Hello My Quilting Friends! Leah Day here with Episode 3 of the podcast and I’m recording this on November 22nd 2016. Today I’m going to share an interview my husband and business partner Josh Day. Josh and I work together and are equal shareholders in our business, and I can honestly say that Josh is 50% if not more of this business.
Learn more about Josh and the behind the scenes of what we do in this fun episode!
Transcript from Hello My Quilting Friends Episode #3:
(Note - this transcript contains affiliate links which help pay for the hosting of this new podcast)
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Even though it’s my face in the videos and my name on the website, Josh is the man behind the curtain and does so much work behind the scenes to keep our business running smoothly. If you email me through the site LeahDay.com, it will be Josh that responds to you. If you place an order, it will be Josh who packs your order for you and ships it to you.
In this interview it’s Josh’s turn to talk and share a side of our business that we’ve never had the opportunity to share – how it works from the back end, the good and bad sides of working together, and a little bit about how we balance work and family, even though we work from home.
Now for an update about what’s going on around the house…
To be honest I really didn’t get as much done last week on the new Machine Quilting Block Party for 2017. It’s just been hard to focus because I feel like I’m literally blowing up my brain trying to get this podcast off the ground. Just learning the basics of podcasting is really pushing me beyond my comfort zone and there is definitely a learning curve to this.
But thankfully I already had the audio editing software for my podcast. I’m using Cyberlink Audio Director and Wave Director and I got that with my video editing software Power Director Pro so that’s allowing me to edit the clips and splice them together and create these shows and it works very similar to my video editing software so at least that wasn’t too much of a change.
So this week I’m going to buckle down and focus exclusively on Block #1 for January. I have the piecing design and it’s definitely ready to go, but now I need to type up the directions, double check my cutting instructions, and get it all formatted together and ready for Josh to edit. Did I mention that was another job Josh does for me? He’s the text editor, at least he’s the first person to see the patterns, then I’ll hand it to our full time piecer employee and they’ll double check all of my math and cutting and then usually I know it’s pretty solid and ready to go.
So I’m really needing to get these quilting designs nailed down. When I design the quilting for my sampler quilts, I always design the blocks first, then I design the quilting designs on top and that way it has a very cohesive look so you don’t end up with like – here’s a really dense design in one corner and then you never have that design in the rest of the quilt. That looks really unbalanced and samplers are tricky anyway because you have such a mesh of different styles and types of blocks.
So designing this is a process, it just takes time and it’s just one of those things that you have to slow down and take your time and I just haven’t felt that I had that block of space so I’m hoping around Thanksgiving I’ll be able to kick kind of back a little bit and sit down with that piece of paper at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. That’s my favorite thing to design. I favorite place to design because I have a bright front window there and I can just sit back with a cup of tea and start working on that design and relax into it.
When I try and push myself to design something like “You need to sit down and design this right now, this second!” then of course nothing comes because I’m feel like I’m on a clock. And I just need to chill out about it and let it all happen.
The Tunic Challenge Continues
Another thing I’ve been actually happily distracted by is The Tunic Challenge with Amy Johnson. I got my pattern cut out and both Amy and I, I think on the same day we both realized that cutting the muslin out too, that’s just basically cutting it out of plain fabric and fitting it, that was too much to do in one week. It was just too much to bite off all at once so we were both happy just to cut out the pattern and next week, next Saturday we will both have it fitted.
And I already did a little bit of playing and I already realized that the pattern is a little long and this is kind of unusual because I already have a long torso already, but I just didn’t like how long the tunic was fitting so I already knew I was going to shorten it a bit and then I want to check the fit of the sleeves next. I haven’t done this yet. I want to check the fit of the sleeves.
I have really long arms and it annoys me to no end when my sleeves fit short so I’m going to double and triple check that the sleeves fit really nicely. That’s the number one reason why I send a shirt back to the store is because the sleeves don’t fit and it feels like, I don’t know, kind of like highwater pants, but on sleeves? I don’t know if that makes any sense, but if my sleeves don’t come down past my wrists I just find that really annoying.
