Hot Seat: Three Owners, No Easy Answers

Introduction:

Sometimes the best conversations start with a simple question—and then another, and another. This week, we put Kate Morgan, Jaci Russo, and Ted Wolf in the hot seat and fire away: Are you hiring? Are you finding impressive job candidates? What was the worst job you ever had—and did you learn anything from it? Have you bought crypto? If you had $10,000 a month to spend on marketing, where would it go? Should a marketing agency ever turn its marketing over to another marketing agency? What’s holding you back? What’s the simplest thing you’ve never quite figured out how to do?

None of these are trick questions, but they don’t necessarily have easy answers. Kate admits she’s never opened her accounting software. Jaci says one of the best things that ever happened to her was getting fired. Ted recounts losing 40 percent of his company’s revenue in a single weekend. Running a business means living with trade-offs, uncertainty, and the occasional punch to the gut. As Jaci reminds us, it usually works out—one way or another. But that doesn’t mean the answers are simple when you’re in the middle of it.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Kate Morgan is CEO of Boston Human Capital Partners.

Jaci Russo is CEO of BrandRusso.

Ted Wolf is CEO of Guidewise.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Kate, Jaci, and Ted. It’s great to have all of you here. I want to do something a little different today. I want to throw a bunch of somewhat random questions at you. They’re all about owning a business and building a business, running a business, but still a little random. But I’m just going to toss them out there. Anyone can respond.

Jaci Russo:
I have questions. Is there a speed? Is there a prize for the winner? How does this work? [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
We’re playing it by ear, Jaci.

Jaci Russo:
All right. All right.

Ted Wolf:
We’re going to award the worst answer today. [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
Oh, yay, I’m in.

Loren Feldman:
All right, let’s get going here. Let’s give it a shot. Number one, just pretty basic, simple: Are any of you hiring?

Kate Morgan:
Yes.

Ted Wolf:
Yes.

Jaci Russo:
I just onboarded three new people. Beautiful.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. And what types of positions?

Jaci Russo:
Kate went first, so I was gonna let her answer first.

Kate Morgan:
Oh, for me, it’s all in the talent acquisition space.

Loren Feldman:
And how did the hiring process go? What did it tell you about the market out there? Was it easy? Was it hard? What did you see?

Kate Morgan:
No, super disappointed. Because I love growing early-career folks, and it’s awful. There’s no work ethic. I hate to be that person on the wrong side of 50 shaking my fist and going, “Kids these days…”

Loren Feldman:
Well, tell me just a little bit more. What are you seeing? What’s the problem?

Kate Morgan:
So the bulk of young people are coming out of college. They haven’t had internships. They never had high school jobs, because their parents told them, “Your job is school and sports.” But the problem is, the world becomes so engineered that people don’t know how to react, and we need people who can react on their own. They can problem-solve. They have all these initial—you know, the intrinsic skills. And they don’t.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, are you seeing anything like that?

Jaci Russo:
I would not say that that is wrong, but I think we have dodged some of those bullets. And I don’t know that we’ve done anything smarter and better than anybody else. It could just be a lot of dumb luck. We have constantly open positions for every place in the company, including my seat, on the website. So we’re always getting talent.

So when we had a designer who was leaving us after years, because they were going to work in-house—you know, one client, and from home—which is different from what we do here, where we’re doing hundreds of things for hundreds of people. And so we had a list of people who had applied in the past few weeks, reached out to them, interviewed a few, hired somebody, and she is on day four. And we couldn’t be more pleased with attention to detail, work ethic, hit the ground running. Just a rock star.

We’ve hired a PR coordinator, who started as an intern for us, went to part-time, and is now full-time after graduating. And we just did a big presentation where she spent, I don’t know, 30 minutes presenting this entire PR plan for a new client. We’re in the middle of our Razor Branding strategic brand planning process for them. And she hit it out of the park, like did the presentation herself to senior leadership—rock star! And then a marketing coordinator who started with us a couple of weeks ago, and at this point, I’m about just to hand her the keys and the alarm codes and let her run the whole shop, because she’s smart. She’s so smart. And so, no, we’re pleased.

Loren Feldman:
Sounds like the key there is that you have something of a relationship with these people already.

Jaci Russo:
One of them. Only one do we have a relationship with. The other two are new to us.

Loren Feldman:
But the thing with them, the other two, is that at least you’d had some interaction with them, and you weren’t just starting cold. They had already expressed an interest.

Jaci Russo:
Yes, yes, they had, and I think that does help.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Ted?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, we just hired an individual and had a very, very good experience. Hired him as an AI technical person, and programming, has a great background. And we found we like to center ourselves around a college, if we can. My son and I own the business. We both went to Penn State University. And other than their football program,this year, it’s been very promising for us. And I think what we’re doing a little bit differently, maybe—and I’m not saying that nobody else is doing this—but we really hit them hard on the interview, as far as starting back in high school. “How’d you spend your time?” “Tell me a really difficult situation, and what you did to get out of it.”

And we’ve been able to find some people who I think want to get into AI, so I mean, that’s a big drawing card for a lot of people. They want to be on the ground floor, hands on, and everything. So it might be, we just got lucky this time. I don’t think so. I know a lot of people are having trouble. And Kate, I understand exactly what you’re talking about, but we don’t have that problem. Haven’t had that problem. And I don’t know if we’re doing anything different or it’s just good luck, to be honest with you.

