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 the positions that directly interact with their customers.

And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited to learn from the experience, and 3) they have the shittiest possible jobs to do…literally. The episode can be watched in full online. Unlike 99.99% of the shows on television, this may actually make be worth watching on a regular basis.

In this instance, O’Donnell made it a point to correct some of the injustices that his employees encountered. Which was awesome. It was nice to see him take action. But it was even better to see him connect this to the big picture. Several times he said how his cost cutting initiatives to make the company more efficient were backfiring in ways that he couldn’t have imagined.

In a large organization like WM, this is a huge problem. The people making the policies are often several levels away from those enacting them. It seems like total common sense, but even in a large company like WM, you have to have some connection to your front line employees that are actually doing the day to day work and interacting directly with your customer base. Larry and his board really didn’t understand their own business.

The answer for most businesses isn’t going on a reality show. But that doesn’t mean that whomever is putting a new process in place shouldn’t actually do it themselves for a day or two. You can learn so much more than any amount of data can give you by just doing it and talking to those who do it on a daily basis. It seems like a waste of time but – as this show is probably going to prove every single week – it’s often the best use of an executive’s time.

There absolutely has to be a regular feedback loop where management solicits information from the people who are doing the actual work. If you empower them at their own job they’ll be much happier and more productive, and you’ll develop more efficient processes as a result of it (and in the end make more money and be more profitable). Again, seems like common sense, but how many businesses actually do it?

Now, in a small business like ours this is much easier but still not impossible to screw up. We’re at the point where the owners are all trying to remove ourselves from the day to day operations of our warehouse. By the end of the year it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that we’ll have a full time warehouse manager and 1-3 part time employees reporting to him.

All of a sudden we’ll be a step removed from our part time employees. It’s not too hard to see how we could lose touch with them while we “focus on more important things”. But the most important thing is always how your existing business operates on a day to day basis. If customers aren’t being taken care of in a way that meets our standards, nothing else really matters.

One of the reasons that our systems have worked so well is that we’ve designed them for us to use. We build it, we try it, and we tweak it, based upon our own feedback (and now the feedback of Charlie and John). We won’t always be the ones pulling the orders or stocking the shelves on a daily basis (in fact, we rarely do that stuff now), but we have to make a commitment to do it somewhat regularly…especially when we make a change to our processes. And we need to make sure our employees feel empowered to tell us what works, what doesn’t, and their ideas for improvement.

I think for the most part we’ve done that so far. Each of our employees has made several suggestions that have been implemented and made the system as a whole better, which I think is a good measuring stick for this kind of stuff – their willingness to speak up, and our willingness to implement. But as we grow it will take more of a concerned effort to achieve.

Today I was in the warehouse by myself (Mike was sick, the other guys all had stuff going on). It was the first time since the holidays that I pulled orders. It was a good thing. It reminded me what the job was like. It got my mind off of some of the other projects I was on and for one day got me thinking about the things that our employees think about. It was a very good use of my time, which is something I’ll hopefully always keep in the back of my mind.

If I don’t, I’m sure I’d end up like the millions of other business owners who make decisions based upon numbers on a screen without being able to consider the true impact that it will have on their employees, their customers, and inevitably their bottom line.

I’ve met several of these people in person and each meetup has been better than I could have imagined.  It’s so hard to find young people with true passion for entrepreneurship, that when you come across one, you feed off each other in an incredible way.  I will always be grateful to Dave from Mind Petals and the Ryan’s from Brazen for enabling these relationships.  They are truly priceless.

However, from what I’ve seen, these networks seem to have a really really hard time making money.  Aside from there not being an obvious revenue model, you have this really interesting dichotomy that you have to deal with:  for success you need these young entrepreneurs doing amazing things and interacting with your community, but for the entrepreneur to actually do something amazing they likely don’t have the time to be an active member in your community.  Unless the network is helping the entrepreneur directly with sales, there are probably more useful immediate relationships that the young business owner can be developing to ensure their business doesn’t flop (and if the YE is using the network for selling their product/services, you probably don’t want them there).

