Patching Together a Quilting Empire

on YouTube. The family has turned Hamilton, Missouri into this like Disneyland for quilters, and their quilt shop, The Missouri Star Quilt Company has grown to over one hundred million dollars a year in revenue. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Alne. My name is Aldone, and I worked for the Missouri Star Quilt Company. What are you now, chairman or something? Were you trying not to say chairman? Oh? I am the yeah, yeah, Okay.

My name is Aldone. I'm the executive chairman of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. The Missouri Star Quilt Company sells quilting supplies on the Internet. Square's a fabric batting zewing machines. But the story of the company is not really about quilting. It's about how to combine low tech and high tech to build a wildly successful brand. So I'll tell you that the story starts with me a long time ago. No,

it actually it started with my mom. And my mom's a cool mom, like she's she's great mom's mom's a big goofball, right, Like she's the funnest mom to have because everything's everything's fun and a game to her, Like we're broke our whole lives. But I never knew it because it was always let's see what we can get for twenty eight dollars. If food for less, We're all right, kids, go look and we're gonna find it. Like so we

come out with like with like nothing. But but for us, it was a great adventure and off we were going. And so that's sort of mom's style, right, She's just

everything's a game, everything's fun, everything's an adventure. And and so like when when I'm in business with her, now, that's a great person to have by your side when you're trying to figure it out, right, And when we started doing this quilt company, we started this quilt company, and it was you know, it wasn't supposed to be The quilt company was supposed to be a cute little side business to help mom pay for the house because Dad was working for the newspaper and we were all

afraid he was going to lose his job, which which if he would have stayed there, he definitely would have. Right, Well was he doing at the paper. He's a machinist and so he worked. Yeah, he worked for the Kansas City Star, just fixing presses and stuff. And like my parents were terrible with money. Uh they well I don't know if they were terrible with money or they just never add any money. But it sort of went hand in hand. And so we started this company just thinking, hey,

it'll help mom. Mom can chip in a few bucks to help pay for the house. And because it was such a low impact effort, we were actually able to start it. Otherwise, like if we needed revenues and monies and stuff I'll put together to get into this, we would have never done it. We shouldn't have done it. Two questions, what were you doing for your day job at the time? End, Like why quilts? So I came out of college and took a job with the Semantic Corporation.

So I'm like a nerdy tech guy. I really liked that space. And then in two thousand and eight they fired or laid off me and twenty thousand of my closest friends, and for the first time in my life, I was without a job. And then why quilts? So my mom took up quilting when all us kids left. Right, when you're used to seven kids at home, you got a lot on your plate. And all of the sudden she found herself with nothing to do. And mom went over to the Votech College, you know, a next town

over from us. They were doing a class on like making a log cabin quilt, and she just fell in love with it. It's an art form, right, it's an expression. It's all the great cool stuff, and then at its core you're making something to keep you warm, which is this very practical thing. And so I called her one time, and she had been making these quilts and she had taken one into our local quilters. And when I say,

when I say a quilter, this is the person. When you make a quilt, you sew a bunch of pieces of fabric together and you have a very thin, big piece of fabric now, and the quilting, the process of quilting is taking that fluffy middle stuff we call it batting, and then the backing and you sandwich all that together and stitch around it so it doesn't come part that

process we call quilting. And so she took her quilt in to get it quilted, and just like the last step, and you need a machine or something that your mom didn't have for that. Yeah, it's a big, like forty thousand dollar sewing machine. It's got a big throat on it, so we can get all the way into the quilt and do all that stuff. Okay, And so she took it into this lady and the lady said, great, I'm backed up about a year. I'll get it back to you.

Let s see it a year. And I was like, man, there's nothing on this planet Earth that needs to take it. You can build a house in eight months if you want to. So she she was relaying this story to me, and I said, if I bought you the machine, could you do this? She said, yeah, I think I could figure it out. And called my sister and the like. That was my market research and so you bought your mom the machine? Did it work? Was that? Oh? Yeah, yeah, okay,

