Open For Business with Stuart Brown and Norman Kallen
Welcome to Open For Business, the podcast exploring the unique challenges faced by business owners today – and how to effectively address them. Join business lawyers Stuart Brown and Norman Kallen as they break down crucial topics about business management, market trends, retirement, work-life balance, and more. Hear valuable words of wisdom from experts and professionals from different industries, from successful entrepreneurs to inspiring authors. Whether you are just starting your journey or currently planning to level up your game, this podcast is a must-listen.
—
Listen to the Podcast here
Open For Business with Stuart Brown and Norman Kallen
The Podcast’s Purpose and Scope
My name is Norman Kallen and my co-host here is Stuart Brown. Welcome to the Open for Business show. We are business lawyers, but this show isn’t about the law. It’s about you, the business owner, and the unique challenges you face every day.
We know what you’re thinking. “Great. A bunch of lawyers who like to hear themselves talk, hosting a podcast,” but we’re not here to showcase ourselves. We’re here to deliver fascinating conversations with really interesting people about the topics that are on your mind. Some of our guests are going to be authors, everyday business people with extraordinary success stories to share and experts that offer advice on everything from organizing your day to planning for retirement or your second act. We’ll also tackle succession and exit planning strategies, as well as pathways to building better relationships and changing your mindset to negotiate more effectively and shadow roadblocks
Introductions and Backgrounds
You’re always open for business, so we’re here to deliver conversations about everything that matters to you at work and in your personal life. We hope to do so with a lot of wit and reverence. My name is Norman Kallen. Welcome to Open for Business. I have an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and I have a few graduate degrees because I enjoyed school so much.
I went to Seton Hall Law Center for my Law degree, Rutgers graduate school for my Management degree and NYU Law School for my LLM and Taxation. I did start out as a tax accountant. Nothing against tax accountants, but that wasn’t my future. I then turned to be a tax lawyer and from there, I went on to the corporate department in a large New Jersey law firm. I then spent ten years as general counsel at a startup company in the supply chain environment. I joined my predecessor firm and now Stevens & Lee. I’ve been with this group now for over 25 years.
That’s enough about you, Norman. Let’s talk about me.
I could go on further, but I won’t, Stuart. It is enough about me.
As Norman said, my name is Stuart Brown and I, too, am an attorney. Don’t hold it against me. I got my undergraduate degree at UPenn and I went to law school at Boston University. I started my career at a large New Jersey-based practice where I met Norman. I left there, went in-house as general counsel of a publicly traded company for several years and was fortunate enough to travel around the world, which was very interesting at the time.
The bloom does fall off that rose, as many of you who travel for a living understand and realize. Ultimately, I started a law firm with another one of our partners, which was in place for 28-plus years and then we joined Stevens & Lee. Norman and I are partners at Stevens & Lee and we believe that this is going to be a very interesting and informative show for you and we hope that you find it to be a lot of fun as well.
Stuart, I’m disappointed you didn’t talk about your football career at Penn, as short-lived as it was.
That’ll be another day, Norman.
Another story. Maybe we’ll have a professional athlete and you can then relate to that aspect point out.
We’re going to leave that as a cliffhanger for our audience.
Fair enough. Why are we doing this? What’s the reason? One is we think it’ll be a lot of fun. Fun not just for us, but for our audience and for our guests.
Not only is it going to be fun, we hope, but it’s also going to be very interesting. We’re going to bring conversations to you about business topics relevant to business owners and about personal topics. After all, in many of our cases, our work impacts our life and our life impacts our work. The goal is to make it interesting for you and for us.
The intent here is to keep it in a non-structured format, similar to sports talk shows, which we enjoy listening to. The goal is not to talk about legal issues, but to talk about business issues, talk about life issues, things that are interesting to you and to us.
We want to keep this social. It’s going to be primarily a Q&A format. It’s going to be conversational, interactive with our guests, and hopefully, very interesting for you.
Navigating Change and Disruption
Our goal is to have guests in conversation about all facets of your business and personal life. We live in very interesting times. If you think of the last 5 or 7 years, Stuart, between the wars, sadly, between the pandemic, between the economic boom and the economic disasters, it’s amazing what we’ve gone through. We only thought our parents and forefathers would’ve done that and no one else and we’ve gone through that. You know something, I won’t say we’ve survived, but we are living with it and we’re managing. How else can it be managed and how else can we manage better? That’s the goal.
Yeah, that’s true. The only thing that we can be sure of is that there’s going to be more change. Change is constant. Toward that end, what everybody’s trying to do is manage their lives in a way where change doesn’t disrupt your life, per se. That’s hard.