It’s hard enough to make a living running your own business.  Blogging is nice because you can set the rules – what you want to cover, how you want to cover it, and how frequently you want to post.  Throw in the obligatory Web 2.0 social networks that everyone is on – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc – and these young entrepreneurs that you’re trying to build a business around just don’t have the time to do all of the things that you want them to do.  No matter how cool the site, no matter how slick the features, there are just so many hours in the day.  And personally, after a long hard day, a lot of times I just want to do something that isn’t work related.  These sites definitely are facing an uphill battle.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m rooting for them to succeed, but I just don’t think I can give a lot of my time to help them do so.  I fear that other participants are in the same boat.

With all of this said, I’m interested to see how well the new and improved Brazen Careerist is received.  I was given access to the new site to test for a week prior to today’s launch.  The complete overhaul is aimed to become a “living resume” for each of it’s members, a showcase for their blog posts, comments, and interactions within the site, in addition to posting their actual resume.

The biggest change is their new Fan Feed.  When you log in, you’re presented with a Facebook-like feed page instead of the old home page:

Otherwise, for the most part, the site feels like and operates like an improved version of the existing BC.  The old “featured posts” that were on the home page are now on the sidebar.

I definitely like the move.  It’s an improved product.  I hope that Brazen Careerist finds a way to thrive – not only by connecting YEs and helping young professionals develop their careers, but also by finding the right mix of sponsors/advertisers/premium offerings to flourish financially.  If anyone can do it, they can.

During my tour of our warehouse I mentioned that we made the switch recently to anti-static biodegradable packing peanuts.  Part of the reason was to protect our products better.  Part of the reason was to create a uniform packing process (previously we had just been re-using all sorts of packing material from our vendors).  And of course part of the reason was because it is good for the environment and – in conjunction with using 100% recycled paper – we can tell our customers that we’re “going green” with their shipments.

George was able to strike a killer deal with our new distributor, so we stocked up:

Which left us with the question:  what do we do with the packing material that our vendors send to us?  We decided to temporarily fill garbage bags with it and then figure it out later.  However, after a few months it really piled up.  We’re receiving orders from our vendors on a daily basis, many times 2-3 in a day.

I had read an article somewhere about freecycle,  which is basically craigslist for free shit, so we decided to give it a shot.  In their own words:

It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.

Pretty good idea huh?  They even have companies like Waste Management as their sponsors.  I signed up for the Albany, NY group and posted that we had packing material and pallets available to anyone willing to come pick them up.  I didn’t expect too much.

Instead I received about 8 inquires in the first 24-48 hours!  Within a week we had about 20 pallets and a whole bunch of packing materials cleared out of our warehouse.  We even made friends with a local company that makes signs and are currently working with them to improve our current outdoor signage (which currently consists of a few laminated sheets of paper).   Anyway, freecycle is an awesome site.  Highly recommended to anyone moving and about to take a trip to the dump.  Snap a few digital pictures of the things you’ll be getting rid of and do a quick post.   After all, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure

Merry Christmas Everyone!

When I woke up today and combed through my morning email I was shocked to see that yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing a browser today.  Usually these things leak out sooner, but I hadn’t heard anything other than the same type of vague rumors that you hear about a gPhone or gOS.

Google Chrome, as it’s called, was released today at noon and can be downloaded for XP/Vista (Linux and Mac soon to follow).  After reading the comic and watching the video, I was excited to download it and take it for a spin. While all of the features sounded nice, I didn’t know what to expect.  Just because they say that they “started a browser from scratch” and that it’s designed for “today’s web applications and not the web pages of 1998″ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera, etc.

After playing with it for 10 minutes I feel confident in saying:  it is better than all of them.  Noticably better.  It is now my default browser.

