Adam McFarland

To the Cuil Management Team:

Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine.  With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around.  So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries.  And I must say - the results are horrible. 

How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago?  SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web.  Wouldn’t want to actually return the SportsLizard.com home page or anything…

Then a search for “sports card price guide” showed up in your auto-suggest box but yielded no results!  There are only like 10 legit online sports card price guides, many of which have been around since the dawn of the internet.  Don’t have those in your 120 billion pages huh?  While we’re on the topic:  why does a search for my name not yield this domain?  Umm, this is Adam-McFarland.net?  At least return the tool over on Adam-McFarland.com!

I’ll admit, you impressed me by showing PureAdapt.com when I searched “Pure Adapt”.  I mean, five minutes ago that wouldn’t have done anything for me, but your results were so bad that I was actually shocked to see some accuracy.  Then again, you do display a totally irrelevant skull next to our name.  Wtf is up with that?

In short - your search engine sucks.  Google is still FAR more relevant for 99.9% of queries.  Stop hating on my company.

Sincerely,

Adam McFarland
Co-Owner, Pure Adapt Inc
www.PureAdapt.com

One of our Tastefully Driven vendors recently contacted us to see if we were ready to re-order their products yet.  We’ve placed one other re-order since the launch of the site, but overall their products haven’t sold very well compared to other brands.  We don’t have a ton in stock, but they’re moving so slow that we’re certainly not inclined to re-order at this point.  So, we bluntly told them as much.

Their response?  Push the product more.  Give out samples, hold contests, give some away to bloggers in the industry.  Not bad ideas, but the premise is that WE need to push THEIR products.   Thing is, their product is very up-and-coming and does not have the name brand recognition that our other lines do. We rank multiple times in the top 10 in Google for all of their products.  Our main disappointment in sales isn’t because we haven’t pushed their product enough (hell, we’ve hardly pushed any of the products on TD), it’s that their isn’t more of an existing demand for their products.

Don’t get me wrong - it was our choice to carry the line and the responsibility lies with us to research the demand for a product before selling it. We’re just disappointed that the existing demand for it isn’t stronger.  Who knows, maybe it will pick up and we’ll capitalize on our solid rankings.

Which got me to thinking - there are really two types of products that we can pick up:  push products or pull products.  Push products, like the one described above, are products that we have to push on to our customers through newsletters, mailings,  announcements in the blog, on-site cross-product upsells, or other promotions.  Customers have never heard of the product, so we’re relying on ourselves to sell them on it.  Pull products are products that have such an existing demand that by adding them to our shopping cart we automatically generate sales due to their auto-inclusion in our product feeds and on our extremely SEO-friendly site (a large portion of TD products already rank top 10 in Google without us really doing anything).  Any pushing we do is just an added bonus.

Why would anyone want to carry a push product?  IF you have a built in audience that listens to you, push products give you the power to push the products you want to sell.  Maybe it’s your own brand with a higher margin, or a brand new product that you have exclusive rights to.  A site like Detailed Image for example, has 3+ years of forum presence in the (relatively) small auto-detailing community.  Everyone knows “George and Greg from Detailed Image” and therefore they have the ability to push products.  If they tell people that a new polish or wax is better, people will listen…at least initially.  If there are two comparable products and they decide to support one over another for any number of reasons, customers will likely listen and buy the brand they recommend.

Tastefully Driven is only a few months old.  It’s not in a niche like auto detailing.  Maybe someday we’ll have that kind of loyal audience, maybe we won’t.  It’s two different types of businesses and that’s fine. One thing is clear:  for new sites or sites built to generate sales via search like TD, you had better do your research and pick up only pull products.  Taking advantage of existing demand is far easier than creating the demand.  Otherwise it’ll just remain sitting on your shelves collecting dust while you’re wishing you had that money available to pick up a more popular line of products.

Quick post here guys.  Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook.  It’s been over six months since the last update.  The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate.

