This is the full transcript for Episode #302 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Liz Picarazzi – The Trashwoman, CITIBIN Founder. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Liz Picarazzi 0:00
Period. Follow your passion.
Max Branstetter 0:16
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 302 and today’s guest is Liz Picarazzi. Liz, in addition to having a fantastic name, is the founder and CEO of CITIBIN tash enclosures, package lockers and being rather rat proof, is super cool and innovative business. And in this interview, we talk all those things, how she went from being pretty anti the whole rat thing to embracing the whole rat proofing thing, working with a significant other and a little bit of Madison wiscan. I I’m not from Madison, but I am from Cleveland, Ohio, but the accents a little different. There it is. Grazie. With piccarazzi, yeah, enjoy the show. Alrighty. We are here with Liz Picarazzi, Founder and CEO of CITIBIN, and I’m just going to go ahead and call you The Trashwoman, the Oscar the crouch turned entrepreneur. Liz so excited to talk to you and all things CITIBIN Thank you so much for joining. How you doing today?
Liz Picarazzi 1:57
Very good. Thanks for the invitation. Of
Max Branstetter 2:00
course, of course. And thank you for not jumping off as soon as I called you the trash woman. I think there’s a lot of glory in the world of trash that we’ll get to today. But before we get to city bin, I know that you know, you’ve had an awesome career with, like, pretty much very different stops everywhere you go. But something that kind of fueled the city bin journey was your business before that where you had a handyman business, checklist home service or checklist Home Services. I’m just gonna mess that. Mess up your name of every stop of your career. How do you say Amex? No. But what got you inspired to start a business in the handy man or handy person space in the first place.
Liz Picarazzi 2:41
Often businesses start because the founder, you know, him or herself, has an unmet need. And back in you know, 2007 when I bought my home in Brooklyn, New York, we had a lot of Home Improvement tasks, home maintenance tasks that just were never getting done. And so, you know, I encountered situations where I would need, you know, electrician, a plumber, a painter, you know, a plaster all at the same time, and realized it was incredibly time consuming to bring together all of those professionals for jobs that were really of a handyman nature. And so I thought, you know, why not have a jack of our Jane of all trades, handy person company that can come in and in one day, take all of those home tasks off of your list. So, you know, someone might have a new TV that they have mounted. They have a new light fixture that needs to be installed. You know, they have a new nursery that they want to paint and furniture in that nursery from Ikea or whatever to put together. You know, the product that became very popular was called the handyman for a day. And so we would work with customers to put together their list, you know, a realistic list of what do they need to have done, and would send in a handyman, handy woman for the whole day. You know, sometimes a team to come and take all of those things off the list. So we called it the honey do list. And it was the sort of list that you know partners in a household would quarrel over so you know who’s going to change the light bulbs can become a detriment to a marriage, if not taken care of, because it creates an opportunity to nag. And no one likes nagging. No one likes to nag and no one likes to be nagged. You may hear my Wisconsin accent in there, because that’s where my A’s come from. My husband always makes fun of the word nagging when I say it, but that’s how it came about. So I was a full time marketer at American Express. At the time, I did not have time to manage all of these. Contractors, and I saw there was a customer need that me, really, as the personification of my target client had and those around me who had busy lives, had children, those are the things that never get done. You know, another one that’s very common is caulking or putting silicon in a bathroom, you know, in your shower. So I always tell people, if you’re in the shower and you look in there a couple of moldy spots, that can be infuriating if you don’t know who’s going to redo that. So that’s really how that idea came about. It came out that I actually am very handy myself. In the very beginning, I would sidecar with the handyman and work on things. But then, as the business grew, you know, I became, you know, the CEO, and, you know, had a team of w2 employees, not 1099, contractors, which people find very surprising. But I wanted to make sure that everybody I sent into someone’s home was licensed, insured, and had a boss that could make sure that the job was done right, and that was really the big differentiator between checklist home services and a sort of check in a truck handyman that one can find on Craigslist. I
Max Branstetter 6:15
knew I messed it up when I said checklist home service. So thank you for confirming that that the singular business, by the way, total, this is probably the most important thing we’ll talk about in this podcast. Definitely keep your Wisconsin A’s in because very you know, all Midwest. I’m from Ohio originally. We joked one of my best friend cam his wife Ashley, made name Valentino, and she jokes that people make fun of me for saying Ashley Valentino is pasta cabanara, yeah,
Liz Picarazzi 6:42
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing I get made fun of is when I say the word, I’m from Madison, Wisconsin, because the A and the O, I don’t have a heavy Wisconsin accent, but there’s certain words where it comes out. Well,
