Episode 52: I Need a Vacation

Guests:

Karen Clark Cole is co-founder and CEO of Blink.

Jay Goltz is founder and CEO of Artists Frame Service and Jayson Home.

Dana White is founder and CEO of Paralee Boyd hair salons.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Episode Highlights:

Karen Clark Cole: “The competitors for us are the tech giants, in terms of getting employees, and they are changing the landscape, never to return.”

Dana White: “I would get a text message at two o’clock in the morning saying, “My boyfriend just cheated on me. Are you up? Can we talk?” I don’t think any of you guys have had that text.”

Dana White: “My hair traffic controller can’t work from home, but my operations manager can. And as long as it gets done, I don’t care if you’re in Kathmandu.”

Jay Goltz: “There are going to be some people who are going to want to still work from home. And that doesn’t work for us.”

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Karen, Dana, and Jay. This episode will be published on Tuesday, March 9th, which is almost precisely one year after the four of us got together on March 13th—Friday the 13th—and taped an episode just as the contours of this crisis were beginning to emerge. That was the week that the WHO declared a pandemic. It was—perhaps even more shocking—the week the NBA suspended its season. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. It’s hard to believe it hasn’t been 10 years. I went back and listened to that episode again just to get a sense of what we were thinking at the moment.

In that episode, Dana told us that she was concerned that some businesses were not going to survive and that she was worried Paralee Boyd could be one of them. Karen told us that she was terrified—not so much about her business specifically, but about the economy overall and people she was close to, especially people with high-risk health profiles. Jay was not quite ready to accept how bad this thing might get. He told us he wasn’t going to participate in the hysteria. He thought everybody was going crazy. I think that morning he had been in a Costco and was trying to buy toilet paper.

I bring it up now after a year, I’d like to talk about: What has this year done to us and also to the people we work with? And I’m especially curious about your employees. It’s been a year unlike any other. I’m wondering where their heads are at, how they’re holding up. It’s such a tricky relationship between an employer and employee, especially with mental health issues. What do you want to know? What are you allowed to know? What can you ask? To go a year without even seeing people… it’s such a different situation. Maybe, Karen, start with you. I know you do regular surveys. What are you hearing from your employees?

Karen Clark Cole:
We do them usually quarterly, but during COVID, we did them monthly, which is just to check in on stress levels, mostly. And for COVID, our HR director, our chief culture officer, she added a few more questions in there around the state of your living conditions and trying to find out: Is there anything we can do to help? And in some cases, they needed a better chair, and so we would ship them a chair. Different things like that, that we actually can do.

Loren Feldman:
Do you think they were honest with you about how much they were struggling?

Karen Clark Cole:
Oh yeah, for sure. We have a very supportive culture anyway, so we know that managers were checking in with their people and colleagues with each other. We had a lot of coming together and helping everybody. Linda’s a psychologist as well—our chief culture officer—so she was able to really help people in ways that go far beyond her job description. It took a long time for everyone to get their heads around it, but then towards the end of the year, we had a bunch of people, when they could travel somewhere—like go to Mexico for two months or go to Hawaii for a month and just work from there, instead of being in an apartment in San Francisco, for example, where our offices were really shut down, and they still are—we’ve had people do things that they love doing, but that just wasn’t really possible before. That’s been a plus for sure.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Dana? Your employees don’t have the option of working from home or working from Hawaii.

Dana White:
Right.

Loren Feldman:
What’s it been like for you?

Dana White:
I re-listened to the podcast as well. And you’re right: I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know if Paralee Boyd was going to survive, and then if she did, what it would look like on the end of this. My staff has had to do what they needed to do in order to survive, because their survival isn’t comfortable, if that makes sense. They’re not salaried positions. They’re young men and women who are hourly, and they’re hopeful. They’re watching to see it turn around, and they’re seeing the business start to pick up, week by week, more and more customers, more and more customers.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Jay? You have a mix of employees who’ve had to come in and employees who’ve stayed home.

Jay Goltz:
Here’s a little anecdote, just to give you a picture. I sit in my office in the back of the second floor by myself. No one’s coming to my office, almost never. And every three hours, some woman with a mask on who’s from a third-party company comes in and is cleaning my doorknob and wiping the light switch, and I’m sitting there thinking to myself, “Wow, I’m spending money to have someone walking around, wiping my doorknob every three hours.” She’s gone through the whole place.

