Walking Away From a Salary

Introduction:

This week, Sarah Segal tells Shawn Busse and Jay Goltz why she’s decided to take her public relations business back after selling it two years ago to a larger firm so it could handle the back-end stuff and allow her to focus on public relations. For Sarah, the immediate result of the decision to break away has been an exhausting few months starting over, including reincorporating, finding health insurance, and reducing her own pay. Meanwhile, Jay suggests an old-school marketing tactic that involves leveraging an envelope, a stamp, and the post office. And Shawn explains how he created a sales process that has allowed him to remove himself from day-to-day sales. Plus, a listener asks the three owners, “When do you know if you’ve made it? Or do you never know?” Shawn, Jay, and Sarah—three owners at very different stages of building a business—offer three very different answers.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Sarah Segal is CEO of Segal Communications.

Jay Goltz is CEO of The Goltz Group.

Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Jay, Shawn, and Sarah. It’s great to have you here. Sarah, let’s start with you. I think you have some news to share.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, a little news to share. So, two years ago, I was offered the opportunity to be acquired by a larger entity. I was being brought in by somebody who I respected and who really saw the opportunity to not have to handle my back-end stuff anymore and really kind of cross collaborate with a larger team. The opportunity was there, and we did it for two years. But at the end of last year, I had a nice chat with them. And I said, “You know what, I just don’t think it’s going where I wanted it to go. And I think we should break up.” So we broke up.

Loren Feldman:
What wasn’t going the way you wanted it to go?

Sarah Segal:
Well, there were just varying factors, like I really liked the people. There was no doubt about that. They were super smart, wonderful, warm, encouraging, supportive. I learned so much over the last two years. But in terms of my business and the growth of my business, I wasn’t seeing a value that made me want to continue. I felt like I was going to hit my head against the wall, in terms of finding better ways to integrate our businesses and cross-pollinate with their teams. Because their teams are fantastic.

It was an issue of finding the right projects to work on together. But also, the majority of their folks were on the East Coast, and the majority of my people are on the West Coast. So the time zone—it was not the right time or place. And the person who kind of prompted the whole acquisition left shortly after we were acquired. And so that visionary was never around, really, to kind of see it through. So I don’t know if that impacted what it would have been. But it just never blossomed. Let’s put it that way.

Loren Feldman:
Was it more that you had hoped that they would refer business to you? Or was it that you just didn’t work well together?

Sarah Segal:
Oh, no. We worked fabulous together, and we did have the opportunities. But the natural flow of business opportunities wasn’t there. And that was kind of what incentivized me to do it. That, “Oh, yeah, we’ll have all of the stuff that we can push your way,” and it was pretty limited. It was because that person who had started the whole idea wasn’t there to advocate for it.

So there’s no one there to do it, and you know, I was busy working, running my business. And I didn’t have a knowledge base necessarily of every opportunity. And probably a lot of that is on me not taking more initiative, but just sometimes, you’ve gotta say, “Let’s be friends.”

So January 1st, we were our own entity again. And they have been nothing but awesome and supportive and encouraging and a great resource for me, and helped me find a new general counsel that I can use on contracts. It wasn’t a bad experience. It was just not the right experience. That’s all.

Loren Feldman:
Did you have to buy the business back?

Sarah Segal:
No.

Jay Goltz:
I mean, they never really gave you a check in the first place, right?

Sarah Segal:
I got a little bit of a check, but it wasn’t anything substantial. It was more the opportunity for growth.

Jay Goltz:
Right, it was like a collaborative effort, and nothing ventured, nothing gained. So, okay.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, exactly, Jay.

Loren Feldman:
So how does it feel?

Sarah Segal:
Well, the last two months of the year, I swear, like I probably had a heart attack probably about 15 times. It was not my first time at the rodeo. When I first started my business, I had a business partner. She left, so I literally had to restart again, rebrand, all that kind of good stuff. And then I was acquired, and the idea initially was that I would merge with one of their existing brands. And that didn’t work out. So I had started that process, and then we paused on that.

