0:00:00.1 Kurt Baker: What does it take to thrive in business and adapt to changing times? Meet Noelle Stary, founder of 20 Lemons, a full service marketing agency and Launchpad Creative Services, New Jersey’s first co-working space, a seasoned entrepreneur and author of Main Street Moxie, thriving in the new Americana economy. Noelle brings innovation and community to every venture. Let’s welcome Noelle as she shares her journey, business insights, and lessons on adapting to today’s economy. That’s cool, you’re the first. I love it when you’re the first.
0:00:40.2 Noelle Stary: Yeah, I am the first.
0:00:41.9 Kurt Baker: So what made you be the first? So usually people aren’t the first for no reason. There’s usually something that happened, there’s some reason that you decided to be the first.
0:00:50.8 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I started my marketing company in 2008 and I had started it after working in marketing in the hospitality industry, I knew that I liked working with small business from the time that I got out of college. I went to University of Maryland. I actually always thought I was gonna be in big corporate and I had interviewed a lot with big corporate and I started picking up just some side work working in a restaurant and next thing I knew I got hired on and I started working for a restaurant group and I fell in love with the speed of small business. I fell in love with the industry. I fell in love with getting to know people in the community, getting to know people in the neighborhood. And as I had moved on, or as, I kind of stayed around in business, I felt that I wanted to start a marketing company where we weren’t just doing the transactional side.
0:02:05.5 Noelle Stary: We weren’t just saying, hey, we need some design work and some postcards and can you produce it and give it back? I really want it to be a hand in glove relationship with the businesses to make sure that the marketing that we were bringing to the business owner, that all the different people in their business knew about it. And so I had started 20 Lemons and when I started it, I was about 26 years old and I was working out of my apartment and I thought to myself, this sucks, I hate it. I had been around… The hospitality environment is full of people full of… It’s it’s very fast. It’s got a lot of energy. And when I was working at home, I felt like just by myself.
0:02:58.5 Kurt Baker: Yeah, very isolated, I’m sure.
0:03:00.0 Noelle Stary: Very isolated. And I didn’t love it. And at the time, I had seen in New York that there was an all-female co-working space. And I thought to myself, well, I have some friends that started businesses around here and they all work by themselves. Maybe they’ll come and hang out with me. But at the time I was working and living in Woodbridge and most of my friends lived in Newark, Jersey. They lived down by the shore and they all said, I’m not driving an hour to come hang out with you. But at the time I had started telling people about I really would love to have this concept, I think that it’s really important that we have people to connect with and people to throw ideas around. And so I had come across another business owner that said, I’d love to get involved and start something with you.
0:03:55.8 Noelle Stary: And so we started looking at the idea of co-working and at the time, as I have mentioned, there were no co-working spaces in the state. There were co-working spaces out in California, out in Austin, out in New York. And we said, let’s open it up and so we opened Launchpad Creatives right on Main Street in Woodbridge, and what we would literally do is, we would like take our friends from the chamber, take our friends from our networking events, and we would just say, Hey, come in, work with us for the day out of our office. And so we started to just have space that like our friends can come and work out of.
0:04:40.8 Noelle Stary: And so luckily around just a few months after we opened a colleague of mine opened a co-working space in Asbury Park. And so the nice part was, when you don’t have competition in the market, you don’t really have a market. And so at least by having another co-working space, at least in Asbury when we were in Woodbridge, we felt like, okay, we’re not alone. And so I was really excited to get involved with the community. And if you noted, we started with the name Launchpad Creatives several years later, we did change the name from Launchpad Creatives to the Co-working space. And people said, isn’t that a really generic name? And I said, yeah, but I used to have to do a two minute elevator pitch to explain that Launchpad Creatives is a co-working space, and then explain what a co-working space was. And so, yeah, so we got started.
0:05:37.6 Kurt Baker: Yeah, sometimes it’s better to be direct, right?
0:05:39.3 Noelle Stary: Yeah.
0:05:39.7 Kurt Baker: If you get too fancy, people get confused a little bit. Right?
0:05:41.6 Noelle Stary: I used to think about it. Wasn’t it in Friends? The coffee shop was just the coffee shop or something.
0:05:45.2 Kurt Baker: Right, right, right, right, right, right, yeah. So sometimes we overthink things, and sometimes if you make it simple.
0:05:48.8 Noelle Stary: Yeah, I was like we are gonna keep it really simple.