I very casually say to my manager, who has been with me for 25 years in framing, “God, Nellie, I’m sitting upstairs and every few hours, this woman…” And she just cut me off. She said, “Jay, people really appreciate it.” And you know what? That’s all I had to hear. I said, “Thank you.” Whatever it’s costing, which isn’t insignificant, if it makes people feel better, nothing to think about, and she knew that.

I will tell you though—and this is where it gets tricky—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, whether it’s their financial situation, whether it’s their physical well-being—any of the above. This is just layered on top of whatever was going on in their life before. This hasn’t helped any, and lots of people have anxiety about a lot of stuff. So it might look like everything’s okay. I recognize that probably most of the people are paying a toll on this whole thing, and unlike Karen’s situation—which I’m glad there’s been some upside—I can’t tell you I’ve got a whole lot of upside from this whole thing.

I can’t tell you that, “Oh wow, look, people are able to work from home.” I want those people back here. The other shoe is gonna drop at some point, and that’s going to be when this is quote-unquote over, and we want these people to come back to work. And I’m going to start having conversations, “Well, why can’t I work from home?” This isn’t going to be a party. This is a problem, and I’m sure that some employees work better from home, and it’s worked out great. I’m not arguing any of that. There are going to be some people who are going to want to still work from home. And that doesn’t work for us. It might in some cases, but it’s just opened up a can of worms that I wish it wouldn’t have.

Loren Feldman:
Are you open to some kind of hybrid?

Jay Goltz:
Maybe, maybe in some cases. But then it’s gonna get to, “Wait, why can she work from home three days a week, and I can’t?” It’d be like telling your kids, “Well, I like you better because you never give me a huge pain in the ass. And well, you can’t do it because once in a while I noticed you’re not…”

Loren Feldman:
But you only have eight employees.

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, but that’s enough. What do you do? I can’t make a blanket policy. There are some people who have been with me for 15 years who I know will work just as hard at home. And there are other people who I think they’d be getting more done if they were here. It’s gonna be a really difficult situation figuring out how to handle that. And then some jobs, you would just as soon have the person here every day because things come up as the day goes on. We’ve made it work. It hasn’t been horrible. It’s worked better than I thought, for sure. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be better if they were here. It’s difficult to keep a corporate culture and brainstorming and ideas and everything when the person’s not here. I have a couple of people who I literally haven’t seen in 10 months.

Karen Clark Cole:
Jay, are you doing Zoom calls with those people at all?

Jay Goltz:
No, because I really have nothing in particular to…

Karen Clark Cole:
But even if you don’t, having all of our phone calls on Zoom meetings, which seemed overkill at first, but that’s saved us. Because I feel like…

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, interesting.

Karen Clark Cole:
I haven’t not seen anybody. I see people more than I do normally. I say “see” in quotes, because we’ve got five offices, and so there are a lot of people who I just wouldn’t see very often, but I see them all the time now. I feel like we are all closer together because of Zoom, and it’s made everyone more accessible.

Jay Goltz:
No, that’s interesting. I’ll have to think about that. I have someone who is pregnant. Somebody could have gotten pregnant and had a baby by now—think about that—and you wouldn’t know about it. I have a woman, she comes in, she’s four months pregnant. I didn’t even know she was pregnant. Not that it makes a difference, but it’s just, they’re not here. Some of these people, I really would have never had a normal meeting with, but I would have seen them in the hall. I would have walked through the office. I would have had a conversation about something.

Karen Clark Cole:
I even started setting up meetings called “hallway chats” with the people who I would typically have those kinds of important conversations in the hallway [with]—mostly the executive team. Every day something would come up in the hallway, and we would solve it. So I had a twice-weekly hallway chat, and you would just come if you could. You would chat about what you’re having for dinner, or you would chat about something really important—just like trying to simulate a hallway.

Jay Goltz:
But I’ve gotta tell you, I don’t think I’m sleeping as well. I have to layer on: This isn’t just COVID. This whole political situation and the social unrest, all this stuff that’s messed up with this country, is really disturbing. I think I’m going to stop watching CNN and MSNBC and all of that, because I’ve gotta tell you, I think it’s adding to the whole thing—

Loren Feldman:
I think you’ve told us that before, Jay. I think it’s time for you to stop.

