I Am Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Introduction:
This week, Jay Goltz, Lena McGuire, and William Vanderbloemen talk about their best days as business owners and their worst days. Not surprisingly, it’s the worst days that often remain the most vivid—both for the pain they inflict and the lessons they bestow. For Lena, it was the day she felt so exhausted and overwhelmed that she knew she had reached her breaking point and had to do something different. For William, it was when the pandemic hit and he had to lay off almost half of his staff in one day, over Zoom. And for Jay, it was realizing that several young employees he’d tried to lift up were just not going to make it. Of course, the most inspiring part of these stories is what the owners did to learn from them and to rise above them. And then there’s the day Lena returned from spending most of this past January unplugged to find that a whole bunch of things had fallen into place during her absence: “My business,” she tells us, “was running without me for the first time in my life. It felt so good.”
— Loren Feldman
Guests:
Jay Goltz is CEO of The Goltz Group.
Lena McGuire is CEO of Spóca Kitchen & Bath.
William Vanderbloemen is CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.
Producer:
Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.
Full Episode Transcript:
Loren Feldman:
Welcome Jay, Lena, and William. It’s great to have you all here. Lena, you made your first appearance here a few weeks ago. For anyone who missed it, can you remind us what it is you do?
Lena McGuire:
I am the owner of Spóca Kitchen & Bath, a boutique kitchen-and-bath design firm soon to be a showroom in the Central New York area. And I specialize in a demographic that is nearing retirement or in retirement, and I help them with wanting to stay in their homes forever. I am a certified CAPS, which is a certified aging in place specialist. So I try to make people’s homes a happy place for them and a safe place.
Loren Feldman:
How’s it going so far?
Lena McGuire:
Well, the new year’s been great. I signed three new accounts just last week, which is wonderful.
Loren Feldman:
Wow, congrats. Can you give us a sense of what your goals are for this year? What are you hoping to accomplish?
Lena McGuire:
I would like to get into a showroom situation. So, I’m currently looking to lease a space. I’m right now in a 370-square-foot professional office building, and I want to get into a showroom model so that my customers can see what products they’re going to be buying. I have an administrative assistant right now, but I’m going to be hiring some support staff like a CAD drafter. I need to hire a receiving warehouse, things like that, so getting ready to grow and hopefully increase my income.
Jay Goltz:
I would say this: Something’s happening in Chicago—I presume it’s happening everywhere. Dental practices are being bought up by private equity, and as a result, you’re starting to see storefronts all over the place, including: My father’s old dime store now is a dental practice. The private equity guys know, “Oh, put it on the first floor in a store because it’s worth paying extra rent.” So what you’re describing is pretty much the same thing. Yeah, it makes sense. You shouldn’t be in an office. You should be in a storefront, because the amount of business you’ll pick up from being in a storefront should easily justify the rent. So, I think that makes sense.
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, I think the first floor makes even more sense, because you probably have people who don’t want to navigate stairs or elevators.
Lena McGuire:
That’s true. And right now, the building I’m in has a ramp on one side and some small steps on the other side, so I can accommodate people who want to get in quickly and people who need to use their walker or wheelchair. So that’s a little bit of an issue, trying to make sure that we have that zero clearance entry for some of my customers.
Jay Goltz:
I’ve got a store right there in the Design District, right by the Merchandise Mart, and down the block, there is a designer showroom that does something with kids. I don’t know what they do, is the point. They just got their name on the front window with nothing else. And I think it’s critical, if you have a storefront, to figure out what your tagline is, so that people go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll stop in this place.”
I’ve been down there for five years. I still have no clue what they do, and all they’d have to do is put “designer kitchens” or “Europe”—I don’t know what they do, so I can’t even make up their line. But there is no line. So I think, when you do get the storefront, you really need to take best advantage of the front window and come up with a very tight, poignant, get-it-right-across tagline that when people drive by, they think, “Oh, we should stop in there.”
Loren Feldman:
Jay, last time you were on, you told us that you thought you were going into a bakery, and it turned out it was a dispensary.
Jay Goltz:
Well, it was a dispensary-bakery. It was both. [Laughter]
Loren Feldman:
Maybe you’re not paying enough attention to the signage at these places.
