It made sense to kick off our podcast interviewing… ourselves!
What the heck are we doing?
Why should anyone listen?
Who are we?????
In this episode, we share our origin story, fail at Avril Lavigne lyrics, and dig into why we care so dang much about cooperatives.
Make sure you stay until the end to hear random animal facts!
Action items from this conversation:
- What does growth mean to you?
- What is your business structure (hierarchical, horizontal, cooperative) and why did you pick it? Does it align with your values?
- Have you ever considered building a bat house?
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Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:06] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for.
[00:00:14] Janel: We are Janelle and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company into a worker owned co op.
[00:00:20] Anna: In this episode, we are interviewing each other. We cover topics like what does it mean to be a co op? What does it mean to transition from big ass corporations to tiny small business to then co op? What does ownership mean? How do you take care of yourself? What does it mean to grow sustainably? What does growth even mean, really though?
So we hope you enjoy the listen and stay to the end for some fun animal facts. So here we are, episode one.
And we thought that the best way to kickstart a podcast that’s a lot easier than managing guests is to interview each other. Because we’re two.
That’s right.
[00:00:59] Janel: Yeah. That’s why you invited me into Strange Birds, so that eventually we could make a podcast together.
[00:01:05] Anna: This was my grand plan. It was podcast. Janelle. Skills aside, all I wanted was a podcast. I knew it. So do you want to tell the story of you and I?
[00:01:15] Janel: Oh, my God.
So I always have trouble calculating this number.
We met when we were going to Earlham College together. I was a junior. You were a freshman. There’s an Avril Lavigne song in there somewhere.
[00:01:29] Anna: You were a senior.
[00:01:31] Janel: I was a senior.
Right. I told you, I have trouble calculating this number.
So that’s.
Is that. It’s not 20 years yet, is it 18?
[00:01:41] Anna: No, it’s 18.
[00:01:43] Janel: 18 years ago.
[00:01:46] Anna: Oh, gosh.
[00:01:47] Janel: Right.
So we’ve been through many different phases of life together. We’ve walked El Camino de Santiago together. We’ve been best buds for our entire adult lives in a lot of different forms. And now we continents apart from each other, but are in business together, which is a whole thing, it turns out. And now we’re making a podcast together.
[00:02:09] Anna: And we’re making a podcast.
[00:02:11] Janel: Yeah.
[00:02:11] Anna: Strange Birds has been around for about eight years. And most people ask me why Strange Birds? And it’s been really fun for you. Coming on is because we are the origin story of Strange Birds. But for six, seven years, it was just me being one strange birdie. And then when you came along, I was like, oh, the story is now complete. So the story of Strange Birds is I’m visiting you and you’re in your parents home in Mesa, Arizona. We had had quite a few tequila drinks and because we are really cool. Cool. We’re very. I’m going to emphasize this, everyone listening to this. We are incredibly Cool people. We were like, you know what would be really fun?
Do you see that giant dictionary in the foyer?
Let’s go look up words.
[00:03:00] Janel: It was amazing.
[00:03:03] Anna: And the first word that we found was hoatzin.
H O A T Z I N. I’m spelling it out so you can go look this bird up. It is a bird in South America that just looks like a messed up dinosaur and it smells like shit. Literally, it smells like poop. And you can smell it for far from far away. It’s like this weird dinosaur bird. And my last name is Hetzel. So I became Anna Houtzon because I’m cool, and Janelle because you’re cooler, became a phoenix, which how did you get a mythical bird? And I got a poop smelling bird. Like, I don’t know what that says about our relationship, but from then on we were strange birds.
[00:03:44] Janel: So, you know, you gotta go with your calling.
I’m from Arizona. Phoenix kind of makes sense. Also, I had a tendency to drop everything and start fresh, you know, turn to ash, rise from it, something like this, and move to new countries, start over.
[00:04:01] Anna: I have a. Yeah, I have a tendency to smell like shit. So thank you.
[00:04:04] Janel: I’m not going to go into that.
I remember going to Oxford together some years ago. I was still working at Meta, and I remember talking to you about my work at Meta and kind of how it had been going so far and where it might go next and kind of mutually realizing, you know, your next step, whenever that is, really could be to come on board with Strange Birds. And it was at that moment that it really solidified to me that this is going to happen. And it didn’t happen for another like two and a half, three years. But then it did. I’d been working for Meta for five years, and at about the four and a half mark, I knew that it was time to close that chapter and do what was what was going to be next.
And I was reminded of that Oxford conversation and I talked to you about it and you were like, okay, I guess it’s time and again, it wasn’t an immediate thing.