Jay Goltz:
I worked out on the elliptical for 40 minutes this morning. I didn’t turn it on. I turned it on for three minutes, and it was already too much. I turned it on, and I had to hear about inflation, and there’s no upside to it. So yeah, I’m telling you today—you hold me accountable, as of today. Next time I’m on this show, you ask me. I’m not watching TV for the next whatever, because it’s not helping my head any, because it’s really messed up. The world’s messed up.

Dana White:
I’ve turned it off. I think if I’ve learned anything through this pandemic, it’s about leadership, even leadership of my life, leadership of my time, leadership of what I allow in my space. I have a filter on my phone. I get no more than 10 minutes a day on Facebook, and it shuts off. You can’t go back on it unless you override it, which I don’t do, because I’ve learned that leadership is what has gotten me through this pandemic. Leadership is why Paralee Boyd is still open, and I can honestly thank this show for that.

If you remember listening to that episode a year ago, I concluded by saying in panic, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know.” I didn’t have the confidence. I was afraid. And so no, I decided at the beginning of April or mid-April what I was going to do after talking to my mom, after talking to you, Jay, and deciding that it’s up to me. Even in the expansion of my business, with the things I choose to do, I’ve chosen to be this type of leader in my personal life, this type of leader in my business, and this type of leader does not have time to count and calculate what everybody else is doing on Facebook. This type of leader doesn’t have time to allow for the television show of news to engage my anxiety, to determine how productive I’m going to be because I’m worried about what may or may not come next.

Loren Feldman:
I want to get back to the employees. Karen, I’m curious, with your situation, you have a lot of employees doing that survey. I think about if I were one of those employees, I don’t know how honest I would be on that kind of survey. I’m curious what you’ve turned up and what are you allowed to do as an employer? Have you had a situation where it has uncovered—I’m sure it’s an anonymous survey—but if you have somebody with real mental health issues, is there something you can do?

Karen Clark Cole:
Oh, it’s not that kind of survey. And why wouldn’t you be honest, Loren?

Loren Feldman:
Well, because you’re admitting vulnerability to an employer.

Karen Clark Cole:
No, it is anonymous, and we’re just doing things like gauging stress levels. It’s things like, “Do you feel like you need to work longer hours on this specific project that you’re on?” It’s meant to get a pulse of people’s workloads, and then I think it talks about external factors contributing to your stress. But it’s not specific, like, “Do you—list your name—have a mental health issue? But you have to understand the kind of environment that we have, which is very supportive, and that’s not lip service. It really is.

We’re really busy towards the end of the year. There’s a high percentage of people who had high stress due to workload, and so we look at that, and we pay attention to it. And what we do is, we start messaging broadly to the company like, “Hey, we see this spike ending in the next two weeks. We’re bringing on contractors.” Just to let people know what we’re doing to alleviate that, and that we’re not just ignoring it and expecting people to sort of quietly suffer away. So it’s more like that. But we do have loads of people who have been working with their managers, and in some cases, working with Linda to figure out how to get more real help outside of the company.

Jay Goltz:
And there’s a problem with that. We have an employee who has been here for years who was having some anxiety and we were trying to accommodate this person by giving them some FMLA treatment so they could have some flexible time. They can’t get an appointment with a professional because they’re overwhelmed. They couldn’t get an appointment for three weeks or something. The health care industry is being burdened, and I just did a little research before the podcast: They think suicides in the United States are up 30 percent this year. There are people who are being pushed to the edge, and you don’t necessarily know it. That’s concerning and troubling.

It’s not something that the typical employee is going to necessarily walk into the office… First of all, I’m bigger than most companies. Most companies don’t have 100 employees. Most companies under 100 employees don’t have an HR person. So if you’ve got a company with 40 employees, there is no HR department frequently. Who would they go tell that to? It’s really a problem in business. At least I have an HR person, and I’ve had to learn the hard way: Whatever they do, they keep me out of it. Now, I made the mistake of thinking, “Well, I own the company. I should know what’s going on.” And boy, was that a mistake. So I realize now, I’ve got an HR person. She’s competent. Karen’s got her person there who’s also got a psychology degree, which is great. If you don’t have that and you’ve got a 20-person, 10-person, 30-person company—and there’s no one designated to do that—who are they going to tell? The owner of the company?