0:05:51.3 Kurt Baker: Right, like Seinfeld’s a show about nothing, those kinds of things. So sometimes being very simple and straightforward actually works better. So if I’m understanding this correctly, part of this was just you wanted to be around other people. So what did you find out when you started actually implementing this? What were some of the things you were happy to see? Maybe some of the unexpected things that were challenges once you started doing this? ’cause there’s pros and cons, I know, when you get people together in the same space. So what kind of things did you see initially?
0:06:18.0 Noelle Stary: Yeah. That’s a really interesting question. So I came from an… So when I was in college at Maryland, I went to… I got my degree in HR, in human resources. And one of the things that they talk about in HR when you’re hiring or trying to create a culture, they talk about people that are kind of like you are gonna wanna stay and people that are like you are gonna leave on their own, they’re not gonna wanna stay, they’re not gonna wanna become members. So what we found was the people that stayed were very similar entrepreneurs. They had their business for a little period of time. They wanted to be able to interact with people. One of the reasons that we wanted to have a space and one of the ways that we talked about it was, hey, when I go to Starbucks, sure, I can go and I can have meetings at Starbucks and I can talk to people, but what do I do when I have to go to the bathroom? Or, hey, I get stuck in an idea, I’m not gonna turn to like the mom with the kid next to me and say, can I throw this idea past you? What do you think about it?
0:07:20.4 Noelle Stary: And so we really wanted to create this environment where you were around like-minded people. I would say that after running co-working spaces for 15 years, I can count on under one handful of disagreements with people in the spaces. Like the people that, when we’ve had people that have helped us with sales or closing conversions, sometimes they’ll say, I don’t want to sell someone. And I said, if someone’s coming and looking for space, they’re here because they wanna be here. And so I’ve really found that the people like working together. We’ve also found, and this has actually been nationwide, worldwide, phenomena for people in co-working spaces, that people tend to start pitching work together. And the concept of those guys working together is considered, it has been called hives. Co-working spaces end up having hives. And it’s been a really great experience.
0:08:24.7 Kurt Baker: Wow, that sounds really awesome. And I noticed, did you start this in 2008?
0:08:30.1 Noelle Stary: I started, 2009 was when I started the co-working space.
0:08:33.4 Kurt Baker: Well, that’s an interesting time in our history, so to speak. And I’m just curious about the challenges. It sounds like this was like an opportunity. They actually say most of the money is made in downturns, right? So you’re one of these people, it sounds like, where you saw a lot of consolidation all the way out. So a lot of people were really in kind of a panic mode, depending on where you were in the economy. It was tough for many parts of the economy. It sounds to me like you made a low-cost way for a lot of these people to really kind of get things started. Almost like, you hear about incubators and stuff like that. So you’re kind of the free market incubator, it sounds like to me.
0:09:08.2 Noelle Stary: Yeah, yeah, yeah, very similar.
0:09:09.6 Kurt Baker: Where people kind of get together. And I know there’s a lot of value. In fact, we talk about that now in just corporate America in general. Like everybody started working remotely. And now businesses are saying, we can’t be totally remotely because we’re missing that whole mastermind kind of thing.
0:09:24.2 Noelle Stary: Water cooler.
0:09:25.5 Kurt Baker: Yeah, when you talk to people together, that’s the point. Is that we work much better as teams. That’s always been the case. No matter how much you think you’re gonna do it all on your own, you’re not. Period. Bottom line. And even if you’re just reaffirming something you thought, it’ll actually help you make a decision. It’s like, I think I want to do something. I’m not a 100% sure, then when somebody else says, yeah, that sounds good, you’re like, oh, okay, I’ll go ahead and do it. I’ll take that step, jump off that, just go.
0:09:54.1 Noelle Stary: Yeah. And it was kind of interesting. When we started our space, we attempted to do a lot of programming like business development programming or business growth programming. And I started to realize, I didn’t wanna be a Chamber of Commerce, I didn’t wanna be a… I didn’t wanna be the SBDC. I didn’t want to be running education, I just wanted to create an environment that allowed for organic growth and organic communication. And that was a really important piece to the space.
0:10:31.9 Kurt Baker: So what were some of the things you did to kind of create that atmosphere? What did you find works really well to try to get people to do that?
0:10:37.8 Noelle Stary: Back to my hospitality side, I’m pretty sure a bunch of like free food and drinks is pretty helpful with that.
0:10:43.9 Kurt Baker: Works for me.
0:10:44.4 Noelle Stary: Yeah. Kind of creating space, we would set up rooms, the space was set up with a multitude of rooms and we would set up rooms that were quiet rooms. So hey, if you really didn’t wanna be distracted, you can go in there and we wanted to create spaces where people can comfortably converse, or if people wanted to host other networking events and open up introductions to the space, we wanted to set up environments like that. So it was more, this goes back to, so it’s kind of funny that you say that I started this in the downturn, I totally started this in the downturn. I started my marketing company in the downturn. Right before I started my marketing company, I was working for an agency and I was only hired several months before. And being in business school long enough, I know last one in, first one out.