Max Branstetter 6:57
I think that’s that’s to blame. You know, people like centuries ago, Whoever named these cities and states because there’s too many A’s,
we’ll just blame it. Blame it on that. But I appreciate you sharing your previous entrepreneurial journey. What was it that got you to leave AmEx and or American Express and actually like go into the entrepreneurial route in the first
Liz Picarazzi 7:22
place. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. You know, even back in middle school, back in those days, they had home at class, Home Economics. They had shop class too. I took both. We had an entrepreneurship section where we needed to pick something to make and sell. So I made little pencil cases for people to put pencils and makeup in, and learning how to sew, going to the fabric store and getting the fabric and the zippers. That really lit me up. I’m a very creative person, so shifting the AMEX when you’re in a large corporation, you know, even a wonderful one like American Express, it’s difficult to express your creativity. There’s a lot of bureaucracy to make a decision. And I felt that many of my ideas couldn’t go anywhere, and in certain situations, were really discouraged, because it seems like you’re sort of going rogue, but if you’re an entrepreneur in a corporation and you’re lit up about something that you have a really strong hunch is going to be successful, it’s sort of maddening. And so toward the end of my seven year tenure there, you know, I had a couple of bosses that weren’t particularly creative, and I’m, ultimately, I’m an entrepreneur, but most entrepreneurs, they’re, they’re actually artists in their own way. Like my husband’s a composer, like a class, he writes classical music.
Max Branstetter 8:51
Oh, you mean literally, composer. I thought, I thought you meant like a romantic term.
Liz Picarazzi 8:56
Well, maybe, like, no,
Max Branstetter 8:59
wow, I’m just embarrassing myself. I mean, like a subjective like, he’s a metaphor, he’s a composer,
Liz Picarazzi 9:05
he’s a literal composer, but he’s also my coo now, and that’s a whole nother story. But so when I refer to myself as an artist, you know, he’s in the fine art of musical, classical composing, and he can kind of laugh, but it’s the same skills. It’s the same passion and drive, whether or not you’re, you know, making trash enclosures, or you’re composing, you know, some sort of orchestral work that takes, you know, many years to compose. You know, I think I’ve myself as an artist and my personality type often clashed with people that were more rules and hierarchy oriented. And again, that’s not to bash Amex. I think that hierarchy exists for a really good reason, but for me, I felt like I couldn’t completely express myself. And you know, as an entrepreneur, when someone or something gets in the way of your idea. You’re not going to tolerate it because you’re driven, you’re an entrepreneur. And so there were an awful lot of people that, when I looked up or I lived left or right, that felt like they were kind of getting in the way, or were at least not entrepreneurial enough to consider options that might not have been part of like the yearly plan.
Max Branstetter 10:25
So now that we know that you’re an artist and a damn good one at that, I would say way better artist than your husband. I mean, that’s that’s clear.
Liz Picarazzi 10:33
I won’t let him listen to this.
Max Branstetter 10:36
We just lost a listener. Oh, let’s get to your latest mural, which is city bin. So really, really creative, I would say, out of the box, but it’s literally like an enclosure. So there’s some literal meanings there, out of the trash business. But really, really cool, like, I’ve never heard of a business like this. Really excited to dive in. What was the aha moment that unlocked for you that like, okay, there’s actually a business potential idea here.
Liz Picarazzi 11:06
The idea for checklist and the original prototyping came within my previous business, and that was because I had a lot of clients who lived in brownstones around New York City that had amazing interiors. You know, spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars on interiors, but when you looked outside of their home, they still had filthy trash cans in front and sometimes with rats in them, because we are in New York City. So I saw this front area of people’s homes as sort of a conspicuous eyesore where, you know, one thing doesn’t make sense with the other. So with an early client, I actually asked, Would you be interested in a trash enclosure? And she said, Yes, you know, I’ve been wanting one. You know, I have a lovely home, but in people in New York City, we don’t have garages and driveways or alleys, so there’s literally nowhere to put those trash cans, except for in front of your home. So we built the first one for this client, and she really liked it. We, you know, took a lot of photos, did a lot of I guess it wasn’t really social media at the time, but we we did marketing with that, and then more people wanted it. I started marketing it within my handyman business, and then more and more clients wanted it. And so I realized I kind of hated the handyman business. I felt pretty tortured by it most of the time. There were too many variables in a service business. You know, there was the house, the client, the handyman, the punch list, all sorts of things. It was just, it was really untenable. And so I started to really like what I was doing with city bin, and ended up selling the handyman business in 2017 in order to completely focus on city bin.
