Hygge Coworking

Founder and CEO of the American Pit Bull Foundation Sara Ondrako is sitting down with us to talk about how her nonprofit survived the pandemic, what long lasting affects Covid-19 has had on their funding and advice for other nonprofits facing the Delta variant.

Hygge's owner Garrett Tichy is taking over Zero to Ten to talk with Alyssa, the usual Zero to Ten host, about her used bookstore at Camp North End. Alyssa shares how That's Novel Books opened two weeks before the state shut down last year, what she did to survive as a business owner and what's next. 

You'd be hard pressed to find a small business owner who didn't learn something throughout the pandemic, but for Olivia Wolff, co-founder of UpDog Kombucha, the lesson was a particularly hard one: she learned she was not the best person to be running her company. Listen in as she tells us about keeping the business afloat during 2020 and finding a buyer to take over.

Over a year ago, Garrett and George first on a podcast about how the Covid-19 pandemic had affected George's music lesson business, Bold Music Co. We're catching back up with this local entrepreneur to see how things are going and what's next. 

We sat down with hygge's owner Garrett Tichy to get an update on business as coworking adjusts to life opening up after the pandemic. He shares more about what hygge coworking faced during the pandemic and how we are still working through it all now as a small team of three. 

In this extra special episode, Garrett guest-hosts while we hear from Niché Faulkner, a Charlotte yoga trainer and the co-founder of SHAE Movement African Arts, on the state of the city's yoga community post-pandemic and the lack of diversity in yoga spaces. 

Mental health and physical wellness often go hand in hand, both in good ways and bad. While physical wellness can alleviate symptoms of mental illness, there's a line that can be crossed. This week we're sitting down with hygge wellness's GM Jamie Horn to talk about her history with this and how hygge wellness tries to keep people well in the safest ways. 

If you've been struggling with your mental wellness lately, you're not alone. For Mental Health Awareness Month we're sitting down with Dana Burbridge Pennington and Jenee Thorsell, the owners and therapists behind Starting Point Counseling and Wellness in Charlotte. We chat about changes in therapy over the past year, tips for finding the best therapist for you and other ways you can prioritize your mental wellness. 

"Sometimes life is just more fun when you wing it." That's what we did for this week's Zero to Ten episode. Alyssa was in need of another guest, so she forced the unsuspecting Hannah Krueger to hop on the mic and participate with no preparation whatsoever. The result? Well... it's a weird, kind of awkward episode, we won't lie. We talk about things like pie, Pitbull, and her favorite take out spots in Charlotte. We still think it's a fun episode, though. Give it a listen.

When Stacy Cassio started Pink Mentor Network 4 years ago, she saw it primarily as a B2C company. She would work with local Charlotte women on creating a community that could learn from each other and lift each other up. The pandemic changed all of that, though, and Stacy has seen her business primarily switch to B2B. It's a journey she didn't expect, but is embracing wholeheartedly. We talk with her about that, the survivors guilt of seeing a business succeed while so many others have failed, and what's next for her on this episode. 

"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