Adam McFarland

As I said back when I launched it, Music-Alerts is a site I’m really proud of.  I think it’s a service that a lot of people could benefit from, and I think I did a pretty good job on the design and programming.  That said, let’s be honest:  the chances for it to actually make us any money is very slim.  The only chance it has is to become HUGE so we could make money on advertising or affiliate sales.  Currently, the links to the albums are affiliate links, so in theory if a crapload of people used the service we’d make some money when they clicked through and bought an album.  But we’re not experts in the music industry and we don’t want to commit ourselves to a site with little to no revenue potential.

So while I want the site to be useful and become popular, I really don’t want to spend much time on it.  We’ve been getting some traffic because of the high search engine rankings, and there’s a good chance if I left it there it would naturally grow slowly but surely.  However, I still wanted to spend a little time and effort to see if I could get the site to catch the viral bug: you never know who will see it and have interest in it.

Today (Sunday) I finished my emails and daily tasks in an hour or two, and I had the rest of my football-watching day ahead of me.  I decided to spend exactly 1 hour marketing Music-Alerts…primarily because I wanted time to relax and watch sports, but also because I thought it would be fun to limit myself to such a ridiculously small amount of time (this way, if the site does take off I’ll look like a genius for only spending an hour marketing it :)).  I also kind of wanted to prove a point that when your back is against the wall - either by choice or by circumstance - you can usually pull something impressive together.  While I really don’t expect much from my hour, I do expect an increase in traffic and feed creations.

Here’s what I did:

• Spent $100 on StumbleUpon PPC, which equates to 2,000 visitors to the site (5 cents/visitor).   I configured it to show to only people in the US that are between 18 and 30 and have listed “music” as one of their interests.
• Submitted the site to the QUIT (Quick Indexing Tool) on Blue Hat SEO.  The site advocates both white hat and black hat SEO techniques, so use your better judgment before following any advice on the site. However, it is a great read and I’m willing to take some risks with Music-Alerts so it was worth a try…I’ve been curious.
• Emailed about 10 influential technology blogs (like TechCrunch and LifeHacker) and a handful of popular music sites.  All it takes is one site like TechCrunch to cover the site and it’s ON.  Are the odds slim? Hell yea.  But it’s worth a shot, especially for the potential payoff.

I’ll follow-up sometime soon with the results!

As sad as it may be, every once in a while I need to be reminded of the fragility of life. Such was the case earlier this week when an under-the-radar sports story stopped me in my tracks and really made me think. I was watching Game 1 of the World Series, and amidst stories about Josh Beckett and the Rockies spectacular win streak, Joe Buck told the story of the death of Matthew Wasser:

The Yankees organization has been mourning the passing of media relations department intern Matthew Wasser, 22, who passed away Sunday morning in Waltham, Mass. Wasser was a passenger in a taxi cab rear-ended by a driver charged with operating under the influence of alcohol.

Born and raised in Bernardsville, N.J., Wasser was to graduate from the College of New Jersey in December with a degree in communications. He is survived by his parents, Marilyn Gottlieb Wasser and Eric Wasser, and siblings Jason and Stephanie.

“A loss of this magnitude is impossible to put into words,” said Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ director of media relations. “Matt will long be remembered for his boundless enthusiasm and uplifting, selfless spirit. The Yankees family reaches out to the Wasser family during this tremendous time of grief, as we keep his loved ones and friends close to our heart.”

A story like this really makes you realize that nothing in life is guaranteed. Neither you or I can say for sure that we will wake up tomorrow, or whether or not we’ll make it through the day unscathed. Matthew did nothing wrong - he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just happened to hop into a taxi with a drunk driver. Take from that what you will. I’m certainly not one to claim to be all-knowing when it comes to life and death, but to me there’s two ways you can look at it: either you’re pessimistic and bitter and believe that life is unfair, or you embrace the fact that life is precious and (as cliched as it is) live every day like it’s your last.

