"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.

This week you'll get to hear from Gerard Littlejohn, easily one of the coolest guys we know. Gerard is insanely kind and compassionate and is basically helping to change the Charlotte community in a million different ways. He does this mostly through his role at the Steve Smith Foundation. In this particular episode, we wanted to hear more from him on education in Charlotte because that's been on a lot of our minds for the past few months as schools have grappled with inviting kids back in person or doing virtual learning. Listen to learn how Gerard is working to provide better education for disenfranchised children here in Charlotte.

It's voter registration deadline week! This Friday is the deadline to register to vote in NC, so expect a ton of info coming at you this week about how to register and why. In addition to talking about the importance of voting, Kamaria and Angel also break down what we can expect on the ballot this year, including some early voting, absentee voting and poll voting tips and tricks. 

Meet Brent LeVasseur, VP of Propellant Media here in Charlotte. There’s one thing you should know about Brent: he has a lot of random thoughts. And this week’s episode of Zero to Ten is full of them. Like his idea for a new YouTube show: purchasing the entire discount cart you see at Food Lion’s and taste-testing each of the questionable alcohol placed inside. We also learn that one of Brent's 2020 goals was actually to stay up later (weirdo).

Even if you've never heard of or met Brian Mister, you've probably heard of the Around the Crown 10k, the monumental race that happened for the first time last September and shut down I-277. Just a few months away from their second race, we sat down with him on Zero to Ten to learn a bit more about him, and boy, did Mary Johnson deliver. On this episode we learned that Brian and his wife, Chelsea, have a goal to run a marathon in all 50 states. They've already knocked out 16, which if you ask us, is pretty damn good. They even make up their own marathons in some states, like Utah, where they charted out their own 13.1 mile run in the middle of the Arches National Park. Talk about running goals 🏃 want to learn more about one of Charlotte's most avid runners? Listen now.

"I think 2020 has a lot of bright, shiny things potential in the horizon but also has an incredible amount of work ahead of it for myself," he told host Mary Johnson. We recorded this episode a few weeks ago on Garrett's birthday, so we got to hear a lot of his outlook on the new year and on him turning 36. It's a damn good episode - and we're not just saying that because he's the one who pays the bills. 

This week on Zero to Ten, we're catching up with hygge's director of marketing, Alyssa Pressler. If you've never met her, Alyssa is The Person (a title she got in this very podcast episode) at hygge west charlotte, and she's also the person you've probably interacted with on any hygge social media. (She's also the one writing this caption about herself, which yes, is very, very awkward).

On this podcast episode, host Mary Johnson asks Alyssa about her openness with her mental health struggles, her tattoos (including 2 that she's tattooed on herself), and why in the heck she's sniffing the microphones in the podcast studio (it's one of those 'you've gotta listen' things). It's a pretty fun episode (and I'm not just saying this because it's me, Alyssa, awkwardly writing this caption).

"If you keep happiness in the front of everything, or kindness, love, whatever it is that keeps you happy, that shifts your perspective."

This is just one of the incredible tidbits from this week's Zero to Ten episode with Megan Pastor, hygge's phenomenal Director of Membership Experience. If you've checked out hygge since March, chances are you already know Megan. She's our human confetti cannon on staff, spreading sunshine and rainbows and laughs and hugs like no one's business. But how well do you really *know* Megan? Like, do you know that she used to write cute notes for her grandpa for his lunch every day? Or that she was offered her job at hygge without even realizing she had been interviewing for it? On the latest podcast episode, we get to learn more about about Megan, how she stays so positive and where she got her incredible baking skills from (if you're ever the lucky recipient of a Megan Pastor baked good, be grateful). You can listen to the whole dang thing below.

This week, we're getting a bit of a deeper dive in the life of Tyler Ford, aka the guy who single-handedly started the coworking trend here in Charlotte with Industry Coworking in 2009. Tyler's history is a really cool one: after school he started out working for Tommy Hilfiger in various positions for 15 years (yes, he knows Tommy, he's kinda awkward; and no, he did not pay for clothes, which was a culture shock after he left). During that time Tyler and his wife moved to Charlotte, where, after leaving retail, Tyler started working from home on graphic and web design. You see where this is going, right? He did the work from home thing for about 6 months before he started going a little stir crazy. He and some other friends bounced around the idea of splitting an office space together... and from there, the idea for Industry Coworking grew. Then in 2018 he decided to join the #hyggefam.

"Most of us meet our friends at our workplace, our spouse at our workplace. When you don't have that at all, it makes it easier to be out there on an island."

You can hear more about Tyler's super interesting journey, along with some other tidbits (like he and his daughter's personal challenge to see 25 concerts together in 5 years and how he steals the bacon off of sandwiches) by listening below.

LaNaria is the Director of Finance over at Love146, a nonprofit that is fighting to end child trafficking across the world. It's incredibly important work, and as the keeper of finances in the organization, LaNaria's role is crucial. "I'm at this point in my career where whatever I do, I want it to mean something," she says. "When I reconcile a bank account, I'm able to save a child, maybe not directly, but indirectly."

LaNaria is a numbers girl at heart - she's always loved them. She even loves excel... which is a thing pretty much everyone hates. She's always worked in accounting, but she says she's found something special with Love146 because it allows her to do meaningful work. This week on the Zero to Ten podcast, host Mary Johnson asked her about chicken salad, what she'd have as her last meal on death row, what child trafficking looks like in Charlotte, how running the finances for a nonprofit is different than a for profit business... a little of everything. You can listen in to the full, fun convo below.