Welcome to the Goat Pen Podcast
The TL;DR Version
- Goat Pen (goat-pen.com) exists as a social community serving Small Business and The Trades
- Small Business and The Trades share enough space that they should be studied together
- In the United States, Small Business and The Trades are keystone to our economy, keystone to our national culture and keystone to our Republic
- Most podcasts about business are a form of “mindset training” or “success studies” that have very little to do with the realities of owning or managing a small business
- The Goat Pen Podcast offers discussions with real small business owners, managers and tradesman and discussions on issues facing these keystone economic sectors
- The Goat Pen Podcast isn’t just for aspiring entrepreneurs listening to stories from those who have claimed to have succeeded. It’s not about becoming motivated or becoming anything. It’s about being and in specific being a doer. It’s about the realities of small business and the trades.
- We’ll interview those who have succeeded, those who have failed, those who are just beginning a journey and those who have been doing it for years. We’ll explore current issues, trends and opportunities.
- And we’ll try to figure out why it’s so damn hard.
- Join the discussion by requesting to be on the podcast or by joining the Goat Pen discussion groups and forums (we call them Goat Pens)
The Rise of the Internet Guru – The “Meta-Heads”
There are a lot of podcasts that claim to be about business. If you take even a cursory look at their content, most of them are conducted by internet gurus and content marketers selling a form of mindset training. Many of these gurus are what I would call “meta-marketers”, who are selling information about marketing. And, many of them are what I would call “meta-successful”, having only achieved their success, or a good portion of it, by selling information about success. Even if you are an avid consumer of this type of content (and for the record I am), you must certainly feel in your gut that there is something off about it. Something kind of “snake-oily”. I’ll argue that there is a recursive or self-referential nature to these Meta-Heads that has triggered an intuition response.
Recursive and Self-Referential Red Flags
The rise of these Meta-Heads interested me and I was interested in why it was off-putting. I suspected there was something in the self-referential or recursive nature of their claims that was creating some dissonance. What was it about this “meta-ness” that threw red flags? So, I asked AI about it – and offered AI some of my ideas – (incidentally, it was precisely this conversation with AI that was the genesis for the Dudeus Ex Machina Podcast). AI responded by suggesting that I was correct in identifying self-referencing as the culprit. The reason it threw flags was because self-referencing shared characteristics with circular reasoning. Even if you don’t know what circular reasoning is, you kind of get the ick when you hear it. Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy where the conclusion is used as a premise, essentially restating the claim instead of proving it (e.g., “The Bible is true because it says so in the Bible”). Together, AI and I explored other types of self-referencing phenomena, such a sound system feeding back and producing a screeching sound in the speakers and the infinity mirror that shows up in Zoom when you share your desktop and your desktop is the Zoom meeting. These physical phenomena suggest that self-referential behavior is tied to and has an explanation in physics. We even went so far as to explore how certain mathematical principles, life itself, cellular reproduction, certain theories of consciousness, theories of “the self” and certain themes in philosophy and religion all were informing us in some way that self-referential recursiveness is important. Some would suggest dissonance, while some would suggest it may hold the key (for lack of a better word) to divine secrets.
Bro...this shit's getting deep...and shit.
Everybody’s Got a Story
I grew up with small business in my blood. As the story goes, my Grandfather AJ and Great Uncle Ed were Mennonites from Missouri, who left to seek their fortune in what was then the Oklahoma Territory. With a strong work ethic, they worked in the salt mines and saved their money waiting for the right opportunity. When a developing town was passed over by the railroad, the general store went under and the two were able to get a good deal on the remaining inventory. So, they packed it up and moved to a small Texas panhandle town on the Oklahoma border where they ended up becoming big fish in that small pond. I’m not sure how much of the story that was passed to me is accurate. Legend has it they owned everything from the general store to the farm implement store, grain elevator and auto dealership. I suspect, things being as they were back then, it was more like they owned the store, farmed some land, had a place to store some grain, sold a car or two and maybe sold some farming equipment. What I do know for sure is that they became quite wealthy and AJ eventually moved his family to Hollywood for a few years. My father spent his “formative” years there and the family kind of lived it up during the golden age of Hollywood with my father, his younger brother, and younger sister performing musical acts as children at one of Mae West’s theaters. My aunt was kind of a musical prodigy and (as the story goes) wrote her first composition at the age of 4 and was dubbed “America’s Sweetheart Composer” (as the story goes of course).
