What’s Harder Now: Getting a Job or Starting a Business?

Introduction:

Despite the waves of uncertainty crashing across the economy, this week we hear from three owners who feel cautiously good about how their year has started. David C. Barnett budgeted for slightly less revenue in 2026, but he’s operating more efficiently and expects to turn a bigger profit. Jaci Russo is hitting her revenue projections—and after implementing a profit-first accounting system, she says the results have been “eye-opening.” And while Lena McGuire isn’t quite on track to meet her aggressive goal of doubling her business this year, she’s doing far better than she did a year ago.

Along the way, we talk about getting runaway software subscriptions under control, figuring out how businesses get discovered in an AI world, and why Jaci’s health plan charges almost three times as much to cover female employees as it does comparable male employees. And we consider a question that might have sounded ridiculous not long ago: Has it become harder to get a job than it is to start a business?

Before we start, I also want to note a correction from last week’s episode about when, if ever, it makes sense for business owners to speak up about what’s happening in the world at large. During our conversation, Kate Morgan said that federal law prohibits the firing of employees because of their political views. Actually, political opinions and beliefs are not a protected employment class under federal law.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

David C. Barnett helps people buy and sell businesses.

Lena McGuire is CEO of Spóca Kitchen & Bath.

Jaci Russo is CEO of BrandRusso.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Dave, Lena, and Jaci. It’s great to have you here. We’ve just about completed the first quarter of 2026. This continues to be an unusual time, in that there seems to be more than the usual confusion about just how the economy is doing. So I’m wondering if we could just start with each of you and get a sense of how your businesses have started the year. How about you, Dave?

David Barnett:
Oh, I knew you were going to ask this, so I did some work, and I actually looked at the budget that I prepared over the holidays for the year. So we’ve kind of completed the first two months of the year. And I learned during my budgeting period this year, by the way, by loading all of my transaction data into ChatGPT, that I do not do 25 percent of my annual business in the first quarter. I actually do 29 and a half percent in most years in the first calendar quarter.

Jaci Russo:
Interesting.

David Barnett:
Yeah, my Q4 is always slower, every year. So I thought that was useful, because if I hold myself to that standard that I’ve calculated, I won’t feel over-secure in the first three quarters of the year, then panic in Q4 and feel like I’m falling behind. So, under the assumption that I should be on track with 29 and a half percent of my revenue for the year coming in the first quarter, that would mean I should have 19.6 percent of my budgeted revenue in already today. And I’m amazed to report that I’m within $200 of that.

Jaci Russo:
Wow.

Lena McGuire:
That’s pretty impressive.

David Barnett:
I was really blown away. But I am ahead on earnings for the year because I have spent less than my budget. But I don’t put too much stock in that, because there’s a lot of software that I pay for that is expensive that I pay on annual subscriptions. So, the first two months of expenses may not quite represent, you know, two-twelfths of the expenses for the year.

Loren Feldman:
Were you expecting to have a good year? What were your thoughts coming into the year?

David Barnett:
So it’s interesting that you say that, because we had a team member leave in November. And over the holidays, when I was doing this budgeting and everything, I made the decision that I would not replace them. And I decided that if we rebalanced the workload a little bit, and maybe went forward with a little bit less capacity, and then also raised our prices a little bit, we could actually have less revenue and maybe earn more money. So it was a very different kind of budget. So I actually budgeted to shrink revenue this year. So I’m on track for what I budgeted, which I’m happy about. But if you want to talk about total volume of business, then we would be down from last year, but on plan. So it’s like good and bad at the same time.

Loren Feldman:
Did you do this out of the sense that, given economic conditions, you wanted to budget conservatively?

David Barnett:
No, I did it out of, again, analysis over the last two years in the number of projects we worked on, how much profit we were earning from those projects, the amount of my time that was going into those projects, versus employees’ time. And it just made sense to sort of retreat a little bit on the growth plan that I initiated at the beginning of 2024. So the coming year is modeled more after what we did in 2023 with a slightly smaller team.