Uh yeah we did. We bought mom the machine. Uh you know, took out a second mortgage on my sister's house because she had she had assets. I was still single and had nothing to my name at the time. And because we're in the middle of nowhere, right Like your world doesn't have this up in real cities, but out here, we bought an old five thousand square foot auto showroom for twenty four thousand dollars and then a

quilt machine for thirty six thousand dollars. So for a total mortgage payment of like four hundred dollars a month, we had a full business ready to go. And uh we all all the kids chipped in and like we fixed up the building and we we got it all set up, and then mom was ready to start quilting. And we opened the doors and there's nobody right there's it's it's sort of a very underwhelming opening a quilt shop in a town of a thousand people. Uh it's

it's not as cool as you're imagining. But uh, but we we launch and and so we had this qute little quilt shop on the side, and then I lose my job shortly thereafter, right, and uh, And I had this idea in the back of my head that I loved around a daily deal for quilters, right and so and so daily deals was it was a thing back then more than now right like what today. Right, It's like the dailiness of it is right now one day

only get this great deal on this thing. I'm twenty five and I was super hooked, like I loved them and uh, but nobody had ever built one for my mom's demographic. There was no one that was doing this for forty to seventy year old women that were into quilting. It was all like outdoor gear. Tech gear is basically like the tech kids, tech bros who would build these sites are selling stuff essentially to themselves. That's right. And nobody had built and marketed and message to that to

that group. And so I was like, man, this would be cool to try. When I lost my job, I said, well, we got this cute little quilt shop at home. I wonder if I could take it online. So we built we built an e commerce store for it, and uh, and we did. We we put it all together, launched this daily Deal site. Uh and again just crickets, right, Like I didn't launching a Launching a site to nobody is hard. We didn't have an audience, we didn't have

we didn't have a customer base yet. But we got it out there and just started building this email cadence to our list of people that were that were, you know, growing it to one hundred people and a thousand people slowly and uh and marketing this daily deal that was happening every day and leading into that as our sort of commerce hook and uh. And it started picking up steam. And it wasn't uh, not almost any fault of our own,

but you know, it started picking up steam. And the things that we were trying to do were figure out where we could find this audience, because I mean, it's funny that the market researches there's twelve million quilters in America and uh and on Facebook, with all of my parameters wide open, I could find about two million of them right, which which you go back to two thousand and eight, they just weren't even like they didn't have an email address. That was something a lot of my

customer service people would have to help with. You had to have an email address to order from us. They're like, well, Judith,

let me sign you up for a Gmail account. This is what it's gonna do, and we can get y'all set up, right, Yeah, yeah, right, Like finding finding those people was was a little bit of an art form and uh and so that's where a lot of my attention and interest went after that, because we knew if we could get them to our site, like they love a deal, they love a deal, and uh, and if I could put them in here and show them the

experience we'd built, that we'd win. I mean, at some like the simple abstraction of it is like there's all this stuff happening daily deals and e commerce and it's growing and Facebook ads, but it's not happening for this giant segment of the population, right, It's not happening for

basically older women. Right. Is that essentially your customer base? Yeah, yeah, that's that's exactly right, right, Like, like I mean, and there's a bunch of demographics that still live in these spaces where like nobody has bothered to build a great experience for them. And you know, I was I was plunking around with like stained glass window making my Grandpa makes stained glass windows, but he's he's too old to

teach me. And like, nobody's sat down and said, how can I make this experience amazing for a beginner and great to get into, and how how do I continue to support them as they keep going? And like, I mean, you can go industry to industry, and so many of these have been overlooked. If you just sat down and said, can I make a great experience around this, you would be ten times better than the incumbent sitting out there

making most of the money. Well, in terms of the great I mean, it seems like one big early move is getting your mom on YouTube. Yeah yeah, so well, well, getting mom on YouTube. So this was this was two thousand and eight that we started going into this, right, and we started putting together tutorials that were just like how do you make a quilt and putting them up

on YouTube. And I was recording mom and I'm a thirty year old bearded man at that point, so I knew nothing about quilting still, and she would she would try and record these these tutorials, and because I'm behind the camera, I got to be like, Mom, I have no idea what you're trying to say, like, I know you think you're teaching how to quilt, but like I'm your audience, explain it to me. And so she got

making these tutorials. She had this very approachable feel to her, which which even today, man, very few people are teaching. Like the instinct is to go and teach the quilter that already knows how to quilt, because that means you're a good quilter. And so to teach in an approachable way that anybody can pick up and watch this and uh and then join into the clan is is a very rare thing. And so she started going. In the early days of YouTube, that became our entire messaging lever. Right.

