Adam McFarland

No question the most interesting statement from the interview I posted earlier today with Jun Loayza was when he said:

“As a young entrepreneur, you will have NO work/life balance. I am very serious about this. If you want to succeed, you need to be working 24/7 every day of the week.”

That’s why I wrote such a long response prior to asking my next question:

“It’s easy to be happy for a year or two working all day, every day.  In my opinion, it’s hard to be happy doing that for a lifetime - one day you’ll wake up at age 50 and realize that you’ve missed out on love and relationships and wonderful experiences because you were obsessed with your company.”

That’s why Anthony took the time to write such a long comment:

“Adam - You’ve spent a lot of time on this blog advocating the fact that this is not true, and that entrepreneurs need to try as hard as possible to sidestep that misconception. I am with you on that. A true entrepreneur, and one who is on a path to success, may reach a peak of high workload, but for the most part, should constantly be on a steady decline of hours per day/week being worked. If you’re doing things right, you’re finding more and more ways to automate, delegate, etc.“

Work/life balance is a very touchy subject for anyone who runs a business.  You clearly love your company, but happiness is rarely (if ever) achieved by loving one thing and neglecting your mental/physical health or your relationships with others.

As Adam Gilbert says, the way that you find out what is truly important to someone is by how they spend their time:

“In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about? Look at their calendar! It’s that simple. Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?”

I’ll take that a step further.  When it comes solely to the business owner and their work/life balance, take a look at how they spend their weekends. Do they use them to recoup and recover, or do they work just as much (or more) than they do during the week?

Why weekends?  Because that’s the time the rest of the world takes off to rest.  You can argue whether 2 days off for every 5 too little or too much, but it’s the way the world works and those are the only 2 days you get to really spend a legitimate amount of time with people in the rest of the world who have jobs.

So go ahead, ask me how I spend my weekends?  Glad you asked.  

To be honest, in 2006 and 2007 I worked most of my weekends.  Probably 75% as much time as a weekday, but I’d have less distractions so I’d get the same amount done.  Then again, my social life sucked.  I justified it (and in retrospect I learned things a lot faster by having my entrepreneurial journey be 7 days/week as opposed to 5) but sacrificing my hobbies, friends, family, and dating life were things that wore on me increasingly.  Those who knew me well often would wonder how I did it (half in amazement, half worried about my sanity).   I always knew that at some point I’d have to balance things out a bit more.  Sacrifice isn’t always admirable - sometimes it’s just plain stupid.

Earlier this year we moved into our warehouse.  Sales continued to grow.  We became more efficient.  We gave ourselves raises.  There was no longer a fear that one wrong move could cripple us.  At that point - as hard as it was, even for someone cognizant of overworking themselves - I took a step back and made a conscious decision to work less.  Every night I started doing something fun that was non work related.  I started saying “yes” every time I got invited to a family party that I would have previously turned down.  I tried to hang out with my friends more.  Most importantly, I started treating my weekends as a time to rejuvenate myself for the coming weeks.  Not to push myself closer to burn out.

Last weekend I went to a wedding.  This coming weekend consists of camping for a night, my fantasy football draft, a full day of watching college football, a family dinner (yours truly is turning 26), and a massive party at my apartment on Sunday night.  Very little work will be done.  That’s OK. Because come Tuesday morning I’ll wake up and be ready to kick ass again.  Taking time for myself doesn’t mean I don’t love what I do as much as I did before.  If anything, the balance leaves me less stressful and more productive when I’m working.  I’m more eager to work when I have a day or two away from it.  Sure, I’ll still block out a weekend here and there to work on a side project because I enjoy those, but the majority of weekends now are for the other people and things in my life that aren’t related to Pure Adapt.  I still have plenty of hours left in the week for my entrepreneurial fix.

I recently conducted an email interview with fellow young entrepreneur Jun Loayza.  As fellow Brazen Careerist bloggers, we struck up a conversation about a month ago due to our striking similarities.  His answers below give a very candid view of what it is like to start a company right out of college:

Adam: You and I are very similar in that we have made the decision to start our own companies and then blog about it. What led you to decide to dedicate yourself to blogging in addition to the immense amount of time it takes to launch a successful startup?

Jun: I actually write in three blogs right now. My personal one is Living the Startup Life, where I write about my personal experiences with starting a company. My two company ones are FD Flow and FD Career Blog.

Why do I spend time writing when I have a bazillion other things to do? The answer is quite simple: I write because I want to share my experiences in hopes of helping others through their entrepreneurial path and to meet others outside of my social circle. With my personal blog, I hope to give people a glimpse into what it’s like to be a young entrepreneur. What are the sacrifices that I have to make and the hardships that I have to go through? What does it feel like to launch and get a strong user base? Because I’ve exposed my life online and to the public, I have met some incredible people in the blogosphere - you included Adam. In essence, this question boils down to, “Why should anyone blog?” For a personal blog, the answer is to share your ideas, build your personal brand, and meet some amazing people.

