The Money Shop

Jill & Katie (00:00.402)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (00:02.222)
Okay. I'm here with Jill and Katie from Wolfe and Wood, Wood and Wolfe. Okay. We're going to edit that part. God. Okay. We do edit by the way. So I'm here with Jill and Katie from Wood and Wolfe. And we were just talking about the, the, the trap of Tik Tok or just any content creation in general. Like when you start a business, especially online, it's like you put yourself out there and then all of sudden it becomes this thing that you have to do to get more sales. And then when you try to outsource it, and this is where the conversation was going, like when you try to outsource it,

Jill & Katie (00:06.471)
Whatever.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (00:32.756)
it usually in my experience has gone to crap. then you have to like end up. So you, you, you two are big on Tik Tok Like you, do a lot of Tik Tok. so have you tried to outsource it before?

Jill & Katie (00:45.915)
Yeah. So we have what? Twice now? Yes. Twice, two or three times now. Yeah. Tried to outsource it. the very, we started, when we started in 2022, the first thing that gave us like our first big jump into like finding success was we made a TikTok and I know you're not familiar, but it's like, if anybody that is listening is familiar, they'll know what we're talking about. It's like an Adam Sandler sound. And it took off. when I say took off, it only got like 20,000 views or something like that.

And that booked us out for Bachelorette parties for almost two or three months at that point, something like that. Excuse me. And so it's great. And then we're like, okay, we have to make a lot more TikToks. we're like constantly, constantly making TikToks. I burnt myself out on it. We're also at the point where we're having like five or six parties a weekend, which is a lot to fit into two days.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:34.958)
How do you do that? How do you do five or six in a weekend?

Jill & Katie (01:38.355)
Um, I don't even live here at this time, so Jill can take that over. So we actually contract out. We've got, we've got a few girls that at the time we had, I don't know, eight, nine employees. Um, and it was a lot of essentially playing Tetris with the schedule, right? So like one girl would go to this party. I would be at another party and another girl would be at this party, but this party ends at this time, but this one starts at the other time. So it was a lot of just making sure having very, very clear communication.

and making sure that everybody was finished at the right time so the next party could start. And it was a lot, but. And we're like changing welders at this time because we only had one welder at the time that we'd started. Hi.

Ariel (02:19.471)
Hey! damn now, I know I'm gonna have problems with this.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (02:21.122)
Sorry, I just started without you, because I was just like, I didn't know. Uh-oh. We're going to be editing this thing like crazy. I mixed up the name of their company from the very beginning, so it's like, it's already, we already have to do some work.

Jill & Katie (02:23.27)
Yeah.

Ariel (02:27.921)
There we go. Okay, okay, okay.

Ariel (02:38.736)
Well, we'll figure it out.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (02:38.882)
Well, I have it down right in front of me, which is the worst part.

Jill & Katie (02:41.235)
We get lot of wooden, like, wood, like W-O-D-E-N, and then wolf without an E, we're like, one ever puts the E in,

Bobbo The Great And Wise (02:52.428)
Ariel, are you okay? You gonna make it?

Ariel (02:53.959)
I'm gonna make it, yes, yes. I was like sitting there in the waiting room, just like, does he not want me on here? But that's okay.

Jill & Katie (02:59.165)
you

Bobbo The Great And Wise (03:00.004)
sorry. I don't know why you're being so self-conscious about that. Like I was telling them before, like Ariel was like, if you need to kick me out in the middle of the episode, you can kick me out. And I was like, why, why, why would I do that? When have I ever done that? Yeah. So we were talking about TikTok and how TikTok is great and sucks at the same time. And they were talking about, there's an Adam Sandler sound, I guess that you can, that went.

Jill & Katie (03:02.226)
Oops.

Jill & Katie (03:12.115)
The more the merrier.

Ariel (03:12.839)
I don't know. No, yeah.

Ariel (03:21.595)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (03:25.415)
Yeah, There's like an Adam Sandler sound that's like, can't even really remember it, but it's like, essentially, what are you doing here? And it's like Adam Sandler and like his basketball shorts and oversized t-shirt at like an event where you should have black tie on. And our whole thing was like, we came into the, we had started just with permanent jewelry. So we came into the permanent jewelry space at a time where the only people that were doing it were like,

white Anglo Saxon Christian Protestant like women like it was just this very like upper middle class. I don't know how familiar you are with Nashville but like outside of Nashville is a suburb called Franklin and it's like where all the celebrities live. It's very expensive like very rich and that's like they were catering to them and only them. Yeah, no one was catering to like the bachelorette parties or the 20 something year olds that can't afford a $300 bracelet. So when we made that sound we were like

We're, know, essentially we're the new permanent jewelry company in town and we're here for like 20 somethings that can't afford that $300 bracelet or $600 necklace or whatever it might be. And it just really took off. So we got so many bookings in the matter of like 24 hours. Jill and I were having mental breakdowns every few hours. And still to this day we have a few every now and again.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (04:34.658)
That sounds right. I will say when I first when I was reading your story and I saw the permanent jewelry thing, I remember it was like maybe a year ago, my wife came home and she had like a permanent bracelet on and I was just I'm maybe I'm just I'm probably just a dumb guy. But I was like, so you can't ever take that off. Like it just stays there forever. Like and she was like, yeah, it's like this is what the girls are. This is what the ladies are doing now. And I was like, how is that?

Jill & Katie (04:48.275)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (04:56.711)
Hopefully.

Ariel (04:57.883)
Yeah, hopefully.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (05:02.158)
What's I didn't understand it. So like, how did that become? Do know how that became popular? Like the just is it just a trend or like, is there is there kind of a deeper story behind it?

Jill & Katie (05:10.949)
Yeah, do you want to take it? I mean, so it all started. I'm pretty sure we can bring it all back to there was a Catbird in New York. They were like the first to do it ever. And then by the time we started, there were no instructions. There was no how do you do this? How do you use it? Like we had no like no YouTube videos even. Yeah, now there's like hundreds of I mean, the market is so saturated now. When we when we started it, I was actually in welding school at the time.

And Katie had called me and she was like, have you ever heard of permanent jewelry? And I was like, I mean, kind of like, sure. And she was like, if I send you this welder, can you, can you figure out how to work it and then teach me how to use it? And I was like, sure. I, this big, lunky, scary machine. You brought it to my, I literally brought it into my, to my welding teacher. And I was like, Greg, have you ever seen one of these before? And he was like, no, what is this? And I'm like, it's a micro welder. Can you figure out how to like,

Ariel (05:55.271)
Ha!

Jill & Katie (06:07.153)
teach me how to figure it out. And we reverse engineered it and that's kind of where we started. For anyone that's listening, it's a micro arc welder, correct? Yes. So it is, it can be very powerful and we have zapped the hell out of ourselves at points, more Jill, but we have pictures from like our first days of Jill in, what's your school's name? What? My? What was the welding school's name? T-Cat. She's like in T-Cat and there's like eight men around her trying to figure out how to jewelry for us.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (06:20.365)
You

Jill & Katie (06:35.123)
And I used all of the boys in my class as they were all my guinea pigs. And they were like, yeah, they saw me do it. like, sure, put one on me, put one on me. So it all, very humble beginnings. We didn't know what the hell we were doing. But now, like I said, it's so saturated and there's people selling courses and you can pay $3,000 and we'll help you start your permanent jewelry business. And it's like, you just have to be a little bit more resourceful. Everything's out there. You just have to seek it out yourself and try to figure it out.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (07:01.614)
Right. Right.

Jill & Katie (07:02.919)
And that's what we did. And boy, did we. so I mean, essentially, it's just all it is. We like to call it lazy girl jewelry, right? So I wear rings. I don't wear necklaces. I don't wear bracelets because I don't like to take them on and off. I just keep my rings on at all times. So with this, you just keep it on all the time. You don't have to worry about it. You wake up, you're already fully accessorized. So I think that's a big, a big thing for everybody. And also you can wear it in water. You can get them wet. You can work out in it. Like it's just meant to be on you.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (07:05.759)
Ariel (07:17.393)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (07:32.755)
And for all the girlies listening, can spray tan, can fake tan in it. That's what I do. So that's always what people ask us. They're like, was my fake tan gonna ruin it? And we're like, no, girl. Yeah, I be faked tan on Thursday.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (07:42.243)
You

Ariel (07:42.823)
I have one on my ankle and I've had it for over a year now and it's done great. The only time it actually bothers me is I got a pair of boots that are super tight and if I'm wearing it with those, because it's a little charm too, but I've actually put a little piece of the, what is it, the mink stuff that you, if you're going hiking, there's something that you can put on a spot if you've got a bad spot on your skin or something.