Business is Hard Bro
As a child, I grew up on the stories of my Grandfather and Great Uncle and their business success. My father was so proud of what they accomplished. I always figured I’d end up there too, as a big fish in a small pond. Or maybe leading a corporation. Or, both and then having proved myself, retired to a life in academia like my college professor father. But life has a way of twisting and turning and sending you down other paths. I struggled with taking college seriously. I struggled to find direction in business. Ultimately, I followed the path put in front of me. I went on to a very blue collar life of an enlisted Coast Guardsman and mariner. Always chasing the next adventure. I sailed on an icebreaker to Antarctica for scientific missions. Served on two patrol boats in Alaska conducting search and rescue and law enforcement missions. I worked aids to navigation and conducted over the horizon boardings as a small boat coxswain off the coast of New England. I was second in command of an Ice Breaking Tug Boat frequently patrolling NY Harbor. How about that for a child’s dream job? Who wouldn’t want to drive a tugboat? And if you drove a tug boat, where would you do it? NY City of course. I also broke ice for 4 years on the Great Lakes. For those unfamiliar with the job, it’s a mariner’s version of extreme heavy equipment operation. Nothing compares to driving an ice breaker, close aboard a 1000 foot “Laker” literally stuck between a rock and a hard place and at the mercy of the crazy spring river currents.
But, I wasn’t happy and something was still missing. If I went to my grave having never succeeded in business, or at least giving it a shot, I would die with a soul crushing regret. But here is the cold hard truth about business…IT’S REALLY FUCKING HARD.
Easy for Some? Hard for Most? WTF?
I’ve always regarded success in business as rare and business owners as some kind of elite MOFOs. The numbers support this, with most estimates putting the percentage of self-employed as a percentage of the American workforce, somewhere around 6-10%. We’ll explore some more numbers later in this post that really speak to the importance of small business, and by association, the trades in the US economy.
What’s always perplexed me is that for some people, it doesn’t seem hard at all. For many of them, including a lot of tradesmen from blue collar families, there’s apparently nothing to it. Growing up in Northern Minnesota, I’d observe that they’d just show up one day to the backwoods pit party bonfire with some logo stenciled on their pickup and a pocket full of cash. A decade later they’d be living on the lake, driving a brand new stenciled truck while pulling a badass fish & ski.
Tradesmen are overrepresented as small business owners. Even when tradesmen are wage earners, they seem to have some shit figured out that the rest of the wage earning population doesn’t. They appear to own their labor more than other workers. As a class of worker, they clearly are overrepresented with union and guild memberships. They often earn a higher wage, are happier, and hold a fraction of the student loan debt that college educated people do. And, in contrast to what the modern American left would have you believe, they are not “uneducated” or lacking in critical thinking skills at all. Some of the most brilliant critical thinkers and systems thinkers I’ve known have been diesel mechanics.
Artwork Courtesy of AI - In case you hadn't noticed
My father didn’t entirely understand these people. He called them the “Blue Collar Rich”. I think he both secretly admired them and despised them at the same time. Likely fueled by a combination of jealousy and frustration. My dad wasn’t a businessman. He was an economics professor who, because of Grandfather’s hard work, had grown up privileged, attended college and then was brave enough to escape the tyranny of employment with the big Texas petroleum companies for academia. But, I know that my father deeply loved business and business people. It’s his stories that influenced me. He had a deep respect for the grit and independence displayed by people like his father and uncle Ed, who were not educated and who earned every bit of what they had. I know he regarded those Bros as elite MOFOs. But, as the Bro who FO’d my MO, he always felt a little inadequate, like he allowed the entrepreneurship gene to skip a generation and had let his family down.
Business Owners are Elite - The Numbers Prove it
- I’ve seen numbers as low as 6%, but most sources cite 10% of the workforce as being self-employed.
- This is down from 1994 by about 2%. It’s interesting that this is the case despite the rise of opportunities with the internet.
- 75-80% are non-employer firms meaning they don’t have any employees. They most certainly contribute fractionally, as in they employ part of a person such as a tax preparer.
