Adam McFarland

Yesterday Nev left a comment on my last post regarding AMEX’s customer service:

By the way, have you ever called the AMEX 1-800 number? I think AMEX hires only the MOST FRIENDLY PEOPLE ON EARTH. I think they slip something in their coffee.

I haven’t ever called them, but I’m kind of looking forward to when I can!

There have been plenty of instances where I’ve had that same feeling Nev is describing:  where the person you’re interacting with is so happy, so helpful, and so friendly that it makes your day to talk to them.  It’s freaking unbelievable, and it’s really really uncommon.

For example, I think I’ve been to every coffee shop in the Albany area, but now I spend most of my time at Starbucks.  For the life of me, I can’t understand why people hate on Starbucks.  I’ve been to all 100 (or something like that) around here and every single employee in every single store has been super friendly.  They always seem like they’re having the time of their lives…while working as a barista serving people coffee!  It’s unreal.  Aside from that, the tea I drink is under $2, the place is always very clean, they bring around free samples all the time, and now they have free wi-fi.  I love the place.

We also recently had the pleasure of dealing with Waste Management. That’s right, a dumpster company.  Mike made most of the contacts, and he went on and on about how everyone he dealt with was overly nice.  When they finally came to drop off our new dumpster, I was there and I swear the guy was the happiest person on earth, hands down.  He had a smile from ear to ear, was extremely patient and nice as we debated where to put the thing (something we should have discussed earlier), and gave us a bunch of friendly pointers.   When he left, all we could talk about was how nice he was.

These things really make a difference.   It makes your customers talk about you.  It makes your customers think about you next time they go to make a purchase.  I actually look forward to ordering my drink at Starbucks because the experience is a pleasure!

Now as an e-commerce company, it’s a bit different.  For now, we (intentionally) don’t take many phone calls.  We don’t see many customers in person.  But we sure do interact a lot via email and on forums we sponsor.   Without being able to see your face or hear your voice, you’re at an immediate disadvantage and risk being cold to your customers.

There are two big things that I’ve found help a ton.  Always always start the message with either “I apologize for the inconvenience/trouble” (if it’s a complaint) or “thanks for contacting us” (if it’s a general inquiry).  Those statements diffuse any tension and show that you’re sympathetic to their troubles and appreciate them as a customer.   They no longer are on the defensive, as many customers are when they contact you.  Second, always close with something like “feel free to contact me with any other questions and I’ll be happy to help” so that they feel like you really do care and that they can ask you anything.  Of course, what you say in between also matters.  Make sure you go above and beyond to answer the question that they asked, including doing relevant research and putting in links so they can quickly access more information.

Customer service isn’t rocket science, but most companies suck at it.  Some customers suck and will never be happy, but most of the time a customer contact is an opportunity to win over a customer.  Your approach to customer service speaks volumes to your approach to your business.  If you approach business with a “one satisfied customer at a time” mentality you’ll likely value your customer service immensely.  If you don’t look at your business in a micro fashion like that, it can be hard to see the importance of good customer service.

Remember that post I wrote about our American Express Plum Card a few months back?  We’ve only had the card since February, but we were just informed that we reached the maximum limit of savings that we can receive from FedEx in one year.  Apparently the 5% discount only works up to $1,000/year of savings.

That means in ~9 months we saved $1,000 just by having our FedEx charges automatically charged to our Plum Card!  This doesn’t even include the 2% cash back we’re getting too.

It also means that we spent $20k with FedEx in that short amount of time.  I never really thought about it, but when you’re shipping out 50-60 orders on a good Monday and each order spends around $8 on shipping, it adds up.

These are the types of things that I don’t think big companies do much of or even really care about, but a bootstrapped company like us thrives on finding creative ways to save money and finance our growth.

As I’m writing this, I just remembered that we have an AMEX Gold Card that offers the same discount.  It would probably make sense for us to switch over to that card for a while so we can continue to rack up the 5% savings.  In 2009 we’ll be able to use both cards and hopefully save $2k (I suppose in theory we could get more cards, but I don’t know how many AMEX will let you have).  And as I’m typing, George just confirmed all of this for me so we’ll definitely be making the switch.  Man, you never know when you’ll have a bright idea

I like trying new restaurants.  It’s fun to assess not only the food, but the overall atmosphere.  I always notice how courteous the staff is.  I always notice how clean the place is (especially the bathrooms and the dishes).  I always notice how happy the other patrons are. It’s amazing how all of the little things add up to form your initial opinion - one that will do a lot to determine whether or not you’ll ever come back.

