Except anyone who has run a business knows that’s not true. Business success does not have such a simple formula. The time and effort you put in does not necessarily correlate to success at all. In fact, a lot of hard work can leave you in a much worse spot than when you got started (think of the entrepreneur who spends his/her life savings on a failed venture).

And since this isn’t something we’re taught, and since most of our parents and teachers would never even consider teaching it (or know how to teach it), we’re all taken by surprise the first time we start a venture, work really hard on it, and don’t see the results we’re used to seeing all of our life. We expect that if we just put in a few weeks/months/years that we should see comparable success to when we put that much time in to our school or our jobs. Then when we don’t, we get frustrated. Even ventures that ultimately succeed have an unbalanced effort-to-success ratio: you put in the longest and hardest work in the beginning when the success is minimal, with the long term payoff of a venture that has a lot of success for comparatively less effort (for instance, if we stopped working on Detailed Image today, it would probably still grow because of the 5+ year foundation we’ve built).

Most people I’ve known, myself included, learn this pretty quickly. Then you decide whether or not to keep going. If you do, and you’re successful, those years of hard work are much harder than other types of hard work because of the ongoing uncertainty of success and this unbalanced effort-to-success ratio. People who aren’t business owners have a hard time grasping this.

For a successful venture, you don’t just need to work hard. You need to be working on the right stuff, at the right time, in the right market, with the right people, with the right amount of capital, and still have a considerable amount of luck…while also working very hard.

Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and I both told him that we’d cover as much of his work as we could for the rest of the month while he got settled and took care of the plethora of projects that any new home owner is faced with. Just as Greg has covered for us when we have traveled in the past. In my case, Greg covered as much as he could for me while I was in Virginia even though he was finalizing things with the house closing. He and Mike also covered for me during the hurricane disaster.

The most important function of our business (or any business for that matter) is ensuring that our customers have a great experience with us. Sure it would be nice to get some development work done or work on some marketing projects, but those pale in comparison to making sure that every order gets shipped out quickly and accurately, and that those customers who have questions about their order get taken care of quickly. Any time one of those areas weakens, we immediately shift our resources in that direction. Could Greg have answered all of the customer service questions? Probably. But it certainly would have been stressful for him, and the customers probably would have had to wait longer to have their inquiry resolved. It makes total sense for me to shift off of development and over to customer service. This just seems completely logical to us.

There’s a nice side benefit to this: I get to see the business from a completely different perspective. As an owner, that’s hugely valuable to me. In this case, I’m answering a lot of customer service questions as we’re in the process of hiring someone to do just that. Think that will help in the interviewing and training process?

I think this is somewhat to be expected of owners of a small business. The good owners at least anyway. It becomes more difficult when you expect this level of teamwork from your employees. Everything we do has a purpose, so the last thing I ever want to hear from an employee is “I’m not doing that because it’s not my job”. That’s the antithesis of teamwork. As I look around at the people I’ve worked with over the years, it seems like this is a personality trait you either have or don’t have. If someone is out for themselves without regard for their peers or the company’s customers, no amount of structure is going to help them become a good teammate.

However, I think a company can make it easier or more difficult for someone to be a team player. If someone’s raise is rigidly tied to specific projects getting done, it’s hard to fault them for doing anything other than those projects. If, as managers, you don’t do a good job of explaining “why” you need someone to shift gears and help somewhere else, it’s hard to expect someone to be enthusiastic about it. Conversely if you tell your employees that you value and reward teamwork from the beginning, and you fully explain how that teamwork helps everyone, then I think it falls back on the person’s personality.

We’re lucky right now. Our warehouse manager Charlie is absolutely great at doing what’s best for the team. I think it’s one of his very best traits. This has never even come close to being an issue for us. However, as we keep adding people to our team, it might be more tricky. Alongside a strong work ethic, it’s arguably the most important trait you want in an employee. Depending on how good we do at the interviewing process, we may or may not end up being good at detecting it. We will however quickly get rid of anyone who isn’t’ working for the good of the team. I’m a big believer in “hire slowly, fire fast”.

At 6 PM EST tonight Detailed Image was among the first retailers to begin selling the new Meguiar’s DA Microfiber Correction System. Meguiar’s is arguably the most well-known detailing brand in the world, and this product line has been receiving tons of hype.

