ASHLEY: Welcome to Outgrowth: A Slice of Pro Beauty with your hosts Ashley Gregory Hackett.

JAIME: And Jaime Schrabeck. If you get paid to work in a salon or pay others to work in your business, how do you know if the payroll has been processed correctly? Avoiding the financial and legal consequences of payroll mistakes is critical for every beauty business.

ASHLEY: We’re learning directly from Vicki Lambert, The Payroll Advisor, how to manage this responsibility. Let’s grow together.

JAIME: Vicki, one thing we haven’t discussed yet, we’ve not talked about workers’ compensation insurance.

VICKI: No, we haven’t. Let me hit a couple of other items first before I forget about them. I want to mention a couple of things. And one of those is after you’ve paid the employee, in almost all states, you have to give them a check stub, what we would call a check stub. It’s actually called a pay statement in the law, but explaining exactly what you paid them. Those are actually done by state law. In other words, what I have to report in New Mexico, I don’t have to report in Hawaii and vice versa. So you have to make sure that that is also up to snuff. People get a lot of penalties for bad pay stubs. Now for workers’ comp, except in Texas, and I’m going to be iffy on Texas. It’s a weird law. You must have workers’ compensation. Some states might limit it to two or more employees, but most of the time it’s one employee, you have to get workers’ comp. And most of the states will allow you to buy workers’ comp either from a state fund or from a private insurance company. But that’s the other difference between freelancers and employees. Not only are they protected under wage and hour and tax law as an employee, but they must be covered usually under workers’ comp. So if I were a freelancer and it was through no fault of yours, I tripped after my own feet, and I sprained my ankle, and I can’t work for three days. Then I’m just out of work for three days. But if I’m an employee, and I’m a klutz, and I’m on your property during work hours, and I sprained my ankle, it’s pretty much worker’s comp. And I would get paid, okay, the equivalent of whatever my workers’ compensation policy would stay for, let’s say, the five days I took off. I might not get paid for day one or two, but I would after that. And that’s one of the big differences is employees are protected. I think what shop owners have to think about is where these laws come from so you understand the protection. Cause I know a lot of you are saying, and I hear it all the time. This is a 27 year old woman who has a family, who is a stylist. She’s old enough to make up her own mind about how she wants to be paid and whether or not she wants to be an employee. Why is the government telling this very educated, very intelligent woman what she can or cannot do, or this very intelligent man? The reason is very simple is they go to the lowest denominator in protecting employees. It goes back to this old philosophy of having to protect the worker from the evil factory owner. It’s that kind of philosophy. If the lowest of the lowest of the workers who has no high school education, has a very low IQ, you know, is working a job, they have to be as protected as the highest paid person who is an employee who has a Mensa IQ and three degrees from three separate Ivy league schools. It doesn’t matter. They all have to be protected. And I wanted to bring this up because it’s always a problem, is you and your employee cannot agree to anything. Cause I know that somebody out there is going to say, well, my employee signed a piece of paper and I’m sure it’s a very lovely piece of paper. And I’m sure you had it notarized pre-COVID, but it means nothing. The employee cannot agree to sign away their rights. You say, well, why not? Because they’re not rights. See, that’s just it. If we were to use a recent analogy, you have the right to vote. And if you choose not to exercise that right, that’s up to you. Can’t vote twice, but basically you have that right to exercise or not. Wage and hour laws and tax laws are mandated onto the employer. The employee has no say whatsoever on whether or not they’re paid overtime. If they are eligible, they are paid. The employee cannot sign anything. And I’ve seen lawyers fall for that. I’ve seen non-wage and hour lawyers thinking if I got my employee to sign a contract, I could make them an independent contractor and it won’t work, not when you get audited. It’ll be a nice piece of paper, but you might as well shred it. But that’s one of the big differences, like I said, with worker’s comp or anything like this is it’s mandated on the employer to protect that worker. And that’s why they’re also covered by something I don’t normally get into because it’s not payroll-related, but I want to mention it and that’s OSHA laws. As a salon owners and salon workers, you know that you have a lot of safety and health laws you have to worry about it, meaning, you know the department of health and make sure your salon’s clean, But you also have to worry about the health of your worker with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I also want to mention one other thing. A lot of people think, well, they’re not auditing anyway. Trump’s been in office for four years, nobody audited. That’s not true. They audit just as much during one presidency as they do during another presidency. They’re always enforced. They don’t back off, especially, and I have to say this, this is not a nice thing to say, but especially on smaller businesses. They may not go after the Microsofts as often as they do the small little salons, but they do go after them. And they definitely go after the smaller businesses because they know that’s where most of the violations are.