Well OK, let’s just say that you believe the latter like I do. What does “live every day like it’s your last” mean? Some people would take that as “have fun all day long”, but when you really think about it that mentality is wholly self serving and would leave most people unsatisfied on their death bed. When I die, I hope people say more than “he liked to have fun”. I’d hope that I would have made the world a better place and improved the lives of those I crossed paths with.

What exactly that means, probably opens up a pandora’s box of more questions: should I spend more time with my friends? More time creating a business to innovate society? More time doing charity work? More time with my family? Etc. Those are constantly churning through my head, and I certainly don’t have answers to them. But I think asking those questions to yourself helps ensure that you don’t take life for granted, regardless of whether or not we ever answer them.

Up until about 2 weeks ago when we launched Faceup I had spent the previous 6 months or so on programming projects…not because I really wanted to do that much programming, but because I knew it was for the good of the company.  So far, it’s paid off:  SportsLizard is making good money without much work, Detailed Image has had it’s best month ever in October (traditionally the slowest month of the year) and most of that can be attributed to the new site, and we’re jam packed with clients for Faceup in only two weeks.

Now I’m transitioning from programmer to true business owner.  My days are filled with a little bit of everything, and I absolutely love the thrill of seeing each part of the company operating at its peak.  Things are going so well that we’re planning to accelerate our expansion and are considering taking on a small outside investment to kick-start everything.  And while I’ve been really busy, it’s been the kind of busy I love:  good things are coming from every direction and I’m just short of being overwhelmed.

It’s only noon on Tuesday, and here’s what this week has shaped up like thusfar:

Monday:

• Up at 7, back from the gym and showered by 9.
• Answer emails and post on Craigslist for Faceup from 9-10.
• 10-1 eat with Mike and George, call a client, prep for another.
• Meet with the largest accounting firm in Albany (with whom we are a client of) and land their web design job…a simple Wordpress site on the front end and a complex system on the back end.  A perfect, perfect client for us.
• 1-3 team meeting to discuss a potential investor, and how much stock we’re willing to give up (less than 10%, probably 5%).
• 3-5 answer emails, call another client, prepare proposal for potential investor.
• 6-10 meet with Mike to work on marketing for Faceup and discuss client work that’s piling up already.
• 10-1 emails, shower, sleep.

Tuesday

• Up at 7, out the door at 7:30 to meet with one of my mentors up in Saratoga (30 min drive).  He asks me to be on the board of advisors for his company, which coming from your mentor is absolutely AWESOME. He values my tech knowledge enough to take advice from me, which excites me because he’s always been someone I’ve been able to lean on for advice and now I can return the favor.
• Back home by 10, I spent the last 2 hours answering emails and am writing this post before digging into some programming.
• The rest of the day will be doing some work for a few clients and prepping the final quote for that accounting firm.  I’ve also got to write an article for SportsLizard because I’ve been slacking on that lately.
• The rest of the week includes a meeting with our potential investor and the possibility that we’re able to begin shopping around for the office/warehouse that we really want and need.

I’m not sure how all of this looks to someone on the outside.  It could sound mundane and normal for a business owner…or it could sound really cool.  But being in the middle of it is amazing.  All of the hard work is coming full circle and showing on the bottom line a lot faster than I thought it would and I’m surprised at how fast we’re moving.  Of course, I LOVE being busy and moving fast so I wouldn’t want it any other way.  There are days that are predictable and stable where I accomplish quite a bit and those are definitely good to have.  However, the chaotic days where I’m pulled in a million directions are the ones that I live for.  That’s how I know everything we do is working.

In the next five years we anticipate that we’ll grow to have a somewhat sizable staff, probably 10-15 people. A few programmers, a book-keeper, a “secretary” (or whatever the politically correct term is now), a warehouse employee for Detailed Image for packing and shipping, a customer service rep, etc. One of the biggest hidden costs for an upstart bootstrapped company like us is software. We have the same problem you do: we want to use the open-source alternative but it always lacks the functionality of the paid counterpart.