Jay Goltz:
It didn’t say anything on the outside. They looked at me, and they felt the need to immediately say, “You realize this is a …” So yeah, but I’m just saying people who aren’t used to retail don’t realize that putting something in your front window is critical to taking full advantage of your retail space. And I see it all over the place all the time that, like, the new thing now is, “Oh, it’s sunny.” So they put a shade down and cover the entire front windows when they’re closed, so you don’t even know what they do. You know, hundreds of cars drive by every night. They should have the windows open. It’s just kind of surprising, and there’s lots of that around Chicago.
Loren Feldman:
Lena, is there a lot of commercial space available?
Lena McGuire:
There is. I took some time this weekend and drove around town, and I looked at a few towns in the surrounding areas, and there are probably five or 10 places that would be suitable. Of course, I have my preferences, and I’d like to be closer to home and have affordable rent and space that has a couple of front windows that I can use for displays. Because, like Jay says, it’s very important to show and display. And even when we’re not working there, I still want people to see the kitchens and the bathrooms and get an idea of what’s going on behind that door.
Jay Goltz:
Well, you hit the word there, you said “affordable rent.” That’s a tricky word: affordable. It’s not really about being affordable. It’s cost-effective, meaning, if you find a great location that’s right near an extremely busy thing, it will absolutely be worth paying another $1,500 a month to be there. So you have to calibrate what affordable means. Like, it needs to be cost-effective. So I would frankly change the word to cost-effective, because there are some locations well worth paying twice the rent, if you’re right by where the customers are going.
Lena McGuire:
Right, and that’s one of the calculations I’m trying to figure out with the square footage. How much do I have to earn per square foot to cover that? And for me, this is very scary. You know, being basically a startup, it’s like: Okay, the difference between $2,000 a month and $5,000 a month is pretty significant.
Jay Goltz:
But this is where people get themselves in trouble. They talk to their advisor who’s an accountant, and the accountant will go, “Oh, you should do the two at lower overhead.” You know what, that might be the worst advice in the world, because in that example, $36,000 a year might make the difference between doing a million dollars a year out of there or $300,000. It’s really insignificant.
So yeah, it’s about traffic flow, neighborhoods, who else is down there, and it’s tricky. But like, the first instinct of many people—listen, it was me. I opened up in a third-floor, walk-up loft. I was paying $200 a month because I didn’t know if it was going to work. And so, that came out to, like, $1 a square foot. Now I’m paying $35 a foot. I own the building, luckily, but still.
Lena McGuire:
Yeah, we’re about $25 a square foot here. Not too bad. For me, it’s a mindset shift, because I do understand the value of having the space, and I’ve been working on that for the last few months as I’ve made the decision to move out into a bigger space where I can have more displays. I know I have to do it. It’s just pulling the trigger and really being comfortable with it. So I am comfortable with being uncomfortable, and I’m moving forward.
Jay Goltz:
That’s funny. You took the words right out of my mouth. I was gonna say it’s about being uncomfortable, so you figured that out. All right, you’re making good progress.
Loren Feldman:
William, how are you doing? How’s your year getting started?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, you know, our business is a lumpy business, right? We don’t sell 50,000 widgets a year. All that is to say, we got off to a really, really great start in January. But that’s kind of like if the Cubs are ahead in the first inning, who cares?
Jay Goltz:
All right, stop picking on the Cubs there. [Laughter] I noticed that.
William Vanderbloemen:
It was just for you, Jay. No, a really robust year, and for a lot of different reasons. I have a dashboard that I look at every day, and it’s kind of like: How are we compared to this period last year—like incoming marketing leads, proposals sent, contracts sent, sales made, phone calls. How are we against this week last year, this day last year, this quarter last year, etc., and I either get a green or a red on all of them. And everything’s green right now. So it’s early in the year, but I like the start.
Loren Feldman:
All right. Well, here’s the main thing I want to talk about today. We recently did an episode where Paul Downs talked about knowing he was going to have to lay off some people. And you could really hear the pain in his voice—not something he was looking forward to, but part of what we all recognize is what it means to own and run a business.