JAIME: Knowing that the burden of compliance falls on the employer, I want to expand on our discussion of the recordkeeping requirements a bit. So it’s not enough that you tell yourself, okay, this person’s going to get X dollars an hour. I could just write a check to them or hand them cash. I actually, as an employer, have to keep records and I assume that would mean having them clock in and out, whether that be like you said either electronically or on a piece of paper, and then the pay stubs, what information specifically needs to be on that pay stub or pay statement?

VICKI: What we’re looking at now, the recordkeeping, is probably the trickiest part of the payroll up until we got computerized, and then it’s kinda like just dump it out on me. I’ve got it, and which is nice. That’s what’s great about doing payroll nowadays is you’ve got a lot more electronic help. You’re not sitting there with a calculator and a columnar pad for us old people who remember columnar pads. But basically is the laws tell you exactly what you have to keep and you have two laws to worry about that I’m going to talk about. That does not include other laws like I9s and things like that, just right now the payroll ones. So the first one is the federal wage and hour law, alright, which requires that you keep all the information about that employee related to federal wage and hour law. So you need their name, their address, their social security number, their date of birth. You need how many hours they worked. So how am I going to keep track of how many hours they worked? You need a report that tells me this information. So the first thing you have to look at is you must record their time. So the federal government does not tell you what it has to look like and neither do the states. It can be anything. So if you want to do it on a piece of paper, that’s fine. If you want to do it on a post-it note, it’s actually fine as long as the information is there. You have to clock in and clock out. That’s the first requirement. Everybody requires you to clock in and clock out. But what about the other requirements for like calculating your wage? Well, if all I did was clock in and clock out, then you have to pay me for those hours. But let’s say I took a lunch. If you are going to dock me for that lunch, they have to clock in and clock out. So in other words, you’re going to take the time away. So if I worked eight to five, but I took an hour for lunch, you don’t want to pay me nine hours. You want me to clock in at eight, clock out at noon, clock back in at one, clock out at five, and you’ll pay me for eight hours. You need timekeeping. You want to call it timecards, timekeeping, whatever you want to call it, you’ve got to track it for your non-exempt employees. Exempt employees are not required to track that. And then the federal government says, I want all the reports that showed how you calculated that. So I want to see the time cards, but I want to see how you got to the gross. And then there’s a few things on the net that they’re going to want to see that are covered under federal wage and hour law, like garnishments. If you took out garnishments, they need to see those. They want to see what you base the hours on. So that could be time cards. But as a salon, maybe I don’t pay the person my time because I am allowed under federal and state law to pay people on the piecework. Maybe I pay that person by every person they shampoo. I don’t know if that’s done, I’m just making up an example. Then I would have to track every single person I shampooed and how much you paid me for each. I would have that would be my time record. Maybe you paid me a commission out of your retail section. My salon that I go to has a retail section. So if I buy some shampoo or flat iron or something, then my person that does my hair or whatever would get a commission. You have to track all those records and keep those permanently if you paid them a commission. The records that you have to keep on the federal level just for wage and hour law are those. And, and there’s more. You have to be very nuanced on this. I can only cover the highlights. Now you have to keep the tax records for the IRS and they want to know gross to net, every deduction that you took for all the taxes. Did you have a 401k? So you have to tell me that because it changes the taxation. Are you offering other types of benefits that change the taxation? And I have to keep all those records for that. And that’s normally called like a payroll register cause you have to keep the rows to the net for every single employee that shows what you took out of that paycheck. So that is part of federal wage and hour and mostly tax. Usually you have to keep everything four years. I mean, some are two-plus current. Some are three plus current. Some are four plus current. It kind of grows exponentially, you know, the more important the document. Timecards are usually two years plus current. Now why do we say plus current? Because it’s always two years from the date it existed. So if I have a timecard for March 31st, I keep it three years, or two years, from March 31st. We always say two years plus current just to round it up to the next year so you don’t throw anything out early, which nobody ever does. Basically, you get that and that’s what you got. And then you multiply that by 50, because you’ve got all the states and they might have told me different requirements. For example, again, on pay stubs, one state doesn’t require it. Another state could require just the deductions. Now there’s you don’t have to tell me what the gross is or what the net is. I just want to know what you took out. And then there’s California, which requires every single thing you’ve ever done on that payroll broken out. Some people have three pages of pay stubs in California. I’m not kidding you. So it just depends on what state you’re in when it comes to the pay stub. These are the two that you have to worry about: the IRS and its equivalent and the Department of Labor and its equivalents throughout the states. And then you may even have local for the taxes or local for the minimum wages. So recordkeeping is a real bear when it comes to payroll. And that doesn’t even count the fact that you’ve got to keep all of your quarterly returns. You’ve got to keep your W2s. You’ve got to keep all of this information, at least, like I said, usually four years plus current. And then of course the one form that payroll can or cannot deal with is the I9 and the I9 is kept indefinitely. As long as I’m working for you, you must keep the I9. So if I work for you for 15 years, you’re going to keep that I9 for 15 years. Once I leave, then one year after I leave, the I9 can be destroyed, but it has to be one year after I leave. And if I leave before three years is up, you got to keep it at least three years. So that’s the only one that never dies on that side. On the side, the one thing I haven’t mentioned yet about recordkeeping is the W4s. An employee can submit a W4 anytime they want. but once they submit a new W4, the old W4 doesn’t get thrown away. It has to be kept four years plus current. And if the employee never submits a new W4, that W4 must stay on file until that employee leaves your employ. I have a friend that worked in the same company for 35 years, and she had the same W4 on file for 35 years, and that payroll person had to keep it for 35 years. These are all of the things that when you do record-keeping and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  