Here are my thoughts:

• It is sooooooo much faster than other browsers that it isn’t funny.  Google spent a lot of time highlighting the new javascript rendering and crash control, and for good reason. Pages load a lot faster than in FF3 or IE7, and the “crash control” isolates each tab so if one crashes your entire browser session doesn’t.  They even have a task manager where you can see which tabs are using the most resources, very similar to the Windows task manager.  I tried apps like Gmail and Google Reader and they absolutely flew relative to the other browsers I had open.
• New tabs aren’t blank.  Instead they show thumbnails of your most visited sites, a list of your most recent bookmarks, a search box to search bookmarks, and a list of your most recent searches.
• Gone is the search box in the upper right.  Everything is in one bar – your history, your searching, and your web addresses.  The first drop down for anything you type is “search on Google”.  Subtle yet awesome.
• Less clutter – I’d say I have an extra 5% viewing space than I do in FF3.  Despite that, it’s still super simple to find everything.  Nothing I can think of that other browsers have is inherintly missing.  It just works.
• It appears to render exactly like Firefox, which is what I figured it would do (since portions are modeled on Mozilla’s engine).  This is good news for developers.
• Speaking of which, the developer tools are solid.  I still prefer Firebug in Firefox, but that might be just because it’s what I know and am familiar with.  The javascript debugging appears to be better than other tools I’ve used, although I don’t do a ton of JS debugging right now.
• Did I mention it’s REALLY FAST?

Download it and see for yourself.  It installs in seconds and imports everything from Firefox or IE so you can pick up right where you left off.

I have yet to really consider how much of a mainstream impact this could have and how it could change the future of the web.  For the time being I’m just enjoying a new browsing experience (I’m typing this post in it right now).  In the past I’ve been critical of all of the half-assed crap that Google releases and slaps “beta” on, but this is different.  It is very refined.  Microsoft should definitely be worried.  Google is creeping more and more into our everyday lives where Microsoft used to be.  Can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

P.S. The spacing on this post was messed up when I first hit submit. Guess it isn’t perfect yet.

P.S.S. I had some trouble in phpMyAdmin (which is how we access our MySQL databases).  Chrome wasn’t executing queries.  It’s no longer my default browser.  That lasted all of 30 minutes.  Oh well, I still stand by everything I said above.  For most browsing it is still fantastic.  I’m sure they’ll work out the minor kinks soon.

We didn’t know how good of cell phone reception we’d get.  We didn’t know if the router would cover the entire warehouse.  We didn’t know if the speeds would be adequate.  We could have totally fallen flat on our face with this risk…but we didn’t.   I wanted to make sure I wrote a follow-up post so that everyone knew how well this has worked for us. This solution for internet service has absolutely been one of the better decisions we’ve made.  In fact, I plan on using this same setup at home (being able to “take your connection with you” by just pulling the card out of the router and putting it in your lapper is sooo cool).

Before I get into specifics, keep in mind that we are about 30 minutes outside of Albany in an area that resembles farm land more than the inner city…meaning we don’t get the worlds best cell phone coverage.  Also keep in mind that the warehouse is a steel framed building, which certainly isn’t helping reception either.  After almost five months of use, here are my thoughts:

• Connection speeds are fast – generally within the range that the broadband card states (600 kbps – 1.4 Mbps download and average upload speeds of 350 – 500 kbps).  Now if you’re uploading movies you aren’t going to like an upload speed of 350 kbps, but for our daily activities these speeds are more than enough.  The router certainly doesn’t prohibit you from getting the maximum available connection speed.
• Connection is strong.  Everywhere in the 5,300 sq-ft warehouse you get a full five-bar connection.  It’s nice to know you can move around and not lose a signal.  Again, being in a steel framed building you just never know what you’re getting.
• Downtime is minimal.  In five months, I’d say we’ve only had one day where we lost connection for a significant amount of time.  It was about 2 hours one morning.  Otherwise, just clicking a button on the router to disconnect / reconnect always solves the problem in less than a minute.  My home internet service is down more often than this is.
• There’s no slowdown when all four of use are connected at once.  These broadband cards aren’t necessarily made for this, so I was worried that the connection would lag or we’d get kicked off if there was too much combined uploading or downloading going on.  I’ve never noticed a difference whether there were five computers using it (our lappers + the shipping desktop) or just one.

In sum:  if you have a Sprint Mobile Broadband card you’d be nuts not to pick one of these up.  For us, trimming a $300/month expense down to a $60/month expense was huge.  Every penny adds up, and that $240 is money we can use to market our sites, pay other warehouse expenses, or pay our salaries.

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.

In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured I’d always be an iTunes Store guy.