0:11:38.5 Noelle Stary: And so I thought to myself, you know what, it’s kind of an interesting thought. I thought to myself, I remember being told when you’re running a business or if you’re doing something, the macro-economy does not have to affect your micro-business ecosystem. And so you could succeed in any micro-system if you can figure out what your system looks like. And so I just kind of thought to myself, you know what, now is as good as, if I’m gonna be like fired and let go and all this stuff, I might as well just go out there and start trying to find some stuff on my own.
0:12:16.0 Kurt Baker: I agree 100%.
0:12:17.1 Noelle Stary: Yeah.
0:12:25.0 Kurt Baker: Okay, well, that’s just awesome. So you’ve got the one you started. But you’ve done more than that now it sounds like. So you’ve grown that. So when you finally got the model kind of down. At what point did you realize, hey, maybe I wanna expand this beyond what we’re doing, and then how did you do that? Because there’s one to think about it but going out and actually replicating what you’re doing, that’s a whole ‘nother business model.
0:12:51.7 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I had my original space for about 10 years before I decided to do expansions. And during that time, I had been approached by other business or building owners, and they said, hey, you can come and lease and open up a space here, and you can come and lease and open up a space here. And I finally ended up opening a licensing model, so we worked with building owners and we essentially did the marketing component. Since then, the entire industry has kind of moved to giving opportunities to business owners… To building owners to do something like this with operators such as myself and doing them under management agreements. And because I am so lucky with my timing, I managed to open two new spaces the week that COVID shut everybody’s doors.
0:13:43.4 Kurt Baker: Oh, wow.
0:13:46.5 Noelle Stary: So between doing marketing for restaurants and having co-working spaces where everyone works in pretty tight places, we went into COVID really in a really bad spot. Like everything kind of shut down overnight.
0:14:03.5 Kurt Baker: Everything you did was people come… You Literally, you’re trying to bring everybody together and they’re telling you, no, we don’t want anybody together.
0:14:07.9 Noelle Stary: Totally.
0:14:09.2 Kurt Baker: So how did you pivot?
0:14:10.1 Noelle Stary: Yeah. So around that time, what we really did was we allowed the spaces to be open, but we allowed them to be open with isolated environments. From a marketing standpoint, we ended up getting really busy just because I got, I had to also work with my restaurants on how were they shifting. And I did go back to saying, let’s run some online programming. Let’s run some online message. And it was funny, like, one of the things that I’ve always learned in marketing was if you listen to the market, the market will tell you exactly how to sell them.
0:14:53.2 Kurt Baker: Very true.
0:14:56.2 Noelle Stary: At first we were trying to put together programming around marketing and put together programming around adjusting your business. And we started asking people, what is it that you actually want us to like do free for programming and they would say can you run a meditation class? Can you run a class on best cooking skills? People just wanted to actually get self care time and that was the content they were interested in. They actually had no interest in the business side of things and so around that time we did pivot. We pivoted, we started giving them that type of messaging. And I decided to write a book Main Street Moxie and Main Street Moxie kind of comes from the idea that the co-working space that I owned was on Main Street in Woodbridge. And I really wanted this to be for local downturn, local businesses in every different community.
0:16:01.7 Noelle Stary: And so when I wrote the book Main Street Moxie, during COVID, it was really about this concept of going back to basics. It wasn’t, it wasn’t fluffy. It wasn’t all the new innovative AI stuff. It was really about taking a step back. And when you feel like your whole world is upside down and falling apart, don’t overcomplicate it. And so that’s the key message of the book.
0:16:37.3 Kurt Baker: Oh, you said a whole lot right there all at once, which I think is great because I know, even in my business, everybody had time to kind of rethink all their priorities. A lot of people did things like start businesses, change companies, quit work, just, there’s all kinds of major changes that occurred when you were little told, you have to shut down, you have to stop, you may not like it, but here we are. So now what are you gonna do. So you really have a lot of time to do a little introspective planning for yourself. That you complain you can’t do things. All the time, we’re so busy, I can’t do anything, I can’t do anything, I can’t do anything. When I was like, okay, well now you’re not busy. And then the result of that was a lot of people really changed their direction, I think, during that whole process, which I think there were a lot of negatives. But I think that was one of the positives where people actually had some downturn to really rethink all of their priorities. I see a lot more people spending time with their families now, which I think is awesome.