The solution we’ve come up with is to use Open Source for everyone’s laptop, and have one “master” desktop with legitimate paid versions of every software we need. So our laptops will run Open Office as an office suite, Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client, Paint.net as a photo editing software, etc…and the high performance desktop will have the entire Adobe Suite, the entire Microsoft Office Suite, and any other expensive software we need. We estimate that 95% of tasks can be accomplished with the Open Source version, but if someone really needs Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop they can use our kickass desktop. This will keep us 100% legal with the latest software without spending $20k/year on software licenses.

We’re going to implement this over the course of the next year. Once we find a warehouse/office space (still looking) we’ll build the desktop and make the transition. In the meantime, I’m testing all of the software out for functionality and using it as part of my day-to-day to see which features the Open Source version doesn’t have and if that will be OK.

When we launched Faceup, I decided to do all of my email and scheduling using Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook. I run the two side-by-side now, and I must say I’m VERY impressed with Thunderbird. It does take a little configuration and a few plugins to up the functionality, but I’d have to say if I were evaluating the software packages based on my needs it’d be a wash.

The one thing Thunderbird lacks is Mail Merge, which I love using in Outlook when I have to send an email to 15-20 people and want to insert their name into the message to customize it. No biggie though - I’ll just use the desktop for that for the once every few months I need it. But Thunderbird has one thing that Outlook doesn’t (at least to my knowledge): HTML email signatures. I program the HTML file, including CSS, and just link my email account to the local file that I can change any time I want - very cool.

Thunderbird is the first Open Source software I’ve evaluated to this extent, but I’m wholly satisfied and loving our cost-saving software plan more and more. As I said though, it does require more configuration than Outlook. Here’s a copy of the info I posted on our internal Wiki that we use to share information throughout the company:

Installing Mozilla Thunderbird as an Email Client

1. Download from Mozilla Website
2. Install and start software
3. It will prompt you to add a new email account (or Tools -> Account Settings -> Add Account)
4. It will walk you through creating an account, similar to the way Outlook does. Make sure to make the Incoming User Name your full email address (i.e. adam@pureadapt.com, not adam).
5. Configure account by going to Tools -> Account Settings
   1. To create a signature - make an HTML file with your signature in it and save it to your local hard drive. Under Account Settings, check Attach This Signature and browse to locate your HTML file.
   2. To have mail go to separate inboxes (instead of all accounts going to the global one) - Select Server Settings -> Advanced -> Inbox for this server’s account
   3. For outgoing mail to work - Select Outgoing Server (SMTP). If it’s your first email account, edit the profile to use your full email address again (i.e. adam@pureadapt.com, not adam). If it’s an additional email account, add a new profile for the account.
   4. To handle email replies like Outlook does - select Composition & Adressing -> Automatically quote the original message when replying -> Then, start my reply above the quote -> and place my signature below my reply (above the quote).
   5. Under Server Settings, make sure that Check for new messages at startup, Check for new messages every X minutes, and Automatically download new messages are all checked.
6. To have Calendar and Task list functions, install Lightning
7. To forward messages inline (and not as an attachment), go to Tools -> Options -> Composition -> Forward Messages -> Inline

I think in previous posts I’ve proven my point that advertising should never be the sole source of revenue for an online business.  In addition to all of the reasons I mentioned previously, there’s another one that’s often overlooked:  bartering advertising.  If your only source of income is ad revenue, you guard each impression as if your life depends on it…you won’t dare trade it because you need to get top dollar for it.

However, if you’ve got another source of revenue (or two or three other sources of revenue) you can barter said advertising to drive more qualified traffic to your site.  Since you’ll likely get only a few dollars for each thousand impressions, a lot of the time advertising is more profitable being bartered with a site that can drive targeted customers looking to buy whatever else you’re offering.

