I learned a lot about us this year. Shit is going to happen. That’s life. The unfortunate reality is that we’re less in control than we think we are. What you can control is how you react. And we reacted by having our best year ever. We set revenue records for our largest day, month, and year, all while increasing our profitability. We worked on our culture and made two hires. We managed to keep LockerPulse growing without slowing down on Detailed Image. The business has never been in a better position.

Here’s hoping for continued prosperity and a little more peace in 2012.

Happy New Year’s everyone!

However, as we started to discuss our hiring plan, we realized that the Pure Adapt website all of a sudden became a more important piece of the puzzle. We needed something that showcased our work, our personalities, and our culture. Finally this past weekend we launched a new site.

The Site

To be honest, I didn’t have a whole lot to do with this new site. The majority of the credit here goes to Mike, who did an amazing job with the design (more on that in a second). Greg then wrote all of the content. I came in at the end and did a quick round of revisions and then deployed the site.

While I was very impressed with the aesthetics and graphics that Mike came up with, I’m even more impressed with how he pushed the envelope on what a website can do today in 2011. Using HTML 5 and CSS 3, Mike created a responsive design, a relatively new concept that essentially means that the site adjusts on the fly almost flawlessly to any screen size.

For instance, it looks great on my 1080P monitor:

And an iPad:

And an iPhone:

Notice how the water at the bottom looks different on each screen size. You can see the same effects by taking your browser and resizing it.

I also love the personality that Greg and Mike infused in to the site. The community page that gives an overview of the work we do in our community is awesome. And I really love the home page. Everything from the intro line right down to the Bruce Lee quote is a perfect reflection of us. It was really important that this site did that for potential employees. We want to show applicants who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and then let them decide whether or not they’d be a good fit.

The Job

Speaking of potential applicants, as you can see on our new careers page, we’re hiring a full-time “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist – Detailed Image”. I realize that job title is a mouth full. Honestly, it was the hardest part for us in the entire job description. We wanted something that described the job without turning potential candidates off (as opposed to say “Customer Service Representative” which, to me, invokes the thought of wearing a headset and answering phones within a tiny cubicle of a gigantic call center…and this job is so much more than that). If you want the most accurate reflection of the job, the bullets under “Primary Responsibilities” describe literally what this person will be doing. A lot of work was put in to the job description so I’ll let that stand for itself rather than rehash it all here.

If you’re interested, I highly encourage you to apply…even if you’re not currently located in Upstate, NY. While it doesn’t say this on the application, we’re open to helping relocate the right candidate to our area.

As is the case with all hires in a growing small business, this person will be the most important hire in company history. That’s magnified by the fact that 1) this is the first employee we’ve hired where we didn’t have someone we already knew in mind, and 2) the skill set for customer support is much more difficult to assess than say a warehouse worker, a designer, or a developer (the other positions we will likely be hiring in the future).

Because of this, and because we expect to get a lot of applicants (one of the benefits of doing business in the Albany area is that there are a LOT of colleges), we have spent a very long time meticulously fine tuning our hiring process for this person. We’ve consulted with other companies, various HR experts, read as many job descriptions for similar positions as we can find, and read as much research as we could get our hands on. Overkill? Maybe. But to me that just shows that we’re attacking hiring with the same passion and intensity that we do everything else. When we dive in to something new, we want to learn as much as we can so that we can put forth our absolute best. I’m really excited to see how this unfolds!

2010 Review

I’m really amazed by what we accomplish every year. At times it seems like things are moving slow, but when I take a look back I can’t say I’m disappointed in the least. Some of the highlights:

• We started the year by closing Tastefully Driven, our Amazon store, and stopped shipping internationally
• We launched the Ask a Professional Detailer Blog on Detailed Image, managed by Todd, which had a major impact on our growth
• We hired our first full time employee
• We built and launched LockerPulse
• We had our record year in terms of revenue and profitability

Those are just the highlights that come to mind. We had a lot of other little “wins”. The more I run a business, the more I realize just how hard it is, and therefore I’m that much more appreciative of what we’ve built.

