What it takes to run a business

Podcast

This week, we introduced a new member of the podcast team, Paul Downs, whose company, Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, makes custom conference tables. Paul wrote about how close his company came to failing in both The New York Times’ You’re the Boss blog and in his own book, "Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business." That was during the Great Recession. Unfortunately, Paul is once again finding it challenging to sell high-end conference tables during a crisis. “My game plan is to stick it out,” he told us in this episode. “I’m not going to shut the doors. And two years from now, I may be a smaller company, but I'm going to be around, and then we're going to ride this back up.”

Jay Goltz, Dana White, and Laura Zander talk about confronting what’s changing in their businesses, possibly forever. Dana is considering a new business model. Laura is considering moving her wholesale business from Texas to Reno. “Ask yourself," says Dana, quoting an adviser, "'What kind of business would you start today?' Because that's the only one that has a chance to survive.” Plus: We get into some interesting strategies for raising prices, for managing lower paid employees, and for balancing entrepreneurship and parenting.

In last week’s episode, we asked our panel of business owners this question: Would you be doing anything differently with your business if you knew for sure that a second shutdown order was coming? It seemed like a pretty straightforward question, but it triggered one of our guests, Jay Goltz, who called it a “stupid” question and encouraged the other panelists not to answer it. So this week, we decided to try again to see if we could better understand how Jay is processing these stressful times. And to some extent, we succeeded, and we did get a little further beneath the surface—although there’s still a part of Jay that seems to be in denial. But maybe that’s just what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. As Jay likes to say, “There's a thin line between visionary and delusional, and I've certainly been on both sides of that.”

As the numbers of new coronavirus cases explode across the country, Karen Clark Cole, Jay Goltz, and Laura Zander talk about how they are trying to make plans for their businesses. The conversation heats up a bit as it becomes clear that one of our owners (Hi, Jay!) isn’t quite ready to confront the possibility that he might have to deal with another shutdown. By contrast, Laura tells us, “We're operating as if there is a shutdown. So, yeah, we're operating the same way we were two months ago.”

Jay Goltz, William Vanderbloemen, and Dana White—all of whom took Paycheck Protection Program loans—respond to an opinion piece that says “competent” business owners shouldn’t have had to go begging “shamelessly” for a government bailout, which got a particularly strong response from Jay: “I'm thinking of all of those entrepreneurs who are trying to run a business, trying to make happy customers—restaurants, hair salons trying to survive this whole thing, trying to take care of the emotional, the financial, and the physical needs… They're fighting a good fight, trying to stay in business so they can continue paying taxes, and he comes along and has to call us ‘shameless’ for taking money from the government.... Oh, we’re incompetent, because these people didn't have six months of savings stowed away?"