Adam McFarland

We’re smaller than most of our competitors.  Particularly in automotive detailing, Detailed Image is chasing large sites like Autogeek and Proper.  Black Friday is a great microcosm of how we manage to compete with them and rapidly steal market share, despite having a team of only four people and an array of other projects we’re working on.

Below is the newsletter that went out this week to our customers.   We think we have the best sales of anyone in the industry.   This is where all of the hard work and minor efficiency improvements really pay off.

There are three things that are key in my mind:  the planning, the programming, and the back-end.

Mike runs our email promotions.  He handles the planning, product selection, and designs, and then runs everything by the rest of us before going ahead with anything.  He started planning our elaborate holiday promotions all the way back in September and October.  He’s been reading everything there is on the topic.  He studies newsletters from all sorts of e-commerce companies and tracks what types of sales they run, what time of day they send the newsletters, and how frequently they send the newsletters.  First and foremost, his preparation and planning is what put us in position to succeed on Black Friday.   Had we been scrambling at the last minute like in previous years, the potential reach and impact would have been much smaller.  Being organized keeps gives us a leg up on the competition.

When it comes to the programming, I’ve put all sorts of systems in place to make running sales like this a piece of cake, cutting down on stress and potential errors.   While our competitors are manually putting items on sale at midnight and manually refunding shipping charges for certain orders, we’ve got it all automated.  From top to bottom on the newsletter:

• We have a coupon code system that Mike used to enter the code in the system weeks ago.  He just put in the code, the start date, and the end date .  The rest is done automatically.
• More recently, I put a sale system in place.  Much like the coupon code system, you just enter in the item id, sale price, and start/end dates and the system takes care of putting the item on sale and displaying a special sale graphic (click to see example).  When the sale ends, the product returns to it’s normal price.
• I also programmed a system to offer the Free Ground Shipping on orders over $150 and the flat rate $5 on all of the rest.  At the end of the holidays it’ll take two seconds to disable.  In the future, we can put it back in place in seconds.
• Our Daily Special system will feature a different popular item each day with only a few seconds of work on our part to pick the item.

And after all of the orders come through, we can process and ship them faster than the competition because of our automated shipping system and uber-efficient packing process.

Needless to say, we have high expectations for this weekend.  The proof will most definitely be in the pudding.  We’re expecting to have our largest weekend ever - both in terms of revenue and quantity of orders.  This past Monday we shipped the most orders we’ve ever shipped in a day (73).  Hopefully it’s a record that doesn’t last for long.

Thanksgiving is an interesting time for an online retailer.  While most people are winding down to relax for the long weekend, we’re gearing up and preparing for what should be our busiest weekend of the year.  But don’t mistake the busyness and the stresses associated with it for not being thankful.  As a team, we are the most thankful group of young business owners that you’ll find.  Answering emails on Thanksgiving and packing orders on Black Friday are small prices to pay for being able to live out our dream.  In a way, since this is the culmination of much of our hard work, we wouldn’t want it any other way than to be smack in the middle of all of the chaos.

Personally, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  The origins are pure and understood.  It transcends people of all different ages, races, and religions.  You’re not expected to “give” or “get” anything other than gratitude, and I know that I have a whole lot of gratitude to give out this Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for having a supportive and loving group of family and friends, and an amazing girlfriend.

I am thankful that I have a roof over my head and food on my plate, as we recently saw first hand that so many people do not.

I am thankful that our business has grown to a point that I am able to live comfortably off of my salary.

I am thankful to every single one of our customers, because without them our business would just consist of a warehouse full of products and some websites.

I am thankful for having found three business partners that make running a business so much fun.  In many ways, they have become my second family.

And of course, I’m thankful for having blog readers like you.  This blog has been a huge part of my growth and happiness over the course of the past few years.  It’s not because I have a place to vent my feelings, it’s because of all of the great emails and comments that I’ve received and the interaction that’s ensued.  I never would’ve met some of the most interesting people I know if I didn’t start blogging.

What are you thankful for?

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to come back and delve a little deeper into our new packing area.

The process outlined below is a combination of George’s prior e-commerce experience, my industrial engineering experience, Greg’s overall business experience, and the work that Mike has done in studying how our competition and other e-commerce sites ship orders (specifically this great newegg video), along with a whole lot of trial and error.  It allows us to process orders faster, with less mistakes, and with less variation.   As any process should be, it’s been designed explicitly with future employees in mind.  Not only is it efficient for us, but it will be very easy to learn and the built-in checks and balances make it very hard to mess up.