It made me think it would be interesting to kind of compare notes on our best and worst days owning and running businesses. You know, those days tend to stick out. They’re the ones that we remember. They’re not always representative, but I think it’s meaningful, and I think to our audience, hearing what you guys have been through and managed to keep going, and what has driven you to keep going could really make a difference.
So Lena, could we start with you? You’ve been in business for a shorter time than William or Jay, but I’m guessing you already have had some ups and downs. Do you have a day that you think of as your worst day?
Lena McGuire:
Oh, I do. Yeah, the day that I was probably closest to ever having a nervous breakdown. I was absolutely, totally overwhelmed. I had too many projects going on. I didn’t have them timed out so that I could do them in a good amount of time. So I was working with deadlines that were practically impossible. I had been working for two or three days straight with very little sleep, skipping meals. Like I said, nearing a nervous breakdown. I just had too much on my plate, and I had no one to help me.
So I had to call clients, and I had to tell them I was behind. And then I would have to reschedule their upcoming appointments, because there was no way I would be prepared. It was embarrassing. My business was a mess, my personal life was becoming a mess, and I was reaching my breaking point. I just kind of got into the fetal position and was crying, because I just was exhausted and overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do.
Loren Feldman:
How long ago was that?
Lena McGuire:
That was about a year and a half ago.
Loren Feldman:
And how did you get out of it?
Lena McGuire:
I vowed that day that I was going to change what I was doing. I hired a business coach. I learned how to use my calendar. I learned what my capacity was so that I’d know not to schedule more than six projects at a time and to start them one per week so that I use the calendar to know when things should happen, when they shouldn’t. I hired an administrative assistant as a 1099 person, so not somebody I had to pay full-time, but somebody I could pay to work as the work was required. So, yeah, I got my act together.
Jay Goltz:
Can I guess you learned how to say no through this period?
Lena McGuire:
I did learn how to say no. It’s my new favorite word.
Jay Goltz:
Yeah, that is part of the learning process. You can’t do everything for everybody.
Lena McGuire:
The other part was qualifying my customers. So I have a good-fit meeting. We have a discovery call to find out if what they are asking me to do is something I can do. Is it in a time frame that I can do? Is it in a budget range that can be accomplished? And is the team able to be pulled together to accomplish this? So just getting the answers to those four things has been night and day. So now I work with customers who are a good fit, and I don’t work with customers who are not a good fit, because everybody is unhappy.
Jay Goltz:
I would think one of the major things in your business, when you say you’re going to help people renovate their house so they can stay in it forever, I don’t know whether that’s $50,000 or $500,000. So I have to believe you have to get rid of the people who think it’s going to be $50,000, because you can’t do it. So as far as qualifying, that seems to be a critical piece, I would think.
Lena McGuire:
It depends on what they want to do, because if they just need to make it so that they can bathe, we can do a shower conversion for like $8,000. But it depends on what their plans are and how much has to be done. So yeah, we work through those details and figure it out.
Loren Feldman:
William, how about you? Do you have a day you think of as your worst day as an owner?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, that’s easy. It goes back, gosh, five years ago now, when we had the lockdowns with the pandemic. Very early on—so for those listening for the first time, we’re an executive search firm, and we help teams that are values-based find their C suite. And we started by saying: Can we help churches find a pastor faster and better? And then it grew to schools, and then to nonprofits, and then values-based, for-profit businesses like the Chick-fil-As of the world sort of thing.
But five years ago, easily the majority of our client base was churches and schools, and that’s diversified a little bit now, but then it was real. Well, when lockdown started, it was actually, “Oh, you’re on spring break? We’re just going to take one more week off.” That’s the way most schools happened. And it was right around Easter. “Well, we’re still going to have Easter.” But then it got serious, and we realized, “Oh, we’re in this for a little while.”
And I read a paper that was amazing. Business owners should go read it now for the next time something happens. It’s called “Leading Beyond the Blizzard.” It’s written by a group called Praxis—very, very important paper. Don’t read it right before you go to bed. I did, and I didn’t sleep. And basically it asked the question, when these lockdowns started: You need to decide right now, small business owner, do you think this is a bad winter storm that’s going to have us staying at home for a week or two? Is it a blizzard where we’re out of commission for a month or a couple months? Or is it a mini-ice age, which, historically, those last about a year and a half, something like that. And you need to decide right now which one it is, and then build your plan around that.