Jill & Katie (07:48.531)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (07:56.927)
yeah.

Ariel (08:10.533)
And it just like sits under there and it doesn't bother you at all, which is great.

Jill & Katie (08:12.967)
Yeah, we have a lot of like girls that are in high school will get them that play volleyball and like they're on your wrist obviously. You just put sports tape over it and they're fine with it apparently.

Ariel (08:18.787)
Yeah.

Ariel (08:22.629)
That's smart.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (08:24.654)
So how long do people keep these on? Because I know that my wife kept hers on for like a year and then it just kind of disappeared after that. So like, do you see that where it's like you get people that that have it for a while, get rid of it and then get a new one?

Jill & Katie (08:37.363)
Yeah, we have a lot. Well, okay, I, the very first bracelet that I ever put on, I put it on my ex boyfriend, so I was just like playing with it, like try to figure it out. And he did not, he took it off, we broke up, but he took it off a month ago. It was on for three years. It was funny. It was like, he was like, whatever, whatever. was very funny. So for at least three years, as long as that's the very first bracelet that we ever put on and that stayed that long. Do you know anyone longer?

Bobbo The Great And Wise (08:51.598)
I don't know why I laughed, I'm sorry.

Ariel (08:52.775)
Jill & Katie (09:05.395)
that has had it longer. I've had these on for almost three years that we've been in business. But I mean, hopefully, we want it stay on forever, right? But it depends on like your activity level. And sometimes they can get ripped off. And you know, but that's where we come in and we can put it back on. Just because it falls off, we can fix it and it'll come back on. usually around a year, year and a half, two years. Yeah, they also make you take it off for surgery. So we have people that will like take it off and then bring it back to

Bobbo The Great And Wise (09:26.54)
Okay.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (09:32.92)
So like what you said that you originally started doing this because some people couldn't afford like the super high price points. So where do you sit price wise?

Jill & Katie (09:42.835)
That's a joke question. We're coming into this space. Other businesses would charge, let's say anywhere between $150 to $300, depending on what you were getting. And we were like, that's just ridiculous. What you're using is, if you do pure gold, it can get a little bit more expensive. But the markup on everything here, since we've been able to see it from the back end, it's just robbery. And we're in Nashville, so it's like,

Bobbo The Great And Wise (09:44.476)
okay.

Jill & Katie (10:09.683)
People come here to spend money so people know that they're going to come here to spend money. like we live here and we have a great community of people here that we want to be able to offer that to. So ours range anywhere between $65 to $75, sometimes $85 for like a longer piece. under a hundred dollars is was our one thing that we always wanted to make sure that we could keep it at. Because baseline everywhere else. I mean, there's still people selling that selling them for like $150, $250. And it's just.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (10:32.302)
That's cool.

Jill & Katie (10:39.475)
And the price of gold has gone up so astronomically in the last three years and we've only raised the prices, I think, five or $10 or something like that. There really is just such a markup and it's so insane. We understand obviously the back end. There's so much more than goes into what something costs besides just the gold or the chain that you're buying. We understand that and we simultaneously can look at these companies and be like, you're assholes.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (10:43.715)
Yeah.

Ariel (11:06.127)
Hahaha!

Jill & Katie (11:07.539)
the markup is like 400%. That's, that's, that's, and we, just, I also don't get why people are like, want pure gold or a solid gold, because ours are gold filled, for example. And they're not going to tarnish either. They don't. they, it's just, it's insane. I'll leave it at that. We could really go into it because we get so mad. Like when we see what people tried, like, that's not fair. Whatever, whatever corporations. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (11:20.675)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (11:36.398)
So.

Jill & Katie (11:37.555)
But then we also think about ourselves too, right? like, I know that I, you know, I'm a 33 year old when we started this, was mid thirties. And I just think about how much money I want to spend on something that's like a good piece of jewelry. And even if it's the best piece of jewelry, like, I don't know, I don't have that, I don't have that disposable income like that. And I know there's a lot of people that feel that way and are in that.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (11:58.178)
Right. Yeah, I mean, I think.

Ariel (12:00.901)
I love that you guys are keeping yourselves in mind. like, if I was the customer here, like I want to be the customer, what would I want price-wise and everything?

Jill & Katie (12:10.769)
Yeah. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (12:12.716)
Ariel, you bought any stuff from them?

Ariel (12:15.033)
I have, actually bought a, one of, yes, a surprise charm necklace. And they, I love, this is like the neatest thing in the world. And I'm sure somebody else is doing it, but in my head and heart, you guys like found this idea, like it's original to you. I'd love to hear that that's the case. But basically they like go through your Instagram and build a charm bracelet or necklace based on what they see on your Instagram.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (12:16.494)
Let's go.

Jill & Katie (12:18.545)
You get a surprise necklace, right?

Ariel (12:44.421)
And it's like a surprise. Isn't that neat? And you can like share info also, or like, I guess you could get it as a gift for someone and like, I don't know, it's the neatest idea. So did you guys come up with it? my gosh, that's awesome.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (12:44.782)
That's cool. Whoa, okay, I've never even heard of that.

Jill & Katie (12:55.827)
Yeah, we did. I don't think anyone else is doing As far as we know, we're the only ones that are doing it. Yeah. So that's cool.

Ariel (13:04.259)
I also love the, then you go through, like you've got videos where I think it's you Katie, who goes through mostly and is like, I put the like spicy pepper one on here because of this, or I put, you know, whatever it is. It's amazing.

Jill & Katie (13:19.505)
Yeah. So we were kind of, we had kind of touched on this earlier, but permanent jewelry got really saturated, I would say in 23, 24, maybe. Yeah. yeah. To the point where we were like, okay, and we can talk about this, but we're not going to be nice about it. The way that this market has gotten saturated with people that are just embarrassing for the brand. can't even like begin to describe it. The people that are doing permanent jewelry and like the way that they're

First of all, pricing it, but also talking about it or just the aesthetic of it. think things come out of the market, right? And they have a certain aesthetic. it's like, you can keep that aesthetic, even if your price point is different, you can keep that aesthetic, that of feel, that kind of value to what it is. And the whole idea behind permanent jewelry was like, you're going to get this with somebody, right? Because it's like this semi-permanent piece. Get it with your friend. Get it with your mom. Get it with your significant other, whatever. It's also really easy jewelry. And then people just start.

making it into the ugliest thing I've ever seen. They also like completely lost the whole like value of like the concept behind it. So in 23, 24, we started realizing like, okay, everybody and literally their mother and aunt and grandmother are running jewelry businesses. Like, what are we going to do next? And we tried, what did we try before charm stuff? Anything? I don't think we just shut up onto charms. So we started doing like charms, offering terms and events and then

We were like, we really like our biggest goal was always to like get online. Like we wanted to have online sales. obviously can't do permanent jewelry online. So you have to be welding in person. So we started doing, we started ordering charms, but we would order them in bulk and they'd always vary depending on like what we could get from our manufacturers. And so we're like, well, how do we put something online that we don't know if we can get it from them again? Like, how do we sell that? And we're like, what if, what if they didn't pick their own charms? Like what if we picked them? And that's kind of where that idea developed is out of necessity because we couldn't.

Ariel (15:09.735)
Jill & Katie (15:14.653)
Constantly upload inventory like that when we're getting when we've no idea when we'll get that stock again Or if it's even worth us sitting there to like make the listing on our website, right? So we came up with this idea And I think originally it started with like someone would tell it like you'd tell us a crazy story and we'd make a charm necklace based off of it Right. Yes. Yeah, and that that didn't do super well. It was funny the couple that we got were really funny and then it and then Jill and I were talking and I think it was you that said something like people love

Bobbo The Great And Wise (15:34.126)
That's cool.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (15:38.03)
You

Jill & Katie (15:44.627)
to hear about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. And like anything that's like about them, especially from a stranger, they're going to share on their socials. And so that's where the idea came from. And so our first viral video with that was January 24. Yeah. Yeah.

Ariel (15:46.054)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (15:46.285)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (16:00.205)
How viral?

Ariel (16:00.315)
Did you foresee, well, and did you foresee that that would happen with those videos that you were making? Like, was that part of the plan?

Jill & Katie (16:06.781)
That was always the hope. Yeah, it was the hope, but we had no idea of what was about to happen. Yeah, it was absolutely insane. Yeah, I think it I don't even know over 100,000 views on the video. We had we got a little over 1000 orders. No, the first one was like, our first one was January. Was that the 1000 orders? No, that was March. so sorry. We didn't hit the 1000 yet. But first one went viral. We got a big push. First one was like,

Ariel (16:14.118)
Mm-hmm.