We we started an email list that was just sending out this video and saying, hey, we released a tutorial, you'll love it, and that was that was it, right, Like they already they knew, we had the daily deal, they knew, and we'd put some of that in there. But but like it was very little bye bye bye and and a lot more like hey, we did this thing for you, we think you'll love it. And it grew, like our our marketing list grew to hundreds of thousands,

now it's millions of people. And back in the early days when I was running the day to day, it was like seventy three percent open rate. Right today it's like fifty six percent open rate. It's still an ab surgery. IM. Yeah, yeah, Is it right that your mom broke her leg when you were making a first videout? It out a video? No, no, no, So this is definitely real. And so we pull out this camera and I'm like, mom, just give me, give

me a tour of the of the shop. She's like way over the top and doing like little leg kicks and song and dance, and she goes by the quilt machine, which has a big chord that runs from the machine down to the computer that runs it, and got her leg tangled and just like I'm recording data and then just boom, she's down, And like I thought she was just being overly dramatic, right, And so me and my sister are like, get up. Mom. She's like, I think

I broke my leg. And I'm like, you did not break your leg, You're fine, and she's like, no, I really, I really did. And uh, And so I was I refused to let an ambulance come to our new little shop. I just thought that would be bad for business. And so finally we load her up into the car and drive her to the clinic and they're like, yeah, it's broken.

And so about I don't know, four or five months into this business, Mom's hold up in her bed and my sister Natalie, who was also working for no payment at the time, I was like, well, you got to learn how to run this because we've got to be putting out this product. So okay, so you got your mom on YouTube, you got the daily deals. I mean, honestly, things things start going and like we're growing at about

two hundred percent a year um. In the early days we went we went one hundred thousand to a million to four million to eight million. Yeah, it's just it's just going up, right, and uh and it's going up because like, I mean that sounds great. Is it super hard? I mean, is it hard to even to finance? Like? Are you have to buy the fabric before you sell it? Is it? Are there moments when you're jammed up in there? Like are there particularly? Yeah? No, the I mean the

tough parts about this are are definitely the finance. We're bootstrapped. Nobody was putting money into a quilt company. Um, and so we're we're like financed off of the very safe space was was when we were buying things and I could just pay it off with my credit card if things went bad, right, But pretty soon we outgrow that. We're starting to talk millions of dollars of inventory that we need to hold. And the way my industry works is you've got to buy fabric six months before you

get it. So you look at it and they say, we're going to print this, we'll have it in six months. How much do you want? And you place your order for say a million dollars worth of fabric. Right, So, when we would get the product, we owed the money and we had to turn that product into dollars in that first thirty days because we couldn't afford to pay for it otherwise, right, And so we have to immediately turn that inventory into money. It's to cover our cost.

And all the while you're growing at two hundred percent year over year. And so when I placed the order to when I'm gonna sell the fabric, I need to plan for hopefully double the amount of customers I think I think they're going to show up. And then as you're holding it, double the customers again, and I hope they show up because if not, I'm stuck with all this inventory, nobody to buy it, and I've killed my entire business. We literally it felt like we were bet

in the farm every three months. So when do you buy the town where you started? Somewhere along the line, you wind up sort of buying up most of the downtown in this town where you where you live. Right, Yeah, I feel like I maybe buried the lead here. We we did buy the town. Yes, that's such a fun part of the story because we're in this small town where where we grew up, Hamilton, Missouri. And we bought just this old auto show room off the off the main street to start. And then about a year or

two in this family in town was selling. They had an old antique shop there and it was right on the main drag, and we said we should get that. Um actually she came to us and said, you should get this location. Location location. So we we go in and we buy this old antique store and uh, you know, it's like paneling on the walls and eight foot ceilings,

and we we remodeled it. We pulled everything out, all the asbestos siding, and uh, but like we we remodeled this into this great cool space and then turned that into our quilt shop. And now we had this quilt schop on Main Street. But as we kept growing our inventory, we had more and more need for space, and so we bought another small building, an old salon, a hair salon, and turned that into a quilt shop and split out

a theme of fabric. It was like Christmas and holiday stuff went over there, and then we filled up again, right this five thousand square foot shop of ours, It just builled up with fabric again, and then we bought

the next one and moved batique fabric over there. And so that's why we started and continued to lean into it, even to the point where once we got three or four quilt or different shops open, I was googling around, like I want to know who had the most quilt chops of any town in the world, And it was like some town in Germany had four, right, and like

it's not a lot. And I was like, man, what if we got to say, what if our marketing stick was we have the most quilt chops of any town in the world, Like that's worth pulling off the highway for let's be that. And so we we leaned into this, right. It was sort of happened by happenstance, and then we realized that we had this really great thing on our hands, and uh and leaned into it. Now we're fourteen quilt

chops and we have three restaurants. We have a sleep and so sort of retreat center that you come with your girlfriends for a slumber party and spend a week. And we have we have a man's land where you park your husbands they sit and watch, you know, sports and playpool while your wife's shops and like, we have

all we built this entire experience around it. That sort of stemmed from the fact that we had cheap real estate here because nobody's opening commercial enterprises and two that that like we were willing to go through and like build an experience that nobody had ever really done before. It's not a big box. It's like a town that we sort of cobbled together into this thing. It's cool and how much of well, how big is your company now? In terms of revenue, we're north of one hundred million.