We have also just started our video series: Living the Startup Life. The video documents our lives as young entrepreneurs.

My company blogs are meant to build thought leadership in career development. For example, we write interviewing and resume tips on our FD Career Blog that help students and young professionals who are going through the interview process. The more we establish ourselves as the go-to place for Career Development, the better branded Future Delivery will become. The goal: whenever someone has a career question, they’ll go to the FD Career Blog.

The FD Flow blog is meant to immerse our users into the Future Delivery culture. Our brand is “Productivity Made Fun,” so we have a tab on our blog that categorizes everything that is FD. For example, Type Racer is very FD. You get better at typing while racing your friends which is super fun: typing (productive) + racing (fun) = ProductiveFun (Future Delivery).

Company blogs are perfect to brand your company and give your company a voice. The Web 2.0 users love to interact with a company, so a blog is the platform that facilitates direct interaction with your users.

Adam: You actively blog about your personal life as well as your entrepreneurial experience, covering topics like sex and relationships in addition to marketing and career development. Where do you draw the line on what you will and will not talk about? Has a post ever backfired and gotten someone in your “offline life” upset? If so, did that (or would that) change how you approached your blog?

Jun: I currently do not draw the line anywhere when I write. I feel that anything is fair game for me as long as I truly believe in what I am writing.

Hahahaha… I’m glad you asked me about a post that “back-fired.” I can really only think of one post: “Flirt with your Interviewer.” Now, what I should have written is, The Principles of Flirting Apply to Interviewing, but I wanted to be bold, controversial, and make an impact on my first post on Brazen Careerist. Did it really backfire? I don’t think so. The post did its job by generating a conversation and driving people to check out my blog. The only way that it might have back-fired is that a few women bloggers were upset with me for a couple of months. We’re all fine now.

What did I learn from it? Controversial blogs generate conversations and traffic like mad! Write them as often and as juicy as you can, but always make sure that you truly believe in everything that you’re writing. Writing just to be controversial is not cool in my opinion.

Adam: In your about page you have a fascinating quote: “I have no work-life balance because I feel that work is life and work is play; therefore, I constantly have fun no matter what I’m doing.” As a young business owner constantly trying to juggle the different areas of my life, I find this very intriguing. How did you develop this mentality? Can you explain why it is beneficial (maybe necessary) to have an outlook like this as a young entrepreneur working a lot of hours?

Jun: As a young entrepreneur, you will have NO work/life balance. I am very serious about this. If you want to succeed, you need to be working 24/7 every day of the week. I love my company, the people that I work with, and the goals that we are trying to achieve; therefore, I feel that work is play. I see no reason to have a work/life balance because they are one and the same to me. If my fun time is work time, then I can be playing while working. (This of course is the essence of Future Delivery: Productivity made fun)

How has this affected my personal life? My personal life has taken a humongous toll because of this mentality. I don’t give my girlfriend as much of my time and attention as she deserves, I miss out on family dinners all the time, and I see my close friends from UCLA or High School probably once a month. This is why the startup life is not for everyone. The sacrifices that you have to make are much more than hours worked. You really have to change your mentality to succeed.

It has even gotten to the point where I am on a date with my girlfriend and I seem stressed. She asks me, “Jun, what’s the matter? You seem stressed. You need to learn how to relax and take a break from work.” I of course tell her that I’m completely happy being with her right now, but what I am really thinking in my head is, “I just want to go back to my laptop and continue working. That would make me happy.”

Yes, this is very intense, but I think this is the way it has got to be. Adam, I would actually like to hear your thoughts about this topic. What is your work/life balance?

Adam:  Jun, I know exactly what you’re talking about.  I’d say I felt 100% the same way for about the first two years after I left my job.  Starting and growing my/our company was the only thing that mattered to me.  As screwed up as that may sound, it’s probably why I persevered and am still able to do something I love.  The hard part is knowing when it’s OK to be able to back off just a little bit.  The past six months or so I’ve made a conceited effort to “regain” my non business life.  I get a little bit less done at work every day, but I knew I needed to show my friends, family, hobbies, etc some more attention or I wouldn’t be happy long term.

It’s easy to be happy for a year or two working all day, every day.  In my opinion, it’s hard to be happy doing that for a lifetime - one day you’ll wake up at age 50 and realize that you’ve missed out on love and relationships and wonderful experiences because you were obsessed with your company.  The “balls out” mentality is necessary at times, but as you grow and revenue grows you have to learn to make time for those other things as well.  More importantly maybe, is teaching yourself to enjoy those things while you’re doing them so that you can fully enjoy the experience.  Unless you are dealing with life or death with your company (a hospital records company, for example), your business can wait.  No issue is so catastrophic that you cannot take a break for a few hours.