- If only 25% of the 10% self-employed people have a single employee, then that quite literally means that only 2.5% of the American population creates a single job for someone else. As the number of employees increases, that percentage quickly moves into a fraction of a percent with only about .34% employing more than 20 individuals
- 36% are incorporated and 64% are unincorporated.
- Self-employed individuals and the workers they hire play a crucial role in the U.S. labor market. In 2014, they accounted for 30% of the national workforce, encompassing approximately 44 million jobs.
- If you look beyond the self-employed label and consider the broader Small Business definition, they employ nearly half of the American workforce, with 45.9% of Americans working for small businesses.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Small Business accounts for 55% of net new jobs.
- A larger percentage of people state a desire to become small business owners or self-employed than actually do. This indicates a significant Agency Gap – the difference between intention and action.
- The government often uses definitions that may either result in overstating or understating certain numbers or impacts. Even so, the conclusions drawn from the data likely remain the same.
- Government jobs and most of the non-profit sector don’t contribute to the economy directly and therefore owe their existence to small business and corporations.
- Corporations employ roughly half of private sector employees (again, these numbers may vary but the conclusions drawn from them don’t)
- Exact numbers are hard to come by but a significant number of large corporations owe at least some of their success to small business either as their origin story or from mergers or acquisitions.
- Again, numbers are hard to come by, but small businesses dominate the skilled trades with most employment of tradesmen coming from small businesses. The other side of this is that the trades, especially when you expand beyond those typically associated with unions and guilds, is where many small business owners get their start.
The True Economic Picture:
I suspect that the true number of individuals who own small businesses with significant employment and their corporate executive counterparts who run companies with significant employment numbers have an outsized impact on the American Economy. So, I asked AI about it and this is what it had to say:
- The ~0.34% who own mid-sized businesses (20–499 employees), along with the less than 0.1% who own or lead corporations (500+ employees), collectively form a tiny fraction (under 0.5%) of the working population.
- Yet, they’re responsible for generating around 75–85% of GDP and providing the bulk of employment (80–85% of jobs).
A version of this statistic is often used to levy an argument against American capitalism. The argument is that only a very small percentage of capitalist elites benefit from our system. The other way to look at this is that our economy is largely dependent on the approximately half a percent of individuals who start or run businesses that offer significant employment of more than 20 individuals. When you factor in those that employ less than 20 but are still self-employed or business owners, it’s still a really small number as a percentage of the working population. Certainly there is truth to everyone pitching in, like when the Amish move a barn. But, even with the Amish barn moving example, there is at least one person who is carrying 4x the weight as the others. There is an individual or team who figured out how to coordinate a few hundred barn movers. There is at least one person who saved their money to buy the barn. There is one person or family that owns the land. The Amish don’t do communal property. They are proprietors. If you want to be the barn owner, you’d better have a strategy that revolves around you taking action, your resources and having something to offer. Your Amish Brothers and Sisters are there to help but only in accordance with their cultural norms. They do the things they do out of a sense of community, church and reciprocity. It’s hardly an example of Marxist Labor Theory.
Cool Story Bro!
WTF does all this have to do with a podcast for small business and the trades?
My point is this:
- Business is hard…really hard…but probably needlessly so. What’s true is that very few people succeed at it.
- Business, and especially small business, absolutely drives our economy, and by extension, all those things that are not business including government and nonprofits.
- I think it’s clear that America needs more self-employed and more small business owners.
- Tradesmen are unique in that they seem to be overrepresented in small business and generally have a lot of shit figured out that other classes of workers don’t.
- As AI advances to displace workers, it will likely take the knowledge work first, with many economists and social scientists arguing that the skilled trades is where the opportunity will be.
- As AI improves, many small business opportunities will be revealed.
- As AI improves, many of the barriers to entry to small business ownership could be completely or at least partially removed.
- Virtually all of the so-called “business podcasts” don’t really have a damn thing to do with business in any meaningful way for aspiring or current business owners or managers. All they do is share stories about businesses that advance business in America about as much as Lifetime Original Movies and the Hallmark Channel actually advance family values. They all tell cool stories and maybe provide enough motivation for a half-hearted sprint. But they don’t do much to get people to finish the race.
- You should join Goat Pen. Join the Podcast. And Join the discussions.