ASHLEY: You mentioned the tip of the iceberg, and that brings us to our next question which is what is your advice for reporting tips?

VICKI: Oh, well, tips, tips are a little tough. And that is because you have so many laws that are variant on them, but you are not required to report handheld tips. That falls on the employee to report it to you. Now you have to acknowledge that they have tips. And if you don’t get a tip report, you could get in trouble. But what you have to do is get a tip report if your employees are normally tipped which a salon would be. I tip every time. Most people I think do, hopefully. You have to give a tip report to your boss by the 15th of the end of each month. So for March, I would give it by April 15th, in that area, April 10th, April 15th. And then basically I would take that as your boss and process that through the payroll. I would count that money as income to you, take out the tax, but you don’t get it on the net of your check. It’s what we call it, imputed income, income recognized, but not received. So I’m going to tell the IRS that you made $30 that month in tips, and I’ll put it on your gross, I’ll tax it, and then I won’t put it on your net of your check. You don’t get the 30 again. And I’m required to do that for every tipped employee, but the tipped employee must give me the tip booklet, but I must ask for the tip booklet. So it’s kind of a mutual society there where we both have to keep each other in line. But yeah, tips are required by law to be reported. Now whether they do or not, whether they lie on them or not, that’s between your employee and the IRS. But you should report the tips that are received if your business is deemed a tipped industry and you are required to report them. Now, a lot of the times, they only say that restaurants have to do tips. And a lot of times people will look at that, but I would look at it and say, make sure that you’re absolutely, positively sure that your company is not covered under the tip reporting requirements which most, if they receive regular tips, usually are.

JAIME: Full disclosure, Vicki. I’m a salon owner in California with employees and I take that burden off them by actually requiring my staff to process their tips through the salon management software so those tips get recorded as part of the transaction. So I have all that information in real time, and take care of that, and report it, and then of course pay my FICA taxes on their tips even though I’m not taking the money. So it actually costs me money as an employer to have them receive the tips.

VICKI: Yes, it does, but that’s an excellent way of doing it. And many companies do do it that way. That was the next thing I was going to mention was that if you do it, if you don’t do the tip booklet, then you have to run it through your payroll. So in your case, it would be a salon management thing. I’ve got to get it somehow onto the paycheck, which is a way a lot of companies do it where they add it on to the bill. They say, okay, you owe me $35 for a haircut, $5 for a tip. So I’m going to take $40 off your card. And when I take the money off the card, I take 35 for the haircut and five for the tip. And I tell my systems what to do with those, as you just explained. So that $5 would go on the payroll, the 35 would go wherever you have it go, and the tips would be reported that way. There’s a lot of different ways to report them, but the most basic way that you can do it is simply the employee acknowledges that they received the tips. Not saying that’s the best way. I’m saying it’s the most basic and the cheapest because they can do it on a piece of paper, a tip booklet that the IRS supplies. But I think your way is probably more efficient. I like everything electronic.