Max Branstetter 13:08
That’s something that’s like a really cool niche, or niche, or whatever that I don’t hear people talk about too often, is like when you’re an entrepreneur who started a business, obviously, like you started it because you’re so passionate about it, like you want to provide that solution. You know you’re gonna work Crazy Nights, crazy hours for it both. But if another business idea comes about, how do you know it’s time to actually not give up, but bring that first business to a close in whatever format, good or bad that is, and then jump to the next one,
Liz Picarazzi 13:40
I would argue that you shouldn’t close the first business and moved on to the next. I would say you should moonlight in your first in your business, sort of like I moonlighted at American Express, like I had the wheels in motion to see. Is this a viable business? Often cases it’s not a viable business. And I’ve had probably three or four things that I thought were big hit next businesses that were distractions. But if I were to have given up on my handyman business, or had given up on City bin in order to pursue what I thought was the next best thing, then I would have lost a lot. So sort of moving on to the next I did it once, and I don’t know if I want to do it again. I’d like to move on to the next thing within my current business, rather than create something new. Yeah.
Max Branstetter 14:26
Well, that’s a beautiful way of putting it, like, visually, if you look at your career, it’s not like career stop, career stop, career stop. It’s like it’s overlapped in each you know? It’s like you’re kind of doing both for a time, which I totally agree is a great way to do it. I mean, it’s no surprise like why side hustles have become so popular over the past couple decades, especially, probably well before that as well. But like you, it’s a good time to to kind of test something out before you go all in on it. Yeah,
Liz Picarazzi 14:54
yeah. And one little sort of anecdote I can say was that well before we work at. Existed. They had some sort of informal shared office spaces. And when I was still at my full time job in corporate, I ended up renting out, like a few hours a week at a shared office space where I had a desk and it was to put me in that seat in order to write my business plan and in order to move that idea forward. So it was a commitment of some money and time, but if I didn’t have that office, and I didn’t have that okay, I’m going to be wasting this money. That’s very motivating for me. I’m Midwestern. I don’t want to waste money, so I often recommend to people that say, Hey, I want to start a business. I say, find some structured time and space to flesh out your idea. Don’t quit your corporate job. Don’t give up your 401, K matching. Set yourself down, away from your kids, away from distractions, and flesh this thing out. Then go out and try it. I think that that’s a way to sort of moonlight where there’s a sort of accountability because of the rent that you’re paying.
Max Branstetter 16:06
Well, I’m Midwestern and I love wasting money, so we are just totally No, I’m just kidding. It’s nothing more painful. But so with CITIBIN what went into perfecting like the actual enclosures, so
Liz Picarazzi 16:21
a lot of mistakes. We started experimenting with a lot of different materials. So, you know, at first, our enclosures were made out of sort of two by fours and then clad with tracks. So literally, the one inch thick treks that you would get, you know, at a Home Depot, we would create a wooden frame and then clad it with the TRex. That ended up being it didn’t work well because TRex is very heavy. A wooden frame doesn’t keep out rats, and, you know, things like the hardware doesn’t work as well if you’ve got a heavy door on hinges. So that was our first iteration. Then we worked with a couple of different materials. We worked with extruded aluminum for a couple of years, couple of good years. And then we realized that being rat proof was part of our brand. We can’t not be rat proof. We can’t say to a client, when they get rats in their city bin, oh, we can come back and we can sheath it on the inside with sheet aluminum. We realized, why not build the whole thing out of sheet aluminum? Don’t come back and Band Aid it from the start. So that was a big aha in terms of materials, because that’s really our foundation, is, if you really look at what a city been, is it’s a very well constructed aluminum cabinet that can be clad with whatever you want. It just turns out that we have a material that’s similar to attracts, that’s made out of bamboo and recycled plastic. We landed on that those materials, those two materials, as the core, probably only after two years,
Max Branstetter 18:07
not many businesses can say they’re rat-proof. So that’s like a pretty cool seal of approval. You have what was like the process for becoming, you know, rat proof to, you know, a decent standard. I
Liz Picarazzi 18:20
mean, I would say that it really was shifting to the sheet aluminum, you know, knowing that we can’t have any openings, you know, and then testing it with clients. And we didn’t have any clients where rats got in after we shifted from our previous way of doing it to our current way of doing it. It’s pretty like miraculous. I’m not miraculous. It’s actually sort of obvious. But because that brought up the cost a lot, that was a pretty scary decision to make, because if you’re just framing a trash enclosure with aluminum, it costs a lot less than building the entire thing with sheet aluminum. So switching from the extruded aluminum to the sheet aluminum was a change that we needed to make, and we probably lost a lot of potential clients. But because we have to be rat proof, and that’s part of our brand, it was a decision that I made, and I never went back.