So I thought about it and said, “Well, I’m gonna go with the mini-ice age. This feels like it’s gonna be here a while.” And then I sort of intuitively ran the numbers and decided, if we’re really shut down, if churches and schools are shut down for a long period of time, that’s going to affect our business. I’d called a few clients, and long story short, my gut told me: We have to cut 40 percent of our overhead. We don’t have a supply chain like Jay. We don’t have hard goods, so overhead is people for us. And that’s painful.
So my COO, who’s Harvard Business School and actually knows business, said, “Let me go through some calculations and some formulas over the weekend, and then I’ll come back and we’ll decide.” He came back and said, “I’ve studied it. I think we need to cut 39.8 percent of our overhead.” And I said, “Oh, that’s a great number. Let’s go with that,” which is a whole other podcast on the founder’s gut versus science, right?
But we landed on 40 percent, and we made the decision, for good or bad, that we would rather just do this all at once than do a little bit of firing each month for months on end. And so that Thursday, we sent word to our team: “Hey, Friday is going to be a hard meeting, but we need everybody there.” And that’s when we do our all-staff. So that Friday, probably the last Friday in March, we said: We’re cutting 40 percent of the staff. We’re going to have calls with people. Of course, we did try to package people out well, but it was a very, very, very sad day, because these were all friends. And we didn’t have any under performers at the time. It was all good people, but it was, it was really hard.
Loren Feldman:
How big was your staff, at the time?
William Vanderbloemen:
I think we were about 42 full-time staff.
Loren Feldman:
So you had to cut about 10 people.
William Vanderbloemen:
No, more like 18. That was hard. That was really hard. And honestly, we should have just shut the business down altogether, if I were really thinking clinically. But we decided we’d cut 40 percent and then try and serve these people who were trying to figure out the world and do it at no cost, things like PPP and that sort of thing. And if we die, we die with our boots on. And it worked out fine, but that day, I don’t ever want to have to live through that day again. It was horrible.
Jay Goltz:
Did you actually tell them all, “We’re going to have a really hard meeting on Friday”? Did you actually tell them that beforehand?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yes.
Jay Goltz:
And I’m just asking: Why? Because it seems to me that would make them not sleep.
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, they weren’t dumb. Churches were canceling Easter. That’s the first time in Christendom that’s ever, ever, ever happened. I mean, that’s un—the word unprecedented is tired by now—like, “Oh, crap, they’re gonna be closed, and they’re certainly not gonna be hiring, and they’re certainly not gonna be paying a firm to help them hire. So this is bad. How are we gonna deal with it?”
Jay Goltz:
So, by telling them that, you felt like you were giving them a little warning?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah.
Jay Goltz:
Okay, I guess it was obvious.
William Vanderbloemen:
Fair warning. And then we had a very brief all-staff meeting: We’re going to drop everything on the agenda. Let me tell you what’s going to happen and why it’s going to happen, and then your team leaders are going to contact you, each of you, to let you know how this affects you personally. And yeah, it was hard.
Jay Goltz:
How many of those people did you bring back since then?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, that’s a good question. I don’t think we brought anybody back as a person. We brought positions back. We’re probably twice as big now as we were then, maybe a little more than that, and we’re right at 40 full-time head count. So we have learned—what is it, “necessity is the mother of invention”? So through that and the people getting used to using virtual meetings and that sort of thing, we’ve figured out how to do our work more efficiently, and it’s kind of a whole new day. Fortunately, most of those people found good jobs, and I don’t know that pulling them out of a job to come back would have been the healthiest thing.
Jay Goltz:
I find that fascinating that not one of them came. So you think the case is, most of them found jobs that suited them better? And my next question is: Or do you think some of them just were a little pissed about the whole thing?
William Vanderbloemen:
I’m sure they were all mad about it.
Jay Goltz:
Right, well, that explains—
William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t think they were mad to the point of, “I’ll never work for him again.” It’s kind of like you get mad when a relative has cancer, but you don’t blame the doctor. You know, it was what it was. And, I mean, 2020, is the only year we’ve not had top-line growth ever, and it was terrible. I don’t know how we got through it. But that day where you’re talking to people, where we worked together pretty closely and had a really great culture, that was hard.