Ariel (16:23.707)
Wow.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (16:26.126)
Crazy.

Jill & Katie (16:36.147)
100 orders or something like that and that was in January of 24 and then March from one of those orders. Yeah in March I had posted a video and that's the one that went like extremely viral I want to say it was like five six hundred thousand views or something. We didn't this is so stupid learn from our mistakes Literally two of the dumbest business owners you'll ever meet. We did not put limits and like an order limit on our stuff online

So we woke up, like I wake up, she worked, We work opposite schedules, she's a bartender. I woke up at like 730 in the morning or something like that. And we had like 400 orders and I literally looked at my phone and I was like, my God. And I didn't turn them off and I didn't think about it. I was like, Jill wake up, wake up. And so we'd look at it and over a 24 hour span, we had, I wanna say a thousand and like 15 orders or something like that.

It was our phones were like every 35 seconds. But an order was coming in. We were like, my God, this is so exciting. Because like money, but then what do we do? Snowball that just kept getting bigger and rolling down the hill and we were just like, shit. Yeah. Like, yeah, look at the money though. Like, what are we gonna do? Scariest, I think scariest, most awesome. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (17:36.746)
Yeah, how do you do it? What did you do?

Ariel (17:44.177)
Just like watching it roll. Like we're not even going to stop it at this point. Right.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (17:50.35)
Right.

Jill & Katie (17:56.071)
things that have ever happened to us with the business. again, scary. And I know you, sorry, go ahead.

Ariel (18:00.049)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (18:00.311)
yeah.

Well, I was just gonna say, like, what did you do? How did you, did you try to fulfill them? Like, what did...

Jill & Katie (18:06.287)
Yeah, so I remember like I was sitting at lunch, I was like, Jill, should I turn the orders off? And like, I know you guys were like, do you guys want to talk about me? So we'll talk about money if you're fine with it. But by like noon that day, so I want to say we had like, maybe six or seven hours worth of orders, it was at like $45,000 already. And we had never that in our life. Like our highest day before that was like 15,000 or something. Yeah. October fest. Yeah.

So we were like blown away and I was like, Jill, should I turn orders off? And she's like, low key no. We might be stupid sometimes, but we're very resourceful and I knew that we were going to able to figure it out. And we did. Like I said before, had, at this time we were, we had about eight or nine employees and we sent out a text and we were like, we need you guys to Around the clock. Around the clock to help us. At the time I was living in

this 800 square foot house, entire, mind you, I don't know, my son is less than six months old. So like my mom's living at the house with me to help me with the baby. The whole living room is just this big long table. And we just had girls that would just come over and shifts and we just did it all day long. And it took us about a month to, think, to get them all out and working every single day, like eight, nine, 10 hours a day. Yeah. And working our other jobs. Yeah. We cried a lot, but we made it through.

Ariel (19:20.08)
Wow.

Jill & Katie (19:29.713)
Yeah. We, I, so I lived in Chattanooga at the time, which is two hours south of Nashville. And I called all my friends that had never done a single Wood + Wolfe event ever. And there was like six of us in Chattanooga at my house and like all of our girls at her house in Nashville. And we're just like teaching them how to do it. And we're like, yeah, I guess just go. like, luckily I'm an attorney, which we can get in the background if you want to. like I, we are an independent contractor.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (19:54.03)
would love to. Yes.

Jill & Katie (19:57.423)
agreements like in place with all of our Nashville girls. So like I had all my friends sign them. I was like, I know this is weird, but I'm too scared not to so we're gonna sign contracts now. And we figured out and then we I think also we had the conversation of like, okay, well, like if we can't ship all these orders out in time, we're gonna have people cancel and Jill was like, okay, well, it's better than just like preemptively canceling their orders, you know what I mean? Like let them have to cancel or like refund or return or whatever, instead of doing it for them. So we're like, okay.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (20:19.287)
Right.

Ariel (20:19.793)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (20:23.747)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (20:27.072)
So who's handling customer service? sorry, Ariel, sorry. We're going to figure out a good flow.

Jill & Katie (20:27.165)
Two months later. Yeah.

Ariel (20:28.635)
Did you have any? I was just going to ask if you have any. Did you have any people cancel or how many people?

Jill & Katie (20:37.787)
not many not many people really understanding because of the virality of the video there like we totally understand and it wasn't like around a holiday so there wasn't like you know we had some people that were like I was ordering this for like a birthday or like something like that I want to say 10 maybe yeah another thing communication we were constantly like updating people like on our instagrams just to be like just so you guys know like we are literally working around the clock I promise you it's coming out it's constantly reminding people and making sure to stay on top of like

Ariel (20:39.131)
That's awesome.

Ariel (20:43.494)
Mm-hmm.

Ariel (20:53.295)
Wow, that's awesome.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (21:03.758)
That's cool.

Ariel (21:04.241)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (21:07.685)
Any email handling customer service on top of all of that? So I, to answer your question, I, I do all the, at the time I was doing all the legal and the accounting and the customer service and socials and Jill was doing pop-ups and orders, but obviously she couldn't do those orders by herself. So then that's when I really stepped in and that's why I didn't have a team in Chattanooga, to do orders as well. And then. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (21:34.434)
What does the team look like now? Like you said, you have employees and all that. Like what is the whole picture?

Jill & Katie (21:40.357)
Yeah. How many do we have now? We actually downsized because we've been doing a lot of like on online stuff. So it's me, her. We had a few girls move away. One girl flew to the Scotland on Friday. I think there's probably what? Eight of us now. Yeah. Total with us included. Give or take eight. Yeah. And I just moved to Nashville. So it that relieves a lot of the like, it's a person we don't have to pay. I'll do it if Jill can't do it. We always, always will like.

we want to make sure that one of us can do it. And if it's outside of our availability, then that's when the girls will come in and help us. we don't have to pay somebody. Or if we want to go out together. Yeah. We'll do an event together and just hang out. It's fun.

Ariel (22:20.325)
What are the people that are on your team, what are they doing? Like just doing the welding, fulfilling orders with the charm bracelets and stuff or?

Jill & Katie (22:27.379)
So usually every beginning of every month, we kind of map out the month and see like, you know, what pop ups are available because we are mobile, we don't have a storefront. we're strictly, we just move around a lot. And so we'll send out the occasional, you know, text like, if it's a day that I can't take, or if Katie can't take it, then we'll have the girls like pick up a bachelorette party. Or if we have like a market event, then the girls will do that. And then if we ever need any help with online orders, we'll just text them and they'll just come to my house and

then we can pay them to help us. Yeah. Luckily, Jill lives in a big house now with a big Way bigger. I have so much more space now. Thankfully. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (23:03.33)
Hey, that's awesome. So I wanted to talk about some of the like, there were some things that you had mentioned that you had problems with, or like some kind of business issues. We talked about firing people and not having a storefront and some of that. So I want to get into some of that because I'm just kind of curious where you are in that kind of journey of entrepreneurship. let's talk about the hiring and firing people.

Ariel (23:06.993)
great.

Jill & Katie (23:21.01)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (23:28.878)
Cause that, feel like that is the freaking hardest thing to do. And Ariel can attest to that because she handles all the hiring and firing for us now. so what, what has been the struggle with all of that?

Jill & Katie (23:31.329)
Yeah.

Ariel (23:32.741)
Yes.

Jill & Katie (23:39.963)
Hiring is easy. Finding people that say they want to work, easy. Finding people that actually want to work, so much harder. Yeah. And also what we do is we work with our hands. We're working with little pliers. if you're not used to doing that, it's all muscle memory. So if you're not used to working with small things and being really calm and still, it takes practice, really. So it's just finding people that are able to put in the work to make sure that they're confident.

