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Suggest who benefitsHot Seat: Three Owners, No Easy Answers
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Suggest questionSometimes the best conversations start with a simple question—and then another, and another. This week, we put Kate Morgan, Jaci Russo, and Ted Wolf in the hot seat and fire away: Are you hiring? Are you finding impressive job candidates? What was the worst job you ever had—and did you learn anything from it? Have you bought crypto? If you had $10,000 a month to spend on marketing, where would it go? Should a marketing agency ever turn its marketing over to another marketing agency? What’s holding you back? What’s the simplest thing you’ve never quite figured out how to do?
None of these are trick questions, but they don’t necessarily have easy answers. Kate admits she’s never opened her accounting software. Jaci says one of the best things that ever happened to her was getting fired. Ted recounts losing 40 percent of his company’s revenue in a single weekend. Running a business means living with trade-offs, uncertainty, and the occasional punch to the gut. As Jaci reminds us, it usually works out—one way or another. But that doesn’t mean the answers are simple when you’re in the middle of it.
About 21 Hats
The proponents of employee stock ownership plans can make them sound like the greatest thing ever. A business owner can take a big chunk of money off the table—or even all of it—while still getting to run the business. And there are some pretty great tax breaks. Oh, and it will also solve income inequality in America. On the other hand, if ESOPs are so smart, why are there so few of them?
Jim Kalb of Triad Components Group in San Diego and Jeff Taylor of Crafts Technology in Chicago have both implemented ESOPs. Jay Goltz of the Goltz Group in Chicago has reached his 60s without a succession plan, and he’s considering his options. In this 21 Hats Conversation, you get to listen in on a street-smart discussion of the pluses and minuses of ESOPs from the business owner’s point of view.