Lena McGuire:
When you were saying that you were paying for software subscriptions, I’m doing the same thing. They tend to be pretty heavy in the first part of the year. Do you take that and divide it by 12 and put it in as a liability and then just bring it over in your accounting so that you’re budgeting more accurately?

David Barnett:
No, I don’t. Just, these big bills—there’s probably eight or nine of these big subscriptions I have, which can be anywhere from $800 to a few thousand dollars. They’re spread throughout the year. I honestly focus more on the sales when I’m looking at month to month, and then I look at the expenses on a year-to-date basis. And I wouldn’t normally be doing this much work on the first two months of the year, except I knew that Loren wanted to have this conversation.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, I started mine in October, looking to see what things were going to be. And I’m very heavy on the subscriptions coming due in January, and I don’t have others to balance them out throughout the year. I do take them so that I can put it across all 12 months, so I get a better idea what the actual cost of running the business is.

Loren Feldman:
I know this is a favorite topic of Jaci’s. Are you all checking to make sure that you’re actually using all those software subscriptions?

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, looking into that. I have a couple I have to drop. It’s embarrassing, but I’m not using them as much as I had hoped, and I’m switching some software now. I just got back from an industry trade show, and I’m switching from one software to another, just because the flow of things is going to work better. And as I’m working with more 1099 subcontractors, it just makes it easier to have certain types of software. So I’ve been looking at that quite a bit.

David Barnett:
We did a comprehensive review. So, this was one of the things we did at the end of December and into early January. All of these kinds of subscriptions go into one credit card for us. So I just took all the credit card statements and put them in the ChatGPT and asked it to produce a list of all of the software subscriptions it saw. And there were no surprises. So we didn’t see anything there that we weren’t sure what it was or if we were using it.

But we actually looked at some of the tools, and we moved away from two tools. And I had someone on my team do some research, and we moved to a new tool. So we moved away from the CRM we were using and from Slack, and we’ve adopted ClickUp, which is giving us all the functionality we were using with our CRM and the team chat capability of Slack, as well as all the project management stuff that we wanted to start using. And so we saved quite a bit of money on that.

Lena McGuire:
Actually, I’m doing the same thing. I’m leaving the software. I’m going into and using a more robust—JobTread—that incorporates all of those things. So I can also start looking at getting rid of some other things.

Jaci Russo:
Alan Pentz says you just can start building your own software.

Lena McGuire:
That would be awesome.

David Barnett:
Yeah, I believe that that will be pretty normal in a while. I’m not ready to build all that stuff yet, but I can see it coming, totally.

Loren Feldman:
Dave, you’re obviously making creative use of ChatGPT. I think you said you threw all your transactions in. Is that like going back years to determine what percentage of your sales normally fall in the first quarter?

David Barnett:
I just did it year by year. And because, you know, I run a consulting business. It’s not like there’s a lot of them. You know, I might have four or five, six, journal entries per week in the accounting software. So when I just asked my bookkeeping software to create an output of all the sales in 2024 and all the sales in 2025, it wasn’t that big of a list. It was just a PDF. And I put that into ChatGPT and asked it just to do breakdowns of the sales. I asked it to notice any patterns or slow periods. I gave it some pretty open-ended questions.

And one of the things that it kind of brought to my attention was this regular slowdown in Q4, and I don’t know if that’s just like the holidays, maybe. You know, people get focused on family gatherings, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, we help people buy and sell businesses. And when I was a business broker, there was basically a two-week period where nothing would get done anywhere, kind of Christmas and New Year’s weeks. So it doesn’t surprise me a whole lot, actually.

Loren Feldman:
Were there surprises that ChatGPT helped you find by going through this?

David Barnett:
No real ahas, but it actually put some numbers to my instinct about it. And it’s allowed me to be more precise in doing the exercise I did before coming on today, in just knowing what I should be expecting to find in the first two months of the year. If I didn’t know about this minor seasonality in my business, I might be fooled into thinking I would be doing one twelfth of the annual budget every month. And I would have told you I was way ahead. But in fact, I’m just right on target.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have a sense that your business correlates with any macro metrics, anything you use to judge the vibrancy of the business-for-sale market?

