Adam McFarland

Nah, this isn’t one of those corny posts where I rattle off a list of accomplishments. Earlier in the year I read The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris and it instantly became my favorite business book ever…not because I agree with everything in it, but because it forces you to ask some very thought provoking questions about work and life.

One little section in particular had a profound impact on my productivity:

Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities. You’ll just read unassociated email and scramble your brain for the day. Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening. I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded three times to about 2″ x 3.5″, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items.

I thought about my complex life of Outlook tasks and iPrioritize to-do lists and decided I was causing paralysis by analysis by over planning and becoming overwhelmed by what needs to be done. So I started my new index card method. Each night I list out the goals for the following day on an index card that I carry with me all day long. I limit goals to only a handful of important work-related goals, and if I accomplish them I know I had a great day.

Maybe more importantly, if I ever question what I accomplished over a particular period I can just pull out my index cards and within seconds I’ll realize that I really did achieve a lot with my time.

Happy New Years to everyone! THANK YOU for taking the time to read this blog, and I wish you, your family, and your business a safe and prosperous 2008!

Let me re-phrase that.  I think it is difficult to make money online, but most people make it far too difficult on themselves.  When starting an online venture, you should ask yourself “can I make money right away?”.  Not when you’ve got 10,000 or 1,000,000 members.  Not when you’ve got 5,000 people subscribed to your premium service.  Right now, by the time you have 1/5/10/20 customers.

How do I know this:  because I’ve made the mistake as much as anyone.  SportsLizard makes solid money, but it’s taken 3+ years and it’s still not enough for one person to live off of.  Contrast that with people I know in the collectibles industry that solely sell on eBay who make a decent living for themselves.  You need to get a lot of advertising/affiliate sales/people paying $5 a month for a Price Guide to come close to the money you make actually selling sports collectibles.  I guarantee that if I started in 2004 with the sole purpose of being a card/collectible dealer I would have SportsLizard pulling in the kind of money Detailed Image does.

And you can repeat the same story for iPrioritize.  Both sites have had pretty measurable success and have trouble making any kind of real money.  I’m not saying this to deter people from making “cool web 2.0″ sites, just that it’s really really hard to get people to pay you money to use one of those sites because the expectation level has been set that web 2.0 sites are free.  There are a very small percent that can make substantial money selling ads or with premium subscriptions.

Hell, Music-Alerts is by far the most viral site I’ve ever started and still gets more traffic than any of our other sites.  Wanna know how much we’ve made off of MA so far?  About $12 in affiliate sales.  All the PR and traffic in the world doesn’t necessarily = money.

In my experience, there are 2 sure-fire ways to make money in the web world: e-commerce and design/development services.  If you sell a product people want, it’s hard NOT to make sales online because almost everyone these days starts their purchasing process with a Google search….and you have built-in ways to reach customers from day one with zero marketing effort in eBay and Amazon.  And there will never, ever be a lack of available design/development work out there because every business - new, old, and future - needs a web presence of some sort.   Put your own special spin on one of those two industries to give your company a competitive advantage of some sort, and I find it hard to believe you can’t build a million dollar company in 5 years or less.

I guess my point is this:  don’t create new ways for people to spend money, instead find better ways to profit off of how they already spend it.

My college bill came to well over $120k for my four years of education. I personally think it was well worth every penny because:

1. I learned how to work in an environment with a lot of very intelligent individuals from across the world.
2. I was able to work with cutting edge technology.
3. I got a degree from a top 50 school in the US that was top 20 for my major.
4. I made invaluable personal and business connections that will last forever.
5. I was challenged above and beyond what I ever was prior to that, and it forced me to learn work ethic and focus and balance.
6. I probably made close to $120k back in work study jobs, research projects, internships, co-op’s, and my full time job (13 months) - all of which I got interviews through our career center…and most of which were only open to RPI students.

That said, there are a lot of people throughout the world who could cut it intellectually at some of the top colleges in the world but don’t have the resources to enroll and receive the education. MIT is now offering 1,800 classes from all disciplines online for free, many with audio/video or foreign language translations. These are valuable tools to those who don’t have access to a premium MIT education, and are even more valuable to professors in developing countries that cannot afford the teaching materials to put together proper lesson plans.

I took a look at the courses available for the Engineering Systems degree (the closest equivalent to my Industrial Engineering degree) and it looks like you could essentially piece together the entire curriculum - from entry level Calculus right through advanced logistics classes. Pretty freaking cool huh?