So I’m going to make sure that is all fitted and you can definitely find the updates for that. We’re posting them every Saturday to both my blog FreeMotionProject.com and also to Amy Johnson is posting and she’s at FreeMotionQuiltingAdventures.com.
Cosplay Sewing Project
Oddly enough I haven’t been sewing in months and I ended up with both The Tunic Challenge and a costume for Josh on the cutting table at the exact same time. Josh and I make costumes of comic book and video game characters and cosplay, that’s like dressing up and go to comic book conventions.
This past summer we saw two awesome movies – Deadpool and Suicide Squad and of course I’d love to dress up like Harley Quinn, and Josh wants to be Deadpool. They seem like a match made in heaven and perfect for cosplaying together because they both wear red. Right?
But we never like to do things straight from the movies. We talked about it and looked through Pinterest and just looked for inspiration and I finally decided to steampunk it up. So Steampunk is a funky style that combines some Victorian elements, with things like corsets and top hats with a science fictiony, kind of technology spin.
Basically it asks the question what if people were able to have the same modern gadgets that we have now like cell phones and computers, but back then, back in the Victorian age when everything was run by steam power. Common themes in steampunk are clocks and gears and vintage technologies like Zeppelins.
But it’s always a little bit of a modern twist. You see a lot of leather and a lot of brass in steampunk and it’s making me want to get into leather work. Which would be really fun.
For Josh’s costume I’ve been cutting out a faux leather jacket, it’s not the real stuff, it’s vinyl and I’m using McCalls pattern number 7374 that has a distinctive Victorian cut. The cool thing is this pattern could have multiple uses. It could easily make a Doctor Who coat or a trench coat for Neo in Matrix. For this costume I’m making it out of dark red vinyl fabric, that more or less looks like leather and lining it with dark red cotton.
And I’ve already figured out –this stuff I can’t fold it. And I’m actually in that kind of tetchy stage where I’ve cut everything out and it’s in a million pieces and I really need to sew it together because I have a feeling just in shifting things around and there is always tons of stuff being put on the table and then folded off and shifted off the table when I need more space. I need to get it sewn because I can already see that this is a problem. If you fold this vinyl it creates a very visible crease and it doesn’t come out ever.
You know when I was cutting out the pattern that thankfully nothing was cut…well two pieces were cut on the fold, but I flipped it and made the pattern piece longer so that way I wouldn’t have to fold the fabric to make that piece. It was the collars. And I noticed that I’ve gotta be very careful with these pieces. So I have to get in there and sew these pieces together so it’s no longer in this state where it could definitely get messed up and that’s really scary.
Incidentally if you’d like to read a series of books that features a steampunk, Victorian heroine and vampires and werewolves you should definitely check out the book Soulless by Gail Carriger. I’ve listened to the first five books and they’re excellent and filled with dirigibles, poltergeists, armed umbrellas and much more. It’s a good series to listen to while sewing. It’s really silly.
So between two sewing patterns and the Machine Quilting Block Party and Thanksgiving, this week feels really packed, but that’s not a bad thing though. It’s this time of the year that things heat up and get a bit crazy and that’s okay. I kind of have a little bit of a resistance to it and then I realize this is temporary, it’s crazy from about November until April and then things back off a bit and we have our summer for things to slow down and take a break, but really this time of the year it’s meant to heat up and that’s okay.
Sponsor
So that’s what’s going on around the house and of course this week’s sponsor for the show is my website LeahDay.com where you will find the biggest sale of the year starting tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day! Everything in the store is on sale including our very popular Affordable Sewing Table which is $20 off during this sale.
Now this is the sewing table I’ve used for years and it features a flatbed shelf which you can lower or raise your machine so the needle area is on a flush surface with your table top. This shelf is adjustable so no matter what type or size of machine you have you can make it fit this table.
Our tables come with a custom cut acrylic insert that fits around your sewing machine and it fills in the gaps between the machine and the edges of the hole. It is a small table, not a big bulky, expensive cabinet so it has a small footprint. And that’s really nice because when you’re piecing a small quilt, it’s actually the perfect size for it right off the bat.
