The goal of our business

I believe that in life and in business you should be in a state of constant improvement. The second that you're content is the second that you've let your guard down and you've already begun to slip. So what's the goal of Pure Adapt? What are we working towards?

If you were to take a snapshot of our day-to-day operations in a vacuum and not talk to us, we'd look horribly inefficient. Detailed Image accounts for 60%+ of our revenue, yet we probably spend 10% of our collective time increasing sales an another 25% packing/shipping/accounting, etc...and the rest of our time is spent on an array of projects that on the surface don't tie together and aren't generating a ton of revenue. When I explain our company to people right now, I get the reaction "you guys are all over the place."

Well we're not. We have a few simple goals: 1)Remove ourselves from the day-to-day operations of the business by ~2009 through a combination of automation and smart hiring, and 2)Create 3-5 large sites that generate substantial revenue, and methodically add to that number over the course of several years.

Here's how we get there: my day right now is spent primarily programming a new DI site from scratch. Why isn't osCommerce good enough? It's not bad, but our new custom cart will 100% automate shipping, accounting, inventory, product upsells, and more, saving George and Greg about 3 hours/day each. Once the site is done (about a month away), we'll be moving into a warehouse where we can streamline our packing and shipping processes, and hire an employee to do those on a daily basis.

At that point, we'll have our day-to-day for Detailed Image covered, and we can focus on an expansion for them: new product lines and new marketing ventures. The four of us can also spend time expanding our smaller web properties, and starting a handful more that we think have the chance of exploding. In the end of the day, we're going to need to throw a lot of shit against the wall to have a few pieces stick. To have 3-5 revenue generating monsters (and hopefully a few smaller ones) we're going to need to have the time and resources to launch a lot of quality sites quickly...at least 4/year in my opinion.

Believe me, we know where we're going and we're excited as hell about it. How many businesses have such a focused goal? Probably more than you think - sometimes chaos on the outside doesn't mean chaos on the inside.

**on a side note, Mike's t-shirt rating site Hotteeez has taken off, largely due to his Simpsons Spider Pig shirt that he designed weeks before the movie came out. He's got a good formula - design shirts for things that will be searched a ton in the coming months - and we're really happy to see that the site has monster potential.

//EDIT - no sooner than 15 minutes after that post did Mike inform me that Hotteeez was penalized by Google (if they still had supplemental results, which they got rid of last week, we'd be in them). Steady drops from top 5 rankings to rankings in the 500 range are not too good. I see a slew of reasons why it probably happened, but it does suck for Mike and for us - that was turning into a nice little revenue stream and now we're back at square one building it back up. So goes the world of SEO - just one more reason not to rely on organic search for your primary source of sales...even if you've got a strong domain.