The whole process has been fascinating to watch unfold. For the most part, everything has happened within the last week. Everyone has been working their ass off to ensure that at 6:01 PM tonight we had done everything we could to have an exhaustive online presence for these hot new products.

My role in the whole thing was relatively minimal. The products are live on our site, but are only available for pre-order since we’re not expecting them in until next week. This created the potential for some new issues to arise. There were a few things I had to tweak in the code to make our pre-order system work a little smoother. I made sure a new PPC campaign was ready to roll right at 6. I made a post on Twitter. And I’ve done anything else I could to support the guys as the details have rapidly unfolded over the past few days.

Todd from Esoteric Auto Detail, who runs our Ask a Pro Blog, has been working with Meguiar’s, along with several of our other authors, to test and refine the products and the process since back in October. His exhaustive review and how-to article went live right at 6 PM and no doubt will be come the definitive resource on the subject in the detailing community. We also had three other reviews from our pro detailers that are now up for enthusiasts to read.

Mike did an amazing job coordinating the sales and promotion effort as he always does. He created the banner for the home page, the banner for the site, the coupon code for the promotion we’re running (3x Free Towels when you pre-order with us), wrote a blog post, sent out the newsletter, posted to Facebook, and created our sale page…all while not knowing much about the products until the last second.

And Greg quarterbacked the whole thing. He spent countless hours on the phone and over email confirming details about the products and the launch “rules”. He placed our order literally the second he learned that we could, hopefully putting us towards the top of the list. We saw, as Oke referred to him after visiting, the pitbull come out in full force He coordinated all of his efforts with Mike, Todd, Charlie, and I to ensure that we were all on the same page come 6 PM tonight. If he hadn’t pushed so hard, it’s likely that we would have missed the boat on this entire opportunity.

Time will only tell how successful these products are, and how integral our fast launch was to that success. We wanted to do everything we could within the rules to give ourselves every advantage possible, and I can confidently say that we did that. In the first few hours pre-orders have been pouring in, so my guess is that it was most definitely worth our effort. Of the sites I checked, we actually were the first ones offering the products. All indications from people like Todd, who know infinitely more about this stuff than I do, is that this system is a “game-changer” so it’s likely that once the early adopters start to report back on their results it will really start to pick up.

In addition to this product launch, we’re all still pushing forward really hard on all of our other projects. I suspect that the LockerPulse ad platform will be released in the next few days. The hard work that everyone has been putting in is ridiculously contagious. I tend to be pretty intrinsically motivated, but when you look up and see everyone else working their ass off you can’t help but get an extra kick of adrenaline. There’s no telling what this team can accomplish this year if things keep going like this.

Here’s the list I put together on 8/20:

• Implement new warehouse pulling system
• Do LP Redesign w/Mike
• Add LP Sources, review all existing sources for quality
• Revamp DI Checkout process
• Create and launch DI Mobile Site
• Create DI Holiday shipping system
• Add Wish List/Save Cart feature to DI
• Improve DI/SL MySQL query optimization
• Complete cart Admin functionality

We also hired our first full-time employee during that time period too.

Now, some of that stuff I can’t/won’t/shouldn’t delve into exactly what it involved, but all of it was important and it all wrapped up nicely heading into the Holidays. When I get back, I can focus on 1) the extra day-to-day work involved in making things run smoothly during a busy season, and 2) finally devoting the majority of my “project time” to growing LockerPulse.

I realize that my posts have dropped off a bit. I’ll probably end up posting a bit more once I get back. The past few months I chose getting an extra hour or two of work done over writing a post. It’s always a balancing act – if business and/or my personal life are super busy, the first thing that I’ll trim back on is the blog posts.

At the end of any given day, I always feel better when I put in a hard days work. It’s always very satisfying to set aggressive goals and then nail all of them.

I’m not sure whether or not I’ll post when I’m gone. I’ll definitely be back in early November when the fun begins!

While I was waiting though, I noticed that one of the ladies helping people was really good at her job. I mean really good. She worked about as fast as a human being could work, she knew every single form that everyone needed for every situation (of the 8-10 people in front of me that she helped, it seemed like everyone was there for a different reason), and she still managed to greet people nicely and smile at everyone. When a mother brought her 16 year old son up to sign up for his permit test and announced that it was his birthday today, she wished him a happy birthday…and then two seconds later jumped over to another line because she overheard the conversation and needed to correct something that the photo/eye-exam lady said to a customer. I was sort of in awe just watching her kick ass at a stressful job that most people would despise.