This past weekend I was in Bennington, Vermont.  We couldn’t find the chic cafe we planned on eating in (I wrote down the address wrong), so we walked in to a place called Carmody’s Irish Pub in downtown Bennington.  I’d never heard of the place, I didn’t know anyone who had been there, and I never read a review of it.  The menu posted outside the door looked intriguing and it looked like there were other people in there, so we walked in.

The food was great.  They had a ton of unique dishes on the menu, my choice perhaps being the most unique: pork loin wrapped in bacon and covered in a maple syrup sauce.  Being that we were in VT, the home of great maple syrup, I had to get that.  It might sound weird, but trust me, it was awesome.  But that’s not why I’m writing about the place.  Lot’s of places have great food.  Here are a list of other things I noticed while I was there:

• The waitress helped us immediately.  She asked for our drink orders right away.  She returned a few minutes later with our drinks and some bread.  Sounds simple, but the very next day I waited 20 minutes for my waitress to ask me for my drink at a different restaurant.
• Speaking of the beverages, they were in squeaky clean glasses with the Carmody’s logo in them.  The glasses looked like they were bought earlier that day.  Most of the time I order a drink at a pub-style place I wonder if the glasses had even been cleaned since the last use.
• Despite how busy it was (the place was eventually packed), the staff all seemed genuinely happy.  Everyone looked like they really enjoyed working there.
• When we first walked in, the owner was walking around sweeping the floors.  Then he seated a couple who was waiting.  Then he helped bus a table.  Throughout most of the rest of our meal he was interacting with the locals, who seemed to love him and his place.  When we got up to leave he was in the back.  He noticed we were walking out and he made it a specific point to race up to the front to thank us for coming and wish us a good night.  How many owners do that? Especially when their place is packed on a Saturday night.  It was an amazing feeling.

Now,  his business doesn’t have a lot in common with us, except for this one universal business truth: every single detail about your business matters, and this business had all of them down pat.  When you run a local pub in a small town like Bennington, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that you need to develop strong relationships with the locals.  It speaks volumes to this commitment that the owner is there on a Saturday doing everything he can to help out and make his customers feel like they’re at home.  If you ask me why I’ll be going back, that has as much to do with it as the great food does.

In comparison, a relatively young business like ours isn’t nearly as good with all of the details.  I’m envious of the maturity that he has with his company.  We leave a lot on the table because we’re still putting our systems in place.  We’re constantly forced to intentionally neglect details because there are more important things that demand our immediate attention.  Over time this will change.  For example, last year we barely ran any specials for the holidays.  This year Mike has developed a rather sophisticated sales plan to make sure we hit Black Friday and the rest of the holiday season pretty good.  But in our meeting yesterday, we had ideas that we want to do that we just don’t have the time to implement until next year.  By then, we’ll probably have a few employees and be able to take it a step further.  Eventually we’ll catch up to what the best online retailers are doing, and hopefully be spending all of our time testing out unique ideas that we’ve never seen done.

I think it’s important to realize that you need to focus primarily on the highest revenue generating tasks when you first start out.  But I think it’s equally as important to pay attention to every single detail as you grow.  Over the next year we’ll be overhauling everything we do.  At first it was about getting the feature up and running.  Now it’s becoming about refining it so it’s the best possible feature we can have.

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth”.
-Roberto Clemente

I mentioned back in August that I was invited to speak to an Entrepreneurship and Small Business class at Skidmore College in Saratoga, NY (about a 45 minute drive north for me).  Well, the day finally came yesterday, and it was an awesome experience.  The class is comprised of about 20 seniors who are interested in entrepreneurship.  For a senior class, it’s relatively intense - they actually develop an idea and pitch to local venture capitalists at the end of the semester.  That’s certainly not something I had the opportunity to do as an undergraduate!

I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  I mostly visualized one of my engineering classes at RPI where half of the students played video games on their laptops during class and the other half slept.  We could have had Bill Gates come in and speak and they wouldn’t have paid attention.  Not the case at all with the Skidmore students.  The class was an hour and twenty minutes long.  The first twenty minutes the students broke up into two teams and debated whether or not your should become an entrepreneur out of college.  Pretty quickly it became apparent that they were really truly interested in the class.  Their responses were right on point - they nailed all of the important pros (you have nothing to lose, you have a stronger desire to prove yourself, etc) and cons (risk of falling behind your peers financially, ruining your social life, etc).