0:17:31.2 Noelle Stary: I think people are taking, when we get to the holidays now, I refer to it as we’re taking European holidays, like we are actually taking holidays, whereas…
0:17:42.1 Kurt Baker: That’s so un-American where we take time off.
0:17:43.5 Noelle Stary: It’s so Un-American. ’cause usually I feel like everyone’s like, hey, it’s my wedding day, and I’m still sending text messages walking down the aisle.
0:17:51.3 Kurt Baker: I hear about people delivering babies and going back to work like a day or two later.
0:17:54.4 Noelle Stary: Yes, yes.
0:17:55.5 Kurt Baker: Like what?
0:17:56.8 Noelle Stary: I have heard this very much so. And I don’t see it quite as much. I see people really saying like, hey, it’s the holiday. We’re gone for a week and a half. We’ll see you before, we’ll see you after, but we’re out of commission.
0:18:11.4 Kurt Baker: And that, it reminds me of another part, is I think a lot of it is we were forced into a lot of automations and processes and the remote stuff was set up. Some entities were already set up, like, oh, that was no big deal, we just flipped the switch, we were ready to go. Other industries, not so much, like the restaurant industry, I think they’re much better at delivering food. I think they’re much better at doing things that they didn’t really necessarily do well before the whole shutdown. So I think in some ways, we were kind of forced to become more efficient, which then allows us to spend a little more personal time with like, why are we doing, what are we doing? And so, yeah, like the hospitality, I always find that a fascinating industry. In fact, they say if you wanna hire a good employee, you go and find somebody in the hospitality industry and you just train them in your particular area of work because you’re taught how to treat customers really, really well.
0:19:01.0 Noelle Stary: Yes.
0:19:01.9 Kurt Baker: Do you wanna tell us a little bit of insights like what you learned from that industry and how you pass that over to your business side of your life, so to speak? Can you help us out with that a little bit?
0:19:11.7 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I think that that’s so like I said, I went to University of Maryland. I got my degree in HR. I actually thought I was gonna be someone who went into corporate law and University of Maryland Business School always said, “Hey, make sure you work a few years before you go back and get your degree.” And I was interviewing with the big companies and I got into hospitality because I just need some side cash, just to kind of like, while I was interviewing and the owner of a business said, “Hey, what are you doing? Your hours are so screwy.” And he’s like, “Tell me more about your background.” And he started telling me about how he, he goes, Well, do you wanna work for my restaurant?” And I literally started crying ’cause I thought, oh my God, I didn’t go to college to like work in a restaurant. And he said, “Do you know how big this industry is?”
0:20:08.6 Kurt Baker: Oh, it’s enormous. Yeah.
0:20:09.6 Noelle Stary: He’s like, “This is a massive industry. There’s like… ” I thought the industry was so interesting to be a part of because, back to your point about the customer service, you have to understand quality and pricing and customer service, almost innately in order to like succeed in that business. And I feel like it’s a business that teaches you to be proactive. You have to be proactive. You have to anticipate people’s needs. You have to be able to deliver a high quality product because it’s an industry where people are very happy to also, to tell you when you have problems, you have to learn how to manage negative behavior. I totally agree with you. I think that it’s an industry that gives you a lot of skills that are super transferable to other businesses. I thought it was great. Yeah.
0:21:17.7 Kurt Baker: That’s incredible. So you embedded that in there. So when you set up the, you set up a, you said a licensing model. So what steps did you go through? First of all, why did you decide that instead of just opening your own? ’cause it sounds like, and then you, if I heard you correctly, you did the management, which sounds like the Marriott thing. They did that years ago. They used to own all the hotels and now they’re really mainly just a management company for the most part, from what I understand. So just kind of tell me why you made those decisions and how you came to those conclusions.
0:21:42.1 Noelle Stary: Yeah. When you’re running a business and you’re trying to think to yourself, how am I gonna expand? Our space was full. We had a full space, we were profitable, we were making money. And when someone said to me, Hey, you can come and open another lease agreement and furnish a space and put another team in, all I heard in my head was like dollar signs. I was like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna commit to another five year agreement or another 10 year agreement. I’m gonna have to hire people. And I thought to myself, there has to be a better way to do this. I wonder if there’s a way to partner with it. And so we started realizing that co-working spaces can meet rent roll, or whatever your rent roll was, the revenue on the co-working spaces are two to three times average rent roll.