The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section.  Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool.   This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO.  Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” how often something was searched on Google.  Since the latest studies seem to show that Google may have upwards of 70% of the search market, these data points are clearly the most important.  Also, I LOVE that you can type in multiple keywords at once - one per line - and do all of your keyword research in one well thought out search.  You can also download your results.  Basically, it’s the perfect keyword research tool.  Vastly different from tools like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, based on Wordtracker data, which was what I was using prior and only allowed you to search one term at a time.

I also made minor updates to all of the other sections where I saw appropriate.  Download it for free over at Faceup-Sites.com.  Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my productive output post where I declared that I would never work more than 35 hours in a week again (see Productive Output:  What the 9-5 Misses and Why I’m Done with a 40 Hour Workweek). It was only two months ago, but a lot has changed since then.

At the time I had just come off of 2+ years of pushing my entire life aside.  In college I worked hard, but I played hard too.  I might not have partied as much as some of my friends (some of which are still in college by the way) but I kept what I thought was a solid balance for someone in an intense engineering program at a top school.  However, once I left my career I didn’t care about balance:  I cared about being an entrepreneur and everything that came with it.  I had the proverbial chip on my shoulder and I was dead focused on kicking ass.

When I moved into the apartment that I’m currently residing in back in May, I took it as the opportunity to “turn on” my social life again.  We had finally reached a point of stability and I realized I needed to phase back in some of the things I’d pushed aside.  The intention when I left my career was never to work 75 hour weeks, neglect family/friends, and teeter on the line of burning myself out.  But the everlasting (self-induced) pressure to make our company a success drove me so hard that - on occasion - I asked myself if I knew what I was doing or if I was just fooling myself and unknowingly becoming a workaholic.  A workaholic that would never recover no matter how much success he had, just because I had become accustomed to it and knew no other way.

I needed to prove to myself that I could have balance and still live the entrepreneurial dream.  So I wrote the post.  I needed the challenge.  It worked.  I began intensely focusing on my 6-7 hours a day and banging through 9 hours of work in 7 just because I was excited at the potential of some true free time after I got finished. All of a sudden my entire day wasn’t based around how much work I could get done.  Pretty quickly I got to the point where 7 nights a week I had plans with friends or family, many of which I saw sparingly the past few years.  Every night something else was going on.  I’ll admit - it was pretty cool coming from a point where I only got out of the house on a non-work related outing once every few weeks.

Of course, this type of social schedule is too much over time for someone like myself  (I proclaim myself to be 50% introverted and 50% extroverted - a convenient even split).  So the past few weeks I’ve still kept my 35 hour rule in effect, but I have made sure I have a few nights a week to myself to read, play video games, catch up on sleep, or run errands.  Of course, a funny thing has happened:  I’ve been getting the itch to use that free time to tackle some of the “secondary” projects like the revamp of SportsLizard or a totally new site (crazy idea) that I’ve been working on.  I call these projects “10%” projects after Google’s 70/20/10 policy where  employees get 10% of their time to work on anything they want, the idea being that very innovative products often come out of the wacky creative projects when people are allowed to think outside the box.  I define “10% time” as time I spend working on non e-commerce projects, seeing as we’re getting 99% of our revenue from our e-commerce sites.  I could spend every waking second on our shopping cart and other e-commerce stuff.  It’s never ending.  We’re growing fast as it is.  There’s definitely a need to cap this work or the potential for burnout definitely exists.

For two years I pushed really hard and my business-life balance was a bit out of whack.  Considering my non-work life is something I highly value, it was only natural that I went the other direction for a few months and loaded up my social life.  Now I feel like I’m settling into a balance that I’ll hopefully keep for the next few years…until we have a few employees and I don’t have any day-to-day responsibilities, which will likely be a whole new adventure for me.  For now I’m still going to keep my “35 hour rule”.  Nights and weekends will always be open for social stuff, but I’m going to still try to get 2-3 nights a week where I can just relax and do whatever I want.  And most likely, what I want to do will include quite a bit of 10% work.

So there’s a new caveat to the rule:   I am limiting myself to 35 hours a week of work - with the same “rules” as before - except that I can spend as much “10% time” as I want.