David Barnett:
It’s a good question. In my own experience in this world, which dates back to 2008 specifically with buying and selling businesses, I was running a brokerage office during the great financial crisis, and the market was still active. We’d get buyers, for example, who had lost their jobs and had a severance and decided to look at buying a business instead of trying to find a new job.

Over the last 10 years of this market space, I don’t need as many of those people, because it was always easies to get a job. But if there are lots of job losses and layoffs, etc., then, well, actually, I’d have to say, in the last six months, I’ve spoken to more people than I have in a while who are looking at this market as a way to replace income versus finding a new job, because they’ve been laid off, like a lot of tech people. So I don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad for me. It just maybe changes the makeup of who is curious about this.

Loren Feldman:
Lena, how about you? How’s your year started?

Lena McGuire:
Much better than last year. I’m in kitchen-and-bath remodeling. People don’t do anything from, like, Thanksgiving til March, because we’re in the central New York area. Nobody wants to remodel in the winter, so I typically don’t have much income. And last year, I had no income for five months, but I had reserves, because I know about these cycles. Business survives.

But now I’m working towards having income coming in on a regular basis, so it’s not so cyclical. So I am, surprisingly, doing better than I thought I would. I’ve given myself some aggressive budgeting forecasting for the year, and I don’t expect to meet it, because it would be more than doubling what I did last year. But I’m shocked, after looking at my numbers for two months, that I am about 75 percent there, based on the first two months. So I’m not too far behind where I should be.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have any idea why more people seem to be interested during those cold months than in previous years?

Lena McGuire:
I think it’s because customers started sooner, and I hired a marketing agency last year. So I have put some money into the marketing, and the phone is ringing. Not a lot, but the people who are calling are pretty well-qualified. They’re self-selecting to do business with me or not. So I’m getting about four calls a month and signing one of them. I’d like to get to the point where I could sign two of them, and that would double the business.

And I’m also working with more ideal clients, so I’m saying no to people who are not a good fit. So not only are they self-selecting out, but when they do come through, if they think it’s a maybe, then we can have that first initial call and determine if we want to move forward together or not. And that seems to be working. So the quality of work, the level of projects, and the time I can commit are all starting to fall into place.

Loren Feldman:
Are you still putting time and energy into trying to buy a building for your business?

Lena McGuire:
I am. There is nothing available in the town that I’m looking in. They only have, like, four buildings a year that come up for sale. And most of the ones that are for sale right now are not suitable for the business that I’m doing. So I keep looking. I’m looking at other areas as well, but in the meantime, I just keep putting some money into the reserves, and I’ll have less of a mortgage. So not all bad. It’s still very cramped in my studio, though. I would really love to have a bigger space, but we’re getting by.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, how about you?

Jaci Russo:
It’s all right. We’re up 1 percent over what I projected. So I’ll take it. It’s a win, because we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. You know, if even a little bit of it comes through, which usually a little bit more than a little bit does, we are going to have a banner a year. So that’s my expectation. I mean, we’re still early, but it feels really good.

I’ve talked about the fact that we’ve adopted “profit first,” and so that’s been eye-opening, in terms of how we have thought about profitability and cash flow before. And so that’s going much better. I like that a lot. Now, I think Lena is like a super-user. I’m just a baby-basic-user, but I’m already seeing impact.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, profit first is amazing. I’ve gone from the basic accounts, and this year, I’ve added some additional accounts, because I do a lot of pass-through when I’m hiring subcontractors, like plumbers and electricians. I don’t mark that up, but you know, it could be thousands of dollars. If I do a flooring installation, it could be $20,000. That’s not my money. I get paid to supervise and do the paperwork on that.

So I’ve added another category for subcontractors and a different one for cost of goods, and I take that out before I start looking at my percentages that I’m going to move. And it’s really made a difference. Now I can see where the money is. I think that’s been very helpful. Moving forward, you know which levers to pull and push so that you can raise prices or cut back on expenses. And it’s making a big difference for me.

Loren Feldman:
We should point out, just for somebody who isn’t familiar, Profit First is the name of a book that Jaci has talked about here in the past. And the basic idea is that you budget your profit the way you would any expense, just to make sure that that profit is actually going to be there. How long have you been doing it, Lena?

