Zero To Ten

"If you're not changing, you're dying," Meggie Williams, founder and owner of SkipTown, likes to say. It's an ethos she's always followed when it comes to her business, which started as Skipper, a dog walking business, and has now evolved into basically a country club for Charlotte's pooches. Change came fast for Meggie and her team last March when investors started pulling out of their SkipTown fundraising round and they lost 90% of their dog walking business within a week as folks started working from home.

A year later, SkipTown is wildly successful and looking to expand to new cities like Atlanta and Dallas. We hear about the wild journey on today's episode. Buckle up.

While the majority of the world shut down or hit pause during 2020 in the face of Covid-19, Charlotte's Camp North End team kept quietly working to continue to grow. The 76-acre revitalized industrial park managed to open 13 food, beverage and retail shops on its campus during the year and kept construction going to allow it to enter into Phase 2 of its 20 year project plan. In this episode, we chat with Camp North End's Varian Shrum to learn how her team adapted during the pandemic and what's coming next. 

Here's the scoop: working a remote job doesn't mean the whole big shift to working from home over the past year has been any easier. Take it from Mark Shropshire, a longtime hygge fam member who's been working remotely for a company for 5 years now. You might think that would make the change to working from home full time easier, but it has not. He's coming in hot this week with some tips on how he's handling it all. 

Anyone else get cold sweats just thinking about filing their personal tax returns, let alone their business ones? Add in a pandemic that has changed a whole lot of things financially for folks last year, and it's going to be a doozy of a few months. This week, we talk with local CPA Jason Ackerman (you may know him better as half of the popular food blog Scallion Pancake - he says he's the Pancake). He's going to give us some helpful tips on what businesses should be expecting this tax season, and how they can make it easier on themselves. 

Charlotte's Janine Davis is an absolute hoot - something you already know if you listen to her radio show throughout the week on 1019 FM - and she definitely brings a ton of life to this week's Zero to Ten episode. We talk with Janine about her path to becoming a radio host as well as her work with Girl Talk Foundation Inc., a local nonprofit that provides a safe space for young women in the area to learn and talk about tough life lessons. Get ready to laugh and learn a lot.

"When you start to talk about stuff being really bad, I don't have a solution. I don't know what to do, and I don't know how to ask for help. I don't have a logical path forward because the landscape is changing every day."

We've shared often over the past few months how the pandemic has affected small businesses and nonprofits we love, but we haven't given a ton of details on how we've been affected as a coworking space. This week on Zero to Ten we've got an extra special, long episode with hygge's founder and owner Garrett Tichy, and we get into the nitty gritty of what 2020 was like for us. He'll talk about our losses, how the tumultuous environment has affected his mental health, the decision to take on debt or not, and share the pretty grim, frank reality that there is no telling what the next few months will bring and if our small business will survive. It's not the cheeriest episode we've ever published, but it is one of the most realistic.

Who would win in a fight, a honey badger or a beaver? These are the hard hitting questions we like to ask on Zero to Ten, and this week, Ady Rivas does not disappoint with her answer. Ady is a member at our Hill Street location and works for Best Cleanup, a Charlotte business that handles huge messes like when a pipe breaks in your home. And while that's cool, that's not at all what we chat with her about. Instead, we spent our time together talking about Ady's love of herbs, and how it's helped her get in touch with her heritage as well as helped her discover a love for cooking and truly perfecting complex dishes. We also get to hear some very interesting bird stories.... but you'll have to listen in to the episode to see what we mean there.

When we realized we hadn't had the dynamic Taylor Florio on the Zero to Ten podcast just yet, we knew we needed to rectify that situation. Taylor has been a long-time member and supporter of our hygge west charlotte location (#westsidebestside, she likes to say) and has become such a big part of the hygge fam that she actually handles all of our podcast trainings for us. This week we talk with her a bit about her job as a college recruiter and how the pandemic has affected younger kids, her podcast Malaprops and Moxie and her passion for her community.

This week we are talking with Adam Brundle about all things soccer in Charlotte. Adam is a part of Charlotte's chapter of ISL Agency and Futsal USA, which means he and his team are involved in training the next generation of soccer stars. They work with kids age 8 and up to teach them skills and send them to training programs over in Europe. On the episode we learn more about soccer and a super cool variation called futsal, which is an indoor, faster-paced and super exciting version of soccer with different rules. With Charlotte diving into soccer (hello Charlotte FC) we figure it's time to start learning more from the pros, like Adam.

This week on Zero to Ten we have the opportunity to chat with Jamie Horn, a local fitness guru, owner of StrongHER360 and the chick in charge over at hygge wellness. Between working with her and her Instagram, we thought we knew Jamie pretty well, but in this episode we learned so much more about her. Like did you know she's a vegetarian (yup, you can cut out meat and still get enough protein to grow those guns 💪) and that she has an autoimmune disease that affects the coloring of her skin? We also talk with her about her love for wellness and what's coming up at hygge wellness.