For the next hour I got the stage and was able to talk about entrepreneurship as a career choice.   I spent the first half telling my story.  I certainly have some work to do on this part for the next time I present, but the goal wasn’t necessarily to do a perfect job talking about myself.  The goal was to give them enough of an idea about who I am and what I do so that we could actively engage in a discussion period at the end.  I posted a list of roughly 10 discussion topics on the last slide and I spent the second half hour bouncing between Q&A and talking to some of the discussion points I had listed (an example would be “businesses you can start for $100 while still in college”).

Again, I feared that I would hear crickets after my initial part of the presentation and I would be stuck talking to the last slide for a half hour not really knowing what they were interested in hearing about.  Instead, almost every student had a question for me.  It really was an awesome experience. You couldn’t ask for a better group of college seniors.  Regardless of whether they start companies or go into the corporate world, they’ll all have a huge positive impact on the world.  I know that’s a bold statement, but you could just tell when you were around them.  Anyone who doesn’t have faith in putting our future in the hands of the kids graduating today hasn’t met any of the students in this class (side note:  I couldn’t find the professor’s office once I got in the building, and a group of about 10 random kids all helped me get there.  They went above and beyond just pointing me in the right direction.  Don’t see that very often).

First and foremost, I want to thank the entire class for (especially Prof. Wales) having me in to speak and actively engaging in the presentation.  I also want to thank them for giving me a more optimistic outlook of the next generation of workers.  We will undoubtedbly be hiring quite a few employees from their generation, so I feel a lot better about our prospects of finding someone great after meeting them yesterday.

Somewhat selfishly,  I also want to thank you for opening up a new door for me.  I was really hoping this presentation would go well, because I wanted to have the opportunity to give it again.  It’s rare that you’re put in a position where people actually want to hear what you have to say, so much so that they will actively engage you in a Q&A session.  I’m lucky enough to be in that position when it comes to entrepreneurship, particularly the decision making process a young entrepreneur goes through when deciding a career path.  How cool is that?

Everyone has opportunities to give back and make the world a better place, but some are less obvious than others.  I’m not very handy, so volunteering for Habitat for Humanity might not work so well for me.  I like to do everything really fast and I hate wasting time, so helping out at a seniors home might drive me insane.  But I can talk all day long about the ups and downs of running a business in your twenties.  I can talk about all of the tough decisions I’ve had to make.  I can talk not only about the really smart things we’ve done, but also the really stupid decisions we’ve made.  When I started this blog I had a feeling that people would be interested in hearing about my experiences.  I thought being as candid as possible would help them decide whether or not they wanted to run a business, especially because most business owners are either too busy to share their story or unwilling to share it.   I feel like that’s been validated from all of the wonderful comments and emails I’ve received over the past few years.  Now I have another medium to get the same message out.

Oh, and for now I’ve decided not to put the presentation online.   This first time I wanted to focus on creating a positive experience for the audience.  I didn’t want to have to worry about setting up a camera or mic.  I don’t want to put the slides online as-is because they have some financial numbers that I’d like to keep off the web.  Ultimately if this continues to go well I will have an online version.  I’m going to make it a goal to give the presentation to one new school per semester.  So in the spring I’ll try to hit up RPI or SUNY Albany in addition to Skidmore.  Once I feel like I’ve got it down and it’s really resonating consistently with every audience, I’ll record it once and create a section on this site.  I’ll try to include other relevant content to supplement the presentation (other videos, articles I’ve written, recommended reading, etc)

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.  For now I’m thankful that it went well and hoping that it goes even better next semester.  In the meantime, I’ve got to get back on that SportsLizard revamp that I’ve managed to drag on for the past few months…

Back in March I wrote about how I was changing my schedule to accommodate our early morning deliveries to our warehouse.  Six months later, we’ve all pretty much acclimated to working from 7:30 AM to around 3:30 PM on our warehouse days.  Even though we’ve more than doubled our inventory since March, we’re able to receive 99% of our deliveries in that block of time.

UPS comes every day around 11 AM.  FedEx delivers at 7:30 AM and picks up around 3 PM.  Freight companies generally come in the early afternoon.  On the rare occasion that a freight company is scheduled to come later, someone hangs around until the delivery arrives.  Overall, it works pretty well.  Of course, that’s working under the assumption that it isn’t Winter.

