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Here are today’s highlights:

The majority of women entrepreneurs surveyed didn’t start paying themselves until year five.
In an overheated real estate market, cat food, a trip to Hawaii, or a year’s worth of frozen yogurt just might seal the deal.
A gas station owner explains why he’s been able to charge more than other stations for 30 years.

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THE ENTREPRENEURIAL LIFE

Female entrepreneurs are much less likely than men to pay themselves: “More than half—or 55 percent—of women entrepreneurs aren’t paying themselves for work they are doing to get their early-stage companies off the ground. They don't want to rack up debt, don’t think they’d be approved by a lender anyway, or are waiting until they’re in a stronger position to raise funds. That’s according to new research released from the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, Wells Fargo Foundation, Penn State, and the Fair Pay Workplace, which studied how a sampling of 152 women entrepreneurs are paying themselves and scoring capital for their businesses.”

“The majority of women surveyed in this case didn’t start paying themselves until they were five years into the business.”
“When it comes to debt, many women aren’t asking for it: In the last 12 months, only 40 percent of respondents applied to open a new line of credit.” READ MORE

PROFILE

Malik McIntyre, a 25-year-old Navy sailor, is part of the growing number of entrepreneurs who start businesses as a side hustle: “The work-automation platform Zapier estimated about 61 million people were planning on starting a side hustle last year, based on its survey of 2,001 U.S. adults. As McIntyre prepares to finish his service with the Navy next year, he's ready to turn his passion project into a full-time career.”

“In 2016, [McIntyre] launched Kash Kouture — which sold hoodies and varsity jackets for between $30 and $100. McIntyre recently changed the company's name to his own and booked $200,000 in sales last year, which Insider verified with documentation. Additionally, in February, he presented his first collection at New York Fashion Week.”
“It helps that between his business and personal accounts, he has more than 38,000 followers on Instagram, 49,000 on Twitter, and expects to reach $500,000 in revenue this year.” READ MORE

REAL ESTATE

The cut-throat home-buying market is forcing buyers to get creative: “After weeks of fruitless house hunting last year, Paolo Dungca and Katrina Villavicencio were getting frustrated. They lost out on house after house to higher bidders. Then they had an inspiration. When the couple bid $500,000 for a three-bedroom brick rambler in Silver Spring, Md.—$35,000 above the asking price—they also appealed to the seller’s stomach. Mr. Dungca, a chef from the Philippines, threw in a 50 percent discount at his Washington, D.C., restaurant, Pogiboy, for a year. They reached a deal soon after.”

“Real-estate brokerage Redfin reported that 70 percent of the home offers written by its agents in January faced bidding wars, the highest share since it started tracking bidding wars monthly in April 2020.”
“In Modesto, Calif., real-estate agent Daniel Del Real’s team has offered over the past year Netflix subscriptions, supplies of cat food, even custom scrubs for a seller who worked as a nurse, he said. For one seller, the buyer offered a round-trip flight to Hawaii, where the seller’s daughter lived.”
“Heather Jackson, owner of Chiller Bee Frozen Yogurt in Conroe, Texas, offered a year’s worth of frozen yogurt to the seller of a house in her neighborhood. The home had multiple offers within days of going on the market, but Mrs. Jackson’s was accepted above a higher-priced offer, said her real-estate agent, Ryan Kutter.” READ MORE

SMALLBIZ TECH

Gene Marks offers his thoughts on Zoho, recently named CRM of the year: “I don’t purport that I’m intimately familiar with some of the other ‘winners of distinction’ like Oracle, ServiceNow and Thunderhead. But I do know that Zoho is not only affordable but genuinely offers not just CRM but an excellent business platform for small and midsized companies with advanced modules for project management, accounting, marketing and HR built around its core CRM application. I have three types of clients that use Zoho. There are those that do contact, calendar and email management and that’s it, because that’s all they can handle. I have a bunch of clients that take advantage of Zoho’s other modules with some customizations and third-party integrations. And I have a (very) few that really leverage Zoho’s quite powerful AI, developer and automation tools.”

“The last two groups are my favorites, because, well, I’m a partner and I make money from services and those clients generally need our help.”
“In addition to Zoho, my firm sells five other CRMs and, depending on the needs of a client, one or more of those other CRMs may be better suitable.”
“For example, companies that are fully invested in Microsoft may be better candidates for Dynamics. Those that want a simple yet powerful sales-driven tool may be happy with Pipedrive. CRM decisions that are being driven by marketers, rather than salespeople, may prefer HubSpot.”
“And besides, Zoho is far from perfect. For example, I like to warn my clients about Zoho’s support. Unfortunately, it leaves a lot to be desired.” READ MORE

A slew of startups are competing to be the future of presentations in a hybrid world: “But they’re all attacking the presentation problem from different angles. Google Slides is focused on the collaborative presentation-building experience. Pitch wants to be your main all-in-one presentation platform, while the folks at Beautiful.ai think they can win the presentation war by making it easier to create elaborate, eye-catching slides. Prezi and mmhmm are focused on video with floating visual aids, letting execs look almost like newscasters. Brandlive thinks workplace presentations should be as entertaining and polished as TV, like ‘Netflix for work.’” READ MORE

PRICING

In Los Angeles, where drivers are routinely paying $5.50 for a gallon of gas, a handful of stations are charging $7: “At the Beverly Center station, in the span of an hour, a number of people drove in just to take a photo of the gas station’s sign showing the day’s prices. More people walked in to buy snacks at the station’s convenience store. When reached at his office, the owner and operator of the gas station, Charles Khalil, said that there’s no economic mystery behind his prices: People shopping around the Beverly Center are just willing to pay. He’s operated the location since 1990 and kept the prices above average since the beginning. ‘I always kept my pricing even, my profitability and everything even, 30 years to today, always the same,’ Khalil said.”