Ariel (23:46.715)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (24:08.403)
and building a lot of confidence here because whenever you are around the welder, if you haven't touched it before, like I can do this in my sleep, like because I've been doing it for so long, but someone else doesn't feel so confident in it. And just making sure that people feel supported and they feel confident before they leave. whenever you send them off to go to, cause it can be kind of scary if you really think about it, like you're welding it, you're going to some random Airbnb. Everybody usually who books a party with us is very happy that we're there, but it still can feel a little.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (24:15.853)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (24:35.118)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (24:36.899)
scary to like go into your first party. I remember my first party I was terrified and it was just a bunch of girls that were just hungover from the night before because they were hanging out at Broadway. So it's like what are we scared for? Yeah, but it's still that little bit of like, it's a little scary, but you want to make sure someone feels confident and supported and they can always, know, and so we've run into the problem of people just like not being outgoing enough, honestly, because you kind of do have to put on a show, especially when you're doing bachelorette parties or like pop ups, you're trying to get business into the tent, right? So it's like,

Ariel (24:44.571)
hahahahah

Jill & Katie (25:05.607)
hey, let me know if you guys need any help, but you have to be outgoing. And so some people just aren't like that inherently. I'm not sure what they thought they'd be doing when we described the job to them. whatever. And then the other problem we really run into is like, people just will put like an event or whatever in the group chat and no one will respond and like no one will take the parties or like people won't work for us for like three, four months on end, which like it's not a set schedule. Obviously, they're independent contractors, they don't have to but

When you've gone all summer and you haven't done a single event, why are you here? And we've had those conversations, just checking out on people and being like, hey, know that you've kind of been absent for a while. Just want to know if you're not, it's OK if you're not in, if you feel like it's not working out with your schedule anymore, let me know so we can make room for someone else. So that's an issue that we've got to into.

That's that piece. And then the other piece is actually contracting out like photographers, social media managers, which I know that was kind of what we were getting into is we had outsourced socials twice. So to preface this conversation, Katie is very type A. I am very type B. Very type A. so Katie, Katie knows what she wants and she knows how to get it done. I look at something, I'm like, looks good. Love it. Like, yeah.

Ariel (26:15.269)
Hahaha

Bobbo The Great And Wise (26:15.64)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (26:22.784)
Yeah, that's how I am. I'm that one. Yeah.

Ariel (26:23.015)
You

Jill & Katie (26:25.223)
She's very meticulous and I, but I love, that's what I love about her. And that's why she's very good at what she does. But trying to find someone to like take what's in her brain and put it out is just nearly impossible. And the only person that can do it is her, is what we found out. Except with one exception, with Jackie. Yeah. Yeah. So we, the first thing we ever outsourced was our, a photo shoot. Cause we're like, okay, we're at the point where we're like, we need good content for socials for our Instagram.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (26:38.414)
You

Jill & Katie (26:51.783)
So we outsourced our photography to, her name is Jackie Sterna. She is like kind of local to Nashville, not anymore, but she used to be incredible photographer. I mean, her mind, the, she's so, so, so, so talented and she's done three photo shoots for us now. We did a spring one, so we had like spring summer content, a fall one, so we had like fall winter content and then she does our e-commerce photos for us as well. Incredible, incredible at her job. Love her job.

so bad. That is the only independent contractor or like outsourced kind of like not our girls that do our events, but anyone else that we haven't, we've had an issue with everyone else we've ever tried to work with. And I think it really does come back to like people just, I really feel like people don't want to work anymore. Like they just, they like the idea of whatever it might be that we're doing. And then they're like, don't answer emails for two or three weeks, which by the way, we'll get

Ariel (27:48.475)
I'm like laughing along with this because I feel like we've had these experiences. It's crazy.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (27:51.421)
It's so relatable.

Jill & Katie (27:54.061)
We're not the only ones and people don't just hate us. That's just us. And I'm like, it's not insane for me to expect if you can't answer an email fully for you to be like, hey, sorry, like, I'll circle back to this. Just let me know you saw it. And also I'm paying you thousands of dollars for you to meet a deadline that you set for yourself and you're not meeting it. I get to be upset about that. Yeah. Communicate with me. Tell me you can't meet it. Tell me why you can't meet it. Like it's just I

Bobbo The Great And Wise (28:17.09)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (28:22.287)
It's crazy to me. other problem is like people we outsource to are the younger generation, right? And we're in our thirties, but we're outsourcing to creative teams that are like in their early twenties, because that's the content our people want to see. so they, who, who better knows that than someone in that is 22 to 25, right? The way that they just, I don't know what the difference is between our 10 years. Don't understand the business side of a business blows my mind every single time.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (28:32.12)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (28:50.619)
I could go all day, but I get so much.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (28:53.582)
Yeah, but it's all super. I mean, it's all very relatable. mean, there was one time, gosh, I can't remember. Maybe I shouldn't even say her name on here. Remember when I hired somebody, Ariel, that was supposed to be in charge of the head of operations and then she never showed up for the job.

Ariel (29:07.184)
yeah, she like ghosted everyone.

Jill & Katie (29:08.645)
Bobbo The Great And Wise (29:10.796)
Yeah, it was so weird. went through it. Like I paid a recruiting firm to like go and hire this person. She interviewed. Great. It was like awesome. Perfect fit. And then it was like, didn't hear from her after like a week. And I was like, okay, this is kind of weird. And then she would like email and she'd like, Hey, I'm working on all this stuff. And it was like, it's kind of hard with like a remote business because you can't at the time, like I didn't do time tracking or anything like that. We didn't have like systems. She was supposed to be there to build it. And she technically worked for me for a month.

And I talked to her once and then I couldn't fire her was the other thing. Like I was trying to get in contact with her to fire her and she wouldn't even respond to that. So it was the only person I've ever had to fire via email and it was the most weird experience and I wasted thousands of dollars finding this person. So I, yes, it is super relatable and we it is hard to find people that are good fits for sure.

Ariel (30:03.661)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (30:04.11)
And I feel like all of my friends that are business owners, all say the same thing that you said where it's like, it doesn't seem like anybody wants to work. And I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it that way for some reason. And I don't know why that is. I wish I did.

Jill & Katie (30:17.223)
Yeah. And the thing is, I don't want to work either. I just know I'm not dreaming of labor. People are like, is this like your, like, do you love? No, I don't want, I want to go hang out with my friends all the time. I don't want them to be doing anything. What are you talking about? It's just at some way, or form. Don't you have anything inside of you that at least feels bad for telling someone you'll do something and not doing it? Don't you have guilt? I was born and raised Catholic. I'm like, this is a job.

Ariel (30:20.545)
Right.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (30:20.851)
Hahaha!

Ariel (30:33.457)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (30:34.115)
Right.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (30:43.982)
Don't you have inherent guilt? Yeah, so how like, sorry, that was funny. How how do you feel like you're handling that? Like, like, you're obviously frustrated by it. But it's like, is there something that you've changed in the hiring process to try to find people that are a better fit?

Jill & Katie (30:53.213)
Thank

Jill & Katie (31:03.907)
two things, good cop, bad cop. Yes. We handle every situation. Yeah. and very intentionally because I find that when people hate me, they're really nice to her and that's how we get things done. Yeah. It works honestly pretty well. Yeah. now we're just like afraid to hire anybody to do like, we're just like, we're also in a good spot now. We're like, we're shifting from being in person. We're doing a lot more online, which is exactly what we want. Right. So

Bobbo The Great And Wise (31:07.672)
Okay.

Jill & Katie (31:33.479)
We haven't really had to deal with that head on. And we do have a few girls that are still left that are still working for us that we can use when we need. So we don't need as many people because we're not doing as many in-person events. And now Katie's here. So we haven't had to deal with that just yet. hopefully we can just continue to increase our online and not do as many in-person stuff because I doing my work in my PJs Right.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (31:42.624)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (31:57.326)
Right.

Ariel (31:58.279)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (31:59.936)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (32:00.403)
Yeah, not making no, I'm making it in English. Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (32:03.962)
So have you had the like you mentioned that you had problems firing people though? Like what is that? I'm guessing it wasn't like my situation where I literally just couldn't find the person to fire them. But like

Jill & Katie (32:12.933)
Yeah. The other problem I think we've run into is like we've largely hired from recommendations, which like Nashville is a big city small town. And so like we have a lot of creative people, especially while Jill does, I should say Jill has a creative network. I don't. And so we have a lot of people that were recommended to us. And so it's like you're walking this fine line of like, yeah, firing someone sucks already, but then firing somebody that like, is a friend of a friend of a friend that you're going to see at the bars on the weekends and like Jill's a bartender. So it's like,

Bobbo The Great And Wise (32:19.758)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (32:42.693)
she's gonna see these people at her bar. How do you handle that without pissing them off, you know what I mean? Or without having people have bad things to say about us is a piece of it. Yes, but also I feel like we've had a few handful, two or three people maybe that we've had, that we've fired in a way that was kind of stressful and hated it. But other than that, it's been pretty cool.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (32:49.439)
That's kind of weird.

Jill & Katie (33:11.187)
I only know one. Should we say her name? So the most recent one. CZ. Yes. And then the girl in Arizona. What's her name? So I forgot about this. This is a crazy story. yeah, while we were like balls to the wall, 2022, 2023, we were expanding out. So we had a girl.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (33:15.81)
We can bleep out or like whatever we can.

Ariel (33:18.31)
Yeah.

Ariel (33:28.007)
feel like there's a good story here.

