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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Culture
The Little Things That Win Customers
Somewhat surprisingly, today we shipped out a record number of orders as a part of our Spring Sale, beating even Cyber Monday 2012. I took a shot of the package pile towards the end of the day: As our FedEx pickup arrived we were literally sprinting around the warehouse trying to pack the last few orders. The interesting thing is that we didn’t have to do that. On our busiest day ever, we had already packed up every order that came in after 12:15 PM, which is our “guaranteed” same-day shipment cutoff time. We had run our afternoon batch around … Continue reading
Why We Still Pay For Health Insurance In Full For Every Employee
Last month I had a dentist appointment. The dental hygienist – who I’ve known for my entire life – was asking me how business was and we eventually got on the topic of health care costs. I mentioned that our plan was being canceled and we had to pick a new plan for 2013. After quite a bit of research we were able to find a pretty good new plan. Of course, it’s still significantly more expensive than the old plan and has significantly worse coverage. Since we set up our health insurance in early 2007, costs per employee have … Continue reading
T-Shaped People
A few weeks ago Mark left a comment with a link to video game maker Valve’s company handbook. That triggered my memory of a NY Times piece profiling them back in September that had garnered quite a bit of attention because of Valve’s “flat” organization (there are no managers) and 100% time (employees can work on whatever they want, kind of like Google’s 20% time…except all the time). Curious to learn more, I then sat down with my iPad and read the whole employee handbook. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, but there was one section within hiring … Continue reading
What a Difference a Monitor Makes
It’s funny how big of a difference little changes can make. Earlier this year we started noticing that our employees were doing a lot of tasks that would benefit from more screen space. Laptop screens are more than adequate for plenty, but when you’re doing accounting, customer service, social media, research projects, and the like, it can be incredibly beneficial to snap two windows side-by-side. Not to mention the programming I’m doing or the graphic design that Mike’s doing. It’s not just more convenient, it saves time and cuts down on errors. It wasn’t too hard of a decision to … Continue reading
17 Weeks of Fantasy Football Fun
Football season is a really fun time of the year for LockerPulse. Walk in to our office at lunch time and we’re all using it to catch up on the latest news for our favorite teams and fantasy players. There’s a constant banter of “did you hear that XYZ is hurt?” and “I can’t believe that you didn’t start XYZ yesterday!” For sports fans like myself, LockerPulse is great all year round, but it really shines during football season. Fantasy football is arguably it’s best use case. Take a look at the video I put together recently: We also added … Continue reading
Monday as a Measure
Steve over at Nerd Fitness wrote a great post last Monday entitled Always Dominate Monday: I challenge you today to start looking at Mondays differently. It’s not the start of a long week. It’s not the worst day of the week. Monday is the most important day of the week, so do it right: Plan out your meals for Monday on Sunday night. Where, when, and what will you eat? Can you prepare any of that the night before? Plan out your workouts for the week, and put them in your calendar. How many sets, reps, what time, and where. … Continue reading
Crafting a Team of Great Writers
In Rework, there’s a great essay entitled Hire Great Writers: Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easier to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society. Look at how much people email and text-message now rather than talk on the phone. The full value of this didn’t hit me until recently. Writing is so key in everything that we do. Our two primary methods of … Continue reading
Scrubbing Toilets
Now that we have our team in place, there’s a new “normal” in the warehouse that’s much different than it was at any time in the past. There are a lot more people there on a daily basis, doing a wider variety of things. When this transition occurred we took the opportunity to change a few routines to better fit the company culture that we wanted going forward. One such example is the routine cleaning around the warehouse: the bathroom, the kitchen area, sweeping, mopping, taking out the garbage, etc. The stuff you’d have a janitorial service do if you … Continue reading
They Don’t Teach Documentation in College
As we continue to learn what works and what doesn’t when it comes to training our employees, we’ve stumbled upon a few gems that will become staples of our training processes moving forward. One such example is with documentation. Documentation is pretty critical for our business (or really any business of any size for that matter). If someone is sick or leaves and someone else has to take over, having a process documented can be a life saver. The same can be said of just documenting tasks for your own reference. I can’t tell you how many things I do … Continue reading
4 Rules for Fantastic Internal Email
Internal email (or inter-company email as some people like to call it) is one of those topics that unfortunately seems to get omitted when discussing the keys to creating a successful business. My experience has always been that if it’s done well it can improve productivity and moral drastically. Conversely, if it’s done poorly it can do the exact opposite. I think that this is one area that our current team excels in. For us this is especially important because we’re scattered in various locations. It’s very rare that my partners and I are all at the warehouse on the … Continue reading