Introduction:

This week, Jay Goltz, Dana White, and Laura Zander have a wide-ranging conversation that starts with the challenge of pricing. Do you set prices based on what you think the market will bear? Or do you set prices based on your own rising costs and what you need to charge to make a profit? And how much profit should a business expect to make? Along the way, the owners also discuss why Laura wants to keep buying businesses (don’t tell her husband, Doug), what Dana needs to do to get her new salon open at Fort Bragg, and why both Dana and Laura are going all-in on influencer marketing. Jay, on the other hand, isn’t entirely convinced that social media marketing works for his picture-framing business. Plus: Should a business owner know every employee’s name? What if you have 130 employees?

— Loren Feldman

This week, Shawn Busse, Liz Picarazzi, and William Vanderbloemen discuss what it’s been like trying to make sense of employee compensation in a time of COVID, the Great Resignation, inflation, and a looming recession. Shawn’s business model is evolving, and he’s trying to adjust his mix of employees to fit the new model with as little disruption as possible. Liz is expecting a year of big growth and is assessing how that will affect her staffing needs—especially as she introduces new benefits, including health care. And William is trying to create a more sustainable compensation structure while also breaking his employees’ expectation that they will always get a year-end bonus. Plus a listener asks: What tasks are the owners still doing, even though they know it’s not worthy of their time? (Aside from participating in this podcast, of course.)

— Loren Feldman

This week, Jay Goltz explains how he got interested in selling a percentage of his business to his employees and why he quickly lost interest once he started reading books, attending seminars, and talking to accountants and lawyers who specialize in employee stock ownership plans. To Jay’s ear, they all made ESOPs sound expensive, complicated, and risky. This was not something he needed to do. So why go to the trouble? Why take the risk? But he kept asking questions, and over time, he sensed that many of the problems he was being warned about didn’t have to be problems. As of now, he’s pretty much concluded that an ESOP could help him secure retirement for his employees while generating more profit for his business. In fact, he says, “I’m confident I can make more owning 70 percent of the company than I am now owning 100 percent.” But he still has a few lingering questions, which is why we invited Corey Rosen to join the conversation. Corey helped draft the legislation that created ESOPs, he’s the founder of the National Center for Employee Ownership, and he literally wrote the book on how the plans work. All of which led to an inevitable question for both Jay and Corey: If ESOPs are so great, why are there so few of them?

— Loren Feldman