It was REALLY hard. I haven’t particularly posted the steps, but the warehouse section of the blog has posts where I discussed it as it was happening.

http://www.adam-mcfarland.net/category/warehouse/

In the end, our best “technique” – and the one that ultimately worked – was to just drive around about a 15 mile radius and collect every single phone number of commercial or warehouse space to rent. We found a lot more signs than you’d think, but they all pointed back to the same handful of companies. So we called them all, and we had a few good options after doing that.

I hear what you’re saying though: finding a 10,000 or 50,000 sq-ft warehouse is a lot easier than a 1,000 of 5,000 sq-ft one.

Good luck. Drop me an email if there’s anything else I can help with.

Holland – you are correct: it will take employees more time to do a task than it does us, especially at first. Over time I would hope they would be as good as or better considering they will be doing it more, but that may not necessarily be the case.

Gilbert – yes, I think the decision has kind of been made that we want to put the systems in place so that the business “runs itself” and we can remove ourselves from the day-to-day. Now, from there we may decide we want to scale big. But right now the focus is getting to those 3-6 employees that can replace what we do most of the time.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot too. I think you guys really need to decide what kind of business you want.

It seems like you guys are trying to create something that takes as little work as possible.

Or you might want to create the next ‘Zappos’ and attract outside funding where you have lifetime employees who are committed to your growth…

HUGE decisions that I think will make this decision a lot easier once you guys know what you want…

I’m proud of you guys. I’m looking forward to seeing more sites and country-wide warehousing.. the sky’s the limit!

Adam Holland

As for the server, I know it’s apples to oranges, but that was kind of my point (ie. No sense in throwing away the benefit of foresight when you actually have it, only to get yourself stuck in a situation like you were with the server, which is something that only happened because you didn’t have that benefit).

Very true. Let me rephrase that sentence:

“That’s about it unless we want to cross train warehouse workers in other areas, which I personally do not think is a good business move.”

I want our warehouse workers doing inventory, stocking shelves, re-organizing the packing area, etc in their downtime. I don’t think it makes sense to have a $10/hr worker cross trained in customer service, marketing, or programming. If they prove themselves, I’d say we’d grow them into the “operations manager” role where they would actually work with our vendors on ordering inventory.

And I agree completely that we probably should get someone in for just Monday’s sooner than later…as long as we can find someone who can grow into more hours in the fall (usually the opposite of what students want). You’re right, we probably should start keeping our eyes out for anyone who would be a good fit.

As far as the server situation, I think that’s apples to oranges. We see this one coming. The server stuff had it’s annoyances in the past, but never any real downtime or issue like a nameserver going down. Had you asked any of us a week prior we would have said we could have probably stayed where we were for another few years. He had been hosting DI since 2005 with no major issues.