Max Branstetter 19:19
Have you heard any backlash from Master Splinter or the rats of New York community as part of this?
Liz Picarazzi 19:29
Yeah. Well, you know what I’ll have to say, one of my proudest moments in this business was that there was a New York Times article written about trash in New York City a couple of years ago, and they featured a city bin, and the last line of this amazing article was the rat couldn’t get into the trash enclosure, but died trying. And so this reporter literally saw a dead rat next to the city bin where he had probably been laboring. For many hours and he couldn’t get in. Was he so exhausted that he passed out? Who knows? He may have been killed by another rat, but the New York Times said that that rat died trying to get into my product. That was a high point in my career. I gotta admit it. Yeah,
Max Branstetter 20:17
you can’t make a press like that.
Liz Picarazzi 20:21
I mean, if I had tried to pay like a publicist for that, it would have been a lot of money, a lot of money, and it probably would have been worth it, because that’s how valuable that line is. But I was really glad that I did it without a publicist. I’d
Max Branstetter 20:35
like to extend a moment to apologize to Chuck E Cheese and all those other affected? No. So there’s so many aspects of your business that are like, from the outside, seeing like, visually like you’ve made it look like the business looks outstanding and totally buttoned up, and the city bins look awesome, but it also feels like, wow, there’s a lot of hurdles you’ve had to go through. Let’s start with New York City, like, within the city approvals there, like, what, what’s involved in, like, creating something that you know the city is actually okay with people displaying on their property, or even, like, visible as public property.
Liz Picarazzi 21:12
So for residential it’s not a problem at all. It’s people’s private space. They’re almost always within the property line of the homeowner, the area, as you intimate, is that’s more difficult is when it’s put in public space. So we have as of two and a half years ago, when we really started booming with our municipal business and our municipal line, there needs to be a whole approval process, both with the Department of Sanitation as well as with the Department of Transportation to put bins in public property such as like business improvement districts. So we’re in 25 business improvement districts of the 76 in New York. And business improvement districts are sort of like, I call them the main street of commercial corridors. So we’re in Times Square. We’re in nine locations. All the trash that previously was sitting in a mountain of trash in Times Square is now in a city bin.
Max Branstetter 22:14
Wow. Thank you for that. That like that just took a weight off my shoulders.
Liz Picarazzi 22:20
Yeah, if you ever come to New York, you’re actually you’re not going to see much trash in Times Square. And if you do, it’s probably going to be overflow from the existing litter baskets. There’s like 300,000 tourists come through Times Square every day, and that’s a lot of frappuccinos that are half drink, drank whatever the word. So many frappuccinos and are thrown into the trash and leak all over. So that process has sometimes been difficult, but it also has helped us that we were the first mover in that we figured out how the process worked, how all of the site maps needed to be done, the questions that would be asked. So part of our value proposition to customers, particularly public customers is that we know how to do their application. We’ve done it so many times that if they’re trying to pick out a vendor that’s never gone through that process before, they’re actually taking a risk. On
Max Branstetter 23:12
that note with customers. So like marketing is another big meatball, which I don’t know. I’m probably five out of the last 10 interviews I’ve done, I’ve used the term meatball, big, hairy meatball. I don’t know what. Maybe I just love meatballs and crave them all the time. But from the marketing standpoint, like from the marketing standpoint, what approach has been most valuable for you as a marketing strategy in terms of actually getting customers to sign up for city
Liz Picarazzi 23:36
Ben, so customer need you know, as marketers always say, you know, you want to figure out what their pain point is. And so for people that end up buying city bin, sometimes it’s cosmetics, oftentimes it’s cosmetics, sometimes it’s being rat proof, and there are a lot of other things. But if you can appeal to people who have, like, a $5 million brownstone that their property value is actually compromised by having rusty or plastic, you know, Rubbermaid trash cans in front that is a way to market to their sense of, I want curb appeal in terms of the rats, that’s actually pretty easy to market around. I mean, I have to say it’s everybody hates rats. They’re disgusting. New York City, We’re known for our rats. You know, one thing that’s interesting is, I would say, probably in the first