can we afford them?

We are terrified. All right, buckle up because we have got six board fulfillments to do. One is for mortgage brokers down in Arizona and the other one is for a mortgage broker here in Houston. So it's just gonna be a mortgage broker kind of day. Let's get at it. I have yet another board request that just came through from a realtor. So now we have seven boards to do today. Let's get at it. We interrupt this time lapse to let you know that yet another request just came through. So now I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight boards to fulfill today. Eight. They just keep coming. This is so exciting. I'm helping. We're starting to get overwhelmed with work. We just have so much to do and there's not enough time to get it all done if we want to avoid burnout. I did a thing. I moved the charging shelf with all the camera gear into that corner. I think it looks a lot better. I also have a second reason for why I did it. It's a little plushy cardboard box from Uline or from Chuline. It's for you. But we didn't just get a coat rack. We got two coat racks. Not because we need two coat racks. We're actually joining forces with Macrimona and moving to Minnesota. That's why we need all the coat racks to hang our heavy winter coats on. It's not true. We also got a new chair and the reason we got a chair and two coat racks is because we've hired a doorman who's going to take our coats for us when we come in. So we are happy to announce that we have hired two new salespeople, one of which will also be on this side of the house helping us with content production. And we are so excited. All right, well, we got the two desks assembled. They look great. Take a look. Look how much bigger this makes the room look when we have like more stuff in it. Real office now. I'm excited to have friends. I mean, working with you is great and all, but I want friends. Me too. I do too. Bruce is less than a coffee break companion. But now that we have multiple employees, we are terrified. We are so afraid that we are not going to have the money to pay them. And that's our fear of the week this week. We're just afraid that for some reason at the end of the month when it's time to run payroll, we're just not going to have the money to pay these people for all the hard work that they've done. They have bills. They like to eat food from time to time. And they're betting on us to provide them with money towards those things. And that makes us very uncomfortable. All right, so we're training our first couple of sales employees. This is their very first sales call with us. So we'll play as the realtor. And they're going to try to sell us on boards. Okay? All right. Do you have to do that right now? Hello? Hey, Jenny. This is Kobe with Samara Table Company. How are you? Hey, Kobe. I'm good. How are you? Hi, is this Jenny? Yeah, this is Jenny. Who's this? Hi, my name is Kaitlyn Kidd and I work with Samara Table Company. How are you today? I'm just checking in. Our office sent y'all one of our charcuterie boards the other day. And I was just checking in to see if that happened to go to y'all. Yes, I did get that the other day. It was beautiful. I'm so sorry. I feel like a terrible person. I should have called days ago. But yes, I did get it. And it's beautiful. Thank you so much. We sent you a board a week ago and I was just wondering if y'all got it. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You're the cutting board people. My assistant set that on my desk and I was out of the office on Friday. But I just got in. Thank you so much for sending that to me. Your packaging is beautiful. I hope you had a good time. I want to talk to you about the board and run you through a couple stuff. I'm actually on my way into a meeting right now. But I mean, maybe we could talk later. I would love to make something happen right now, here, soon, after your meeting. Whatever's best for you. We do cutting boards, charcuterie boards. And you are on our list of people that we're really interested in partnering with. But we just wanted you to first see the product and just look at it and know who we are before we even pitch an idea to you. I've got like two minutes before I got to go to this meeting. Okay, perfect. Well, let's make now work. And then if you got to cut me off, we can talk later if that's good with you. All right. Go for it, Kobe. I got two minutes. I'm not by a computer. I'm literally picking my kid up from preschool right now. I'm like in the pickup line. I got like two minutes. If you text me, are you gonna text me like a link? All right. They both did very well for their first phone call. Both of us did not do that well when we first started out. No, not even close. Really excited. There's a lot of room for improvement, but they did so many right things. I was over here like, oh, you're at school. I'm sorry. Call me back whenever, at your leisure. Anyway, they did great. We're gonna go get the analysis done with them. We won't do that on camera just because it's their first time. We don't want to make it too embarrassing. Anyway. So far, so good. They did a good job. The first guy, Kobe, he was a little pushy. But again, we can work with that. With Kaitlyn, she needs to work on leaning forward. In fewer words, maybe. This realtor was supposed to