I’m not saying this is easy - I have a whole Life Balance section of this blog where I discuss the struggles I face - but it is something I am very cognizant of.  My goal as an entrepreneur is to do something that I’m passionate about that brings me excitement and fulfillment while also making the world a better place.  I can’t be thoroughly excited and fulfilled if I am not also cultivating my relationships away from the job.  I’m guessing that finding this balance will be an eternal struggle for both of us, which is why I asked the question:  it will always fascinate me to discuss it.

Back to the questions:

Your startup FDCareer.com aims to take a different approach to personal and professional development. Can you explain why young professionals should look to your site instead of all of the other networking/development sites we’re constantly bombarded with?

Jun: Sites like Monster.com help students and professionals apply for a job. Sites like Vault.com help people research about companies. We see a huge gap. People are able to apply for companies and conduct research, but there is nothing preparing them to be better qualified candidates or to ultimately succeed in their positions. Also, these sites are so boring and mundane that most people would rather do work or homework than to spend time on the site. This is why we created FD Career which features the FD RPG (role playing game).

Our goal with FD Career is unique yet simple: We want to provide the platform that will help undergraduates and young professionals have fun while developing themselves professionally. In the FD RPG, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up on the site. As you level-up, you gain prestige, new abilities, access to new areas of the site, and will be able to recruit with more prestigious firms. We have also implemented Quests that help you develop career-wise. For example, a Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis case. You will have to solve a company’s problem - could be profitability or an acquisition - and you will submit your solutions online to be reviewed by our expert panel. A Marketing Quest could be to gain social infleunce on Twitter by gaining more followers.

Monster.com is about helping people apply for a job.

Vault.com is about helping people research about companies

FD Career is about getting students and young professionals prepared for their careers. It helps you discover what you want to be, and how to get there.

Adam: If your blog was a book, with the story being about your life and FDCareer, what would the ideal ending be? (i.e. would you run your company forever and turn it into a Fortune 500 company, cash out and live on a beach, start 10 more companies, etc).

Jun: The ideal ending for Future Delivery is to build an empire. Our ultimate goal with Future Delivery is to build FD World, a virtual world that compliments your personal and professional life. Think of it as the fusion between LinkedIn and Second Life.

FD Career is the first step to building FD World. Once you achieve a high social level on FD Career, you will be rewarded an avatar. This avatar will carry over to FD World once we launch it. Expect FD World to come out late 2009.

My personal goal is to eventually move on from Future Delivery and start another company. I would still like to remain a Board Member and adviser to Future Delivery, but I would leave the day to day operation to another CMO who would take my place. I feel that my personality is best suited for starting up a company rather than running an already successful company. It’s so challenging, diverse, and always leads to unexpected turns and twists. Its a stressful yet super fun life!

Adam:  I’m the same way - my skills are probably best suited for the startup phase so I probably won’t be happy unless I’m building something new. Anything else you want to add?

Jun: My final piece of advise is to strive for more than a high GPA. When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I would read a business book while in class rather than listen to the professor. The only reason I was able to learn about entrepreneurship, business, or marketing was because I learned it through trial and error, from a mentor, or by reading a book. My classes taught me none of these things. Yes, GPA is important, but it is definitely not everything. Compliment your academics with personal development. FD Career is the perfect platform that will help you develop professionally and personally (Yes, it’s a plug, but a very honest and sincere plug).

Adam, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to be featured on your blog. Good luck with everything and if your readers ever have any further questions about entrepreneurship, they are free to email me at jun.loayza (at) fdcareer (dot) com.

Adam: Thank YOU Jun for the insightful replies.  Best of luck to you!

**Update 9/16.  I’ve fixed the one unprotected feed security issue mentioned below in Step 5.  Please see the Micro Blog Security Fix after reading this post, before attempting to build a similar system.**

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We’re growing fast right now, very fast.  It’s exciting stuff.  In 2007 we spent the majority of our time assimilating as a team, determining which projects could drive the most revenue, and looking for a warehouse.  We had a very good year, but 2008 has been a whole new story.  Everyone knows what to do and all four of us have just been executing all day long.  The result has been a 2-3 times growth in revenue every single month this year so far - pretty impressive in my opinion considering we have no employees and didn’t take any outside funding.

However we have had an increasing communication problem.  Everyone was accomplishing stuff so fast that the remaining three partners had a hard time keeping up on everyone else’s progress.  Minor things would slip through the cracks because of a lack of communication.  We only have one day where we are all in the warehouse (Monday) so we only have one full team meeting per week.  The rest of the time we’re on our own.  It was becoming clear that weekly updates weren’t quick enough.