Loren Feldman:
You knew you were doing what you had to do. Is there a particular moment that sticks out in your mind as being most painful?
William Vanderbloemen:
I think, honestly—this is going to sound drama, or it’s going to come out the wrong way—but I think the hardest part of it was that I wasn’t with any of them. We were all locked down, so it was a Zoom meeting. That was the hardest part for me.
Jay Goltz:
I can see that.
Loren Feldman:
Although, it’s interesting. It sounds like you’re saying, you have a stronger business today as a result of that lockdown.
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, we do. We do.
Loren Feldman:
You also said that maybe you should have just shut the whole business down. Looking back on it, if you had it to do over again, is that something you would seriously contemplate?
William Vanderbloemen:
Let me say it again and try and get it a little better. I think if I were purely in my business for having the most profitable, efficient business that made the most amount of money, then the smartest move would have been to say, “Hey guys, we know nobody’s gonna be hiring for a year and a half, so we’re closing our doors. We’ll reopen when this is better.” And just let everybody go. I would have made more money that way, probably. But, you know, I didn’t start the business for the money. I started it because people who are trying to do good in the world need great staff.
And I’m a recovering pastor. I guess I still have that in me. And I saw these churches that were flailing trying to figure out how to help really hurting people in a really hard time. And I thought, “Let’s keep what we can. We’re going to completely pivot,” another tired word, “and we’re not doing searches anymore, but we’ll help people figure out: How do I do online church? How do I do online school? How do I do payroll protection plan for the very weird tax code that clergy is?” And we kind of just got on that and said: We’re just going to serve and we’re going to do it because it’s a good thing. And then secondarily, if we get through this, we will have a lot of people who are very close friends because of what we’ve done.
Jay Goltz:
The fact of the matter is, though, maybe you did come out better doing it this way.
William Vanderbloemen:
I know we did. I know we did.
Jay Goltz:
I’m just saying, you said you would have made more money if you just closed down, but maybe not.
William Vanderbloemen:
Jay, you’re right. I mean, the 90,000 faith-based organizations that received PPP money—any faith, right? 30,000 of them came directly to us for help, and only about 2,000 of them were people we knew. So if you help people get 10 weeks of free payroll during a crisis, they tend to remember you and call you when they need things in the future. But we didn’t know that. We made the decision that: We’re gonna do what’s right, and we’ll trust that it’ll work out. And then, it’s been maybe the best decision we’ve fallen into in the history of the company.
Loren Feldman:
Jay, what was your worst day?
Jay Goltz:
That’s a tough call, but I can think of one. When I started in my $200-a-month, third-floor walk up loft, I was 22. My father had a dime store around the corner, and he knew all the neighborhood kids. So he sent the neighborhood kids by me. So I hired these three kids who were in high school still to help me with the framing in the beginning.
Two of them were brothers, and the father abandoned them, and they were going to get thrown out of high school. And I went to the local high school, and I talked to the counselor there and said, “Don’t throw them out. Blah, blah, blah.” And they said to me, which at 68 means something much different to me back then. He said, “Thank you for caring.” And I didn’t realize. I’m sure they were thrilled somebody cared about these kids. I was gonna drag these kids up with me. So this goes on for a year, year and a half, two years.
And then one day there was a big order that had to get done, and one of them started to flake out on me. He had a girlfriend who actually worked for me, and it was bringing a whole big mess. And an order didn’t get delivered when it was supposed to, and I can remember like yesterday—which surprised me—sitting in my office. And I just cried. And I realized that I put my heart and soul into this, and I failed. Now, one of those three kids is now 60 years old and still works for me—you know, he’s like my little brother. But the other two just flaked out, and the business lesson from it—if I had the mentor, the business coach, somebody would have said, “Jay, just because you want to make something out of somebody doesn’t mean they either want it or have the ability to do it.” And I was trying to drag them along with me, and I put everything I had into it, and I failed.