It’s hard and change, disruption is obviously a relative term because nobody likes change or most people don’t like change. The best thing that can happen is we learn to adjust and adapt. I think that’s really what we’re after. I think, hopefully, that’s where our guests will help us learn more of.
I think the roster that we’re going to give you in a short while of some of our early guests will prove the point because everybody is expert at something and our guests are truly experts at what they do.
Future Topics: Retirement/Second Act, Labor and Culture
All right, so let’s talk about some of the future questions, Stuart, that we would like to cover with our guests going forward, which we hope will give you some insight into the flavor, into the various questions and topics that we will be discussing in the future. Let’s jump into that for a moment. If you thought about retirement, either in the long-term or the short-term, have you thought about what you want to do? What’s your second act?
That’s a phrase that everybody is beginning to use. What’s your second act? It’s true because people are retiring now and they’re much more active than they had been in years past. There are things that people still want to accomplish, whether or not it’s starting a new career, starting a new business, taking up a hobby, taking up a sport, what have you. The question becomes, are you prepared for it? When are you going to do it? Do you have the right financial capabilities to do it? Do you have the right mindset to do it? It’s very interesting and I think that’s a topic that we’re going to find very interesting when we explore it.
Stuart, whether it’s work or whether it’s private or personal or whether it’s in retirement, I’m a firm believer you have to wake up with a purpose. That makes for a day, otherwise, days just roll into one another.
You have to wake up with a purpose. Otherwise, the days just blend into one another.
Also, I’m very happy to wake up actually. That’s a good thing.
Good to hear that, by the way. As an employer and employee, what is the biggest challenge you’re currently facing? The tariffs that are in today’s marketplace, inflation, labor shortages, bringing employees back to the office, those are all challenges for businesses, as well as for employees.
There are always going to be, in my opinion, one-offs like the tariffs, but there are certain business challenges that are constant like employee morale, inflation, labor shortages and overabundance of labor. Do we have to lay people off? Do we have to hire people? What are we going to do? Those are conversations that take place every day, every month, every year.
Some of the stories we talked about, change, the best businesses, the best business owners learn to adapt. They look ahead, they anticipate so they’re prepared. Easier said than done, I get that, but that’s what you really have to do as a business owner. Let’s talk about culture for a moment. Everybody talks about you unique, positive culture. You need a good culture, you need the right culture in a business for several reasons.
One is it attracts employees and it keeps employees. At the end of the day, though, it’s a job and you have to make a profit. We talk about change, we talk about balance. How do you find that balance that you want the people to feel good about where they work? You want to feel rewarded, I don’t mean just financially, but at the same time, you’ve got to make money.
If you’re not making money, the whole point is moot.
We might as well retire.
I’ll be interested, as we speak with our guests along the way, what their definition of culture is because if you ask 3 people for the definition of culture in their opinion, you get 5 answers. It’ll be very interesting to see what they have to say about that.
Stuart, also, I think important on the issue of culture is perspective. Life is all about perspective. Are you looking up or you’re looking down? I’ve got to tell you, it makes a world of difference whether you’re looking up or looking down or even looking sideways as to what your perspective of culture is and how it impacts you and how it impacts the business.
Sometimes, looking up is not always the best thing. I was traveling in a former job in the Philippines, of all places, and I was looking up because somebody had said to me that the building up ahead was really beautiful and cool. I was looking at the building and I’m walking along the sidewalk and all of a sudden, I feel this squeak in my shoe. They had just poured fresh concrete on the sidewalk and here I am in the Philippines and these guys are smoothing it out and I’m walking across it. Talk about dirty looks. I should have been looking down at the time.
I’m not quite sure looking up in absentminded is in the same category, but fair enough. Alright, a couple other questions that are interesting too is what would you pay for a cup of coffee? Anybody who’s been outside and got to Starbucks or any of the coffee houses, which we love coffee, the price of coffee is unbelievable. It really is. I don’t know whether it’s the price of the bean or people want to feel like their coffee is special, therefore, you’ll pay more money for it. I don’t know which came first, the cart or the horse here.
I’m a tea drinker, so it doesn’t bother for me. Next.
You’re right. Not for you. You go to the coffee houses, they have all these selections of tea as well, and the bubble tea, which my wife loves.
I never understood that, but okay.
I don’t get it either.
Norman, here’s a very tough one for you. Are you ready?
Go ahead.
Are you sure?
I’m holding my breath.
Okay. Star Wars or Star Trek? Which one and why?
All right, that’s a good question for our guests. Not a good question for me, only because I’m one of the few people in this world probably who hasn’t seen either one. None of the movies. I’ve seen Star Trek when it was on TV, but never the movie. I know that’s a little odd among the other oddities that I have. I admit to that. Hopefully, my wife is not reading this because she’ll just pack on that. No, I haven’t seen either, but certainly good question for our guests.