She turned a generally miserable experience into a not-so-bad experience. I was able to get in and out of there in 15 minutes, when a less experienced, less interested person doing the same job could have turned it into a chaotic 45 minute mess. If I had to guess, she probably does that same thing all day long, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year. She makes that DMV tolerable, which is quite a feat. Most people probably don’t notice…I’m sure there would be plenty of times where I wouldn’t have noticed.

People like her make the world a better place, and they often don’t get enough credit for doing so.

Update – To clarify, I actually got called up to a different line so I did not interact with her directly. She was, however, the person most responsible for me having a quick experience – without her the line would have likely been backed up for a very long time. Anyway, given the general sentiment of this post, I do think it’s appropriate that I try to give her some more appreciation for a job well done than an anonymous blog post that doesn’t even mention the location of the DMV. I’m penning a letter to the DMV as we speak…

Be An Executioner

It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

* Awful idea = -1
* Weak idea = 1
* So-so idea = 5
* Good idea = 10
* Great idea = 15
* Brilliant idea = 20

* No execution = $1
* Weak execution = $1000
* So-so execution = $10,000
* Good execution = $100,000
* Great execution = $1,000,000
* Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.

Ideas are worthless. The best entrepreneurs I know have executed very basic business ideas with extreme precision over long periods of time. How they separate themselves from the competition, and how they innovate, is simply by being consistent and using their data and their experience to improve their product/service. Hell, look at us – Detailed Image is arguably the simplest most vanilla business we’ve attempted, but it’s undoubtebly the most successful. Assuming there’s a market for your idea (there almost always is if you’re scratching your own itch), the idea itself becomes of very little value. It’s the execution of said idea that matters. It’s your passion. It’s your work ethic. It’s your consistency.

Reminds me of that post I wrote last year: Consistency = Success = Happiness?.

When you give it your all every day, not only do you feel awesome for having done so, but you are making progress.

And at the end of the day, I’ve never felt better from taking a day off of laying bricks than I have from a hard days work of laying them. Ever.

One brick at a time.

That’s so true. That article was in the context of dieting and exercising, but it just as easily applies to entrepreneurship.

I enjoy taking time off. But I never quite enjoy it as much as the feeling I get after a hard day’s work. It doesn’t get any better than going to bed knowing I’ve done my very best for the day. It feels great knowing that whatever I worked on is one little tiny bit better than it was when the day began. I value hard work…in myself and in the people around me.

Increasingly as we learn more and more about what makes us as humans happy, we’re becoming aware that those who are work hard, believe in their work, and achieve things they believe in, are happier than those who don’t. To be honest, that’s so obvious that we really don’t even need studies to tell us this.

Yet somehow this value seems to be one that is increasingly lost in our current culture. It’s sad that I can honestly say I know plenty of people who have never put forth their full effort into anything. There are so many variables that you can not control in life and in business. One of the few that you can control is your work ethic.

We reply with something to the extent of “our team built the platform in-house for solely our own use”. If I get the question, I also tend to then suggest Shopify and Magento as solutions that might work for them.

I enjoy the question because it really validates the hard work that we all put into it. I often wonder how much more interested people would be if they could see just how effective our back end is at improving our warehouse operations.

However, I’ve noticed that a good portion of people reply with a semi-snotty remark along the lines of “well I’m not as lucky to have a team of expert web developers” or, my personal favorite, “I don’t have the resources that you have so I’d never be able to do that”.

I know that they don’t necessarily know the history of our company, but from my perspective those comments sound ABSURD. We had no resources when we got started. If you go back 5 years, we all had no web experience and were in the process of graduating college. We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of experience doing much of anything. You know what we did have? Work ethic.

Everything we’ve done is stuff that anyone could have done. Aside from a few hundred dollars on books, I didn’t spend anything to learn how to program. PHP and MySQL are free and open source. So are Linux and Apache. Web hosting and domains are dirt cheap (less than $100/year to get started with a site).

It was just a shear matter of building a site, learning something new, improving the site, and then doing that over and over again for years. While I was finishing school, and while I had a full time job. It wasn’t always the easy choice or the convenient choice, but I made sure I found time to work at it because it was something I truly wanted to be good at.

We have a “team of experts” with a lot of “resources” because we worked hard to achieve that (although I’m not sure either of those things is completely true…). We have advantages that they don’t only because we value those skills enough to have made them a priority and have worked at improving them for years and years.