Kate Morgan:
For us, the challenge is, there’s no college program that you can pull these people out of, and so that’s why I’m trying to groom folks. And what they hear is, “talent acquisition.” They think recruiter. They think sales. We don’t work on commission, and because we’re more consultants, we have to have a really, extremely high bar, because they’re going to be interfacing with executives very early in their tenure with us, so our bar is crazy high. And we have them go through these hoops, and they just fall out throughout the process.

Ted Wolf:
And if I may ask, why is it that they’re falling out? What do you think? Don’t have the drive?

Kate Morgan:
Yeah, there’s no motor. There’s no motor. We need intellectual curiosity. And they just start to look at it as, “Wow, this is going to be, like, too much hard work.” [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
Reminds them of their parents, right?

Loren Feldman:
What level is this, Kate? Apparently not entry level. How senior a position is this?

Kate Morgan:
No, no, I would rather take somebody without any experience in my industry, because when we bring people in from my industry, I have to break all their horrible habits. So, I can’t really take anybody that’s fresh out of college. They have to have life experience.

Loren Feldman:
But you said these people will be dealing with executives pretty quickly, so I guess you throw them in the fire after some training?

Kate Morgan:
Yeah, oh yeah. But I look at it from the perspective—like, my daughter works for private equity. When she first went in, she was sourcing, so she’s reaching out to folks doing essentially what my team does, except we’re doing more consultative side stuff. But I just don’t understand. Yeah, it’s, no drive, no drive.

Loren Feldman:
I think all three of you have had other jobs other than running your own business. Based on something Kate wrote recently, I’m curious to ask you: Kate, you used a different word, but I’ll say: What was the worst job each of you has ever had? Anybody?

Ted Wolf:
I’ll go first. I was really young, pre-college, high school: I worked on a dairy farm and how to wash cows and get them ready for milking. [Laughter] And the farmer who hired me said, “I’ll pay you,” at that time, “25 cents an hour.” This was in May. He said, “I’ll pay you in October, when I get paid. I’ll keep account of your hours, but I’ll show you how to grow up.” And his growing up was at the end of the day, he’d buy everybody a beer. Okay, I drank a beer and got sick. Next week, he brought in chewing tobacco. I tried that. Got sick. So the guy really made me grow up fast and find out what I didn’t want. I will say that, but he did hold his word. In October, I got paid. [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
So, there’s nothing better than farm work. I grew up on a farm, and so that set the stage for me. But I will say, my worst job was actually working at a state-run assisted living facility in Western New York. And it was really, really tough, because there was a lot of cognitive decline, and it was really awkward, because there were two people that were always having hanky panky. So I’d be like, walking in on it. [Laughter] At 16, I’m like, “Oh, dear Lord, I don’t need to see that.”

Ted Wolf:
Scarred you for life.

Kate Morgan:
Totally.

Loren Feldman:
They were probably the happiest people in the facility.

Kate Morgan:
Exactly, they were.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Jaci? Did you have a terrible job?

Jaci Russo:
First-ever job, I was probably nine or 10, and there were some fig and pecan trees. We had been mosquito-coasted to a town called Grand Coteau, about 45 minutes away from where I live now, in Lafayette. And it was country. Like, there was no stoplight. It was long distance, and we were removed from basically all of society.

So there were these fig and pecan trees not too far away, and I would go pick them and then walk to the local country grocery store and sell them for so much a pound. And that was my first job, so an entrepreneur from the early days. Worst job was high school, working Taco Bell drive-thru on Friday nights during football season. When I’m working the Taco Bell and everybody from my school is driving through to get their Taco Bell after the game, those were not good days. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Did any of you take anything from those worst jobs that is still useful, as you think about what you’re doing, running your own business?

Ted Wolf:
No. [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
I wonder: Is it dementia, or is it syphilis? [Laughter] But I digress. I mean, kind of stemming from what Ted said, if you work hard, it builds character. You get grit. Because—this was in the ‘80s, for me—there weren’t a lot of jobs. So you just did what you could. You didn’t have the allowance, so you learned how to manage your own money, and there was just so much benefit from it.

Ted Wolf:
The benefit I got was, you know, it was way back in time, and there weren’t a lot of jobs available, as Kate just said. And we had one car. I had to be able to walk to the farm. I had to be able to walk wherever I was going to go. And actually, the biggest lesson that I learned was, he hired a bunch of kids that were in high school, and he knew how to, believe it or not, manage them.

Because at the end of every day of work, he built a fire. We’d smell it as we’re working. We could see the fire. We’d come over, and he’d have drinks for us and stuff—non-alcoholic, I should say—and then he made some food. And we talked and had fun, and he told jokes, and he told us how to sing some dirty songs and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, we actually kind of looked forward to it, because it was fun and it wasn’t sitting at home watching TV. And he learned how to make you feel like you belonged to something special, and all it was was a dairy farm. So that was invaluable for me.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, did you take anything from your job that’s still useful?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, absolutely. A lot of motivation to not be poor, a really good work ethic, a need to be resilient, and an ability to not have shame. You cannot serve all the cool kids of high school tacos with extra sour cream without feeling a little shame in the early days. And I quickly learned to get over that and be proud of myself and what I’ve done.