This could be the start of the way we look at education in the years to come (and consequently could be the beginning of the end of super high priced universities). Is anyone going to hire you if you take a full course load with these free courses? Probably not…yet.

In moving back and forth for several internships during college and then my job after college, I’ve lived in quite a few different places from anywhere from three months to a year. In doing so, I’ve looked at a lot of apartments and become accustomed to the relatively pain-free process of leasing an apartment. I always figured leasing business space would be the same. I was wrong.

Following our debacle a few months ago, we were pretty certain we found a great place for us a few weeks ago. It’s a short commute, it’s a brand new facility (meaning we have control over the layout), and it had a decent amount of space to grow in to. Then slowly but surely it began to fall apart. They would only sign a 5-year lease (five years is A LONG TIME for a young and ever-changing company like ours….we could have 30 employees in 5 years or it could still be just the four of us), and then the lease they sent over seemed to be a bit over the top. We forwarded it over to our lawyer who specializes in real estate, and hoped he’d tell us it was a good lease. If that was the case, we probably would have attempted to work them down to a 3-year lease and try to get a few other small concessions and if all things went well we could have moved in on 2/1.

Not so much. He came back with NINETEEN points of contention on top of the few that we came up with. And they weren’t just minor things. I’m quoting from his email here:

• “This is burdensome and unnecessary”
• “This particular section of the lease sucks for you and there are a lot of hidden costs here”
• “This is not reasonable and is too suggestive”
• “I think paragraph 5 under Section Nineteen is bull shit and definitely not standard”
• “DEFINITELY NOT. The last paragraph under Section Twenty is OUT. I have never seen it done this way.”

That was enough for us to bail. We’re not going to sign a lease without those concessions, and there’s about a 0% chance they’ll concede on over 20 points in a 10 page lease. It’s not worth wasting our time.

Maybe I’m reaching here, but when you get a lease that sucks THAT MUCH, you have to wonder if they were trying to take advantage of us. This is an established property company in Albany that we were dealing with. They own a lot of commercial real estate in this area, and you’d think their other tenants would have a lawyer review a lease. They’ve been around for a long time and I wonder if they’d try to slip a lease like that by a large corporation. Do they see four 25 year old guys and think “these guys have no clue what they’re doing”? Regardless of whether they are ageist scumbags or just equal-opportunity scumbags, we’re out and we’re happy we took a hard stance.

We’re now looking at cheaper, shorter-term alternatives. After getting together for a few hours last night and calling some of our friends/family/business contacts, we already have a handful of opportunities. If we can trim our rent costs from ~$3k/month to ~$1k/month we can put that extra money away to build our own facility in 1-2 years when we learn a little more about how our company is going to shake out.

Even though stuff like this pisses me off, it always seems to work out for the best.

One of the biggest things I’ve been focusing on lately to eliminate the guilt factor is controlling my day.  As Christmas and New Years approach, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate through my day so that I see all of my family members, attend celebrations, buy gifts, etc while still trying to get some work done and have time for the gym.  Unfortunately it’s not usually an option for most young business owners to just step away for two weeks.  We’ve got to deal with the normal challenges of balancing life with business, while also giving appropriate attention to the holidays that are important to us.

So wtf does “controlling your day” mean?  It does not mean setting rigid schedule and forcing yourself to adhere to it regardless of outside factors.  To me it means:

• Setting goals the night before.  Each night I make a list of goals for the following day.  I use an index card because it forces me to keep it to only a handful of goals.  I try to keep the business goals to four at most, and always put a few other personal goals in there so I’m not neglecting the rest of my life.  To avoid being stressed, I plan as though I’ve only got about 70% of the time I have in the day - this allows for unexpected issues while still giving me time to meet my goals.  At least once a week something happens that screws the whole day, but at least I usually have a positive day 6/7th of the time.
• Limiting phone and email.  On the worst of days, phone and email is all I do. - sometimes everyone you’ve ever worked with decides to contact you on the same day and you’ve just got to deal with it.  But on an average day it’s OK to only check and answer email every 3 hours or so.  This ensures plenty of 2-3 hour pockets to get work done, eat, go to the gym, etc while still keeping on top of things.
• Setting a time that I’m done for the day, no matter what.  Even if my goals go to hell, I stop working at a pre-set time.  This ensures I have at least some time to myself, and that I always get enough sleep.  At least once a week I hit my goals with plenty of time to spare and am able to have some unexpected time to read a book or grab a beer with friends.