With the cold weather on the way there are two potential problems:  commuting and heat.  It’s hard to commute on a cold, snowy morning and get to work before 7:30…not to mention we’re located right next to a high school that starts school just after 7 (see picture).  Then there’s the cost of oil rising as much as 18% from last year, and it wasn’t exactly affordable last year.  Heating a warehouse isn’t cheap, and every hour we can avoid being there will save us some cash.

Oh, and working in a warehouse in the winter kind of sucks too.  Personally, I’d like to spend as little time there as possible during the cold weather.

About three weeks ago I posed the question:  if we could get FedEx to deliver later in the morning and pick up later in the afternoon, how much money could we save on gas?  What if we could push our schedule from 10 AM - 2 PM? We started a spreadsheet and tracked every delivery for a few weeks.  Every delivery - other than FedEx - came in the 9-3 window.

With our increase in volume, FedEx has assigned us a local rep and we actually have some pull now.  Greg was able to talk to a routing expert and negotiate our deliveries to be dropped off at the same time as pickup, which is now 2 PM.

So starting today we now officially work 9-3 on our warehouse days.  We’ll save ~2 hours/day on heating in the winter.  We’ve improved the warehouse so much since February (insulation, programmable thermostats, etc) that we don’t know exactly what a day of heating will cost us, but as soon as I have numbers I’ll let you know.  Consider this though:  2 hours per weekday will save us 200 hours of heating over the course of 20 weeks of winter from Nov - Mar (5 months * 4 weeks/month * 5 days/week * 2 hours/day).  That’s a lot of coin.

We’ve also adjusted our Monday’s so that 2 people can leave each week as soon as we have a meeting and pack orders, which usually is about noon.  Meaning each of us work Monday’s alternating between half and full days, and then two other days from 9 AM - 3 PM.  Not bad considering we still don’t have an employee and have to pack and ship all of our orders ourselves.  We’re becoming so damn efficient that we can double in size, and spend half the time, and get better results (shipping mistakes are down with a new packing check system we put in place).  I can’t wait until that day that we do have employees, but for now 15-18 hours a week in the warehouse aint too bad.

Oh, and I forgot the best part:  I can go back to going to the gym in the morning before work.  9 is perfect.  I can get up at 6, eat, check email, go to the gym, come home, shower, eat, and get to the warehouse right at 9.  I really enjoy working out first thing in the AM so this is a big “lifestyle” deal for me.  Since we went to the 7 AM schedule I haven’t really been able to find a workout schedule I like.  From a personal side of things, it was the thing I was most looking forward to being able to do once we had an employee.  Now I don’t even have to wait.  Good stuff

I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about his job hunt.  It’s not that he doesn’t like his current job per-se, but that he feels like it isn’t offering any growth opportunities - financially or otherwise.  We discussed how frustrating it is to go to a job every day and feel like you aren’t accomplishing anything important.

I know the feeling.  I felt it at my job, and by all normal measures I had a very good job.  Unfortunately, my advice in situations like these isn’t always the best.  I can’t just say “do what I did - quit and start a company.”  For many obvious reasons, that’s not sound advice for most people.  Maybe they don’t want to run a business, maybe they don’t have the discipline, or maybe they aren’t at a point where they can take the financial risk.  I realize I’m in the minority - most people will never get to write a blog post the day they quit their job to go run a web company.  I’m very thankful that everything in my life aligned correctly so I could take the risks that I did.

Since that discussion though, I’ve continued to think about my friends situation.  I sort of veered off on a tangent and asked myself the question “what if their entire career continued like this?”  And then I realized that for many people, that’s exactly what happens.  They either stay in a job they despise or jump from job to job never quite feeling like what they’re doing is important or brings them any sort of satisfaction.  It’s certainly not everyone, but it’s not no one either.  It’s very sad when you think about it.

It all just makes me remember how lucky I am.  Through all of the long hours, sacrifice, and stress, at least I can lay my head to rest every night knowing I am doing something that I enjoy. Everyone’s definition of  “meaningful work” is undoubtedly different, but for myself, starting and growing a successful company with strong values is very meaningful.

We’re building something.  Every day our company grows and gets a little better.  We can see the progress not only in our bottom line, but in the feedback we get from our customers.  Not to mention that the once seemingly vast warehouse that we operate out of seems to have less and less open space every time I go in.  Sometime later this year, we’ll see it when we hire our first employee and someone is able to support themselves and their family with a job at Pure Adapt.  How cool is that?  It’s an awesome feeling to have.