You know, we have four kids, and they worked, even though they had sports and school and all the things, they still worked. They had jobs, and whether it was at our company, when they had free time—which they worked harder than other employees, because there’s no favorites here—or at outside jobs, which they found to be better paying and less stressful, I think that’s an important part of the growing up experience.

Loren Feldman:
Next question: Have any of you bought Bitcoin or any other crypto product?

Jaci Russo:
Nope.

Kate Morgan:
Nope.

Ted Wolf:
I didn’t buy Bitcoin. I’m still kicking myself for not doing that. Crypto, yes. Mixed results, and still feels a little bit like the Wild West to me.

Jaci Russo:
I have a question: If you had bought Bitcoin at the point you wanted to, would you still be holding it, or would you have sold it at some point along the way? And if so, at what point?

Ted Wolf:
That’s a great question. And I learned a lot about myself from doing some trading, and that is that I was impatient. And I probably would not have held it, because I had tens of thousands of Apple stock at $13, and I ended up selling it and made a little money—I should say, made some nice money, but not what it could be today if I had held it.

Jaci Russo:
Yeah, because we’re at 250 right now, and we’ve split a couple times. Yeah, sorry—not to rub salt in that wound. [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
Great way to end the day. Thank you. Thank you, Jaci.

Jaci Russo:
Well, I asked because, when I lived in Los Angeles, you know, I was single, I was in my 20s, before I moved back home to Lafayette, Louisiana. And I owned my house out there and kept it for the first three or four or five years, once I moved back, and then sold it. And Michael and I were back in the city a couple of months ago and drove past it, and foolishly, I looked up what it’s worth right now—speaking of being sick about it. But then I kept thinking: Would I still own it? Would I have sold it at some point? At what point along its rapid growth of value would I have sold it? And then I realized there’s no right answer there.

Ted Wolf:
No, there’s not. And I think you’re right. But you know, there’s another stock, though, that I should have bought. It was at $6 about two years ago, and it was up at $90 just the other day, but I got busy with working, didn’t do it. And that’s life.

Kate Morgan:
So, I don’t want to say the company, but they were a client of ours. We actually had two companies that were in the cryptocurrency space, and their coin, at one point, was worth $2,700 and then tanked and was 11 cents.

Ted Wolf:
I’ve experienced some of those also.

Loren Feldman:
So Ted, you’ve bought crypto as an investment, the way you would a company’s stock?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I still have it today. Can’t say that I made an awful lot. Because crypto in the last year or two, I think, has been having some problems. But I think long-term, there’s a trend out there. I don’t think it’s going to go away. You know, obviously I can’t see into the future that far, but I think it’s always good to have a little bit of that and gold.

Loren Feldman:
Are you sitting on some gold right now? Because that would be a good investment.

Ted Wolf:
Oh, yeah, I bought a lot of gold years ago.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. I thought most business owners put it all into the business.

Ted Wolf:
Well, what little that I could afford, I put into it. Let’s put it that way. It’s all relative.

Loren Feldman:
If I gave each of you $10,000 a month to spend on marketing, what would you do? Jaci, you go last.

Jaci Russo:
I figured. [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
I think for me, it would be really focused on building out my personal brand for speaking. I think that’s the critical piece right now. I’ve always done well just word of mouth with my own business, so I don’t think I would do much there.

Loren Feldman:
So if you’re spending it on promoting your own brand, especially for speaking, where are you spending it?

Kate 18:13
Oh, I don’t know. I’d hire an agency. That would be the $10,000. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Okay. Ted?

Ted Wolf:
I’d probably go to Jaci and ask her for some advice.

Jaci Russo:
Aww, thank you.

Loren Feldman:
Well, you’re going to get that anyway. I want to know what you think.

Ted Wolf:
I would spend $10,000 a month to build a community, and I’d build a network first, a personal network, and then I would build a community out of that. And the community would be where people would be coming in, a closed community, and that’s where you would really start finding the leads, the referrals, working together, helping each other succeed. I think, for myself, that’s what I think the future holds. I don’t have a lot of faith in email. SEO is changing because of ChatGPT and OpenAI. But I would build it into community referrals, very strong support. And it takes me back to the farm days: make people feel like they belong to something.

Loren Feldman:
And, asking for a friend, how would you attract people to this community?

Ted Wolf:
Two things, is what I found: books, meaning plural, that you would write, and number two, podcasts. That’s what I would do, because that’s where you can get an awful lot of echo chambers going on, and people hearing from you in a lot of different areas. And it positions you as an idea person. And if you can actually demonstrate that, I think it brings a lot of credibility, versus an email that you send out twice a week. That’s my own personal experience.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, if I gave you $10,000 a month to spend on marketing your marketing agency, what would you do?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I think everybody’s answer should always start with strategy, and so to have a plan is the first thing: an assessment of what you’re doing right now so you can really step back. And so, I would hire another agency who has outside perspective, because I don’t think you can properly evaluate yourself. You can’t stand inside the house and also look at your house from the street. You can’t do that at the same time. And so you need to really know what your curb appeal looks like.

So I would get an outside third party who could have conversations with my clients—not involving me, so they get real answers—people who aren’t with us anymore, people who should be with us, but haven’t become so yet, and get a real good assessment of us, compared to competitors and a real understanding of how we are missing—because everybody is—the ability to explain ourselves in a way that cuts through the clutter and connects with people. And that’s what I would do.