All right, we’ll tuck that into the back of my mind as we ask guests. Let me ask you another one, then. Which requires more Tylenol or perhaps something stronger, being an employee or being an employer?
I think it depends on the moment, depends on the economy, depends on the moment.
You’re not going to give an answer, are you?
No, not just yet. Think about it. During the pandemic, which would require more? You’re worried about your job or you’re worried about closing your business?
Yeah, that’s true.
Give us one more.
Alright, here’s another tough one. Are you ready? If you had your choice, which would you prefer, scotch, bourbon or perhaps neither? Maybe a glass of wine instead.
Okay, so you’re talking to the wrong person. First of all, you know I have difficulty dealing with scotch. Bourbon, I happen to like, but I love wine, and I think you’re just the opposite. It makes the world go around. The problem is the price of bourbon because it became so demanding because scotch got so expensive that the price of bourbon has gone through the roof too, for good bourbons. You can’t find them anymore on the shelf.
That is true. Let me just put a disclaimer in here. We are not promoting drinking alcohol, right, Norman?
Absolutely. Notwithstanding that, I did get, as I told you, a smoker for my Old Fashioneds, which I love.
Guest Preview and Their Areas of Expertise
Yeah, those are cool. Maybe one day, on the show, we’ll discuss these smokers, but they are great things. Anyway, let’s move on. Let’s give our audience a preview as to who some of our guests are going to be actually.
Absolutely. The purpose of having these guests and the way we’ve selected them, hopefully, obviously no guarantees, our audience will be the judge of that, is to provide information, to provide insight, people that are interesting and they’re going to add information, add thoughts and ideas about your business life and your personal life. That’s our ultimate goal here.
Whether you’re walking your dog, driving in your car, laying in bed, doing whatever you’re doing, hopefully, this brings value to you. Norman, who are some of our guests?
Why don’t you start? You know Bobby very well. Why don’t you introduce him?
One of our guests is going to be a gentleman by the name of Bobby Mascia. Bobby is the consummate entrepreneur. He has what I call the E-gene. He is an entrepreneur. He runs multiple businesses. He started his own wealth planning firm. He runs a family business and he is also an independent investor. On top of that, he’s a family man. I think Bobby will provide a lot of insight into being a multifaceted entrepreneur. I think that everybody’s going to get a kick out of the way Bobby presents himself.
Bobby is exceptionally entertaining, but more importantly, what Bobby’s going to talk about, which is his hardest job in life, is how to manage his time. We’re also going to have on Colonel Jack Jacobs. For anyone who knows Colonel Jack Jacobs, first of all, wonderful person. A Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, a businessman, an educator, and an author and a great proponent of public service and leadership. One of the things we really want to explore with Colonel Jacobs is his concept of leadership. How did he develop that? What does the Army do for him? What did Wall Street do for him? What does he believe in and how do you learn how to be a good leader?
Colonel Jacobs is an insightful guy and he’s got years of experience behind him. I anticipate a really interesting conversation.
Yeah, we both met him, we’ve both spoken with him and there isn’t a time when we’ve had those conversations that your ear isn’t just peeled to listen to what he has to say. He’s interesting. Another guest we’re going to have is Adam Bleecker. Adam Bleecker had a family-owned business, built it up with his family, his father started the business, and the family had a successful exit.
They had a very successful exit from this perspective of not just financially, but the family stayed together and everyone made it work. That’s really a difficult thing. A lot of families. Stuart and I, sadly enough, deal with dysfunctional families or families that become dysfunctional because of a business and because of the money involved. He’s going to try to give us a roadmap on how he did it.
One thing that’s true is you can win the battle and lose the war. In this case, he won the war and his family did because not only did they successfully exit, but as you said, they exited in a functional way. They’re not arguing with each other.
It’s a great success story. I know Adam well, and it’s just really wonderful to hear.
Another guest we’re going to have is another Adam, a guy named Adam Coffey. Adam is an author and a very successful private equity participant. He’s the author of several books. The first book is The Private Equity Playbook. How does private equity evaluate target and what to expect when private equity comes knocking at your door? Adam is truly insightful when it comes to private equity. If you haven’t heard of him or heard of this book, I would strongly suggest whether you read our show or not, to go out and get this book and read it.
If you’re in the market or you’re thinking about selling your company and you’ve heard all about private equity, what it means, and this is not an advertisement for private equity because we’re not talking about whether it’s good or bad, it’s understanding what private equity is about, you have to have this book. It’s a roadmap, exactly what it says.
