What makes money vs. what I want to do

Ever since my invention back in college, I've loved to create and innovate. My partners and I love to joke about being able to innovate any business - give us a pizza store or a cattle ranch and we'll find new and creative ways to improve the existing business processes.

That said, there are particular industries that I'd RATHER innovate in. We are in a unique position where Pure Adapt makes about 50% of its revenue from Detailed Image and 50% from client work (and a few thousand a year from my sites). It's our goal to eventually replace the 50% from client work with 35% revenue from non-Detailed Image sites and 15% from client work (and only take on larger clients). We've done a great job of planning and I think we'll be at this point sometime in 2008, if not sooner.

I'm going to sound like a whiny five year old when I say this - but I want it now. I love innovating my sites and launching new sites, and right now that's relegated to a few hours a week. My 9-5 is pretty much spent answering emails and phone calls from the ~20 clients we're working with, and then communicating the results of those conversations to my team. I spend my time before and after that doing client work, and then the leftover time is left for this blog and my sites. We're growing our business, and we're making the kind of money we need to grow the way we want to, so it's hard for me to complain (although I'm doing it right now).

My desires make me want to stop servicing clients, but my head knows that the "right" way to do this is to build a recurring revenue stream from maintenance on our clients work, and then slowly start allocating more and more time to the fun stuff. I thought of this when I read Trizle's post about What Startups Get Wrong, which basically says that most startups fail because they do too much innovating and not enough money-making - do what generates cash flow first so that you can survive, and then work towards the sexy stuff.

Innovating is tough. Failure will usually occur several times before success, and most companies burn through their cash before they even have a chance to see a return on their investment. Large corporations make their money with their go-to classic products, and then kick money back into R&D for the future. Not all of that R&D money will return a profit, and what does turn a profit probably won't do it for years. Now imagine starting a company where you kick all that money into R&D but have no existing revenue stream. It sounds stupid, but it's the way most tech startups do things (and honestly, I can relate because that's where my heart is).

I'm an impatient guy, but this is one of those instances I'll have to be patient with. How about you - as an entrepreneur, how do you balance your desire to innovate with your bottom line?

D Wade's business decision

In case you've been living under a rock the past few days, Dwayne Wade has a big choice ahead of him - try and rehab his shoulder and make it back in time for a playoff run to defend his title, or get season ending surgery and be 100% healthy for next year. Anyone and everyone thinks they know what he should do.

People who think he should rehab are saying that he should do everything possible to be on the court for every game possible. They say that the Heats window is closing (it is) with aging veterans like Shaq, Antoine Walker, Gary Payton, Eddie Jones, etc and that Dwayne Wade "owes it" to those guys, the organization, and the fans to try to win right now at all costs.

The other camp says that the only way to completely heal a shoulder is surgery, and he's placing his long term health and the health of the Heat franchise in jeopardy to get back to a team that was barely .500 WITH him in the lineup.

No side is "right" but both sides make great points. So you say, "that's nice Adam...but I hate sports and wtf does this have to do with being a business owner?"

Dwayne's decisions are similar to the business decisions we make every day. It isn't always better to sell out the future health of your company to make as much money as possible. If you could earn $1million in revenue if you cut all sorts of corners, is that better for your business than earning $750K and properly satisfying every customer and planning properly for future growth? If you don't put effective and efficient processes in place than your businesses long term health will likely suffer. If you don't plan properly for scaling your business, you will run into problems as you grow.

In my opinion the smart business owner "gets surgery" and sacrifices some cash for the future health of the company. And I think most private companies think like this. But the odd thing with public companies is that CEO's are brought in to turn around a company on a whim - essentially to try to win a championship now at all costs, in turn hurting the long term health of the business. Not only does this effect employees, it effects shareholders. If you are planning on holding the stock for 20 years for retirement, is a CEO whose brought in to increase the bottom line within a five year window really acting in your best interest?

It will be interesting to see what D Wade does...

Totally swamped

If you're an entrepreneur and you're not extremely busy, something is wrong. But some times are far busier than others and these last few days I've been reaching my max. It seems like all the "pending" tasks I had to get done have all become due right around the same time. I literally spent the entire day yesterday sending emails - from 7 AM to 7 PM. They were coming in faster than they were going out. I sent out 24 f*cking emails! Some were only a sentence or two, but others to clients were the type of emails that take 20-30 minutes to write.

The rest of my team is pretty busy too, and to be honest with you, the majority of what I'm working on is with other team members and I'm the one slowing things down. I'm not really used to being in this position - I'm used to being the guy who always gets everything done quicker than expected. There's only so much time in the day, so unfortunately some people are going to have to wait.

Now, it's always better to be too busy than not busy enough...and I know that every email I send and every project I take on is helping Pure Adapt grow, but sometimes I wish it would just stop. Even for a day. Thankfully the weekend has arrived - I get less emails and I can actually get more done on the projects I'm on. I realize it's not a good thing to be looking forward to a weekend to do MORE work, but overall I have been spending more time doing fun things, and I plan on going out this weekend. For the time being, I can work 8 hours on a Saturday and still have plenty of time to go out and have fun. Long term it's not a solution, but when a company is this young I can't expect to work 40 hour weeks. I'm 24 - if I'm still working like this at 27 then something is very wrong.