ASHLEY: Okay, what are the rules around terminating an employee and then providing a final paycheck? Are there any requirements?

VICKI: Yeah, let me talk about it from a payroll standpoint and I’m going to preface by this. Firing an employee has repercussions for other laws, discrimination, any kind, open to a lawsuit kind of thing. So I don’t want to get into that. That’s more for the attorneys and the HR people. So let’s say it’s a clean fire. In other words, you terminate this employee for cause, and we don’t have to worry. We’re just going to worry about the payroll side of it which is what I can address. So basically is if an employee terminates, it triggers the termination laws on the state level. There is not one on the federal, so 50 states, 50 laws. The federal government just says an employee must be paid. It doesn’t even tell you when. So you have to pay this guy, but after that, it goes on to the state. Now what will happen is the state will look at that under their laws. They could be as easy as the next payroll and that’s pretty common in a lot of states for employees who terminate voluntarily. If I voluntarily give you two weeks notice, a lot of times the state will say, well, just put that money on their next paycheck when they normally would have got it. We’re fine. That’s cool. But other states will say, well, if they’re voluntarily quitting, we’ll accept that, but not if you terminate them. If you terminate them, you have to pay them by this time. For example, in California, it is, here is your paycheck, fired, and that’s probably not quick enough. When President Trump used to say, you’re fired when he was in California, yeah, well, he violated wage and hour law by not handing the person that check first because you can’t fire somebody unless you pay them immediately, and they mean immediately. Where other states might give you six days to pay that person if they’re terminated. But to the next payroll, if they’re, if they voluntarily leave. When you’re terminating an employee, when an employee is quitting one, it depends on why, whether it’s voluntary or involuntary and two, it’s the state law as to when you have to pay them. And you have to be very careful because there are heavy fines for that. The second thing that has to be done when an employee terminates is the method of paying them. You must be very careful. Some states take the position that if an employee is on direct deposit and I’m going to mention this because California takes this position. If an employee is on direct deposit and they are terminated or they’ve quit, that direct deposit stops. The moment that they quit, that direct deposit is done. So you cannot give them their final check by direct deposit unless they sign a new form stating they wanted one. So be careful about direct deposit on a final check. Now, other than that, those are pretty much the rules for paying an employee that is either terminated or has voluntarily quit when it comes to just handing them their paycheck. But other companies find that you may end up with litigation or something like that on our employment insurance and things like that. I don’t want to go into that cause that’s totally different. But one facet that you always have to look at is when an employee terminates and you give them that final check is whether or not you have to include vacation in that final check. That’s the one thing people get in trouble with. Is did the employee have vacation on the books and was I required to pay them out? Because some salons do offer vacation. I don’t know if it’s a big benefit in the industry, but I know some that do. And so I’ve got 80 hours of vacation on the books and I quit. Do you have to pay me that money out? Depends on state law. Nevada, no. California, yes. So you have to be very careful. And in some states, if you terminate them, you have to pay it out. But if they voluntarily quit, and other states like New York, it depends on your company policy. You can write in your company policy if you quit or we fire you, you don’t get any vacation. And that would be fine as long as it’s in the book. So you need to be very careful when terminating somebody that everything is on that final paycheck that is supposed to be. 

JAIME: Vicki, if there were ever a business responsibility that you did not want to DIY, payroll would be it. So what recommendations would you have for hiring a payroll professional?