We’d spent about six months talking it through, making sure that we were on the same page about things. And then right as I jumped ship from Meta, then I started in with Strange Birds and we were directly in what we called our fuck around and find out phase and trying to figure out what is right and what is this business now that it’s gone from six years being just one person to now suddenly being two with an entirely fresh set of skills. But not only that, how would we combine together and what does that mean for the business going forward? We had no answers to any of these questions, hence F around and find out.
[00:05:42] Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Zero answers. And it was really interesting because I’m a big systems person and so I was like, oh, well that’s great. I can just onboard Janelle into my systems friends. That’s not how it works.
How it works is when you add a new person to your team, you have a completely new team.
It’s not that you’ve just added a new person to the team. You now have a brand new spanking team and you need to kind of start from scratch. When you came on to Strange Birds, there were two things that were my biggest concerns.
One was, you’re my best friend. How do we keep being best friends? Which everyone says, don’t go into business with your best friend. We just happily ignored that because I guarantee you, people listening. We have had much trickier conversations than about money in our relationship.
Something that I really love about how we are in relationship with each other is that we are very honest and open and are okay with having messy conversations because that’s how relationships grow and develop.
And then the other thing that I was concerned about was when I had started Strange Birds and it had started to grow, everyone kept saying I should hire someone, I should get a subcontractor, I should grow my team. And I was like, absolutely not. One, one of the main reasons why I left my corporate job was it was starting to kind of move into sort of a managerial role and I hated it. I didn’t want to manage someone.
Two, I had always wanted to turn Strange Birds into a co op. And that doesn’t look like you just hire a subcontractor. That requires a lot more intentionality.
[00:07:22] Janel: Why did you want to do that? That is not a very common thing for folks in service based industries in the US to want to do. It’s much more common here in Barcelona, but it’s quite unusual for a US based business.
So why was that a desire of yours?
[00:07:37] Anna: I think honestly it came about with a conversation I had with my good friend Sean. Shout out to Sean, I’m definitely going to be sending this to him.
And we were, we were talking about how in the creative industry the work happens depending on the structure within the work. And what I mean by that is it’s not that the client tells you to like do a thing and then you do it. Right. The best work happens when the structure around the work itself makes sense. And Sean and I had this very long, I think over a couple happy hour drinks, conversation about how the agency structure is just broken and why are we so creative in the work that we put out? He’s a graphic designer, I’m a messaging strategist, copywriter. How are we so creative in the work that we put out? But we still keep repeating the same business structures and that means the same business failings. Right. Like I had contracted with agencies, I had worked in an agency and how they are set up. It’s just this hierarchical mess that most creatives have a hard time actually producing anything great. They produce good enough stuff.
And so we started talking about what about a co op model where everyone. It’s not just a, oh, this is a horizontal business structure bullshit. There’s always a boss that has the final say. That’s not horizontal. That’s just nice words.
People who have worked in a horizontal business structure, you are probably like snapping your fingers right now.
But what if the business structure itself was designed to be horizontal and not just on paper? So thinking about the co op model where all of the creatives had the same amount of say, we’re all being paid equally regardless. This is important regardless of the value the market put on their right. So the market values certain types of creative work over others, but all creative work is equally valuable in moving businesses forward. So how can we more level the playing field for all creatives to do their best work and get compensated fairly for it? So that was the impetus of me going deep into some research rabbit holes of what it means to run a co op. What are co op structures? What are options out there? And realizing this is definitely the route that I wanted to take str birds down. So when Janelle, we were talking about bringing you on, I was like, hey, what do you think about co ops? And you were like, yeah, let’s go.
[00:10:17] Janel: And I was like, for, for me, it was actually, it was an easy yes because living in Barcelona, it’s a, it’s just a much more common structure. I have dear friends who are in programming co ops and it’s, it’s a clear way to support each other and do better work. So your, your pitch landed in very fertile soil in the first place.
[00:10:41] Anna: Part of the project of, of us becoming a co op and honestly doing this podcast and kind of recording our experience and interviewing other people is there aren’t a lot of resources out there on how to do this.
Specifically in the industry that we are in. Most of the co ops in the United States are Agricultural co ops.
So if you’ve ever bought Angus beef, congratulations, you’ve supported a co op.
All Angus beef is branded Angus beef and it comes from multiple different cow people.
Ranchers.
[00:11:12] Janel: Ranchers. Yeah, ranchers.
[00:11:14] Anna: Beef producers.
Wranglers.
Wranglers, Cowboys. And they pool their money together to process it all and then brand it as Angus beef to help them make the money that they need to make. There’s a lot of examples of how to do that and at the agricultural world, but there are like, I think we have found two so far in the US that are creative co ops and if you are one of them, oh my gosh, please reach out. Let’s talk, let’s talk.
