What it takes to run a business

Podcast

This week, Liz Picarazzi tells Jay Goltz and Sarah Segal that her trip to a bear sanctuary in Montana to get her trash enclosures certified as bear-resistant did not go precisely as planned. Because of a logistical snafu, she has not yet obtained either the certification or her real goal: a marketing video of the grizzlies attempting to crack open her baited enclosure. Fortunately, things went better for Liz in a more traditional marketing venue, a trade show in Chicago where she promoted her rat-resistant enclosures. Meanwhile, Sarah follows up on how things are going since losing two big clients and having to lay off three employees, and Jay explains his new catch phrase, “Let me not sleep on it.” Plus: we discuss the owner of a two-year-old construction business who wonders how long he should keep going if he doesn’t start to make a profit. He also asks why no one ever talks about how hard it is to run a business. While we can’t know for sure what’s happening inside his company, we can be pretty confident that he’s not listening to the right podcast.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know we spend a lot of time talking about all of the things that can go wrong for a business owner. And yes, in part because we started recording these conversations just a couple of months before the pandemic hit, we’ve had plenty to talk about. Even this year, with the worst of the pandemic behind us, we’ve been talking about everything from excess inventory to lost clients to layoffs to ineffective marketing to surviving the valley of death. So, with that in mind, this week, I’ve chosen to replay an old episode both because it offers an inspirational message and because, well, we here at the home office need a little break. It’s the episode we recorded two years ago when Karen Clark Cole sold her business. Especially given that Karen had only recently been through a tough period that prompted her to take time away from the business, the conversation is a nice reminder that sometimes things do come together. It’s also full of great advice for anyone who thinks they may want to sell their business one day.

This week, we meet Jaci Russo, the co-founder and CEO of BrandRusso and the latest addition to the 21 Hats Podcast team. Jaci tells Jay Goltz and Laura Zander how she went from working for Barry Diller to starting her marketing agency. Jaci also explains why she recently decided to introduce a four-day workweek and why she thinks her agency has now gone eight months and counting without signing up a new client—the longest such stretch in more than 20 years in business. “I find it interesting,” responds Jay. “You just said this is the first time you've ever had such a long period without new business. And, ‘Oh, we went to a four-day workweek.’ Hmm, how interesting.” Plus: Laura talks about what happened when venture-backed competitors came for the knitting industry and how stressful it is to buy and operate another business in another state.

In this week’s bonus episode, Bill Fotsch, a business consultant, explains why he thinks much of the effort that he and many others have put into creating employee engagement over the past three decades has been wasted effort—well intentioned, but wasted. The fact is, Fotsch says, employees today are no more engaged than they were some 30 years ago when the concept of employee engagement first gained currency. So what’s the answer? Fotsch has come to the conclusion that it’s something he calls “economic engagement,” which happens to be the name of his consulting business. What exactly is economic engagement? He says it’s getting employees to focus on serving customers, and doing so profitably. He says it’s not so much about sharing financials with employees but about getting employees to understand the strategies and actions that really drive a business’s profitability. Fotsch is so convinced that he’s cracked the code that he’s gone beyond mere consulting and has been buying stakes in businesses so he can implement his ideas and prove his concept. So far, he says, it’s working.

It took a series of sad losses to turn banker Channon Kennedy into an entrepreneur. If a friend hadn’t lost his son and if Channon’s mother and sister hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer, she never would have designed, prototyped, manufactured, and started selling the Morgan Square, a tool that can save carpenters time while framing a project. Shannon is just getting started, but we’ll keep in touch as her journey continues.