Jill & Katie (33:38.003)
We had two girls, no, and the other girl. Oh, I just remembered her. So Katie was in Chattanooga, so we were taking parties in Chattanooga. I was here taking parties in Nashville. Then we had a girl, one of Katie's friends, former friends. She moved out to Well, she was doing events in Chattanooga for me. Gotcha. And so we did some events in Chattanooga, and she was doing events in Chattanooga, and she was great. She moved to Charlotte, so we were let's try to pick up some events in Charlotte. And then we were like, well, let's try to like...

be let's try to get one more city under our belt. we reached we reached out I don't even know where we posted something in some like permanent jewelry Facebook group or something like that. And we had a girl that reached out from Arizona that was wanting to do events with us. And boy, let me tell you that was a nightmare. Well, Arizona is like, it's like Nashville, Arizona, Charleston are like three huge bachelorette towns, right? So we were like, at the time, that was like our biggest market.

We had already had like branding photo shoots. had the know-how. had the website. Like we had the booking platform. We had Square. Like we had everything. So it was really like, hey, if anybody wants to like essentially franchise Wood + Wolfe into a city that like Bachelorette's come to, it's like, you know, you don't have to pay anything upfront. We will provide you everything. We just then split profits because we're still managing legal, accounting, websites, and socials. So you guys don't even have to do your socials. I'll do them. You just have to work your events essentially.

And so this girl reached out, she was like, target demographic, right? Like, especially in Arizona, target demographic is like white 30 year old, or 20, 25, 30 year old. She was very cute, seemed great, sent her all this stuff. She like booked events that we paid. So like the other thing is like, we pay everything upfront, right? We pay vendor fees, whatever. Paid a vendor fee for an event that was like $400. No, was $800. It was $800. And she...

Ariel (35:13.063)
You

Jill & Katie (35:32.967)
just no call, no shows it. And so we're like, Hey, and then but but also didn't tell us that she wasn't going to do it. So we thought she was there and just had no sales that day. And then when we reached out to her, she was very like, upset. And I'm like, Why are you upset? Why are you mad at me? Because you didn't show up to an event. And she was just like, really upset. She just she was something to do like she had a lot of personal stuff going on. I'm like, How are we supposed to know that? Like,

Ariel (35:36.443)
Wow.

Jill & Katie (36:01.363)
we're here to support you. I don't understand why you're being so like hostile. turned. Yeah, it turned bad really quickly. It was definitely like something she was going through with like her baby's daddy or like something like that. seemed like something but I think her own part she did like her she had another side business that ended up closing. I think it probably has either way. Let me know. Like I will like we could have refunded that that vendor fee and we were out $800 and like it was it just turned out to be

Ariel (36:08.368)
Hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (36:22.36)
Right.

Jill & Katie (36:29.971)
I like, didn't tell her. And I was like, still responding to emails for Scottsdale and doing all the socials and everything. And then we just like, she just wouldn't answer us. So eventually we were like, Hey, like if you're going to close this down, still in our contract is like a return of materials, right? has to be. And so we're like, you still have to like mail all this stuff back to us. Like it's a welder. It's a bunch of like inventory and that's like gold and silver. Like it's thousands of dollars worth of stuff. You have to mail that back to us. And she was like, well, where's my money? And we were like,

Honey, what money? We split a profit and when you, even if you made money, like you brought in money at an event, it cost us money to get there. So unless you make more than the event costs, there's no profit to split with you, babe. And we're like trying to explain this to her and she goes, well, I'm an owner of this company. She thought she was a shareholder. I thought Ashton Kutcher was gonna pop out and we were gonna get punked. I couldn't.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (37:17.834)
whoa.

Ariel (37:17.977)
my gosh.

Jill & Katie (37:24.915)
She thought that she was a personal owner and I'm like, you obviously didn't read the contract. I thought we were very clear on like what this was. Yeah. So in it, long story short, we got our stuff back. Cause I, cause I was going to file a lawsuit against her. Yeah. So I like drafted and filed the small claims court. Cause she was like refusing to return the stuff to us. And I was like, I can either file this and I will fly my out there for $300 and represent us in court. Or you can mail this shit back and we'll pay for mailing by the way. It's like $85 to ship it. Shouldn't have had to, but I was like,

Ariel (37:36.465)
Wow.

Jill & Katie (37:54.867)
babe, just give us our shit back and let's end this. We got it back. She went ghost, but we got it back. That wasn't a fun one. Yeah, it was kind of fun.

Ariel (37:58.886)
Wow.

Ariel (38:06.631)
So many thoughts on all that. Like one, how great is it to have an attorney like is just on your team who can handle stuff, but also like the vetting process that you like if you are going to build out like a franchise model, which I don't, I mean, is that something that you guys are continuing to do or no? Okay.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (38:06.678)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (38:26.419)
No, we kissed goodbye after. But we did, we basically made up a whole package and it was pretty awesome. Yeah, I did like a whole contract and obviously had like a breakdown of how much everything costs versus like what the profit split would look like when we make those payouts, like all of those things. Because that's franchise contracts are also what I do for work. that was very, it was very easy thing to do. Again, it's just finding the right person to do it.

And that was the issue. then it was kind of like, we got burned twice. We were just like, let's put a pin in this one. The business kind of just went a complete different way. that's great. Which it always does. You plan and then we're like, why do we even try to plan? Because it's never how it ends up going anyway. We don't own this business. This business owns us.

Ariel (38:55.836)
Yeah.

Ariel (39:00.464)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (39:05.964)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (39:17.58)
Yeah. God, Ariel, this is like the third time in a row that I've talked about EOS in a freaking podcast. Have you ever heard of EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System? I've got to, yeah, we got to say that because she's like, it's just, it's a good, what's the book? What book should they read potentially if you're interested in this? We adopted EOS at Stellar Brands, yeah, Traction. We adopted that system because I was basically going through a lot.

Ariel (39:22.855)
I know, I was just thinking. Yeah, that sounds about right.

We're not getting paid for this, by the way.

Jill & Katie (39:37.234)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ariel (39:40.167)
distraction.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (39:47.394)
Maybe not, it sounds like there's like a little bit more like problem child kind of employees in your business than there are in ours it just, didn't, well, we do, but you know, but it's like, to me, it was just really hard to get actual traction. And that's why the book is called Traction, but it was just like, were doing all these different things and I was like pushing the team in all these different directions and I couldn't figure out how to get out of the day to day of the business. so,

Ariel (39:57.499)
We've had problem, child, for sure.

Jill & Katie (39:58.227)
to the country.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (40:14.306)
When Ariel came on as head of operations, we decided to go the EOS route. And I think so far it's been pretty amazing because I've been able to like, the whole thing is like, you're able to step into just being the business owner and you don't have to like do all of the stuff. Like basically Ariel does all of the stuff that I don't want to do anymore as a business owner. Cause I've been doing this for 10 years. But just even hearing like Katie, saying like, or Jill saying that Katie, it's hard for you to like.

Ariel (40:21.786)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (40:41.004)
hand stuff off to people because like they're not gonna do it the same way that you want it done. To me, it sounded like counting to read EOS because it's such a good system. I'll let Ariel talk and I promise we're not selling this because we literally cannot sell it, but it's just been so helpful for me in the business. And this is the first time in the business, I would say I've been doing this for 10 years now. It's the first time that I feel like free and I'm still not quite there, but I'm like very close.

Jill & Katie (40:51.443)
You know.

Ariel (40:54.695)
I'm

Ariel (41:05.915)
Well, you were able to take a month long, full month long paternity leave. And I don't think that you would have been able to do that without this, which felt really good.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (41:10.338)
Yeah, yeah, that was pretty sweet.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (41:15.352)
Probably not. No, it's great.

Jill & Katie (41:16.979)
Do you feel like when you hand things off finally that they're being done the way that you wanted them to? I know this is a loaded question with Ariel here, but I...

Ariel (41:24.231)
No, that's totally fine. I like this feedback.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (41:27.426)
This is good because yeah, like Ariel and have a quarterly feedback thing in a couple weeks.

Ariel (41:30.949)
Yeah, we can just do it right now with everyone.

Jill & Katie (41:33.011)
Great, actually this is it, we're finished here now, let's go.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (41:36.556)
Yeah, no, that's a good question. think initially, no. But that's what I've kind of learned after all the years of like having different contractors and full-time employees and all that stuff, like they're gonna mess stuff up. But it's what you're looking for is somebody that's gonna make a mistake and then fix it and then not do that again. And so it's like, kind of, it sucks because you kind of have to be willing to like let people.