And then when we finally fully integrated there, everything was great. But I dissolved my LLC. I didn’t have health care independently. The last two months of the year, I literally was restarting an entire business. And so January 1st, I had zero dollars in my account, and that was a little stressful. But clients paid this month. So things are good. And I didn’t leave on my own. My entire team is still showing up to work every day, and they’re getting paid. And that’s all that really matters.

Jay Goltz:
So you’re obviously not a startup. You’re more of a reboot.

Sarah Segal:
I’m more of a reboot, yeah. But if anybody does know how to start a small business from scratch, I’ve done it many times. [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
You’re a glutton for punishment.

Sarah Segal:
I am. But I learned things. Like, I’m not gonna say anything terrible about providers and vendors, but there were a couple of vendors that I used when I first started that were terrible. And then I found better vendors. So I think that I’m more set up.

And this time around, I also have the benefit of: My first employee that I had hired, she transitioned into an operations manager role, and so she has been instrumental in helping me with all of the nitty gritty. So I haven’t been doing it totally on my own again. I have had somebody who is helping me figure it out.

Jay Goltz:
So on the entrepreneurial dashboard, there are three major gauges: Marketing, management, finance. My guess is you got the management thing down. What is your weakest spot that you’re most concerned about? Is it the finance piece? Is it the finding new business piece? What is it that’s—

Loren Feldman:
—that’s keeping you up at night?

Jay Goltz:
Maybe. I hate that phrase. But maybe that’s the right phrase.

Sarah Segal:
Well, I think it’s always just making sure that I can meet payroll. That’s always going to be the number one thing. And I’ve reduced and negated some of my income since the beginning of the year, just to make sure that I started to have a little bit of a pad.

They always say, “When you’re the owner, when you’re the boss, you’re the last person to get paid,” and I’m fine with that position. I’d rather make sure that things keep going along in the way that they should. So that’s probably my biggest stress is the finance part.

As far as new biz, it’s very weird, but we’re getting a lot of new biz, knock on wood. But I think we’re just starting to be more of a presence, because of the various things that we’ve done over the years to kind of establish ourselves.

Loren Feldman:
That’s interesting, because this is a bit of a tough time, especially for tech companies, and I know you have a lot of them in your neighborhood. Can you tell us a little more about why you think your business is picking up?

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, we have tech clients, for sure. But there are a lot of agencies that will be very specific about what kind of clients they work with. They’ll say, “We only do food and beverage, we only do technology, we only do B2B.” We don’t do that. And that saved us during COVID. I think I’ve mentioned before I watched one agency literally dissolve into nearly nothing because they were only hospitality. And so while I would love to say I want to have an absolute focus and only do beer clients…

Loren Feldman:
I thought it was chocolate.

Jay Goltz:
I thought it was picture framers. [Laughter]

Sarah Segal:
Chocolate’s my goal. I like to have a diversity of clients and so does my team, because it keeps you kind of fresh on what’s happening in various industries. So to your question: Yeah, all the big guys are dropping employees like hotcakes, but my theory about that is that some of them are doing it not because they need to do it, but because other companies are doing it. It’s okay now. It’s normal.

I read an article the other day about Microsoft. Their earnings have been pretty good. They don’t really need to lay off as many people as they did. But they may have done it because they wanted to trim the fat. And why not do it now, when everybody else is laying people off?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I think a lot of it is that. Somebody pointed out the other day that—I can’t remember which tech company it was, it might have been Amazon—they laid off 10,000 people, and they made the point that they hired 40,000 the quarter before. So these numbers look really dire. Part of that’s the media wanting to create a narrative that gets clicks. Even though people are losing their jobs, and it’s pretty awful.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, but they say the unemployment rate is still, what, 2 or 3 percent? It’s still super, super low. We’re actually hiring right now. We’re looking to hire two new people. I’m actually interviewing two people today.

Loren Feldman:
Does that feel different, Sarah, hiring now? Are you a little bit leery of that out on your own?