Loren Feldman:
Dana?

Dana White:
So, here’s the thing—again, this is what I struggle with during the pandemic—there are a lot of layers when we’re talking about how we, as owners, interact with our staff and what they give us and what they give back. And all of our staffs are operating at different places. No, we don’t have somebody with mental health expertise on our staff to be there to talk. I was listening to somebody last year, and they called me after their podcast and said, “Well, Dana, why don’t you do a dueling piano bar via Skype or Zoom for your staff?” That’s not my staff. My staff? “When is my next check coming?” They might appreciate that, but their mindset is, “Dana, aren’t you going to pay our checks through this pandemic? Aren’t you going to pay for this, because you’re a business owner? You’re rich, right?”

There’s a fine line that I’m willing to balance with my staff—not because they’re Black, not because they’re hourly employees—but if you come to me—and that’s the culture I have. The culture at Paralee Boyd is, “You are enough. You are here to be kept here and not to be fired.” So we create a culture of open-door, but we respect that not everybody is going to be willing and comfortable to walk through that door because of what their own restraints are.

I’m very careful as to how personal I want to get with my staff. Also, because I do have staff who sometimes doesn’t understand the difference between Dana being my friend, and my managers being my friend, and being a good boss. There are these dynamics that are hidden, that at larger companies or at companies that have a different barrier of entry than my company, they’re like, “Well, Dana, why don’t you do this?” Well, okay, they’re not engineers. These are 22-year-old women and men who went to cosmetology school from McDonald’s. I’m not saying we can’t do it, but I’m just saying that I’m very cautious. I’ve been in that situation where I was that boss bringing that corporate culture that I was used to, and I was an employee leader. The breakdown that happened in my company—because I was an employee leader, I was involved—I learned that distance at Paralee Boyd was healthy. Because at the time, my staff didn’t know the difference between a good leader and a friend. I would get a text message at two o’clock in the morning saying, “My boyfriend just cheated on me. Are you up? Can we talk?” I don’t think any of you guys have had that text.

Jay Goltz:
Dana, let me tell you something. I’ve bailed several people out of jail in the middle of the night. Believe me, I’m not at all telling you or anyone else you should have this. I totally hear where you’re coming from. It just illustrates there is a huge bandwidth of different kinds of businesses, and Karen is very much to the left or right, whichever side at one end. There’s a huge difference between having a bunch of whatever $60,000, $80,000, $100,000 people and doing what you do. I’m in the middle somewhere, because believe me, I’ve bailed people out of jail. I’ve lent them money for lawyers. I know what you’re saying. I don’t disagree with a word you’re saying.

Dana White:
But Jay, I’m not saying you choose it, but you put yourself and your company to be that leader. I don’t want my staff calling me asking me to bail them out of jail.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, and frankly, I do. I really do.

Dana White:
That’s the difference, right?

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, no, I get it. I do. I do only cause the world’s not fair… One guy, for instance, I don’t know if everyone knows this, if you have a drink and you fall asleep in your car, and your car’s parked, and there’s keys in the car, you can get a DUI. So anyway, I’m not saying anybody should be doing anything. I’m saying it’s just a mixed bag out there, and there’s issues out there. Personally, I don’t want to go around to every employee—I don’t want the responsibility. Loren, I think you said, “Do you want to know?” I maybe don’t want to know some of it. There’s only so much I can do at this point. The biggest joke in business, I think, is the phrase, “Oh, we’ve got an open-door policy.” Great. The bigger the company, the less people come into the open door. It takes far more than announcing, “We’ve got an open-door policy.” I mean, you have to actively go out there and talk to people, and that doesn’t fix everything. Certainly everyone should have an open-door policy, but just because you have one doesn’t mean that you created an environment where people feel that they can come and talk to you.

Dana White:
I’ve been that leader where I’m the one: Dana, Dana, Dana, Dana. There’s a lot of pride in my staff, because Dana looks like me, and she has this. Again, there are a lot of cultural things. I stopped going to my salon getting my hair done, because I was tired of going in and being the owner. And then they come in, and I’m trying to get a shampoo, and they want to hear my life story. They want to be inspired constantly. Some days, Dana doesn’t want to talk. Dana just wants to get her hair done. And so the culture can be very different.