Jill & Katie (41:57.287)
Yes.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (42:03.566)
mess things up inside of your business. But as long as they are trying to improve and they learn quickly, which Ariel does, absolutely. Um, then it's it long-term, you do get that freedom that you want. It's just really hard to do it in the beginning. And it's a process and it's so funny. My, um, we, own another company called laptop empires and my business owner or business partner is an attorney. it's like his personality and yours are exactly the same. Um,

Jill & Katie (42:18.461)
It's a process for sure.

Ariel (42:30.513)
Hahaha

Bobbo The Great And Wise (42:31.848)
It's like he is like he will cut somebody's throat if they do the wrong thing and it but I love it though because it's like it's he knows exactly what he freaking wants. But like, I think that I think that yes, eventually they do mess up a lot going back to the original question, but they eventually take things off your plate. And then the space that you're supposed to get to with the OS is where you just come up with ideas. And that's it.

Jill & Katie (42:55.229)
love that.

Ariel (42:55.791)
His job description is literally like 20 new ideas or something is like on his responsibilities list.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (43:00.483)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (43:02.663)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (43:03.724)
Yes. Now the frustrating thing is that I come up with a lot of ideas and now Ariel tells me no. like that's, and that's just part of it though, because like the reality is like, I, if I have, yeah, if I, if I have all of these ideas and I, and what I was doing was I was like, we need to build this product. We need to this thing. We need to sell this thing. And then the team can't like, nobody actually gets anything done. So now I'll come up with ideas and Ariel's like, we're to do that maybe next quarter.

Ariel (43:08.785)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (43:28.556)
maybe next year, you know, and so it's taken, it's been a learning process for me, you know, cause like, I like to know what's going on in the business, you know, I like to move things around. I don't know how you feel about it. Like I'm talking, but you're the one that's actually doing it.

Ariel (43:38.789)
No, I think it's great. mean, I think the... Bobby and I have always had a like a great working relationship where he's like super open to like, you can break something and that's okay. That's just like part of like running a business. And I am very much like, I wanna get it perfect the right, like the first time. And so him being that kind of leader has helped me as I start to delegate to other people, which is great.

And I think it all comes down to a lot of issues like communicating with each other. Like don't expect anything unless you have like clear communication about what the expectations are. Like don't assume anything, don't assume people know anything, just like talking about it. And yeah, I don't know if that's any more helpful, but.

Jill & Katie (44:24.424)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (44:26.626)
But the other thing that EOS does, so it'll give you the freedom and it'll really like, it'll help both of you really define your roles in the business. Cause everybody has like a seat in that system where it's like your seat is very well defined. But the whole idea is that you replace those seats with other people eventually. But the other thing it does is like, we have a full blown system for evaluating employees. And like, we know exactly they have to check like certain boxes.

And if they don't, then we have to exit them from the company. Like it's very clear cut. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that, Ariel, because that's.

Jill & Katie (44:57.117)
Mm-hmm.

Ariel (44:59.183)
Yeah, the process of implementing EOS is the first things that you do are determine your core values as a company. And they're not like woo-woo core values that just go on your website. They're like, these are actually things that you have to commit to upholding and then hiring, firing, and rewarding through. And it's kind of funny. I feel like there will be moments where I'm like, what core value is this aligned with? And then let's tell this person they did a great job with core value three or whatever.

It feels like a kind of parenting like, know, you're supposed to be nice people and you did that today. Good job. But then you come up with your, it's not a mission statement, core focus, which is like a mission statement basically. And then it's like that guides everything your company does, but also, as I said, how you hire, fire, reward.

Jill & Katie (45:37.181)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (45:54.36)
But, okay, I was like, all right, I guess she's

Ariel (45:54.479)
Sorry. No, my phone is like ringing. But yeah, been like, it reduces a lot of the emotional labor that goes along with managing people and firing them because it's like, hey, we have these things lined out clearly. Not only do we have core values lined up clearly, we have a list of examples of each of them. So if there are any questions about what does this one look like, it's right here.

And if you are not following the rules, essentially, this is, you know, we're going to help you correct that, hopefully. But yeah, it's like the, I think the most exciting thing for me as somebody who is newer to like managing people is just having like a very clear cut system for how to handle people.

Jill & Katie (46:45.646)
Yeah. And I think that reminds me of two things. First and foremost, my partner at my law firm is genuinely one of the best bosses I've ever had my entire life. And one of the reasons I think he's the best boss I've ever had is because like, obviously when you fuck up, sorry, can I swear on this podcast? I was like, Fuck something up. When you fuck something up in law, it's like, it matters, right? Like that.

Ariel (47:01.253)
Yeah, you can swear on this.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (47:02.222)
Sure. Just keep going.

Ariel (47:06.439)
You

Bobbo The Great And Wise (47:12.91)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (47:13.629)
somebody's business or like that makes us look unprofessional or whatever. But my boss has always been very, very good at like, I never feel like I'm going to get yelled at. I've always felt like I can do something wrong, even submit it or even have our clients sign it. And if he finds out, I know that he's going to be like, it's okay, like you're never going to be perfect. Like he's very good at that. And the second piece is like when we take when you're an attorney and you take your bar exam, you take an ethics portion of the bar exam and

One of the biggest things, like the number one reason that attorneys get disbarred is lack of communication because we have obligation to communicate case updates. And that's the biggest problem I think we find with every single person that we've ever had an issue working for us is either not communicating at all or lying about what's going on or saying that they'll do something and then not following through with it. And so it's just kind of like, we had a problem with one of our girls and we love her to death.

Ariel (47:45.799)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (48:08.755)
We've always left her. She's been with us since the beginning, but she wasn't picking anything up, wasn't responding to text messages. And we finally were like, hey, we texted her separate and we were like, what's going on? And she's like, oh, my dad passed. And we're like, oh my God, we didn't know, we're so sorry. Didn't mean to get on your case about it. We didn't know. So she had been traveling. Or maybe he didn't pass, maybe he was just sick. No, he passed. He did, okay.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (48:21.102)
Hmm.

Ariel (48:23.352)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (48:33.139)
So he was just sick and so we sent her like $100 on Venmo and we were just like, for all your tickets or like food and the airport or like whatever, like we love you, let us know when you're, when you want to come back if you ever do want to come back. Cause that's all it takes. Like just tell us what's going on,

Ariel (48:46.022)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. I think it gets hard sometimes for me a little bit is like when people go really in depth on what's going on and now I'm like really worried about you as like a team member too. Like, my gosh, this is like too much. it's like, there's a fine line and I really, mean, I think the communication stuff is like very big and, but yeah, I have to like not internalize other people's like stuff though.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (49:17.262)
Yeah. Yeah. So one other thing that the two of you talked about before the episode was just like the tax side of things and

Jill & Katie (49:26.867)
You actually make me want to blow my brains out. Yeah.

Ariel (49:28.391)
Bobby is once at least once a week Bobby makes a joke to our like bookkeeping and like finance people as like Like basically, what if I stop paying taxes today? Like, you know some you know, I know you try really hard Right

Bobbo The Great And Wise (49:29.27)
Hey, me too. Me too. I'm not a big fan.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (49:47.254)
I'm always trying it, like I feel like...

Jill & Katie (49:48.147)
Like what if

Bobbo The Great And Wise (49:51.81)
They don't like that. Yeah, they don't like that question, but I'm like, I feel like I should be able to figure out a way. Like there's gotta be some way to do it.

Jill & Katie (49:59.547)
How are millionaires and billionaires not paying taxes? Why can't I?

Bobbo The Great And Wise (50:02.926)
Exactly. Where's the Cayman Islands account that I can open up and whatever?

Jill & Katie (50:06.321)
Right? I don't have to ask you when it comes to taxes. I'm so serious. Let us know if you figure it out and we'll let you know.

Ariel (50:07.675)
Yes.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (50:10.926)
Yeah. But I did it like I started working with an accounting firm six years ago that was super helpful for me.

And like, because forever, like I just, had no idea what I was doing with taxes. I hired bookkeepers myself and I hired one out of the Philippines that totally messed up my books. It was like a complete disaster. I've made like every single mistake with all that stuff. So I'm just curious, what is the, challenge do the two of you have with just taxes in general, but like accounting and all that.

Jill & Katie (50:42.387)
We can take this one over. Katie tried to do it herself, which he knows a lot more than I mean, you're talking to me. like, I took an accounting class in college eight years ago. I don't know anything. So Katie tried for a little bit. And then I noticed Katie tries to take on a lot and then she stresses herself out and then she spirals. And I'm like, Katie doesn't have to be like this. Like we can outsource this. Let's try to figure it out. I like I spend a lot of my time talking her off the edge just because she just likes to take on so much. But then we did, we...