Sarah Segal:
Now, well, I just have to make sure that it’s the right fit. It’s a process. I need to make sure that I have the numbers to pay that person. It’s hard to find people, especially in the Bay Area, who do anything besides B2B and tech. Like, we have beer and wine and jewelry and metaverse. We have a diversity. We like to find people who are happy to do both. But if you worked at a tech company—like in their communications department—and then you want to work in an agency, we’re not gonna be able to compete with your salary. The challenge is finding good people for the right price.

Loren Feldman:
How did your existing staff react, Sarah? Did they have to be reassured? Were they excited? What was their take?

Sarah Segal:
They were a little anxious. They hadn’t been through it before. Sarah, on my team, who’s my operations manager, she came into the company with me and left the company with me. She wasn’t concerned necessarily. I think that everybody has wanted to see the dust settle.

And we now have a nice little office in San Francisco. Our desks are minimal, but we have three more desks set to arrive next week. They’re seeing that there was no change in their day to day and/or their paycheck. And I think that once that was apparent, people were a little bit more relaxed.

Jay Goltz:
How far is your office from where it was?

Sarah Segal:
Four blocks.

Jay Goltz:
Oh, good. So nobody said, “Oh, this is hard for me to get here now,” or something. [Laughter]

Sarah Segal:
No, can I just show off? My location—it’s not a huge office, but it’s a fine office for me—it’s literally a block from Dragon’s Gate, which is the beautiful gate to Chinatown, a block from the financial district. And then there’s a really nice hotel about a block away with a nice cocktail at the end of a long day.

Loren Feldman:
That sounds good.

Sarah Segal:
I’m surrounded by dim sum.

Jay Goltz:
Let me ask this question, because I think I remember when I first met you, the partner had left, and you were just picking up steam. And then, as you said, you thought this was a good thing, because you wouldn’t have to deal with the back-end stuff. So my question is, I don’t know that you ever fully hit stride on your own, so I’m just wondering: What piece of that quote-unquote backroom stuff you never really had to deal with, do you now have to [deal with]?

Sarah Segal:
I am one of those people who really likes to know how to do everything. It’s hard for me not to know how to do everything. I’m a generalist. And I’m realizing that, more and more, I can’t know how to do everything.

Like, for example, I have a social media team, and they know how to use this scheduling program. And they know how to do all these bells and whistles on social media. I have no idea what they do. And if they were to ever depart, I’d be in the hole, because I couldn’t step in and help.

Loren Feldman:
You need them to write down their processes.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, we actually are working on a best-practices and a SOPs document right now. But still, even if they were and I had it written down, I couldn’t fill those shoes.

Jay Goltz:
Congratulations. You’ve made the jump from profession to running a business. I certainly can’t do everything that all my employees do, and that is a jump that you have to finally get to. I mean, you know, people who are running businesses can’t do every single thing in the business. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Sarah Segal:
And that’s been a big thing, Jay. I have to realize that it’s not even a good use of my time to know how to do everything.

Jay Goltz:
I have to tell you, good for you. Because there are lots of people who never get to that stage, and they go their entire career like that with three employees, because they need to have their hands on everything. And it does stunt your growth. So I’m glad to hear that you’ve come up with that realization, and you’re dealing with it. Good for you.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah, has it changed your outlook for this year? Is it affecting your goals, your hopes and dreams for what you hope to accomplish this year?

Sarah Segal:
I met with everybody on the team, and we did their goals—we’re doing quarterly goals for the team this year, so everybody has three goals just for the quarter. I haven’t done my own goals yet, just because I finally have come up for air. And I think that my biggest goal—and Jay will probably be proud of this—is to do what he’s always advised: Working on the business, not in the business. And that’s part of the reason we’re hiring some more people, so I can get fully out of the day-to-day.