Lena McGuire:
About five years.

Loren Feldman:
Wow.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, it’s wonderful to take the profit first and just set that aside, and then you get your dividends every quarter. So it’s pretty good.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, you just started doing it. The last time you talked about it, you were pretty excited about it. A little bit more time has passed. It. Do you have the sense that it’s working, and have you had to make any cuts as a result to make sure that that profit actually is there?

Jaci Russo:
No, we were profitable, but I’m smarter about it now. It’s more intentional now. It’s allocated now. It has its own account now. And I subscribe to the theory that your tasks are going to fill whatever space you give it, and so your expenses are going to fill whatever’s in the account. So it’s just a discipline thing. When I see this reduced amount in my operating expense account, that’s all I have to work with.

And I know—like, I’m not dumb—I know I have these other accounts, but I’m not looking at them. They’re hidden. And so that’s what I have to work with, and I find myself being smarter about expenses, spending less, just being a better entrepreneur. So it’s good.

Lena McGuire:
It does make a big difference.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, do you think your positive start to the year is representative of things you’re doing right with your own marketing, or is it the regional economy or the national economy? Why do you think things are looking up?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I definitely think we’re being more intentional and smarter about our own marketing. You know, we like to test things on ourselves first, and so we started last year really getting into making sure our website was AI-ready. And so we’ve put in place a ton of smarter systems, and I’m seeing the impact. I mean, we are getting proposal requests, meeting requests, from people who don’t subscribe to our email, don’t follow me on LinkedIn. I didn’t meet them at a conference. They’re like strangers popping up out of the blue.

And we did not used to have a lot of those, and they’re coming from our website. So I love that. And now that we’ve tested it on ourselves for enough time, we’ve started offering it to our clients to say, “Okay, we know now what we’re talking about. We know this is working. We will gladly do it for you.” And so that’s been good.

Loren Feldman:
What is it that you’re doing? What did you change on your website?

Jaci Russo:
Well, we have two sets of rules now. We have SEO rules following the published rules of Google, which we’ve been very attuned to. You know, Google says this is exactly what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it. And they change those rules every few months to make sure that people don’t try to game the system, and they actually follow them with protocols.

The AI platforms haven’t really published a set of rules the same way, but we do have a lot of insights into their desire for clear pricing, thought leadership, good content, smart, trustworthy backlinks. There’s just some things they’ve kind of given us some clues on, and so we’ve built systems in place to make sure we’re following what we think their rules are. And it seems to be working. People tell me that they found us in a search on ChatGPT. They found us in something they asked Claude. I’m like, “Okay, let’s go. That’s great. I love that for us.”

Loren Feldman:
Have you had clients take you up on the offer to do this for them.

Jaci Russo:
Oh yes, absolutely.

Loren Feldman:
And is it working for them as well?

Jaci Russo:
Well, it’s new, still early days. We just started offering it to them in January, because, again, I’m not gonna make my clients a guinea pig. We’re the guinea pigs. And so, after testing it on ourselves for six months and feeling like we know what we’re talking about, now I’m willing to risk the client’s investment on that. And so we don’t have results for them yet, but we, I think, will in the next few months. Ask me again in three or four months.

Loren Feldman:
I’m sure I will.

Jaci Russo:
I’m sure you will.

Loren Feldman:
So Jaci, is this a new category? Like, instead of SEO optimization, you’re talking about AI optimization as an add-on package?

Jaci Russo:
Correct. You know, some people call it GEO. Some people call it AIO. So that’s not even an industry standard yet. But so I call it SEO and AIO because I think that makes it very clear to people we’re talking about two different things. And so we have said: Here are the rules for if we host a client’s website. There’s just things we do automatically that are good form and best practice, and then there’s add-on things that clients can have us do, because it’s about the search terms. You know, it’s like, what are people searching for that you want to be found in, and who else is optimized for that term, and then how do you get optimized against them? That’s sort of the shorthand of it.

Lena McGuire:
And it sounds like a very good value proposition that’s differentiating you. Because eventually everybody’s going to talk about AI optimization, and you’re already doing it as a specific line item. I think that’s pretty smart.