The general “flow” of packages follows the red arrows in the diagram below, flowing from the puller’s table to a packing area, and eventually out the garage door into a backed-up FedEx truck. (I should note that prior to this, we just had a few packing tables without much organization or flow.  It worked, but as we’ve grown the need for a well structured system became readily apparent).

The system is built to work with anywhere from 2-5 people.  I’m going to describe a Monday morning when all four of us are working.  That’s when we’re the busiest and therefore that’s when we see the biggest impact of having a system in place like this.

• 2 pullers - these people are responsible for physically pulling the orders from the shelves and then for picking a box-size for the order (now automated with our new box-size system).  For small orders, they just make the box and place the items directly in the box.  For larger orders they use one of the bins and put the box underneath the bins.  Once they’ve pulled an order, they double check it and place it on the packing table next to the #1 in the image below, sliding any existing orders down the table in the direction of the arrow.
• 1 packer/inspector - this person stands behind the tables, near the #2 in the photo above.  If the box isn’t already made, they first make the box.  If the order was in a bin, they put the bin back.  They then take the order, double check that it was pulled correctly, and then arrange it in the box in the safest manner.  They tighten tops, wipe off dust, and do anything else to ensure that the order is ready to ship.  They separate the invoice from the shipping label, place our promotional cards (located in the black organizer) in the invoice, fold the invoice up and place it in the box, and finally pass the order to the left, again following the arrows.
• 1 shipper - this person also stands behind the tables, near the #3 in the photo above.  They fill the box to the brim with packing peanuts, seal the box, and push it forward onto the double tables.  When FedEx shows up, they back their truck right up to the door and it’s only a walk of a few feet to put the boxes on the truck.

The peanut dispenser is what really tied the whole thing together for us.  Previously we used all sorts of packing material, from bubble wrap to re-used material from our vendors and pretty much anything else you can could imagine.  Not only did our customers receive packages with different boxes and packing material each time they ordered, but more importantly the quality of the packing job was left up to the discretion of that individual packer.  Now we simply have a rule that every single order gets these strong anti-static biodegradable packing peanuts filled to the top, no exceptions.  Every order is presumably packed just as well as an order shipped out by someone else.

We keep a shared spreadsheet with any shipping mistakes or damaged items.  Since implementing this a few months ago, we’ve dropped off to almost zero, which I take as a testament to how good of a system we built.  The real test will be when we plop a few employees in.  If McDonald’s can train any zit-faced 15 year old in the world to make the  exact same Big Mac, we think we can infuse any competent employee into this system without a drop off in results.  Only time will tell, but for now we couldn’t be happier with what we’ve built.

A whole lot has changed since that frigid Monday in February when we worked our first day from our warehouse. We survived not paying ourselves, we’ve grown our sites by leaps and bounds, we’ve made significant improvements to all of our business processes from accounting to shipping, and we’ve seen revenue grow to more than double what it was in 2007.

But one of the best ways to see progress is to walk through our warehouse.  Everyday I walk out on the floor I’m amazed at how much we have progressed in just nine short months. Take a glance at the photos on that post and then come back and look at these.  Today was the first time I looked at those photos in a long time. The place was even emptier than I remember!

Earlier this week I decided to take a break from real work and take some pictures so that I could take all of you on a photo tour of  our warehouse.  I apologize for the darkness of the pics - the lighting obviously isn’t so great.  Some of the photos have the same “spots” on them that the ones from February did.  Different camera, so I’d assume it’s something to do with the lighting?  Any photo experts want to weigh in?

Anyway, let’s get started.

When you first walk in the door, you’re in our tiny little office.  It’s just enough room for five small tables.  We only work from this room in the winter, when we keep the warehouse temperature at 55 degrees and the office at 67 degrees.

From the office, you can walk out on to the warehouse floor.  The first thing you see is our much more spacious work area where we spend the warmer months.

Turn to the right, and you’ll find our loading dock/hockey goal, with our kitchen in the corner (which you really can’t see very well other than the side of the fridge).

Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice our target.  That’s a picture taken from Hot Chicks with Douchebags representing a former vendor who was a total douchebag to us.  We’ve never met him, but we can only imagine that’s what he looks like…

Turn around 180 degrees and you can see the rest of our warehouse floor.

