Adam McFarland

As I mentioned last week, weekends have been our busiest time (which does seem counter-intuitive, but whatever, we’ll take it).  Friday afternoon Mike sent out a newsletter with a code for 10% off and free shipping for orders over $75 on Detailed Image.  Combined with some killer daily specials and the DI busy season, the flood gates opened and the sales came pouring on in.

George took this photo mid-day of all of the domestic FedEx Ground orders for DI and TD.  This doesn’t include a handful of international orders (we ship those via USPS) or FedEx Express orders.  It also doesn’t include about 30 orders that we couldn’t ship because products are on back order.

Damn that’s a lot of boxes!

On top of that, Tastefully Driven orders have picked up in the past week or so.  I’ve also been having quite a bit of success finding talented authors to write for us for what we’ve now decided is going to be a re-launch of the blog portion of the site.  Overall, just a great day (well - except I got an email from someone who was upset that the Premium Price Guide Account on SportsLizard costs $4.99/month.  He used the phrase “fuck you” every other sentence, and also ended with “P.S. Fuck You”.  Gotta love people’s manners.  The Price Guide isn’t perfect and definitely has it’s flaws, but it still is a useful tool that makes us good money with no work, so I’ve learned to just ignore any pissy emails that don’t have substance.  I just wrote him back with a link to an article I wrote about various methods of pricing collectibles and wished him luck.  No sense in letting someone like that ruin a great day).

It’s funny - when sales are down or there’s other financial stress, everyone gets a bit down and starts to question everything we do and everything we’ve done.  Admittedly we all take it too far at times (myself included).  Then, when sales are great, we look/act/feel like rock stars who can’t make a mistake. The reality is that we’re somewhere in between.  So is the life of a business owner.

Back in February I wrote a post about positive reinforcement.  At the time we were just realizing how important it was for all four of us to see the positive feedback that the others get.  The prime example that I used were Detailed Image orders.  At the time we weren’t yet in the warehouse and George and Greg were doing 100% of the shipping of the products.  There was no real “need” for Mike and I to also see the emails every time a sale came through, but we started doing it after I realized that it was helping our morale to open up our inbox and see ten orders instead of just getting weekly sales updates.

It’s crazy how much this has helped.  We all get the immediate positive feedback any time a sale comes through.  We also all have become great at inspecting orders at a quick glance for any errors.  As refined as our system is, there are infinite order possibilities - I’d say 1 in 100 orders still has one of us doing some manual work to double check that everything went through properly.  A few times each week I make minor tweaks to the code to prevent a wacky scenario from happening again.

BUT positive reinforcement also works the other way.   Weekends and Monday’s have been our biggest sales days the past few months.  Of course, the days where we get the most work done are probably Tuesday - Friday.  See where this could mess with you mentally?  I feel like in the middle of the week I’m working my ass off and seeing so-so sales.  Then we’re out drinking beers on the weekends, doing no work at all, and George pulls up our system on his iPhone and shows everyone how much money we just make during dinner.

Don’t get me wrong - making $1,000 while you’re out drinking for the night is a cool feeling that you can’t really get unless you run your own business.   However, waking up every day in the middle of the week and seeing sales slow down a bit kind of sucks.   You go from the high of all highs to just feeling OK about things.  Even though I know the weekends are when we make our money it still messes with my head.  I’ve become conditioned to seeing a sale as my positive reinforcement for doing a good job, whereas I used to just think that the completion of my daily tasks was enough.  Not saying that we shouldn’t be monitoring sales closely, but doing so often has the by product of being on a roller coaster ride emotionally based upon how many customers purchased on that particular day.

I’ve never met a business owner who thought it was easy to take a step back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished.

Businesses always have unique problems, issues, things that are unsettled that stress owners out.  It’s because of this that you either fall flat on your face or develop an extreme sense of optimism and a strong work ethic.  Unfortunately those are accompanied by a feeling of constantly being worried that this problem or that problem is going to crumble your business.  The same things that make it possible for one to succeed in business are the exact qualities that make it difficult to appreciate the hard work done.

