👋 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 benefitsThe Case for Not Pivoting
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 questionIn this week’s conversation with Paul Downs, William Vanderbloemen, and Laura Zander, Paul explains why he’s not planning to pivot his business—even as his sales collapse. Normally, Paul says, his most reliable customers are other business owners. When they call to ask about a custom boardroom table, he and his sales staff know they are likely to buy. Right now, though, in the midst of a pandemic that has changed the way people look at commercial space, they aren’t even calling. A lot of people have suggested that Paul pivot to manufacturing desks for home offices. So far, he’s resisted the idea. “To walk away from what we know,” he says, “and do something that we don't know and that others know very well, I just feel like it would be a huge mistake.” Paul, William, and Laura also talk about how the crisis has affected their own compensation.
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.