Now, flash forward 20 years: The kid shows up. It’s 20 years later, and I barely recognize him, because he was twice the size he was when he left. And I was able to get an opportunity most people in this life don’t get. I was actually able to ask him. I said to him, “I gotta ask you”—now, keep in mind, at the time this all happened, I was 28, he was probably 18. Now, I’m 48 and he’s 38. I said, “Do you recognize I was trying to drag you up with me as we were growing the company, and I was looking out for your own best interest, and blah, blah?” And he looks at me, he goes, “Yeah, I realize that.” I go, “Why didn’t you come back?” He goes, “It was too late.”
Loren Feldman:
What do you think he meant by that?
Jay Goltz:
I think he had screwed up so bad that—first of all, I probably would have taken him back, had he come back. But just because you want somebody … This is a problem in small business. It is unlikely that those few people you hired when you first opened are going to be helping you run your company when you have 100 people. It is just unlikely they’ve got the skill-set to grow along with that. So, that story about, “Oh so-and-so, he started on the loading dock.” That absolutely happens, for sure. But for every one of those, there’s three more of them that, you know, it didn’t work.
It was an important life lesson that, especially when you’re dealing with kids, just because you want somebody to be successful, and you want them to take more responsibility, and you want them to be part of your quote-unquote management team, doesn’t mean they have the desire or ability to do it. And like I said, I was surprised at myself, because I just was by myself. I remember like yesterday I was in the office by myself, and I just started crying. And I realized I was spent.
Loren Feldman:
Lena, do you have a best day?
Lena McGuire:
I do have a best day, but I have to tell you, these guys are scaring me, because I’m not to their level yet, and the hiring and firing—worst days—yeah, I have those ahead of me. I’m not looking forward to that too much, but good coaching and good camaraderie here, so we’ll get through it.
Best day: It was quite recently. I only worked seven days in January. I went away for the holidays, and then I came back for two days, and then I went on a two-week vacation. And when I came back, my business systems and processes were working. I had three new client checks hit my checking account, so I had deposits for three new projects. I had cabinet orders come in for two large kitchens. They had been scheduled and confirmed for home delivery, coordinated with the warehouse, the client, the contractor, added to my calendar so that I could be there for delivery day if I wanted to be there.
My administrative assistant scheduled me for three speaking engagements at the local library in April and had confirmed some dates for September for three more. And we heard back from another library to do some additional presentations at this place that I hadn’t been at. I had an in-home consultation appointment coming up later in the week that had been confirmed, and a new appointment set for later in February. All this happened while I was on a cruise with my sisters. My business was running without me for the first time in my life. It felt so good.
Loren Feldman:
You need to take more vacations.
Lena McGuire:
Apparently. Yeah, so all the stuff that I’d been working very hard at to get those systems and processes together and get the right person in that admin position, all that came to fruition. And I can’t tell you what a great feeling it was to just check my email when I came home and see, “Oh, look, you had a deposit in your checking account.”
Loren Feldman:
You weren’t even checking your email while you were away?
Lena McGuire:
I was 100-percent disconnected. When I’m on vacation, I don’t answer the phone, I don’t check the email, nothing. I need to vacate. So all this was happening without me. I was kind of proud of myself and very relieved that all the hard work I’m putting in is actually paying off. So I believe that the business will continue to grow because something is working.
Jay Goltz:
There’s little greater joy than watching an employee that you hired and trained and mentored, to see them blossom and do wonderful things. I have it on a daily basis here, and I hope everyone who has good employees appreciates that, because it’s a beautiful thing.
Loren Feldman:
William, when was the first time you were able to work only seven days in a month?
William Vanderbloemen:
That’s been a long journey. A lot of search firms, consulting firms are personality-dependent. You know, “Oh, well, we want William, or we want Jay or Loren to do the work.” And as founder—and then, again, another podcast—with the name on the door, which I didn’t care to do but did, my concern is that the thing dies with me. So I call it a sustainability plan, more than a transition or succession plan. But the company’s got to be able to live and breathe and function without me.
Now, when I wrote my first book on succession, which would have been 11 years ago now, I started saying, “Let’s try to see how the business functions without me for a little bit more time every summer.” Summer tends to be a little slower. Schools are closed. A lot of people are on vacation. I think all businesses slow down then. So last summer, I think I was gone 11 or 12 weeks. I was supposed to have a once-a-week phone call with our CEO, and we probably did that half the time. And I think the longest one was 20 or 30 minutes.