[00:11:43] Janel: Mm. That’s one of the main goals with starting to put our voices out there a little bit more is to connect with other people who are doing something similar or have similar stuff in their hearts, would like to see similar things in the world. We’re really, really interested in getting in conversation with you. So please say hi.
What does a sustainable business mean to you? We talk a lot about sticking around for the long term, building something that’s going to last despite the changes in the weather. What does that look like? What does that bring up for you?
[00:12:14] Anna: When I was doing research into co ops, there’s a stat that just blew my mind. It’s pretty common knowledge that 90 some percent of businesses fail within the first five years.
It is truly hard to start a business and maintain it. It’s hard work, it is hard to be an entrepreneur, it’s hard to build something.
But the stat that really blew my mind is 97% of co ops last more than 10 years.
So if you think about like the sustainability and it goes back to what I was talking about of like the structure itself lends itself to the thing that you want to grow.
And the co op model, it’s not a necessarily for profit company because a for profit company is you are growing for the sake of profit. In a co op model you are growing for the sake of the well being of the members inside of it. That means that the type of decisions that you’re making are automatically thinking about the long term versus the quick growth hacky wins that usually lead to depleted resources and, and usually leads to you’ve lost some loyal customers because you’ve made these like wild decisions in order to make a couple quick bucks.
[00:13:23] Janel: Maybe a sustainable business is one that takes care of people and by people I mean the people who are working within it and the people who are set to benefit from whatever the business is doing, whether that’s clients or your users or whatever it is. And sustainability means overtime taking care of them financially, emotionally, stability wise, etc. Sustainable business is necessarily a business that cares, a business that keeps heart at its center.
[00:13:52] Anna: I think that’s why the co op model is so sexy to me is because you literally can’t stray away from that mission with a co op model. It is organizationally impossible to do and I think that those guardrails are so important.
We just got to hear me wax poetic about my journey from entrepreneurship to ooh, this should be a co op.
Janelle, I think that your, your journey is really interesting because you went from startups to giant massive corporation, AKA Meta, like huge global, enormous to little small business to then that business changing into a cooperative.
All of those things, I guess. Is there any part of your identity, any, any part of, of how you think about yourself? How has that shifted with all of these changes?
[00:14:54] Janel: The big thing that I have noticed, especially in this more recent shift from giant corporate to small heart centered business, is around uncertainty.
I am a person who can understand complex systems and how to move within them pretty well. I was quite successful within Meta, was having a good time there, got promoted a couple times. It went well because there’s a very, very clear definition of what success means. The scaffolding is all spelled out for you like it’s in a, in an internal Wikipedia you can see exactly the steps you need to take in order to do a good job. Right.
And to cut loose from that and find yourself floating in the void of the infinite is terrifying and also an opportunity to build something that is really truly yours if you want. When you’re running your own thing, it’s very tempting to try to grasp at whatever you can find that will tell you the way. Like that’s why there’s so many business coaches out there who claim to have like the one true method and just pay me 15k and I I’ll spell it out for you because like it that sense of there’s something beneath my feet, I have the 1, 2, 3 method in order to reach success. That’s, that’s comforting. It feels better that there’s an a platonic integral truth to what you’re doing, but I just don’t think that that’s real. And so my most recent growth has been being okay with that discomfort of uncertainty and embracing the possibility that lies within. There are still days when I get vertigo, but less now.
[00:17:03] Anna: When you have those feelings of vertigo, what do you do to Feel more firmly grounded on your feet again.
[00:17:12] Janel: The biggest thing is step away from the screen.
Just really at the moment when you recognize that it’s all just building up and up and up. I mean, I get excited, right? So like, don’t feed the beast. Step away. Do something else.
Go take a walk. Barcelona is beautiful. Get some fresh air, move your body then. What usually helps me is writing down all of the chaos that’s in my head and seeing that in fact, it’s not infinite. It’s usually quite finite, even if it’s got a lot of facets. And then deciding how to take action on the things that are doable and then leaving the stuff that’s not so actionable alone. It’s been written down, it’s been recognized. I’ve seen it. Like, it’s okay. This is more kind of emotional coaching kind of dealie. But like, but this is a huge part of how the hell to keep a business afloat is learning how to ride the sometimes emotional storms that well up. You warned me at the very beginning back August two years ago, this is going to be harder than you think it is.
Just prepare yourself for some months of turbulence. And you were correct. Learning how to be okay with the bumps is a massive part of doing this. And like, to bring that back to the model that we are building together. A major part of why it works for these two best friends to be in business together is that we have built structures of care into it.
