Adam McFarland

Earlier this week we launched a feature called the Detailed Image Daily Special. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds - each day one of our products is on sale for 24 hours. The Daily Special is featured on the homepage with a nifty little countdown clock:

A special message and countdown clock are also on the product page in case someone reaches the product from somewhere other than the home page:

Here’s how we do it: each night at midnight Eastern time our system automatically selects an item and places it on sale. The sale prices is determined from a formula that factors in our profit and cost of goods sold and reduces the price by a set percentage of profit. We did it this way - instead of a flat discount like 25% - because some products we make 200% on and others we make 10% on and we didn’t ever want to be selling an item for less than our cost. We have the option to exclude certain items from the formula. The formula also makes sure we have plenty in stock and that the item hasn’t been on sale recently before selecting it.

Once selected, all other discounts applying to that item are temporarily disabled. An email is then kicked out to anyone on our newsletter list who has opted in for these daily emails (by default current subscribers are opted out since we felt a daily email was too much unless you specifically asked for it). The script obviously also takes the previous days sale item off of sale.

I’ve stayed up the last two nights until after midnight to ensure everything works well and so far it’s worked flawlessly. The best part is that there’s no work involved, it’s 100% automated - my favorite type of feature.

How this feature came about is a really random story, and a testament to how flexible a small business owner can be. About a week ago George and I got into a discussion about updating the content on our home page a bit more frequently to try to get it indexed more often. Other pages on the site get crawled more frequently because they are updated more frequently. One thing led to another, and we remembered this idea George had about a year ago to run one item on special every day. The benefits are obvious (discussed below) so I said I’d program it. I figured it would take me a month or so to get it done around the rest of my work. Turns out I only needed about 10 hours in full to complete it, and here we are with it live a week later.

As I said, the benefits seem obvious but I’ll list them anyway. George wrote a great post yesterday that covered the main ones:

• Customers are more likely to visit the site daily.
• Getting daily emails keeps Detailed Image in your mind EVERY DAY - not just a few times a year when you make large detailing purchases.
• It gives George and Greg extra content to post about daily in the forums we sponsor. Initial feedback has been great - look at what some of the people over on E90Post had to say.
• It creates a gap between our competitors and us. They all run off-the-shelf shopping carts, so this feature that cost me 10 hours of work might cost a competitor thousands of dollars and take months to implement.
• For that day, we’ll get a ton of Google Product Search traffic/sales because we’ll have the lowest price…by far.
• It enables us to cycle through inventory faster.
• Customers initially attracted to the site to buy the Daily Special will be subjected to our upsells. We’ve already seen several orders that came from forum posts about the Daily Special but resulted in large sales.

Like everything else, this is one more micro-innovation that makes us just a little bit better as a company. I expect that at some point in the near future we will roll this out on Tastefully Driven as well. TD has been getting a good amount of sales considering it’s been getting almost no attention lately. The busy season (Spring/Summer) for DI has really locked up all four of us - we want to capitalize on it as best we can. I want to do more for TD, but I realize that come Fall and Winter we’ll flip our attention to TD marketing and spend the majority of our time growing the site. For now, it’s just good to have it up and slowly but surely growing. There’s no doubt in my mind that the best business move is to capitalize as much as possible on DI while we can.

“Without realizing it, we fill important places in each other’s lives. It’s that way with a minister and congregation. Or with the guy at the corner grocery store, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, co-workers. Good people, who are always ‘there’, who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know. Don’t sell yourself short. You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think.”

-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (great non-business book, by the way)

A few days ago I received an email from Adnan, who runs the very popular young entrepreneur blog Blogtrepreneur. The message included the following (reproduced with his permission of course):

This is going to sound random, but I really wanted to shoot you an email just basically saying that your blog has been my favourite read over the past year. Out of the 30-40 blogs in my feedreader, and the many, many blogs I frequent over the course of the day, yours is the one I most look forward to reading.

I wrote back and expressed my gratitude for taking the time to write such an email. Emails like that are why I blog. Hell, getting emails like that are what I live for. There are few things that make someone happier and more satisfied than to hear that they are appreciated.

The world truly would be a better place if we all took more time to share our appreciation with others. For some reason it’s a really hard thing to do (for most people anyway), but that doesn’t mean we can’t work on it. It’s not an easy thing to do whether the person is really close like a family member, or someone you routinely encounter like that person you chat with a few days a week at the gym.

Today I challenge you to tell someone important in your life how much they mean to you. I’m going to start by following Adnan’s lead - emailing my favorite blogger - and then try to carry the momentum over to the rest of my life.

Each of us is so unique that I always am amazed by what my partners can accomplish.  Anyone who follows Mike’s blog knows that he does a “charity of the month” where he profiles a charity and makes a donation. This month he chose the American Red Cross. The other day someone from the Red Cross left a comment:

Hi Michael. I’m Claire from the American Red Cross. Thank you for your endorsement. There are many people in need right now and we are doing everything we can to help.

Then today Mike noticed that a link to his post was on the home page of RedCross.org!  That my friends is NOT an easy link to get.  Congrats to Mike!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my Back on Track post I wrote about how I took a day off and hiked by myself in Thacher Park.  Increasingly I’m finding that the more time I spend doing enjoyable outdoors things like hiking and playing basketball, the more relaxed and focused I am when it comes time to work.  Afterwards my partners and I started talking about all of the great local spots for hiking.  Turns out that George and my roommate Gary had never been to Thacher Park, and Mike hasn’t been since he was a kid.

