Over the years we’ve had numerous part-time workers, both in the warehouse and contracted workers doing various web stuff, but today was the first day that we had a full-time, salaried employee. The position is warehouse manager, and the guy is Charlie, who has been with us on a part-time basis for just about year [...]
Archive for the ‘Employees’ Category
Don’t Fail Your Employees
Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in [...]
Hiring Within Your Network
Yesterday I spent my day training Charlie, our second part time warehouse employee. Like John, he picked everything up very quickly and by the end of the day was able to do 90% of the work without asking a question. And like with John, this is partly because he’s a very intelligent guy and partly [...]
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 [...]
Employeeless No More
We just hired our first employee. Well, technically that’s not true. Back when we were doing SEO and web design work we had a few contracted employees. But for Pure Adapt in it’s current e-commerce centric state, he is our first employee. Who? His name is John. He’s our accountant’s son. He just graduated from [...]
Small Businesses and Jobs
This is a follow-up thought on my last post about being an employee right now. All of this has sort of led me to take a step back and see the true value of a job and the role that small businesses like ours play in people’s lives. When you have a successful business you [...]
More on College as a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE)
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 [...]
An Interesting By-Product of Running a Small Business
I had a great lunch yesterday with a friend and former classmate who now has a PhD in Entrepreneurship. He’s teaching a class called Entrepreneurship and Small Business at prestigious Skidmore college in the fall and asked me if I’d like to come in and speak to the class. Of course, it’s a total honor [...]
When to Hire: Our Next Big Task
If this first story sounds familiar, it is – I touched upon it in my Productive Output post. A few weeks ago the owner of a local large online retailer (approx 10x bigger than us) visited the warehouse. George worked for him prior to starting DI, and he based much of early DI off of [...]
How To Do Client Work Right
While it’s on my mind, I want to reflect on how I think client work can be done correctly. By ‘correctly’ I mean being happy with the work you’re doing, not being over-worked, making plenty of profit, and satisfying your clients. It can be done – I know people who do it – but it [...]
