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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: Efficiency
Setting Up Employees For Success
These first two weeks with our first employee have been a fascinating experience for us. John has picked up the job much faster than we anticipated. He’s getting more work done more accurately and in less time than we could have ever predicted. Now, a good portion of that is because he’s a very hard working, intelligent kid. I think we realize that not every employee is going to pick things up quite as fast as he has. But the other portion of that, the part that we have more control over, is how well I think we set him … Continue reading
Eliminating Clutter [Flow Chart]
I’m making the move to a (much nicer) new apartment next week and am in the process of going through all of my belongings. By my count, this is 8 moves in 8 years. I’m getting pretty good at getting rid of all of the clutter each time so I don’t need to lug stuff around that I don’t use. Even if you don’t move as frequently as I do, going through your belongings once a year can be a very beneficial exercise. Not only do you free up some space and minimize clutter, but you can also make some … Continue reading
New Warehouse Layout, Inventory Zones, & Efficiency
A few weekends back we re-organized the product layout in the warehouse. When we first moved in we only had one row of products. Since then we’ve just been adding shelving units as we go, with no real organization other than trying to keep items of a specific brand together. It grew to the point where pulling and packing a large order took forever. You’d be running around like a chicken with your head cut off, going up and down rows on one side of the warehouse to get a few products, then back to the other side for a … Continue reading
Breaking Down the New Detailed Image – Part 3 of 3
Now that I’ve outlined the majority of the improvements on Part 1 and Part 2, I want to take a step back and quickly talk about why I think this was a successful project. The Process & The Time Frame We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous cart in 2007 we were planning for this one. We kept track of every potential feature that we’d want, both on the front end and the back end, we collected data in any instances where we weren’t sure about something, and we kept tabs of … Continue reading
Officially Addicted to Texter
Did you ever discover a piece of software that is so simple and so useful that it almost seems amazing that it isn’t standard on everyone’s computer? This past weekend while reading Lifehacker, I saw a reference to a free text-replacement tool called Texter that they created and were hyping up. After reading all of the positive comments, I decided to take it for a spin. The tool cuts down on keystrokes by replacing a keystroke pattern with a pre-defined string of text. For example, I use the phrase “Let me know if you have any other questions and … Continue reading
Going Back to My Index Card Method for Daily Goals
About a year ago I ditched my index card method for daily goals in favor of using my task list. I’ve always had an electronic task list going back to college – first it was in Outlook, then in Thunderbird, then iPrioritize, and now Remember the Milk (only because it integrates with my Pure Adapt Google Start Page). The problem is, for me, a task list is really something different from daily goals. Tasks are things like “pay credit card bill” and “check on backups”. They are things that generally take only a few minutes, but need to be done. … Continue reading
Inventory Considerations for Discontinued Products
This is one of those fun mini business problems that encapsulates all of the uncertainty of running a business. You could play it right and have a huge advantage over the competition, or play it wrong and waste a ton of time & money. One of our bestselling products is being discontinued and replaced by a similar, yet seemingly better, model (I don’t think I’m technically supposed to disclose what product it is yet, so I won’t…even though it’s leaked all over the internet…). The new model is due in within a few months, but we don’t have a set … Continue reading
Trimming the Fat
Since we made the decision last week to launch our revamped Detailed Image by early April, I have been programming my brains out. I’ve probably worked more hours in the last two weeks than I have in any two week stretch since 2007. While there’s definitely some stress involved with that, there is also a really good by-product of doing it: being busy forces me to trim out all of the unimportant stuff that I spend my time on. I’ve cut the number of feeds in my feed reader in half, stopped playing video games or reading books, have been … Continue reading
Teamwork
We have a pretty stressful few months ahead of us. It’s not the same type of stress we had last year when we feared that one wrong move would crush us and eventually decided to not pay ourselves for a few months, but nonetheless it’s still a little more stress than anyone would like. We’ve set up a culture of constant improvement, and because of that we expect a lot out of ourselves. Like any business owner, we see all sorts of opportunities that we’re leaving on the table because we haven’t had the time or money to get to … Continue reading
Productivity – Where Have You Been?
About an hour ago I was dismissed from jury duty. I don’t know exactly how it works elsewhere, but living in Albany County (the capital of New York State) you have to serve once every six years. It used to be four years, so I served back in 2004. I actually came really close to being selected to a criminal jury for a relatively high profile case – a local business who was robbed of $2.1 million. I was one of the last potential jurors dismissed, and I presume it was because I owned a business (they asked me questions … Continue reading