So last Saturday we decided to get everyone together and go.  My favorite part about where I live is that I’m less than 15 minutes away from either being downtown in Albany (a relatively major city…around 60th largest in the country I believe) or being in the middle of the mountains.  George took some amazing photos with his Digital SLR camera.  I figured I’d share a few - we’ve each been setting them as backgrounds on our computers because of how awesome they are.  Here’s a link to the full album on Flickr.

The warehouse from a distance…

 Waterfall off of the cliff…

The SportsLizard (a dead lizard that we shaped like an S, couldn’t resist)…

The waterfall from above…

Waterfall with the warehouse in the background…

The city of Albany off in the distance, with mountains from Massachusetts and Vermont in the background…

And a stream…

Have a great weekend everybody!  We’re rolling out a couple of cool things for Detailed Image next week that I think could increase sales by a lot, so I’m excited to share once they’re live.

Tonight Mike, George, and I will be heading up to Saratoga with some friends for the first time of the year - amazing Summer bar scene and of course I’ll be eating several famous doughboys at Esperanto…quite possibly the greatest food on Earth.  I believe it’s chicken, chives, cream cheese, and mozzarella wrapped in dough and baked.  It tastes even better smothered in hot sauce - my mouth is watering just thinking about one!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re looking to grow and expand the presence of the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog and we need some help to get us there. We don’t just want the blog to supplement the e-commerce portion of the site, we want it to be one of the main reasons that people visit the site. In a way, we’re treating it as a separate business - grow the scope and readership of the blog and there will naturally be a trickle-down effect in terms of traffic and links to the e-commerce portion of the site

The goal of the blog is to present a vast array of lifestyle tips, tutorials, videos, articles, and more ranging from sports to technology to fashion…and everything in between. As long as it fits our demographic - men in their twenties and thirties - we consider it fair game for the blog. I wrote a post entitled What You’ve Been Missing on the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog about a month ago if you’re looking to get a flavor for some of my favorite posts.

Overall I think we’re putting up very good posts, but we’d like to post more frequently and with a broader array of topics (we only know so many things well). That’s where you come in: we’re looking for writers to post on the blog. We’d like to start with a post or two, but are willing to make it a more regular thing if both parties feel like they are getting value out of it. If you have an area of expertise like sports, fitness, video games, audio, movies, music, poker, fashion, etc we’d love to have you do a post or series of posts for us.

What do you get out of it? For every post you’ll get a by-line at the beginning of the post (i.e. “By Adam McFarland of Pure Adapt”) with a link to your site and a longer about the author section at the end where you can write a paragraph about your business and link to your sites. You also get a wholesale account to purchase anything we have for sale on Tastefully Driven at a large discount. The discounts vary by item, but you can usually expect 30%+ discounts to start. If this becomes a more long-term thing we’ll increase the discounts. Even if you don’t buy a lot of stuff for yourself, the discounts are great for buying gifts (see our Father’s Day suggestions). I know that most of my friends and family can expect TD gifts for the indefinite future

The best part - even if you only do one post with us the links stay and you can keep your wholesale account. Drop me an email at adam [at] pureadapt [dot] com if you’re interested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

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

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Logical Thought

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

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

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

What I Want us to Become

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m Doing About it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As usual, never a dull moment.

I’m lucky enough to have somehow gotten on the American Management Association’s list of bloggers to send advanced copies of books to. I’d say I get around ten requests a year from the AMA and other organizations asking me to review their books. While always flattered, I’ve been saying no more and more recently because of my last experience. But when the AMA contacted me with a book entitled Internet Riches I had to say yes. My initial thought was “this is going to be great, I’m going to tear this crappy book apart.” Alas, it actually is a pretty damn good book despite the super cheesy title.

What it is:

• Author Scott Fox has started several online businesses and has consulted with the likes of Larry King and Bill O’Reilly. He provides a blueprint for anyone to start their own online business.

The Pros:

• He provides a very accurate, very in-depth history of how companies have made money on the internet in the past and how the internet has evolved over it’s short history.
• He provides details on everything from choosing a domain name to finding a web host to marketing your business. The step-by-step instructions could be followed by anyone who can write an email. Honestly, I kept looking to poke holes but everything essentially aligns with what I would tell a first time web entrepreneur.
• He mentions eBay, but - unlike most of these type of books - is very realistic about the ups and downs of eBay. It can be great for your business, but usually isn’t going to make you millions by itself.
• He preaches over and over the importance of just getting your product to market. So many people spend months/years developing technology instead of testing their business in the market and developing and growing based upon how it goes. You should always be focused on doing the absolute minimum to get your product/service in front of real live customers. Scott and I agree on this, but I’m not sure everyone in business does.

The Cons:

• The title and the cover. Both are ultra-cheesy and look like they should be featured on a late-night infomercial between Ron Popeil and Tony Little. Thankfully once you open the cover it gets better. It really is a great “reference book” so it should carry a title like How to Build an Internet Business from Scratch…or something less corny.

Who should buy the book:

• Any first time web entrepreneur. Along with the now slightly out-dated big blue book and a few others, this is a great way to get started on the ins and outs of e-businesses. If you’re already pretty tech/web savvy, it might get boring or redundant at times, but you’ll still get a bunch of great info.

Who shouldn’t buy the book:

• Anyone who owns a web business or has spent considerable time working for one. I realize I’m not the target market, but I didn’t learn one thing that I could directly apply to our business. Again - lot’s of great info…just nothing I haven’t read myself in my 4+ years reading books, blogs, newsletters, etc related to online business.