For me, this week has been one big crap sandwich filled with twists and turns caused by the growing pains of our business.  It’s seemed like we were completely doomed several times in the past, yet we’re still around.  This is no different - we had a stressful week, but the big picture is still pretty good.  Nonetheless, it’s hard to see that right now we’re already a pretty impressive business, regardless of what the future brings.  Sometimes I even feel guilty for taking a few minutes and telling my partners they did a good job or for taking a moment and admiring what we’ve accomplished.  Not because I think it’s wrong, but because I’ve become conditioned to always pushing towards bigger and better things.  It feels like it’s a sign of weakness to be “content” with the company, if even for a second. Us business owners, we always have something bigger and better down the pipeline.

Then again, my personality is such that I am a pretty genuinely happy guy.  I  am very appreciative for what I have.  I do not lack any of the truly important things in life.  It’s like a personality split that pulls me back and forth.   The drive to do better is a blessing, but the inability to appreciate it when you actually have done better is a curse.  Very frustrating.

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Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  I had some good ones planned (or at least ones I thought would be good), but it’s been one of those overly chaotic weeks where even when I do get a free moment to relax or get some work done I’m so frazzled that I cannot think straight.  Not a week where my productive output plan really came into play much, although for all of the other more “normal” weeks I’ve been adhering to it pretty well.

Hulu has done it again: the TV section has introduced me to another show I never would have known about otherwise. The show is called Start-Up Junkies. On TV it can be found on the HD only channel MOJO, which to be honest I’m not even sure if I get or not…let me run out and check…yup, channel 1855 for anyone subscribed to Time Warner HD service here in Albany. Huh, never had any clue it was there.

The show follows the startup adventurs of Earth Class Mail, a company that receives, sorts, and scans your snail mail for you to view online or on your phone. It is a fascinating watch for anyone interested in startup life, particularly anyone interested in a large startup that requires quite a bit of Angel/VC investment. I highly recommend watching all of the episodes over on Hulu. There are only eight twenty-minute episodes as of this writing, so it’ll take less than three hours. I just finished watching them all and recorded my personal thoughts as I was watching. My notes are below the graphic, but I think it would be more beneficial to watch without my bias in mind, make your own observations, then come back to the rest of this post (and comment of course). I am interested to see if people pick up on the same things that I do.

