21 Hats Podcast

This week, Shawn Busse walks us through his LinkedIn strategy: how often he writes, what he writes about, what he posts on his own page, what he posts on the company page, and how he promotes his business without promoting his business. Most importantly, Shawn explains why he believes his posting helps Kinesis attract both employees and clients.

This week, in episode 217, Laura Zander tells Shawn Busse and Jay Goltz about her approach to buying businesses. Laura says she simply recognizes that for a period of time, life will be miserable for her and for her team. That’s what happened almost a year ago when she bought two businesses that were a challenge to integrate. And now, just as things have calmed down a bit, she expects it to happen...

With the election only two weeks away, John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of Small Business Majority, talks through what’s at stake for small businesses, including what the campaigns are saying about taxes, regulation, immigration, tariffs, and manufacturing. Plus: Given the likelihood that, regardless of who wins the White House, a closely divided federal government is likely to be with us for some...

This week, in episode 216, Shawn Busse and Jay Goltz talk about the trendy job interview strategy of trying to get beyond canned responses by asking candidates unexpected questions along the lines of, “If you were a superhero, what powers would you have and why?” Or, “What animal best represents you as a person?” Not surprisingly, Jay isn’t a big fan of those questions, and he offers an alternativ...

This week, Gene Marks talks about the lessons business owners should take from the devastating hurricanes of recent weeks. Gene is confident that the communities will build back better than ever, but of course, not all of the businesses will make it. We’ve been reminded that disaster can strike anywhere. What should business owners do to prepare?

This week, in episode 215, Mel Gravely, Jennifer Kehrin, and Liz Picarazzi start out talking about the pain of being fired by a long-time client. “It still stings,” says Jennifer, who nonetheless surprised her team by writing a note of congratulations to the CEO of the company that took the business. The conversation moves on to the tradeoff that comes with deciding between promoting managers from...

This week, Victor Hwang talks about the remarkable road trip he recently completed in which he got a fresh perspective on the state of entrepreneurship across America. At a time when many of us are consumed with the election and politics and all of the things that divide us, Hwang, who is founder and CEO of Right to Start, a non-partisan advocacy group, met with entrepreneurs in cities and towns f...

This week, in episode 214, we bring you another Entrepreneurial Fish Bowl with Chris Hutchinson of Trebuchet Group . As you may remember, this is a virtual exercise where we offer a business owner—or in this case a potential business owner—the opportunity to pose a challenge he or she is facing to a group of owners and entrepreneurs from the 21 Hats community as part of a brainstorming session. In...

This week, Ami Kassar, founder and CEO of MultiFunding, explains how it’s almost as if these past few years we’ve run a grand experiment to see what would happen if the government gave lots of business owners more money than they knew what to do with. In many cases, the businesses got far bigger Covid loans than they could have hoped to borrow conventionally, and they got them without having to go...

This week, in episode 213, Paul Downs, Jaci Russo, and Sarah Segal talk about how and when they start planning for next year. And here’s one happy challenge they’ve all confronted: What do they do when they don’t have the capacity to handle all of the work that’s coming their way? Do they staff up? If so, what happens if the work subsequently falls off? Do they create a backlog? Do they miss deadl...

This week, Rob Levin, says there’s a talent crisis in America, but you wouldn't know it reading most business publications. That’s because the crisis is affecting smaller businesses much more than bigger businesses. Levin, co-founder and chairman of  WorkBetterNow, which provides remote workforce and virtual assistant services to small businesses, says he keeps hearing the same thing from owners w...

This week, in episode 212, Shawn Busse, Paul Downs, and Laura Zander call on their own experiences to assess whether the EOS operating system—as explained in Gino Wickman’s book Traction—lives up to its promise of freeing owners from frustration, helping them put the right people in the right seats, and generating all of the scale they want. Laura hired an implementer to install EOS in her busines...

This week, Shawn explains how a plumbing job went awry -- and more importantly, what it says about the “professionalization” of the blue-collar trades. That professionalization—along with the accompanying private equity dollars and the roll-ups and the MBAs—has certainly brought benefits. But it seems there’s been a price to pay as well.