I made it a priority. I worked hard. People don’t like to hear that. They like to hear the easy solution, the solution that doesn’t require any effort on their part. That’s why the majority of people aren’t very good at much of anything. Putting in hours upon hours of hard work over the course of weeks/months/years is a lost art.

But in business it’s a little different. When your fiscal year aligns with the calendar year like ours does, it just makes sense to take a step back and evaluate 2009 vs 2008 vs 2007 and then put together a tentative game plan for 2010.

Last year we did a good job of setting realistic goals. We got the new Detailed Image launched. We hired our first employee. We grew a lot in a year when many companies didn’t. We passed the point where we were “ramen profitable” and became very profitable. Essentially everything I had hoped that we would do, we did, plus a lot more good stuff that came from the unexpected.

A few weeks ago we met with our lawyer for our annual meeting. Then earlier this week we had a long team meeting about the past year and the coming year. I couldn’t have been more pleased with how things went.

From a business perspective, I’m really excited for 2010. I think we’ve done a good job of thinking through what our goals are and creating a work environment moving forward that meets everyone’s needs. It really is important to us that everyone involved has work that they are passionate about, a reasonable work load, and the flexibility that they want for their personal lives. Even more so than making a few more bucks. I love that.

Personally though, 2009 wore me out. It went from launching the DI site, to moving into a new apartment, to a whole bunch of trips (bachelor party, vacation, wedding, talk at JMU, etc), to the holiday season. It was a great year, but I think I’d like to slow that stuff down for at least the first half of ’09. I like traveling and keeping a busy social life, but last year was too busy at times. And for me personally, when things get too busy I get stressed out and start to lose out on time at the gym, time to read, time to just relax by myself or with my family/friends/girlfriend. I start looking forward to trips ending more than I look forward to them starting, and that’s not how I want things to be.

It’s interesting how this stuff unfolds. For the first two years after I left my job, it was business 24×7 just trying to survive and not take a job. In 2008 I made a concerted effort to get my personal life back on track a bit. And in 2009 I had to re-focus and get the DI site built so I could do my part in helping us take that next step as a company.

This year should be a little bit of a leveling out. Which I think is natural as a company ages. We’ve got some really really cool stuff to work on. Stuff that excites me and I cannot wait to show the world. My personal life and living situation is the best it’s been since I left my job (maybe ever), so I hope that allows me to just enjoy my work and enjoy my time off. Sometimes I over-extend myself and try to do too much, so this year I’m just going to try to keep it simple.

I’ll probably say “no” a little more than I have in the past. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone. It is possible to do a few things really well though. Overextending myself definitely does not make me happy. What does make me happy is running a profitable business, creating jobs, giving back to our community, developing a lot of great personal relationships, having some time to myself, and hopefully having fun doing it all. That’s what I’m shooting for in 2010.

When you’re in school, your grades are – for the most part – tied to your effort. If you study hard, you’ll score higher on tests. Even if you do bad on tests, you get credit for attending class, asking questions, and doing homework. If you put in extra time after class, your teacher/professor will likely notice and adjust your grade accordingly. Your hard work is directly tied to your success: you work harder and longer and you always get better grades.

Same thing in the corporate world. Work hard, put in extra hours, and you’ll inevitably get good reviews, get raises, and get good recommendations. Even if your project bombs and costs the company a ton of money, your boss will still likely give you a glowing review if you come in early and stay late. You work hard. It wasn’t your fault that the project failed.

That’s not what happens when you run a business. You can throw all of the hours in the day at something, all of your heart and soul, but if the work is misguided it doesn’t matter. All of a sudden your hard work isn’t necessarily rewarded.

Running a business is hard. The odds are stacked against you. You have competition that has more resources and more experience. There are a lot of ways your business can go wrong. There are a lot of things you cannot control.

Your smart work is what’s rewarded. You still have to work hard, but the amount of effort doesn’t directly correlate to success. You have to decide what matters and what doesn’t, and then spend your time doing what matters and ignoring everything else. Most people suck at this because someone else has always made those decisions for them. Their entire life someone has told them what is important and how they should be spending their time.

Starting a successful business always requires effort, hard work, and persistence. But it also takes effort, hard work, and persistence applied to the right things. You can’t just blindly throw hard work at something and have success. Working hard is no longer the difficult part. Figuring out what to work hard on is.