Jay Goltz:
Congratulations again. You don’t have to do that, but if you want to grow, you have to do that. And like I said, there are lots of businesses in America—most, probably 99 percent of businesses—that never get past that. They run their business. They’ve got their six or eight employees. Everything goes through them, and they make a living, and then they retire one day. There are very few companies, statistically, that get that big that you have to do that. And some people don’t have the head for it, or really don’t want to. So it sounds like you’re making good progress with all that.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, I mean, if you ask me, I want to grow. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to get to a FleishmanHillard size. But I want to be a contender and establish something. I feel like, if you look at my growth in general, over the last five years, it’s been substantial. And if I can keep up that momentum, or even double it…

But I want to grow smart. I don’t want to get ourselves into trouble. I’ve actually thought about the idea of: Wouldn’t it be great to acquire a smaller agency that really is a two-person show with a bunch of clients, just to get some growth that way? But I haven’t totally figured out my goals yet.

Shawn Busse:
Sarah, how do you get new business? In terms of, is it predominantly through your network? Is it through marketing? Do you do something else?

Sarah Segal:
So we do a lot of original content, and so that’s number one. We’re constantly pushing that out. We have a newsletter that goes out on a regular basis. I am part of several organizations, so I’ve tried to be as involved as possible. I was just elected to the board of directors for the Public Relations Society of America chapter here in San Francisco. So it’s just talking to people and being referred. And then literally asking my clients, “Hey, refer us. Say something nice about us.”

And then we work with a bunch of marketing agencies, as well, on great projects. And I will constantly refer them, and they will refer me back. Most of the relationships they have, they’re like, “Yeah, you’ll get me back,” and then I’ll send them work. Because we don’t do digital marketing—that’s not our thing, most marketing agencies will have a PR person, but they don’t really do what we do—there’s not much competition. So we’re happy to refer in either direction.

Shawn Busse:
How do you see your involvement in the sales process as you grow and scale and bring in more people?

Sarah Segal:
Good question. My sales process is not fine-tuned. I listen to podcasts a lot, outside of this one.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah!

Shawn Busse:
Blasphemy! No, there’s a big pie. Plenty of room.

Sarah Segal:
And how do you systemize it? How do you systematize your process for new business? I would love your thoughts on that. But also, I don’t want to systemize it so much that it’s impersonal. I am still trying to navigate what that looks like.

Jay Goltz:
I can tell you an opportunity. After 45 years, I’ve used, I think three or four PR firms over the years. How many people call me, send me a letter, on an annual basis saying, “Hey, we’ve been looking at your business. I think you’ve got an interesting story. I would love to talk to you about being your PR.” How many of those outreaches do I get? Zero. Zero! In 45 years.

I think there’s an opportunity for brainstorming: What companies would you like to work for? And then sending them a letter—an actual paper letter with a stamp and the whole routine in an envelope—that says, “I’ve been looking at—”

Sarah Segal:
Really?!!!

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, I’ve had this conversation with Shawn. I seldom get one. When you get an envelope that’s typed out to your name, you know this is like the lady or the tiger. It’s either going to be, “I love your company, thank you so much,” or, “You’re scum of the Earth, and I’m suing you.” It’s one or the other, or it’s a legal thing.

Now, I never get those. I haven’t had one of those in many, many, many years. But I always open them. And it’s surprising to me, the amount of emails I get every day, pitching me. I get, like you get, 20 to 30 a day, and like, I’d open the letter and I’d read it.

Sarah Segal:
I literally get at least two, maybe three, either LinkedIn InMails or regular emails every day with somebody saying, “Hey, we can send you these leads with our magic skills and tools.” I never open those. I delete, delete, delete, delete. Literally, it’s hard for me to look at my LinkedIn mail nowadays because that’s all it is, is somebody wanting to prostitute my business for me.

Jay Goltz:
They’re usually not even written well. And you think to yourself, “If you can’t write a letter to me trying to get me as a client, why would I hire you to help me go out and market? You can’t even market yourself.”

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, and as a PR professional, it’s interesting. Because I have clients that will get solicited by another agency, and then my clients will send me an email and be like, “What is this?” Because it’s another agency.

We actually had a funny scenario where there’s this agency that, I swear, was just going down my list of clients that I had listed on my website. And they were emailing every single one of them. And so it was just this kind of running joke of, “Oh, they’re back at it again.”

Jay Goltz:
That’s tacky. That is very tacky.