We uh, we we get up there a little bit. It's fun it's about four hundred employees. Uh, we're yeah, it's full time. How much how much of the revenue is from people coming to your town? About eight about eight million, I'd see, Yeah, it's it's not it's not

like it's it's somewhere around five percent. It's not a ton and uh but like it's it's media enough that like it represents such a small check of revenue, but it's like an outsize, like ninety percent of our marketing message is built around this town and the people here and the customers coming right right, well, and your mom right, So instead of being just some like random place where the fabric is cheap, You've got like your mom, who's an actual person in this actual town, in a real shop.

Like it seems like that is a huge part of the of the the town that you have bought and of your mom. Right, it's like a real place and real people. Yeah, I mean mom, Mom is our key for sure, right, which is which is tough because like I mean, I always talked to her. I'm like nobody lets you know, sleeping Beauty have a bad day at Disneyland. You've got to be on You're smiling, you're happy, you know for thirteen years, you've got to really shine keep going.

I mean, we get such distance out of this online because you're not buying from a faceless warehouse. You're buying from us. You know us. You can come and talk to us, you can come and give us a hug, you can come out and visit. And you got a question like we'll come and chat with you about it, which which you don't have in most businesses. Amazing story and so fun. We didn't even get into any problems, but we will in a minute after the break. Now

back to the show. So, okay, So congratulations on all your six um. But I'm right, it's interesting. It is cool. No, it's a it's a wonderful story. It's a happy story. I'm happy for you and your family. But I'm also curious. I mean, like, what are you pushing on now? So what we're working on now, let's see, there's probably two or three things that I think are super interesting. One, we we bought a second town, because once you have one,

the first thing you want is a second town. So seven miles to the south of US is a town called Kingston, and it's population three hundred people and they literally have no revenue, right, there's no budget for the town. There's nothing there. Um, it's it's just a few houses in our county courthouse. And then I'm trying to like get the Missouri Department of Transportation to let me do

a run walk trail. And my wife's building a you know, we're putting in like a like a rec center because out here, you know that it's not the culture isn't built around fitness and health and stuff, and so there's a lot of distance still to go on that and to convince people to move out here. We have a lot of branding and messaging to do around that. The challenge inside of that is, like we need more warehouse employees.

We're probably fifty employees short of where we need to be, and so we're trying to solve like the housing challenge here, which is there's been no new development since the seventies, and nobody really wants to develop here because why would you, And so me and my sister, I'm like, I'm like trying to build a subdivision and I'm googling where do roads come from? How do street lights happen? Now, that

kind of stuff, just trying to stumble through it. So that's so like the physical the physical in town retail like multi town experience stuff I think is super interesting. I really like that as an opportunity. I like it because it's a little bit harder. But but like there's no saturation in that branding message, right, Like if you heard somebody somebody bought three towns and turned it into a quilting trifecta. Like it's just more interesting and everybody's

not doing it, so it's worth going to see. Okay, so uh buying slash building another town. That's one of the one of the things you're working on. You said there were two, What's what's the other one? I mean, I'm just chewing on what content looks like for my industry in the next iterations, right, Like, if you think about content, I think about in three buckets where there's like education, entertainment, and inspiration. And we got inside of education.

You know, there's like a thousand different ways to do education content, and we picked ten minute tutorials for quilting, and like we have nailed that, but there's the fifty other ways that content can be done that like we have yet to address or build into. And that's the other thing that, like, I think, is a huge opportunity and worth us staring really hard at. I think we should own you know, the twenty minute. If you're into quilting, what do you watch while you're sitting on the treadmill

on Netflix? Right, It's it's that kind of stuff, And I'm like, man, we would kill that. I want you to tell me a story of something where you brewed up, something went wrong, something didn't work. I mean, I'm sure there's a million of those. Yeah, Okay, no, I mean I mean I've got two big failure stories that I think of when I think of what we what we've done here, right, And the first one was when we built a warehouse and we built we built our first warehouse.

