I think that this is one area that our current team excels in. For us this is especially important because we’re scattered in various locations. It’s very rare that my partners and I are all at the warehouse on the same day, so at least one or two of us is working remotely in addition to our three contractors who all live in other regions of the country.

It’s a particularly fascinating topic because I think doing it successfully is part cultural, part training, and part each individual’s personality. My partners and I can affect the first two, but you can’t make other people be be unselfish and value other people’s time as much as their own. That’s something that we have to do our best to vet in the hiring process. It’s one of the many reasons why we communicated with our applicants so much via email prior to even interviewing them. You can learn a surprising amount about someone by observing their email behaviors.

Having worked in organizations of various sizes as well as being a part of a growing company that’s constantly changing in size, there are a few rules that I’ve adopted as the keys for doing internal email successfully:

1. Know who to CC and who not to CC. We’ve all seen organizations where everyone CC’s everyone to cover their own ass. My rule: if someone isn’t directly involved in a project, don’t CC them.
2. Know when email is the right medium and when phone/IM is better. I wrote about this in detail last year. In most cases email is sufficient. We generally respond to each others’ emails in less than 24 hours. Only interrupt with IM or a phone call if you need an answer sooner.
3. Know when to respond and when not to. This is a tough one. I like to put myself in other people’s shoes. If I would want a response from them – even if it’s just “great idea!” or “keep me posted, I’m interested” – then I write a response. If it’s more of a FYI type of email then a response probably isn’t necessary. If you’re not sure, I think you’re always better spending a minute and writing a quick response to show the other person that you’re paying attention.
4. Keep personal stuff out of it. We don’t send any chain emails or pictures of cats dancing on telephone poles. Keep work email for work, and personal email for personal stuff.

What about you: what are your best and worst experiences with internal email? How would you make it better?

Without a doubt, running Detailed Image is reason #1.  We’ve grown significantly since our last large development project, the original launch of LockerPulse in 2010.  I severely underestimated how much time Mike and I have to spend daily on managing/training employees, communication with our team, customer service, accounting, marketing, etc.  The long stretches of development time without interruption are still there, they’re just harder to come by on a consistent basis.

The second reason is that we’re approaching this project a little differently.  We’re taking our best shot right here.  It’s our home run swing.  As I mentioned in that post back in February, we’ve got what we think is enough data to justify taking that one gigantic home run swing with this project.  With that, the level of detail we’re paying attention to is magnified.  Instead of cutting every feasible corner to launch as fast as possible (something I’m 100% in favor of for most projects), we’re allowing ourselves to spend an extra few days to get something right if that’s what it takes.  The fact that we don’t need LockerPulse to bring in any revenue any time soon for us to survive works to our advantage here (although one can see how it could work as a disadvantage if you’re not careful).

Lastly, we’ve had some bad luck.  For instance, our data provider for rosters, schedules, and standings shut down their API last week.  We kind of saw this coming – the service was increasingly bad – so there was a backup plan in place that I got working on as soon as they made an announcement.  In the end it’s for the better, but it easily cost us ~2 weeks and stressed me out quite a bit.  As of a few weeks ago we were hoping to launch on 5/12/12, the two year anniversary of our original launch, but now it’s looking like sometime around Memorial Day.  Such is the risk any time you rely on API’s.

As it’s dragged on (well, dragged on by my standards at least) I’ve been plenty stressed and frustrated.  I’ve worked far too many hours for the work/life balance that I want.   The good news is that the serious development is almost completely done.  The other good news is that it came out awesome.  I absolutely love using it. Seemingly all of the attention to detail has been worth it.  Now comes the fun part: launching so that the rest of the world can use it!

This problem is especially evident when you’re building something new and you have literally nothing to work with. One of the best ways to overcome it and make a decision that’s generally mostly right on the first try is to study what companies have done in similar situations that’s worked. And not just study what they did, but why they did it and why it worked. Essentially, use their data. Or maybe more accurately, use the conclusions drawn from their data to draw your own similar conclusions. Your decision probably won’t be perfect, but it will be good enough to get you in the game.

This recently came up with LockerPulse. One of the first decisions that we made when working on the new LockerPulse was to separate it in to two distinct sites: the application that logged-in users see, and a “marketing site” for registrations, logins, help, informational pages, our blog, etc. Why? Well we noticed that that’s what most other successful web apps do, and with good reason. It’s too complex to try to do everything in a single template as we do now. You end up compromising the quality of the app as well as the effectiveness of the signup process.

A few weeks ago we sat down to start planning out the marketing site. We’ve never built a marketing site before. The #1 goal by far is to convert new visitors in to registered users at a much higher rate than we’ve done in the past. But what we know about converting a sale on DI doesn’t really apply, so we didn’t have much to work with beyond our own opinions.