eight years of the business, I didn’t want to talk about rats because I thought I had a premium product that I wanted to sell to architects and designers, and they want to hear about how beautiful it is and how many design awards it’s won. Back then, I didn’t have design awards. Now I do, and I had a sort of a brand association. With a rat that I didn’t want attached to my brand. I was really sort of stubborn about it, and then I realized this is one of our biggest selling points, and I’m going to start talking about it. And then, you know, our municipal business started booming about two and a half years ago when the mayor declared a war on rats and pledged to roll out trash enclosures all over the city, which he did, which was like the biggest boost to my business I probably could have ever gotten. And the city literally paid for some of these business improvement districts to put trash enclosures because we want tourism dollars in New York. We want people to feel comfortable in their neighborhoods. And if tourists come to Times Square and they see a lot of rats, that hurts tourism. And so the city realized that this was something that was really important, and for me, then to have those sorts of customers, like the city of New York, of course, I was going to start branding and talking about the rats, because that was what their concern was, with their constituents calling and saying, What is going on with our community? You know, the rat population boomed during the pandemic because, well, there’s a lot of takeout food that people were ordering that were not properly disposing of there was also a lot of construction, which creates burrows for rats. So I know that you’ve asked a question generally about marketing, and I’m kind of talking a lot about the rats that’s become really big. But the esthetics is, if you are a homeowner and you spent, you know, $2,000 for a light fixture in your living room that no one or very few people will ever see. Why wouldn’t you pay that to have a trash enclosure in the front of your house that everybody will see? Everybody sees the front of your house as they’re walking by. And that’s actually my best form of marketing, because we have branding plates on the side of our product, and passersby see it. It’s, it wasn’t something that I ever thought this is the most genius way to do marketing. It was sort of an AHA after we started. But oftentimes, when people, you know, initiate with city bin, what they’ll say is, my neighbors have it, you know, I saw it walking by, you know, Williamsburg. That is something I don’t need to pay for. So I love that form of marketing.
Max Branstetter 27:27
That’s the best form of marketing. But by the way, you could, you can answer any question with rats. I think it’s super fascinating. And yeah, anybody who’s been to New York and seen a rat that looks like the size of a hippo, it’s like, yeah, all right, they’re kind of a nuisance,
Liz Picarazzi 27:42
but just kind of, it’s also fast.
Max Branstetter 27:46
It’s also fascinating that you metaphorically, like you tried to rat-proof your business at the start, like you wanted to keep rats out of it, and then you realize, like, oh, actually, the rat proofing is a huge thing for us. And that timing worked out incredibly well with the city. Besides that timing being fantastic, and like the war on rats and all that, what else would you say is a major reason that you and team have been able to grow this business and get awards and recognition and like, what, like, what’s driving this hairy meatball? And I just couldn’t
Liz Picarazzi 28:18
resist so I think that, you know, one of the core design principles is that city bin is modular. So if someone has three trash cans, they get a three module. If they have four trash cans and they’re 96 gallon cans, then they get a four module large. So whatever size can you have and however many cans you have, we have a city bin for you, whatever color you want, you can have that. Whereas, if someone is looking for a trash enclosure, and they go to Home Depot, or they go on to Amazon or they go on to Wayfair, they’re going to find plastic or very poorly constructed, you know, cedar containers that they’re going to end up needing to replace after a couple of years. So I would say probably 20, 25% of our installations are of an installation of a city bin that also are removing their existing city bin and taking it to the dump. And we have a service for that. So, you know, we have services wrapped around the trash enclosure product, so someone’s going to need installation, they’re going to need to take it away. So my employees are top of it. I have an incredible team. I sometimes tell people there’s no one on my team who I want to fire. I like everybody. It hasn’t always been that way, but developing a team as we had is really big. We’re subject subject matter experts in trash like we can all walk down the street, and we can eyeball trash cans, and we know exactly what size it is. We know the dimensions of it, and we know the brand, and we often.