Example:  the large 336×280 that we have on SportsLizard’s home page is shown between 5,000 and 10,000 times each month (the majority of traffic enters the site from pages other than the home page, like the customs section or the price guide).   We used to show AdSense there and get at best $2 CPM.  So on the best of months we’d make $20 from that slot.  Now that slot is occupied by SportsCardFreaks, a sports card forum that we partnered with.  I put their ad on our home page and made an announcement that they are the “official forum” of SportsLizard, and in return they put up an ad for SportsLizard’s Price Guide in their forum.

After about a month, we’re getting just over 1 Premium Account signed up per day from the ads on SportsCardFreaks.  Those users are the *perfect* user for our Price Guide because they’re the “hardcore” collectors. We end up getting a new $5/month sign up EACH DAY by giving up that $20/month spot on our home page.

Just one example, but I bet most sites could benefit from similar thinking.

That’s a question I often ask myself.  Is it better for a business to pre-scale processes or to scale only when they absolutely need to?  The answer I’ve come up with for us is a mix of the two.  Let me explain.

As I mentioned when we launched Faceup, we took a step back as a company this year to take two steps forward next year.  If we had continued taking on clients at the rate we were in the first quarter we would have made a lot more money, but we would have been a mess.  Instead we re-developed SportsLizard and Detailed Image and automated everything we could, and we built Faceup so that we could immediately handle several new clients each day.

In a way, these decisions reflect my personality and the skills that were hammered into me as an engineer.  When you’re talking about an assembly line at an auto manufacturer, every single process needs to be built with extreme scalability in mind or you’ll fail.  I kind of took those skills to the web.  Even iPrioritize, which has succeeded in registering a lot of users but failed to make money was very, very scalable.  SportsLizard’s Price Guide has grown to over 20,000 members in about six months and I spend the same amount of time each day on it as I did when we had 15 members.

But there’s a huge downside to doing this.  If you guess wrong and the customers want something different than your cookie cutter process, you fail.  If that happens you spend a lot of time re-building a system that you could have just waited to make until you completely understood your customer.  We built Faceup only after we noticed patterns with the clients we were attracting and we *think* we can become a leader in that market due to our efficiencies that are going to allow us to do high quality work fast.  However, there’s still a risk that it won’t work and customers won’t act the way we suspect they will, and in that case we’d be out about a month of work.

In a perfect world, every site/company would be built with the minimum processes in place until you gather ample data from your client base to build the system so that it encompasses the majority of situations.  Detailed Image’s site was extremely difficult to build because they had almost three years of customer experiences to draw upon, and we built the site to address as many of those needs as possible.  However, it was probably better that they used a crappy version of osCommerce for  a few years before building the custom site.  Had they built the custom site in 2004 they wouldn’t have known what they needed.

That’s my take when it comes to websites.  When it comes to office space, employees, and most other expenses, I absolutely think you should scale by need instead of pre-scaling.  A company just starting off needs to keep overhead low and I say work from your basement as long as you can before taking on the expenses of an office (particularly the upfront expenses of furniture, additional technology, and insurance, which I think blindside people).  The *only* time I’d break that rule is if you encountered the perfect employee and you don’t want to let them slip away.  Then it might be worth snagging them up while they’re available.

Note - this doesn’t apply to getting a good lawyer, accountant, and payroll service.  Get those in place ASAP so you can cultivate that relationship for years as you grow.

In the end, I think that the scalable systems we’re putting in place are one of the highest indicators of our probable long-term success.  Whether or not you agree with my sentiments about scaling, you absolutely need to be thinking about it constantly.  Don’t just work on your day-to-day business tasks, force yourself to take the time to put the systems in place so you’ll be able to handle your business when volume doubles, quadruples, increases one-hundred-fold, etc

Reminder:  Only 4 days left to download the Faceup Web Marketing Book for FREE.