Instead of diving right in to a design, we took a step back. We made a list of roughly twenty similar web apps (Mint and Evernote are two examples). Most of them have been around for a while, are extremely popular, extremely well funded, are built by really talented teams, and – most importantly – have signed up hundreds of thousands of users. If you think about that for a second then you realize that they’ve likely gone through dozens (maybe hundreds) of iterations before arriving at their current marketing site. Every detail about the design and functionality is the way it is now because it was supported by their data.

When you look at twenty of these sites in a row you start to pick up patterns. Patterns in the design, patterns in the registration process, patterns in the ad copy, patterns in the call-to-action, patterns in the link structure, and much more. At that point we could sit down and mock up our site with quite a bit of certainty that we are going to do is going to work. Or at least not completely suck. Which is really the best you can hope for when you have nothing to work with.

During a meeting that he and I had we discussed ways to better captivate the Twitter audience and take advantage of the immediacy of Twitter as a platform. A few minutes in he had an idea: what if every Thursday we do some sort of Twitter promotion and call it “Twitter Thursday’s.” We could do a variety of different things – product giveaways, contests, coupons, etc – and we could experiment with a variety of time periods ranging from really short (first person to do X gets Y) to the entire day.

I thought this was a really really good idea. My partners thought so too. So, we told him to start at it. Every Thursday he would come up with a promotion idea, run it by us (for now), and then go on Twitter and execute it. The first few worked OK. I suspected that the problem wasn’t the specials, it was our relatively small Twitter audience in comparison to our newsletter list or even our Facebook following.

I brought this up to my partners and we decided to give “Twitter Thursday’s” some extra attention. We adjusted our spring promotions schedule to add in this newsletter that went out last night (Wednesday) to everyone on our list:

We also posted this up to Facebook. By reaching our entire customer base with a few very enticing promotions, we hope to bring attention to “Twitter Thursday’s” and help Reece establish a loyal audience that checks @DetailedImage every Thursday for his promotion.

I’m writing about this because I think there’s a good management lesson here. There’s no surer way to have disgruntled employees than to ignore their good ideas. We’re firm believers that the best ideas come from the ground-up, not the top-down. Good companies and good managers create a culture where ideas for improvement are encouraged and embraced.

If “Twitter Thursday’s” doesn’t work I want it to be because our customers didn’t like it. Not because we didn’t buy in to the idea enough to give it any resources. When an employee has a good idea I think it’s critically important to give them every opportunity to make it a success. If they fail, it shouldn’t be because of you. As a boss, you should be empowering them, not getting in their way. All things being equal, I’d rather prioritize an employee’s really good idea over an equally good idea of mine solely because it gives you an opportunity to show them that you’re the type of employer who gets that.

For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.

Now, in context of the previous questions, he was partially taking a jab at Apple when he made that remark. Still, I find that to be an incredibly refreshing perspective from the leader of a large public company. Which is why Google does crazy cool things like self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses. Even products like Google Docs and Google Apps for Business seemed sort of crazy when they arrived, but have turned out to be incredibly visionary.

And of course, plenty that Google does (see: Wave and Buzz) fails. But I love the overall mentality. It’s the same mentality that we have towards our competitors. Rather than be reactionary to what they do, we’re focused on creating great products for our customers now, while also trying to anticipate what their needs will be one/two/five years down the road.

To me that’s more motivating, more rewarding, and more fun than trying to focus primarily on “beating” a competitor.

Let’s get started fixing this problem immediately.

The goal here is to become influence by GREAT people who have legitimately achieved GREAT things.  And here’s a way to get DIRECTLY INFLUENCED by some of the greatest humans in history.

Read.

That’s it.  Read.

It sounds so simple…but let me explain a little more.

Read auto-biographies where great people first-handedly describe their lives.

It’s incredible what you’ll pick up from these.

You’ll learn how they handled problems.

How they think.

How they defied odds.

You’ll learn about their triumphant successes…as well as all the miserable failures it took to reach them.

While I think it’s critically important for any entrepreneur to have a small group of other local business owners to meet with semi-regularly, and a few other ones to communicate with over the web regularly and meet with occasionally, I’m also increasingly realizing the importance of “surrounding” yourself with great people in the blogs you read, people you follow on Twitter, magazines you read, books you read, podcasts you listen to, and videos you watch. In doing so, you can open yourself up to the influence of many magnitudes more people than you could ever interact with individually.

In retrospect this has actually been less of a problem for us than I’d imagine it is at most small businesses.  Because roughly half of our team is working from home on any given day, and because we’re all relatively healthy and sanitary, we tend  not to be sick all that often, and when someone does get sick we just make sure they stay at home until they’re better.