Bobbo The Great And Wise (50:51.116)
Right.

Ariel (50:52.817)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (51:07.756)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (51:10.323)
we outsourced to someone that she was, someone had just recommended So for the first year, I did it myself, but we weren't that big yet. And then the second year, we're like, shit. Yeah, we're like doing numbers. We're like, this is real, what we're doing. This isn't a fake business. like I remember our first event, it was that- The bridal show? We did like a bridal show and we made like $300 each, I want to say.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (51:22.328)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah.

Ariel (51:29.851)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (51:38.909)
We're like, my God, we're so excited. were literally like, we're like, my God, this is so exciting. Like mind blown. We never expected that much money. and then we had like our first $16,000 day and we're like, we need a CPA. We're in a lot of cash here. Yeah. so the first year I did it ourselves, cause it wasn't that big of a deal. And then the second year someone had recommended a local Chattanooga account to us.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (51:47.32)
Right.

Ariel (51:47.793)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (51:54.594)
Yeah.

Ariel (51:56.197)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (52:07.315)
She seemed great at first she did she she was really good at bookkeeping and really bad at taxes is how I felt she was very organized like always got us all of our financial statements and like Filed our sales taxes and like that kind of stuff But then when it came to like any piece of like what you would expect your accountant to tell you to do to save money on taxes nothing was there like

Ariel (52:13.188)
Hmm

Jill & Katie (52:30.419)
She didn't tell us about, I knew a decent amount because I work with tax attorneys so often, especially for businesses. I'm in a lot of the meetings, so I understand double taxation. I understand pass. They're like, get all of that stuff. But it was the exceptions to rules that I obviously wouldn't know anything about. You should pay this much to yourself as payroll because then you don't have to pay the 14, all of that stuff. You probably know what I'm talking about. That she just never told us about. I was like, how would I know that? I'm talking to my

Bobbo The Great And Wise (52:36.077)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (52:52.503)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (52:55.852)
Yes, unfortunately I do.

Jill & Katie (53:00.339)
partner of my law firm, John, he obviously runs their business. And he's like, well, yeah, you pay yourself the salary, right? And we're like, no, we just take dividends. And he's like, talk to your account right now. And if they're not telling you to do that, fire them. And that's how we realized all of the shit she was like, missing telling us. And she cost us, I want to say eight or $9,000 that year. So we fired her. I finished out the year because it was really just filing like

Bobbo The Great And Wise (53:16.46)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (53:28.241)
monthly sales tax for the state of Tennessee and then like our quarterly taxes. So was like, I can do that piece and then we'll hire someone to do our taxes in the new year for like the previous year. Found another firm that was recommended and the very first meeting he was like, if I'm not saving you what you're spending on me, I'm not doing my job correctly. I'm gonna meet with you quarterly and tell you how much money you need to be like expensing out so that you can essentially pay no taxes. And I was like, great.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (53:36.835)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (53:56.237)
Hey.

Jill & Katie (53:57.139)
So, so far so good. This is our first year with him though, so we'll see.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (54:01.152)
Okay, that's cool. Have you had have you felt like it's been difficult to figure out how to pay yourselves from the company?

Jill & Katie (54:07.827)
Um, yes and no. Yeah. think the thing is like, just want to, I just want to Venmo us and be like distribution. We can't do that, turns out. So we have like through our accountants have set up like ADP payroll and we just pay ourselves like, you know, the idea is like we work part time. So all you have to do to avoid that like extra taxation is a reasonable salary for what a part time full year employee would be. Right. So we hit that and then we start taking distributions. But that has

Bobbo The Great And Wise (54:15.948)
Right, yeah.

Jill & Katie (54:38.555)
always gone through our accountants. So outside of just bed mowing ourselves our distributions, it's been easy.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (54:43.5)
Yeah. Have you felt like, actually, I don't know if I even asked you this, like, where are you trying to take this? Because right now it's like you're at a point where you've grown to like, it sounds like a really great level. Like, are you trying to like blow this thing up or are you trying to keep it where it is?

Jill & Katie (54:58.341)
Yeah, I mean, I'd be great, right? Like the dream is to always blow it up. We're doing about 300,000 a year. Yeah, right now, I would say our first year was only six months. So it was 80,000, something like that. Second year was like 159. And then our third year was 300,000. And yeah, we're looking at it. We were like, wow, like, we have a lot of imposter syndrome, I feel like because we say those numbers out loud, it just doesn't feel real.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (55:06.382)
That's awesome.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (55:17.198)
Great.

Ariel (55:17.701)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (55:23.085)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (55:27.943)
Yeah. But I mean, I think we're we're we never know what we actually really want to do. But it always changes, right. But we're slowly getting closer towards our goal of just strictly being online. I guess I think for us, it was we never knew exactly how to get there. But we always knew that's where we wanted to get. I would love for our brand to be more than just jewelry. I think it was a great start. But I think

Ariel (55:28.188)
Yeah.

Ariel (55:40.731)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (55:55.915)
like Jill and I just have such big personalities and such specific voices that I think our brand could be very funny. And so like we're moving into merch. I don't know if I put that on the thing. Okay, so we're moving into merch. We just actually had our first round of merch printed. And so we should be getting that soon. And we honestly, we're fucking funny. so we're really going to be able to lean into a more creative side with

Bobbo The Great And Wise (56:06.318)
You did? Yeah.

Jill & Katie (56:24.819)
Like with our voice, like our captions are funny, our TikTok captions are funny, like all that shit is funny, like our branding is funny. And so we're finally going to be able to use that because you can't really use that in jewelry, right? Like there's no words in jewelry for, you know, largely. So we're really excited about that. I would love for like our socials, our brand to be more associated with like a tone, if that makes sense. Sarcastic, swearing, funny.

Ariel (56:48.485)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jill & Katie (56:53.611)
making fun, laughing at how horrible the world is currently. You know what I mean? Like, for a cheap laugh. That's kind of what I, that's kind of where I envision us making sense going, because it's always kind of been what we are. Anyway, so.

Ariel (56:57.296)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (56:57.592)
Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (57:06.402)
Yeah, no, that's cool.

Ariel (57:06.479)
You recently redid your website and all of the branding and everything. I love it. And was that all part of this idea of moving into merch and other stuff as well? OK.

Jill & Katie (57:17.489)
Yes. Yeah, we really needed we really needed more cohesiveness on our socials, which is kind of what drove that. That was the beginning part of it. And then knowing that we wanted to get into merch, we were like, okay, we really want there's a couple of brands that we really follow that we really like hold in such high regard. And one of them is good girls snacks or good girls pickles. Have you ever heard of them? Okay.

Ariel (57:25.467)
Mm-hmm.

Ariel (57:39.053)
No, but I'm gonna look them up.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (57:40.078)
Mm.

Jill & Katie (57:41.115)
They're amazing. have these like little, their branding is phenomenal. And it's just two women that own this pickle company and their, their socials are so funny. Like their branding is amazing. And they have these two little like one is a pickle and then one's like a girl and that's like their characters for their brand. And so like whatever they're posting or whenever they're doing socials or like whatever they have these characters doing random funny things. And we were like, wait, we love that.

So when we went into branding, knew obviously we needed our color scheme and our fonts or whatever, but we also needed our like, what is Duolingo to Duolingo? You know what I mean? Like the little, we need that for ourselves. And so when we met with the girl that was doing our branding, one of our things were like, we kind of want like a wood character and a wolf character. And so they're both wolves, which makes sense.

Ariel (58:16.805)
Mmm, yeah.

Jill & Katie (58:31.229)
But mine is very girly, very clean girl aesthetic. She's wearing high heels and cute sunglasses, and Jill's is wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. And hers is more edgy and darker color vibes, which is very much us. So that drove is a lot of merch based of an idea. We make these into characters people are going to want to watch or know. You know what I mean? They have our voices.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (58:58.062)
Yeah, your website's freaking cool. I looked at it like a week ago when Ariel first told me about this interview and I was like, God, this is freaking awesome. Did you did you hire somebody to do it or did do it yourself?

Jill & Katie (59:08.251)
Yes, we hired somebody to do that. She is incredibly talented at what she does, but she needs to have somebody running her business side of. That's very type B person. Yeah. Very hard for me to work with because again, like when a deadline gets blown, when an email goes unanswered, all you have to do is communicate with me and a lack of communication is very frustrating. So Jill handles most communication.

Ariel (59:17.058)
Hahaha

Bobbo The Great And Wise (59:19.544)
think we all do.

Yeah.