Shawn Busse:
If we can step back just a sec, Sarah, just an experience share on the sales side of things: When I finally sat down and shifted from, “Shawn’s intuition is the sales process,” to, “Okay, let’s map this out and build a system,” it really changed our company. So we’ve mapped it out into a discrete seven or eight steps, and then we map that to our CRM, which would make Gene Marks really happy. And essentially, what it allowed us to do is to start optimizing the process and see: Where were we losing people? Where were people really affirming us as a choice? And it really helped us scale.

And it also then allowed me to do the magic trick, which a lot of companies struggle with, which is for me to actually get out of sales. Because now we had a way to do it, that I could train somebody in. We could optimize that. So I started training my internal teams in how to do the work. And even yesterday, we were looking at making an announcement to all our clients, and I was looking at it, and I was like, “Wow, I have no connection to these three clients.” Because the sales process was run by other people.

Sarah Segal:
First of all, literally, that was one of the January things—one of my staffers, she’s really interested in doing more of the new biz, and the strategy, and all that kind of stuff. So I had her on a new-biz call with me yesterday, and she’s gonna start doing the proposals and all of that. And she’s just a natural at it. She makes people feel awesome, and so it’s a natural fit. So yeah, A) I am doing that. B) I want to hear about your process. Tell me about your process. I’m curious.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, sure. So one of the things we did is, we picked a CRM that was easy, so essentially, we could make the process easy, too. The rough outline is, the first stage is the initial conversation. So somebody’s curious about what it is you do. They have an interest, but you haven’t validated them. That’s kind of like the inbound inquiry level, and a lot of stuff comes into that and then never goes any further. Because a lot of times, they don’t have a budget, they don’t actually want to buy what you’re offering, they’re confused, etc., etc.

But then those who make it through that, essentially what we’re trying to do is discover what they’re trying to achieve. And that’s a lot of inquiry, inquiry, inquiry. They should do more talking than we do, less pitching from us and more them sharing what their challenges are. And then that becomes the shape of subsequent meetings, which starts to become us talking about how we can address their needs, which are probably very similar to you and your pitch process.

From there, we try to get to an agreement at the end of this meeting, like, “Hey, do you feel like moving forward makes sense? Do you want to set up another meeting to talk about our engagement agreement, and kind of the nuts and bolts of how this would be?” So every step is designed to get more and more specific to where the last meeting is about the engagement agreement, where we’re actually reviewing the agreement together and getting them to either say yes to everything, or to answer the questions that they’re confused about. And the idea being that we’re never sending a proposal. Like, never.

Sarah Segal:
Really?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, well, what I mean by that is, I’m never emailing somebody something. It’s always a conversation to get to an agreement. And the proposal for us is to engage in—what I think we talked about in one of the earlier podcast episodes—that discovery process, what we call True North, which is the kind of short engagement, four months, to kind of get to the essence of their business and make sure that when we work together, it’s really a great experience. And if it’s not, four months is no big deal.

Jay Goltz:
What is your first point of contact? Are you actually using the thing that’s on a desk, the telephone? Are you actually calling people? [Laughter] What is the first point of contact?

Shawn Busse:
So if you’re talking top of funnel, like how to get people interested, a lot of times it’s like Sarah. It’s referral, it’s centers of influence, it’s word of mouth. Before the pandemic, the most powerful engine of new business generation for us was speaking, like going to a conference and being a speaker and workshops. So inviting people to be part of something where they were going to learn.

What we’ve discovered is that business owners who want to learn are really a good fit for us. Because if they want to learn, then they’re open to new ideas. And they’re not the kind of business owner who comes to the table thinking they know everything. And so learning environments are really good for us. So that’s top of the funnel.

Jay Goltz:
I know I’ve said this before, but I’m gonna say it again: I actually answer my phone. And I’m telling you, 95 percent of the people who call are so incompetent. First, they start with, “How are you today?” The second they say that, I know it’s a sales call. And it’s like, “I know you don’t care how I am today. Can you just get to the point?”

Loren Feldman:
Shawn or Sarah, do you answer the phone if you don’t know who’s calling?