I’ve been really surprised and encouraged by the emails I’ve received after the announcement yesterday of the re-launch of our client services under the Faceup-Sites name. I wasn’t sure how it would be received by other developers/young entrepreneurs, but I received a handful of emails from people I respect a great deal who love the idea of going after the market we’re going after.

One of the biggest components of the site is the Faceup Web Marketing eBook that I wrote, which is essentially a compilation of the SEO/web marketing work I’ve done for clients over the last few years. It includes all of the techniques I taught them….except it’s only $39.99 and not $1,500. You can check out the book page on Faceup to see what topics are covered, and also to read some testimonials (there are some really good ones from Anthony from Xonatek and Tricia from Webmail.us…which was an Inc 500 company and was acquired by Rackspace last week).

ANYWAY - to help kick off the promotion of the book and start spreading the word, I’m offering it for free on this blog. The link below will be active for one week (until 10/16/07). No signup process or anything, just click the link and you’ll be redirected to the book download.

http://www.faceup-sites.com/ebook-download/free-blog-download

If you download the book and like it, I’d greatly appreciate it if you tell a friend…or if you have a blog or website give it an honest review.

Thanks

This first year as Pure Adapt has been interesting.  All four of us have had to get used to working together and running our first incorporated business.  Way back in December of last year when we officially formed the company our primary source of revenue was SEO and web design services.  Around March we hit a road block:  many of our sites severely needed upgrades and we were very inefficient with our client work because we didn’t have the proper systems in place.

So we decided to take a step back.  I spent a few months re-launching SportsLizard and the Price Guide, which has been very successful, profitable, and best of all efficient (I probably average around 8 hours/week on SL now).  Then we saw that George and Greg were spending 3-6 hours a day doing tasks that could be automated with Detailed Image.  So Mike and I spent a few months overhauling the entire system.  About a month in, over 75% of customers are using our upsell system and George and Greg have reduced order processing down to about an hour a day.  All in all, our moves have been successful, but I’d be lying if there wasn’t a cost.  It came at the expense of quite a bit of revenue…I’d estimate about $100k if we had focused more on our services.

Whether you agree or not with our choices, we’re operating at close to 100% efficiency now and it’s time to “cash in” and scale up.  Today is the first day in about 8 months that all four of us are working on revenue-generating tasks.  Our systems are in place and we’re spending our time marketing.  George and Greg for DI, and Mike and I on our client services.  We made one major decision when re-launching our client services:  we decided not to do it under the Pure Adapt name.

With that said, I’d like to introduce Faceup-Sites.  There are three components to the site:

• Web design services
• A SEO/Web Marketing eBook that I wrote
• Business card design and printing

Why did we launch this separate from Pure Adapt and why did we target this market?  A handful of reasons:

• I have officially deemed SEO work to be very inefficient.  We only consult and put together plans now, we don’t actively do work for clients - it just wasn’t profitable and we had a hard time getting cooperation from people.  While I’ll still take on the occasional client by referral under Pure Adapt, I’ll direct everyone else to the eBook which is selling for $39.99.
• When you do web design/development work, you can go after low-level clients (think restaurants or lawyers that only need a few updates each year) or mid and high level clients that require much more management and much more challenging work.  We’re not a team of A+ programmers, so we chose to go after the former because they suit our skillset the best.  We also seemed to be getting A LOT of referrals for small, simple sites and we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to do the work cost-effectively until now.  Mike has developed his own “version” of Wordpress that allows us to build completely custom sites on top of WP - saving us time and giving clients the ability to edit their own sites.  Because of how efficient the process is, we’re charging $249 for a basic site or blog, which is extremely affordable.  The Faceup site itself is built upon WP, with quite a bit of extra functionality that we built on top of it.  The coolest feature by far is the Site Builder that lets you choose a layout, color scheme, and header before contacting us (again, saving time going back and forth).
• We noticed that the margins on our reseller account that we have with a print shop are HUGE.  We initially got the account just for our own business cards and promo work, but have just realized that it’s worth offering because of the huge mark-ups.
• We want to keep the Pure Adapt name associated with high end, high quality.  Faceup is more “affordable and efficient” so it made sense to put it on its own domain.
• We’re counting on the recurring hosting fees to increase the profitability of Faceup over time.
• Because we’ll have efficient systems in place, this will be the perfect site to have interns and part time employees start with before moving on to more challenging coding projects.
• We seem to have easier access and more personal connections to this target market - restaurants, lawyers, accountants, real estate, new businesses, bloggers - than we do the higher end market.