Changes to Our Team

Over the holidays George decided to leave the company. We’re thankful for all of his years of hard work, and of course we’re all still good friends and wish him the best in his future endeavors. I’ve always maintained that business relationships are like entering a marriage that’s guaranteed to end in divorce. There are just too many variables in life to expect a group of partners to run a business forever and ever.

Our lawyer was adamant from the start about the importance of having a rock solid operating agreement. Thankfully, we were smart enough to heed his advice. We reviewed and updated it yearly, the most recent update being in mid-December, a few weeks before George made his decision. Given that almost everything related to a partner leaving (either due to choice, being forced out, death, or disability) was clearly outlined, there wasn’t much to “negotiate” and therefore there wasn’t much to stress about (or potentially fight about). From a legal standpoint the transition was able to happen in a matter of days instead of dragging out over months or years, which is always best for all parties involved.

There’s definitely a lesson to be learned in all of this. Once you become bigger than a one-man shop, it’s absolutely in your best interest to sit down with a good lawyer and draw up an operating agreement, and then review it annually. No questions asked. For the few thousand dollars you’ll spend over the years you get a piece of mind that’s priceless.

New Warehouse Lease

After some uncertainty, we’re staying put in our warehouse for another three years. Greg did a great job negotiating the new lease. Essentially we wanted to continue our existing lease, but also wanted a new heating system put in. Our oil heaters are ridiculously old so they’re expensive to maintain and horribly inefficient, and oil itself is expensive. We’ve been having problems since when we first moved in. After some back and forth we came to an agreement. They are scheduled to begin work on a propane/electric hybrid system in the next week or two.

I think our general consensus is that we’ll be looking for a new place to move after this lease is up, which means that by this time in 2013 we’ll probably be looking. Not only will we likely need more physical space for our products, we’ll also likely need some “real” office space, and I think we’ll all be ready to have a little nicer, cleaner, more modern place. Obviously things could change, but that’s the thought right now.

What I Expect in 2011

While the past few years have been largely about new development projects – the new Detailed Image cart in 2009 and LockerPulse in 2010 – and about becoming more lean and efficient. There likely won’t be any new sites in 2011, and the operations are pretty well optimized. We also have a great team in place, from our owners to our employees and contractors, so I don’t foresee much change there either.

This year is all about growing what we have. We’ve all had to work a little harder recently and pick up some new roles and responsibilities, but we’ve still managed to push ahead full force with our plans. For DI, there are a lot of marketing initiatives we weren’t able to get to in the past. There are also a lot of things we want to do with all of the data we’ve accumulated over the years (think: a more targeted and customized shopping experience). For LP, we have a lot of great features planned, and I hope to build on some of our recent momentum and be aggressively marketing the site in the coming months. I fully expect it to be a significant source of revenue for us by year’s end.

We’re all looking forward to a fun, innovative, and prosperous 2011!

…And I’m sure there will be some more surprises mixed in as well

Outside my apartment early this morning

If you haven’t heard, it’s snowing a lot today in the Northeast. My constant interest in the weather, and the fact that I’m up early, has sort of led to me becoming the guy who makes the decision on whether or not to close the warehouse for the day. It wasn’t a very difficult decision today. The timing of this storm essentially makes for the worst-case scenario of bad commutes both ways. Plus all of the schools were closed too, which always solidifies my decision if I’m on the fence.

Still, when I turned on the news and looked at the traffic cams, the highways were jam packed because the majority of workplaces are attempting to conduct business as usual. Considering that most jobs are non-essential, and that there’s an inherit danger involved in driving in this weather, and that most people will spend more time in the car than they will at work because 30 minute commutes will take two hours, and that most people can do some or all of their work from home…well the whole thing just seems archaic and stupid to me. There will be people who get in accidents today, get stranded in the cold, get injured (or worse), all because they had to go to work.