• Startups take after their founders. CEO Ron Weiner loves to talk about how this is a “billion dollar idea” and how he would be lying if he said he wasn’t in it for the money. Consequently it seems like when they ask employees why they are involved in such a risky career you get two answers: the money and the love of startup life. Nothing wrong with that per-se, but Earth Class Mail can literally change the world. It can improve lives in major, major ways. Just would have been nice for one of them to say that they wanted to be a part of something that makes the world a better place. Maybe I’m naive, but I thought all entrepreneurs had a little of that “change the world” attitude in them.
• They changed their company name and their domain to Earth Class Mail (formerly known as Document Command and Remote Control Mail). First off, changing your name that many times is crazy. Second, they didn’t initiate the DNS changes until the night before a major convention. They are flipping out that the domain hasn’t propagated, they can’t demo the site, and that the press release has already gone out. They make a big deal about how stressful it is. They celebrate like they won the Super Bowl when it finally does propagate. Everyone knows it takes up to 48 hrs to propagate fully - you caused that stress yourself. Stop acting like this major unforeseen error occurred and by the grace of God everything worked at the exact second you needed it to. You f*cked up, why doesn’t that get mentioned?
• Phil, a sales executive who is by all accounts very important to the team, is totally left in the dark about the financial situation. It seems as if Ron and Chief Marketing Officer Natalee are totally secretive about when funding is coming and how much. He says “when I started, I was under the understanding that funding was a month a way and that it was all locked and loaded and ready to close. I guess there are some hiccups there that I’m not quite aware of”. Not the way I’d run a company. Transparency - especially to critical employees - is key.
• Going to that RV rally was absolutely stupid. They didn’t have permission. They didn’t have a plan. The people really aren’t their target market. What an absolute total waste of time for three important people to kill a day doing that.
• Let’s be real here: all startups are stressful for their own reasons, but 99% of the stress this company is enduring is related to Angel and VC funding. It seems like all of their resources are poured into securing tens of millions of dollars. I understand why, but it’s also the #1 reason why I plan on always self-funding my ventures. How is the company supposed to grow when everyone - marketing, sales, accounting, executives - spends all day long scrambling to prepare numbers or presentations for VC pitches?
• Natalee “Our lawyers wrote the website and engineers built it so now we have to create a marketing website”. Oh boy. That’s how a web company fails. How can all these smart people allow such a thing? You’re trying to raise millions of dollars and you HAVEN’T built a site with the customer in mind?
• I disagree with Ron when he says you need to acquire customers “not like the company you are, but like the company you intend to be”. Fortune 500 client “Cheetah” essentially re-writes their business plan and puts immense stress on the entire team. You can grow too fast, and as I’m watching this it seems like taking on this client could do that to ECM. If it destroys your systems by forcing them to scale before they are ready to do so, it’s a bad move.
• Maybe I’m overstepping my boundaries here, but when Natalee gets into a car accident and is sidelined with whiplash all she does is bitch and whine about how “unfair” it is and how she should be in meetings. She doesn’t seem thankful that she’s OK at all. No one likes getting in a car accident, but there are far worse things in life than getting hit up with whiplash and being sidelined for a few days. She comes across as a five year old who throws a tantrum because their work at a startup is more important than everything else in the world. All the fellow employees also just blab about how much her getting injured has cost the company. No one at all seems grateful that she’s OK or mentions that an injury like that puts things back in perspective and makes them realize that her health is more important than her day-to-day tasks. A bit saddening.
• I HATE when people say “9 out of 10 startups fail”. They say it at the beginning of each episode, and each time I cringe just a little bit more. It’s a total myth. “Using Census Bureau microdata of firms started from 1989 to 1992 and tracked through 1996, Headd found, among other things, that about half of new employer firms survive beyond four years, and about one-third of closed businesses were a success at closure.”
• Watching the marketing team review their PPC results is interesting. They have outsourced their campaigns and seem to only review them monthly. They get frustrated at the results, but don’t have enough time or know-how to dig deeper as to why they aren’t optimal. Sounds like every single company I’ve ever known. PPC is one of those things that seems simple, but is absurdly complex. It requires a lot of keyword research, time to write ads, and a whole lot of split-testing. When you’re relying on PPC results as much as Earth Class Mail seems to be, reviewing and tweaking the campaign needs to be a daily task (whether done internally or outsourced). I learned this the hard way.
• They also mention how frustrating PPC can be in the beginning: you don’t know what works, but you have a fixed budget to figure out what works. If something seems to be working, you can pour more money into it, however you don’t get an opportunity to test for something that could potentially work even better.
• If I ever start a VC backed company, I will need a partner with experience raising money. Ron seems to be VERY good at schmoozing VC’s and Angel’s. I would need a mentor to follow around and learn from before I could ever get to that point. I know the bootstrapping world, not this stuff. It’s basically a full time job for Ron to constantly secure more funding.
• Mid-stream they switch from developing on an open-source platform (maybe LAMP or Ruby on Rails?) to .NET because they are an official partner with Microsoft at a conference. Ballsy. They must have some hella good programmers.
• I thought Ron was a bit of a douche in the beginning, but he’s really grown on me. He knows his shit. He loves what he does. He will do ANYTHING for his company to succeed. Hard not to get on board with a guy like that. Hell, seems like he handles the stress better than I would (or better than the rest of his team does for that matter).
• They’re meeting with Venture Debt Bankers to get more funding without giving up more stock. Pretty interesting - I didn’t know this was possible. Apparently they come in after the VC’s have done their due diligence and will give you a business loan. It seems like the assumption is that they know the VC firms and how much work they put into researching the company, so they feel like they are backing more solid companies than just any company off the street. One interesting thing: they prefer the money be spent on capital equipment like buildings and machinery as opposed to marketing or software because if the business fails they can recoup some of their investment. They even state that you get lower rates when you use the money for those things.
• Honestly, there are SO many business processes and contributing factors to success in a company like this that I would find it tough be be CEO or even a VP. As of now I can’t really see myself being involved in something of this magnitude with this many people involved. Just doesn’t seem like much fun. I think I’ll always be a small startup guy with relatively simple business solutions that meet one specific niche need.
• Ah, they did develop on PHP. Holy f*&@! that’s a lot of work to re-build everything from scratch and deploy it on .NET!
• Love the Red Bull’s on all of the developer’s desks. They are really pushing these programmers hard, almost to the point where you wonder if they can possibly be productive.
• Wow, looks like all of the crazy gambles have paid off so far. Ron is the shit - dude pushes everything to the limit and definitely wins more than he loses.
• The last two minutes are nuts - almost every member of the senior staff leaves for one reason or another. Makes you wonder if they just pushed this thing too hard too fast.

