👋 Meet Zolid AI
Here to support your company's exit journey — Zolid AI can answer questions and provide insights. Free for now, with fair usage limits.
Your conversations are not shared with others. We may review them to improve Zolid AI.
Zolid AI may provide inaccurate info, so verify responses.
No quick summary yet. Be the first to add a quick summary.
Add quick summaryNo information listed yet. Be the first to add who benefits from this content.
Suggest who benefitsHow Do We Get Out of This Cage?
No detailed summary yet. Suggest a summary to help the community.
Suggest summaryNo questions listed yet. Be the first to add a question for this topic.
Suggest questionThis week, Karen, William, and Laura cover a lot of ground: For one thing, what do you do when the to-do list seems endless, you’re already working 24/7, and you just can’t get ahead? For another, what do you do when employees decide they want to work remotely from random parts of the country? Does that work? Is it a bureaucratic nightmare? Meanwhile, Laura is confronting several big, interrelated issues. Her co-founder and husband, Doug, is ready to step back from the business. That’s a little tricky because the company operates off a 19-year-old platform that Doug built, and only he knows how to make it work. They’ve been trying to hire tech people for Doug to train, but they’ve been through 15 people in 10 years—and they know they’re doing something wrong. Do they need to hire a recruiter? Is it time to junk Doug’s platform and go with Shopify? If they do that, will they forfeit 19 years of SEO value? All of which has left Laura feeling trapped. “That’s this cage that we’re in,” she tells us. “What the hell do you do?”
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.