Kate Morgan:
So Jaci, on that, it sounds like I had the right answer, then. Right? [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
Yes, absolutely. Well, I will give you points for your answer. But really, y’all both did, because building a community is also valuable, and you would need a plan for that. It all has to start with a plan. And too many people approach marketing in just a tactical way. They are hammers. They see everything as nails. And they just go do, and when we back up and actually approach it like an architect planning something, then we have a toolkit, and we can match the right tool to the right opportunity, and it all goes much better.

Ted Wolf:
By the way, I do agree with that an awful lot. I think that’s very good.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, I’m going to guess that it’s not very common for a marketing agency to hire another marketing agency to do its marketing. Maybe it happens, but I haven’t heard that a lot. Have you ever actually done that?

Jaci Russo:
I have not. I have heard of it happening. We’ve had some hire us, but I have not hired others. But we’ve worked for, gosh, probably five different agencies in 25 years, where we’ve done exactly what I just described for somebody else. They’re not a direct competitor, so there was no issue. And we went and did our process for them, and to watch the light bulbs go off, for them to realize that they’ve been making the same mistakes that they educate their clients to not make, it was fun. Actually, it was really fun.

Loren Feldman:
So that leads to an obvious question: Why haven’t you done it?

Jaci Russo:
I’m waiting for your $10,000 check to arrive. [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
That’s quick. That was quick.

Loren Feldman:
It’s in the mail, Jaci. All right, so the check has arrived. Are you actually going to do it?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I would, in a heartbeat. The thing is, they’re going to charge more than 10 grand, but I absolutely would, because I think it’s valuable. And there are a number of agencies that I have great respect for that I think do really good work, and I think they would provide insight. No one can really be their own best judge, critic, and teacher.

Loren Feldman:
What was the best advice any of you ever got? Anyone?

Ted Wolf:
You mean from a business perspective?

Loren Feldman:
Yes.

Ted Wolf:
For me, someone said to me, “If you’re going to have your own business, you have to learn how to make money and save money. Most people focus on making money.” I thought that was very interesting, and it stuck with me for a long, long time.

Loren Feldman:
And what was the upshot of that? What did that lead you to do, actually?

Ted Wolf:
It made me look at a business. My background from college education is finance. So when I would look at financial statements, it would make me look at it and ask two questions: Where am I making money? Second, where can I save money? Because sometimes, when you save money, you make a lot more money. And sometimes you don’t. But it just made me look at the financial aspects of a business and the operating aspects of business much, much differently.

And it made me look for where I can actually kind of get a boost, how can I say, in productivity. I owned a restaurant at one time, and I found out if we had a special event at the restaurant once a month, it was almost giving us an extra weekend’s income. And that made all the difference in the world. And that was the type of thing of, “Okay, where can we make money and save money? What have I got to do? Spend a little bit more money here, I’ll make it.” It paid off for me, learning how to do both.

Kate Morgan:
So mine’s a little bit more rudimentary. I had been working on a business plan that was sort of actually going to be a version of HelloFresh, way before HelloFresh. And I brought it to a CEO who had been a client.

Loren Feldman:
That’s an online grocer.

Kate Morgan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I brought it to the CEO who I had been working for, and I told him, “This is what I’m kind of thinking.” And he went through the business plan. He goes, “Well, this is great.” He goes, “You’re stupid to go into any business you know nothing about.” And I said, “Fair enough.” And meanwhile, I’d worked on this for like, four months, and so I put it down. And six weeks later, I launched Boston Human Capital Partners, because that I did know, and it’s been successful for 15 years.

Loren Feldman:
So, do you ever think about going into the online grocery business?

Kate Morgan:
Nope, not anymore. It’s a crowded, crowded market.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci?

Jaci Russo:
You know, I will tell you that I’ve had some similar advice in terms of: It’s not what you make, it’s what you spend that’s going to determine the success of your business. I don’t think I’ve listened to that at some times as well as I should have. I think we’ve talked about that I’ve adopted Profit First as our code of ethics for 2026. And honestly, three weeks in, I’m already seeing a change in how I think, how I track things.

My team will tell you I am on their behinds about spending, and it’s a whole new world. And so it’s been very interesting to see how it has taken hold, and I’m excited to see when we all get together in May at the 21 Hats in-person conference, what kind of report I’m going to be able to deliver to everybody, because I think it’s going to be pretty impressive. I think I’m going to stop talking about revenue and start talking about profit I’ve kept. And that’s a way better number for me to look at. It makes me happy.

But most of the business advice that I’ve gotten has really been watching other people’s examples, both good and bad. And the best, most practical one I can refer to is: One is a guy named Stan Richards who started the Richards Group, which is a big agency in Dallas. They’re one of the biggest independent agencies. They haven’t been scooped up by one of the conglomerates—and I think I’ve even told the story on the podcast before—but we got an RFP, which we don’t do anymore, but we got an opportunity to do one. It was way bigger than us. I have greatly admired Stan’s business and what he’s built. You’ll know every one of his clients. You know, it’s Motel 6 and Chick-fil-A, and all these amazing campaigns.