But if you’re wanting to quilt larger quilts, you can easily expand the surface using folding tables or I found some really good table tops at IKEA that have a slippery coating that were perfect to expand the surface. I’ve also, out in the Crafty Cottage, I cut a big sheet of melanine. Melanine is basically particle board with a plastic coating. And I cut that to fit around my table exactly in the Crafty Cottage and that worked great and I think the melanine was $40 - $50 for a huge sheet so it was very economical.
Now this table, the Affordable Sewing Table and insert combo normally costs $280, but during this sale only it will cost $260. Learn more about this affordable sewing table at LeahDay.com/table
And now…on to the show!
Leah: Hello My quilting friends! Leah Day here and today I’m joined by my husband and business partner, Josh Day. Welcome to the show Josh.
Josh: Hello Leah and thank you and hi my quilting friends.
Leah: Now I’m not sure that everyone knows our history and how we’ve worked together. So you want to start just by sharing how we first started working together.
Josh: Yes, sure. This actually takes us back to our college years. I’d just graduated from UNC-Asheville in 2004 and Leah and I moved into a small, one bedroom basement apartment. And I started working for my father, Chet Day of ChetDay.com
I answered some email, did content creation, SEO which means search engine optimization and basically did a lot of his technical work and site maintenance and I did this for six years. We lived in Asheville for two years, 2004 to 2006, and during the first year Leah was still going to college as a junior. Leah, do you want to tell that story?
Leah: yeah, well technically it was my third year of college, but I didn’t have the credits to be a junior, so technically I was still a sophomore, but I dropped out within the first couple of weeks. I can remember that I made the decision to drop out the last week of October that year so I just saw you working online and being at home and kind of doing your own thing, making your own routine and schedule and you had so much more independence than I did, as far as just being able to wake up when you wanted to, and eat lunch when you wanted to, and go out to a restaurant and have a beer in the middle of the day.
And I really liked that and I liked seeing that so I envied that. That was one of the things that inspired me to drop out and say “I don’t need this degree anymore.”
Josh: Also to add to that you weren’t happy with your degree either. You were attempting a Biology degree and you didn’t really have any future plans with it and you were honestly miserable.
Leah: Yeah, well what am I going to do a biology degree?! Like teach biology? You know, not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just it was just never going to be what I wanted to do. I wanted to own a business. Even when I was a little girl, I wanted to own a business and just seeing how you were working with your dad made me realize that might actually be easier and actually possible. I’d never really considered that, you know working online as a possibility.
Josh: Absolutely. That was definitely kind of the first chink in the armor. You saw the possibility of working at home, making your own hours, and that goes part and parcel with the whole idea of starting your own business and being your own boss and being in charge of your own destiny.
Leah: Yeah, I think you need to have somebody to model it for you. I think that’s why a lot of kids that are the children of business owners become business owners. Just like the children of doctors tend become doctors and lawyers become lawyers because they see that lifestyle being modeled that’s how they grow up. I didn’t necessarily grow up in that background but seeing you and of course you’d grown up with it with Chet. It’s like seeing something that’s kind of totally different and it opened up my eyes and my world to it and then that’s when I started sewing.
I don’t know if you remember back on Hubbard (our old address) I pulled out a sewing machine and just started sewing all the time and I’d not really done that to that degree until we moved in. And I didn’t have room to have other things out, it really just became all about sewing.
Josh: You know staying on this topic, you’re first business was actually the christening gowns and the christening outfits remember with your sewing machine when you pulled it out of the closet?
Leah: Yeah, it’s kind of actually embarrassing to think about now. I’m sure if somebody uses a Wayback Machine, that’s a website that shows kind of what a website looks like many years ago. And you can use that to go back in time and see like what Amazon looked like when it was first being built.