On the right you’ll see our biodegradable packing peanut bags.  We made the switch about a month ago.  George struck a killer deal with the manufacturer so we stocked up.  In the down months of January and February we’ll be doing a campaign to show how we’ve “gone green” with our packing materials, paper, etc.  Don’t you just want to jump on top of them?  I’m soooo tempted every day.

We’ve gone from having one and a half rows of shelving units, to having four full rows and two rows of boxed items (not to mention a row along the wall).

On the left is our new packing area, which I will delve a bit more into in my next post.  Behind the packing area is the garage door where FedEx picks up our packages every day.

Behind the packing area is our really tiny shipping computer room.

And finally, a turn to the right and you’ll find our array of different boxes, ordered by size so they’re easy to find.

You also may notice how clean our floors are.  We rented one of those floor zamboni’s and gave it a good cleaning last month.  It’s amazing how much less dust there is now.

That’s my tour.  Hopefully the next tour nine months from now will show just as much improvement!

Earlier this week I set out to sign us up for an independent website monitoring service.  In case you don’t know, these services periodically check your websites to ensure that the site is up and running.  If it isn’t, they contact you.  It’s really pretty simple, but it’s also very useful, especially for someone like me.

Now that we run our own server and I can control everything, I can usually fix any issue.  If I can’t, I can call Liquid Web and their awesome help usually resolves it for me in a matter of minutes.  However, I need to know when there is a problem and since I’m not on our sites 24×7 there are times when I’m not aware of issues as soon as I should be.  Enter a monitoring service.

A quick Google search brings up hundreds of options.  After extensively looking through them, I got frustrated.  I/we were willing to pay for good monitoring.  All that it had to do was allow for multiple sites, check them frequently (several times per hour),  check from different physical locations, and alert me via email and text message when something goes down.  Since I only check my email a few times each day, email alerts only are useless.

Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a service that met those requirements.  They either charged per site, charged per text message, or didn’t offer text messaging.  Frustrated, I decided to get creative.

The site I liked best by far was Montastic.   It’s free, it’s super simple to use, and it offers everything except the text messaging (including RSS, which is a nice bonus).  Here’s a screenshot of our account with TD and DI set up:

Then there was a matter of the text messaging.  After some Googling around I learned that every cell phone can be sent a text message by sending an email to yourphone#@yourcarrier.com.  I then added both my email address and my phone number’s email address to Montastic.  To test the service, I put in a fake site that didn’t exist and minutes later received an alert via both email and text message.  Voila, problem solved.

For anyone interested in replicating this set up, here’s a list I found of email addresses for US phone carriers.  It’s taken from this article from a few years back so I cannot vouche for the accuracy of every one of these, but the Sprint one worked for me:

• Verizon:     10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
• AT&T:     10digitphonenumber@mobile.att.net
• Sprint:     10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile:     10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
• Nextel:     10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
• Cingular:     10digitphonenumber@mobile.mycingular.com
• Virgin Mobile:     10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
• Alltel:     10digitphonenumber@alltelmessage.com OR message.alltel.com
• CellularOne:     10digitphonenumber@mobile.celloneusa.com
• Omnipoint:     10digitphonenumber@omnipointpcs.com
• Qwest:     10digitphonenumber@qwestmp.come

One of the features of our shopping cart that I’ve touted over and over again is that we’ve automated our back-end shipping process.  With a few clicks we can print invoices and shipping labels while the accounting and inventory are being done automatically.  Whether it’s 5 or 50 orders, we can process them (packing excluded of course) in essentially the same amount of time.

In reality though, there was one manual step left in the process:  picking a box size for every order.  FedEx requires a weight and a box size to return a shipping label.  We have each product weighed in the database so passing along a weight wasn’t very hard.  The box size thing is a bit more complicated, so when developing the site we just put a drop-down menu on the shipping page and whomever was processing the orders would do their best to guess at a box size for each and every order.  Needless to say, on a busy Monday morning this could take a while.