Is it a risk?  Of course.  We’re evolving our client work based upon what we’ve seen in the past, and we think it will work, although it wouldn’t shock me if it didn’t (nothing shocks me at this point).  I know a lot of developers who swear by the higher end client and would tell me this is a mistake.  Maybe so - both have their pros and cons, but we think this approach fits our business better.   If it doesn’t, we’ll adjust the model until it does.

I’ll post in the coming days about our marketing plan, and also more info about the SEO/Web Marketing eBook and how you can get a free copy.   Off to start executing said marketing plan

I got quite a response from my previous post about my issues with online advertising. I was actually quite surprised at people rushing to the defense of using advertising as a primary revenue source. Personally, I think it goes to show just how much “brainwashing” web entrepreneurs of the web2.0/Google AdSense generation have been subjected to. I will never ever say that advertising is a bad way to monetize a site, but I will also never ever say that it’s a good business model to solely rely on advertising revenue for your business (unless you’re a traditional business like magazine, newspaper, and tv…although they even have other revenue models like subscriptions).

ANYWAY, I wanted to bring the Elevator Pitch column from the October 2007 issue of Inc. Magazine to everyone’s attention. Elevator Pitch is one of the many columns that makes Inc. (in my opinion) the best business magazine out there. They give you pertinent info for a company - year founded, employees, 2006 revenue, 2007 projected revenue, location, ownership, how much money they need to grow, etc - and then the founders give a one paragraph “elevator pitch” to three venture capitalists. The venture capitalists then react and give their opinions about the company and the money they are trying to raise.

This month the company way 55-Alive, a social network for baby boomers. By most measures, the new company has been a success: they have been featured on CNBC and other television stations, and in July had 600,000 page views. That is NOT easy to do. However, they rely on advertising for revenue. Despite all of their success, they made $4,000 in 2006 and are only projecting $30,000 in 2007. Nice cash, but for a web success that’s not even enough for one person to live off of. And you’ve got to figure they have at least $10k in expenses (pr, advertising, servers, programmers)…maybe more depending on their marketing.

How hard will it be for them to scale to make money on advertising? Listen to what Jeff Bussgang from IDG Ventures in Boston says:

The Lantzes need about $20 million to get 55-Alive! to the point where it can make real money through advertising. Major advertisers want scale. Anything under a million unique visitors per month doesn’t attract them.

It’s like saying you’re going to start playing basketball and you’re banking on making it to the NBA. The numbers are not in your favor. The sooner young business owners realize this, the faster they’ll build sustainable businesses that have a legitimate chance for success. Now, if 55-Alive ALSO sold products for baby boomers, or offered premium services (maybe align themselves with financial planners specializing in retirement), then an extra $30k from advertising would be fantastic.

Every few months I’m contacted by an author/publicist and asked to review their new book. It’s one of my favorite perks about having a semi-popular entrepreneurship blog - they need book reviews so they send me a free book and I get the pleasure of reviewing it. I had one publisher tell me that my blog post generated more sales than their radio campaign, and I take great pride in that. Why am I telling you this? Because the most recent book - If Nobody Loves You Create The Demand by Joel Freeman was one of my favorites. But before I get to that, I want to thank Joel for his personal approach to contacting me.