And so I reached out to them to see if they wanted to partner on it. And about two hours after I sent out a query to the website of a company that has over a thousand employees, I got a phone call from Stan Richards himself. And I thought at first it was somebody who was just yanking my chain. But it was absolutely him, and we had a lovely conversation, and he politely explained to me why we weren’t going to be partnering. [Laughter] It was so kind, though, and it really taught me a lot about attention to detail, reply response times, never looking an opportunity down until you know what the full opportunity is. And it really set me in motion for a lot of things I think I still do better today because of that.

And the other is a guy named Rick Frayard, who was married to a boss that I had. It wasn’t his agency. I worked for his wife, but he was really invested in her success, and therefore, in all of us. And so he would show up at the office at 6 a.m., and therefore so did I, to go through training with him before my job started at 8. And I was a little shit about it. Sorry for the language, but there’s no other word that applies. And I was not respectful, and I did not give him the time of day that he deserved. He was an incredibly successful man, and so, he so wisely, six months later, fired me, which was a great lesson. And both of those two interactions, I think, really set me in an important direction in my career.

Loren Feldman:
That’s great, when you can look at being fired as a form of advice.

Jaci Russo:
Well, I didn’t at the time. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Well, I’ve been there too, and I didn’t either.

Jaci Russo:
No, but I do. I look back on that. It set in motion so many things: all good now. It did happen three weeks before my wedding, so the timing wasn’t great, but it was the wake up call I needed. Because I had a bit of an attitude, and it needed to be adjusted.

Loren Feldman:
What’s holding any of you back right now? What challenge do you need to solve? What decision are you putting off making? What’s holding you back?

Kate Morgan:
I think, for me, it’s just kind of, our business is really booming right now. At the same time, my book is doing so well, so it’s hard to do both.

Loren Feldman:
What a terrible problem!

Jaci Russo:
I know.

Kate Morgan:
I know, right? Yeah, but it really is: Where do I put my mindshare? And I think if I can get these roles filled, that will help me, but that’s why I’m also making sure that we keep the bar as high as possible. We just can’t afford to bring somebody in who’s not going to be successful.

Loren Feldman:
Are you doing something different? Are you trying a different approach, given what’s happened so far?

Kate Morgan:
No, it’s just, you have to be stringent. And I’m an impatient person. I’m an Aries, so I’m just not a patient person. I get really frustrated because it feels like the people that we’re talking to, they’re just stunted in some way. And it’s disappointing.

Loren Feldman:
But this is your industry. You’ve been doing this a long time. You must have some idea what your next step is.

Kate Morgan:
Well, yeah, I mean, we do. It’s just, do we spend the time upfront breaking bad habits from people within the industry? It just doesn’t feel right, so then trying to convince somebody to come into our industry, it just takes a little longer. So again, it was easier to recruit Gen X and millennials. Gen Z? Not so much.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, is there anything holding you back?

Jaci Russo:
Time, Loren. I always want more time. I keep taking on new things, and that’s both my Achilles heel and my superpower all at the same time. And so my word for the year is: balance. And I’m very focused right now on bringing more balance into what I’m doing and not letting my time get lopsided from one company to the other.

Loren Feldman:
One company to the other, meaning the different companies?

Jaci Russo:
Right, so, you know, we have BrandRusso, the agency; Brand State U, the educational platform; and the consulting work that I do. And then GrowthX Academy is launching like five cohorts this year for first-stage businesses, in partnership with Louisiana Economic Development, a program for rising C-suite executives to help them do a better job of taking over companies that they are purchasing or ascending into. And then women’s business cohorts—that’s national. So, that’s a lot. So I just want more time, because I love all of those things. It’s like picking between my kids. I just want to have more time for all of them. [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
It’s all fun, and hopefully they’ll take care of you once they get older, right?

Jaci Russo:
That’s the plan. That is the plan.

Ted Wolf:
If there’s anything that’s holding me back, I’d say right now—I don’t know how to phrase this correctly—but there seems to be some latency in business today. It’s like, it takes a long time to get an answer from people. I’m going to give you an example. I’m dealing with Claude, the AI window. They double-billed me on the same day due to an error on their part, not mine. They even sent me an email: “That’s our fault.” So I said I’d like to cancel one of the double bills. And they said, “Okay, we gave you a credit for one.” And this is all through email, and it wasn’t like back and forth email. And it ends up, they said, “We’ll give you one cancellation on one, but you pay for it for the next 30 days until that cancellation runs in effect.”

And I said, “In other words, I’ve got to pay for an extra month on Claude for a license I don’t need because I already have one?” And they still haven’t gotten back to me. And this is probably a week now, and I find that very frustrating. And I find it bleeds in a lot of areas. It just seems like it’s so hard to communicate and get communication and a decision and get something done on trivial things such as that. That’s what I’m running into. Maybe I’m expecting too much, but business didn’t work that way in the past.

Loren Feldman:
You’d think AI can figure that one out.

Ted Wolf:
Well, I don’t think AI is there yet. And I hate to say this, but in the old days, you actually talked to a person and you got something done. You got decisions made, and you could move on. And what you could get done in a week would be incredible. Now, it’s slow, incremental movements. You’re not sure, then all of a sudden, something happens and puts you back in frame zero. And you’re working and starting all over. I just find that frustrating. And overall, it might be just my experience, but I find that seems to be holding me back more than I like.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, it sounded like you were agreeing that it’s taking longer to get people to make decisions.