Well you can go back and use the Wayback Machine to see LeahDay.com when it was first started and I guess that was 2004 -2005 and yeah, the first thing I thought of doing was to make old style christening gowns like ruffles and lace galore. Just totally over the top and to sell those. To make them custom and that was my original idea. I never sold a single one and mostly I just remember being very frustrated because I hated everything about.
Like I’m not the type of person to actually put my child in a christening gown! And I guess that was one of my first lessons – you can’t make something and sell something that you wouldn’t actually buy yourself. You know?
Josh: Exactly. But that was the foundation, that was the very beginning and I remember that site. I was really proud of all the work you did on it. Because that opened my eyes to the possibilities that we could do together because we used the base template which is essentially the core of any website, this is ChetDay.com and just built upon that to build the original LeahDay.com.
Leah: Yeah and you taught me all of that. You taught me how to play with Dreamweaver that was the site builder that we were using at the time. You taught me how to use Dreamweaver and a lot of times I can remember being like “How do I get the image in there?” and “How do I get it the right size?” and you’d be like “Stand up and let me show up, let me show you.” And I’d be like “No! I’ve gotta do it myself!”
So I can remember it was a little, it was really the first thing we did together and you really taught me from the ground up and then that site eventually I just ended up taking it down. There were several years there where it just didn’t end up getting used and when I went back to it years later and started Day Style Designs, that was our first site for quilting, that’s when I resurrected it and rebuilt a lot of it, but all of that foundation, everything you taught me from the beginning I definitely used. It’s still in my head.
Josh: Yeah, we’ve come a long way, have we not?
Leah: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So things have changed a lot since the beginning of our business. Now we are on a totally different website system, we’re on Shopify, and you have a very different role. You know, you work with me and you are really more than 50% of the business so what do you do every day for LeahDay.com?
Josh: Wow. First, may I tell the story of how I came on board?
Leah: Yeah, sure.
Josh: In 2008, as everyone remembers, that was the major recession that hit not only brick and mortar stores, it also hit a number of online businesses. My father’s site ChetDay.com was not immune, though it happened a lot slower to us.
Then when 2009 rolled around, Leah began the Free Motion Quilting Project and began our online store with just nine products and she did all the blogging, all the video editing, all the quilt creation, and all the customer service including shipping all by herself.
And as her business grew, Dad’s business continued to feel the effect of the recession and I had a salary cut and eventually he couldn’t keep the business afloat with me as contract labor any longer. But thankfully at this point Leah’s business and the Free Motion Quilting Project had grown so much that she could take me on as full shipping and website maintenance and marketing too.
So that’s how I came on board and that was mid 2010.
Leah: Yeah, that was August 2010 and it was when we were launching the book Free Motion Quilting from Daisy to Paisley and the DVD, we were coming out with a DVD and a book at the same time and don’t ever do that! If you ever consider coming out with multiple products at once, that is not a good combo. It’s very stressful and I just reached a point where it was like - I can’t do this by myself.
It was just, you know there was so much email and that was so much time back and forth and communicate with people and try to have the best customer service I could have and then also trying to write a book on top of that and I was at that time, I was doing all my formatting and doing all that stuff myself and it was just, I can remember, it was kind of a crucial point and I looked at you and I was like “You gotta work for me.” There really wasn’t a choice.
I never regretted it. You were already packing the orders and helping out six months or more before that so it just made the most sense and at that point Chet took back over that side of the business that you had been doing the order packing and stuff and we switched around the Paypal account and got it set up and it was within a day that you came on board and started doing all of the customer service and all of the email and then all of the order packing.
Josh: Mmm…well getting back to the question on what my day is like?
Leah: Yeah, what do you do every day?
Josh: Okay. Well, first I get up and turn on the computer or waken the computer. And what’s interesting things have evolved just in the last five or six years with mobile devices so it’s no longer just a computer. When I first started working for my dad Chet it was just a desktop computer. That was all you needed.
Because back then your phones, you didn’t have these apps. Your average person didn’t even know what an app was. I don’t even think the term app was around back then. We called them extensions.
But what happened, what I do now, I usually have my phone with me too and I check all of our social media sites and check our email, do customer support. And then I pull down the orders for the day and pack the orders.