I know, I know.  The list of things that I can do above and beyond 35 hours is getting pretty long.  Then again, the line between what is “work” and what is “fun” for me has never been 100% clear anyway.   That’s what makes me one of the lucky ones.  I get to do something every day that is fun, exciting, satisfying, and can pay the bills.  Can’t get much better than that.

—–

*Besides, the most important thing to take away from the productive output post is that efficiency and productivity are more important than hours of work put in.  Results are great.  Results with minimal time/effort are what businesses should really be looking for.

—–

Minor Blog  News:  I added a “Most Popular Posts” section to the sidebar.  My initial idea was to do a “Best of” section for new readers to familiarize themselves with the site.  Then I realized that I have 440 posts and combing through those would take forever.  So I just auto-pulled a list based upon most commented posts and called it a day.  Maybe for post 500 I’ll do a comprehensive list of my favorite posts…we’ll see.

Earlier this year we were getting crushed with customer service contacts.  Particularly with Detailed Image, but also to a lesser extent with SportsLizard.  It became apparent that emails and phone calls were becoming a full time job and that we either needed to A) find a way to reduce contacts, or B) hire someone to handle customer service.  In my previous life I actually tackled a similar project as an engineer on a much larger scale and was able to significantly reduce customer contacts without impacting sales or satisfaction.  So naturally, we gave option A a shot.

Before getting into exactly what we did and how, I want to preface everything with:  I do not recommend implementing this for a brand new site/business.  In the beginning it is important - especially as an owner - to have contact with as many potential customers as possible.  Your initial customers will likely give you important feedback about important adjustments you need to make to your business.  If you make it hard for them to contact you, I think you’re impeding your chances for success.

But after years and years of customer service, as is the case with both Detailed Image and SportsLizard, the same questions keep coming up and you just end up wasting your time copying and pasting the same response over and over.  For both your sake and the customers sake, making those answers readily available is a smart decision.

The Problems

We had three types of customer service contacts that were repetitive and time consuming:

1. Detailed Image emails - questions about what products to buy, where we ship to, shipping quotes, technical site questions, etc
2. Detailed Image phone calls - very time consuming.  The same questions as above, but dragged out over the course of 30 minutes or more many times, especially when discussing their cars and specifically how to detail them.  Now, these longer calls also generally resulted in large sales, so there was some risk involved.  However, in addition to the time spent on the phone we would also have to manually put the order through the website, which added an extra 5 - 15 minutes.  We knew it was worth it to take a stab at significantly reducing these.
3. SportsLizard emails - mostly about the Price Guide:  how to sign up, how to cancel, and how to get better prices.  Also, people emailing in customs for the gallery was very time consuming for me to post.

Our Solutions

There are more complex solutions to these problems than what we came up with.  We were trying to get the most bang for our buck.  No sense in spending a week programming a solution when you can spend an hour and get the same results.  If the results fell short, we probably would’ve gone back to the old contact pages and spent time developing a more complex question/answer system.

Detailed Image:

Greg put together a FAQ of the most common questions.  I turned it into a “drill down tree” FAQ to replace the contact page.  So instead of a contact form that included our email address and phone number, customers are presented with the following:

Which drills down like so:

At the end of certain “branches” we give our phone number and/or email address, only when necessary.

SportsLizard:

Replacing the contact form with a page that has the top 5 most common FAQs, a link to a regular FAQ page for the rest, and the text “I checked the Frequently Asked Questions and they did not answer my question.”, which then reveals the contact form.

To minimize the time it takes to post a custom, I created a custom submissions form.

The Results

Detailed Image:

For the email side of things, Greg reports a huge drop off in basic questions like “how do I log in to the site?” or “how do I get a shipping quote?”  We are attempting to quantify the improvement, but the data set is incomplete at this time (it’s hard to determine what exactly constitutes a “contact” via email so it takes quite a bit of work to comb back through emails and only count specific instances).   That said, contacts are definitely down.

The phone is where we’ve seen a HUGE improvement.  I went back and studied our bills for the past few months. In March we had 36 incoming calls and we checked our voicemail 16 voicemail times.  In June we had 2 incoming calls and checked our voicemail 15 times.  That’s a 94% reduction in incoming calls.  We went from handling almost two per business day to handling none.  That’s a lot of time saved.