Seriously people, if you’re not a police officer or a doctor, stay home. If you run a company or have enough influence to make decisions about this kind of stuff, make your employees stay home. Live to fight another day. Even in the worst of winters there are at most a handful of these days around here. It’s not worth risking your life for a snow storm that will cleaned up by tomorrow. Also – it’s not like you’re going to get much work done when everyone spends the majority of their day cleaning their car and driving 10 MPH in a foul mood.

I couldn’t live with myself if one of my partners or one of my employees got in to an accident because I prioritized shipping some car cleaning products over their safety. And even if we did go in today and were able to ship out our orders, there’s no guarantee that they would go anywhere further than our local FedEx depot today. They’ll probably be delivered just as fast if they ship out tomorrow. On their site it says:

Unavoidable service delays should be expected due to local road conditions and in areas that have issued a state of emergency. Our top priority is the safety and well-being of our employees and contractors. FedEx is committed to providing service to the best of our ability in areas that can be safely accessed and where conditions have improved.

Most commerce slows down on days like these anyways, so why not just give your employees the day off, kick back and enjoy the snow day, and get back to work tomorrow?

Except one thread that did work.

My partners and I are all fans of the sports show Around the Horn. One of the best parts of ATH is that the eccentric panelist Woody Paige always has a blackboard behind him with a random quote on it (see below). My favorite is probably “Stable relationships are for horses”, although they are almost all great. He changes it every segment (2-3 times per show depending on when he is “eliminated”). He’s been a regular on the show since it began in 2002 and has had more than 500 appearances. That’s a lot of quotes!

So we started a thread to track them back in early 2008. We stopped contributing a while back, but other people kept it going. Not every day, but here and there people would contribute new quotes.

Fast forward to last Tuesday. Tastefully Driven had a 20% off sale that did pretty good during the holidays because it made it’s way across a few forums. I decided to check the stats. Which was when I realized just how popular our thread was. It was the most viewed page on the site in December, 2x more than the home page. We ranked top 5 in Google for many Woody Paige related terms, including #1 for “Woody Paige Blackboard Quotes” – ahead of Wikipedia, Woody’s official site, and IMDB:

Given that interesting bit of information, we decided to create a site dedicated to Woody Paige’s blackboard quotes. We don’t expect too much to come of it, but we figured that it would be way better than an old thread on an inactive forum.  My guess was that many people browsed the forum thread, read all of the quotes (average time on page is just over 3 minutes), and then never came back because it wasn’t updated and we require you to be a TD registered user to post on the forum.

The benefits of a dedicated site:

• Better design and organization of the content.
• An easy form for people to submit quotes.  The show is on every weekday so we hope that submissions will be pretty regular.
• Easy for people to subscribe to updates via email, Twitter, and RSS.
• Each quote will get indexed and hopefully suck in some more traffic.
• Maybe we’ll make a few bucks with AdSense (I’m talking like $100/month at most).

And if we get lucky it could be one of those viral blog sites that catches on, sort of like Autocompleteme or People of Walmart.

So on Tuesday Mike and I came up with a list of what we needed to do to get the site launched.  Over the past few days we split up the work and spent a few hours here and there to get the site launched. 

Here’s our to-do list for this mini-project:

• Pick out a domain
• Set up hosting on our server
• Install WordPress
• Install plugin to allow users to submit posts (pending our approval)
• Design template
• Write site copy
• SEO
  • Enable rewritten URLs
  • Put canonical redirect in place
  • Install sitemaps plugin and submit to Google Sitemaps
• Configure AdSense
• Set up Google Analytics
• Create Twitter account
• Feedburner
  • Burn Feed
  • Enable email subscriptions
  • Auto-post to Twitter
• Copy all posts from thread into system
• Test on all browsers
• 301 redirect old thread on Tastefully Driven (both pages)
• Adam & Mike – blog posts, Twitter, Facebook
• Add to Pure Adapt site
• Submit to StumbleUpon
• Test Analytics and AdSense to ensure tracking correctly

Friday night while I was watching college football WoodyPaigeQuotes.com was born:

All in all, a pretty quick, fun project that will be fun to keep going (I certainly plan on adding new quotes whenever I watch).