The problem of course lies in that many times you’re at your most contagious when you are just starting to show symptoms, and if that happens while you’re at the warehouse around other employees…well it can spiral out of control quickly.

Back in early 2009 Mike was on vacation and the rest of us all got a nasty cold, leaving us rotating through the “least sick people” on any given day to go in and pack orders.  I briefly mentioned it back then in a post about my productivity lacking. We’ve always used that as an example of why we should all be cognizant of the ramifications of getting someone else in the business sick, and for the most part we’ve been able to avoid the dreaded company-wide illness.

Of course, I’m writing about this now because we’re potentially in the midst of it happening right now.  We’re also in the midst of one of our busiest warehouse weeks of the year, Detailed Image’s Spring Sale.  In some ways this is crazier than Black Friday through Cyber Monday because we’re concurrently stocking up for our busy months ahead, creating a lot more laborious warehouse work aside from packing boxes.  At a minimum it’s our second busiest week of the year, one that we want to come out of ahead of the game because the tone we set this week has a big impact on the efficiency of the warehouse throughout the spring and summer.  We’re either ahead of the game or we’re playing catch-up for months.

It started last week when my partner Greg started to get sick.  He’s been putting extra time in at the warehouse to train our new full-time employe Reece.  By the end of the week, he had gotten our operations manager Charlie sick and Greg had come down with a sinus infection.  I’m hoping that’s where it ends and the rest of us stay healthy.

Charlie is arguably the most important component in making things go smooth on a week like this because he runs the show in the warehouse.  Keep in mind that we’re already a little short-staffed as it is because our future full-time employee Bobby is wrapping up his last semester in college and has been so busy that he hasn’t been able to put in his usual part-time hours.

So, it’s been a little hectic to say the least.  I put in a full long day of warehouse work (pulling orders, packing boxes, unloading incoming shipments) today from about 7 AM – 4 PM and man am I worn out.  Tomorrow’s schedule is still up in the air depending upon how everyone is feeling.  Hopefully Mike, Reece, and I continue to avoid the cold or things could get real dicey.

The basic idea is that each person involved drafts a group of teams in a fantasy-style draft and then receives a point for each time their team wins a game.  The person with the most points wins.

More specifically:

• Figure out how many teams you’ll each draft.  Take 68 and divide it by the total number of people participating and round the answer down.  Generally this works great with 8 – 12 people but any number can work.  If you have 8 people, 68 divided by 8 is 8.5, so you’ll each draft 8 teams.
• Randomly pick a draft order out of a hat or using a spreadsheet.
• Conduct the draft as a snake draft, meaning that the person who picks last in the first round picks first in the second round.  So the draft order for an 8 team league would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…
• After each game the owner of the winning team is awarded a point.  68 games = 67 total points.  Yes, play-in games are included, which makes for some interesting draft strategy.
• The person with the most points at the end of the tourney wins!

This year my business partners and I decided to do one of these for our company.  Our draft is Tuesday afternoon.  In years past I’ve done one with my friends as well.  In many ways I like this more than the traditional bracket.  You get to enjoy a draft just like in a fantasy league (which, let’s be real, is the most fun part of the entire season), and then you have a clear list of teams to root for.  Unlike in a bracket where after the first round you end up rooting for all sorts of crazy scenarios, you can simply root for your list of teams to win.  I always become big fans of the teams I pick, similar to how you become a big fan of someone you draft in a fantasy league.

Maybe the most enjoyable aspect of the tournament – the upset – is far more entertaining because there’s always a head-to-head matchup in every game.  Instead of everyone’s bracket getting screwed, you have one person who has one of their top seeds lose and another who has one of their bottom seeds win.

I’m posting this Monday evening, which gives you ample time to round up a group of friends and give the draft a try in the next 24 hours or so   Once you try it I bet you’ll be hooked like I am!

Norm Brodsky authors one of my favorite columns, Street Smarts, in which he fields questions from business owners. Norm is a veteran entrepreneur who has probably forgotten more business than I know. However, I have to take him to task for his latest column. Norm Brodsky on the New Breed of Entrepreneur ventures in to something I do know quite a bit about – web entrepreneurship – and I respectfully disagree with the conclusion that he arrived at.

But there’s another reason I am troubled by all these part-time, Web-based businesses. It’s precisely because they are less difficult, less expensive, and less risky. When you’ve scrounged up every last cent and put it all on the line, success or failure becomes a matter of survival. Your instincts become sharper. You approach problems with a totally different mindset. If, in your part-time Web business, no customers show up for a week or two, you can take your time finding a solution. In a business you depend on for your livelihood, you have to come up with a solution immediately. I realize that there are many Web entrepreneurs who make that kind of total commitment to their companies. But my sense is that they are a minority. A decade ago, nearly every aspiring entrepreneur I met was 100 percent committed.