0:22:32.5 Noelle Stary: And so I said, the person who really, people actually had said to me for a long time, they said, the people who really benefit from these spaces is the owner of the building. And so I thought to myself, maybe I can start partnering with building owners that had available space. And if they were working on site, they might already have an admin who can do some of the basic admin work. You don’t have to really put another full-time person in place. And so I would start just thinking about how that operations would look. And then, of course, I started just telling some people about the ideas. And as I started telling people, I started getting some interest. And so once I started getting some more established interest, I then approached a lawyer and said, what does it actually take to do something like this? And so we try to do that.
0:23:31.1 Kurt Baker: Awesome. So when you first talk to the lawyers about this, what were the steps they took you through and how, ’cause some people get like an, they go, oh, licensing, oh my gosh. It is like another world to them. So if you’re a business owner, you’re used to like going in and kind of getting dirty every day and doing the thing. You know what you’re doing and you’re like, and we start getting on this legal side and compliance side and all these other things. So if you could kind of walk them through like what that experience was like for you in case somebody else has a similar business saying, Hey, maybe I want to expand. And as you said, there’s two ways you can do it. You just start opening things up, of course, now you have to hire the employees, You have to get the space, you have to do everything yourself.
0:24:14.9 Kurt Baker: Or you can take your expertise and share that with somebody and end up with a win-win situation where if you template it well and set up the processes and systems well, you can just leverage that and actually do better. ’cause you can open up a lot more With a lot less time on your side and just really just sharing your expertise and the systems you put in place and things like that. And of course, the landlord wins too, because now they’re, especially now, all this space. So how did that conversation first start off with a lawyer?
0:24:42.9 Noelle Stary: Yeah, So a lot of people say to me, oh, you have a franchise. And I immediately go, no, I do not have a franchise. And the main reason I say that is, is when you are starting to look at the different business entities that you wanna have, a franchise just has so many more components to it that I just felt that is not the direction that I wanna go. These spaces are meant to be a little more organic. They don’t have to really follow the full letter of the law. And so I knew that I wanted it to have a little bit more freedom for us and for the business owner. And so when I started working with the lawyer, it’s really interesting. Lawyers are more than happy to fight either side of the position of what you’re trying to.
0:25:32.9 Kurt Baker: Oh, Of course that’s what they do with school first.
0:25:34.4 Noelle Stary: What you’re trying to accomplish. And so I think it’s important that when you’re talking to a lawyer, you are very clear on your side what you want them to do, and you have it basically spelled out and you’re asking them to help you execute it. If you have specific questions, then you should ask those specific questions. But if you wanna use them as a business coach or as someone who’s gonna work through each of these components, like I said, they’re more than happy to tell you the pros and cons of any single point that you position. And I think you can find that to be a very frustrating situation. And it eats a lot of time and it starts adding up to big dollars. And so in order to kind of keep that stuff in sync, I think you wanna be really clear before you go in. So make sure that you’re getting your other questions, your finance questions hashed out with your accounting, get them hashed out with your business coach, get your financial plannings figured out. Do some research online, like make sure you do those pieces first.
0:26:41.3 Kurt Baker: So When you started setting up your licensing agreement, what were the things that you wanted to make sure were addressed in there so you didn’t have problems later on?
0:26:47.9 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I think the more that you are in business, when you start looking at more bigger legal agreements, to me I always joke and say, well, the bigger the legal agreements, it’s because they’ve had more problems along the way, so they say, make sure that you slide this in too.
0:27:04.6 Kurt Baker: True. Very true.
0:27:05.7 Noelle Stary: And so for me, I felt like one of the more important pieces whenever you get into any type of contract that you’re gonna do is, is, hey, it’s, as much as it’s important to know how I’m getting something started or how it’s gonna be maintained, I need to really understand what’s my crash and burn scenario. If this doesn’t work or if I decide to break this agreement, or they decide to break this agreement, what does that really look like? And so understanding your kill portion of the agreement, I think is a really important piece.
0:27:37.3 Kurt Baker: Do you wanna elaborate on that a little bit? The kill portion? Go ahead. Just what do you mean by that?
0:27:41.2 Noelle Stary: Yeah. Fast forward to December, 2024, I only have one co-working space. Now, our original co-working space we shut during COVID because we basically turned it into fully private offices. Our second co-working space was a smaller office space, but it had a huge conference room with it. And so part of the big sell for that building was the conference room. And when you got to COVID and all conference stuff stopped, the deal just didn’t make sense. The math would’ve never made sense on that space without the conference room. And so being able to go into the conversation with the licensee was important because we needed to understand, Hey, how are we gonna shut this thing down? And the kill agreement really breaks down, Hey, if you’re open for one year, what does that look like?
