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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Learning What to Learn
When I first quit my job and decided to venture out on my own, I was working alone, had almost no resources, had very few connections, and almost no web experience. What I did have was time. And the desire to learn anything and everything that could help me be successful.* So, naturally, if there was something that needed to be done I picked up a book and learned it. This is a great thing. It’s probably a necessary trait to bootstrap your own company, especially if it’s your first company and you’re in a situation like I was. Thankfully … Continue reading
Trading Hours
@DHH wrote a really interesting blog post yesterday about what he calls “flipping the day“: Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates to 6am to 2pm Chicago time. That gives me all the time before lunch to enjoy the light of day and all the activities that encourages. I find myself more interested in working out, more eager to read books, and generally infused with more energy for both physical and mental activities. Over the past few years my average sleep schedule has been roughly 10 PM – 6 AM. When you compare that … Continue reading
A Randomly Selected, Potentially Awesome Post From 10/8/2008
Google Me
No, seriously, Google me. I finally, finally, rank #1 for “Adam McFarland”: Take that Adam-McFarland.com! Only took me like 3 years of actively maintaining a blog while that site hasn’t changed since about 1998…
Taking Care of Your Best Customers
When it comes to our customers, it’s easy for our attention to gravitate to the small minority who contact us repeatedly: the ones who love to chat about detailing, the ones who have crazy purchasing scenarios (you know, the guy who wants to dropship a gift to his brother-in-law, wants it delivered precisely on January 25th, wants a hand-written card included in it, and wants to pay for his order using 4x $25 VISA gift cards that he received from his step-grandmother for Hanukkah), and the ones who love to complain about anything/everything. The reality is that this small subset … Continue reading
Enjoying the Variety of Running a Business
One of the best aspects of running your own business is that you have the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats. Notice that I said “best” and “opportunity.” I view this as a huge positive. Not everyone feels the same way. For instance, some developers solely want to develop websites all day long without ever worrying about the other facets of running a business. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – there are plenty of jobs where you can thrive doing just that. However, I know that I would personally get bored out of my mind if … Continue reading
Overcoming Adversity
What a year 2011 was. It started off with a partner abruptly leaving the company. Throughout the year it felt like a week didn’t go by where there wasn’t some major business or personal catastrophe for Mike, Greg, or I. The phone would ring and someone would be in the emergency room, or in a car wreck, or come home to find their house robbed (all of which happened). Or we’d get audited. Or a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane would displace me from my home. It literally felt like 10 years worth of bad luck happening all at once. I learned a … Continue reading
From Applicants to Making a Hire
Sit back and relax because this is going to be a LONG post Again I’ll pick up right where I left off at the end of Attracting Quality Job Applicants. At this point we had crafted our job application to act as a natural filter by making the application process take a little thought, and we had promoted the posting using our sites and social media accounts, the career center websites at local colleges, LinkedIn, and Craigslist. Reviewing the Applications Pretty quickly applicants started coming through. Not a gigantic wave, but we would get one or two a day. The … Continue reading
Attracting Quality Job Applicants
Picking up where I left off at the end of Why Most Hiring Processes Suck, the primary philosophical difference between our hiring process and most traditional hiring processes is that we want to first assess a candidate’s aptitude at performing the skills required for the job prior to conducting any interviews or making any job offers. For some jobs this is easier than others. Developers, for example, can be evaluated by their prior work and/or by giving them a small sample project to complete. A warehouse worker can be evaluated by having them come in and pack orders for a … Continue reading
Why Most Hiring Processes Suck
My partners and I are all too familiar with a “traditional” hiring process. We’ve all been on both sides of the fence – as the applicant and the one doing the hiring, for companies small and large, for companies old and new. The common theme amongst us was that every hiring process we’ve been through has sucked. So we set out to do something about it. While it’s impossible to pick the right person 100% of the time, we sought out anything we could do to improve our chances beyond just a shot in the dark. Over the course of … Continue reading
Welcome Reece & Bobby to the Pure Adapt Team!
We’re extremely excited to be welcoming two new full-time members to the Pure Adapt family. In September we set out to hire a “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist” for Detailed Image. We recently made an offer to our leading candidate Reece for this position. He accepted and is scheduled to start in January. Reece is a recent graduate of St. Rose college. He handled everything we threw at him exceptionally (and believe me, we didn’t make things easy on our applicants). He’s also a great culture fit – his family owns a body shop and he’s a passionate sports … Continue reading
A Huge (& Highly Efficient) Cyber Monday!
That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot! I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant. To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy … Continue reading