Shawn Busse:
Well, there’s no way for somebody to reach me, which is sort of intentional, from a sales perspective.

Loren Feldman:
That would be no.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah?

Sarah Segal:
Our old office, we had Ooma. We had that system, and everybody had a number. And nobody ever used it. Everybody uses their cell phone. So here, we got internet service, and it came with a free telephone line. And I just set that up to where it automatically goes to a digital voicemail. So we’ll get those, but nobody calls.

Jay Goltz:
I’ve been getting the ones that are—literally every day, I get a call from these loan [people]. These, “Oh, we can get you the employee tax.” I don’t know where these people came from. But it’s on my cell phone, too. Every day.

Loren Feldman:
Those are scammers, the Employee Retention Tax Credit.

Jay Goltz:
Really?

Loren Feldman:
Yeah, they want a huge percentage. You want to stay away from them.

Jay Goltz:
Well, I don’t even answer them.

Sarah Segal:
I think I’d get more new business if, on my website, I said, “Hey, text me.” Because so many people just text. They don’t even want to send an email.

Jay Goltz:
I think that’s a good idea.

Sarah Segal:
Like, “Hey, text us if you want to talk.” There are ways that you can set up text where you can establish a text that goes to a different phone number, but it routes to your number. So it’s not your personal text, but you still get it on your phone.

Shawn Busse:
In a business like ours, a lot of times you have to create awareness for the buyer that they actually have a problem. This is why, for us, education has been a really good play. You have to get folks to understand the nature of the challenge in order to sell to them.

Jay Goltz:
You know what, I can’t argue with that. You’re not selling phone systems. You’re not selling car leasing. You’re selling something that it might be too difficult to actually find that customer that you could actually get a hold of, but then get them to understand what you do. So in your particular case, okay, maybe a phone call is difficult. I think there are plenty of other businesses, though—stuff that I would absolutely pay attention to—that don’t call.

Shawn Busse:
I mean, Loren and I are starting a new marketing podcast. I hope it’s okay to announce this. But essentially, one of our first guests did that, Jay. He did that. And it has transformed his business. I mean, he’s got rocket fuel. Fundamentally, he identified very, very carefully what his right-fit buyer was, and what the need was he was solving, and how he solved it in a different way.

And I think the problem with all these spammers is they have terrible messaging. And to your point, they don’t get to the point. They try to use this, like, “Would you like a free Yeti cooler in order to talk to me?” Or, “I’ll take you to dinner if you spend time [with me].” It’s like, “What? What are you trying to sell me?”

Sarah Segal:
I have a question. Shawn, what do you do to drive in-bound new biz, outside of referral?

Shawn Busse:
Well, like I was saying, pre-pandemic, it was education. So I would go to, say, a manufacturing association, and say, “Hey, are your members concerned about employee recruiting and retention?” And they’d be like, “Yeah, they suck at it, and they’re struggling really hard.” Like, “Great. I have a presentation I can give. It’s not a sales pitch. But it’s all about how they can become better at recruiting and retention.”

And so I would give that presentation, and basically give away our IP, and say, “Hey, you can absolutely DIY this stuff. Here’s how you would do it.” And then 10 percent of them would look at me and go, “This looks kind of hard. And also, I don’t want to try to do it myself, because I have a job. How about you help me with this?” And I would get lots of business through that. It was a great methodology: teaching people.

Sarah Segal:
You don’t do that anymore?

Shawn Busse:
Well, the pandemic screwed that up. And what I found is, to Jay’s point, the medium matters. Email is becoming less and less of a thing people want to pay attention to. And he’s saying, “Hey, try a letter because I don’t get those anymore.” And you know, I think he’s onto something. So for us, we found Zoom did not work in the pandemic for that type of approach. People just don’t buy, because they don’t have the kind of relationship they have in person. So it was really tough on us.

