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Suggest questionThis week, in episode 188, we offer you a taste of the 21 Hats Live event we held in Fort Worth two weeks ago. It’s a different kind of event where there are no speakers, only participants. It’s pretty much a three-day, peer-group session for business owners, where we share challenges and insights and make connections. There were 25 of us, including most of our podcast regulars.
For me, the highlight was an exercise that Chris Hutchinson of the Trebuchet Group (https://www.trebuchetgroup.com/) facilitates. He calls it a “Fish Bowl” because the idea is to have an owner stand up and expose everything about a specific challenge that he or she is confronting. Fortunately, we had one owner who was gracious enough to agree to reveal all, to answer any question. And that owner was, well, it was me, actually. The truth is, this was a priceless opportunity for me to get some feedback from a focus group of smart entrepreneurs who were already familiar with 21 Hats.
It even got a little emotional, mostly because a couple of the owners were kind enough to say that, had it not been for 21 Hats, their businesses might not have survived the pandemic. That was moving to hear, to say the least, but of course, that alone doesn’t mean 21 Hats has a sustainable business model. We recorded the whole thing, and if you have any thoughts after listening to it, please send them my way.
Sound engineer: Blake Sessions, Content Capital (https://contentcapitalonline.com/) .
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.