be ready to buy. And so she needs to have that text message lined up. She needs to already know. And that's just a tactic. I have a post-it with all the links so I can just copy paste. But it was her first one. That's amazing. She did a great job. So all right. Definitely. I'm excited. Okay, let's go. Let's go. All right. So the two people we've been talking at the whole time are these guys. Hi. This is Kobe and Kaitlyn. Hi. They're friends of ours from church. And they are going to be helping us sell some cutting and charcuterie boards. There we are. And they're fantastic, y'all. Wait for these phone calls. They're great. So yeah, now we're going to do their second round of phone calls. Now that they've had a chance to try it, get the wiggles out. We've gone over what they did well, what they need to improve on. And now Jenny's going to go be the evil realtor again. And we'll see how they do. Here we go. Maybe I just need to say that one felt a little better. Yeah. His first one, he was burning a hole in the carpet, making laps. I made Bruce tired following me on my first one. So how do you feel about that one? I felt like it went a lot better. Yeah. Felt smoother. I knew the product. I felt more comfortable. Had a transition. From our last one, we talked what not to do. So I left out the ums, the whats, the... I have never seen anybody in all of my years of teaching people to brief in front of generals and doing sales and everything. I've never seen anybody like instantly stop saying the word um as fast as you. I was like, whoa. Usually that's such an ingrained habit that it takes years for people to get rid of. I still do it a lot sometimes, but... I'll still do it. You'll catch me. Anyway, that was really cool. A couple of things you both did. You both really pushed for the sale. You got them to the website. That's the website. If the website should do its job. It's the website's job to convert. It's your job to guide them through the process and fix any snags. Obviously, we didn't have you go through the checkout process, but we fully intend if you're on the phone with somebody, walk them through even typing in the number on their credit card. Jenny's even had people sometimes that have like spoken the credit card number on the phone to them. And Jenny typed it in. Whatever it takes. And if they're like, oh, I'm so busy. I can't like, look, I'll take your order over the phone. I have it all typed up. Just read me your credit card number. Give me an email address. Like I got it. Oh, really? That's it? Yeah, I can pull out my card. Four, two, you know, and then they start reading it off and I've done orders like that. So anyway, great job. We're going to keep hashing these out, but they did great for their first sale. They're ready to go like right now. So sweet. I can't wait for their first sale. Let's do so much fun. We have absolutely no trouble supervising or training employees. Thank God. That's something that we were given a lot of experience with in the military. For all its flaws, the Air Force really gave us some good experiences when it came to training and supervising people. This is also a great opportunity to audit all of our procedures to make sure that the business really can scale and grow with people who are not woodworkers. And that's not scary to us at all. It's the stupid money thing. The thing we brag about all the time in our clickbait. For some reason, we're just afraid that we're not going to have the money to pay these people. All right. So we just got a delivery. We got a new computer because Caitlin can't use Caleb's computer. This is Caitlin. Hi. You might recognize her. She's also going to be doing sales for us and she's doing media stuff for us. So right now she's putting together a brand package for us, which I didn't even know was a thing. It's all sorts of colors and fonts and other things. Really cool stuff. She's going to help us clean up the website. Just all the things that we have not had time to do. She's going to help us out with. She's amazingly talented. Super great. And she's got a great postcard collection. Say hi to everybody. Hi, I'm excited to be here. We're excited you're here. She brought coffee on her second day. Yes. Not her first day, her second day. So she really knows, she knows how to make this work. We have money. We trust the math. Our CPA even tells us that we're being overly cautious. And that should be a red flag. So we're certainly not overextending ourselves. And even if we were, our employees are doing tasks that are going to make the businesses money. Nobody said fears have to be rational. Okay. It's just that we're scared. Even though we have really no reason to be. So it's week two. Jenny's having her weekly sales meeting. I'm trying not to be distracted. I'll show you the highlights. Very first person I called. Her name is. And I'm going to sell her. She's going to buy. I feel it. I love the energy. I call her as my first one. And she was like, not interested, not interested. And then I said, well, I know how the market is right now. I'm actually full-time. I work with home building and build homes. So I know exactly what we're going through. And also she's like, oh, really? I had her on the ropes. Then I had her on the ropes. Then I hit her with, I wrote it down. Cause I was like, all