For example, we started a big sale on Detailed Image during a 1 hour down time for our credit card processing service.  George and Mike were running the sale, Greg and I were the ones aware of the downtime posting.  Consequently, I posted a message on the site that our credit card processing was down just as the sale was going off.  Not a huge deal - the sale ended up being a success - but it highlighted an increasing communication problem that was coming from the fact that everyone was just accomplishing so much every day and didn’t have an effective way to communicate what they did to everyone else.

We needed a way to quickly communicate simple things such as “we’re out of Flex Buffers” or “a shipment of Chin Up Bars came in today” or “I made a minor fix to the shipping system”.  Instantly I thought of the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter, which allows you to post mini blog posts of 140 characters or less from your phone, the web, or a slew of other places and then others can read them on your twitter page, get updates on their phone, or subscribe to your RSS feed.

Unfortunately there are two problems I saw right away with Twitter:  it isn’t secure and it doesn’t allow multiple people to post to a singular feed.  When I checked the list of API apps I couldn’t find one that solved those two issues.  I ultimately decided against it because of the fact that our confidential company information would be stored in their database and we just can’t have that.  I wanted more control, but I didn’t want to build something from scratch.  A solution needed to be something I could throw together in hours, not days or weeks.

When we met about it we talked about our other options:  Skype or email.   Skype doesn’t work because it interrupts you.  A response is expected when you receive an instant message.  I don’t need to be interrupted with a message from George telling me we’re out of a product.  I just need to know within the next day or so in case I’m interacting with a customer or processing an order with that product.  Skype also relies on all of us being on our computers all day long to receive messages, which we’re not.  So we turned to email.  It worked OK for a couple of weeks, but my biggest problem is that most of us only check our email 1-2 times per day.  I don’t want to open my email every time I want to notify them of something I accomplished.  I also don’t want all of us clogging inboxes up with these updates.  On a basic level, email messages should be items you need to take action on, and these updates are updates that do not need a reply.

Our Solution

Then I had an idea:  customize a version of WordPress to make a micro-blogging system to meet our needs.  In addition to the multi-user and security issues, I needed to create something that integrated into everyone’s existing routine.  If the solution required a new application to be open or a new web page to visit, it wouldn’t work.  The only thing that really fit the criteria is our Google Apps page that we all have set as our default home page on our browser for our shared task lists, wiki, documents, and email.

Here are some pictures of the completed product.  The Google Apps page:

The login page that displays when trying to access the blog:

The blog home page:

Step By Step Instructions

These instructions assume you have a domain, hosting, and a working knowledge of WordPress and development with PHP/MySQL.

1. Install WordPress on your domain, making sure to uncheck the box that says “I would like my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati”. This ensures that WordPress doesn’t ping search engines and blog directories with updates of your latest posts.  Even though we will password protect everything, we need to make sure that none of the blog gets indexed, including the RSS feed that WordPress produces.
2. Install and customize a simple WordPress theme.  My choice was uTheme.  The idea here being to have something simple and easy that people can use to read the updates, post a new update, and access the secure RSS feed.  Everything else in my opinion is a waste.  I went in to the template files and removed code for comments, categories, and other miscellaneous stuff on the sidebar.  Our posts only include the title, the body, and the date posted.  Our sidebar only has a search box, a link to post, a link to the secure RSS feed, and the archives.  For the link to post, I linked directly to the wp-post.php page so that logged in users are only a click away from posting.  In addition, WordPress returns you to the last viewed page after a post, so if you come from the home page of your blog you’ll be returned to the home page after a post, minimizing the clicks your users need to write a post.  I also changed some of the colors in the CSS to match our company colors.
3. Create user accounts for all potential users and modify WordPress to display who posted in the title.   I created accounts for all four of us with our first name as the name on the account.  I then called the <?php the_author(); ?> function to display the author of each post everywhere the title is displayed (home page, permalink page, and feed).  This way I can make a post and my partners can instantly know that I wrote it.  For example, if I wrote a quick post entitled “Inventory updated” WordPress would display it as “Adam:  Inventory updated”.
4. Install the WordPress Password Plugin.  This password protects each page of the blog, preventing unwanted visitors or spiders from viewing the site.  In the configuration file you can set your password and can identify specific pages to not be password protected.  You should disable the password protection for the RSS feed (we’ll password protect this in a different way).   I also customized the login.php page of the plugin to look a bit better aesthetically.
5. Use FeedBurner to create a password protected feed.  “Burn” your unprotected feed and go to Publicize -> Password Protector to password protect the feed.  Use this feed for everything related to your blog.  DO NOT give anyone the URL to the original unprotected WordPress feed.  That is not password protected and is most definitely the weak point of this system.  I’d also advise against putting the URL of this blog in your robots.txt file - it isn’t going to be indexed if you follow these steps, but by putting it in there hackers could potentially find the location of your feed.
6. Use FreeMyFeed to securely pull your feed.  Most (almost all) feed readers do not support password protected feeds like the one we just created.  Enter FreeMyFeed.  They provide you a unique URL for your feed.  As long as you don’t give this URL away, you should be safe to use this feed in any manner that you use a normal feed.  According to their site: “Usernames, passwords, feed URLs and feeds are never stored on the server. Usernames, passwords and feed URLs are only parsed from the alternate URL to retrieve your RSS feed on the fly from the original source and then are discarded.”
7. Install the CustomRSS Google Gadget.  This ties it all together for us.   Use the feed from Step 5 to securely pull the headlines from your micro blog.  You can click on a link and the gadget will drop down and display the full post, meaning you do not need to leave the Google Apps page unless you want to post.  I customized the gadged by linking the “Pure Adapt Micro Blog” title to our micro blog home page and then modified the aesthetics to match our colors.

