What it takes to run a business

Podcast

This week, we meet Jennifer Kerhin, the newest addition to the 21 Hats Podcast team. Jennifer’s business, SB Expos and Events, is an event-management business that survived the shut down in 2020 and has grown to more than $3 million a year in revenue. When COVID first hit, Jennifer tells Jay Goltz she really thought it would put her out of business; in the end, she says, it made her stronger. Even so, she is very much stuck working in her business, while looking for ways to extract herself from day-to-day tasks someone else could handle. But how do you free yourself up enough so that you have the time to put the people and systems in place that you know you need? And how long should that take? “I hate to tell you,” says Jay, “it took me 10 years. But I'm going to help you here, so it's going to take you 10 months.”

This week, Hans Schrei and Shawn Busse talk about why they put their businesses through accelerators, and Paul Downs explains why he might have done the same thing if accelerators had existed back when he started his business—”although,” he says, “I was probably too dumb to realize the value of it.” Hans, who just completed a 13-week accelerator program with his partner, Luis, also tells us how Wunderkeks fared while he and Luis were in the program, what they got out of it, and why they felt it was worth giving up the equity that was the price of admission. Plus: why Shawn went to an employee’s college graduation and how Paul managed to take a vacation. Oh, and Paul also talks about what surprised him about the recent 21 Hats event in Chicago.

This week, we did something different. We recorded this session in Chicago at our very first 21 Hats in-person event. In May, some 20 impressive entrepreneurs from around the country, from different industries, with businesses of different sizes and stages, gathered to talk shop for three days. The last thing we did was to record this episode in which we gave the participants the opportunity to ask the podcast regulars anything they wanted. Those regulars included Jay Goltz, Sarah Segal, and Dana White, and the questions addressed everything from hiring to motivating to delegating to pricing to coping with stress to what they wished they’d figured out sooner and to what still keeps them up at night. And when there were no more questions, I asked those who attended the Chicago event what I could have done to make it better. That I would invite criticism in a conversation being recorded for a podcast audience, took some of the participants by surprise. But, as you’ll hear, it worked out pretty much the way I hoped.

This week, William Vanderbloemen says good public relations is absolutely worth the time and money. Paul Downs says PR hasn’t worked for him. At this point, he says, there are all kinds of ways he’d rather spend his time and money. Meanwhile, Sarah Segal, who owns a PR firm, offers some tips on how to approach and how to employ a firm effectively. Along the way, we discuss what’s expensive when it comes to PR and whether owners can just do it themselves. Plus: Paul explains how he dug himself out of a sales hole by not doing anything differently. And we find out how the owners feel about all of the new ways they’re being asked to leave tips.

This week, Shawn Busse and Loren Feldman talk to John Garrett about his contrarian approach to newspapers, marketing, and competition. Garrett has built a Texas-based chain of print newspapers that has managed to outcompete established news organizations and digital platforms for both community engagement and local advertising. Not surprisingly, when he first took out a $39,000 credit card loan in 2005 and started telling people that his business model would feature a monthly print publication that he would mail to everyone in his target communities for free, he didn’t get a lot of congratulations. And not everything he’s tried has worked. An expansion into Arizona, Tennessee, and Georgia, for example, failed early in the pandemic. But almost 20 years after its debut, a period during which most local publications have been in retreat, Community Impact is thriving. And from his seat as a publisher, Garrett offers a perspective on marketing that any business owner would be wise to consider.