My business partner Mike just released a nifty little web app called My Wish List.

I think most people have used “wish lists” in some capacity on an e-commerce site.  I know I use the Amazon wish list to help me keep track of books I want to read.   There are also these large super wishlist sites like WishList.com where you can organize anything you shop for.  But nothing (that I know of) where you can just create a simple list, get a permanent URL for your wish, and share it with people.

So that’s what Mike created.  It’s dead simple to use.  No registration or anything like that.  Just create a list, get a link, and share it.  Below is a screenshot of my first list with the option to share the list via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

You’ll notice that the eBay ads are related to the items on the list.  The eBay and Amazon links are also affiliate links so there’s some potential to make a little money.

The most interesting thing about this site is that it’s the type of thing that could get caught in a “viral loop”.  That is, it grows itself by nature because the primary function is to share the site with other people, who will then (in theory) create a list themselves and share it with more people. Rinse and repeat.

We have a simple marketing plan to do a few quick things to try to get the word out.  This is a great little side project because if it does make us even a little money there is a lot of room for expansion.

Great work Mike!

On the back side of our office there’s this little storage area.  I started experimenting with shooting pucks towards the goal from behind the storage area.  With all of the stuff in the way of the goal it’s become quite a challenge.  We shoot from the red x in the picture below:

Here’s the view from behind:

It looks easier than it is.  We don’t allow lame little lob shots over the top – you’ve got to drill it through.  We’ve only been playing for a week or two, but no one has hit the target from back here.  We can get it in the goal pretty routinely (1 in 5 shots maybe) but the target is real hard to hit.  You need to keep the puck low enough to hit the target, but high enough to clear the boxes and wide enough to miss the bins. Even if you get that part right, there’s the paper towels, the push cart, the vacuum, and the oil stick that get in the way:

We’ve each hit the screws just above the target a few times, but never low enough to hit it directly.  When we do get it in the goal low enough, it’s generally to the left by a few inches.  Very frustrating, but very fun.   This is so much fun that over the past few weeks I’ve found myself staying late on Friday afternoons to shoot pucks with Greg.

Here’s the thing:  we’re not afraid to create our own culture.  We like to work hard and focus, but we also like to play around and act like we’re 12 sometimes.  That’s why we play hockey, listen to 90′s rap music while packing orders, and fly around on razor scooters that aren’t supposed to hold more than 143 lbs:

I’ve heard of companies that provide free alcoholic drinks for their employees.  It’s not a big deal for them to have a few beers while on the job.  Or there’s Zappos, who holds interviews over vodka shots.  It’s great if that works for them, but we’d never ever allow that.  It’s not us.

Our company culture has become a reflection of our personalities.  If you allow that to naturally happen it will shine through in everything you do – from your relationships with vendors, to customer service, to your relationships with your employees.  People will see through you if you aren’t genuine.  You’ll also probably be less happy.  It would be really easy for a company that’s growing as fast as we are to start changing.  To start becoming “too good” for certain things.  We can justify not doing just about anything in the name of “it’s not worth my time”.  But we genuinely like what we do, and we genuinely care so we keep working hard, we keep valuing every customer, we keep going out to dinners on the company’s dime to celebrate, and we’ll continue to shoot pucks at our shipping dock.

Yet those things are easily lost when all you can think about is next months sales or that new feature. After a not so good January, I really needed to trim my life back a bit and focus on getting our new e-commerce platform done. I did, we got it up on 5/1, and it’s since paid off more than we imagined it would. We’ve had a few huge months where we’re hitting revenue and profitability numbers that I could only dream of in January. Remember that huge Black Friday we had? That’s now a normal weekend. It’s nuts. We’ve turned a corner in the sense that we’ve become very self-sustainable. If things keep up like this we shouldn’t have any troubles meeting our financial goals for the rest of the year: have a profitable year, pay ourselves a bit more, expand to a few new product lines, and hire a few part-time warehouse workers (we have our first starting on Monday).