“The majority of his revenue comes from the convenience store, not gasoline sales; even at the prices he charges, he said, gas has a fairly low profit margin compared with snacks and drinks, once upkeep, labor costs and taxes are factored in.”
“He said he holds on to his two locations in part to serve as test sites for his [convenience-store marketing] consulting firm, to better understand how new products play in the market.” READ MORE

RETAIL

Startups that hoped to reinvent the department store are shuttering in the wake of the pandemic: “These multi-brand retailers wanted to offer DTC startups a cheaper, less time-intensive way to test out retail instead of spinning up their own stores. B8ta for example, charged retailers a monthly subscription fee to access its software, through which they got access to data like dwell time, rather than charging them rent. Naked Retail Group would let brands rent out space inside its Soho stores for just a few months at a time, charging brands between $15,000 to $20,000 a month for 150 to 200 square feet of space. It wasn’t cheap, but less expensive than renting out an entire store (the average retail rent in Soho pre-pandemic was around $350 per square foot, according to Cushman and Wakefield).”

“Between 2018 and 2019 three startups — Naked Retail Group, Neighborhood Goods and Showfields — all launched with the goal of creating a more modern retail experience that catered to the rise of direct-to-consumer startups.”
“There was evidence that this model could scale: a more established competitor, B8ta, had raised $50 million, had grown to roughly 20 stores — and had even earned the stamp of approval from a traditional department store: Macy’s.”
“But, three years later, not all of these startups have stuck around.” READ MORE

HUMAN RESOURCES

This has been a two-year, 50 million person experiment in remote work: “The last two years ushered in an unplanned experiment with a different way of working: Some 50 million Americans left their offices. Before the pandemic, in 2019, about 4 percent of employed people in the U.S. worked exclusively from home; by May 2020, that figure rose to 43 percent, according to Gallup. Of course, that means a majority of the work force continued working in person throughout the last two years. But among white-collar workers, the shift is stark: Before Covid just 6 percent worked exclusively from home, which by May 2020 rose to 65 percent.”

“Some of the companies now attempting to call their staff back are facing a wave of resistance from workers emboldened to question the way things always were — which is to say, difficult for many people.”
“There are people of color whose colleagues wouldn’t stop asking them how to work the copy machine. There are the introverts who never wanted to chat about fantasy football leagues. There are the caretakers who used to rush out for school pickup, feeling they were failing to meet unspoken professional expectations and just barely meeting their families’ needs.”
“Studies of 10,000 office workers conducted last year by Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack, suggest that women and people of color were more likely to see working remotely as beneficial than their white male colleagues.”
“‘What have companies done to upskill senior leaders and managers so they’re going back into the office with empathy?’ Ms. Couba added. ‘Not one single person who re-enters the office in the next three months is the same as the one who left.’” READ MORE

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is ordering employees back to the office five days a week (or more): “Solomon has risked looking like a Neanderthal as remote work has gone mainstream worldwide. Top-tier tech firms—Salesforce, Twitter, Meta (Facebook’s parent), Spotify—have told thousands of employees they’re liberated to work remotely full-time, anywhere in the world. Some of Goldman’s Wall Street rivals, including Citigroup and UBS, are letting staffers work from home regularly and claim the policy will give the firms a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining excellent employees.”

“Solomon has said the opposite. Remote work ‘is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal,’ he famously told a finance industry conference in February 2021.”
“‘It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.’” READ MORE

DESIGN

How one design agency created an unforgettable McDonald’s: “It’s in Sydney Airport’s Terminal 1, and it wasn’t conceived, at least not initially, to stop passengers and their Samsonites in their tracks. At first, it was just about addressing a challenge: The space available in the terminal was only enough for Mickey D’s kitchen alone, leaving no room for the self-ordering kiosks where customers tap in their orders or the counter where workers hand over the Cokes and Big Macs. Searching for a solution, Landini Associates, the Sydney-based design studio tasked with designing the location (and McDonald’s worldwide), did what comes naturally at an airport: They looked skyward.”

The kitchen is enclosed in a yellow-tinted glass cube that seems to float above the counter.”
“Mark Landini, creative director of Landini Associates, told Retail Brew that one reason for fishbowling the kitchen is ‘because transparency is becoming much more important in our work.’”
“The contraption that transports the bags from the upper to lower levels, meanwhile, is common in Asia, where street-level space is at such a premium that kitchens are often located on upper floors, but there it is generally concealed by ducts, not showcased for its entertainment value.” READ MORE

THE 21 HATS PODCAST

We Tried That Brand Thing. It Didn't Work: This week, Shawn Busse, Paul Downs, and Jay Goltz talk about the tendency of many businesses to obsess about their logo, their website, and the need to drive more leads. To which Shawn suggests concentrating first on customer experience. And Jay agrees: “It's better business,” he says, “to make your customers happier than to keep trying to find new customers.” But Paul has his doubts: “You can have your internal house in order, as I do,” he says. “And you can have a great website, as I do. But it's not driving new business to us at the moment.”

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If you see a story that business owners should know about, hit reply and send me the link. If you got something out of this email, you can click the heart symbol, you can click the comment icon below, and you can share it with a friend. Thanks for reading, everyone. — Loren

The 21 Hats Morning Report

A Two-Year, 50 Million-Person Experiment