We did everything out of our five thousand square foot auto show room that was our warehouse, which which it's easy to organize. I mean, you get a lot in there. It was a lot going on, but for a big company that was sending I think we're like thirty million a year before we moved out of there. I mean, we had a lot of inventory and no forklifts. Just our poor guy am and was just moving stuff. So we built this warehouse and I was like I was too cheap to know that you're supposed to hire like

partners and consultants to help you do this stuff. And so I just I found the only guy that like would build off of my notepad drawing and didn't stress out about like not having blueprints because I was like, it's a big box, and he's like, well, where do you want the toilet? I was like, do a wall that's ten foot here and it would be lunch room and toilet and all. You know, Like I'm just trying to solve it in two minutes because I had a

thousand other things going on. So anyway, this guy builds a warehouse, and simultaneously I had built all the software, like we had a little team. I wasn't me alone, but like we'd built all the software for this company, and so we had to build this new fulfillment software now again because I thought that we were so unique and so customed that we couldn't get anybody Like we can go and buy a thing off the shelf and pay somebody to do this, we had to build it ourselves.

And then like I ordered the racking, right, the Pallette racking, and they were like, hey, for ten thousand dollars, we'll set it up. And I was like, ah, I'll save the ten grand. I'll set it up myself. I know how to do that. So I get this pallet racking. Me and Dad are there until three in the morning. And then we also had a hundred computers we had to set up in there for shipping stations, all this stuff. And I'm a computer guy. I know how to do this, and so I'll order to put it all in there.

And then the big day comes and we go to move everything over and everything breaks and it like it's a disaster and like completely down. We can't ship orders the phone, like we've got eight thousand tickets in our email. The phones are ringing off the hook. Nothing works, and it was terrible. And I stuck around for like two days. We tried, you know, we get it cobbled together. They're almost getting stuff out, everything's still broken. And I remember I went to my I had a mentor at the time,

and I just went to his house in tears. It was just like what do I do? Man? Like I like this is too hard, this is too hard, and just to like just to land the specific warehouse story, like yeah, is there a lesson there, No, it just sucked. And then we figured it out and fine, And still fulfillment is the hardest thing that you'll ever do any commerce. It's the worst thing. And like, so much of my time energy is still in that, Like, should you not have just paid somebody to like do some of the

things that you thought you could do yourself? I mean, so if I were doing it again, and we did do it again, we immediately then started on other warehouse. We've got like two hundred thousand square feet of warehouse in there now and uh, so we immediately started this other one and uh and we paid a guy, a consultant to come in and design it and place all the stuff and pick the flows and do all that stuff.

And like, I mean, really, really the lesson out of any out of any business person's experiences, start using the leverage that you've built so that your life gets easier. Right, And I've got an assistant now and she does a lot of you know, and I and like, then you

you you have enough money to hire consultants. But when you're bootstrapped, I think you you don't feel like you've earned your way into a lot of that stuff yet, because we didn't have enough money to pay, like my mother a decent wage, and so why would I ever think we could pay somebody to come and do this. And I had to do it all myself. And so like the lessons learned are just leverage, it's it's using the assets and the knowledge and the skills that you've

built over time to do this. It's the hard part about starting a company as a twenty six year old schmow that doesn't know anything, is like I had no leverage. I had to build it all up through these really hard moments. But yeah, that would be a hard moment. The other hard moment where I felt like I failed was the UH was actually when I when I stepped out of the day to day of the company, because like I was, I started at twenty six, grew it. This company grew really fast and got really big, and

soon I was managing hundreds of people. But I wasn't a great manager. I'd never been managed in a in a big thing like this. I didn't know what you're supposed to do. And so what I built was an organization that was a hundred employees that were all extensions of my own hands. And I would ask for like

daily reports, like what'd you get done today? And I was trying to keep tabs on if you were working hard enough, because I wasn't going to get screwed, You're not going to take advantage of And so I found myself just exhausting myself, micromanaging and being a really crappy leader.