For the Biz

So what’s next? For every person and every company, the answer would be different. For us it starts with our personal goals, which pretty much all align, and then trickles down to the business. We don’t want to have 100 employees. We don’t want outside investors. We don’t want a 500,000 sq-ft warehouse, nor do we want to run fifty e-commerce sites. Other people would probably take our company in that direction. I think it could be done. But it isn’t the type of company we want.

We like not having set hours. We like emphasizing productivity over hours put in. We like going to the warehouse 2-3 days/week from 9 -3. We like working from home on the other days. We like having the flexibility to work more or less if we want to or need to. We like being able to do whatever we think is “right” for our customers. We like not having to deal with the HR issues that inevitably come along with having a lot of employees. Basically, we like owning all of our company so that we can make all of the decisions. To me, that’s what makes running a business fun. We can do whatever WE want. If we had a bunch of investors to answer to, it would be like a job to me.

We’ve decided that for the time being our main focus needs to stay with Detailed Image…probably through 2010. We went through our list of planned projects the other day. There is easily 1 year+ worth of work there, but each task is easily identifiable as something that will make us more money, save us more time, or eliminate common problems/mistakes.  In addition, with a few part time employees, we should be able to knock each of us down to 2 warehouse days/week and get rid of most of the grunt work that is tiring and eats up time. We’re able to make those improvement claims with relative certainty because we’ve been in business for a few years now.  We have data, we know our customers, and we (think) we know the direction that the web is going.  DI is becoming a much more mature business.  I’d imagine that by the end of 2011 we’ll be close to being the largest US based site in our niche, which in and of itself is a nice business, but not something that we’ll be satisfied with.

The other limiting factors are cash flow and warehouse space – we can’t just grow in e-commerce with reckless abandon because we don’t have the credit available or space available to risk stocking $30k worth or products that don’t move.  Not to mention the other time and work involved in another e-commerce venture.  At this point, I’d imagine that non-DI e-commerce expansion isn’t going to happen anytime soon (unless it’s done with a dropshipping model, which we *may* do on Tastefully Driven because of how much organic search traffic it pulls in).

Then the next logical question is:  is Pure Adapt just Detailed Image?  And if so, what happens when you do hit that wall in 2010 or 2011 or 2012?  On the e-commerce side, we’ll have to start up again on the fitness and poker sites that we had planned, both of which have had success on TD and Amazon for us.  But as I mentioned above, e-commerce expansion is tough and it might still be in a year or two.

To me, the key is SportsLizard.  Not SportsLizard per se, but the SportsLizard model. I spend about 1 hour per month answering emails and maintaining the site.  We spend $0 marketing it.  We make money from eBay ads and Price Guide subscriptions (a web app I developed).  It’s not enough to live off of, but it would be if you had a few SportsLizard’s.  That’s exactly what I want to do – between Mike and I, develop a few more SportsLizard’s in the next year.  Z.ips.ME doesn’t really count, but it might surprise me and make us a few dollars here and there.  First things first, we want to expand Hotteeez, which despite not being updated in a year makes us pretty decent money.  With a few new well-planned shirts each month, it could easily become a SportsLizard by the end of the year.  Beyond that, we have two other planned projects that I think could do the same.  Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but over time some of them will hit.  And hopefully one or two is even bigger than SL. If not, there’s really no loss for us and we can just try some more until something works. How fun is that?

For Myself

On a more personal level, I couldn’t be happier with the first half of ’09.  However, since I spent every waking hour through May working on getting the site up, I lost a little of the work/life “balance” that I had achieved prior.  I followed the site up by moving, so I’m only just now getting the opportunity to get back to a spot like I outlined in my productive output post.  I’m only checking email twice per day on weekdays, at 7 AM and 5 PM, and then once per day on the weekends.  Since I’ve got everything filtered pretty well, my inbox is usually near empty when I open it.