Other optional enhancements - I developed this for our needs, but there’s a lot more that can be done.  You can post via email to WordPress.  Since you can send email from a mobile phone, you could post from your phone.  You can also display the RSS feed in your feed reader or Vista desktop RSS widget (I do both).  WordPress plugins like the SMS Text Message plugin could be configured with a few hours of work to send text message updates to all users after every post.  I’m sure there’s more that I haven’t thought of - the possibilities are really endless.

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Now I feel like we have a communication system for everything.  We still use meetings, phone, email and Skype, but the void left by those is now filled.  A few weeks in we’re all loving it.  Problem solved!

Anyone who owns a business like ours has been there.

You’ve just met a new group of people and they casually ask what you do for a living.  You give one of a variety of answers, based upon how web-savvy the crowd is and how interested you are in talking about your business at the moment.  They think what you do is really cool and they ask a bunch of nosey-but-well-intended questions.

In a way, it gets a bit old.  Of course, in another way it’s pretty freaking cool.  Having someone genuinely interested in what you do is a pretty big compliment.

Then the night goes on like normal.  Until someone brings up one of the following:  their lack of vacation time, their not-so-wonderful boss, the glass ceiling at their job, the BS politics, or the perpetual fear of losing their job.  And then they say it.  They look you in the eye, smile, and (somewhat sarcastically) say:  “Of course, YOU don’t have to worry about that!”   Again, in a way it’s a compliment.  But in another way it’s as if they’re saying “look at the business owner who is soooo cool that he doesn’t have to deal with all of the crap that the rest of us do.  Must be nice to be him. ”

The easy answer is to just smile and say “yup, you’re right.  It’s nice not having that stuff going through my head.  Being a business owner is awesome.”

In a way, that’s true - it’s what I used to say back when I had more of a chip on my shoulder and was trying to prove that entrepreneurship (or better yet, my choice of entrepreneurship) was “superior”.  Now I smile and say how I truly feel.  Something along the lines of “yes, that’s definitely true, but like anything else in life there are trade-offs.”

I don’t have to worry about many of the things that stress someone in a typical corporate position, but I also have stresses that they don’t.  Trying to speak from a completely generalized point of view: owing a business is neither “better” nor “worse” than having a job.  It’s just a different path.  A path that I happen to feel suits me better, but that doesn’t mean that the lifestyle should necessarily be romanticized as much as I feel like it is.  At times owning a business sucks far worse than going to work at 9 and checking out at 5.

Yup, my pay has no ceiling.  I can give myself a raise whenever I want.  I don’t need to worry about my bosses nephew getting preferential treatment and taking “my promotion”.  Of course, my salary also has no floor.  Earlier this year we didn’t pay ourselves for several months to survive our move and expansion.  And every time I do give myself a raise I am taking away from money that could be used to increase marketing or hire/train employees.  Pay yourself more at the cost of growing your company (and your stock), or pay yourself less and struggle to pay your bills? Show me an employee who has to make a decision like that.

Sure, I can take a day “off” whenever I want.  I don’t need to get permission from anyone.  I don’t need to deduct it from my yearly vacation time.  At this point, the company won’t fall apart without me.  Of course, at any time on one of those days off something could happen and I could immediately be pulled away from whatever I’m doing from an indefinite amount of time (see our server issue from a few months ago).  The reality is that until we have a large staff I cannot completely get away from work from any discernible amount of time.  I feel like I’ve done a good job this year of spending more time with friends and family away from work, but I still haven’t taken anything even close to resembling a vacation in several years (Florida for a week in January of 2005 is the most recent I can think of).  And even with a staff, I’ll probably be so passionate about what we’re working on that I’ll want to be contacted if something major goes wrong…even if I’m not the one fixing it.  So is the life of an entrepreneur who loves what they do.  I wouldn’t want it any other way.  I will be able to spend more time away from work in the coming years.  But when that time comes it will come because of great sacrifice over the previous years.  It’s not something that I lucked in to, it’s something I earned through my choices and my hard work.  I understand if others think it’s “cool”, but I don’t necessarily think they’d find the process leading up to it very “cool”.