My day usually begins around 8:30 – 9, that’s the great thing about working from home and having your own business, you set your own hours.
There is a caveat to that though, you remember Wall Street with Michael Douglas “Money never sleeps.” Well the internet never sleeps, and even more so, social media never sleeps.
So while you do make your own hours, you don’t really get to take a real day off. You always have to access something remotely just to make sure there’s not any spam on your social media or you know, not a major catastrophic thing with warehouse or shipping problem or say, if you were expecting in a couple pallets of books. You always have to be on the ball pretty much 24/7.
Leah: But that being said, we can’t work all the time.
Josh: Yeah, that was going to be my next point. We do sleep. I try as hard as I can to stay on top of social media, there have been some issues with that in the past with spammers and some bad links and things like that, I try to take care of that as soon as I can. But, yes, we do definitely have our off times as everyone needs to.
Leah: Yeah, and what do you like the best about working with me and doing this business?
Josh: I’m just amazed at how well we’ve grown it. You pioneered the project and it just took off and just looking at the organic grown and how far we’ve come from 2009.
Our first real manufactured projects were Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Free Motion Filler project and these were DVDs that we sold and we initially ordered I believe what 200 of the first one?
Leah: Yeah, I like to pretend those never happened.
Josh: Yeah, they had their problems. The resolution wasn’t the best. It wasn’t the highest quality, the audio had some issues. But I need to be honest, we only had one complaint and we sold a couple hundred of those, a couple hundred plus.
My favorite aspect is just controlling your own destiny and working with you Leah and being part to some degree of the creative process. Case in point being Building Blocks Quilt Along, I’m sure we’ll get into this a bit later. That was my idea to pull up a chair beside Leah and do two quilts on the project. One with Leah and her high skill set and then me where you can’t get more of a beginner than myself here.
I’ve never touched a sewing machine aside from you know, packing them and hauling them around. So that’s what I enjoy the most - just controlling our own destiny, working at home, and being part of the business.
Leah: Now I guess I should follow that up by asking what do you like least about working with me?
Josh: Working with you in specifically? Or just the business?
Leah: Well…both. Let’s just say both.
Josh: Let’s see. Let me think for a minute here. Well again there’s a pro and con to this. I don’t know. I’m sure you all have kind of detected this but Leah can be pretty stubborn. And once she’s onto an idea she’ll take that idea all the way to the bank for the most part.
And that’s both a blessing and a curse sometimes. Usually she’s dead on like case in point starting The Free Motion Quilting Project. I never thought it would take off. I was happily proven wrong. But sometimes there have been decisions that Leah has made or both of us have made together which were just the wrong decisions that never fit our business model.
And that’s one thing that I’d like to digress a little bit. Our goal is to reach you know people online all over the world and show them it’s not hard to free motion quilt and it’s definitely doable and here are the instructions for you. You know, you may not have access to a local to a local guild. You may not have access to a local quilt library.
And that is what our business model is and I believe will always be.
Leah: Yeah, definitely. Always beginners and always focusing on just that machine quilting side of it. And that’s just from the two of us working together and looking at the things we’ve focused on that have worked and the things that haven’t worked as well and that’s the thing we’ve always come back to.
Having that bedrock grounding of we’re gonna just focus on beginners and help people get started with it.
So what’s unique to this quilting business that you didn’t really experience before when you were working for your dad?
Josh: Well Leah and I are 50-50 partners so I really feel that we have a full heading on our business and decide the direction it goes. I love that. I can see the trends, see where things are going, or at least I believe I can. We were on the forefront of getting on board the social media train. That includes Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram and Instagram is a service that pretty much pings all of them all at once.
Leah: Well we were a little late on Instagram technically, but we got in there soon enough. Yeah, you’re right. It’s mostly just forming the groups and really making sure our groups are just as interactive as an in-person class. When someone posts or asks a question that we’re there to answer it.
Josh: Absolutely. That is what I would say is the core of our model. Being interactive and trying to provide as much support to the quilter who’s just starting out and maybe a little intimidated or very intimidated by the prospect of free motion quilting.