It should be noted that an incoming call only happens when the phone is left on, and we’ve been turning our phone off with the exception of turning it on to check for voicemail occasionally.  Keeping the phone off has the added dual benefit of allowing us to stay focused without distractions, similar to keeping your inbox closed or IM off (for another post).  So the combination of  adding a FAQ section, making it harder to find our phone number, keeping the phone turned off, and steering customers to email via our voicemail message has essentially eliminating incoming calls.  On the rare occasion that we do get a voicemail, I’d say half of them have already been resolved by email or by the customer themself and don’t require a call back.

SportsLizard:

I haven’t tallied the data, but I’d estimate I went from about 5 customer service emails/day to about 2 emails/week, a huge improvement.  I really love making people click the link that says “I checked the Frequently Asked Questions and they did not answer my question.”  That extra step of forcing people to click the link makes them spend a minute really thinking about their problem and checking the FAQs before jumping in and contacting us.  I really like this solution and will definitely use it in the future on other sites.

On the customs side of things, I probably went from spending 2-3 hours a week posting in the gallery, to spending about 10 minutes a week approving submissions in the database.

Financially:

Detailed Image is continuing to exceed our expectations, with 100%+ growth each month compared to the same month in 2007. SportsLizard - despite my minimal effort - has seen an increase in paid subscribers to the Price Guide and an increase in ad revenue.

Customer Satisfaction:

No, we haven’t done a customer satisfaction survey, but here’s my opinion:  most customers don’t notice a difference, some customers are more satisfied because they get their answer immediately via FAQs or our detailing guides or other info on the sites, and a small minority are mildly inconvenienced because they want a person on the phone right now.  For some businesses that aren’t e-commerce, that minority would be a majority and a system like this wouldn’t make sense.

In our case, we’ve made a commitment to minimize unnecessary contacts and funnel the necessary ones to email.  We have received a few emails from people who complain that they can’t find a phone number.  In these cases, we either apologize and answer via email or pick up the phone and call if the situation warrants it.  The difference of course being that we’re the ones deciding whether or not a phone call is necessary.

While I’m sure we’ve lost a sale or two because it’s harder to find our contact information, we’ve more than made up for that in revenue generated from the time saved.   It’s OK not to appease everyone - we know that the majority of our customers are happy and praise our sites for having exceptional customer service.  We’re now able to get to the important customer service emails faster.   I personally will sacrifice the profit from one pain-in-the-ass, hold-my-hand customer for the free time to pursue customers that value our time and won’t bother us with unecessary emails/calls without first checking the site.

The bottom line:  it seems as if my hypothesis - that putting a customer service system in place would save time without sacrificing revenue or customer satisfaction - was a correct one.   

Last month we struck a deal for Detailed Image to sponsor Autopia.org, definitively the largest online community of auto detailers.  Clearly our target market for DI - a community that can exponentially increase our foothold in the detailing community.  The potential is very large.

Part of the sponsorship agreement included a 120 x 600 banner ad thrown into the rotation on the homepage.   George came up with the idea of having the banner show our automated Daily Special.  Autopia (like most sites) will pull your ad from an image or from Javascript.  So he approached me and asked me if it was possible for me to create said banner that updated daily as our specials updated.  I said yes, but I hadn’t done it before so I’d have to do some research.

In my research I basically found nothing.  No examples of anyone with a similar issue.  I’ve seen the end result before, but couldn’t find a tutorial to help me or even point me in the right direction.  It’s been a few weeks, but I wanted to make sure I came back to this and posted about it because sometime, somewhere, someone will have the exact same problem and hopefully this post will help.  I’m sure there are other (possibly better) ways to do this, but the technique below was what I came up with.  Since it’s gone live we’ve yet to have any issues.

Step 1 - Create the static portion of the banner

I had George and Mike create a PNG graphic of the portion of the banner that would remain unchanged.  You can layer any type of image with PHP, but our product pics are PNGs so I kept uniformity by using only PNGs for this process.