VICKI: Okay, well, when you will hire someone in payroll, what has changed over the years is not necessarily the rules, but the quality of the payroll professional now. When I was hired in payroll in 1977, it was my first payroll job, actually late 76, I was breathing and I could run a 10 key. And that was not necessarily the order that they asked for, okay? The breathing was optional. They wanted the 10 key cause remember payroll was tabulating data. We didn’t have a whole lot of wage and hour laws as we do now. We had the Fair Labor Standards Act, but even California was pretty young on wage and hour law back then. Now, over the course of the years, the profession has grown and we’re no longer just, okay, hire anybody that can run a 10 key. They can do your payroll. We’re actually now certified in the field. I’ve been certified since 1990, which means I sat down for a test on everything we’ve been talking about plus five other, other topics. And I passed. And I’ve known less people pass the CPP test than pass the bar exam. That’s how tough it is. You’re doing things that you would never do again like manually calculating overtime, and you would never do that normally. So this is the situation is when you hire someone, you want that experience, but you have to pay for that experience for a CPP, which is a certified payroll professional, or an FPC, which is a payroll certification that is below CPP. In other words, you’ve got about three or four years experience and you’re doing good kind of thing. You might want to look for that first. And that’s given through the American Payroll Association. But it, like said, that might cost you more, but you want somebody who understands already the wage and hour laws and the tax laws. And I can tell you how difficult this is. You know, I want to give you an example that is happening to me right now. I have a woman who is giving me questions to answer for her that are so basic that it’s, I’m almost not going to charge her for doing it because it’s so basic. And why is she doing this? Because she’s the payroll backup to a very small company. She’s never been trained. Her payroll person is in a coma with COVID. Her boss was going to do the payroll except he’s been deployed to Washington. She is now a person who has no payroll knowledge whatsoever stuck in front of a payroll system, trying to balance W2s for the entire year. And she doesn’t even know what a W3C is, which is the form you use to submit them. And she’s never done a 941 and she’s trying to do one under COVID. That’s a horror story. And so I’m walking her through it. And so this is why it’s critical if you’re going to hire somebody, make sure they’ve been trained. If you don’t want to pay for the CPP, then before you let them touch your payroll, get them to attend webinars. There are dozens of webinars out there that they could attend. Some of them are even given free by the state. California does one where they give a free webinar through the EDD about the taxes and the wage and hour law. Get them the training that they need before they start doing your payroll. Because remember every mistake that they make costs you on the federal level for wage and hour law almost $2,000. Let that sink in. On the tax level, probably about $300 for every error. If they make a deposit one day late, that’s $3,000 out of your funds, because that’s about what the penalty would be. So before you hire somebody saying, oh, this is just an easy job. I’m going to pay them minimum wage. Make sure that you can afford the penalties. And I’ve seen that. We hired a person one time when I was working at a company. I was leaving. I got another job. They were hired to replace. I said, don’t hire her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. They didn’t want to listen to me. Hundred thousand dollar penalty, plus she sent out all the W2s wrong and they had, I think, it was 3,500 W2s had to be hand-typed back in that day. Hiring the wrong person gets expensive. Now, if you want to look for a person, look under the local chapter of the APA. I’m a member. I’ve been a member since 1990. Put it out there for the local chapter, might have a website. And you could say I’ve got a job opening for a basic payroll person. That might help you hire somebody good there, but don’t take a shampoo person. I’m sure they’re very intelligent, very smart and decide that you’re going to make her your payroll person. That was cool in 1976, but 2021, it’s going to get you penalties. So I’m off my soap box.

JAIME: If you’re ready to step back on your soap box, Vicki. I wanted to ask you one question as a bonus, and that would be what are your expectations for the new administration’s proposals for increasing worker protections, not the least of which would be a $15 federal minimum wage.