There’s always more to the story than what you see on the surface.

Back in 2006 when I reviewed Barry Moltz’s first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Busines, I said the following:

I often say how much I love unique blogs. Well, the same goes for books. Most entrepreneurial books paint pretty pictures of the fantasy land of running a business, which we all know is far from the truth. When I was handed a copy of You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business by Barry Moltz, I could tell that it wasn’t going to be one of those “typical” rah-rah books.

It certainly was one of the more unique books I’ve encountered when it comes to business and entrepreneurship, which is probably why I’ve revisited it several times since that review.   When I learned that he had a new book coming out, I was excited to get my hands on an early copy to read and review.  Unfortunately I was backed up by a few books and it took me longer to get to it than I wanted to.  Once I did however, it definitely didn’t disappoint.

The easiest way to explain what bounce! is all about is from the description on his website: “Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true—sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system. Both success and failure are simply outcomes in the lifecycle of business where repetition is inevitable and overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome.”

The book is an in depth overview of what Moltz calls the “Ten Building Bands for True Business Confidence”.  There were a few that really struck a chord as important for first time business owners.  If you haven’t figured it out already, you’re going to fail…a lot.  You can either go into an emotional rollercoaster each time something doesn’t go right (in which case you’ll probably drive yourself insane) or you can deal with it using Moltz’s “bands” as the foundation for dealing with failure.

My favorites:

• “In failure, give up the shame.  Grieve failures and wallow if you need to, but let go rather than absorb shame, and deflect shame coming at you from others.  Find new words to define a poor outcome”.   The first time you fail at something, you’ll get a lot of “I told you so’s” from people.  Maybe they won’t say it directly, but you’ll get that feeling from people.  Who cares.  Call it a learning experience and move on.  YOU aren’t a failure because something you did failed.
• “Failure Gives a Choice.  It provides an escape hatch to find a different choice.”  Totally overlooked, but huge in my book.  Use failure to pursue new and (hopefully) better opportunities rather than hanging on too long and making yourself miserable.  Long time readers of this blog have seen me do this on several occassions.
• “More effective risk taking.  Improve your decision making by examining the risks.  Take only the risks that you want, and avoide the ones that could prove fatal”.  Another overlooked one in my book.  Sure, I’ve taken a lot of risks, but in every instance I’ve been able to accept the possibility of failure and the situation that failure would leave me in.  If you aren’t comfortable with where you’ll be after failing, don’t jump…or better yet, find a way to take a more calculated and less risky jump.   Perfect example:  you want to start a fitness company.  You could either bankrupt yourself trying to open a gym or start with personal training services, an online store, and a blog.  Both can make you money, but only the former can leave you broke.  The web has made it possible to almost eliminate all upfront risk with a venture.  You can almost always prove your business model for less than $1k prior to investing more.
• “Process trumps outcome.  We are too focused on the binary outcome:  success or failure.  Business is all about cycles, and we need to focus on the process more than the outcome for better decision making that will improve our chance of success.”  There are a few different ways I interepret this, but this chapter really got me thinking about why I really am a business owner.  At the end of the day, the money is to help me live, not to make me happy.  Our company stock is nice, but I don’t do it for that either.  You could take that away from me and I’d still love the process.  I love the experience of being a business owner.  It’s fun, fufilling, and rewarding.  I think that helps me make better decisions because I don’t worry about how “rich” I am.  No decision is really fatal as long as I can continue to have the awesome experience of running a company.
• “A measurement system of our own.  Money doesn’t buy happiness.  With what, besides money, will you measure your success.”  Doing something I love, making a positive impact on the world, and doing it with people I love is more important to me than being rich.  If being rich is a by product of that, so be it.  If not, I’ll be happy as long as I can pay the bills.
• “Value action.  Stop reading this book and see what comes next.”  Love this one.  Reading is important, but action is more important.  Make sure you’re portioning your time accordingly.

Like his previous book, what makes this book great is that it makes you think.  It’s not a pain-free read.  And what I mean by that is that you’ll find yourself deep in thought while reading it.  I’d imagine if you read this prior to starting a business, you’d be seriously asking yourself if the entrepreneurial lifestyle is something you truly want to do.   I spent about half of the book nodding my head and thinking “that’s exactly what it’s like but I’ve never seen it verbalized in quite this way” and the other half wondering why running a business hasn’t destroyed my health and personal life like it does to many of the people profiled.