Last week I finally got around to tackling the problem.  Like I tend to do for most things, I challenged myself to come up with an accurate solution by doing as little work as possible.  Here’s what I decided to do:

• Input into the database the length, width, height and volume (L x W x H) of every box that we have in stock, which is something like 25 different variations.
• Record the same dimensions for every product that we offer, treating every product like a rectangle (thus simplifying things a whole lot).  So for example, a bottle with a diameter of 3″ and height of 9″ would simply be treated as a 9″ x 3″ x 3″ cube.
• When entering both, enter the length as the largest dimension, the width as the second largest, and the height as the third largest.
• Have the system determine length, width, height, and volume constraints:
  • It takes the largest L/W/H of the items in the package and makes those the constraints, which is why inputting them in order is important.  Take for example that same 9″ x 3″ x 3″ bottle and a 4″ x 4″ x 1″ applicator pad.  The constraining dimensions would be that the box has to be at least 9″ x 4″ x 3″.  If the dimensions weren’t in decreasing order, this wouldn’t be consistent and would’ve made the programming more complicated.
  • It adds up all of the volumes of every item in the package to determine the volume constraint.
• It picks the smallest box that is larger than the L/W/H constraints and has a total volume that is greater than the volume constraint.

Here’s a visual example:

In this instance, the wax measures 5.25″ x 5.25″ x 4″ for a volume of 110.25 cubic inches.  Our smallest box is 10″ x 4″ x 4″.  That has a volume of 160 cubic inches, but since the width dimension of the product is greater than the width of the box, the system bumps the product up to the next box, which is the 6″ x 6″ x 6″ one shown with a volume of 216 cubic inches.

Pretty sweet huh?  The whole thing only took me a few days to implement, including measuring all of the several hundred products we sell (which I did twice because my dumb ass shift+deleted the original spreadsheet prior to uploading it to Google Docs.  My friend Paul got me doing this in college, absolute worst habit ever and it’s so hard to break).

To be quite honest, these are the types of projects that really pump me up.  They take a little bit of my engineering problem solving skills and a little bit of my programming skills, and they result in a quantifiable gain for the company (in this case, time).  The system is already more accurate than we were and will save us anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes a day.  For a small company like us, cutting out a relatively large step in an already well-refined process is a big deal.

Seriously. I see these little cards every month and think to myself  “what a steal”.

One of the best uses for your money is investing in your own personal development.  Reading offers the most bang for your buck - you can literally learn anything you want by picking up a book.  Back in January I wrote a post entitled What I Read.  The list has changed a bit since then, but the overall goal hasn’t changed - read a whole lot each and every day because I never know when I’m going to stumble upon something that will change the course of my life or our company.

Both Inc. and Fast Company are filled from cover to cover with great features.  I can’t even quantify how many useful things I’ve learned from these two magazines.  Sometimes I read about a technique a company is using that I can directly apply to our company.  Sometimes I read about a web tool that I never knew about that we can use.  Sometimes I read a totally unrelated article, but something in it sparks an idea.  Sometimes I put myself in the shoes of the business owner in a case study and try to discern how I would handle his or her situation.  Other times I just read and enjoy the article…and then a few months later it becomes relevant, at which time I head over to the website and find it again.

A great example was on my last post.  In the comments Travis asked me a question that immediately made me think of an article on Inc.  I searched around, found the article, and then linked to it.  I wouldn’t have had a good answer if I hadn’t read that article.  It happens to me all the time.  Reading about business increases my general knowledge about all things business.

So cut out a few beers or hold off on the movie this weekend and instead pick yourself up something that will improve you over and over again for the next year.

I’ve referenced Tim Ferris’ awesome blog post about Best Buy’s Results-Only-Work-Environment before, but it bears quoting again:

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the points I made in my last post about lifestyle was about the difficulty in transitioning from college to a “typical” corporate job:

I think it’s one of the hardest adjustments students have to make when going into the corporate world. All of a sudden you’re not able to decide what you do and when you do it. It’s like you regress back to being in high school.

The more I think about it, college is the ultimate ROWE.  I’m sure it was slightly different for everyone, but here’s how it pretty much worked for me:  you get a syllabus the first day of class that has all of your assignments, projects, and tests in it and it’s your responsibility to get all of it done.  You don’t have to go to class.  If you do, you don’t have to participate.  You don’t have to turn in homework (unless it counts towards your grade).  Your only responsibility is to meet the requirements of the syllabus, which usually entails turning in a few key papers/projects and taking a few important tests.  That’s it.  No one tells you how to do it or when to do it.  You can work an hour each morning a month in advance or do it all the night before.  Whatever works for you so long as you get it done.

Now why the hell aren’t more companies like this?  I know, I know, academia and business are two different things.  But the mentality of the results being what matters, that’s what should translate.  Clearly some companies are starting to make the push.  It just blows my mind that this isn’t more common.  It seems like such common sense.  I mean, at my job, everyone told me to come early and stay late because it “looked good”.  So I’d get all my work done in like 5 hours and then bone around on ESPN.com until 5:30 so I’d look like a hard worker.  Why on earth I couldn’t just take off at 3 was beyond me.  All of my work on all of my projects was up to date.  There’s just no motivation to work fast or efficiently.  You have to be there for 8-9 hours regardless.  It’s such garbage.