right, y'all would be so fast. Would it be the worst thing in the world for you to buy 10 cutting boards today? And so. Dude, I love the confidence. That's the best part. We have never had that success with cold calls. Dan and I both have tried cold calls and we can't get anybody to even answer the phone. So the fact that you were able to like get them to pick up is progress. If you want to see all of their training videos and learn how we're training these salespeople to sell our products and stuff, that's those videos are going to be posted in the stud stack. So it's a link below the like button in the description studstack.net. You can check it out. And, uh, that's where we'll be posting the long form of those videos. Otherwise you'll just see the highlights here on YouTube. Then this week I had an epiphany. Once you get above the poverty line, money is one of the smallest things that goes into your workplace satisfaction or how you feel about your job. When I was stationed in North Dakota with the air force, I was doing a job that nobody wanted to do. We were happy to do it. I mean, we were happy to serve and do what our country needed us to do, but nobody was super duper jazzed to be there. It wasn't a glamorous job. The hours were pretty terrible. Not to mention that this career field was full of below average military leaders. All of that combined and led to a pretty toxic culture. People didn't feel like their work mattered. Our bosses were so hyper focused on things that had absolutely nothing to do with our mission. It just didn't feel like we were making any progress day to day. We felt like we were playing chess and our bosses were playing a game of chutes and ladders. And productivity took a nosedive. Nobody wanted to volunteer to come in when somebody got sick. Nobody wanted to put in extra hours at work because we didn't feel like our efforts were being appreciated. Myself included. We've seen the damage a toxic culture can do to an organization. And all of that had nothing to do with how much money we were making. Obviously, we need to pay our employees well. We have absolutely no problem writing a big fat check to our employees. But more important than the money, we need to make sure that they feel like their work matters. At the end of the week, they need to feel like their efforts are really genuinely appreciated because they are. Then they'll be more productive and then the business will make more money and then making payroll won't even be a concern. So that's what we need to do with our fear. We need to channel that energy and make sure that our employees feel empowered, trusted and appreciated. And that's very easy to do when your team is full of great people like we have. All right. So Caleb just left and tomorrow is his birthday. So we got a little bit of a heads up from his family. So which is nice. And of course, he can't just get away with not telling us when his birthday is and us not doing anything. It's one thing if we don't know your birthday is coming. If we find out you're intentionally hiding your birthday from us because you don't want us to make a big deal out of it. Guess what we're going to do? Make twice as big a deal out of it. The next morning. Hello. Happy birthday. Why don't you open your gifts? Oh, look, it's a desk decoration. I always wanted this. The chicken biscuit's new. No, that's my mouse. He's waited all day to beat his pinata open. So take the mallet and have at it. OK, so do I just go ham or... Why are you asking questions? OK. You go taco. Watch out, Bruce. You need more leverage. Oh my gosh. There we go. Happy birthday, man. Here's your taco. His birthday's on a Tuesday this year, so we had to get him the taco Tuesday pinata. We have to trust the math and that we have plenty of cash flow, even if our emotions are getting away from us. We also know that money doesn't matter if you hate your job. We're focusing the energy that we're getting from our fear to making sure our co-workers feel appreciated and supported. All right, we got the goods. First up, we got Dream Sickles, off-brand because they didn't have the real ones. We got fudge bars, my personal favorite. Bluebell, of course. Ice cream sandwiches, that's always a crowd favorite. And I texted them and asked them their favorite frozen treats growing up. Caleb likes pickle pops, which... I didn't get pickle juice, but I got ice cube trays, so I'm halfway there. And then Caitlin likes cookies and cream and creamy things, so we got these Greek yogurt cookies and cream bars. I hope she likes them. And a can opener in case somebody wants to eat soup or something. I don't know, it's an impulse buy. What was your favorite ice cream treat growing up? Let us know down in the comments. Yes. We know that ice cream and piñatas are not going to make up for a bad company culture. It's a much more complex game than that. But it's what we can do right now to train ourselves to take time and resources and dedicate them and invest them into our employees. And if we want to achieve our goal of being voted one of the best places to work, then we have to do that better than every other company out there. So it starts right now. If you want to watch us build a kitchen table, watch this video. If you want to watch us fly through a hurricane, watch this video.