Jaci Russo:
Thanks. Thanks. I try.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, have you had any surprise expenses so far this year?

Jaci Russo:
[Laughter] Oh, Loren, so I’m going to answer that with two parts. In the first part, yes, I’ve had a couple of things. Through my work with profit first, and in the midst of updating our budgeting and how we budget, I did the deep dive into subscriptions and found just vast amounts of subscriptions—most of which we use on a regular basis.

Probably 70 or 80 are legit, authentic, real subscriptions that we are using. And they are part of what powers this place, and I’ve got no complaints. But when I started to find duplicates—you know, everything got moved to one card so we could track it. And then there’s another one. So maybe there’s an annual, but then there’s also a monthly. Like, why do we have two subscriptions to the same thing?

Loren Feldman:
And you’ve been watching this, too, because you raised this issue, I think, a year or two ago.

Jaci Russo:
It was exactly two years ago and a year ago. And so now I’m putting it on a six-month rotation. You know, it’s not that my team is doing anything nefarious. Please don’t hear that. That’s not it. And I don’t think any of us are irresponsible. I think it is quite simply that we use a lot of different tools in our tech stack. We move quickly. We have a shared document that tracks everything, and I’m the one who’s put myself in charge of that responsibility, and I’m apparently sleeping at the wheel.

And so, we had to have a very lengthy conversation with Adobe last week, because the entire creative team is on one massive account. And then there’s these two other charges that Adobe can’t explain, and I can’t explain. They’re not attached to any email that we have or have had, but they’re getting charged to my card.

Loren Feldman:
What did Adobe say it would do?

Jaci Russo:
Well, when you figure out what email it goes to let us know.

David Barnett:
Really?

Lena McGuire:
So helpful.

Jaci Russo:
Oh yeah, so helpful.

Lena McGuire:
Boy, they’ll continue to take your money. But they’re not going to be too helpful.

David Barnett:
This is when you take advantage of the arbitration services of the credit card company.

Jaci Russo:
Yes, and the arbitration services of the credit card company said, “Well, it’s kind of complicated, because you’ve been paying this for a few months now. So it looks legitimate and real.” I’m like, “Oh, I don’t doubt that it is, but I need to get this fixed.” So I thought I’d be smart, and so I said to the credit card company, “Okay, here’s what I want to do: I want to cancel this card. I want a whole new card number. I do not want you to allow anything to get pushed through. Everything needs to be manually entered with the new card number so that we know everything is clean and fresh.”

And the credit card company said, “Oh, a great idea. Yeah, let’s do that. That’s a great plan.” I’m talking to a live human person: “Let’s do that.” I was like, “Great, yes.” And wouldn’t you know that I went through and re-entered every single charge as it would be bounced back. I’d go into the new number, enter the number, except the one company, Adobe, I was trying to fix. They have some magical, “I’m a really big company,” and my stuff gets pushed through no matter what. And so those charges are still there. It’s so annoying, so annoying. So yeah, good times.

Loren Feldman:
And Adobe won’t just—

Jaci Russo:
They can’t, Loren. It’s the system. The system won’t allow it. If we can’t enter the email address, it doesn’t matter that I know exactly how much the charge was, the day it was charged, the full card number, all the details. They cannot do it without the email address, and they can’t just run a search for our extension. They can’t just look for brandrusso.com It has to be the user@brandrusso.com to be found. It’s almost as if they know sometimes people start a subscription and leave a company. Or they use their personal email or whatever, almost as if they know and they don’t care. So I will get it figured out, don’t you worry, and then I’m gonna get a credit for every single penny.

Loren Feldman:
You think?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I know.

Lena McGuire:
Oh yeah, as you should.

Loren Feldman:
So it sounded like you had another expense that you uncovered?

Jaci Russo:
I did have another expense. Thank you for remembering. So, Loren is encouraging me to repeat something I wrote to him in writing in an email, and I’m happy to do it. What I said—jokingly and sarcastically—is: I’m going to stop hiring women. So the humor is, number one, our company is 90-percent female. Two, I run these women’s summits at sea, and I’m a huge advocate for women entrepreneurs. But we just got our Blue Cross renewal, and it’s gone up 20 percent.