VICKI: Well, I have to now identify. I don’t normally, but I do all my Facebook page, but I will identify now as the world’s biggest liberal Democrat. I am all for worker protection. In fact, I have to be honest with you. I will be honest with your listeners. The only job I’ve ever wanted in my whole life that I wanted that I would never be able to get was the person in charge of the Department of Labor for California, the DLSE, or the person as the Secretary of Labor for the United States government because I’m very big into worker protection. So I have to preface by saying that, but if I took myself out of the political realm and said, what do I think of this? I look at it as a historian payroll person because I know what the minimum wage was. And so when I was working in high school and made a dollar 65 an hour, I could buy lunch at McDonald’s for less than a dollar 65 an hour. So a lot of this has not kept pace. $7.25 has been the minimum wage for 10, 11 years now. No other country in the world that have minimum wages have kept it that low for that long. That’s why the states took off because they said even in Alabama, after a while, it gets ridiculous to try to live on that. So the fact that it has not kept pace with what it started out keeping pace as is evident, I think, by the one area which is exempt employees. And let me share this with you and show you how often wage and hour law is not changed. Minimum wage went up and up and up and up, and then it stopped with Bush. It hadn’t changed since then. However, the amount of money you have to pay an exempt employee which is called on salary, you have to pay them a minimum. The last time before president George W. Bush raised it in 2004 was Nixon, was the last one. Actually, Ford signed it because Nixon had resigned three days earlier. Nixon Ford signed the last increase before 2004. So that’s 74 to 2004. That amount never changed, which meant the minimum wage went up, So I could pay a worker $5.15 an hour, $6,and some odd cents an hour, et cetera, that was non-exempt, but I could pay an exempt employee $155 a week. That’s why wage and hour law needs to be overhauled. Now president George W. Bush did increase that a little bit. Nobody did it again. Everybody left it until Obama’s last year. And then he tried to get it up to where it would normally be, but that got kicked out with lawsuits. And then President Trump comes in and he brought it up to $600 in change, which isn’t anywhere near where it should be. This is the problem is these wage and hour laws have sat dormant for too long and now we have to catch them up. And as I said before, we’re the only industrialized country. I mean, how can we say, yay, United States when if I get sick for one day, I could lose my job or I have to come in sick because I have no sick leave because we’re not required to on the federal level? This is what I’m looking at. I’m looking at saying that whether I’m a liberal Democrat or not, the laws have just been, they’ve sat for too long, and they need to be revamped, and they need to be looked at. I also want to mention that sometimes they need to be looked at the opposite way. See, for example, when you’re calculating overtime, there’s a very obscure law to everybody but payroll people that you have to include a bonus when calculating the overtime rate. You know, the rate I’m going to pay you for hourly working. So let’s say you make $10 an hour. Now I know right now you’re saying to yourself, if I get paid $10 an hour and I work an hour of overtime, well it’s one and a half. So I get paid $15 an hour. No, it’s not. And this would affect your salons. That’s why I’m mentioning it. And all the states do this, but the federal doesn’t. So it doesn’t matter. You have to do it anyway. I would have to take that $10 times all the hours you worked, add in that bonus, then get a figure divided by the number of hours work, and go back and start over to calculate the overtime rate. It has to be included in there. So if you pay commissions to your staff that are hourly, that you’re paying the non-exempts per hour, and you’re not including those commissions when you calculate their overtime rate, you have violated the wage and hour law and that’s $2,000 a shot every time you did it cause it’s every single episode. It’s called the regular rate of pay and it’s been on the books since 1938 when they wrote the Fair Labor Standards Act. And it was written that way because the person who wrote it, her name is Frances Perkins. The Department of Labor’s building is named after her in Washington, DC. Under FDR, she wrote the Fair Labor Standards Act. And she was afraid the big, bad employer would try to pay everybody by commissions and not pay them anything other than just this flat 25 cent minimum wage that she was proposing. So she made this crazy way of calculating it. And that’s one of the biggest ways that people get in trouble under wage and hour law is the regular rate of pay.

It’s the biggest fine next to exempt and non-exempt and independent contractor versus employee. So I wanted to mention that because I’m hoping that’s one of the laws they might look at to either clarify it or to make it easier for employers to understand how to do that math. And the thing of it is is a lot of payroll systems don’t do it. So people are thinking they’re in compliance because they’re feeding it into their payroll system and their payroll system may not be able to do it and may not be doing it. If we’re going to look at the wage and hour law, do I think a 15 hour minimum wage? I’ll leave that to the economists, okay. But do I think we should have sick leave and paid family leave so when somebody has a baby, they, you know, unless you’re in California or the other four states that have SDI or TDI, you have to go six to eight weeks without any income, just because you had a baby, or cancer surgery, or a heart attack, or a broken leg? We’re the only country that does that and I think if we’re going to be one of the leaders of the world, we should lead in that way too. So I’m off my soap box, but I wish they would look at some of the more complicated laws that make it difficult for employers cause like I said, that regular rate of pay, I mean, people who’ve been in the payroll profession for 20 years can’t do those calculations. They don’t n even know about it. So that would be the one I would hope they would look at. Hopefully that will be a good answer for your listeners.

JAIME: Vicki, we have been so impressed with not only your willingness to share all this information with us, but bringing up topics that we might not have thought about when we first started our podcast today. So thank you so much for sharing of your time and your expertise.

VICKI:  Well, thank you so much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed this, and I wish everybody good luck, and please stay safe until we’re all out of this COVID situation. Everybody stay safe and healthy.  

ASHLEY: If you’re enjoying Outgrowth, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts now with just one click. Visit bit.ly/outgrowthpodcast.

JAIME: As always, you can follow us in comment on recent episodes on Instagram at @outgrowthpodcast.

ASHLEY: Well, Jaime, until next week. Be smart.

JAIME: Be safe.

ASHLEY: Bye.