We have regular weekly emotional check ins.
We have a policy of talking about things rather than letting them fester. We have very clear delineations of how we mix and do not mix, friendship and work. A lot of different stuff that makes it work for us, not just in terms of getting a paycheck, but also in terms of taking care of each other as people, showing up as humans first. And that’s been massive.
[00:19:06] Anna: Yeah. I remember when we first were like, oh, we should work together. We asked our partners, who have much higher emotional intelligence than we do and know us very well, of where are blind spots here? Like, what do we need to think about going into business with each other? And both of them said, you need to have emotional check ins regularly. And we were like, okay.
And it has been a huge boon for us. So, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been a business owner for eight years now, but you are quite newer. So I guess my question is, what has being a business owner taught you about power? And I’m using the word power because it’s a word that everyone else uses. But is it really power or is it something else entirely?
[00:19:56] Janel: I’m glad that you called out that word as maybe not being the word because it doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels more like what is my responsibility? What am I holding? What am I taking on?
What am I able to do? What do I want to do? These are the questions I ask more often going back to the idea of like what is possible.
Like, I do think a lot of the bro y hustle culture stuff that we’re so against does kind of worship power and clout and reach and all this stuff that is, that adds up to vanity metrics, right. That you can show off and boast about and that kind of thing.
And I’ve always been a little allergic to that because I think that numbers don’t ever tell the whole story of something.
And I am more interested in what kind of space can be built to hold the potential for something. That’s what we’re exploring within our own company. Strange birds. That’s what we explore every time we take on a project with clients.
That’s why we have a model that allows for us to do potentially anything with clients so that we can focus on what matters the most. When I send messages out into the ether with intention of marketing. Right. Like what kind of conversations are possible based on what it is that I’m saying, I see this as my responsibility as somebody who chooses to take up space and how can I hold people when they enter those spaces that I create? I don’t have perfect answers to any of these, but I think about things using this framing a whole lot more than I think about what power do I have.
[00:21:43] Anna: Yeah. I think that’s why I really like this question because I think it’s a good summary of this whole conversation. Right. When you think about business ownership in general culture, there is this feeling of power. You are in control. You get to choose, you make all the decisions.
Right.
And my experience of being a business owner was quickly poo pooed upon that. Right. Like, of like, yeah, sure, I get to choose, but there’s a lot of things out of my control.
And I like the word that you used, responsibility. Like what is the responsibility to myself when I was alone? And now it’s what’s the responsibility to each other and what’s the responsibility to our clients and how do we treat those relationships? With an immense amount of respect. Okay, here’s my follow up question to this. When you use the word responsibility instead of power, how does that change how you Grow a business.
[00:22:31] Janel: I think it links back to the thing that we said earlier about sustainability means caring for the people that your business affects. Yourself, the people working on your business with you, your clients, your users, the people who read the stuff that you put out there.
It’s about care that oftentimes means moving slowly and with intention. That flies in the face of a lot of traditional business advice. You taught me that things will move slower than you expect because I came from a place where every five minutes you should be optimizing your time. And that’s certainly one way to do things. It’s also a way to skim the surface and miss opportunities to care and maybe miss things that are critically important to take care of people. We at Strange Birds don’t have nearly as much responsibility in our hands as like, Meta did. We’re entirely different birds, right?
And at the same time, the gravity with which I approach our client relationships and our relationships to each other, etcetera, it feels even greater because I’m not just a cog in the machine. I am at this moment, half the business. Right? And it’s, It’s. Yeah, it has a lot of weight.
[00:23:57] Anna: I think. In summary, this is episode one, right, of Flying the Coop.
And the goal of this project really is to really dig into what does it mean to do things differently when it comes to ownership, when it comes to growth, when it comes to building a business, when it comes to being a human, when it comes to how does your business impact your community, both the community literally right next door, your neighbors, and the greater community at large.
So we have a lot of open cues, open questions that we are looking to explore in this podcast.
I think it’s more than, you know, human first mentality.
It’s more complicated than that. And it’s so easy to just be like, oh, well, we’re humans first, great. But like, what does that mean in practice? What does it mean when you actually put yourself first? Like, I highly recommend reading books like, laziness does not exist. Rest is resistance. Right? Like, what if we are radically human first and we’re excited to talk to companies and co ops and organizations that do that type of work?
Because I think that’s not celebrated enough in the business world.
[00:25:17] Janel: Mm. Yeah. And how are various people walking the walk? Right? Because it is easy enough to just say, you gotta center heart, you gotta care for people, you gotta set up these structures. But like, how. How are different people doing that in ways that work for them? So I really want to collect a lot of answers to that Question. Because I think that truth is multifaceted and always shifting. So let’s talk to lots of people and find out lots of stories.