The other day I went to the pump and filled up my 2008 VW Rabbit.  With gas in my neck of the woods well over $4/gallon, it cost me nearly $60 to fill up my 14.5 gallon tank.  $60!  Dude, I drive a freaking Rabbit!  It’s like the smallest car ever.

It might not happen tomorrow.  It might not happen next week.  But if things keep going the way they are going gas prices are going to drastically change our lives.  Food and shipping prices will continue to rise.  Air fare will continue to rise.  It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.  We’re all going to be forced to make sacrifices.

I’m not trying to be bleak - just a realist.  With great problems come great opportunity.  I have no doubt that we will respond successfully, it’s just now a matter of how, when, and how bad it will get before alternative energies will be scalable. After reading an interview with Texas oil tycoon T.Boone Pickens in Fast Company the other day, I’m all of a sudden feeling a little bit better about things:

You recently announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, in the panhandle. Is that about money or the environment?
Money! First thing, it’s about money. Of course, I’m also a good environmentalist. I can pass the saliva test. But I’m not going to go do a 4,000-megawatt wind farm for the environment first and money second. I’d rather go give money someplace else. You’re talking about $10 billion.

What kind of return do you expect?
A minimum of 15%. It’ll probably be closer to 25%.

Tell me about the project.
It’s huge, the size of two nuclear plants in output, enough to power a million homes. More than 2,000 turbines, each between 2 and 3 megawatts. The first 1,000 megawatts will be ready by 2011, and 1,000 each year or two after that.

Transmission is a major challenge for most wind projects — getting the electricity to where the people are.
That’s right. The hardest part is having rights-of-way and buyers someplace.You’ve been planning a $3 billion water pipeline from the Texas panhandle to Dallas. Would the wind and water be transported along the same corridor?
Yes, if it goes to Dallas. We bought $45 million worth of water rights in Roberts County. We’ll transport 200,000 acre-feet of water a year. And we set up a water district that gives us the power of eminent domain for the transmission corridor. We can issue tax-free bonds. It has all the favorable characteristics of a city government.

How important is wind to America’s future energy needs?
The United States today runs on 987,000 megawatts, and the demand is going to increase 150,000 megawatts in the next 10 years — 15%. We could supply most of that with wind from the Great Plains, from Texas to North Dakota, but we’ve got to set up corridors to the West Coast and to the East Coast.

So you’re an oil man who’s turning his back on oil?
Foreign oil is costing us $500 billion a year. In 10 years, $5 trillion goes out of the country. It’s nuts. It’s the greatest transfer of wealth from one area to another in the history of the world.

You argue in your new book, The First Billion Is the Hardest (out in September from Crown), that global oil supply is slowing.
If I’m right, world oil supply has peaked. Existing fields are going to start declining at 5% to 8% per year, and it’s like a treadmill: As your production declines, it gets harder to keep up. Look at the biggest oil field in the world, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia; for every barrel of oil, they’re lifting six of water. That means the field has matured. It peaked at 5.7 million barrels a day; now it’s 4 million.

