'What Doesn't Keep Me Up at Night?'

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Loren Feldman:
This is just a great opportunity to get some feedback from some really smart people who’ve been hanging out with us this week. So I’d like to throw it open. Does anybody here have a question that they would like to ask anybody on the panel or all of the panel?

Nawal Motawi:
My name is Nawal Motawi. I’m the owner and founder of Motawi Tileworks, maker of very beautiful and distinctive art tiles. My question is for Jay, and it’s about hiring. So I’m always interested in learning new questions to ask of new hires. I’m trying to tease out whether these are kind, decent human beings. I’m looking for humble, hungry, and smart people for my company, and I’m interested to hear a question that you would ask someone, and what kind of answer you would look for or how you would interpret an answer.

Jay Goltz:
Well, we hire people everywhere from working in the factory to doing sales. So it’s different. But the first thing I want to know is, “Why are you looking for a job?” Because that can be very telling. “So are you still working?” That’s a big question. Are they still working? “Yes.” “Why do you want to leave?” “Well, it’s just time.” To which I go, “God, that sounds like bullshit. What do you mean, ‘It’s just time’? What does that mean?” And then I would ask them, “What do you like about where you’re at? And what don’t you like?” “Why are you looking?” I want to know: Why are they looking for a job?

And then given the internet and the websites, you can now say to them, “What do you know about my company that makes it seem like a good place for you to work?” I mean, they should have done a little research to go on and look at your website, for God’s sake. So I want to see if they have any good answers as to why they want to work here. And then I want to know: What are you looking for in a job? And that’s probably half the process.

The other half of the process is checking references, which from my experience, most people don’t do. Or they say they do, and they don’t, and you are just playing with fire. And it’s absolutely correct that nine out of 10 times, you’ll be wasting your time with a reference check. And that one time will save you a lot of grief. So good ad, great interview. I ask people who are in retail, “Tell me a difficult customer story that you had.” And that’s very telling.

Loren Feldman:
Does that answer your question, though, about finding kind people?

Jay Goltz:
That’s difficult. I don’t know how to tell if they’re kind.

Nawal Motawi:
I asked you a question earlier, and I liked your answer.

Jay Goltz:
Okay. What did I say?

Nawal Motawi:
I think the question you asked was: What did you think your previous boss could have done better?

Jay Goltz:
Right, tell me if you were in charge of the job you’re at or your previous job, what do you think they could be doing better? And I want to hear an answer. If they say, “Nothing.” Okay, they’re not being honest. There must be something. And then if they see there was a problem, I want to hear, “Oh, did you talk to your boss about it?” And I want to hear, “Yeah, actually, I did. I talked to him several times. I talked to their boss. And that’s why I’m looking for a job. Nothing changes.”

What I don’t want to hear is, I don’t want to see the rolling eyes. “They don’t listen to anybody.” I don’t want to hear that. I want to hear about somebody who was trying to participate, who was trying to make things better. Because, otherwise, they’re going to be complaining about you. I want people who are going to say to our face, “Hey, can we do something better here?” I want people to complain to our face. And you can tell from their last job frequently whether they’re the ones that are going to be the team player to say what’s on their mind, or they’re just gonna complain to everybody else?

Sarah Segal:
What do you think about references, though? You mentioned talking to references, and like, someone’s going to put forward their three favorite people who are gonna say wonderful things.

Jay Goltz:
Not true. Absolutely not true.

Dana White:
No, references with me are a waste of time. The three to four people they put on there are three to four people who tell the absolute best [things] every time. It’s very rare I’ve gotten a reference where someone said, “Yeah, no.”

Jay Goltz:
They’re not going to say no. It’s about what they don’t say. When I did the blog with Loren years ago, someone sent a great suggestion. He says: If you’re interviewing someone that the person is saying nothing but wonderful things about, and they quit, then he would say to them, “So it sounds like they were a great employee.” Pause. “What did you do to screw that up?” “Well, I didn’t say they were perfect.” And they’ll tell you the truth. I’ve had people tell me really bad stuff by just saying to them, “Well, they’re not working for you. So what went wrong there?”

What I’ve learned is, unless it’s their friend they just set you up with—and it was a setup, which you should be able to figure out—no one wants to lie for someone who was a terrible employee. I have never met a human being who is going to let the words come out of their mouth, “Oh, they were great,” when they were a nightmare. They won’t. Their brain won’t allow it to come out of their mouth. They’re gonna give you a long silence. I had one guy once tell me, “Well, I don’t want to elaborate.” Well, that was enough. Really? You don’t want to elaborate?