Most of the time I get sent a mass email from a publishing company essentially saying “Our author just wrote a new book about entrepreneurship, we think your readers would be interested in it, can we send you a copy?” I always say yes, review the book promptly, and send them a thank you note. And that’s great. A few times, particularly in the case of the great book by Barry Moltz, I struck up a conversation with the author and now consider them an acquaintance.

Joel Freeman took the personalized customer service to another level. HE sent me the initial email, HE replied to me, and HE mailed me the book. How do I know - because the envelope had a personal note, his business card had his personal cell hand written in (great technique for personalization by the way), and the book was autographed with a personal message. I received the book Saturday and those touches blew me away. I picked it up Sunday, finished it last night (I’m a real fast reader) and here I am reviewing it today. Anyone who thinks that personalization doesn’t matter should take note of this post: I just spent a few paragraphs endorsing Mr. Freeman as a person BEFORE talking about his book. How much more likely are you to purchase his book now that you know he’s the type of guy who cares to go the extra mile?

On to the book review. Although I am a fast reader, I have to be engaged to not put a book down for hours at a time, and Joel Freeman definitely accomplishes that. It’s hard to say what the book is about: it’s not a marketing book (although I learned some interesting marketing techniques), it’s not a business plan book (although it discussed planning strategies), and it’s not an autobiography (although it covered a lot of Joel’s personal experiences). Essentially it’s a book about being an entrepreneur…the entire scope of being an entrepreneur. It’s a tough thing to do - I try it with this blog - but Mr. Freeman blends every aspect of being an entrepreneur into one. Because it’s not just about career happiness and making a lot of money, becoming an entrepreneur makes you ask the tough questions like: what is the purpose of life? how can I best use my God given talents to improve the world? how will my personal life blend with my business life if I start my own company?

You may never know for sure the answers to those questions. But to be a great entrepreneur you need to grapple with them and come to your own conclusions before embarking on your journey. Those who use their talents to change the world are much more likely to be successful, happy, and rich than those who simply want to make a lot of money. People who chase the money won’t make it in most cases because the focus, determination, passion, and sacrifice that all great entrepreneurs have made is hard to justify if money is your only goal.

Aside from the fact that Freeman quotes The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lews (one of my all-time favorite books), there are two things that I really loved about the book:

1. The baseball analogy. I am probably as guilty of this as anyone who ever walked the planet. I want to hit a “home run” with every project I work on. I want to change the world for the better with every second I spend. It’s a great thing, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I’ve reached the same conclusion Dr. Freeman has - spend 70-80% of your time on “singles” and “doubles” and spend the rest of your time swinging for the fences. Most great businesses aren’t home runs, so you don’t want to become Jeremy Burnitz and swing for the fences all day long. Google has been the most successful at adopting this with their 70-20-10 program (70% of your time on core projects, 20% on side projects, and 10% on whatever the hell you want). My partners and I always classify all of our projects in terms of baseball, and I think it’s pretty cool that someone else feels the same way.
2. The non-profit factor. Freeman encourages every entrepreneur to form a non profit. The tax benefits help your bottom line, but the good you do for the world will likely outlast the for-profit work you do. Who knows, you might even become the next Bill Gates/Warren Buffet. There’s a reason that those guys are devoting their lives to helping cure disease and poverty - only so much gratification can be had from money. True happiness for those with lots of money does not come from their money. A lesson for every entrepreneur.

Why did I love those two things so much when there are so many other interesting chapters in the book? Because that’s what I/we aspire to be at Pure Adapt. We want to set up the systems and processes so that the “singles” and “doubles” happen without our work, and we can focus on swinging for the fences and giving back to the community. It’s nice to see other entrepreneurs who feel the same way.

I  recommend this book to any new and aspiring entrepreneur, or a current entrepreneur looking for some guidance. If you don’t know what you want to do with your life, this book will ask the questions to help you progress. If you do, it will reinvigorate you and provide reassurance that you have chosen the correct path.