this week’s conversation with Karen Clark Cole, Jay Goltz, and Stephanie Stuckey, we once again unearth more questions than answers—mostly because there are rarely one-size-fits-all answers to the questions we discuss. This week, those questions include: Can you be friends with your employees? Can you work with your family? How are you coping with price increases in your supply chain? How do you handle shipping—especially given the example set by Amazon? Are refrigerated trucks really called ...
Apr 20, 2021•41 min
This week, Dana White informs Jay Goltz and Stephanie Stuckey that she has begun the process of franchising her hair salons across the country, and perhaps the world. Why did she choose to franchise? As she explains, she does have concerns about controlling the culture in franchised locations, but she believes this is her best opportunity to grow. Interestingly, when Stephanie took over Stuckey’s in 2019, she bought a franchise business that she says had lost control of its franchisees, which is...
Apr 13, 2021•42 min
This week with Paul Downs, William Vanderbloemen, and Laura Zander, the talk leaps from one plague to another—floods, power outages, cyber crime, employee churn, supplier price hikes, and vanished shipping containers—not to mention the actual plague. For Laura, whose wholesale yarn business keeps falling further behind on its orders, these events have necessitated a series of difficult conversations with customers: “They can't get mad about the pandemic,” she tells us. “And they're not going to ...
Apr 06, 2021•40 min
This week, Jay Goltz tells Dana White and Laura Zander why he can’t stop starting businesses. In recent years, for example, he’s considered buying other picture -frame shops, he’s bought a firehouse that he thought he might turn into an event space (or a dog kennel), and he’s fantasized about opening an ice cream shop. “I have a whole list of businesses I'm not starting,” says Jay, who has been down this road so many times he’s developed a five-point test for whether he should proceed. And now h...
Mar 30, 2021•44 min
This week, Stephanie Stuckey tells Paul Downs and Jay Goltz about seeking the guidance and perspective that a board of directors could bring to Stuckey’s. But does a business have to be a certain size to warrant having a board? How do you recruit board members? How should they be compensated? And is a peer group, like Vistage, a better alternative? Plus: Uncovering a $140,000 cyber crime. Coping with the nightmare of shipping furniture. And Jay tells us why, if you listen to either the artists o...
Mar 23, 2021•43 min
Should Stephanie Stuckey sell pecans on Amazon? Should Laura Zander wholesale yarn to discounters? Should Jay Goltz’s businesses be active on Pinterest? (Assuming Jay knows what Pinterest is.) This week we cover those issues, plus whether the owners are ready for an economic boom and how Laura made the painful decision to fire several employees she inherited when she bought her wholesale yarn business in Texas. “You have to do it,” says Jay. “And it doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a ...
Mar 16, 2021•50 min
This week, we talk about what we were thinking a year ago as the contours of this crisis began to emerge. It was this week that the W.H.O. declared a pandemic, the NBA suspended its season, and toilet paper started to disappear. It has all taken a toll. “This is where it gets tricky,” Jay Goltz tells us. “Just because everybody shows up every day and looks like they're happy-go-lucky, they're not. People have stresses in their life, whether it's their kids, whether it's their aging parents, whet...
Mar 09, 2021•41 min