Jaci Russo:
Well, I would have two responses to that. One, we were told that a certain software platform could do a certain feature, and so, believing that, signed a contract. Upon logging in, within 12 minutes, realized: Oh, it did not do that at all. Immediately emailed them and said, “Hey, we’ve had this account for all of 12 minutes. There’s a problem. It doesn’t do the thing that you said it would that we told you we needed. So we need to cancel it.” I am now in the third month of fighting with them, because they want me to pay this multi-thousands-of-dollar contract for something that doesn’t do the thing I told them it needed to do.

Loren Feldman:
Do they dispute that?

Jaci Russo:
Well, their theory is: “You really need the thing we do. You don’t really need the thing you think you need.” So then I am in a bit of a chat with a company that we use for all of our on-camera video meetings. I’m not naming them, but it rhymes with room. We have canceled our webinar service with them 14 times since last March, according to my email threads, and yet, they just don’t believe that I should live without it. They think it’s a really important part of my business, and I just don’t know how important it is—and if I just gave it a chance, the last message I got today. I’m like, “No, I’ve given it a chance. We’re not using you anymore.” [Laughter]

So there’s that kind of stuff. But then my real reaction was around clients. Now, we’ve grown over time. Our value has gotten bigger, so I know that our ticket price has gotten bigger, but I am still shocked by the amount of, I’m going to say, hemming and hawing. And I don’t mean it disrespectfully, but man, like, make a decision!

Loren Feldman:
And do you think that’s reflective of the current economic environment or something else?

Jaci Russo:
I really don’t know. It seems to be—because I’ve tried to isolate it. So we’re doing a better job of tracking. Is it we didn’t do a good enough job of there being trust? And so, they came in cold. They don’t really know us, and so that’s why? And so, I’m looking at that compared to people who have been on our email list, have been listening to our podcast, have had conversations with us, have seen me speak at a conference, have bought the book, you know, whatever. And so, where’s the line? I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I think I’m close, and I think I’m going to be able to figure out pretty soon what the common denominator is.

Ted Wolf:
Loren, I think some of what I’m feeling, based on what you had just asked, is I think we might be reaching the raw inflection point in using technology, thinking technology will solve everything. And here I am in AI, and I know I’m talking about it, and it may be against the grain, but I think we’re reaching a point where we’re saying: We still need some people involved. And maybe we’re going to learn how to put people back involved, if we can, and not just rely on technology to do everything. Because there is a steep learning curve. It moves real fast. It’s constant change. And not everybody can keep up with it, and that’s not really good, I think, long-term for a business environment.

Loren Feldman:
Do any of the three of you have a question you’d like to put before the group? I can keep going, but if there’s something that you would like to ask—

Ted Wolf:
I’d like to know where Jaci gets her energy. [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
It’s from all the water I drink all day. I’m very hydrated. [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
And your skin glows.

Jaci Russo:
It’s a little wrinkly now. I’m about to be 56 in mere days, and I’m feeling it. I’m starting to feel it. You know what it is? I like what I do. I am very driven to keep managing these three different entities that I run, and so I think I have the same level of energy, no matter what. But I’ve got to bring a little bit more to the table, because I’m not just running one company. And so it does take a little more time, attention, and activity to make that happen. But it’s fun, and now’s the time. This is a seize-the-day moment. And if I wait, I’m gonna miss the worm or something in the morning. So, I gotta go.

Ted Wolf:
Jaci, you said you live in Louisiana. Is that right?

Jaci Russo:
I do.

Ted Wolf:
I thought the pace down there was a little slower.

Jaci Russo:
That’s the advantage. Don’t tell the others. [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
So you were the one that went to California, and you’ve worked harder and made a lot of money. And everybody was saying, “Why doesn’t she ever get down to the beach?” Right?

Jaci Russo:
Well, no, I actually lived about three blocks from the beach when I first got there and learned to surf. And I was a big fan of outdoor activities. My first job, though, I worked at a company called Creative Artists Agency, which is actors and actresses and A-list talent. And that was an 80-hour work week. It was very much a, “If you don’t come in on Sunday, don’t bother coming back on Monday,” kind of place.

So I didn’t really experience California lifestyle when I was at that job. That was my first two years out of college. But then after that, I was an executive, and I had a little more free time, and I got to really enjoy it. It was hard to leave. I think I still brought a little bit of it home with me, so I try to keep a little bit of that vibe still in me. But I like what I do, and I like the people I get to do it with, and that is energizing to me.

Loren Feldman:
What’s the simplest task, the simplest aspect of running a business, that you feel you’ve never really figured out?

Kate Morgan:
You know, that is such a hysterical question, because there’s so much. [Laughter] Like, honest to God, I’ve never been into QuickBooks.

Jaci Russo:
I hate it!

Kate Morgan:
Well, I’ve never been in.

Loren Feldman:
You’ve never even opened it up?

Kate Morgan:
No. And, legit, my head of operations could be robbing me blind, and I wouldn’t even know. I should be concerned. He splits his time between here and Europe. So he could walk out. But honest to God, I’ve never been in QuickBooks. He downloads stuff, I request stuff, and that’s how I want it. Just give it to me in the dashboard. Don’t ask me to get into it.