Sarah Segal:
I guess you have to be kind of specific with their kind of references. Like, “Please provide us a former manager.”

Jay Goltz:
And if it wasn’t the last job, if somebody hasn’t accumulated people they’ve worked with who can say something positive about them, there’s something wrong there. Now, if they’re right out of college, that’s a problem. There’s not much you can get for references. But if somebody has been working in the workplace, and they can’t find someone? What do I want to hear in the reference? “Oh, she’s great. You should hire her.” That’s what I want to hear.

Jim Kalb:
Jim Kalb, Triad Components Group. Good to see you all. So you all come from very diverse backgrounds and industries. I want to know what keeps you up at night? And what are you afraid of after the time you’ve been in your business?

Sarah Segal:
Ooh, that’s a good question. Don’t come to me first.

Jay Goltz:
You know that phrase—what keeps you up at night?—sometimes I get up thinking about stuff I have no control over. And it has nothing to do with business. So what am I worried about in the business? Not a whole lot. I mean, if a key employee left, that’d be a problem. But does it keep me up at night? What I’ve learned over the years is: Stop worrying about stuff that you can’t control. I’m trying to choose not to worry about stuff. Does my subconscious do it? Sometimes. Yes. But at the moment, there’s nothing business-wise that’s making me [worry].

Loren Feldman:
What If he asked you this question 20 years ago? What would your answer have been?

Jay Goltz:
Oh, I had constant cash flow problems, employee problems. I keep telling everyone: I’ve been doing this for 45 years, I’ve gotten better at it. It didn’t happen in 10 years. This did not happen in 10 years. Twenty years ago, I was stressed out to the max, and—I take it back. About 20 years ago, I started to get it under control. So I’ll rephrase the question for you. I would say,
“What changed me from completely being stressed out to not?” Hiring and firing, hiring and firing, hiring and firing.

Loren Feldman:
Dana?

Dana White:
For me, it’s growth and making sure I don’t make the same mistakes that have hurt me, you know, personally—not personally, but emotionally—and hurt my business. Fear of the unknown, right? Because I am 10 years in. So it’s cash flow, do we have enough money? We’re going so slow. Why are we going slow? What didn’t I do? Am I repeating the same mistakes? That keeps me up at night.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah?

Sarah Segal:
What doesn’t keep me up at night? [Laughter] Every aspect of my business keeps me up at night. I make lists, and I have to have a pad of paper and pen next to my bed, because if I don’t write it down—I think it’s a thing in my family where we solve the world’s problems as we’re trying to sleep at the same time. And the only way to get it off of my brain is if I put it down on a piece of paper.

So, I don’t worry too much about making payroll anymore, because we’re profitable. But I worry about making sure that our clients are successful and happy. I worry about whether my staff is being successful and happy and flourishing and being challenged and being given new opportunities so they want to stay with us and want to grow with us.

And then I definitely worry about the growth of the business. Where should I put my money and my time so I can make sure that we’re growing in such a way that is sustainable and good for us in the long-term? Because I don’t want to start doing something that is not going to be sustainable for us and is not going to be something that we can repeat for other clients.

Loren Feldman:
Another question? Kemi?

Kemi Tignor:
My name is Kemi Tignor, and I’m the founder of Upbounders. We make screen-free puzzles and toys, with decidedly diverse imagery. I’m earlier on in our startup journey than you all are. So I’m making a lot of decisions, and I’m having those sort of first-employee, first-contractor engagements. And I wondered, as you were building your teams, what were the first positions that you began to fill?

Dana White:
I couldn’t grow my business without a team. I was one woman—and I’m not a hairstylist—so during buildout, I opened. So my first positions were stylist and shampoo assistant. Similarly to you, two or three years in, I replaced myself, if you will, in the administrative capacity. So it was now, bring on a manager, bring on an assistant manager and a receptionist.

Jay Goltz:
I was 22 years old when I started. I hired people who were younger. I hired kids. They were out of high school, and we’re doing framing. And it evolved over the years. How long was it before I hired a grown-up who was taking responsibility? Probably six years into it at that point. But I started at zero. Different businesses need different skill-sets.