On a positive note, my getting up at 6AM thing has been working like a charm - I can't even imagine how much worse it would be if I was still getting up around 9 every day.

Finally 100% away from my career

Yesterday in the mail I received my health insurance package welcoming me to the plan that Pure Adapt is now paying for. Why is this significant? Because previously I was still on COBRA (continuation of benefits) from my employer. In a weird way I always felt like I still kind of worked there because I was getting mail from them all the time. Or maybe a better explanation is that I felt like I hadn't "proved" to myself that quitting was the right move if I wasn't paying my own health insurance. COBRA would have ran out in June anyway, but it's nice to kick them to the curb sooner than later.

Even as of late 2006, I still wasn't sure if financially I was going to be able to swing working 100% for myself. I didn't know if I'd need to borrow money from family members or my 401K or what not. Now I know - I completely, without a doubt, made the right decision to drop my engineering career when I did. In a way it was easy, but in a way it couldn't possibly be easy to leave something I spent years studying for and had just been rewarded with a high salary and a company willing to send me to any school I wanted for a masters degree.

Now with Pure Adapt being able to easily pay our salaries, pay for our benefits, and cover expenses, my worries shift from wondering how I'm going to pay my insurance or student loans, to worrying about the most effective way to grow our company. Now those worries are the kind of problems I want :)

Find Auto Info launches

Today we launched Find Auto Info, an automotive directory we created to supplement Detailed Image. This site has been in development for quite some time, and you are only seeing a small portion of what was developed.

The coolest thing we have going for us is that Find Auto Info is now the largest car forum directory on the web (over 400 hand-picked forum listings). In development, we also built some cool mapping features to locate your nearest dealership, but those will have to wait until we figure out the best way to populate every dealership in the country.

A little background as to WHY we are doing this. George and Greg have largely grown Detailed Image with ONE successful marketing strategy - posting on car forums. They pay large forums of high end cars (so they're sponsoring a BMW site and not a Honda site) and get exclusive rights to "ask the detailer" threads like this one and they spend hours a day building relationships with the people that spend thousands of dollars a year detailing their car. In the times I've been around them, they are also fielding several phone calls an hour. Their competitive advantage is their willingness to share knowledge - and it's resulted in some fiercely loyal consumers who buy large packages from Detailed Image regularly.

Back to Find Auto Info - the initial purpose is primarily to be a supplemental site that gives us something to barter back with when negotiating with forums. We can offer them ad space or a premium listing on Find Auto Info in return for a reduced rate on sponsorship rights in their forum.

This is the first (and by far the smallest) of our car detailing spin-offs. George and Greg have made a name for themselves with Detailed Image and are realizing that the potential to expand their influence is clearly there.

Although I'm not very involved in the day to day operations of DI, I'm excited for Pure Adapt as a whole and the steps we're taking to grow our sites, our client's sites, and to also be building new sites.

Sleep - my productivity killer

I think I'm a pretty productive guy. If you ask people I know I'm pretty sure they'd say I'm generally on top of things. But I'm always looking for ways to cram more life into my day. Every entrepreneur should understand the importance of a healthy diet, regular exercise, and a good nights sleep - falling short in any of those areas will prohibit you from being at your mental and physical best.

Working out is like crack to me so I've got the diet/exercise thing down pretty good, but I can never seem to wrap my hands around the sleep thing. This is nothing new - I've written about it a lot in the past - but it's definitely my vice. My sleep patterns since I was a little kid have always fallen into one of the these three categories:

• The drag and makeup - this is the one most high school kids and working professionals I know are on. It's where you sleep like 5 hours/night during the week and then 12/day on the weekends. Basically you are tired as shit for 5 out of 7 days...not exactly at your peak.
  
• The creep - this is the one I'd been suffering from primarily since I started working for myself and haven't had a set time I NEEDED to be up every day. You wake up at 8 AM Monday morning and then you stay up late Monday night. So you get up at 9 AM on Tuesday. You aren't tired Tuesday night, so you go to bed at 2 and wake up at 10:30 on Wednesday. By Friday it's a big deal to wake up before 11 and you totally feel like a loser...even if you've been getting your work done late at night.
• The reversal - this is the one I was on all through college, and for a while when I was going to the gym MWF @ 8 AM. It happens when you need to be up early (say for a class) several days a week, but don't have to get up for anything the rest of the week. In this case, you stay up until 2 AM every night, but one day you wake up at 8 AM and the next noon. You sleep 6-10-6-10-6 instead of 8 every night....in theory it should work, but it sucks.

The past few days I've been using Steve Pavlina's theory about the best way to sleep. He claims most attempts fail because people either try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every night (problem being your body needs varied rest) or because they just "listen to their body" and end up doing the creep and oversleeping.