More to be replenished. And he joined the business in May of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, when he was laid off. And that was the kind of the decision point where we had to say, is he going to go back and get another corporate job? Or we at a point where he can join? And we were at a point where he not only could join, but we needed him to join, because I would order the wrong amount of inventory. I, you know, would get frustrated with, you know, things with QuickBooks or inventory reports, all the stuff that he knew really well in terms of what is the the tips is, you know, try to have separation of work and home. We’re not very good at that, but luckily, it doesn’t usually lead to any major difficulties, because we know each other really well and we recognize each other’s strengths. You know, he knows that I’m the strategist, the visionary, the marketer, and he’s the operations guy. And the other thing is, he’s also incredibly strong in sales. So even if I’m pissed at about something in the CO overall, if he’s doing really, you know, well, in sales, I’m going to ignore those other things that are falling between the cracks, or get someone else to do it. Well,
Max Branstetter 36:18
he sounds like a total catch. So it works out on multiple levels. But all right. And then you mentioned that you kind of like you and team are really the trash experts. You know, all sorts of things about trash. Now, what’s a fun fact about trash or trash cans that most people would be surprised by?
Liz Picarazzi 36:34
You know, that’s a good question, and I don’t know how to answer it, but I would say that people might not realize how many sizes there are, and that many people are not optimizing their space. So in New York City, where we have very little space, if you’re using a trash can That’s too short, you’re wasting the vertical space, which means your trash may overflow. And that’s actually what goes on with New York City? You know, corner litter baskets because those overflow, and it’s partly because the size of it isn’t big enough. I
Max Branstetter 37:10
love it. I’ve noticed that just going to people’s places, that sounds very specific, going to people’s places, no just seeing trash cans in different places, especially in like apartments, like people have a wide range of trash cans that they use. And every now and then, if, like, somebody is using a tiny one, it’s like, what like that is not efficient at all, just so much, unless,
Liz Picarazzi 37:31
I will argue for that person, if they consume less, which is a great thing. So we often talk about less consumption. Yes, that hurts our business, but ultimately, as humans on this planet, we need to be tackling consumption.
Max Branstetter 37:46
And then last one, what it you know, I know you’ve lived in the City and Brooklyn, like some of the most urban areas in the world, for a while, but what is the biggest thing you miss about Madison, Wisconsin. Good recess. You don’t sound like that.
Liz Picarazzi 38:05
Yeah, no, I missed the pace. It’s a really beautiful place. I’m still a Midwesterner, you know, in terms of my just my man would say completely way of life. People in Wisconsin would say that I’m a New Yorker. They would not say that I’m from the homeland, really, but I life was simpler there. You know, I recently went home to Madison, and I spent several hours just riding bike with my dad and going to the farmers market with my friends. Those are just really precious things that I’m never going to forget about my homeland.
Max Branstetter 38:43
That’s a really beautiful way to wrap up. And now I want to fly, drive, walk or ride a bike to Wisconsin and go for a bike ride there too. So yeah. Liz, thank you so much. This has just been fantastic. And I don’t know why I said fantastic that way, but this has been awesome, and I really appreciate all you’re doing with Citi bin and your insights and stories everything in between, where is the best place for people to learn more about Citi bin, as well as if they want to connect with you online, anywhere, citybin.com,
Liz Picarazzi 39:12
C, I T, I B, I n.com. Not Citi Bike or Citibank. That’s a whole nother story about my trademark which I was able to get.
Max Branstetter 39:22
Oh, I was curious about that. Congrats on that. That’s awesome. Yeah,
Liz Picarazzi 39:25
no, my lawyer actually told me not to try to go with that. And I I said, Let’s do it. And I got it. And then I would also say on Instagram, I would love people to look at that. And we’re just at City bin, because that’s our portfolio. We We regularly update it with the work that we’re proud of. As for me, I’m on LinkedIn, feel free to hit me up there. Perfect
Max Branstetter 39:48
city all around, best in the city. Last thing here, final thoughts. It could be a quote, words to live by your favorite food from Wisconsin, whatever you want. Send us home here you.
Liz Picarazzi 39:59
I would say, like, follow your passion. Period, follow your passion. Because I’ve had a lot of weird places in my career. We didn’t talk about how I worked in Russia and Ukraine for most of the 1990s that was because I had a passion and an interest for that. That’s how I got into the trash business as well. Is that you like observing it. You’re really fascinated with it, and you have to have the courage to follow that. And unfortunately, most people don’t.
Max Branstetter 40:32
And Liz, definitely pick a does. Liz, thank you so much for coming on the Wild Business Growth podcast, sharing your wild story, and thank you, wild listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more wild stories like this one, make sure to follow or subscribe to the wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast platform, and check out the video versions and subscribe as well on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. You can also find us on Goodpods, and for any help with podcast production,
you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