I will tell you the worst advice someone gave me. I was having a real bad day at the front counter. And this older guy said to me, “Jay, the bigger you get, the harder it gets.” Absolutely not true. My life is—no comparison—easier now than it was 20 years ago. So I want to tell everybody who’s struggling: Keep working at it. You’ll figure it out, and it gets easier. That should be the message. It gets easier, not harder, because you can figure this out. It’s complicated. There’s a lot of working parts. Don’t think you’re going to figure this out in five years.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah?

Sarah Segal:
My first hire was to find somebody who could do the things that I shouldn’t be doing anymore, the things that I knew that I could train somebody else to do with competence. So for PR, that’s building media lists, pitching out to reporters, getting feedback, doing follow-up. It’s like, what I do for a living, the general PR, it’s not brain surgery. It just takes a person who’s organized, who can understand the nuances of how a newsroom works and what reporters are looking for, and be following trends, and really be able to communicate well with the clients. And so my first person—and actually, my first several people—are always people that can do something that takes something off my plate.

Jay Goltz:
You know, you use that phrase, “it’s not brain surgery,” but it’s not scooping ice cream, either. It’s somewhere in between. So most jobs take some kind of skill-set.

Sarah Segal:
But I think that’s important, to hire people to do things that, yeah, you know how to do them, and you could probably do them really well. But should you be doing them? And I think that’s something that you’ve talked a lot about as well.

Jay Goltz:
They always say, “Oh, you’ve got to delegate.” No, before you can delegate, you have to have a competent employee to delegate to, because delegating to an incompetent employee is not a good thing. And that’s the part they leave out.

Dana White:
It’s double work.

Steve Krull:
Steve Krull, CEO of Befoundonline, a digital marketing agency here in Chicago. There’s always this idea as people are starting out, and I’m sure a lot of your listeners, Loren, are new to business. We’ve got some folks in the room here who’ve only been at this a year or two. Looking back—and you’ve each had careers of varying lengths—what do you tell your former self? Jay, what do you tell your 22-year-old self when you started this? What advice would you give them now after everything you’ve been through, looking back?

Jay Goltz:
There’s no question there are two things that I just messed up for many, many, many years. Don’t be naive with hiring. If you’re looking for really good people, only one out of 10 is going to be a real good hire. So don’t just interview people, “Oh, they’re nice,” and hire them, because they’re probably not going to work out. So I went through a horrible learning curve with that.

And the second one is—and this isn’t just me, this is general to most entrepreneurs—I was giving tremendous service and tremendous product, and I wasn’t charging enough. I said this out loud: “Listen, price, quality, service. Most people want to give two out of three. I’m gonna give all three.” Stupid! You can’t give all three. It is impossible to give all three, because if you’re giving the best service and the best product, you’re gonna have to have better people and you have to buy the better stuff. It’s gonna cost more. So you’ve got to pick the two out of three. And I think if you’re a small business owner, it’s easier to give quality and service than it is to try to give price. Because unless you’re Walmart, I don’t know how you’re going to buy cheaper or something to pass along the savings. So that haunted me for many, many, many, many years. You need to charge what you need to charge.

Dana White:
I would have gone back and told her, “You’re smarter than you realize. Stop giving everybody the microphone as if you don’t already know. And raise your prices. [Laughter] Raise your prices.”

Sarah Segal:
So I agree: Raise your prices. Know your value. Because even though what I do is not brain surgery, people can’t do what I do. And I know that they can’t do what I do, because they don’t have the 10,000 hours of having been a reporter, more than 10,000 hours of being a publicist. They don’t have my background and ability to dive into different industries like I do. I can talk metaverse one moment, and talk donuts the next moment. And not everybody has the ability to do that.

I’d tell my younger self: Although we’ve only been around for five years, trust your gut. Because I’ve made some hiring mistakes where I was like, “Well, everybody likes the person. They seem very competent”—and I didn’t trust my gut. Or a potential client where I got the feeling that they just didn’t understand the value of PR. And I was like, “But you know what? They’re such a great company, and they have such a great product.” But we spent so much time explaining the value of what we did, it took into the hours that we should have been working on them as a client. And then the last thing would be: Keep with the idea that just because it was done a certain way in the industry forever doesn’t mean you have to do it that same way.

