Everywhere you look, there is risk and uncertainty, but the biggest risk may be in letting the constant flow of unsettling news paralyze you.
The fourth annual 21 Hats Live will take place in Cincinnati in May. It's a rare opportunity to connect with other owners who understand what it takes to build a business.
Have you read our testimonials? At 21 Hats, don't tell you how to run your business. But we do publish news articles, Q&As, webinars, podcasts about what it takes to build a business.
The model, which tracks a diverse set of entrepreneurial businesses, indicates companies with less than $10 million in revenue are growing at less than 1 percent a year.
It’s easy to condemn the horror stories coming out of Noma, the celebrated restaurant in Copenhagen. But this week, Jay Goltz, Jennifer Kerhin, and Ted Wolf confront a harder question: How far are the rest of us—business owners in every industry—from crossing the line? Because it’s not just restaurants. Most owners don’t set out to be abusive. They set out to build something great. And somewhere along the way, high standards can start to blur into something else. ‘I was out of control when I was in my 20s,’ Jay admits.
So, what changed? And where did the owners land? How much command and control is actually necessary? When does pushing someone cross the line—and when does not pushing them enough become its own failure? Have you ever held onto the wrong employee too long? Or pushed the right one too hard? Jay doesn’t sugarcoat his opinion about yellers: “You’re going to tell me you’re passionate. I’m going to tell you, ‘You’re an asshole.’”
The group digs into the trade-offs every owner faces: hiring versus managing, systems versus stars, culture versus performance. What do you do with the high performer who damages the team? Can you really coach anyone to excellence—or are there limits? And then there’s the quiet warning sign many owners ignore: Something goes wrong, and someone says, “Oh, well, everybody knows how Bob is.” That, says Jay, is when you know you’ve got a problem. This is a conversation about judgment calls—messy, human, unavoidable. Because as Jennifer puts it, “It’s really hard to manage people.”
For many, knitting may still conjure an image of a grandmother in a rocking chair, her cats sleeping and her doilies taking shape. In recent years, however, the quiet industry of tiny neighborhood yarn shops scattered across the U.S. has become an unlikely cultural battleground. It’s been divided by charges of racism and cultural appropriation that have erupted in a series of social media firestorms, prompting some owners to close, sell, or rebrand their businesses. It may seem surprising that such a quiet pursuit could produce so much conflict, but it’s really not all that different from the fissures afflicting the country as a whole. In this conversation, we meet three women who were not content to stick to their knitting: Adella Colvin, whose business, LolaBean Yarn Co., is a prominent independent dyer based in Grovetown, Ga.; Gaye “GG” Glasspie, a leading yarn industry influencer whose signature color is orange and who is based in Clifton, N.J.; and Felicia Eve, who owns String Thing Studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of the few Black-owned yarn shops in the country. The video offers our entire conversation. You can also listen to a slightly edited 21 Hats Podcast version of the conversation wherever you get podcasts.
It’s not always about marketing. Sometimes, the real issues go deeper. Sometimes, before you can figure out how to sell, you have to figure out who you are.
For many, knitting may still conjure an image of a grandmother in a rocking chair, her cats sleeping and her doilies taking shape. In recent years, however, the quiet industry of tiny neighborhood yarn shops scattered across the U.S. has become an unlikely cultural battleground. It’s been divided by charges of racism and cultural appropriation that have erupted in a series of social media firestorms, prompting some owners to close, sell, or rebrand their businesses. It may seem surprising that such a quiet pursuit could produce so much conflict, but it’s really not all that different from the fissures afflicting the country as a whole. In this conversation, we meet three women who were not content to stick to their knitting: Adella Colvin, whose business, LolaBean Yarn Co., is a prominent independent dyer based in Grovetown, Ga.; Gaye “GG” Glasspie, a leading yarn industry influencer whose signature color is orange and who is based in Clifton, N.J.; and Felicia Eve, who owns String Thing Studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of the few Black-owned yarn shops in the country. The video offers our entire conversation. You can also listen to a slightly edited 21 Hats Podcast version of the conversation wherever you get podcasts.
This week, we talk to two people who walked away from promising careers to buy blue collar businesses. Long before search funds and sweaty startups became all the rage, Bob Schwartz left a Wall Street investment banking career to buy a chain of laundromats, SuperSuds, which operates in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. More recently, Mills Snell left a prominent private equity firm to buy a roofing contractor, Aqua Seal Manufacturing and Roofing, which is based in Columbia, South Carolina. In this conversation, Schwartz and Snell talk about what they were thinking, what they learned about buying a business, what they’ve learned about operating a business, and whether they’re looking for an exit.