Sarah Segal:
It was this podcast that told me to go and do our pitches in person, and we started doing that. And it just makes so much of a difference. Because in all honesty, what we do right now, as in the services that we provide, it’s similar to what a lot of agencies do. We’re not doing brain surgery. We’ve not reinvented the process or the deliverables. And what it comes down to really is whether or not you gel with the client, whether or not you speak the same language where you feel comfortable talking to them, and whether or not you’re smiling during the conversation. And you can’t really do that on Zoom.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, because we’re in the business of trust. We are selling trust. Because what we do, there’s a lot of black box to it, especially in the early days. So you have to create a sense of trust and affinity in the marketing process, and email doesn’t do that. Email doesn’t create a sense of trust and affinity. It’s just garbage.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, are you going back to what you were doing before, now that there are more live events? Are you trying to pick up where you left off?

Shawn Busse:
Totally. And what’s good about it is, people are really hungry for that. So I’m seeing a lot of engagement for going to events. The other piece that we have started doing that is new is we’ve started shaping our own events. So we did our Catalyst event in the fall. That was an in-person event for small business owners. And then the digital side of it, which has actually been working really well, is something we call Catalyst Labs, which is where we create a small group roundtable of business owners who are addressing a specific issue.

It could be, “How to be remarkable as an engineering firm.” It could be, “How to work on your employer brand.” And then I make specific invites. So to Jay’s point, that’s where the opportunity is to go out to the market and say, “Hey, I saw you on LinkedIn, and you posted something interesting. Would you like to join us for an educational session on that topic and share your insight and learn from others? We can compare notes, get to know each other.” That’s been really effective. I haven’t gotten any business from it, but I’ve gotten a lot of engagement and a lot of new connections. So that’s working really well.

Loren Feldman:
I want to get to one more thing. We got an interesting listener question. It came from the owner, of all things, of a picture-framing shop.

Jay Goltz:
What are the odds of that?

Shawn Busse:
Is this from Jay? [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
No it’s not!

Sarah Segal:
It’s planted.

Loren Feldman:
No, it’s from an owner named Rich Ehrenhaus, who was curious to see what responses he would get to the question: “When do you know if you’ve made it? Or do you never know? I’m at a stage where I feel the business is set up for success in the future, assuming we continue to get things right. But I’m not there yet. Part of me is afraid I’ll never feel I’ve gotten there until I’m retiring. But I really hope it is sooner than that.” You guys are all at different stages. Have you thought about that?

Jay Goltz:
Absolutely.

Sarah Segal:
I don’t think an entrepreneur should ever feel like they’ve made it. I think that once you have that feeling, then you’re not moving forward anymore. You’re complacent. I mean, I feel like an imposter when it comes to running a business every day. And it makes me work harder at what I do. But I also realize that everybody feels like an impostor in running a business.

Loren Feldman:
Do you think that’s true? Everybody?

Jay Goltz:
I completely disagree with pretty much everything you just said.

Sarah Segal:
Really?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, I’m older than you. To be fair, I’m older than you. I’ve been doing it longer. I’m just telling you, I feel completely liberated that I made it, that there’s a certain number. That once you have a certain number, you say, “You know what, I will never be hurting for money. I can buy anything I want. Life is grand. I made it. And as far as being complacent? I’m still going to work and still trying to grow. Not like I used to, because I don’t need to.”

Loren Feldman:
When did you know you’d made it, Jay?

Jay Goltz:
When I turned about 50. I’ve been buying real estate all these years just for the business, and I needed it. And I finally woke up, and I looked at what they were worth, and I realized, “Oh my God, I’m far more successful than I ever imagined.” And like, it’s good. And I cannot emphasize enough: I’ve got this albatross off of me about never doing enough, never being enough. And I hear about people making gazillions of dollars. I watch Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. Good for Mark. He’s way smarter than I am. No problem. I don’t care! I don’t care about who’s making how much. I made it. And I can’t tell you how liberating that is.

So I fully disagree. And I hope that everyone in entrepreneurship gets to the point that they can say, “I made it.” I don’t think grinding it out every day for the rest of your life, thinking, “I’m not good enough, I’m not doing enough”—I’ve been there. It’s much better to feel like you’ve made it, sSo that’s what I wish for everyone.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah, what do you think of that?