Life as a business owner is never going to fit in a pretty 9-5 window, and I think most business owners like it that way.  But that means that you’ve got to make the effort to fit in the rest of your life or you’ll go crazy.  At the end of most days - particularly lately - I end the day saying “wow, I had a great day today because I accomplished x, y, and z”.  I can’t think of a better thought to have after a long days work.

About ten minutes ago the FedEx guy showed up at my door with a package. I saw the OLPC (one laptop per child) logo on the box and I immediately dropped everything and busted out my camera. The Give One Get One Laptop finally arrived! Here are some initial pics…I’m shocked at how small it is.

Just connected to wi-fi, I’ll write a review after I’ve toyed with it…

• On an internship in college, I partnered with another student to develop a revolutionary new quality testing device for consumer products. Upon being told our company wished to patent the device, we came to the conclusion that we should try to gain ownership of the device, patent it ourselves, and start an engineering design company. We were not granted that permission, but we decided to proceed and purchased “the big blue book” to learn about starting a new business.
• After returning to college, we lost a business plan competition to a group that wanted to take Dunkin Donuts franchises to China (no lie, we were shocked…is that even an idea for a business? I mean, DD kind of already exists). My partner graduated a year before me, took a “real” job in Boston, and I was on my own.
• I came up with the idea for SportsLizard in February 2004. Having taken an Information Systems class the semester before, I decided to try to apply what I learned and was able to teach myself enough PHP/MySQL and learn enough about starting a business to launch in July of 2004. I had a semester left of college, and I figured that if I could grow the site fast enough that I could avoid getting a real job upon graduation.
• SportsLizard had some decent success and made some money right away (in hindsight, I’m actually more impressed than I was at the time…when I was expecting hundreds of thousands of dollars right away and “just” hundreds of dollars didn’t impress me). I figured I was in good shape…until I got a call from a recruiter offering me a great job, a lot of $, a signing bonus, and paid relocation to New Haven, CT to work as an engineer.
• I took the job and figured I could run the site on my “free” time at work. That didn’t work out so well. In November 2005 I started this blog. In January 2006 I quit my job on the heels of SportsLizard winning Honorable Mention in the Microsoft Start Something Amazing Awards. I figured it would be easy to ride that success to enough revenue to support me, and that I’d never, ever want to become more than a sole proprietorship.
• Just before leaving my job and moving back to NY to live with family, I came up with the idea for iPrioritize - a manager was constantly calling everything a “priority” and I jokingly told one of his employees that he needs to create a list of priorities for his employees so they’re not scrambling around with their heads cut off every day. I planned to spend my “free” time working on it on the side while I developed SportsLizard.
• I made a series of mistakes my first few months developing SportsLizard - I focused on everything but getting sales. I learned a valuable lesson in what’s important and what is not. Ironically, the one thing I quasi-obsessed over was search engine rankings and I was gaining quite a knowledge in the industry.
• iPrioritize launched in mid-2006. SportsLizard was showing growth in traffic but not revenue, so I focused on getting premium accounts for iPrioritize. Again, in hindsight I’m more impressed than I was at the time, because I did a pretty damn good job of getting a decent amount of revenue with $0 for a marketing budget. Around this time I started getting contacted about SEO consulting jobs because of a few articles I had written, and SEO-Playbook was born.
• For Q4 of 2006 I spend 75% of my time on SEO projects and the remainder on my sites. The balance of revenue was great, and for the first time I was making more than enough money to live off of. I figured I had found my perfect balance and I would be good for 2007.
• Towards the end of 2006, George and Greg asked me to help them out with some SEO for DetailedImage. The site was in such bad shape that I couldn’t do much, but they ended up hiring me to work on a site called FindAutoInfo. I brought Mike in on the project because he used the Yahoo Maps API on ChineseFoodAmerica and FAI needed some map work.
• FindAutoInfo bombed, but it brought the four of us closer. George, Mike, and I purchased the now-defunct PaidPosting.net and decided to incorporate as Pure Adapt about a year ago. We were to be a web development company focused on acquiring and creating a lot of low-maintenance revenue generating sites, and performing client services (mainly SEO). I figured we’d always be a 100% virtual company. We had one hell of a celebration on our one month anniversary.
  