[00:25:42] Anna: Yeah, and we’re really hoping to get into, like, the messier bits, because being radically human is. Humans are messy.
We are animals at heart. We are instinctual. We are messy, we are chaotic. And so how do you do something intentional when underneath you’re like, I wish I could go climb that tree. Right.
I’m gonna go smell that flower.
Sorry, I’m done now.
[00:26:09] Janel: You are a hoatzin is what you are.
This is a perfect segue into.
I think my last question for you strange birds is currently undergoing metamorphosis, as evidenced by this very podcast. So what animal do you think we’re turning into?
[00:26:27] Anna: So you all don’t know this, but in the notes beside this question, Janelle put Aching to pupate Regina Spector song. And that’s all I can think of. So thank you.
Aching to be paid.
[00:26:42] Janel: You’re so welcome.
You’re welcome, Emily. Also, who is definitely gonna listen to this?
[00:26:46] Anna: Oh, my gosh, my partner truly hates that word.
Pupate. I’m just gonna say it one more time. Okay, what.
What creature are we turning into?
You know, I saw this question and then I did give no thoughts into it. I think, okay, if we’re going to use birds, I would say that for the first six years when it was me alone, I worked really, really hard to build a soft, comfortable, stable nest for myself in the business.
Now with you here and with our goals to grow our co op membership a little bit eventually. Right? So slow is good.
I’m thinking like, okay, it’s not a nest anymore. I know this is not a creature, but I’m thinking more like, are we building a bird house?
Oh, maybe we’re a bat. We’re turning into a bat house. So cool things about bat houses is, like, it actually takes, like, you build it, and then it actually takes a really long time to attract the bats to get there. But when they’re there, they’re, like, so happy and they come back all the time. It’s different than a birdhouse, where, like, you build a birdhouse and they’re like, oh, cool, a house.
But, like, bat houses require intention and.
[00:28:08] Janel: Bats come and stay. I love that. I didn’t know that.
[00:28:10] Anna: What’s your answer to this question?
[00:28:13] Janel: You made me think of Octopolis, that Octopus City. You ever read about that?
No. Oh, friend, you are in for a treat there. Somewhere in the deep reaches of the ocean, there is a I hesitate to call it a colony. We’re going to call it a city. There is a city of octopi that live and have like they, they, they coexist together and they support each other and they’ve built this whole area that’s theirs. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna send you the link.
[00:28:46] Anna: Please do. This isn’t science fiction. This is real.
[00:28:48] Janel: This is real. Yeah.
Yeah. We all learned something today. Me, Bad houses. Euroctopolis.
[00:28:57] Anna: Welcome to fact Checking Anna.
I have a lot of random things in my head and I am usually 80% right. So we thought it would be a fun segment to end every podcast with with. Did Anna get it right or not? Yes or no?
So first, at one point I said, Angus Beef is a cooperative. If you bought Angus Beef, congratulations, you supported a cooperative. Janelle, is that correct?
[00:29:24] Janel: No, it’s completely false. Incorrect, Anna. Angus Beef is not a co op. It’s actually a non profit brand that is run by the American Angus association, supports ranchers, but is not structured as a co op. However, there are beef co ops out there. For example, the Legacy Beef Co Op in the Midwest or Silver Fern Farms in New Zealand and I imagine a whole lot else out there as it’s a cool model for agriculture.
Next, we wanted to talk about the 90% of cooperatives stay in business stat that you threw out there.
Ana, is that actually true?
[00:29:58] Anna: Yes.
Okay, so 10% of cooperatives fail after the first year while 60 to 80% of traditional businesses fail after the first year. So winning there. After five years, 90% of cooperatives are still in business while only 3 to 5% of traditional businesses are still operating after five years. And we will put all of that in the show notes. So, yes, benefits of cooperatives more likely to stick around and do better.
[00:30:29] Janel: That’s pretty crazy. Those are some wild numbers.
[00:30:32] Anna: That’s why I was like, anytime I get a like, you know, a naysayer of like, oh well, a cooperative.
And I’m like, well actually I’ll be around longer than your business.
[00:30:43] Janel: Thanks for the fact checking, Anna.
[00:30:45] Anna: Thank you for keeping me honest.
Flying the Coop is sponsored by Strange Birds, a marketing cooperative that helps companies navigate change. With us, you can evolve without losing what’s already working and without pausing growth. You can find us at Strangebirds dot Land.
See all episodes: https://strangebirds.land/podcast/