And then there is the purely financial way of looking at it.  When I quit my job I got paid out for my vacation days and that was it.  I think it was something like $2,000 that I got.  If for some reason I was to leave Pure Adapt tomorrow, I’d have my 25% stock to either cash in or keep (we have a protocol for this in our by laws, but it’s not worth getting in to).  Even if things soured, I’d at least have a relatively large pay day for my hard work in growing the company.  At 26 we each already have an asset that’s bigger than a decent size starter home (according to my guess as to what our company valuation will be, which is done yearly in December).  It’s an asset that most people will never have.  Certainly not the reason I do it, but an added perk that a regular job doesn’t offer.

Entrepreneurship - it’s not for everybody, but I’m glad it’s for me.

Back in April I did a post entitled Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability where I basically pondered the advantages of become a higher volume, lower margin retailer:

Generating sales is the hardest thing to do in the world of business. If I find a hands-off way to drive sales AND can turn over inventory faster by doing it, I’ll gladly sacrifice some profitability.

The comments were mixed - some in agreeance, some not. And rightfully so. It’s an interesting debate with no clear cut right answer for every business in every situation.

In the time since, we’ve become more and more of a volume retailer.  Our main revenue increases have come from business wholesale accounts, creative sales (particularly Mike’s newsletters and the Daily Special on Detailed Image), and increased volume on Amazon (mostly due to being the low cost leader for certain products).  That’s not to say that normal sales of full retail value aren’t up as well, but the majority of that increase has come from those other methods.

The big question is whether or not we’re a better business for making this decision?  I say yes, and the numbers agree with me.

First things first though, numbers aside, we have the advantage of exposing more people to our business.  More sales - especially through sites like Amazon - give us more packages to include promo material in, and more email addresses for our newsletters (provided they opt-in of course).  Some people will like our fast shipping and our products and come back naturally, so that’s a win.  Then there’s people who get on our newsletter list and forget about us until a sale really entices them, and that’s a win too.  That’s huge because every newsletter has a greater impact than the previous one.  Some day our newsletter list will have 100k people on it and every single mailing will have a massive impact on sales.  Doing more volume is helping us get there sooner.

Financially, pretty much the best case scenario happened:

• We dipped in profitability during Q2, with margins dropping from around 35% to around 25%
• Sales continued to increase.  Compared to the same month last year, we hit our goal of doubling revenue every month this year.  By September we had tripled revenue from September 2007 and had our best month in company history in a month that is traditionally one of the slowest of the year.
• When we looked at our Q3 numbers last week, margins had risen back up to 35%.  We received volume shipping discounts from FedEx (and a free label printer, which I thought was pretty sweet), and we started hitting the highest volume tiers with our vendors.  Those cost savings offset our sales, and essentially we’ve “passed our savings on to the customer” while growing immensely in size and volume.  Overall as a company, we turned a pretty significant profit for the first time in Q3 (this is after salaries, warehouse expenses, rent, utilities, insurance, etc - in the past we’ve been closer to breaking even after all of those expenses).

Like anything else, this had the potential to backfire and I’d be lying if I was sure it would work.  We could have squeezed ourselves too thin and ran out of available credit and had trouble paying bills.  In this case though, it was a risk that seems to have paid off.

Back when I was in high school, we barely used computers.  Other than typing up reports and a little bit for research, I don’t think I really needed a computer in any of my non-elective classes.  I graduated in 2000.  A lot has changed since then.

Our sports writer for the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog runs a great blog called The Blog of Champions.  He also happens to be in high school.  As part of a social studies project he and his classmates were asked to create a blog about social injustice in America.  Let me repeat that:  as part of a social studies project he was asked to create a blog.  How freaking cool is that?  Blogging has hit high school classrooms!  Pretty soon every kid will at least know how to set up a blogger blog or a wordpress.com blog.

If you get a chance, swing over to his blog about fixing health care and leave a comment on the first post.  It’s always nice to help a student out when you get a chance.  But helping a student out with a blog comment - man, times are changing.

No, seriously, Google me.  I finally, finally, rank #1 for “Adam McFarland”:

Take that Adam-McFarland.com!

Only took me like 3 years of actively maintaining a blog while that site hasn’t changed since about 1998…

Like every other American, the economy has been on my mind a little more lately than I would like.  This post isn’t really put together with much of a “point”, more so just a collection of thoughts I have on everything that’s been going on.