Sarah Segal:
Well, I think we agree to disagree, because knowing myself, I’m never going to feel like—you know, there are gonna be aspects of it. Like, “I’ve done a good job,” or whatever. But to me, there’s always another hill to climb and another opportunity, another challenge. I’m a constant learner. On my way to work today, I was listening to Coursera. I want to understand and see what I can do to improve myself and my company. And so I don’t know that I will ever say, “Hey, I’ve checked that box.” I would love to be able to get to where Jay is, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do that until I retire.

Jay Goltz:
Well, we’re not disagreeing. I do exactly what you do. I still think about ways to improve things. But maybe your personality type—you just said maybe you’ll never feel that way. Maybe, maybe. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or I’m right.

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, I’m my own worst critic, like 100 percent.

Jay Goltz:
And I used to be.

Sarah Segal:
But sometimes it’s important to tell people when you think that you’ve made it. So when I was a TV reporter in Binghamton, New York, my roommate was the morning anchor there. A lovely woman by the name of Kristin Wright. And you know, she’s bopped around from various television stations since then, and she went out of broadcast for a while. And then she got a job at the NPR station in Washington, DC. And I’m sitting there this morning listening to NPR, and she came on and did a story.

And my first reaction was, I texted her, and I was like, “You made it. You are my hero.” And I think part of it is hearing it from other people, because I’m never going to be the person who says it to myself. Maybe someday, someone will tell me I made it.

Jay Goltz:
You just set it up perfectly for me. And my message to everyone is, “Be your own hero.” That’s my message. I want to be my own hero. And again, I’m 66. I’ve been doing this a long time. I wouldn’t have said what I just said to you 10 years ago. Well, maybe 10. But yeah, it took me a while to finally get to this.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, how do you think about this issue?

Shawn Busse:
I mean, I think it kind of boils down to extrinsic rewards or intrinsic rewards. And earlier in my life, I was much more extrinsically motivated. As I built a business, it was all about, “How do you get to a million dollars?” Because that’s a threshold that a lot of people can’t get past. So I work and work and work, and I get past the million dollars. Like, “Okay, well, what now?” And, “Okay, well, let’s see if you can do it twice.” And you work and work and work, and you do that. And I’ve just kind of come to a place in my life where I’ve realized that it’s less important to me how other people measure me.

And you see, we haven’t applied for awards in a long time. Because it just hasn’t been a value for me, personally, just kind of as an emotional… I don’t need that validation from outside sources. So I would just encourage your listener to seek within himself. What makes him happy? I think business is a trap to put so much energy into what others say about you. And I feel like Jay is a little bit at that point in his life, where he’s realized that—I don’t mean to speak for you too much, Jay—

Jay Goltz:
Give it a shot.

Shawn Busse:
Some of those things that we believe when we’re younger are important, you come to realize are a lot less important.

Loren Feldman:
Jay, this question did come from the owner of a picture-framing shop.

Jay Goltz:
Well, just so you know, it’s not a picture-framing shop. He does high-end, beautiful finish corner frames. He’s a supplier of mine. But still, he’s in the picture-frame business, yes. I had a long talk with him. He’s got a lovely story, and he’s on a great path. And I think he will absolutely get to a point where he feels successful. He’s only been in it, I think, seven years.

Loren Feldman:
Well, thank you for correcting me on that. And I guess I just wanted to ask, is there anything about that particular industry that would lend itself toward an answer to this question?

Jay Goltz:
Well, the high-end frame suppliers, there’s not many of them left. And he’s running a great business that makes those frames for frame shops. And I think he could very easily in the next, I don’t know, 5 to 10 years, get the business up to a size that he’s making plenty of money, and life is good. I love picture framers. They work hard, they’re trying to make customers happy, and it’s a small industry, but we do good things. We make customers happy. So he’s in the making-customers-happy business, and that’s why I love picture framing.

Loren Feldman:
All right, my thanks to Shawn Busse, Jay Goltz, and Sarah Segal—and of course to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses implement open book management and employee ownership. You can learn more at greatgame.com. Thanks for sharing, everyone.