Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube · Amazon Music · iHeartRadio · Pandora · RSS
Episode Summary
You’re in business with your daughter. You started it together. You went on TV together. And now you want out, and you can’t agree on what the business is worth or how to value the thirty years of experience you brought to the table that she didn’t. That’s the seat Karen Laine was sitting in. Karen co-founded Two Chicks and a Hammer with her daughter Mina, rehabbing houses in transitional Indianapolis neighborhoods, and ended up on HGTV’s Good Bones for seven seasons before retiring from the day-to-day. We got into the part nobody on TV shows you: the year-long failed buyout, the misalignment between time-in-seat value and intellectual-property value, why she and Mina never learned to switch hats the way she did with her younger daughter, and the choice to withdraw from a fight rather than win it. Real talk from a former prosecutor and defense attorney on conflict, mediation, and what happens when family pressure and TV pressure collide on the same balance sheet. The line that stuck: family is way more important than any business, and if the business creates the conflict, the business is what has to go.
Watch on YouTube
## Top 10 Takeaways- Decide how you will wind down the partnership before you start it, not when one of you wants out.
- Time in the seat and intellectual property are two different forms of value, and partners rarely weight them the same.
- If you don’t value goodwill on the way in, you avoid a decade-long fight on the way out.
- Family conflict gets imported into business decisions because nobody made the hats explicit.
- When you can’t resolve a conflict, withdrawing is a choice with a real cost: resentment compounds quietly.
- TV pressure and family pressure on the same P&L breaks the “we don’t decide unless we agree” rule fast.
- The blender of estate, siblings, buyouts, and lifestyle money is what makes family transitions actually hard.
- Active listening, I-statements, and naming common ground are skills, not personality traits. Learn them or hire someone.
- Practice being retired before you actually retire, because the identity question hits harder than the financial one.
- Reinventing yourself starts with one question owners avoid for years: who am I when this isn’t my title?
Sound Bites
“If we don’t agree, we don’t do it. We are going to have those hard conversations and we are gonna step back from them and come back at them until we find where our interests align.” (@TBD) — Karen Laine
“What you need to value is the 30 years it took me to gain that knowledge. She started looking at it as just how many hours you put in a day. That’s what matters. And I couldn’t look at it that way.” (@TBD) — Karen Laine
“If TV hadn’t come along, eventually I would have said I want to retire. Buy me out. And we would have had a decade-long fight about what the business is worth. Which is why you have a podcast.” (@TBD) — Karen Laine
“Family is way more important than any business. If business is creating a conflict in a family, the business is what has to go because the family is what has to stay.” (@TBD) — Karen Laine
“The more educated the parties are about the different tools of valuations and roles and responsibilities, the more tools we have to communicate with.” (@TBD) — Ryan Tansom
About This Episode
Karen Laine is the co-founder of Two Chicks and a Hammer and co-star of HGTV’s Good Bones alongside her daughter Mina Starsiak Hawk. Before rehabbing houses full-time, Karen spent over a decade as a deputy prosecutor and criminal defense attorney in Indianapolis, with training as a mediator. She and Mina started rehabbing houses in 2007 to improve their own transitional neighborhood, did 27 houses on their own money before TV came along, and then scaled into a seven-season HGTV production. Karen retired from the day-to-day in 2019 after a year-long buyout negotiation. She brings a rare on-the-record perspective on family business transitions because most of the misalignment played out in front of cameras.
Resources Mentioned
- Two Chicks and a Hammer — Karen and Mina’s rehab business
- HGTV’s Good Bones — The show that scaled the business to 13 houses a year
- High Noon Entertainment — Production company that approached them via Skype
- Finish Big by Bo Burlingham — Referenced on the identity question owners face after exit
- Think Again by Adam Grant — Referenced on tying identity to values, not opinions
- Gail Golden — Referenced for the “curating life like a museum” framing
- Karen on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram — @KarenLaine
- Karen on Facebook and Twitter — @MamaChick / @MamaChick1
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 1 — Ownership Goals — Time, role, and cash flow targets that drive the decision to retire from the seat
- Module 9 — Operator Transition — The actual mechanics of stepping out of the day-to-day
Milestones:
- Milestone 1 — Time & Role Goals — The conversation Karen had with herself before the buyout
- Milestone 6 — Transaction Value — What a partner buyout actually requires you to define up front
- Milestone 25 — Operator Transition Plan — The year of “practicing being retired” before the handoff
Concepts referenced:
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — When founder identity and business identity stop being separable
- Enterprise Value vs. Equity Value — The valuation conversation that takes a year when you skip it on day one