• In January 2007, George was wilting under the pressure of running Detailed Image and Pure Adapt, and proposed a merger. Against our initial opinions, George managed to convince us all that it was a good idea, and Greg was brought on as a fourth partner. The steady revenue stream from DI allowed us to pay salaries and provide benefits to all four owners.
• By Spring of 2007 Mike and I had started on Hotteeez and SportsLizard’s redesign (and subsequently Price Guide) as the companies “new” sites. We hoped to essentially eliminate client work.
• By Summer of 2007 we saw the need for a new Detailed Image shopping cart, and decided to build the perfect SEO friendly cart from scratch. Mike and I immediately threw all attention to DI, and - other than the occasional SEO project - all four of us were working on Detailed Image.
• After the launch of the DI cart, Mike and I went back to work on our sites. Realizing that both Hotteeez and SportsLizard are solid revenue streams that don’t require much time, we decided to take another stab at client work. Mike had become a WordPress master working on a site for a non-profit client of ours, so we decided to launch Faceup-Sites.com around the premise that small businesses that need simple sites will get a higher quality site for less money in less time. Immediately we reaped the benefits of our network of local professionals, doing a site for our lawyer in Albany and our accounting firm (still under construction).
• After a few months, Faceup-Sites was bringing in great revenue, but the customer service was taxing on me and was hurting our margins. We decided to become stricter in the clients we take on, and to raise our prices to accommodate customer service time. The target client is still the same - lawyer, restaurant owner, non profits, etc - but we’ll inevitably get less work by being more picky. Which frees up more time…
• At the same time, the Detailed Image cart proved to be the best thing we ever did as a company (ironically, it’s also the only project all four of us worked on together). In addition to the back-end automation, search engine traffic has directly accounted for over $10,000 in additional revenue the past few months…and that’s only a few months in, without much link building or even ranking top 20 for our big terms. Imagine the potential
• Last week, we found the perfect warehouse/office facility and are wrapping up the lease this week. Thank God that our previous deal fell through.
• NOW: SportsLizard and Hotteeez bring in enough money to cover our warehouse rent. Client work through Faceup-Sites will continue to provide steady revenue. Per my “figuring out how to be great” post, the Detailed Image business model - the technology behind our cart, our customer service, our marketing strategy, and our operations skills - is our greatest competitive advantage, and with our new warehouse we’ll really be looking to develop the cart further in 2008. Warehouse space will also give us an advantage over most web entrepreneurs (we actually have the ability to carry inventory and don’t immediately turn our backs on a business opportunity that requires inventory). With that, we’ll probably take the same DI model and apply it to similar industries. When you do something as good and as profitable as DI, it’s stupid to focus on client work or web 2.0 services when you can take that model to the next level.
• 2008: ???

What’s the point of this post?

1. Don’t be too close minded because if you do you’ll likely miss some great opportunities - in life and in business.
2. You can’t predict the future…so stop trying to come up with all the answers and do the best you can to have a great day today.

You’re a business owner. It’s one of those rare occurrences where you’re doing something non-business related. But instead of focusing on what you’re doing, you’re thinking about your business. What if I miss an important phone call? What if someone has an emergency when I’m gone and doesn’t know what to do? What if I’m not giving myself enough time to meet a deadline and I should really be working now?

This is what I refer to as the guilt factor. My partner Mike and I talk about it all the time. The example we always use is going to the gym. Something that should be invigorating and refreshing becomes stressful because you’re constantly trying to cram a 60 minute work out in to 45 minutes by cutting sets short or skipping your stretching. We’ve always said that we want to get to the point where we don’t have to think like that.

Here’s the secret though: that point will never come unless you force it. Mike and I have spent the last several years sacrificing a lot in the name of our business, doing only what is necessary to keep us sane and healthy so we can get as much work done as possible. You can only do that for so long. Luckily for us, Pure Adapt is in really good shape right now and we don’t need to sit up at night trying to figure out where payroll is going to come from next week. But there’s lots of stuff we could worry about, and if you’re a business owner that will never end. It consumes you, and if you’re not careful it will drive you insane.

Personally, it was different when I was worrying about where the money would come from. I felt guilty if I did anything that wasn’t furthering my sites, particularly when I was a solo-entrepreneur back in the SportsLizard-iPrioritize-SEO consulting days. Now that we don’t have those worries, I’ve started working at shedding that guilt. And trust me, it’s not easy. You become addicted to it, and it becomes the norm.