Jaci Russo:
I am in it, and I do not enjoy it.

Kate Morgan:
Yeah, I don’t do anything I don’t like. If there’s something I don’t like, I just pay people to do it, because they’re just naturally going to do it better than me. And I get angry when I’m shown stuff I don’t like.

Loren Feldman:
Are you paying someone else to have a second set of eyes on your books, just to make sure?

Kate Morgan:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Loren Feldman:
Good. Anybody else?

Ted Wolf:
Loren, I’d like to ask you a question.

Loren Feldman:
Well, wait, wait, wait. I’ll be happy to answer it, but I bet there’s something about running a business—and I know you’ve done a lot of businesses, Ted; it’s been a while—but there’s probably something that you’re still not comfortable with. What is it?

Ted Wolf:
I would just say complacency. A lot of people don’t like change. I seem to love change. I think change is really good. I look between the lines.

Loren Feldman:
But wait a second. That’s something that you’re good at.

Ted Wolf:
No, no, no. What I don’t like is people who don’t like change, they’re really—

Loren Feldman:
Oh, I see. You haven’t figured out how to make them understand.

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, it takes a lot of convincing sometimes. And for me, I look at it, and in some ways, although I may not talk as fast as Jaci, I think like her mind, and it’s one idea to the next. And I find when people are really status quo oriented, it kind of gets under my skin. Looking for the next thing is exciting and it’s an adventure, and I can learn so much from it. And not everybody feels that way. So when I find other entrepreneurs, even, who might be in that boat, I feel kind of an extra incentive to say, “Okay, I’ve got to help them get through this somehow.” But it’s the whole idea of change and not accepting it that I find annoying.

Loren Feldman:
Okay, Jaci, how about you? Is there some seemingly simple aspect of running a business that you’re still not comfortable with?

Jaci Russo:
I am really not good at the paperwork part of it. So the QuickBooks, the stuff you got to turn into the state for new employees, filing this thing and that thing. And, like, I have people. I have a bookkeeper, I have CPA. There’s still stuff I’m supposed to do, and it is the bane of my existence.

Loren Feldman:
I mean, an HR person?

Jaci Russo:
Yeah, but we’re just not quite big enough for a real HR person, and fractional was something we’ve considered, but haven’t really figured out how to make that work right for us.

Loren Feldman:
A COO? An admin?

Jaci Russo:
Yeah, I thought about that, and I had one for a while. Loved that. But, you know, we went through that shift last year where I moved all these resources into this new person, and now we’re kind of reassessing. So we’ve done some organizational shifts of how people fit into the org chart. And I actually have talked about this not being a thing I’m good at internally.

And so we’ve kind of started with, now that we’re putting the right people in the right places again, what do their promotional opportunities look like? At what level do they come in? What do they need to learn or know to grow, to move up to the next level? What does that entail? And so to me, that’s the first step. Then I figure out where I want to fill some gaps and who I want to fill them with, because we’ve got enough opportunities that people wear multiple hats—not 21 of them, but multiples—inside the building. And so I want to make sure I’m filling the right open hat with the right head.

Loren Feldman:
Okay, Ted, you had a question for me?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, what’s holding you back?

Jaci Russo:
Ooh, nice.

Loren Feldman:
[Laughter] Oh, that’s easy. What’s holding me back is, when I started doing this, kind of creating my own job, I gave myself too much to do. And years later, I’m still working way too much in the business instead of on the business. And I’m trying to pull myself out of that and find other ways to do what I’ve committed myself to do more efficiently, or through some other means. It’s part of the reason I’m taking that AI course right now. And in fact, I spent a lot of time today with Claude trying to get it to help me make my process in creating my daily newsletter a little more efficient, and I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about that than I ever have before. But overall, that’s what’s holding me back, for sure.

Ted Wolf:
Well, you have a very good newsletter, podcast, and everything, so I’m sure you’ll work your way through it, and you’ll find some real success.

Loren Feldman:
Could I put you on the line with my wife? [Laughter]

Ted Wolf:
I know that feeling. I’ve said that myself sometimes.

Loren Feldman:
All right, last question: At what point did you feel you were taking the biggest risk you’ve taken, as a business owner?

Jaci Russo:
I’ll go: Buying the building. You know, we were four years old at that point, we had four kids, and the youngest was probably eight or nine months old. The oldest would have been five. And we were buying an 8,000-square-foot building in the middle of downtown Lafayette, and no one thought it was a good idea—not our CPA, not the bookkeeper, not my internal CFO/COO at the time, not the bank, the second bank, third bank, or fourth bank. But I just, I believed in it. I believed in downtown Lafayette. I believed in the growth of this company. And I think real estate’s good, and so we bought it. And man, am I glad! [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
What got you over the hump? What gave you the nerve to do what everyone was telling you not to do?

Jaci Russo:
Because I approach almost everything with the same mindset: It’s going to work out one way or the other.

Loren Feldman:
But it doesn’t always, does it?

Jaci Russo:
It always does. It absolutely always does. 100 percent of the time, it works out—one way or the other.

Loren Feldman:
You get fired and you learn a lesson from it.