I was able to take the temperature for, “What did I sign up to do?” Did I sign up to make an impact on these people’s lives to this degree? Or did I sign up to make an impact on people’s lives by providing gainful employment, a company that wants you to be there, that will nurture you and your craft and pay you to do it? And then if you choose to leave, you are a better operator because of it. That’s what I want to do.

And then I want to create economic opportunities so they can go back to their community and maybe open up a Paralee Boyd for themselves one day as a franchise. I don’t know. But as far as Dana being front row and center in the personal lives of my staff… I literally was getting my hair shampooed a year ago, and a young lady who had been working with me for two weeks, walked up to me with her mother on FaceTime. They wanted to ask me to be the godmother of their daughter. And so no, Dana’s not going personal.

Jay Goltz:
I think that that’s a good illustration of how there’s a huge difference in different kinds of …

Dana White:
There’s a huge difference. But as a leader of the organization, I’m committed to doing the things I just said I did. Work from home? As long as it’s done! My hair traffic controller can’t work from home, but my operations manager can. And as long as it’s done, I don’t care if you’re in Kathmandu. Because where you are affects how you produce. I’ve been in that work environment where I dreaded going into work and loved getting stuff done from home because I didn’t have to balance the Barack Obama questions. I didn’t have to balance the “Can I touch your hair?” questions. I could just produce. You like everybody around you, but make sure you’re setting the temperature and the culture that may not be completely obvious to you because you’re the owner. Try to make sure that it’s working for everybody, because not everybody is dealing with what you’re not dealing with as an owner.

Jay Goltz:
I feel bad no one’s ever asked to touch my hair.

Dana White:
It’s not really something I like when people ask me.

Jay Goltz:
No, no. I totally understand where you’re coming from.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve asked you about your employees, and some of your answers have gotten into what this year has been like for each of you as well. But I’d like to ask that more directly. How are each of you doing? How have you held up, Karen?

Karen Clark Cole:
Well, it’s stressful for everybody. All those things, like Dana’s saying, it’s a leadership moment 365 days for sure. I miss seeing people, and it breaks my heart to go in and see an empty office when we put so much energy into making that a really great space for our employees and our clients. And yeah, it’s managing kids’ school, worrying about education, and worrying about the stress of the kids who are trying to keep up in school. That’s real and a big part of my life. Again, I’m trying to look for, “Okay, so what are some different ways of thinking?” I’m actually going to get out of the city, too. I’m in the process of moving. I have a little cabin in the woods in the mountains, and have had it for a long time. I’ve always wished I could be there full-time. One day, it kind of dawned on my daughter and I, who’s 12, “Why don’t we?” She goes to school in-person two days a week right now, and I can do the same with the office.

Loren Feldman:
How far away is it?

Karen Clark Cole:
It’s an hour and a half from the city.

Loren Feldman:
So you’ll be able to do that on those two days a week?

Karen Clark Cole:
Yeah, and the rest of the time, my neighbors are elks and I look out at large trees and a little river, and it’s paradise. It has just never been an option before.

Jay Goltz:
Is there an outhouse? I just want to get the whole picture.

Karen Clark Cole:
No, it’s a house. It’s a real house. It’s all made of wood and you’re in the forest. It’s near Mount Rainier, so it’s sort of southeast of Seattle.

Loren Feldman:
Do you expect to stay there even once your office returns to being open full-time?

Karen Clark Cole:
What? In like five years from now?

Loren Feldman:
Do you think it’s gonna take that long?

Karen Clark Cole:
Well, we are not going back to normal. I know that for sure. The world is different. AThe competitors for us are the tech giants, in terms of getting employees, and they are changing the landscape, never to return.

Loren Feldman:
But you’ve talked to us about how much you want to get people back in the office.

Karen Clark Cole:
Oh, I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to. It’s like what Jay says, “What I want isn’t necessarily what’s going to happen.” And so yeah, I want everybody in there, stuffed all together having great collaborative meetings. But the reality is, we’ve got a lot of employees who are asking to move to cities in states that we don’t even have offices. And we’re at first, “No, we need to at least have an office in that state,” or at least be paying the HR taxes and the corporate [filings], the state filings, the city filings, all of the HR laws, all of that kind of stuff. It’s a big deal. It’s not insignificant to just let somebody go somewhere. And then they’re not connected to a physical office, and so we’re just dealing with that.