What will happen in the next five years?
Demand will go up, and price will go up.

Take a stab at what we’ll be paying at the pump in five years.
Oh hell, that’s so far out. Maybe $6 to $8 a gallon.

Is ethanol part of the solution?
Ethanol is political. That’s what Bob Dole told me in 1989. He called me up and said, “Quit talking down ethanol. You need to understand something: There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Those senators want ethanol.” He said, “Are you getting the picture?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s coming through pretty clear.” [Dole confirms that Pickens’s account is “probably accurate.”]

Not exactly an inspiring vision of Congress.
The leadership is absolutely, totally pissy in Congress — a real conglomeration of fruitcakes. I mean pitiful people.

So would you cut the ethanol subsidy?
No. Hell, I’d rather subsidize ethanol or cream soda than have the money going out of the country buying oil. If you subsidize ethanol, the technology will ultimately get better. Corn will not be the primary ethanol fuel. They’ll go to something cellulosic. People who are against it say, “It costs so much to buy ethanol.” It costs more to buy oil from the Middle East. You’re better off circulating money in the United States. Create jobs here.

Money and politics aside, you’ve long said — like Al Gore — that climate change is happening, and it’s man-made.
It could be that it’s happening naturally, and we’ve pushed it over the edge. Regardless, I’m going to take action. Opponents say it’s going to cost so much money to address. And I say, well, hell, go ahead and spend it. I’d rather take a chance that I’m right than that I’m wrong. I don’t want to wait around until the house burns down ’til I decide whether it’s a serious fire or not.

F*ck yes! You have no idea how happy it makes me to read this.  Don’t get me wrong - me and T.Boone don’t exactly have a lot in common - but this guy is exactly what we need.  He admits that we have a problem and that the solution is about money first and philanthropy second.  That’s OK - like he said, it’s freaking $10 billion!   He’s a rich oil tycoon who sees financial opportunity in alternative energy.  The largest problems in the world will be solved when they become the most lucrative to be solved.  People with the money and resources to truly make a global impact tend to focus on the things that will make them the most money.  This guy is so rich he could potentially save our country on his own.

Imagine if every oil bigwig got their head out of their ass and instead embraced the potential opportunity like T.Boone? Kudos to an 80 year oil tycoon for recognizing change and taking this on.  It would be easy for him to just sit on his money and relax for the rest of his life.  I’m glad he’s not.

A few months back I wrote a post entitled Micro-Innovating Every Day:

Ideas are a very, very small part of the majority of great innovations. Most great innovations come from a recognition of a recurring problem that a company encounters repeatedly and has the foresight to come up with a creative solution. It’s less about ideas and more about discovering opportunities that other people have failed to see or exploit. Most of the time, you only find those opportunities if you are working passionately at your craft each and every day for years.

I’ve talked a lot about how I feel like our shopping cart software for Detailed Image is one of our competitive advantages. As I was working on subtle features and additions for Tastefully Driven that will result in it blowing DI out of the water, I thought about how all of these daily micro-innovations will result in one big innovation. By 2010 maybe we’ll be featured in some magazine for our unique shopping cart community. Some kid will be reading it and think “man, I wish I could have an idea like that.” Not realizing that DI was in existence for 2+ years running osCommerce before we even attempted to build our own cart. And that DI was running the new cart for 6 months before developing the Tastefully Driven cart/community. And that the majority of features that make it great in 2010 hadn’t even entered our minds in 2008.

Want to be an innovator? Work hard. Pay attention to your customers. Analyze data. Learn like there’s no tomorrow. Open yourself to opportunities. Execute - every single day.

Today was the perfect example of this.  Ask any one of us what we accomplished today and we’d probably have to think for a second, look at our to-do list, and rattle off a few things that we did in addition to our day-to-day.  All relatively minor, but all subtle things that make us just a little more efficient, just a little more effective, and just a little bit better as a company.