That is, until I started seriously playing around with Grooveshark. One of the best parts about Music-Alerts drawing some attention is that I’ve received praise from – and consequently struck up conversations with – some young startups in the music industry. One such new acquaintance is Andrew Wise of the upstart company Grooveshark, which was started by three University of Florida students. It’s so unique and has so many features, that I’ll just cut to the chase and list off what it does:

• There are two components – your online profile and the file-sharing software (like old Napster or Limewire) that accesses your MP3 files.
• You can listen to streaming music for free on the site as much as you want.
• You can create playlists, add friends, receive suggestions, etc (all the social networking stuff).
• When you want to download a track, you add funds to your account and buy it DRM free for $0.99. Royalties are paid to the labels, to Grooveshark, and to the person who you’re downloading the song from. Hence the slogan “everybody gets paid”.

After being invited to be a BETA tester, I just went in minutes ago and set up my profile and added $5 to my account. I then proceeded to search for a song, download it, and import it into iTunes (gotta be able to transfer it to the iPod). It worked awesome. Bottom line – as long as Grooveshark is able to strike up deals with all the labels and be legal, it’s now where I’m starting my music search. It’s a cross between a social network, p2p file sharing system, and streaming music service. For the same price as a song on iTunes, I get it DRM free and I get the advantages of a social network that knows my music habits (incidentally, if I have a feature request it would be to import my iTunes library XML file so it already knows what music I like).

The only real question is about the legalities. What are the origins of the music I’m downloading, and if 90+% of the music on the site is bootleg, how will record companies feel about it? On one hand, they might like the fact that they’re actually making money from it when they otherwise wouldn’t be. On the other hand, they might not like the fact that other people are getting a cut for uploading it. Only time will tell. I’m certainly rooting for it to work.

P.S. – the Music-Alerts Facebook App is REAL buggy. I know about it, I just hate debugging under the constraints of Facebook. I’ll fix it…eventually. My bad

Well supposedly today they are supposed to launch so I figured I’d give my $.02 on whether or not I thought it was worth using.  I’ve been a beta tester for a little less than a week now, and I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing:

What they claim to be:  “The world’s first true live search engine.  Searching the internet will never be the same.”

What they actually are:  A browser plug-in that starts with search results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN (your choice) and then indexes the pages on the domain of the top results “live” using your computer to expand upon and re-order the results.

What I like:  It’s an interesting way to look at the web.  For example, a Google Search for “Custom McFarlane” returns 2 results from SportsLizard and 3 results from articles linking to SportsLizard that I wrote.  Clearly we dominate that niche.

A search on MyLiveSearch starts with SportsLizard at the top, but ends with eBay dominating the rankings because there are hundreds of custom McFarlane figures being sold on eBay. SportsLizard is the second site that appears, but it takes a bunch of scrolling (or some refining of the results) to find SL.  As MyLiveSearch crawls the sites “live” it re-orders them based upon what they find.

You’ll notice that it does a poor job of sorting which pages are most important.  Clearly the Custom McFarlane home page is most relevant to the query, but it shows other SL pages ahead of it when I narrow the results to only show pages from our site.  MyLiveSearch also shows you who indexed the site and when – so they start with a page Google indexed a few days ago and then index and sort the rest “live”.

I personally think they did a bad job on this query, ranking eBay ahead of us because of the quantity of content.  However, it’s still pretty cool to watch and I can at least relate to where they are coming from and appreciate their attempt at innovation.   There are a handful of features that allow you to focus results more on news results (i.e. Google News) and group the results by site, but nothing that really does much for me.  Overall for other queries I got solid results, but nothing I’d say that was that much better than Google.

What I don’t like about it:  In order:  installing a plug-in to run a search sucks, having to login to perform a search sucks, the time to run a search is annoying (I had searches take up to a minute to complete…eh), and the false promise that you actually index the web live doesn’t sit well with me.  I suppose you are technically indexing live, but it would be a lot more convincing if the live indexing was being done on a central server and not on my CPU.

Bottom line:  MyLiveSearch is  creative and different, but not so creative and so different that Google couldn’t copy it in a few days.  I’m pretty sure that if you gave me a few months I could program something similar…and I’m not even that great of a programmer.   In the end, the login and plugin crush any chance I have of using it with any regularity.  Fun to toy with, but Google still rules.