Leah: So what would you say is the hardest part of your job or the most frustrating?
Josh: I actually have two answers to that one. The first one would be ironically social media as I said social media never sleeps and as we get more and more interconnected through our mobile devices and on our computers we also become more disconnected because there can be a level of entitlement there and sometimes just rudeness and that can be an issue. I’m happy to say it is very very rare.
Leah: yeah, so like an example of that. We had a customer that sent us an email through our website and it was 7 at night and we were having dinner. And then she didn’t get an immediate response back and posted then to Facebook complaining that we didn’t respond.
And you know, that’s one those things, one of the hard things to balance is when we feel like we constantly have to check things to make sure someone isn’t posting something nasty to Facebook or Instagram.
How I balance it out is, well, even if that post goes up and even if somebody complains and it’s up for 30 minutes or an hour or even all evening, there’s enough people that know that it’s just the two of us running this.
An employee helps out with cutting and piecing but this individual is not suited for almost anything else. Most people know that there’s two people running this and that we can’t always be on and always be answering questions.
And I agree with you that is very frustrating. It’s very hard. It’s hard for me when I feel like I’m not, I’m not answering peoples question fast enough, but at the same time, I can’t do this all the time. I can’t live online.
Josh: Exactly. The second thing for me would be the lack of quality and dedication, just professionalism when dealing with a third party business partner. Case in point being we had a warehouse for some time and they fulfilled our orders through shipping. They were not up to par with what I expect for customer support. I strive really highly to do a great, the best job I can and even, you know, two orders out of a hundred, putting the wrong thing in there, or missing an item. That’s unacceptable to me.
You don’t see that so much when dealing with a third party because they’re not invested in the business or the brand the way you are. And that can be frustrating.
Leah: Yeah, Josh gets really upset when even one order gets messed up. That always let me know that the business is in great hands because when he gets that upset when one order, one product goes missing, or maybe the label was mixed up and put on the wrong package or something like that. It just always makes me feel good that you know, you’re the right person in the right job and you do a great job in what you do and make sure that everyone gets their stuff and gets it as quickly as they possibly can.
Josh: It’s true. It’s to the point of neurosis.
Leah: Getting back to Building Blocks, whenever we did that filming, did you felt pressure from me to learn how to quilt so you could do those videos better or so you could answer our customer questions better?
Josh: No, I’ll answer that real quick, and then hopefully you can give background and tell people what Building Blocks actually is. But to address your point, no, I never felt pressure. You were a great teacher. I did feel at times when something wasn’t working for me, you were a little stubborn and pushing me and pushing my square pin in a circular hole. It just wasn’t going to happen. No I never felt any pressure and I absolutely saw improvement in my quilting ability.
I had extreme difficulty in doing curves, especially spirals and I saw marked improvement by the twelfth and final block.
Leah: Definitely, and Building Blocks was our quilt along for 2014 and it’s a pattern you can still find it on our website LeahDay.com and basically it is a huge sampler quilt. Now it’s not actually physically big. It’s huge as in the sense that you’re getting pieced blocks and free motion quilting patterns and you make two to three different blocks, basically the same block two to three times, then you mark the design, and then you quilt it.
We also have a cheater cloth option that’s what Josh used that’s printed through Spoonflower and you can just quilt on the printed lines. And it was such an interesting project because that was the first time that I did a quilt along that I actually asked to be paid. I made it a pattern and made it paid and that was a precursor to the Machine Quilting Block Party that we do now.
IT was different in that we sold the pattern and you got everything all at once. It wasn’t a mystery, you got everything all at once. Now that made us a little insane in January that year because you know, people were asking questions about block #8 and we were on block #1 and so that was when we definitely both Josh and I looked at each other and were like “We need to restructure this or figure out something new.” And we are continually playing and tweeking things to try figure out how to make it work where not only are teaching well, but we’re not driven crazy by the volume.