And so the you know, like that that moment where all of a sudden you find yourself like you're yelling at people and you're not normally a yeller, and you know, you you start lobbing bombs back into your business to blow it up so that you you're needed and you're

good at fixing these things. If if it's broken, I really see how need to die, like how much they still need and uh, and what you should be doing is being very comfortable working your way out of your own position and spitting in your chair for a couple of months having nothing to do, and then go do

other big stuff. But I wasn't there yet, and so like that was that part really really broke and was really hard emotionally, and uh, and my my fix for that as I went and like you know, scaled myself up emotionally through through some coaching and UH and therapy and stuff like that, and then UM, for me, the outcome was I ended up needing to step away from our company UH from the day to day, and we hired in as CEO, and my job became to support him, and I had to learn how to now be a

good governor to manage the manager. And eventually I'll learn how to be a good owner who manages the governors who managed the management. Um. But I'm not quite there yet and so we're still working our way through that. But like, yeah, those are those are those are the scary ones that I think of when you say, what was a hard moment? In a minute, it's a lightning round. Including the most fun you can have in Hamilton, Missouri is making quilts is not really your thing. That's the

end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Great, Okay, let's do a lightning round. Give it to me man, I'm ready, okay, okay, Um. What's the best thing about working with your family? The best thing about working with my family, I think is just having having a very common thing that keeps us pulled together as we all

get older. Right like most most families, I think it's just turns into Sunday dinner if you're lucky, and we still put ourselves in a room and try and be creative and come up with great things and solve problem and stuff, and that's that's really fun to me. Worst thing about working with your family you got to fire him sometimes. Have you fired? Have you fired family members? Yeah?

I fired my little brother. He wasn't showing up. So then his sweet wife of three little kids calls me crying, and my mom calls me and says, you did not just fire your brother. My pride stands up. It says, absolutely I did. And you know, well it's hard man, because like he actually came back and we figured it all out. He worked with us for a decade and it's great. How has being a YouTube quilting star changed

your mom? Very sincerely, I would say, I would say anytime there's any level of fame that comes into somebody's life, right, you start to shift some of your inputs a validation and that's a challenge. Thankfully, she's got a great heart and is very willing to like go back to center with me, But she gets really used to people clapping for and telling her how amazing she is and how

great she is, and that'll change somebody. What is one thing besides going to Hamilton and buying quilting supplies that everybody should do when they go to Missouri? Um, let's see what's something everybody should do? Covin ride some motorcycles with us. We play motorcycle soccer at the fourth of July celebration every year and it's maybe the most fun I've ever had in my life. How many quilts have you made in your life? I am working on my second.

If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in five years? Well? The big I think, the big one, the big one that weighs on me in five years is what do we do with this company? Right? And it's I mean the options are IPO How cool would it be to ipo a billion dollar business in Hamilton, Missouri?

Or its sell it's some private equity folks that are going to maximize profits and and who knows what will happen in the town or do we keep private and just live off our fat ibadah checks that will continue? We'll turn this thing into just being a cash cow and generate money. Um. And and there's different weights that come with all those right, like if I hold onto it, never cash out. Like I'm great at buying low, I'm

bad at selling high. And so I like, I worry that, you know, did I try and ride this too long? I think I think in five years that's what I'm staring at and saying, Mom's, mom's sixty five now, like she she doesn't want to wait for another twenty years to get a payout. Like what do we want to do? And how how do I represent everybody's interests and help us all feel like we accomplished a thing. I think

that's the big one that I'm trying to solve. This is this is like the hardest thing I've ever tried to solve. And I think anybody has sold a company has probably stared at the same thing, and very few people I think, I don't know a lot of people regret it. A lot of people regret selling and sort of letting it. I think if I sold the company and all of a sudden, the town like they move out of here and it's all a ghost town in vacant buildings, it's not much of a legacy to leave.

So I don't know, I don't know, man, it's this is a this is a very real one that I don't exactly understand how to solve. Yet, what's your mom think? Dude? My family, My family is fantastic because they love me and they say whatever you think. El like, like, you know, if I gave mom a million dollars tomorrow, she is pumped. She's pumped, you know. And I'm not trying to create a million dollars. I'm trying to create hundreds of millions

of dollars and so and so. Most of the weight of that is sort of is sort of set up and felt by me. It's not it's not for mom. There's no right answer. This is this. It's a nightmare one because if you're right, everybody loves you. You did a great thing. Your life's work is is preserved, and the legacy is enshrined. And if I'm wrong, it's a huge disaster. Big dummy. I ruined my family's outcomes and mine. How could I? It's the worst. Welcome to the life

of family businesses. Even when you win, you feel like you could still lose. Yeah, how to present? Aldon is the executive chairman of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Today's show was produced by Edith Ruslow, engineered by Amanda kay Wong, and edited by Robert Smith. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.