All of these things probably added up to 3 hours of work total, but all will make an impact:

• Previously we each got one day a week off from the warehouse, with all of us going on Monday.  We agreed to all still go on Mondays, but now everyone will get a second day off.  Tuesday - Friday will only have two people in the warehouse, but those two people will obviously be doing a lot of warehouse work on those days.  This gives each of us a little more freedom and will save everyone on gas.
• To trim the time down that we all have to spend at the warehouse, Greg called and had our FedEx pickup time shifted from ~4 PM to now ~2 PM.  We get a lot of early deliveries, so the two people at the warehouse will now have to work approx 7:30 AM - 2:30 PM.  We can stay later if we want, but we won’t have to.  Again, more freedom for everyone involved.
• When using our custom built back-end shipping platform the only required input is box size (you look at the order and enter a box size for each order).  We had a drop down of our available boxes, but it was poorly organized and defaulted to 10 x 8 x 8″.  This worked OK when we only had a few orders a day, but causes a few issues when you’re shipping 20+ orders a day.  Greg uses the system the most and requested that I re-order the boxes by dimension and that we default the drop down to say “Choose a box size” so you can quickly scan the list and see the ones that still need to be inputted as opposed to wondering if they really are a 10 x 8 x 8 or if they just haven’t been entered.  Minor stuff that I never really noticed, but if it trims an 8 minute/day job to a 5 minute/day job it’s worth it in the long run.
• Greg also negotiated a 3.5% reduction in shipping rates with our FedEx rep.  With gas prices these days, a reduction in shipping costs is huge.

We’ve also recently reduced common Detailed Image inquiries with a new FAQ system, reduced my SportsLizard work down to almost nothing by automating customs submissions, reduced accounting work when George automated our accounting so that PayPal transactions can be imported to our QuickBooks, and probably a lot more that I didn’t mention..

Nothing major here, but the fact that every day we do a few of these things adds up to our company growing A LOT every week, month, and especially every year.   It seems obvious, but it’s easier than you’d think to get caught up in the day to day operations of a company and neglect anything that won’t pay immediate benefit.

As any college student will tell you, scheduling classes is an art form. My first semester I didn’t have much choice and had to take whatever was available. My second semester I loaded up on Monday and Thursday and had the rest of the week off. It sucked - Mondays and Thursdays wore me out and the rest of the week I had to spend 10 hours doing homework. My third semester I put large gaps between my classes so I’d have time to get work done during the day, but all I did was bone around on ESPN.com and AIM.

My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 - 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.

If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.

Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.

Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74

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 misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.

Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.

Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?

Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.

David Roberts - Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices - Fast Company: May 2008

OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:

The Logical Thought

So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?

In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.

I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.

What I Want us to Become

I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.

In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing - while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.

Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks - like packing and shipping - cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ‘09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us - the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.

How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting - I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.

Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.

What I’m Doing About it

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:

• Commuting time
• Blog posts on this blog
• Time spent reading business books or business magazines
• Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)

Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week - if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others - like today - I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:

• Monday - 7 AM - 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
• Tuesday - 7:30 AM - 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
• Wednesday - 7:30 AM - 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
• Thursday - 7:30 AM - 1 PM (5.5 hrs)

That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday - Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday - Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).

This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home - I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.

I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.

Last week was supposed to be a laid back week for me.  I moved to a new apt the week prior so I just wanted to take some time to settle into the new living situation.

Obviously with our server issues that didn’t happen.  The stress/frustration caught up with me and - despite the site move going relatively well - I was on the edge of being burnt out.  Obviously it was a cumulative thing that accrued over the past 2+ years and didn’t just start last week.  I was trying to look at the summer and my move as a chance to regain a little balance and have some more fun outside of work, but last week almost sent me over the edge.  I wanted to be spending my nights playing basketball, having drinks with friends, watching the NBA/NHL playoffs, and catching up on sleep…not doing something I’ve never done before under extreme pressure and with a lack of sleep.