Conversely, if you build a company around accomplishing meaningful things, you’ll have employees who are willing to work longer, harder, and smarter because they care.  If they know that they can take advantage of downtime to run errands, spend time with their family, or relax, they’ll be happier and more satisfied with their job.

Seems like common sense…doesn’t it?

George and I often remark to each other that we wouldn’t trade our lifestyle for any amount of money.  It happens pretty often because we’re often reminded of how lucky we are to do what we do everyday.

I think that’s often lost in the decision of whether or not to become an entrepreneur, particularly for young entrepreneurs.  Yes - you should want to change the world.  Yes - you should want to make a ton of money.  But starting a business should also be about creating a great lifestyle for yourself.  Luckily, since businesses are a reflection of their owners and there are infinite shapes a business can be molded into, you have an opportunity to grow and develop your company around the life that you want to live.  Like to work from your bedroom?  Like to have every Tuesday and Thursday off?  Like to communicate only via email?  Those things can be arranged if you start the business and establish a culture that allows for those things.  As long as the money is coming in and everyone’s happy (employees, owners, & customers) you can pretty much do whatever you want.

My corporate experience was just the opposite.  They were molding me into what they wanted me to be.  It didn’t feel right.  Corporate culture is often overlooked when choosing a company, but it damn may be the most important thing for prospective employees to inquire about.  If you constantly feel like you don’t fit in, the most exciting work in the world isn’t going to keep you happy.

Some people are great workers but crave structure and guidance.  That’s fine.  Starting a business probably isn’t for them.  It’s not for everyone…hell, it’s not for most people.  BUT if you have a desire to live a lifestyle that most jobs don’t offer, it’s worth at least considering starting a biz.  Even if it’s just a 1 person business that supports just the owner.  It provides you the opportunity to live a lifestyle that you otherwise couldn’t.  That alone is worth starting a company in my opinion.

Entrepreneurs are lucky because we don’t need to worry about any of that.  My partners and I have established a culture that allows for us to have maximum freedom while still meeting the requirements of the business.  We each work about 18 hours/week in the warehouse. The rest of the time we’re free to do whatever we want.  Everyone has their own way of getting shit done, but I prefer to spend about half of that time working from home and the other half at a coffee shop.  I tend to turn off all distractions and zone in on my work so that I have plenty of free time to recharge.  I pretty much am still hitting all of the goals outlined in my productive output post.

I feel like I have the same amount of “freedom” that I had when I was in college. I hated having that taken away from me at my engineering job. It’s like between the hours of 8 and 5 I was jailed and forced to remain in one spot regardless of how much work I had to get done or what was going on with the rest of my life.  I like being able to run errands on a Tuesday morning and then go do work at night.  As long as I’m getting my work done, it doesn’t matter when I do it, much like writing a paper or studying in college.  I like being able to go to the gym early in the morning some days, and mid afternoon other days.  I like being able to take breaks to eat every 2-3 hours without having people ask me if I missed lunch.  This is huge to me.  There’s no way I could give it back.  In fact, I think it’s one of the hardest adjustments students have to make when going into the corporate world.  All of a sudden you’re not able to decide what you do and when you do it.  It’s like you regress back to being in high school.  

We also have our company pay for nights out at least once a month - we consider those opportunities to celebrate our accomplishments very important to the future success of our company.   We work hard to minimize phone calls because we have deemed the majority of them to be time-wasters, but we still put a huge emphasis on customer service.  We spend time and money giving back to our community because we think it’s important for small businesses to do that.   We recently switched to biodegradable packing materials and recycled paper in an effort to push towards being a “green e-commerce” company.  We are buying our lawyer, accountant, FedEx driver, and best customers presents for the holidays because we want to thank them for helping us have a great year.

That’s what works for us.  Four other twenty-somethings running an e-commerce company would undoubtedly do it different.  The beauty of starting a company is that you can define what works for you.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve only had Tastefully Driven since April.  It feels like it’s been around forever.  The first year has been a mixed bag, but overall we’ve learned a lot and created a solid stream of revenue so it’s hard to look at it as anything but a positive experience.   My #1 favorite feature of the site is the Commerce with Conscience program where we donate 5% of our pre-tax profit to local charities in the Albany area.   The idea being that we’re pulling in revenue from all over the world and pumping some of it back into the community we live in.