0:28:50.7 Noelle Stary: Or two years, or three years? So it kind of helps to give some guardrails as to how do you shut this down if you don’t fulfill the entire term of the contract. And so when I was thinking about how you put that piece together, and everyone always says, oh, I’ll try to be fair in a moment. I think it’s hard for people to be fair when things are breaking apart. And so when you look at the kill agreement, you wanna kind of say, Hey, I wanna make sure that we’re both signing off on this in the front end and we feel like it’s gonna be like a fair deal if we ever shut down.
0:29:30.6 Kurt Baker: Yeah. It’s always better being clear up front. Always Better.
0:29:32.4 Noelle Stary: It’s super important. So we did have to execute on that for the secondary space and it ended up being okay.
0:29:41.0 Kurt Baker: Good.
0:29:41.8 Noelle Stary: Everyone walked away in a good spot.
0:29:43.0 Kurt Baker: So are you actively looking for other places to partner? I know there’s a lot of vacant commercial space right now, or is this not a good point in the evolution of the economy? What are your feelings about adding or not adding right now?
0:29:54.6 Noelle Stary: Yeah. That’s a really interesting question. It’s a question that I’m evaluating for myself right now. I think that the way people and businesses interact has definitely changed. I constantly say a lot of my clients over the last year, they’ll say to me, Hey, I feel like my numbers are down, or I feel like people aren’t buying this anymore. And if you look at the broad economy, I think people are still buying, they’re just buying different.
0:30:24.8 Kurt Baker: Absolutely.
0:30:25.4 Noelle Stary: So you have to kind of like look at your environment and say, Hey, how do I just shift it? How do I shift my product 5% or 10% so that I can kind of go back to where my market space is buying? So I think at the time, I think I’m really focused on just keeping our current space operating well. I have been in touch with a lot of people in the co-working world. It is a market space that’s growing. But I sometimes look at the New Jersey economy and the New Jersey temperament and how people in Jersey like to do business. And I’m not totally sold that our market space really wants to embrace it.
0:31:14.5 Kurt Baker: Fair enough. Well, you’re in the business so it’s better to know. And then, ’cause last time you grew it was like things were quite consolidating. So maybe in a year or two or three, if something like that occurs, you might say, oh, maybe this is something they want right now, maybe not so much.
0:31:26.8 Noelle Stary: I think co-working still works. I think it’s looking a little different. When I set up our licensing agreement, I think that this is also one other important part. I set up our agreement as a five-year term with a renewable, with renewable terms. And the lawyer had advised me and some people advised me, they said, Hey, you should set this up as a 10 year term. Like when you think of big lease agreements on malls and big buildings, they’re always very long terms. And just because I had seen how co-working had evolved since 2009, I said, I think co-working is gonna look different in a few years and if it adjusts, then I wanna be able to readjust our terms. And so it’s kind of interesting. I predicted it a bunch of years ago and I’m like, Hey, here we are. And maybe it’s better that I gave myself an opportunity to say, Hey, let’s shift this around so that we can remold it and put it back out.
0:32:26.1 Kurt Baker: Awesome. Okay. Well, you’re doing a lot and I know actually we met at the Princeton Mercer Regional Chamber. So I’m just curious about like why you decided to join the Chamber, which has been your experience, and ’cause I know you deal with kind of mainly smaller businesses. So how did that whole, what inspired you to do that, I guess to start with? And then what’s been the experience like dealing with other Business Owners of the Chamber?
0:32:50.6 Noelle Stary: Yeah. Back to like the community component, I live in Cranberry, New Jersey and Princeton Chambers right around the corner. And I always think that when you have an opportunity to be around other business owners, it really gives you a pulse on what’s happening in the market space. So it’s kind of funny. I feel like, for me, I use the Chamber more or the, my contacts that I meet from the Chamber, more as a sounding board for, what are they seeing or what are new trends or what are… Like, hey, what’s happening with redevelopment in certain areas? So that I can kind of get an idea of where I wanna be pivoting my business. I was just at the Women in Business holiday luncheon the other day, the WIBA event. And it was just even so interesting. Anytime I get into that room with like, all those women, they’re all, like.
0:33:50.3 Kurt Baker: There’s a lot of them.
0:33:51.5 Noelle Stary: There’s a lot of them. They’re like, they’re always like, oh, this is so magical, we need to do more. And a lot of them really talk about like, Hey, we really wanna be able to support each other and how can we get in front of each other and can we make sure that we know more about each other? And so again, I think back to your comment about being virtual. Virtual’s fine, but I just think that there’s an element of relationship that happens when you’re in a room with people. And so the chamber’s been really great because of the different type of events that they hold that you can get in front of and spend time with people. I think that that’s the big part that I like.