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James Hong, co-founder of Hot or Not, wrote the following in a post on his blog, which I happen to think is dead on:

Ideologically, I don’t like the idea of a bailout. But I also understand that if there is no bailout, the economy might collapse faster and harder than we can deal with. I agree that we need to do things to slowly ramp things down to avoid massive shocks, but we can’t put a bandaid on things and hope to just go back to business as usual either.

Our economy is fundamentally in trouble right now because we Americans have gotten fat and lazy. Over the past few decades, banks and other credit lenders have had every incentive to get people to spend more and owe more. When deregulation happened that enabled the credit originators to securitize debt and sell the risk to someone else, the credit originators had even more incentive to SELL SELL SELL credit cards, mortgages, etc.. to you and me, the American public.

The worst part of it all is that not only did we collectively sign up for more and more credit, we got used to it. And now like a salesman with a large expense account who just got fired, we have to live with the fact that all we can REALLY afford is ramen.

To be honest, part of me feels that a depression is exactly what this country needs. . because just like a drug addict who has to go through withdrawal the hard way before becoming well again, we can’t expect things to be easy. We’ve been living large for decades now, and unfortunately it’s time to pay the piper. But don’t worry, it’ll be just the wakeup call we need. We’ll wake up poor, start working hard and smart again, and rebuild ourselves. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.
So accept the bailout, but accept the fact that our markets are also still probably inflated and let it drop, and depression may be headed our way no matter what.. because bailout or not, I don’t see credit loosening anytime soon.

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Mark Cuban has done an exceptional job covering the bailout from a totally different perspective, that of a self-made billionaire.  Not for everyone, but I certainly enjoy it.   One interesting point he made in a post the other day:

Sec Paulson has asked for authority to spend what he needs to save our financial, and possibly the world’s financial system. There is only one problem. Sec Paulson may not be in charge of the Treasury for that much longer. So in essence we are giving carte blance spending authority to some unidentified person.

If the Sen Obama wins, then the Democrats will have the Presidency and the Congress under their control. Which will give them the right to appoint just about anyone they want to run the Treasury.

Let me say that again. A Democratic win could give them the right to appoint the King of the Financial World and let that person spend whatever they want, up to 700 Billion dollars. Have you heard anything scarier in your adult life?

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How do these hard times impact your company?  I’ll tell you how:  not much at all.  Remember my book review of Stall Points:

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. 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.

A shitty economy isn’t going to effect your business as much as you think…unless of course you continue to harp on how bad the economy is and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you blame every mistake or bad turn on the poor economy.  Even when the economy is good, companies still go through hard times and ultimately fail.  It’s the nature of entrepreneurship.  Don’t forget that.

It’d be easy for us to say that Detailed Image might suffer in sales because it’s a commodity item.  But we own a very small portion of the online detailing pie, and even if said pie decreases by 10%, 20%, or even 30%, our growth will likely continue because we’re only occupying a small percentage of a market that generates tens of millions of dollars and contains a lot of incumbents who have stagnant growth.  I personally don’t think we’ll stall at all, and if we do I certainly am going to analyze the situation long and hard before I think about blaming the economy.

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How does all of this impact you personally?  If you weren’t being conservative and cautious with your money, you probably should start doing so.  Cut back on the $100 nights of drinking or the daily $5 latte.  But if you spent soundly before, you probably will continue to spend soundly and be just fine.  If anything, this should just reinforce the importance of living within your means and not deriving happiness by constantly spending money on a new toy you don’t need.

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Finally, this election is probably even more important because of the recent market collapse and subsequent bailout.  I always try to look objectively at the candidates (which is really hard given all of the bias out there) and Entrepreneur Magazine has been a huge help in both of the last two elections.  Their print and online-only sections do a good job of quickly and objectively breaking down the things that business owners care about most.

Small businesses like ours are important to the economy.  By growing a successful small business we are positively contributing to this country.  If you’re a small business owner like us, make sure don’t forget that.  It’s very important.  As both citizens and business owners you owe it to yourselves to put a little time into making a decision that you believe benefits yourself, your company, and your country.

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To that point however, I have a personal question:  if you truly believe in your heart of hearts that each candidate has an equal chance for success (albeit by different means), should you still vote?  Because that’s kind of where I’m at right now.  It’s not like there’s a “both” or “neither” lever in the voting booth…