So it’s a very slow, intentional move toward me not having to be the keystone in the archway, if that makes sense. And probably we could grow faster, if I weren’t doing that. Probably we would be booming a little bit more if I were just in the weeds and digging, because I’ve got more institutional memory than anybody here, and hopefully I’m still good at what I do.
But for sustainability’s sake, we’ve taken the last 11 years and spread that time out a little farther where the company can go on without me. And the first marker was: Can it function without me? And we got there about, I don’t know, probably right before the pandemic. And then, obviously, in 2020, everything changed, but in about ‘22 we got to a new marker where the company can grow without me being involved. And that’s a whole different thing. So we’re still figuring it out as we go, but that doesn’t really answer your question, does it?
Loren Feldman:
It comes close. Lena, I’m curious, William’s obviously at a very different stage. Did you have any trepidation about taking that much time away from a startup?
Lena McGuire:
No, because it’s typically very slow for me from November till March. And because I didn’t have a full pipeline—you remember the last episode—I’m struggling with that pipeline and working with my marketing. So I didn’t have the new business coming in. I was at that low where all the design work was done, all the orders were placed. We’re just waiting for all the products to come in before the construction starts. So I typically have an eight-week lull with projects like that. I had a couple of kitchens coming in, so there wasn’t a lot of design work to be done. So it was a slow time for me, so I could definitely schedule my vacation at that point.
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, you may just be a lot smarter than I am, because I wasn’t smart enough to do that as early as you’re doing it. When I was at your stage of the business, I was taking every single call. I was doing every sales call. I mean, in an unhealthy way.
I remember we finally got to the point where we had enough frequent flyer miles and such that we took the kids to Disney. We stood in line for the Dumbo ride forever with our littlest one, who was probably, I don’t know, two or three at the time. And right when it was our turn, a sales lead came in, and I, of course, took it and started on the phone. And Adrienne looked at me and said, “What in the world are you doing right now?” And I said, “I’m doing the thing that paid for the Dumbo ride,” and that was a tense moment. [Laughter]
Lena McGuire:
Yeah, that’s hard. So I make a conscious decision, so I don’t have to. I’ve said this before, but I have calendared my whole year, and travel is very important to me, and seeing my family. I have travel scheduled already, so I know when I can work and when I can’t. And I’ve also scheduled my business so I work 20 hours in my business and 20 hours on my business. Because I’m not a young person anymore, and I have goals for my business, so I have to work hard to move it forward.
So I’m being conscious. And this is my second business. I was a graphic designer for 22 years, so I did run a business before. So I’m stepping into this one with a little bit more experience than the first one. And I had bigger goals this time, so I’m working hard to achieve those.
Loren Feldman:
William, what was your best day? Was it the Dumbo ride?
William Vanderbloemen:
The Dumbo ride was a great day. It’s really hard to distill what the best day is, because I don’t know—Jay’s got more miles as a business owner than I do—but it feels, Loren, like I probably launched about seven different companies, even though I’ve only launched this one, because we’ve had different iterations. You know, when we expanded from churches to churches and schools, when we expanded from large churches to normal-sized churches, anytime we’ve expanded the work into a new vertical, those days are the most fun, I think, because I’m a serial entrepreneur who’s just started one company but added things along the way. Does that make sense?
Loren Feldman:
Sure. Does one of those days stand out for you?
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, you know, there’s a lot of satisfaction in finishing a really complicated search, and that’s more about the art of what we do than owning the business. So that doesn’t really help listeners so much. But when we see a client—like, we did a succession and search for a person that was going to replace a founding pastor at maybe the largest church on the West Coast, certainly the most influential, that could have gone wrong 100 different ways. And it went well, and that was pretty special. Some of the days during the pandemic, when we were able to help people who didn’t know what they were doing, that was pretty special. You know, there are a lot of cool moments. I don’t know that I could distill it to one.
Loren Feldman:
Understood.
William Vanderbloemen:
I’m also learning that I get far more out of an interview if I refrain from superlative questions, and that may be a term I made up. But: Tell me your best, tell me your worst. That really corners candidates and it makes them anxious. So that’s a rabbit trail a bit, but maybe it helps some owners out there. Don’t say, “What’s your best accomplishment?” What’s something you’re proud of? Tell me about a day you went home and you thought, “We got it right that day.”