I took Friday completely off and spent the day hiking by myself at Thacher Park.  I’d say I hiked a good portion of the 12 miles of trails.   It rained a bit, but I enjoyed chilling out in the cave next to the waterfall on the Indian Ladder trail for a while.  That’s kind of “my spot” where I go to take stock on shit and regain balance.  Ironically, despite being almost 30 minutes from the warehouse, you can get a crystal clear view of the industrial park because of the elevation.  Other than that though, the thought of work didn’t cross my mind and I was temporarily refreshed.

George and I then went out for dinner/drinks at the chic Avenue A in Albany on Saturday night, which again gave my mind some time away from “server server server”.

Sunday I looked at my to-do list from last week and realized I did 0% of it.  I slowly started chipping away at a reasonable plan to get it all done this week while still working “normal” hours.  Today I got my work done in a reasonable six hours or so (more to come on this - I’m fairly certain that I can work less and accomplish more. I’m planning on placing a work restriction on myself to show that…and give me the dual benefit of retaining my sanity).

Oh, the best part - we nearly made up all of the lost revenue by having a MONSTER weekend and beginning of the week thus far.   From Friday night until Monday morning orders were off the hook - we ended up shipping out 60 orders this morning, easily a record for us.   Average order value was well over $100, so needless to say we’re feeling pretty good about things.  Monday is also the only day where we all work together in the warehouse, so it’s nice to get a little of that energy you get from feeding off the synergy we have as a team.

As usual, never a dull moment.

Back in February we made the somewhat difficult decision to self-fund our move and expansion by not paying ourselves for three months.  In retrospect, this was a riskier move than I think we all realized.  It’s really, really stressful to see your bank account dwindling without anything to replenish it.  It’s also really, really stressful to work 12 hour days and see nothing in return.  That said, it was the best move we ever could have made.

Taking no pay brought us together as a team - we united around the fact that we needed to work our asses off to get paid again. It also motivated each individual.  While stressful for me, the desperation of the matter made me block out the rest of the world for a while and dial in 100% to the task at hand.

And right around the launch of Tastefully Driven, it all started to pay off:

• We no longer had to commit time to moving and expanding
• Our initial warehouse expenses were gone and replaced with manageable fixed monthly costs
• The marketing we had worked so hard on has resulted in several months in a row of record sales.  We are consistently doing 3-4X monthly revenue from the corresponding month last year, which was on the high side of our estimations.
• We found a great new accountant to replace the unsatisfactory one we fired during tax season (who by the way seems to have cost us approximately $6,000 last year that we could have avoided….good accountants are valuable, lesson learned)
• We secured a large line of credit with our local bank.  We didn’t need it, but it doesn’t cost anything and ties in with our existing bank account, so it was a no brainer to apply for and have in our back pocket for future expansion if we need it.

All of this led us to the decision to start paying ourselves again early.  So yesterday, almost a month earlier than planned, I walked into the bank and cashed my first check.  Sure, I’m making exactly what I was a few months ago but it just felt so much better to cash this check, mostly because I know we’ve weathered our storm and are able to cover all expenses, pay ourselves, and profit - something we thought might take a lot longer to achieve.  We could have paid ourselves a raise, but we decided to play it conservative and do this for a few months just in case sales unexpectedly dip.  Come mid-summer, I expect we’ll be able to give ourselves another raise, which will be significant because it’ll give us each a little breathing room financially on a personal level.

Sometimes business risks like not paying yourself can backfire.  This one could have been the start of us falling apart if warehouse costs were more than expected and sales were less than expected.  Thankfully, a lot has gone right lately and everything paid off.  Looking back a few months, this post is probably the best possible outcome to our situation.  These are the times you live for as a business owner.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how fast technology changes. In December I wrote an article about our company embracing the open source software alternatives:

So we came up with a plan. We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative). Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year. We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal. The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

In the comments Anthony from Xonatek and I had a great back-and-forth about taking our mentality a step further utilizing Google Apps and free web based software.  Ultimately, we didn’t change our plan at the time but the conversation left the thought in the back of my mind.