I hope I’m wrong. If I’m right, it could be very bad news for our economy.

I don’t doubt that a higher percentage of entrepreneurs were more fully committed a decade ago (or any other time in history really). What I think Norm is missing is that the raw number of ventures being attempted has skyrocketed*. So what if now only 10% or 20% of new business owners are “fully committed”? That might be 10% of a number that’s 100x larger, likely leaving a much larger raw number of “fully committed” entrepreneurs…which I think is a net win for our economy.

Even the 80% or 90% who aren’t committed and ultimately fail have been exposed to entrepreneurship, which is also probably a good thing for the economy. Maybe that person who couldn’t cut it on their own becomes a better employee because they understand more about how a business is run, or maybe they are someday in a position (personally, at a corporate job, or in government) to influence how small businesses are run and they use their short experience as a business owner to empathize with entrepreneurs and develop solutions that truly work.

The other thing I think Norm misses is just how much better this method of part-time web entrepreneurship is for the individual. I get quite a few emails from people who are miserable at their job and are looking to start a business. I always try to steer them in to keeping their job while getting their venture up and running.

Why? Well, for some people (a lot of people actually), this is just a phase. Maybe they’re pissed off at their boss or they just went through a nasty breakup. For one reason or another their looking for something new and adventurous, and starting a business sounds like a good idea. Until they start doing it and they realize that they’d rather do other stuff when they’re not at work. Which is fine. They didn’t lose anything more than their time and probably a few thousand dollars. They keep their job and move on with life. But could you imagine if they had quit their job? A few months later when their venture failed they could lose their savings or their house, or be in so much debt that they’ll never dig their way out.

Other times, people are very serious and they just can’t get the venture to work for one reason or another. If the customers don’t come after a few months, they can again pull the plug without their entire life being over. They can take a break for a few months and try again without risking their livelihood.

And if the part-time entrepreneur is successful – they have customers and they’re on the road to profitability – they can quit their full-time job with confidence. They also proved their work ethic by starting a successful company while working a full-time job, something that I think is an amazing feat in and of itself.

I feel like I have a pretty good pulse on the web entrepreneur community. If everyone quit their job and became fully committed to every new venture we’d have a lot of miserable, broke entrepreneurs running crappy businesses. Afraid to pull the plug. Afraid to try something new (or just move on with their lives) because quitting would equate to failure at life. That, to me, would be bad for our economy.

*The most recent data I can find from both the Kauffman Foundation and the SBA is from 2009 and suggests that while entrepreneurship is at record highs, it’s nowhere near the 100X I suggested. BUT that doesn’t factor in everyone who has attempted a website or app on the side, which for our purposes makes the number much much higher. It also omits the past few years, where I would surmise you’d see an even greater rise in new businesses than you did during the start of the recession.

In order to make the move happen, Father John Bradley of Blessed Sacrament was tasked with raising over $400,000 as well as coordinating the move on an extremely tight schedule so that there would be no interruption in service to the community. Father Bradley is Greg’s uncle, so we have been aware of the project from the beginning and wanted to help in any way that we could. In addition to volunteering our entire team to help expedite the move (which, due to the amazing number of volunteers, got done with plenty of time to spare), Pure Adapt also made a donation in the company’s name to the project.

Fr. Bradley did a great job ensuring that the media was there to cover the event and raise awareness, which of course led to all of us being on the news or in the paper! I counted four TV stations and two newspapers while we were there. It was actually hard to move a box without it being on camera! As soon as we got home we checked all of the websites, and low and behold the lead story on The Times Union (Albany’s paper) was the soup kitchen with a picture of our newest employee Reece:

Days like this do wonders for the culture of a company. There are no bosses or employees, just a group of people helping out in any way that they can. The teamwork involved in moving a soup kitchen translates directly to the teamwork necessary for everything else that we do. Everyone also gets a reprieve from their busy lives and gets some perspective on just how good they have things. It’s impossible to do something like this and not walk away feeling really lucky and really motivated to do more stuff like this in the future.

I added a section about this project to our Community page. One of the things I’m most proud of about our company is that we really try to take advantage of opportunities we have to give back, whether it’s through our scholarship or teaching or days like this. Hopefully as we grow we can continue to expand upon what we do. It really is a win for everyone involved.

Here are a few links about the soup kitchen project if you’re interested in learning more:

• Albany soup kitchen getting a new home – The Evangelist
• Soup, services and solutions – The Albany Times Union
• Soup kitchen gets a new home – YNN
• Soup kitchen moves to new home – The Albany Times Union