For example, when I was working at other agencies, there was a really crazy formality in terms of how you address your clients. And every email that you sent had to be very structured and professional. And I was like, “That’s such a waste of time. I don’t want my team spending 15 minutes curating out a fancy email when you’re just trying to get some point across.” So we integrated Slack. Now we have a Slack channel with all of our clients. We are constantly communicating, and sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s short. Sometimes it’s straight to the point. But it makes us so much more efficient in what we do. And you don’t have to do it the way that everybody else has done to be successful.

Jay Goltz:
I’ll tell you what I didn’t do wrong. I have always, from day one, had unwavering support to make sure the customer is taken care of every single time. And that’s why I’ve survived all of the bad stuff that I did: the wrong hiring, the cash-flow problems, pricing problems, whatever. I’ve survived that all because I have always taken care of the customer. And at the end of the day, if you look at my growth chart compared to somebody else, it’s just about being a little bit better. Just a little bit better. If everyone else is retaining 90 percent of the customers, and you retain 95, it’s—

Loren Feldman:
Over 40 years.

Jay Goltz:
Over 40 years, it’s the difference between being a multimillion-dollar business or a $200,000 business. It’s just being a little bit better. It’s not about being a lot better.

Kemi Tignor:
This is Kemi again of Upbounders. So social media, podcast advertising, is everything niche? Or are there still ways to reach the mass market, such that it still exists?

Loren Feldman:
Can we all agree that podcast advertising is the most promising of those options? [Laughter]

Sarah Segal:
I think if you want to reach younger audiences, podcast advertising is absolutely where you should spend your money. You talk to anybody who’s under 40 what radio station they listen to, and they’re going to look at you cross-eyed. I mean, I listen to news radio like it’s going out of style. And my children are forced to listen to it, because that’s what I listen to. But they don’t listen to radio at all. And television—

Jay Goltz:
Nobody under 40 listens to radio?

Sarah Segal:
It’s pretty light.

Jay Goltz:
A lot. So let’s get off nobody, to less people.

Sarah Segal:
They listen for the weather, and they listen for their traffic, and that’s about it. But podcasts? Podcasts are what they listen to. They don’t watch television anymore. It’s all about streaming. It’s being able to have the program that they want on demand.

So, yeah, I think podcasts are a fantastic place to invest your money, but depending on your demographic, who you’re going for. Because if my client says, “We really want to reach out to people who are 25 and under,” we’re gonna be like, “All right, TikTok. TikTok’s what you gotta do.” You’ve gotta talk to influencers. We’ve got to get some content going out there, and you have to look at the medium and figure out who’s watching or listening or reading that medium, and figure out whether it matches your target audience. And that’s where you invest your money.

Chris Campbell:
This is Chris Campbell with Ritzr. You know, we’ve talked a lot these last few days here in Chicago about business, but I’m kind of curious—mostly because I find most entrepreneurs match the office and the home life in terms of the same level of intensity—whatever the hobbies or passions might be.

Jay Goltz:
I’m relaxed all day long, so I don’t have to go home and relax. [Laughter] I mean it. I’m in business groups. I said to them at the last meeting, I looked around the room and I go, “Does everyone realize that every single month we have meetings, every single one of you talks about how stressed out you are, and I’m not? Have you seen the difference?” And I’m trying to make a point to them that there’s something wrong there. I just don’t think you have to be stressed out all day long in business. I think if you hire the right people, it will get easier.

So I’m relaxed at work. What do I do? I don’t play cards. I love my family, married 43 years. I love being with my grandchildren. But somebody said to me, “Hey, you need a hobby.” And I laughed. I go, “Really? My life is my hobby. My business is my hobby. I don’t need a hobby.” So I don’t have a great answer for that. And I don’t play pickleball, though everyone else I know seems to be playing pickleball.

Dana White:
I’m a reader. I’m a cross-stitcher. I love a good movie.

Jay Goltz:
Oh, I love movies, too. I left that out.

Dana White:
Yeah, I love a good movie. I live in a great community. So I spend time in that community, walking. But I’m constantly—that’s my problem—my business lives with me. It is my third parent, and my first child.

Jay Goltz:
Is that a problem? That’s the question. Is that a problem?

Dana White:
It can be a problem if you’re worrying about things you can’t control, but I’m learning over time: “Okay, this is not productive.” I haven’t had a vacation in years. Haven’t had a vacation. Because it’s like, now’s not a good time. Now’s not a good time. Now it’s not a good time. But in COVID, I was like, “Oh my god, this is the worst thing that could possibly happen,” but it actually was a blessing.

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