Step 2 - Create a PHP script to overlay Daily Special Image

I take the 500 x 500 image of the Daily Special product, re-size it to 100 x 100 using PHP function imagecreatetruecolor, and then overlay it using the PHP function imagecopymerge.

Step 3 - Create a PHP script to write the HTML and CSS using Javascript

This might be a bit confusing.  I created a PHP script that retrieves the information for the current special.  Once I have that information, I can write the product title and price with Javascript using the document.write function.

Even though this is a PHP page, it needs to be viewed by a browser as a Javascript page so you should to declare the page as a Javascript application using the PHP header function prior to outputting any text:

header(’Content-type: application/javascript’);

Now within the document.write function you can write the HTML/CSS for the banner like you normally would.  I created a div with a size of 120 x 600 and the background image being the image above.  From there I wrote and styled the text using CSS/HTML in the div.  I put a link around the div so the entire thing links back to Detailed Image. The end result is the text overlayed on top of the banner.

Step 4 - URL rewrite Step 3 as a Javascript file

The file above creates the Javascript, but can’t be called remotely as a Javascript file since it has a .php extension.  Thankfully, URL rewriting allows you to “change” a file named autopia_banner_javascript.php to autopia_banner.js.

Step 5 - Set up a Cron Job for the image generation

We’re almost done.  The Javascript file updates the title and the price each time it’s called, but the picture remains the same unless the script from Step 2 is executed.  We have our Daily Special change at midnight EST each night with a cron job.  I set up a cron job to run immediately after, which executes the PHP script from Step 2 and updates the image with the current special.

Step 6 - Include Javascript on a page to display the banner ad

Assuming the location of the javascript is http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js, you can give anyone the following code to include it on their site:

 <script src=”http://www.detailedimage.com/banners/autopia_scripts.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Which produces:

And finally, the banner on Autopia:

Wohoo - success!

This is driving me nuts.  So I’m on browsing stories on Digg, which I am now officially obsessed with and fascinated by from a user perspective, a community perspective, and a business perspective.  I click on a story in Firefox (3.0, but also happened previously in versions 2.xx) and about 1/10th of the time a page that should have a banner ad that looks like this:

Has a banner ad that looks like this:

With the javascript actually typed out:

Am I the only one that this happens to?  Wtf Digg.  If this happens to anyone other than me, you’re losing impressions/money, as are your advertisers.   I feel like there’s no possible way that this happens to other people.  That it must be some Firefox plugin interfering or something…although maybe I’m wrong and no one else has caught something so obvious and ridiculously costly…

(By the way, check out my Digg profile and add me as a friend if you have an account.)

One of my huge pet peeves is when someone is in a difficult situation and they whine and complain about it, but proceed to do nothing to change the situation.  Usually this comes in two flavors -  relationships and jobs - although it really can apply to anything.  It drives me nuts.  If you don’t like a situation in life get off your ass and do something about it.

When it comes to starting your own business, everyone has a tendency to talk a big game.  You might succeed, you might fail, but to me it’s unacceptable to talk about changing the world without even trying.  In most cases, “failure” leads to success at some other point down the road…even if it means you just laid the groundwork for someone else to come along and succeed.

The other day I saw this index card over on Indexed, one of my favorite blogs:

No arguments from me on the sex side of things

But I started to really think about the “changing the world” portion of the card.  And you know what?  Yea, I’d say that’s what most people do.  But that’s not what I do.  Or - more appropriately - that’s not what we do.

My definition of  “changing the world” - an action that improves the life of one or more people.

I don’t agree that the only events that can “change the world” are curing cancer or eliminating poverty.  I think that mentality makes it too easy to give up and walk through life feeling like you can’t make a difference.  That just simply isn’t true.  You might not be able to cure cancer, but you can brighten the day of a little kid with cancer down at your local hospital.  You might not be able to end poverty, but you can pick up some extra groceries for your local food pantry.  I look at this blog, SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Detailed Image, Music-Alerts, etc and I know that each one has “changed the world” in it’s own minor-but-relevant way because I’ve seen hundreds of emails from people expressing their gratitude for the work we’ve done.