Jay Goltz:
That’s a good question.
Loren Feldman:
Especially in a podcast where I’m asking you for your best and worst. [Laughter]
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, you’re paralyzing me, Loren. I can’t answer.
Loren Feldman:
We’ve demonstrated your point right here. Jay, how about you? Do you have a best day?
Jay Goltz:
You know, I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but my father used to always say, “You put thousands into the business, and you take it out in nickels.” And in this case, I don’t know that I could tell you the best day, because I have good days all the time. I don’t know that I can think of one. What? You got one big sale? I don’t know that I can think of one particular day.
Loren Feldman:
Not a day that you’re proud of, that you—
Jay Goltz:
Well, you’ve told me I’ve told the story too many times, so I’m afraid to tell it again. My Lily moment where the employee who worked for me for 10 years and was older came up to me. She had a retirement party, and she walked up to me afterward, and she looked me in the eye, and she said, “I’ve got to tell you something.” I said, “What?” And she said, “When you hired me, I never thought I’d work again.” That was a life-changing day for me, that I realized that giving people jobs can really profoundly help their lives. And I never thought about it. I was torturing myself about the ones that I shouldn’t have hired and should have gotten rid of sooner, and I didn’t realize those don’t matter. It’s the ones that you hired that worked out great, that you’ve given a nice job to, a meaningful job. So that was a life-changing day, for sure.
Lena McGuire:
I think that’s really important, because if people are our biggest and most important assets, then the hiring and the firing of them is super important.
Jay Goltz:
And you know what, it took me years before—and how nice of her to say that to me. She didn’t have to say anything. That was such a gift, but it really took the wind out of me: “I never thought I’d work again.” Think of the power the boss has for giving someone a job, for God’s sake. I mean, we always get blamed for, “Oh, they laid people off.” Yeah, there’s stuff that the boss has to do that’s not pretty, but there’s lots of stuff we do that is pretty. We give people jobs. We give them meaning. We give them confidence. We do lots of good things if we’re doing a good job. William, are you with me on that?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, maybe the best day was the first day we got a contract when we sure didn’t know if the business was going to work. I remember we went and bought steaks at the grocery store that night. Yay! But the longer I do this, it’s: Yes, we want to run a good business, and we want to make money doing it. But it’s not the money as much as the: Are we doing something that’s going to make a lasting difference? And the times that we get that right are pretty fun.
Jay Goltz:
And I hate when they do commercials—like, you can’t pick on anyone anymore, which is fine, except the boss. That’s a running joke, like the commercial with the screaming boss with his glasses bouncing. Like, it’s not funny. Being a bad boss is not a funny thing. Screaming at people is not a funny thing.
So I like doing speeches. I like doing this podcast to just give people some perspective of: I was screaming back in my twenties when I was completely out of control. There’s something beautiful about running a nice company where you’re a good boss and you can nurture and develop people.
Loren Feldman:
Jay, I certainly understand why that was a moving moment for you. Did it change the way you did anything?
Jay Goltz:
Well, it totally changed my head, in that once I figured out the way business was supposed to work, I tortured myself a little bit: Oh my God, you were so stupid doing that. Or you shouldn’t have done that. Or you shouldn’t have hired them. From that moment on, I didn’t just go from half empty to half full. I went from half empty to full. I’m telling you, it was like a movie. I looked over her shoulder. There were a bunch of people still milling around eating, and I looked at every one of them. I thought, “That’s the 17-year-old kid I took in who’s now 37 and that’s making 60 grand a year. And that’s somebody who”—yeah, it gave me a whole new metric of feeling good about running a business.
Loren Feldman:
It’s also the kind of the polar opposite of your experience with the three kids you tried to bring on.
Jay Goltz:
Absolutely. That’s the point. That was the learning curve of: Yes, that’s the entire spectrum. On one hand, you can’t drag everyone else up. You can’t make people into what they don’t want to be. And at the other end, you can! That’s the line we’re on. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t work.
Loren Feldman:
All right, we are out of time. My thanks to Jay Goltz, Lena McGuire, and William Vanderbloemen. As always, thanks for sharing, guys.
