What it takes to run a business

Podcast

This week, in episode 91, we introduce a new member of the 21 Hats Podcast team, Shawn Busse, who tells Jay Goltz and Laura Zander about an intriguing challenge he faces. Twenty-two years ago, Shawn co-founded a marketing firm called Kinesis, but now he’s trying to convince clients that it takes more than just marketing. Sometimes, it’s not enough just to drive more leads. Sometimes, you have to step back and take a deeper look at your business, which not every client is ready to do. In fact, it took Shawn 10 years (and the Great Recession) to do it with his own business.

This week, in a special bonus episode, we talk to Steve Krull and Dan Golden, co-founders of Be Found Online, a digital marketing agency based in Chicago. In the second quarter of 2020, as COVID hit and their clients stopped advertising, Krull and Golden watched helplessly as their agency lost 40 percent of its revenue. And then things got much worse: By the end of the year, both of their wives would be diagnosed with cancer. This is a conversation about how Krull and Golden have coped with matters big and small, personal and professional, throughout an experience they compare to being in a knife fight in the middle of a forest fire.

This week, in episode 90, we have a special guest, Fred Warmbier, owner of a metal-finishing business he founded in Cincinnati in 1998. About 10 years ago, Warmbier was ready to walk away from that business. “It just never seemed like I could have the type of business that I wanted,” he says, “where things worked properly and our employees were happy and our customers were happy.”

That changed when he discovered the Deming Management Method through a consultant, Kelly Allan, who helped him tame the chaos. Where does one start with Deming? “You start,” says Allan, who is chairman of the Advisory Council of The W. Edwards Deming Institute, “where the pain is.” As it happens, and as he discusses in this conversation, Fred Warmbier has experienced more than his share of pain.

So, I decided to give the 21 Hats Podcast crew this week off. Between the Memorial Day holiday and our first 21 Hats in-person event the previous week in Chicago—attended by five of the podcast regulars—it seemed the right thing to do. It also seemed like a great opportunity to reprise one of our favorite all-time episodes. It’s not a used episode; it’s a certified pre-owned episode, or better yet, a greatest hits episode. We first published it in December of 2021, and it features highlights taken from the podcasts we’d published up until that point that cover many of the risks and rewards of business ownership, including what it’s like to sell your business, to fire an employee, to risk your own home in order to get financing, and even to deal with serious mental health issues. If you’re new to the podcast, I think you’ll find that these conversations bring real context to the journeys of the entrepreneurs you’ve been following here. But even if you’ve heard some of these discussions before, I think you’ll find them a refreshing reminder that choosing to build a business can be a noble mission, but it generally doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. We’re all figuring it out as we go.

This week, in episode 89, our last episode of 2021, we take a look back at the conversations we’ve had this year about the rewards and responsibilities of business ownership, including what it’s like to sell your business, to fire an employee, to risk your own home in order to get financing, to have to make a bet-the-company decision, and to deal with mental health issues, even thoughts of suicide. In this bonus episode, we highlight some of our happiest, smartest, funniest, and most difficult exchanges from the past year.