0:34:29.8 Kurt Baker: So what are you seeing with small businesses up and running, like the ones that are in your co-working space? Like what kinds of business did you see kind of getting started, which ones do you see are kind of like, what do you see happening out there since you’re kind of in touch with a lot of these smaller businesses? What’s your view on all that? What’s going on right Now?
0:34:45.5 Noelle Stary: So I would say, I think that there’s a lot of pivoting going on. Like one of the things that I see on the marketing side is there’s tons of changes happening on social media. There’s tons of changes happening on the Google algorithms. And so a lot of the businesses that I’m working with are trying to figure out how can I get more with less? And what I mean by that is, there’s so much data out there, there’s so much reporting, there’s so much and they’re trying to eat it all up. And I actually think that we’re taking a step in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is, I don’t know if you can really get a whole lot more with a whole lot less, like I think people need to reestablish what they’re really trying to achieve and figure out how to do that within the constraints they have.
0:35:51.6 Noelle Stary: Whether it’s their budget or their time or their effort, or their energy. So like, I’m sitting on a chair and one of the things that I talk about in my marketing business is, is I say, Hey, when you make a marketing plan, you don’t have to come up with 20 and 30 ideas, like, a chair has four legs. ’cause that’s what supports your butt and your body weight. So when you’re trying to think about, Hey, how do I want to grow my business? Or what do I wanna do? I actually think that there’s some value in slowing down, taking a step back and saying, wait, what are the most like, essential things that I have to be doing? Sometimes I think businesses are trying to overextend themselves because of the speed at which we see a lot of the stuff happening on social and podcast and on big website changes and all of this stuff. And I don’t think that you have to compete with that. I think it goes back to that micro economy piece.
0:36:53.9 Kurt Baker: Yeah. I think you brought up something very, very critical, which I hear about all the time, and I talk to business owners all the time. It’s like you have to get narrow and deep in whatever you’re gonna do because there’s literally unbounded opportunities right now, if you’re really, if you’re paying attention and you wanna go do something, there’s, it’s like almost like there’s too much opportunity, because you have to say, wow, there’s a lot. And then one of the problems when you start doing something, it’s very easy to get distracted when you’re digging deep into something. ’cause you’ll start seeing more and more things that they might need. But you gotta really get good at doing one or two or three things, just a couple things really, really, really well. And once you kind of nail that, then maybe you start talking about, we see big businesses do this all the time, where they go.
0:37:34.8 Noelle Stary: Yeah, for sure.
0:37:35.3 Kurt Baker: We’re gonna go acquire something that really has no synergy with them whatsoever. You’re like, why the heck did they buy that business? I think they’re getting better at not doing that. But I know years ago they would just say, oh, we wanna buy this kind of company. We’re like, just because we think it’ll be a nice diversion, a nice diversification, I should say. And ended up being a diversion. Maybe that’s just a slip there, but, so they think they’re diversified, but you can only think about so much. That’s why like these tech geniuses like wear the same t-shirt every day, that kind of stuff. Because they don’t wanna make too many decisions. They wanna reserve them for the stuff they have to really do.
0:38:04.0 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I also think, like the other thing that I’m seeing a lot of is I think a lot of businesses are having more challenges with customer service. And again, I think part of that comes with the squeeze of there’s so much going on and people are distracted and customers want more and faster and cheaper. And it’s sometimes, businesses may miss the quality on something because they were trying to get something out too fast. Or someone’s trying to exchange something and maybe the customer service is being outsourced to another country and they only have a certain amount of data or a certain amount of level of, Hey, this is what I can do for you. And so I think that… I think customer service has been a big challenge. I think when I talk to my colleagues, when I talk to a lot of businesses that’s an area that I think is like a big, it has more troubles right now.
0:39:08.5 Kurt Baker: So what do you think is the next step? Where do you think we’re gonna head with that? How do you think we address that? Obviously, if I have better customer service than the person next down the street, I’m much more likely to obtain and retain a client or a customer. Right?
0:39:19.9 Noelle Stary: Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of interesting. Now we’re gonna start delving into AI for a second.
0:39:26.3 Kurt Baker: Right. Sure.
0:39:27.9 Noelle Stary: I feel like I was just looking at the headline the other day and it was talking about, how Siri and ChatGPT are like now connecting. And so just moving to this idea of, are there opportunities with AI to help with getting answers to whatever you need on your customer service? Can you have more FAQs? Can you have more automation? Can you make sure that you set up better reminders for people? Can you set up you know follow up surveys that are happening after experiences to kind of make sure, hey, if there’s a problem, can I catch it faster and get back to them? So I think we’re at a really interesting point because the tech’s there to help with the better customer service. But I think it’s the marrying it.