Jaci Russo:
Yes, yes! Look, when my kids used to leave in high school, and they would go out with their friends or go to sleepover, go to a dance, go to whatever, they will tell you the most horribly embarrassing and frustrating aspect of their young lives was when I would tell them the same exact thing every time they leave the house, whether they were by themselves or with a group of 10 friends: “Hey, do not make a life or take a life tonight. That’s it. Anything else, we can cover.” [Laughter] Those were my guardrails.

Ted Wolf:
Do your kids still talk to you today?

Jaci Russo:
Barely.

Loren Feldman:
One of them works for her.

Jaci Russo:
Two of them work for me, actually. But they are barely talking to me, when that story comes back up. They were horrified. But we can work through anything. Those two things would be harder, and it’s crazy, because now I’m like, “Why can’t any of you get pregnant? Please. You’re all adults. I am ready for grandchildren. This is my timeline.” [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Kate, what did you feel was the biggest risk you took?

Kate Morgan:
You know, I’ve got to be honest. I don’t know. I’m pretty calculated, so looking back, I mean, I don’t see anything that was really huge. I mean, I think a lot of people were a little shocked when I decided to go with the publisher and drop so much coin on that. But you know, that really worked out.

Loren Feldman:
So, starting the business didn’t feel risky?

Kate Morgan:
No, because, literally, when I started the company, I was an independent, and I just started bringing some 1099s on. And eventually, I did bring on my first full-time hire, but I just figured if it didn’t work, I’d just slip off into the abyss and be a solopreneur again.

Loren Feldman:
Well, that kind of makes a great point, I think. A lot of people make the same assumption about entrepreneurs, that they’re just natural-born risk takers. And I don’t think most of the time that’s actually right. I think they are smart about taking calculated risks. And it sounds like that’s what you did starting your business. You didn’t go out and raise money and hire a bunch of people and then see if it worked. You did it on your own, and then hired contractors to supplement that as you grew. Is that right?

Kate Morgan:
Yeah, yep. Ted was talking about profit, so I’ve always been profit-focused, as opposed to revenue. So what’s that old adage that they say? “Profits, vanity”? No, sorry—

Loren Feldman:
“Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity.” [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
All I know is I want: Cash is king. And that’s what I got. And I always ride on that. We don’t have any loans out. I’ve always been cash flow positive. I invest it. I reinvest it.

Loren Feldman:
You had a period you’ve talked about here, Kate, where your revenues declined pretty significantly. Were you able to remain profitable even during that? Is that why it didn’t feel terribly risky at the time?

Kate Morgan:
Right. Yeah, and my team really appreciated it, because they knew I was not going to let them go. So we were reduced, but we still were profitable. And, yeah, you just manage your books right.

Loren Feldman:
Even if you don’t open them. [Laughter]

Kate Morgan:
Exactly.

Loren Feldman:
Ted, how about you?

Ted Wolf:
My brother and I both worked for IBM, left IBM, started the businesses I’ve talked and explained in some detail before. But everybody thought we were crazy. We had $1,000 we put in. My parents even said, “We don’t think you’re going to be able to do this. Why are you doing this?” [Laughter] And that was kind of shocking, in a way. But we got off, and about four years later, we lost 40 percent of the revenue in one weekend. And we sat back, and the hardest thing we had to do was take ownership of it and say: We own everything we did.

And we did that. We made a lot of changes that sent me down an avenue of understanding how to get people to adopt change and how to, myself, face a lot of uncertainty. I mean massive uncertainty, because it was embarrassing. Because we had to go to the bank that Monday morning and tell them we had a material change. Lines of credit, you know, covenants were being violated, and everything. So we had to talk our way out of that. Pretty humbling. But we put a lot of changes in place. We worked, and I can’t say that we weren’t scared and we didn’t have doubts, and it was just nothing but necessity on us. And five years later, we were in the Inc. 500 as one of the 500 fastest growing privately-owned companies in America.

Jaci Russo:
Can I ask a quick question?

Ted Wolf:
Sure.

Jaci Russo:
We don’t have a line of credit, so why did you have to go to the bank and talk to them about a client change?

Ted Wolf:
We had covenants, because we had lines of credit, because we were growing extremely fast, and cash flow would not pay for everything. So we needed to tap into the lines of credit. And all of a sudden, I don’t have the revenue to cover this line of credit and other things. That meant I couldn’t go ask them for more money. So we said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to figure some other things out.”

But we had to keep the bank informed, because I didn’t want to break any laws or anything. And I just wanted open books, wanted open honest conversation. I think they appreciated that. They worked with us, and we never left them, to be honest with you, because they stood by us.

Jaci Russo:
So that’s a part of the line of credit, is there’s an expectation that you have X revenue coming. And so when that changes, especially at such a level, you have a legal responsibility to tell them? I had no idea.

Loren Feldman:
And they could say to you: “You need to pay back everything”?

Ted Wolf:
Exactly. They could have called in all the loans, lines of credit, and everything. So that was very scary, from a financial standpoint, from an emotional standpoint. I have to admit, there was more than once we both looked at each other and said, “Geez, maybe everybody was right. Maybe we can’t do this.” But we kept working every day. We just got up, went into work, and just did what we had to do, and it all started turning around. But we learned a lot in the process.

Loren Feldman:
Well, this was fun. My thanks to Kate Morgan, Jaci Russo, and Ted Wolf. I really appreciate it, guys.