Jill & Katie (59:35.315)
with her. But yeah, like that's one of the things we had a problem with. Like, what did I send that email about website help two weeks ago? I haven't heard back. So I feel like it's been longer than that. Yeah, still haven't heard back. Like it's just, but we did get a good website out of it. Website's great though. Prior to this was one that Katie made. And it got us through. And guess what? I have no experience making websites. We knew that we wanted to be online more.

Ariel (59:51.567)
Yeah, it looks great.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (59:51.692)
Website looks cool, website looks great.

Ariel (59:59.106)
Hahaha

Jill & Katie (01:00:03.155)
It's our storefront essentially, so we wanted it to look as good as we make our socials look and she did a really good job with that and I think that's been very helpful for driving more sales.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:00:03.342)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:00:12.172)
Yeah, yeah, it's, mean, think I've never, honestly, I've never worked with a web developer that's been easy to work with. like that's, that's been the actually for the longest time, and that was the hardest thing to hire. Cause our business is so web heavy with just like technical, like tracking analytics, all sorts of stuff. I hate all of it. But it was like forever. took, it was just, it's always been a disaster. But I've got to get my kid up soon.

Jill & Katie (01:00:19.301)
I love you.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:00:40.17)
So I don't have a whole lot of time left, unfortunately, but the two of your like, you are hilarious. So, and so, and it's so cool to hear like how your business is going. I mean, you're growing every year. I would definitely check out EOS just because that's something if I could go back 10 years, I wish I had just done it from the beginning, even though it's like, I still don't even feel like we're quite ready for it. Cause it's really for companies. What's the, what's the size Ariel? It's like 2 million and up or something, or is it a million? I don't.

Jill & Katie (01:00:54.877)
Okay.

Ariel (01:01:06.151)
It's like.

And it's like a team size thing also like 10 team members, an app maybe.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:01:09.39)
Remember what the numbers.

Yeah, so it definitely like you grow into it, but like I think that's gonna give the two of you so much more freedom, because I think what's gonna happen is that your business is gonna keep growing exponentially, because you already have, I think the cool stuff figured out of like the branding and the message and a good product. And so I think you're just gonna grow really quickly from there. So I would get out ahead of it. And then the other thing I would look into, we didn't talk about it at all, profit first. Well, tell them about it.

Ariel (01:01:38.631)
I was just going to say profit first. Yeah. Well, I don't know as much about it as... No, I don't know as much about profit first as Bobby does, but it's basically a system that you... It helps you as a business owner pay yourself and also setting aside money to do... We do like profit... What do we call it? Profit, rewards, sharing, something like that. Every quarter employees get...

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:01:41.812)
We these companies need to pay us like these companies need to pay us for talking about the stuff that they don't.

Jill & Katie (01:01:44.231)
Thank you.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:02:05.08)
Mm-hmm.

profit rewards account. Yeah, it's like money goes into it and then it gets distributed to the employees.

Ariel (01:02:08.721)
Profit rewards, yeah.

Yeah, and it's just been like, think it's been really good for Bobby as the owner to like, this is where I want pay to be at for myself. This is how, and not just that, but like making sure everything is like okay for the team and having all these different accounts and everything. That's all handled by our like bookkeeper and CPA team too. So we don't do it, but there is a book called Profit First, if you're interested.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:02:35.394)
You can self implement. It's just been helpful. And where I see the two of you going, what happened to me several times throughout my, my career so far is that we'd get a big growth in revenue. And then I would go hire a bunch of people. And then, because I was like, I'm going to invest in future growth. And then it always like, I either hired people that shouldn't have been hired or is like all of sudden they were eating up all of our, our revenue. And I was like, crap, how am going to pay myself? This sucks.

And since we did the profit first thing, which really all it is, is like every dollar that comes into the company gets put into a certain account. And there's like seven different accounts, but there's like owners pay taxes, profit, operating expenses, like everything gets portioned out every month. And then you know exactly like how much it makes you live within your means inside of the business. And then you know, exactly like you set owners pay for yourself and then you take profit on top of that.

It's just a different way of accounting, but I would highly recommend it. like that, that has made, cause there's like, there's in the two of you know, this is like, sometimes you make a lot of money and sometimes it feels like you're not making anything. And so that's, I was tired of going through that, you know, especially like I have kids now and stuff. So it's like, I can't just be like, I guess we're not paying ourselves. but that's, think that the two of you are going to have to figure that out because I think you're going to grow really quickly, because you already are. And so.

Jill & Katie (01:03:43.751)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (01:03:54.461)
We can hope. Simultaneously, it's like when you objectively look at it, you're like, okay, what started as a small business is people's dream way to run a business, right? Like we're so fortunate and so lucky. But then when you're in it, especially when you have a low month, you're like, the thing's closing down. You know what I mean? I'm never going to make another dollar. It's like, it's so up and down. That's what people don't talk about enough. Owning a business is not fun.

Ariel (01:03:55.953)
haha

Ariel (01:04:06.641)
Mm-hmm.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:04:13.482)
It sucks. Yeah. yeah.

Jill & Katie (01:04:23.205)
It's not fun. It has fun moments and it's awesome. But it's very stressful. I'm so stressed out all the time.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:04:31.086)
Yeah, I know exactly what we were talking about that like I've driven so many times. dude, I was so ready to quit the business last week. Like there's a Chick-fil-A down the road. Like I was like, I'll go work there. I would work there and I would press the fry button over and over again. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like easy.

Jill & Katie (01:04:35.312)
you

Ariel (01:04:35.323)
We had a rough week last week that Bobby was like ready to jump off a cliff.

Jill & Katie (01:04:41.268)
I'm just kidding.

Ariel (01:04:45.553)
you

Jill & Katie (01:04:47.027)
Wherever you get Sundays off.

Yeah.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:04:52.012)
But there's so many, and that's a great point. Like there's so many times where I've been like, this is so hard. Like why did I do this to myself? Like I could have just been a teacher and like been happy, you know, but it's.

Jill & Katie (01:05:02.771)
stick with our other careers, but we don't for some reason.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:05:05.577)
Yeah, it's just like you, I don't know, I feel like the challenge is like the part, maybe I don't even know if I'm just telling myself that at this point, like the challenge is what I enjoy. I think I've created like a coping mechanism that I just like struggle and pain, but it's, you whatever, it's like I'm here, But anyway, I would check out Profit First, check out EOS. I love your company, I love what you're doing. I'm probably gonna buy something for my wife. I gotta go figure out how to do it, but.

Ariel (01:05:05.745)
Mm-hmm.

Jill & Katie (01:05:13.479)
least you feel better than the Bobby

Jill & Katie (01:05:23.187)
Yeah.

Jill & Katie (01:05:29.629)
Thank you.

Jill & Katie (01:05:33.395)
I believe in you.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:05:34.58)
but I appreciate your time so much is where do want people to go and find you out in the internet world?

Jill & Katie (01:05:39.985)
Yeah, we are a website and also shows our wood and wolf, but wolf has an E on the end of it. So it's W O O D A N D W O O L F E. Wood and wolf. Don't forget the E. Don't forget the E.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:05:51.179)
Awesome.

Ariel (01:05:53.797)
And we'll have to share when we share this episode, one of those viral videos that kind of kicked things off for you guys, because those are, they're great. The one where you look what? Yeah, definitely.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:05:54.114)
Very cool.

Jill & Katie (01:06:01.265)
The one where I look the best in, please. The prettiest in, please. Thanks for thinking of us. Yeah, thank you guys so much. For all the record. Yeah, good to you.

Ariel (01:06:11.727)
Yeah, this is great. Good seeing you, Jill. Yeah, I'll be in Nashville in October, so we'll have to maybe come get a drink. Yeah. All right.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:06:13.452)
And of course.

Jill & Katie (01:06:20.561)
Yes, let's do it. Be here.

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:06:21.976)
Yeah. Yeah. And if you have any questions as you keep growing, just hit us up. Like we can just, you know, we'll show you, we've messed up every single thing that you can possibly mess up. So we can try to help you, you know, if somebody needs to. Yeah.

Jill & Katie (01:06:26.415)
Thank you so much.

Jill & Katie (01:06:32.147)
We'll learn from your mistakes. Yeah, would be nice way learn from our own mistakes.

Ariel (01:06:34.033)
Yeah.

Ariel (01:06:38.134)
I mean, we will probably continue making the same mistakes over and over again, too, to be honest.

Jill & Katie (01:06:41.597)
Bye!

Bobbo The Great And Wise (01:06:42.454)
No, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that. No, we're not. But anyway, thank you so much. Y'all are awesome. Appreciate it. Bye.

Ariel (01:06:48.379)
yep. bye guys.