Adam is an entertaining guy and I’m positive you’re going to find this discussion really fascinating. Who’s next, Norman?
Brent Beene. Anyone who knows know me, he’s the managing partner of Corient, which is a national financial planning and financial advisory firm. Why we’re going to have him on is not to talk about investing, rather, Brent is a great supporter of creating the right culture. He believes that creating the right culture allows you to maintain the right employees, attract the right employees, and grow successfully and how having the wrong culture is destructive for an organization. You may say, “Who really cares? You have to make money,” but he’ll show you that when you have the right culture, you can make more money.
It’s not mutually exclusive. Brent also is a very successful guy in his own right. He’s climbed the ladder and he understands what it’s like when you’re in both a positive culture and in a negative culture. I think he will shed some light on the concept and he’s the guy I’m going to ask for the definition of culture. We’ll see what he has to say.
That’s the way we’re going to turn. That’s the right person to ask.
We’ll give you one more. Norman, tell us about Laurie Barkman.
Laura Barkman is the author of a book called The Business Transition Handbook. We were talking about what’s your second act. She’s going to talk to you about how to prepare for retirement, why preparation is so important, and the problems and the pitfalls she sees day in and day out with people who don’t do the planning, who don’t give some thought to it.
It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to have another job. It means if you have an exit from your business, what do you want to do with your life afterwards? From both a personal basis, from a charitable per perspective, what’s available for you? Part of it is also talking about once you retire, living life with a purpose, what does it mean to you?
Absolutely, because you can work all your life and get that gold watch and then do nothing. What’s the point in that?
Maybe realize there’s nothing to do.
Right, exactly. I’m going to give everybody a little foreshadowing and just leave it as a cliffhanger for everybody. We have a couple of guests also that are scheduled to come on that are going to make you happy. Why are they going to make you happy? You’re going to have to wait to find out, but mark my words, they’re going to talk to you about being happy.
In addition, we’re going to talk about other business to personal items. Obviously, positive psychology, as Stuart just mentioned, is a great thing to learn about. Understand what it means and how it can help you personally and professionally. We’ll hopefully have some sports figures on. One of the things we’re going to talk about is hobbies. Golf, is it a sport? Is it an activity?
Yes, it is.
Is it a metaphor for life? You have to self-enforce in golf. The question becomes, do people do it? What people do it? Who does it? Who doesn’t do it? What does it say about you?
It’s all relative, I think.
We’re going to talk about spirits and wine. We talked about bourbon wine, we talked about the scotch. We’re going to try out people in the industry, people who have built successful businesses in the industry, how do they do that? Why do they get interested in whether it’s liquor, whether it’s wine, the spirits, whatever it might be, what attracted them to that?
Norman, you can discuss your new wine room. Norman just built a beautiful wine room in his house.
Stuart, it’s next to the gym in my basement. When I go down there, I just turn the lights on because I just love to look. It’s my favorite room in my house. Even when I just walk in and smell it, it’s great. Thank you. I’d love to talk about it, but I’ll stop.
We’re going to talk about something near and dear to hopefully many of our audience, which is running and owning a family business and dealing with stress and family conflict, and of course, time allocation. Three things that rule almost everybody’s day, and to that end, ruin almost everybody’s day. We’re going to have a guest that’s going to talk to you about that as well.
Sometimes you need a roadmap and a guide to get through it—just to survive the day, keep the business going, and keep your family together.
We can all do a lot of talking. It’s clearly harder than it appears. It’s not an easy thing. If you talk about it, if you understand how best to manage it, hopefully, you can successfully get through it. Have a successful business, and maintain the family. Talk to one another and have a successful exit. Whether that means leaving it to the family members, the next generation, or selling out. Whatever it is you think is in the best interest of the family, and we’ll keep the family together.
Do you know what’s very interesting? Think about this. When you meet somebody, what do you ask them? “How are you doing?” What’s the response you get 9 out of 10 times? “Doing great. I’m fine.” When you peel back the onion, they’re not doing so fine. They’re not doing so great. If you believe in something like social media, everybody’s doing amazing. If that were the case, there’d be no problems in this world.
I think the psychologists, psychiatrists would be out of business. You have to deal with these things and sometimes you need a roadmap and a helper to get through these in order to survive the day, survive the business, and keep your family together. Sometimes, it’s meant to be and sometimes it’s just not.
That’s exactly right. Bottom line, folks, we hope that you enjoy. We hope that you find it interesting. We hope that you read and obviously if you have input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Good, bad or indifferent.
We want to hear from you.
That’s right. We’d love to hear from you. Please stay tuned. Read our show and enjoy.
Important Links