You know, it’s almost like you reach a point that we love our business to be big, but I don’t want it to be too big. I don’t want it to get crazy where I can’t, you know, like we were saying earlier, like I don’t feel like I can sleep, or I don’t feel like we can have family time and stuff.
So Building Blocks was our first real introduction to crazy world and it went super great and it was better than we could both, either of us could imagine.
Josh: We had no idea.
Leah: No idea.
Josh: It blew all our expectations away times three. It went viral.
Leah: But Josh’s idea to do the videos I think was a large part of that where from the beginning we were sharing my video on the Monday of each week and then Josh’s video would come out on the Tuesday and the struggle for me was I like to batch things out and film several videos at once and Josh was not as willing to do that right? Do you remember I was always wanting to film more than you were wanting to film?
Josh: There’s a technical reason for this. I did not have the muscle memory of a quilter yet. I physically could not sit there for three hours with any level of consistency with my stitching to do that. I needed to do it about an hour, maybe an hour and a half a day.
Leah: Yeah, it was also exhausting for you. I can remember that.
Josh: It was. It really was.
Leah: So it was after Building Blocks that we incorporated. It was during that year that we incorporated our business and we switched from a sole proprietorship in my name and became an S-corp that’s 50-50 split between the two of us. Now did you notice anything change – first technically our job didn’t change at all. You were still doing your thing and I was still doing my thing, but did you notice anything else change after we incorporated?
Josh: Not really…
Leah: Really?
Josh: yeah, I mean, I don’t know what you’re getting at.
Leah: See, I remember when we incorporated you were a lot more like “I’m 50% of this business and you’re gonna listen to me!” So that was one of the things that changed for me that I could no longer be like “Well, this is my business and I get my way.” You were much more vocal on your opinion and if you didn’t like something that I had in mind you were much more likely to say “Naw, let’s not do that.” And I had to start listening to you more.
Josh: Well that is true. Yeah that definitely was the case. It worked out well though.
Leah: Absolutely! And I couldn’t be happier. And I think that that was a very important step for us where yeah, I might have built it, and yeah, my name might be on it, but I have to listen to you and we have to build it together because this is the most important thing that I’ve learned – when you’re not happy, I’m not happy.
Josh: And vice versa.
Leah: Exactly. Because if it’s not working for one of us, it’s not working for either of us.
So one last question and this is something I think I’ll ask anyone that comes on the podcast and that is where do you see our business growing and what are you looking forward to in the next 5 years?
Josh: Well in the next 5 to 10 years honestly I’d like to just continue doing what we’ve been doing. It’s been great so far. And I love it. I love connecting with all these quilters who I fill their orders and I get to know them by name and then I get to meet them on Facebook and see their pictures of their projects and that’s just really cool. Seeing these finished quilts made with these tools that I shipped out, that’s just on a personal level something I really enjoy seeing.
One thing Leah and I always like to do and actually Leah got me into this is home improvement. We actually have a basement, we work down in our basement and we have a semi-finished bathroom that we plan to gut and put in a nice Jacuzzi tub and that is something in the next two years we look forward to doing.
I’m also a big outdoorsman, you know, semi-homesteader. We have thirty plus chickens and ducks and I just love taking care of them, collecting their eggs, and you know practicing a level of self-sustainability and that’s something I really look forward to that in the future.
Leah: Yeah, excellent. I’m really looking forward to that too and I can’t wait to work on that bathroom. So thank you so much for joining me Josh and sharing about our business and what you think about it. It’s kind of fun to hear something from a – you’re not really a quilter – you did make a quilt with me, but you’re not really a quilter but you’re such an important aspect of this business and I really couldn’t do it without you.
Josh: Thank you. Really excited to be on the show too. Hopefully give you guys a little behind the scenes look at what we do.
Leah: Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode at LeahDay.com/episode3.
Don’t forget to swing by our website LeahDay.com to take advantage of our Thanksgiving Sale starting on November 24th and an extra special deal on our Affordable Sewing Tables. We’re actually not allowed to discount them during any other time of the year so make sure to come check them out at LeahDay.com/table
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