This week, we take a look back at the conversations we had last year about the many rewards and responsibilities of business ownership, highlighting some of our happiest, smartest, funniest, and most difficult exchanges from the past year. Along the way, we discuss topics such as escalating salary demands, how much profit a business should make, a new way to sell a business, the problems with ESOPs, how to sell cookies on LinkedIn, breaking a million dollars in annual revenue, escaping the valley of death, and the pain of having to fire a long-time employee.
There aren’t many places where you can hear entrepreneurs talk about the real-life problems they are confronting right now, today, as they happen—with no guarantee of a happy ending. But those are the conversations I have every week with Paul Downs of
Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, Shawn Busse of
Kinesis, Jay Goltz of
Artists Frame Service, Mel Gravely of
Triversity Construction, Jennifer Kerhin of
SB Expos & Events, Liz Picarazzi of
Citibin, Jaci Russo of
BrandRusso, Sarah Segal of
Segal Communications, William Vanderbloemen of
Vanderbloemen Search Group, Dana White of a soon-to-be-named successor to
Paralee Boyd, and Laura Zander of
Jimmy Beans Wool.
In this episode, we also highlight several appearances by special guests who stopped by in 2023 to discuss their journeys, including Muhammad Abdul-Hadi of
Down North Pizza, Jeff Braverman of
Nuts.com, Michael Brown of
Teamshares, Brad Herrmann of
Text-Em-All, Grayson Hogard of
Grove Cookie Company, Lance Tyson of the
Tyson Group, and Ari Weinzweig of
Zingerman’s. If listening to one of these highlights makes you want to go back and listen to the full episode, that can be done most easily by going to
21hats.com. There you’ll find a transcript of this episode with links to all of the episodes we sample.