Well, let me rephrase, all of the women on our health insurance policy have gone up 20 percent. None of the men have incurred any increased charges. So you look at a young, single male who works here in his late 20s, his cost is $386 a month total cost. So it’s not his cost, because we obviously pay for a large part of it. But the cost, though, of a woman in the same demographic category, also late 20s, is $878 a month—almost three times as much—also single, also in good health.

Loren Feldman:
Is that new this year, or have you seen that previously?

Jaci Russo:
It is not, but it is a wider disparity than it was since all of the women increased 20 percent and none of the men did. Again, by the way, it’s not the first time that women have gone up and the men have stayed the same.

Loren Feldman:
Did you make any phone calls to try to figure this one out?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I did. I did. I had some chats with my agents, and then we all had some chats with Blue Cross of Louisiana. And they said, “Yeah, women are more expensive to insure, just like teenage boys cost more for car insurance. Oh, well.” The bigger problem is, in the state of Louisiana, we really only have 1.5 insurers. We have Blue Cross, and then every once while, UnitedHealthCare is able to slip in. But Blue Cross has done a really great job of blocking everybody else, so there’s no competition. And if there was, I’d have left. But we’ve been with Blue Cross since 2001, the day we opened our doors, because there’s no other alternative.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve never heard this before. Do you know if this happens in other states as well?

Jaci Russo:
I do not, but maybe some listeners can tell us.

Loren Feldman:
I would be very appreciative if they did. If this is a widespread issue, I’d think we’d be aware of it.

David Barnett:
I’m just trying to think of why. I mean, is it because, Jaci, you’re talking about a demographic—you’re talking about people in their late 20s. I mean, that’s child-bearing age for a lot of people. I’m guessing the bills for birth and care of children is probably tacked onto the lady at the hospital. Could that be one of the drivers?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I think that the fine folks at Blue Cross don’t understand the way the babies are made, which you apparently do appreciate. It’s men and women together to make that happen. Because they believe that only the women should bear the cost of the potential impending pregnancy. I mean, do we want to keep this conversation going down the path? Because I have more thoughts.

Lena McGuire:
Jaci, the rates for family plan, do they reflect a big difference?

Jaci Russo:
They do. But interestingly enough, if the man has the kids, it is almost 50 percent cheaper than if the women have the kids on the family plan. Like, if it’s a male employee with dependents, it’s significantly cheaper than if it’s a female employee with dependents. Because again, those women can just keep getting themselves knocked up all by themselves, racking up charges.

Lena McGuire:
I’m sitting here burning up.

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I’ve been fuming for days.

Loren Feldman:
I don’t understand this at all, and I’m hoping we do hear from some people who explain it. You did mention the male and female driver issue, and the fact that males have to pay more because they’re more reckless drivers. That actually makes sense to me. Do you agree with that, Jaci?

Jaci Russo:
Well, to be clear, that was Blue Cross’ analogy, not mine. And I appreciate that there might be some statistical evidence that some male teenage drivers get more tickets, accidents, whatever, but that means we’re punishing all men for the choices of some men. So by that, are we saying that we are punishing all women for the choices of some women? I mean, I don’t think the analogy is quite fair, so I agree with you. It’s not the same, but that’s how Blue Cross justified their choice.

David Barnett:
Is there any kind of regular maintenance costs that are being covered for the women that are not for the men. Like, does this plan cover contraception, things like that?

Jaci Russo:
Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know.

David Barnett:
Because if most of the women are having a regular monthly expense for these prescriptions, and I can see how that would add up quickly, because then it’s no longer insurance if someone gets sick, if something happens. Now you’re talking about a cost built into the system.

Jaci Russo:
Well, but then I’ll go one further with you. If the women in this hypothetical scenario are, in fact, blowing their salaries on contraception—which should be a two-part state—then they are not about to get pregnant. Therefore, why are my costs up for a potential impending pregnancy?

David Barnett:
Oh. Well, that’s a good question. Good question.