This week, in episode 211, Jay Goltz and special guests Peter Koehler and Jimmy Kalb discuss the hottest new thing in succession planning. You may recall that earlier this year Peter was a guest on an episode in which he explained how he helped Laura Anderson sell her seafood restaurant to what’s known as an employee ownership trust or a perpetual purpose trust. Both Jay and Jimmy listened to that...

This week, Gene Marks tries to sort through some confusion. First, he talks about Kamala Harriss’s proposal to 10X a small business tax deduction, which sounds great except that it’s not really going to help small businesses. And then he addresses the comments of a Houston CPA who asserts that small businesses have the best tax deal in America. Gene sees it a little differently.

This week, I’m replaying an oldie but goodie, an episode that Shawn Busse and I recorded with Jeff Braverman, who turned his family’s failing retail business into a thriving ecommerce business. I’m replaying this episode both because Jeff has a great story to share, with lots of takeaways, and because—well, actually, because I took a little time off last week. But listen to this: Jeff walked away...

This week, in episode 210, Jay Goltz, Jaci Russo, and Jennifer Kerhin discuss some of the systems they’ve created that have made their businesses successful. Jay established a process that helps employees diffuse conflicts with angry customers. Jaci has a process that tracks the performance of her agency’s lead-generation efforts and has helped her target clients more precisely. And Jennifer recen...

This week, Gene Marks notes that the two major presidential candidates happen to agree on something, which is that we should stop taxing tipped income. Unfortunately, Gene explains, it’s a boneheaded idea. Plus: Gene’s been looking into the progress that manufacturing companies are making adopting artificial intelligence applications, and he says—at least when it comes to manufacturing—the promise...

This week, in episode 209, Shawn Busse, Jaci Russo, and Jay Goltz discuss what it takes to stand out these days, especially if your business—like most businesses—isn’t exactly the Next Big Thing. What about trash collection? What if your business is selling scrap metal? What if you happen to be one of 69 picture framers in Chicago? What’s an owner to do to stand out then? Is it enough to execute r...

This week, Gene Marks offers some suggestions as to what it would take for the presumptive Democratic nominee to earn his vote and those of other small business owners. Suggestion No. 1: make clear that in the debate over whether to extend the Trump tax cuts she favors keeping the Qualified Business Income Deduction for owners of pass-through businesses. He’d also like to see her promise fewer reg...

This week, in episode 208, Paul Downs, Mel Gravely, and Sarah Segal talk about the tricky calculation all entrepreneurs must make between sticking to their vision and accepting advice. Sarah explains why she is reluctant to take advice from people who don’t really know the inner workings of her business, which is pretty much everyone. Paul, on the other hand, says taking advice from outsiders help...

This week, Gene Marks talks about three very different topics. First, he explains how helping employees find affordable health care can actually generate business growth, and he walks through the ways even very small businesses can help. Next, Gene weighs in on proposed legislation in California that is designed to keep AI models from causing catastrophic harm. And finally, he explains how a new h...

This week, in episode 207, special guest Sharon Gillenwater lets us in on some dirty little secrets about Silicon Valley. She’s the founder of two businesses. The first one was backed by venture capital and then destroyed by venture capital. Despite that experience, Sharon tried to raise capital for her second business, Boardroom Insiders , a software-as-a-service marketing tool that helps busines...

This week, Gene Marks reminds us once again that AI tools by and large still aren’t ready for prime time, but he does find a handful of people doing interesting things with AI—like getting a fresh take on the risks and opportunities their business is confronting. Plus: Gene and Loren Feldman discuss whether Gene is right that his business taxes will definitely go up if Kamala Harris is elected pre...

This week, in episode 206, Shawn Busse, Jay Goltz, and Jennifer Kerhin talk about what it takes to plan and execute an employee retreat—especially in our post-Covid, more-remote environment. Do you go offsite? Do you take everybody? Do you delegate the planning? Do you try to measure the ROI? Jennifer tells us about the interesting responses she got when she encouraged her employees at her retreat...