0:40:19.8 Kurt Baker: Absolutely.
0:40:20.8 Noelle Stary: With the human element.
0:40:22.7 Kurt Baker: No, I agree. In fact, one of the things I was at that’s very big into the AI and the automation, which we talked about offline a little bit, but one of the things is like, they were running this workflow and this process down and it’s one of the conversations, it got to a certain point like, why don’t you just automate that part of it? He’s like, no, no, no, no, no. At this point in the conversation, we want a real person involved because you’re gonna get into nuanced things. That no matter how good you train the AI, you want the personality in there. It could answer all the questions, possibly. But you have to have a human interaction at some point. And I think if it’s done well and I’m just calling him and saying what’s your address?
0:41:01.8 Kurt Baker: And it tells me that I’m gonna be happy, get off the phone and be happy. But if I start asking very personal specific questions, like, I have this pain in my side and I think it’s doing this and I think it’s doing that, oh, it could be this, this, this, this. 37% of this. Hat doesn’t feel very personal to me. I think I’d like to actually talk to somebody about this. So I think it all depends on like the conversation. So part of that, I think the challenge is gonna be is like, where do you stop the automation and plug the people back in again. Because as you know, from the hospitality world, we’re all human beings and ultimately we want to have that quality connection. If the automation helps with the other things that aren’t really necessary as far as us having to like, remember things and do things. That’s great. But don’t forget, ultimately there’s a reason that I don’t have all my meals delivered to my house. I wanna go out to dinner and have a nice atmosphere experience, have people around me. And isn’t that the point? Talk to the waiter waitress. Don’t you wanna do that?
0:41:56.0 Noelle Stary: Yeah. It’s even interesting ’cause when we were in the heart of COVID, one of the messaging pieces that we really worked on with a lot of our clients, so some of our clients that we work with are in the trucking and logistics business. And so when you’re thinking about, Hey, I just need a courier to get me from, get something, get a package from A to B, you’re not thinking like, Hey, this is Bob the driver that came out to help you. And what we really started doing was like highlighting, hey, this is the person who’s coming out and this is our team and this is like the way that we do things. And we really want it to personalize it because we want it to put the feeling that business is done with people doing business with people. It’s people with people. And it’s not always just transactional. And so to your point, I think there’s going to be a little bit of a challenge in understanding how do we use AI as a supplement without boxing out the personal aspect.
0:43:05.3 Kurt Baker: No, I agree. So with all this knowledge we have and everything where do you think we’re kind of going from here? ’cause you have a marketing background and the co-working space, so you’re right there on the front line. So where do you see all this kind of moving in the next like year or two? Where do you see us headed?
0:43:18.0 Noelle Stary: Yeah. I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching on this concept in the last few days. And I think part of why I’ve been doing it is because, like I said, I think that there’s a really interesting speed at which business is happening today. And I think we sometimes need to look at just because something’s moving fast, should it? And so what I mean by that is, I have seen a lot of businesses in the last year doing a lot of pivots. So back to what I was saying a minute ago with some businesses are seeing, hey, I’m a little slow, but it’s because people may not be buying the product that they were always putting out. They have to actually shift their product a little bit to be in front of a different buyer at this point.
0:44:19.2 Noelle Stary: So I think that businesses and people and the way that we’re interacting is, businesses are reevaluating, what is the real product in the service that I need to be putting out there? So actually looking at the product line itself first, and then how am I getting it out there? I think there’s more competition than ever in almost every market space that you’re looking at right now. And I don’t think that that should be little people thinking that they can get a share of the market. I think they just have to get more clear on what their niche is. I think that almost all businesses that I’m talking to are talking about how can I utilize AI more in my business? And so they’re trying to find ways to utilize it. And as far as how people are working, it’s really interesting. I feel like there is still a really interesting cultural component right now where people are still showing up to their, if they show up to their office, I don’t think they’re getting the same office experience that they were getting before. And I think businesses are still struggling to create what a new culture looks like. Yeah.
0:45:43.7 Kurt Baker: Well, Noelle, this has been awesome. The time has flown by.
0:45:46.1 Noelle Stary: Thanks.
0:45:46.9 Kurt Baker: I appreciate it very much. You’ve been listening to Master Your Finances. Did you have fun?
0:45:54.4 Noelle Stary: Yeah.
0:45:55.7 Kurt Baker: Good. That was awesome. Yeah, we could easily spend like a…