The best answer that I can come up with is that this book made me realize that I naturally deal with failure very well.  We’ve already been through so much.  We’ve grown our revenue to a point where I don’t think many small businesses ever get.  So I don’t think I can really say that it’s because I haven’t been a business owner long enough or haven’t dealt with enough failure or haven’t had a large enough company.  When I really thought about it I sort of realized that I make decisions quickly, learn from failure if there’s something to learn from it, then move on.  Sometimes there’s really nothing to learn - failure was due to total shit luck or variables that were impossible to account for.   I tend to shrug my shoulders and move on.  I’ve never lost a night’s worth of sleep over a failure.  As a team, we tend to have a meeting, come up with a plan, and move on.  Failure generally doesn’t linger because we’re already too busy pushing towards something new.  I never really thought about it until now, but this is probably the reason that I’m still running a business and didn’t flame out after a few months of leaving my job.

Oh - I also don’t want to forget to personally thank Mr. Moltz.  He and I have exchanged several emails regarding the book.  I’ve read and reviewed quite a few books, and it’s rare to have anyone beyond a publicist contact you.  In addition to being easy to contact, he’s also been very patient with me.  This book and this review took longer than they should have due to my busier than normal schedule lately.   Oh, and he also autographed the inside cover and wrote me a short personal message. I’m sure he does it for everyone, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside nonetheless.

The book flows great, cites solid resources, uses a ton of great real-life examples, and contains a lot of material that’s very motivating.  But don’t read it for that reason - read it because it really makes you think.  Books like bounce! and authors like Moltz are few and far between.

One of the most nerve racking moments when making an online purchase is that moment after you enter your credit card information and hit submit.  It’s the responsibility of the retailer to make it clear that the order is complete by telling the customer so, displaying a receipt, and emailing a receipt.   If something goes wrong, it is also the responsibility of the merchant to notify the customer of what went wrong, reassure them that their card was not charged, and display instructions on how to complete their order.  Pretty standard stuff.

Yesterday I ordered a set of three Stick N Click lights from the As Seen on TV Store after our warehouse bathroom light went out and we couldn’t fix it ($9.95 for 3 lights vs. the cost of an electrician).  Take a look at the confirmation page:

That big blue “Sorry” banner isn’t exactly what I want to be seeing after completing a purchase.  And no, it wasn’t animated and it didn’t go anywhere if you clicked it:  it was just a big ass banner that said “Sorry…”.

Why on earth would you do that to your customers?

Several months back I built an email follow-up system for Detailed Image that sends an email to our customers two weeks after their purchase.  In addition to checking in with them to see if they received their products in a timely manner, it also asks them to write a product review for each product they ordered.  The email provides direct links to the product review pages for the specific products.

However, the reviews were intentionally buried a bit on the site.  We wanted to have a substantial amount before making them part of the buying process, as so many successful e-commerce sites do these days.  In addition to the reviews, we also needed a way to convey any detailing packages we sell that included the item the customer was looking at.  For example, if you’re buying a wax it’s helpful to know the various packages we offer that include that wax and other supplementary items.  It makes the customer more aware of what we have available in relation to the product they’re looking for, which hopefully leads to them making a better purchasing decision.

So we mimicked the “tab” format that sites like CircuitCity.com and Newegg use so well:

We’re hoping that changes like this improve the buying process for the customer and in turn increase our conversion rate.  I’ll be implementing the same feature - with a few modifications - tomorrow on Tastefully Driven.

Certainly not a major overhaul, but just another example of micro-innovating, constantly improving our sites and our business.   It also helps lay the groundwork for the complete shopping cart overhaul that we’re looking to do at some point in ‘09.

My college degree is in Industrial Engineering.  Unlike other forms of engineering, IE is focused on process design and improvement and not product design and improvement.  Using this mindset, I spent a considerable amount of time building to scale aspects of SportsLizard before I even launched it back in ‘04.  Most of what I did never ended up being applicable to the site…or needed to be tweaked considerably to be useful.  I tried to automate things so that I could handle thousands of transactions a day before I even was getting one a day.  Clearly I took the wrong approach.

So what’s a bootstrapping business owner to do?  Do the absolute minimum amount of work to get your site online or your service to market.  This allows you to spend your time elsewhere - taking more similar types of chances or doing other activities that have proven to bring in revenue/personal income.  Your initial customers will take a long time to service, but you’ll learn every single intricacy of your unique process.  Things you would have thought to be important or time consuming really aren’t, and others that would seemingly be easy to automate will need personal attention.