While difficult, the answers are kind of obvious. You’ve got to draw lines and boundaries, and more importantly you’ve got to train yourself to not feel guilty when you’re not working. I’ve begun spending more time at the gym lately because my goals at the gym are now getting the importance and place they deserve. I’ve begun scheduling more social events for week nights and weekends because I want to spend time with my friends and family. I don’t carry a blackberry or iPhone, and sometimes when I’m reading at home I go as far as shutting down all of my computers and turning off my phone so no one can get a hold of me. That might sound a bit over the top, but it’s what I need to do to take time for myself. If you don’t give yourself that respect, you can’t expect anyone else to.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the cool things about having a blog that does a decent job ranking high in search engines is that every time a PR company is looking to hype up a new book and Joe Q PR-guy Google’s “entrepreneur blog” I show up. So I get quite a few inquiries and I gladly accept most of them (I mean, who wouldn’t want free books?). Joel Freeman was very accommodating and accessible when I got a copy of his book, but I thought this latest book was pretty creative in their PR.

The book is The Inside Advantage: the Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business by Robert Bloom. The book arrived in ONE day, with a lock around it so I can “unlock” my businesses hidden growth potential.

Very creative!  Taking the idea of “unlocking” your businesses potential and putting a lock on the cover art is one thing, but adding the master lock to the package it was delivered in is a really nice touch.  To add to the mystique, the combination was not included. I was able to slip the lock off to read the book, but I really could use a new lock for the gym so I’m going to try to crack the lock myself….should be fun!

Where the F$%# is the book review? I decided not to review the book because it would be an utterly biased view. I like two types of business books: ones where entrepreneurs tell their stories and I can enjoy and appreciate their retrospective view of their experiences, and books that have hard data and draw conclusions that change my perception on business. This book is neither. For the average business owner who reads one book a year, or the new business owner looking to get their hands on sound techniques for getting the best out of their business, this is a great book. Unfortunately I read a lot of business books. The day before I read The Inside Advantage I finished Good to Great - the single most comprehensive study of businesses and what makes them great. Coming from that book, this one just didn’t do it for me.

I think I need to start minimizing the business books I read….

A little over a month ago I posted about using Mozilla Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement, and how our company is planning on transitioning in to using more open source software.   As I said back then, we’re anticipating having a staff that grows by a handful of people each year for the next few years, and - as any small business should be - we’re concerned about software costs.

So we came up with a plan.  We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007.  Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative).  Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year.  We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal.  The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

At the time of that post we didn’t have a hard time frame for the transition, but when George purchased a new laptop last month he and I decided it was a good time to go OSALT across the board and give it a shot.  There was certainly a bit of trepidation on our parts, but I’ve gone about a month now with only OSALT software on my laptop and I love it.  More specifically:

•  Hands down I now prefer Thunderbird to Outlook.  If they both cost the same amount, I’d buy Thunderbird. It took some tweaking, but now the Thunderbird/Lightning combination work like a charm and is extremely simple to use.  My absolute favorite part is that the spam filter ACTUALLY WORKS.  I get hundreds of spam messages each day, and I had heard great things about the Thunderbird spam filter so I was really anxious to see how it handled my spam.  After about 2 weeks of marking my spam as it came through I got to the point where I’m no longer greeted with more than a few spam messages each day.  There’s also only been one false-positive thus far.  All in all, much better than what I observed with Outlook.
• OpenOffice is much more functional than I expected.  It is a legit replacement for the Microsoft Office suite.  I only found two cases where I go over to my desktop and use Microsoft Office:  mail merges in Word that we use to create labels for Faceup postcards, and an advanced filter in Excel for a SportsLizard product upload.  Now, OO has both of those features, but I have templates that I was using in Word/Excel and those don’t quite work the way I want them too without some tweaking.  I also LOVE the “print to PDF” button in all OO software.  No Adobe Acrobat, and no stupid plugins.  PDF integration is sooooo helpful.
• Paint.net (with the .PSD file plugin for Photoshop files) also surprised me with how functional it was.  If you’re hard-core into photo editing you’ll still want Photoshop, but for the editing I do for images on the web I find Paint.net simpler with more intuitive keyboard short-cuts…meaning I work faster.  I used it for putting that image above together and it took about 30 seconds.

In each instance there are things I like better about the Adobe/Microsoft versions of the software, but there are also things I like better about the OSALT.  Considering the OSALT’s have no trouble opening .doc, .xls, .ppt, .psd, etc files, I really can’t see why the normal business user would need the Adobe and Microsoft counterparts.  If you make your life doing data analysis in Excel or graphic design in Photoshop, than you should spring for the real thing.  Otherwise, I say save your cash and go with the OSALT.  I never thought the transition would be this smooth for us, and I’m thrilled that we freed up some extra cash for our company.