When we started the program, we figured we’d pick a charity, mail a check, and that would be that.  Boy was I wrong.  This experience has been so much more than that.

It started rather innocently.  In the midst of our warehouse move and all the work involved in getting Tastefully Driven up and running, we didn’t have a chance to sit down and pick a charity.  Growing up I had always admired our regional food bank and had even done a little volunteer work there as a kid with my church.  The fact that some people in our area do not have food to eat blows my mind.  I absolutely cannot comprehend what it would be like to not know where your next meal will be coming from.  It’s so very sad if you stop and think about it.  So, I chose the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York as our first charity.

The plan was to make a series of smaller donations every quarter so that we made four donations to four different charities each year.  However, when I sent an email to the food bank notifying them of our impending donation, I received a phone call back from director Mark Quandt, someone who I knew from their TV commercials, news segments, and articles in the local paper.  That alone was really cool.  He told me that he had never heard of such a thing and that he wanted to know more about us and our business.   I told him how much I admired what he had accomplished with the food bank.   The conversation was really awesome.  Subsequently we decided to extend the food bank to the end of the year and give them our entire donation for 2008…especially because sales for a new site are so small for the first 3 months.  We wanted to make sure we gave them a substantial donation.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  I received an email from Mark about their annual auction event.  They sell 150 x $100 raffle tickets to raise $15,000 for the food bank.  Combined with the live auction, silent auction, and tickets to the event they planned on raising $90k.  Unfortunately they were short quite a few of the $100 tickets.  He mentioned that this year the demand is higher than ever before because of our hard economic times:

I know it’s a hard time to ask because the economic news is so bad. But it’s even worse for the agencies and people we serve (food pantries are being overwhelmed with a huge increase in requests and many people are seeking help for the first time). We are very concerned about the upcoming winter months.

I forwarded the email over to my partners and we decided to make our yearly donation in $100 raffle tickets.  We projected our sales for the end of the year and then added a bit of a cushion in.  I then contacted Mark and received the following response:

Wow! That’s great news. We would love you to make your donation through the sale of raffle tickets. The Auction is very important to us, and we want it to be a big success. Your donation will help immensely. We were worried about selling all the $100 raffle tickets in this tough economy. Now with your decision to buy tickets, I think we will make it.

That might be the best email I’ve ever received.  We then inquired about attending the event and decided to purchase four tickets, one for each of us, at $85 each with proceeds benefiting the food bank.  The event was Wednesday night at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Albany.  The food was amazing (plus there was an open bar) and the people were amazing. I was so impressed with the turnout - there were over 40 tables with 8 people per table.  Everyone was very generous in bidding during the live auctions.  Greg, George and I all won silent auctions with all of the proceeds again benefiting the food bank.  I got tickets to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY (one of my favorite places on earth, I’ve been probably seven times but none since the 2004 inductions), George won the entire series of Everybody Loves Raymond on DVD, and Greg won a very very nice mountain bike.

I just did a quick post on Tastefully Driven about the event:

With the struggles our economy is facing, more people than ever will go without food this holiday season.  Our Commerce with Conscience program donates 5% of Tastefully Driven’s profits to local charities in the Albany, NY area.  For 2008 we were proud to make our donation to the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York a few months early so that they would be able to use the funds to help families in our community this holiday season. This past Wednesday night our team attended the 19th Annual Auction to benefit the Regional Food Bank at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Albany.  In addition to the company donation, our team won several auctions to directly benefit the Food Bank.  Thank you to all of our customers who were able to make this donation possible.  The Food Bank estimates that for every dollar donated $10 - $12 of food is given to the hungry.

Here’s a photo.  From left to right:  George, me, Mike, Greg.  It’s not exactly my favorite photo of me, I was kind of leaning back and slanted.  I also never realized how much taller I am than Mike…

Of course, we all rocked our CwC wrist bands too:

When I take a step back I can’t help but think about how proud I am of our team.  With our raffle tickets, event tickets, and auction winnings we contributed quite a bit towards that $90k goal.  When I looked around at all of the faces and saw local business owners, CEOs, politicians, and local news “stars” I realized that we have no where near the net worth that these people do.   But that didn’t stop us from giving all that we could. I really hope we keep that mentality as we grow.