Just before we moved into the warehouse George’s computer died and we lost all of his data.  I personally was doing an OK job of backing up my files, but we didn’t yet have a company backup plan (something I planned on doing once we settled in).  The more I thought of it, the harder the idea of a backup plan became because we’re always on the move.  You can’t set your laptop to auto-backup at midnight if it’s in a different location each night at midnight.  What happens if it’s suspended or shut down?  If it backs up as soon as you boot up that could bother you and prevent you from performing a time-critical task.  If it skips the backup that defeats the purpose.

More and more I decided the route to go was not to back anything up, but to have everything stored on the web.  Aside from not needing to schedule and perform backups, you can also work from any internet-ready device at close to full capacity.  The downside of course is that if you have a slow internet connection many of the apps straight up suck.  We combat this by having the open source alternative installed on the hard drives on all of our computers.  We also still purchase software when necessary:  for example, Mike has a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that isn’t really replaceable  with an open source alternative for the graphics work he does.  We also sort of killed the idea of a super duper master $5,000 PC - what’s the point when almost everything is online anyway?

Here’s how we have it set up:

• We use Google Apps for:
  • Email hosting through Gmail.  This is for our @pureadapt.com emails.  For the rest of the emails (sportslizard, iprioritize, tastefullydriven, etc) I use the mail fetcher to take a copy of each incoming email off of the server and put it in an appropriate folder.  It leaves the message on the server for me to download in Thunderbird (still my email client of choice), acting as a great auto-backup.  I also set it up so I can reply from any of those email accounts via Gmail if I’m on the road and don’t have access to my Thunderbird on my laptop.
  • Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations for our office suite.  We’ve already had quite a bit of great collaboration on some docs and spreadsheets that otherwise would have been emailed back and forth a bunch of times.  Far more useful than I anticipated.
  • Google Sites to replace our Wiki’s.  We have one wiki for just the owners that has critical info in it and a second wiki that employees will have access to that has all of the important processes (like how to pack and ship an order).
  • Google Calendar to manage our schedules.  We don’t use it much, but it’s an easy way to set up a meeting with everyone without having a big chain of emails back and forth.
  • The company start page where you can access all of these things.  I can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to have one login for everything.
  • The Remember the Milk plugin for the company start page as a shared task manager (ironically, I had someone email me the other day ripping Remember the Milk and saying iPrioritize was far better…maybe so, but iP doesn’t have a plugin like this…suppose that’s my fault…)
• Xdrive for storing other files like our Quickbooks backup, database backups, PDF files, PSD files, etc.

So far it’s going great.  The coolest part for me has been that it has opened up a whole new world of devices away from my laptop where I can work.  I went from working solely on my one powerhouse laptop (dual core processor, 2 gb ram, etc) to now sometimes using my desktop for its 22″ monitor when I need more space.  I even pulled the trigger on an ultra portable Eee PC for when I’m on the go.  For $399 I figured I could reduce the wear and tear on my current laptop (especially the hard drive - the Eee has a solid-state hard drive which is much better for traveling) and reduce the amount of stuff I need to carry on a regular basis while still remaining almost as productive as I would be on my lapper.  Linux took some time getting used to, but with the help of EeeUser.com I’ve become addicted to hacking up this little device.  I’d say at this point I could work solely from the Eee PC for a few weeks with very little productivity loss.  I wrote a full review over on the Tastefully Driven blog, but take a look at how much smaller it is compared to my current lapper:

Random happenings not worthy of a full post…

• This weekend I’ll be moving to a new apartment so the posts might be slow for the next few weeks.
• Check out this little analysis I did over on TD:  Gas Prices Got You Down?  Buy Online…Really
• Thanks to the NBA and NHL playoffs my sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. I’m still getting up at 6, but going to bed really late means I need to take a nap in the afternoon….which kind of sucks.