What if I didn’t decide to start this blog back in 2005?  What if I gave up on SportsLizard after the first few tough months?  What if George and Greg didn’t take initiative on the opportunity that they saw to start an auto detailing site focused around great customer service and educating car owners?  What if I gave up on my search for an album release date service and didn’t start Music-Alerts?

The obvious answer to me is that we wouldn’t have changed the world.

All of those emails from satisfied users/customers would seize to exist.  To me that’s more important than any dollar amount in my pocket.  That’s why I continue to try to change the collectibles industry with SportsLizard even if it accounts for (and probably will always account for) a tiny percentage of our revenues.  If I can make enough money to live and I know my work is making the world a better place, I will be wholly satisfied with myself.

You might contest my definition of changing the world.  That’s fine, it’s certainly debatable.  I’ll tell you one thing that isn’t debatable:  no one has ever changed the world by just talking about changing the world.  Talk without action will get you nowhere.

Virtually all corporations stagnate at some point in their lifetime, and their stall typically follows the period of their highest growth.  Why?

That’s the question that Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever of the Corporate Executive Board attempt to answer.  I’m going to cut to the chase on this one so I can get to the good stuff:

• This is an absolutely exhaustive study of over 600 companies, on par in level of depth with Good to Great.
• Because of how exhaustive it is, I had a hard time reading more than 10 pages in a sitting (very atypical for me).  There’s just SO much information to soak up that it hurts your brain to read any more without giving it some time to set in.
• This book is written for - and is in turn best suited for - C-level executives at Fortune 500 size firms.  Still a good read for a small business owner, but don’t be looking for a lot of practical solutions for your business unless you’re the CEO of GE or the CFO of Xerox.

Now, to what really makes this a great book.  I learned two very important things from this study that I did not previously know:

1. Most companies don’t fail/stall due to outside factors.  In fact, of the companies who “stalled” (defined as a significant downturn in revenue growth) only 13% were due to “external factors”.  In short:  business owners who blame the economy, or claim market saturation, or the government for failing are usually full of shit.  Most of the reasons companies fail are because they have internal strategic or organizational issues.   Stop worrying about the economy or the competition and start focusing on making your company great.
2. The overwhelming reason that most companies have internal failures is because of the poor business assumptions that they make.  In the beginning, something worked.  Then it worked again.  Pretty soon it was etched into everyone’s mind that “our customer only want X” or “the market will always react positively to Y”.  Years pass, times change, technology changes, people change, but everyone still holds the assumption to be true.  Unfortunately it isn’t.  The authors do a great job discussing how to test and measure the impact of the primary assumptions about your business.  This is very applicable to any business owner.  Take us for example.  We have always needed George and Greg to interact regularly on car forums for DI sales to be high.  George took a week business trip - and consequently did not post - and we had our record days of sales.  Now we’re realizing that maybe we don’t need to have such a strong presence on all of our forums, especially after we’ve become established and have other members posting on our behalf with affiliate links, as we do on many forums now.

Bottom line:  if you love business, this is on par with Good to Great and should be considered “must read material” for any entrepreneur.  If you’re a C-Level executive, this should be your freaking handbook for how to not screw up your company.

Have you seen the commercials for the AMEX Plum Card?  It’s freaking unreal.  Mike talked us in to applying for one earlier this year and it was one of the best financial decisions we’ve made.

• There’s no limit - we each carry a card around and we charge all of our purchases on it, with the exception of a few places that don’t take AMEX
• If you pay within 10 days of your statement closing you get 2% cash back.  When you buy ~$30k/month in inventory and supplies, $600 back is no joke.
• We also get 5% off of our FedEx shipments, all of which get billed to the card.  We just hit a shipping tier where we got an additional 3.5% off from FedEx.  Pretty soon we’ll hit another tier.  With all of this our shipping costs are rapidly declining.

Mike also applied to get us put on the home page of the Plum Card website.  Lo and behold, look who is the fourth card down from the top (out of 10,000+):

Wohoo!