One perfect example is our customer service system.  Here’s another:

In my Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability post back in April I discussed our decision to begin selling on Amazon.  I did the absolute bare minimum to give it a test:  I only listed products that were already in Amazon’s system and I spent no time entering ones in that weren’t.  If there were five variations of a product listed, I just went with the first one I found.  I put no effort into optimizing anything.  Since it didn’t sync with our shipping/inventory system, we manually put every order through Tastefully Driven each time they came through.  Each order was tedious, but at least we were only spending time after we made the money.  We just wanted to give it a shot with as little effort as possible.

In that post I mentioned that we were getting some good sales from Amazon.  Over the next several months the number of sales per day increased steadily to the point where we realized that it was worth the time to get all of our products listed.  I spent a day doing that.  Then I spent some time investigating their algorithm - how they decide what comes up when someone searches and which store gets preferential treatment as the primary seller.  I then spent another day making some tweaks.

All of a sudden Amazon sales began to take off and it was taking us over an hour a day to put them through our system manually.  At that point, I double backed and programmed a system to export all of the orders from Amazon directly to our back-end, and also to upload tracking numbers from our system back to them.  It took me about a week to get all of this working.

So let’s recap:  I spent about a day getting products up back in April. After it worked I spent two more days adding more products and tweaking our settings.  After that worked, I spent a week automating the whole thing.  Had I automated it from the beginning I would have risked wasting those two days and that week of programming on something that wasn’t going to drive revenue.  I also may have programmed it worse due to a lack of familiarity with Amazon’s sale process.

In general, time is valuable so why waste it unless you know you’re using it on something productive?  The tradeoff is that you grow a little slower, but you also significantly reduce your risk and the price you pay for failure.

Taking a step back, this is one of the reasons I think getting large amounts of Angel or VC funding to help scale rapidly is often not a very good idea.  It’s just simply impossible for someone in your organization to really own a process and grow it correctly if you’re rushing to push things faster than they should go.  Take a look at Startup Junkies if you want to get a feel for the types of catastrophes you can run into if you force growth.

I have had a few friends, former co-workers, and former roommates who have gone on to work jobs for the FBI or do defense contracting for private companies.  As part of the interview process an investigator calls basically everyone they have ever associated with and asks a million personal questions that I usually don’t know the answer to (have they ever done drugs?  have they ever had an altercation with a co-worker? are they a patriot who is loyal to the US?  are they easy to bribe?  are they married? etc, etc).  The person on the other end always has a great personality too.

I received one of these wonderfully fun calls yesterday.  I was busy playing hockey in the warehouse when he called, so I let it go to voicemail.  Here’s how the message started:

Hi Adam.  My name is Rich and I’m an investigator retained by US government office of personnel management, working on an investigation on…

STOP RIGHT THERE.

What’s going through my mind at this point?  What would be going through your mind?  It generally goes something like:  “holy shit, what did I do?  Who is in trouble?” while my heart races about a million beats per second.  Why can’t you start the conversation by telling me what you are calling about and who you are calling about BEFORE you tell me that you are an investigator and scare the living crap out of me.  Something like:

Hi Adam.  My name is Rich and I’m calling about {NAME}.  He/She applied for a job doing defense contracting.  I am an investigator retained by US office of  personnel management, working on a background investigation on him…

See, much better.

Do you think they scare the shit out of people intentionally?

If they do, it certainly works on me.

Like anything else, once you get good at programming a large part of your improvement comes in your ability to be more efficient.  Can you get the same results with less code, fewer files, less queries to execute, etc.  If you don’t, any inefficiencies really become magnified as a project scales and your hand gets forced.

When I whipped up Music-Alerts over a weekend last fall I really just wanted something that worked for ME.  I didn’t exactly plan it to scale.  I also wasn’t as good of a programmer as I am now.  When I made a database caching system for feeds, I figured I’d done everything I needed to for it to scale.

However, once I moved it over to our new server we started having issues.  Even after an upgrade to 4GB of RAM the script to generate the feeds was killing our MySQL server in terms of number of connections and number of queries.  While the caching system limited the number of times the web service connected to Amazon, it didn’t minimize the number of database connections.  For most sites this wouldn’t be a big deal, but RSS feeds get checked by feed readers several times per hour.  With 4,000+ feeds - and some subscribed to in multiple feed readers - you can do the math and see that our MySQL server was getting crushed.

So yesterday I spent a few hours building a static caching system that literally creates the feed as a file on the server and only connects to the database once every 3 days just to sync up with Amazon for new releases.  I also trimmed the core code from about 1,000 lines down to just over 100, eliminating a few unnecessary queries each time it does connect to the database. In less than 24 hours our bandwidth consumption, server load, and MySQL usage on the server have all plummeted.

Lesson learned: any RSS service I build in the future will be built with static feeds and minimal database connections.