Loren Feldman:
Well, we’re gonna have to just leave this one. I hope we come back to it and figure it out. I just can’t believe that that’s a widespread issue, and none of us were aware of it. That just doesn’t seem possible.

Jaci Russo:
I have been aware of it for years, because for as long as I have been the administrator of our plan, there has been a discrepancy between the two. But they used to be so much closer together, and so honestly, it didn’t phase me. And I didn’t sit down and do the grid of how many are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. It just was; Yeah, some of the women are a little bit more than some of the men, okay. But it has become glaringly obvious because it’s 20 percent more for the women, 20percent more for the women, 20 percent more for the women, 20 percent more for the women. So now it’s two and a half, three times more for the women.

Loren Feldman:
All right, next thing: I sometimes, as you know, like to pull something out of the small business subreddit and get your reactions to it. I found an interesting one today from somebody who posted that, today, starting a business is actually easier than getting a job. And I’m curious what you guys think of this. Let me read it to you quickly. This person writes:

“It’s never been so hard to find a job before. You apply to 300-plus roles just to get rejected one after the other with no sign of hope. What’s worse is, you don’t even get efficient responses anymore. I’ve seen many times where people are getting told they’ve been rejected a year after they’ve applied. Like, WTF. Even when you do get a job, it’s not like the good old days where you actually had security. Nowadays you can just be dropped at any moment and become jobless again. It frustrates me so much, honestly, and with vibe-coding being so powerful now you can literally build anything in a matter of weeks. For example, I just built a full stack production grade SaaS that would have previously taken at least a year to build. And guess what? It took me two weeks. If that was two years ago, it would have cost me at least 50k to build and a full dev team. Now, obviously, building a business and actually getting customers is a whole different story, but then I was thinking, if I swapped all that job hunting time of sending dozens of applications per day to outreaching to customers instead, I feel as though it would be plausible to actually acquire paying customers. What’s stopping us from starting a business revolution? Wouldn’t this be better anyway, and desaturate the job market? Wondering what others think?”

What do you guys think? Anybody?

Jaci Russo:
One hundred percent agree.

Lena McGuire:
I agree also.

David Barnett:
It would be less risky for the person too, because when you have a job, you’ve got this customer concentration called your boss, who gives you 100 percent of your income. If you start a business and get 20 customers, you have more resilience if one of them goes away.

Loren Feldman:
It’s so interesting to me that you all agree. I’m quite confident that if I’d asked this of you five years ago—I don’t mean you specifically—but most business owners would have laughed at the possibility that someone would think that starting a business is easier than getting a job.

Jaci Russo:
But you’re talking to three people who started businesses.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, we’re a little biased, right?

Loren Feldman:
But you don’t think it was easy, right?

David Barnett:
My son, when he was 13, couldn’t get a job, so he borrowed my lawn mower and started a little business. Whenever I see something about small business failure rates being very high, I always wonder how many of them are just little incidental businesses like that. And people have always been able just to get 100 business cards printed and a cell phone number and call themselves a consultant or some kind of business like that. So what the person is saying is absolutely correct. You can start. The challenge, obviously, is going to be for this person to come up with an offer that will be compelling, that people will want to buy, and then making sure they can deliver the service in a profitable fashion.

Loren Feldman:
That reminds me, I forget who, some comedian had the line: “Why does everybody think it’s so hard to quit smoking? It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” [Laughter] And the same thing is kind of true about starting a business. It’s easy to start a business. You could do lots of them. Building one that actually lasts is a different story. We are having something of a revolution here. I mean, there have been more business starts in this country, and I’m guessing in Canada too, Dave, than there used to be. The trend started with the pandemic, but it’s continued since the pandemic let up.

Lena McGuire:
Maybe because it’s easy to start.

David Barnett:
Yeah, and it’s getting easier and easier. You know, you can think about online stuff, but let’s think about a regular old retail store. I mean, I remember at one point people had to spend a couple thousand dollars on a cash register. Now, you just get an iPad or a tablet of some kind and your Shopify account that you can just use in your retail store. And there you go, you have a retail point of sale. Everything about business is moving away from large upfront costs into these subscription models, which makes it easier for people to experiment.