What I think is going to happen is people are going to come back for collaborative working sessions with their project teams. They’re going to come back to meet with clients who come into town or want to have an in-person collaboration, and the rest of the heads-down work, which is the majority of what we do, is going to happen at home, and people are going to have that flexibility. They’re going to be really happy as a result, because the kind of work that we do allows that. We have to think differently, and I have to think differently as the vision for the company.

And so we’re not going to give up our spaces, because we do need the physical research facilities that we have in them, but it means that we have a lot more capacity in each office. Let’s just say an office could have 100 people sitting at desks working. Now, we have the capacity for three times that if people are sharing desks now, or they’re just coming in a couple days a week, so it’s just a totally different way of thinking. And it’s taken me the whole year to get my head around it, honestly.

Loren Feldman:
We’re running short of time. Let me ask you a couple of quick questions. Have any of you taken a vacation?

Jay Goltz:
Ha!

Dana White:
My last vacation was 2008.

Loren Feldman:
Oof. You need a vacation, Dana.

Dana White:
I need a vacation. Bahamas, 2008.

Jay Goltz:
I certainly haven’t gone anywhere. You can’t even get on a plane.

Loren Feldman:
People do. A lot of people do.

Jay Goltz:
Well, I’m not.

Dana White:
A lot of people do. I’m not doing it.

Loren Feldman:
Karen, you got on a plane.

Karen Clark Cole:
Yeah, I went to Mexico at Thanksgiving, but I went for a couple of weeks and I did some work from there. I’m not interested in getting on a plane just for a quick jaunt here or there unnecessarily, because it was not very comfortable. We got there and got back and it’s fine. But that’s about it. But luckily, I have this cabin in the woods, and so I go there for the weekend, and it feels like I’m a million miles away.

Jay Goltz:
I have a granddaughter. She’s 14 months old, and she’s never been with another kid. Think about that.

Loren Feldman:
We got an interesting listener question that came in that I want to deal with. It’s in reaction to the conversation we had last week with Dana about her considering expanding, possibly going to another city like Chicago, Atlanta, or New York. The question comes from John Stiles, who says he’s a lifelong retailer with a company called Underground Clothing in Canada. He wrote:

“The subject of the expansion plans for Paralee Boyd was interesting. I was surprised that a question that wasn’t asked was how expansion outside of the Detroit area would provide operating synergies to her existing locations. It would seem logical to me that building out Detroit would allow her management team to focus on a single geographic area. Things become much more complex when your operations are spread out over multiple cities and possibly time zones. Sticking to one market and having better marketing and operational synergies would make things easier to run and probably more profitable. The next step after building a solid base in Detroit would be to step out into new markets.”

Dana, what do you think of that?

Dana White:
Oh, it’s a great question, and it’s one I’ve been wrestling with. Understanding this market is why I’m considering going to other markets. I’ve been speaking to other entrepreneurs in this market, like 10 of them, and we’re all on the same page. The Detroit market is a great place to start your business. But Detroit has been through a lot, and one of the biggest things it’s been through is a population downturn. It doesn’t have the population density to truly test what you can do.

In regard to operational synergies, it’s a matter of—he’s right—making sure your operations are put together in your one location, and then bringing on people who have broad experience managing and operating, especially salons and businesses across the country. That is the experience my operations manager brings. Doing it by myself was never an option. One of the reasons why the Southfield location closed is because, let’s focus on one and grow it. But what I don’t want to do is miss an opportunity because we’re throwing so much money into one location when there are some things that are working against us.

We’re still doing all the marketing, doing the most we can out of this Midtown location. But I think I’d be missing an opportunity, especially as we’re trying to turn the corner with COVID. I’d be missing an opportunity in looking at other markets and testing the viability there. I don’t think it’s a loss. I think if this pandemic has taught me anything, it’s to stay on fire and plow ahead. And I just think there’s an opportunity to consider an expansion.

Jay Goltz:
This is also about not the pandemic, it’s about pan pizza, and the pizza’s better here. Let’s just be honest, Dana.