I’m not really setting a time constraint on my working “hours”, but I just want to make sure that I spend a little more time with my friends, family, and girlfriend.  In particular, there are a handful of people that I just haven’t had time for the past six months that I want to make sure I get back in touch with.  An hour phone call or a night of drinks needs to be OK now, whereas in March it wasn’t unfortunately. It sucks, but there’s always a trade off. If you want to go balls out on a project something is going to suffer.

I LOVE the fact that with a few part-time workers I can get my warehouse days down to 2/week and eliminate things like stocking shelves and breaking down boxes. At this point, all of our time is much more valuable than that. The more freedom I have, the more driven I am, the more productive I am, and the happier I am. I feel like we’re really really close to hitting that point where my job is almost “perfect”, which is exciting. Instead of focusing on getting to that point, I can focus on achieving some higher level business and personal goals.

Hobbies are a different story.  I realized something these past few months – my favorite hobbies are running my blog (and all of the emails and meetups that result from it) and working on web-apps. Which is great, because both are beneficial to our business.  I just don’t really have the desire right now to watch movies or play video games or read fiction books or make a custom.  I see so much opportunity out there and I want to “throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks”.  Having the steadiness of DI allows me to just do whatever I want when it comes to the side projects without much financial risk.  The only real non work related hobby (if you call it that) I still have is working out.  I still am on my regular gym schedule and I enjoy going for regular hikes with my girlfriend.  That won’t change.  I’m constantly challenging myself to be in better shape and to eat better.  But the other stuff really does nothing for me anymore.

For Everyone

I realize that for a lot of people the lifestyle that I’m creating for myself and that we’re creating for our business would not be desired. Or maybe more appropriately, not ideal. That’s OK, as long as you recognize what is important to you. I value time and freedom over money. I didn’t leave my job to make more money. I was making more than enough at age 23. I could have made that salary with a 3% bonus each year and been monetarily satisfied. It was everything else that I wasn’t happy with – the purpose behind the work I was doing, the lack of freedom at a traditional 9 -5, and the bureaucracy of a system that prevented people from doing their best. For you, the goals might be different. If you want to solve the energy crisis or buy the New York Yankees, you probably won’t be satisfied with a business as small as ours.

This past week has been the most fun I’ve ever had running a business.  Part of it is seeing the positive results of what we’ve done.  We’ve accomplished everything as a team, and accomplishments are always better when you have people to share them with…especially when you all went through the ups and downs together.  Even more so though, I think it’s the infinite potential that I see now, both for DI and other upcoming projects.  It’s just so much fun waking up every day.  I find myself still working long hours, even though I could dial it down a bit.  Not sure how long it’ll last, but for now all I really feel like doing all day long is growing our company.  It doesn’t seem like work at all, which is a good feeling to have.  I think it’s common for the first few months, but to feel like this a few years into it is awesome.

I’ve already been able to add a bunch of minor features to DI (mostly on the back end), I’m starting to start doing some non-programming (i.e. marketing) projects, I’m working on redesigning and revamping my blog, and I’m starting to work on some side projects.  And I see the light at the end of the tunnel to start using our e-commerce platform on other sites, which is when it will really shine.   In particular, the poker and fitness sections of Tastefully Driven have really done well.  We have solid customer bases already in both, and we have relationships with A+ vendors, so in the next year or two we’re really going to try to establish ourselves in those industries.  The idea of building a web app in conjunction with an e-commerce store really intrigues me as a potentially great business idea  – bring users in with the web app, and have the store along side of it instead of ads or premium accounts.  Both fitness and poker have huge unmet needs when it comes to web apps.   All of these sites will tie back into one product management/inventory system, and all will show on Tastefully Driven and be sold on Amazon under the TD name (as we do with all of our products now), which is when TD could really explode.  There’s a much bigger vision here than just detailing, and the massive potential that comes with that just excites the hell out of me.