I’ve seen people, for example, start selling something at a farmers market and then evolve to maybe a storefront business, or something of that nature. And you can see people do this growing up over the course of time, as they accumulate capital, kind of bootstrap themselves. And I think if somebody figures out how to do something that is a business, where they’re making money, I think they can just move along that trajectory even faster now, because you don’t require these capital investments that were once required for someone.

Lena McGuire:
You also don’t have to worry about where you’re going to get information from. I mean, you have to check your sources, but the availability of information on the internet and coaching—I mean, coaching used to be thousands and thousands of dollars. Now, you can sign up for a class for $150 and there’s a lot more available help and a lot more ease at getting it. You can do self-paced courses at night.

It’s just very different than it was even 10 years ago. So I think with the ease of starting a business, and then the ease of getting information, and we just put it into ChatGPT, and it’s like, “Oh, I’m stuck here. What do I do? This is what I’ve tried. What else can I do?” And I think you get some good information.

Loren Feldman:
We’ve been focusing primarily on the how much easier it is to start a business side of the equation. Do you all also agree with what the poster said about how hard it is to get a job these days?

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, it’s not pretty out there.

David Barnett:
The difficulty, though, about why it’s so hard to get a job is because it’s become so much more easy to apply. So I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, we had someone leave our team in November, and my first instinct was to replace them. So we actually put up a job ad on LinkedIn, and in the job ad, we actually put that we would not be accepting applications on LinkedIn. And we put an email address where people could send a resume, and we asked people to put a cover letter saying why they thought they were suitable for the role we advertised. We got 25 people who emailed, five of them put a cover letter on, but like 300 applied on LinkedIn, which we said that we weren’t going to accept.

But it just goes to show you, there are people who just looked at the subject line and clicked apply, because it’s so easy to apply. I mean, that’s why we put the email thing in there, because we just knew we would get flooded with applicants. And you know, people who don’t bother to read the job posting, I don’t think, are good quality applicants.

Loren Feldman:
Were you happy with the quality of applicants you did get?

David Barnett:
The people who did send in their email in the application, there were four or five of them who I could see could potentially have filled the role. And then I decided not to fill it. But you know, when I hear people say, “I’ve applied for 300 jobs in two months,” I know this is what they’re doing. It’s going on these websites, going apply, apply, apply, apply. They’re just clicking, and to me, it’s not a real application, because you’re not reading the job application saying, “Hey, I could do that,” and thinking about your past experience and trying to see how your experience in particular would make you suitable to that—and then trying to figure out how you might make a good impression through whatever communication you’re going to send into that company. Or maybe you go look and see if you might know someone in the company, maybe, who’d give you some advice on how to apply.

And this is why you’re reading all these headlines about companies saying they’re having to revert back to networking to try to find applicants, because people are just being overwhelmed by these applicants. And then AI is adding to the problem, because some people are customizing their applications one at a time, but they’re doing it with ChatGPT.

Loren Feldman:
Well, you kind of have an AI arms race, where the applicants know that the businesses are reading their resumes with AI so the applicants use AI to try to improve their resumes so that they’ll actually get read and reviewed. How much do you think that accounts for the frustration level and people feeling as though it’s all a nightmare?

David Barnett:
I’m sure that people do feel frustrated. There’s no question. I just know that—and I mean, hey, I’m a middle-aged person with lots of different experiences. If I was going to go look for a job tomorrow, and I saw a job that I would be perfect for, my instinct would not be to just apply on the platform or within whatever fashion they were telling me.

My instinct would be to try to figure out: Who in this organization do I need to talk to, and how can I get to them? Can I call them? Can I call a friend? Can I find someone on LinkedIn and send them a message directly? I would think that, if I could get some time on the phone or in front of the person who had something to do with hiring, that I could set myself apart from all the other applications, because I just would know that they’re getting this flood of static. So the question is, how do you break through the static?

Loren Feldman:
Thank you so much. My thanks to David Barnett, Lena McGuire, and Jaci Russo. Thanks for sharing, everybody.