Dana White:
I lived in Brooklyn. So I don’t know if the pizza is better in Chicago than it is in Brooklyn.

Loren Feldman:
Real quickly: Karen, you recently were in the news for a very high-profile client of yours. Can you talk about that?

Karen Clark Cole:
NASA!

Loren Feldman:
Yes, tell us what you did.

Karen Clark Cole:
We worked with the internal team, called the Eyes Team, based out of JPL, which is the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, who has this amazing data visualization tool that they developed in-house that allows you to see any object in space that any of the missions that NASA is working on. You can see the planets. You can see all kinds of satellites zipping around up there, using actual engineering data to actually see these things.

We worked with them on many of their systems on the user experience, the storytelling aspect of it, the interface, the visual design, all that stuff. And specifically, they created a separate little standalone for the Mars landing, where any of the TV coverage you would have seen, the data visualization of what it’s going to be like when the rover lands, of the different stages of descent, where the different parts of the spaceship are coming off, and the rover gets let down very carefully by some ropes and then lands, and then the rocket zips off and crashes somewhere else—we designed all of that with them. And for me, the most fun is when we meet with them—well, prior to COVID—we’d meet down at JPL. We’ve watched over the last several years the rover being built. There’s a viewing room up above the clean room where they were working on it. I feel like the rover is my good friend, because I’ve watched it being born.

Loren Feldman:
Pretty cool. Lastly, Jay, I just want to share, you’ve talked on this podcast quite a bit about your thoughts on succession and how the pandemic has changed your thinking a little bit. You would love to figure out a way to keep the business going even beyond you for your employees, if possible. And this week, I did a webinar conversation where I had you on with two business owners who have gone employee stock ownership plan. They have ESOPs, and I brought you on to be the natural skeptic that you are and to ask a lot of questions, and I assumed you would poke a lot of holes in the idea and that would be that. But somewhat to my surprise—and perhaps to yours—it sounded like you took it seriously and we’re kind of interested.

Jay Goltz:
I have to say, I’d heard the phrase. I knew what it meant. I knew no details. And it was quite interesting. I’ll just cut to the chase. There were two things that came out of it, one from each of the two guys who you had on there. One is, you don’t necessarily give up control. You can run your company. There’s not a committee running it. You run it.

And the second thing is, there’s no downside to the employees because—as you know, Loren, I talked to you about—I said to you, “This can’t be true.” It is true: You don’t pay federal income tax. And if you’re an ESOP, that money can go into a pool that helps the employees buy the company from you. It’s probably not an overnight thing, but if you plan it out over a period of 10, 15, 20 years, you’re basically taking advantage of tax laws to generate some cash to help the employees buy the company. There’s not a lot of downside for the employees, if any. I’m sure it’s very complicated, and there are 50 different variations of the theme, but it does appear that it works extremely well in the right environment—to which the surprise is, there are only 8,000 of them in the United States.

Loren Feldman:
Now that you know more about it, do you have a theory as to why there are so few?

Jay Goltz:
I believe that there are a bunch of technicians involved with it, and nobody in marketing. Because if I were a law firm and had a person who specialized in this—which exists—I would be doing some PR, and I would be placing some articles, and I would be out there more. Because it’s very interesting. As I said, I think it would work for a lot of companies. You know me, I’ve been going to the conferences for years, reading articles. I’ve never read anything on it.

Loren Feldman:
You didn’t believe me when I told you that ESOPs don’t have to pay income taxes.

Jay Goltz:
I said, “Loren, that can’t be possible. Loren, you’ve got that wrong. That can’t be possible.” It’s true! You don’t pay federal income tax. It’s unbelievable. I think it’s very interesting. I will look into it some more. It’s not just, “Oh, look at what a good person I am. I’m going to sell to my employees.” It’s really a tool to use to get your money out of your company, period, and provide a good thing for your employees at the same time. It’s a win-win for everybody, I think—unless I got it wrong, but I don’t think so.

Loren Feldman:
We’ll find out. We’ll probably discuss that more going forward. I want to thank Karen Clark Cole, Jay Goltz, and Dana White. As we discussed at the beginning, this has been quite a year. I really appreciate you guys sharing a good part of your year with me and with our listeners.