I estimate I'd been spending 9-11 hours in bed each night...probably only sleeping 8 or so, but doing a lot of tossing and turning on both ends. I'd wake up late and feel behind the 8-ball and rush through my workouts. This week I've been going to bed whenever I'm tired and getting up at 6AM everyday and it's awesome. I feel MORE rested from LESS sleep, and I feel like I've finally figured out something that's plagued me for years. It'll be interesting to see how long I can stick with it.

PS. To force myself up I placed the alarm clock about 15 feet away from my bed and turned it ALL the way up so that I have to get up and sprint to end the horrible sound every AM....that'll wake me up no matter how tired I am.

How NOT to run your biz

A few months back my parents decided they were going to rid their house of carpet and replace it with laminate hard wood floors. After doing some research and talking to some people, they decided on a contractor they thought would do a great job.

About a month ago they came to do the floors. My parents were raving about what a good job his company did, and I agreed. A few days later, his company came back and did the stairs. To install this particular laminate floor, they had to cut down the existing floor that was under the carpet and "build it back." Only they didn't do that correctly and now my parents have stairs that don't meet the building code because they are an inch too short. They are also too tall because they didn't take the height down and just put the laminate on top...and honestly, they look like shit all around. And since they are an inch shorter than the MINIMUM length, I can't even fit my entire foot on the stair and it's a challenge to walk up and down.

Now, my grandfather and uncle ran a very successful high-end contracting business in the area and they noticed about 15 other things wrong with the job. So I took some photos for my Dad and he contacted the contractor.

What the contractor should have said: "I'm sorry sir. We will come fix the problem." OR "I'm sorry sir, we will pay for someone who knows what they are doing to fix the problem."

What did he say? "I did exactly what you told me, I did nothing wrong and I'm not fixing anything." So if I told you to shoot someone, you'd be off the hook because you were doing what I told you to do? He should have checked the building code, and he didn't. How he can claim that it's not his job to do that when he's the one cutting down the stairs is beyond me. They paid the contractor because he's supposed to know what he's doing! Better yet, he has a money back guarantee but claims this doesn't count because he did everything the contract stipulated!

So now my parents are left with some shitty stairs and a probable date in small claims court. Nothing good comes out of this for anyone. It could have been solved if the guy just did his job correctly the first time. But we all know that everyone makes mistakes, and my parents would have been happy if he just admitted to his mistake and came back and fixed the stairs.

My guess is that he will lose in small claims court and be out the profit he made anyway. Why not at least save yourself a court date and leave with a satisfied customer? Take this as a case study in how to lose customers AND lose money.

Focusing on the task at hand

Remember back when I gave Barry Moltz's book about business a pretty good review despite a few negatives? I suppose the true telling of a book is whether or not you ever re-visit it. I know the books I love the most are the ones I read over several times and refer back to constantly. There's one particular section entitled "Mind Your Business" in You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business that I keep referring back to:

I always struggled with being effective at the task at hand until I learned a favorite Zen Buddhist parable where two monks are discussing their Zen masters. One monk says to the other "My master is so powerful he can walk across the water of this river without using a bridge." The other monk replies, "That's nothing. My master is so powerful that when he chops wood, he chops wood. When he cooks rice, he cooks rice." The way I interpret this parable is that there is nothing more powerful in this world than just focusing on what you are doing right now.

Lately I have been constantly reminding myself to focus on the moment. If I'm at the gym, I'm dialed in to executing every rep of an exercise with perfect form. If I'm working on a client's project, my entire mind is in their business. If I'm cooking, I'm focusing on every aspect of the meal I'm making.

That's not to say that if a good idea pops into my mind I don't write it down and think about it for a second, it just means that when I'm at the gym I'm not thinking about how in a few months we're going to need a payroll service, or worrying about how were going to handle hiring our first full time employee. I'm focusing on what I'm doing. If I stray, I remind myself to get back on track.

The end result - I'm more relaxed, less stressed out, and I accomplish more. Are you wasting time by letting your mind jump all over the place?

How would you Wiki?

A few weekends back I went to NYC to visit a few fellow young entrepreneurs. We struck up a conversation about training and internal documentation - two of the most important (and most overlooked) functions of a growing company. One of them (the very successful Anthony Putignano of Xonatek) suggested that the perfect solution was a password-protected internal Wiki. I thought for a second, and then I realized that he was right - it would go a long way in helping to solve both the training and the documentation problem. The collaborative nature of a Wiki is the perfect place for a companies internal documents.

Yesterday I spent the day configuring MediaWiki (recommended to me by Anthony and Dave from Mind Petals) for Pure Adapt. I instantly fell in love with the flexibility and simplicity of the system, and I can envision it being one of our most invaluable assets as we grow.

However, I am running into one MAJOR problem and I can't win the argument in my head, so I figured I'd throw it out there to you. This Wiki will document every important internal process that we have - accounting, hiring, quoting a client, etc. Who exactly should have access to this information? Right now, just the four owners have access. We may grant restricted access to our contracted employees soon. But as we grow we will ultimately hire people to fill the role of accounting and recruiting and what not, and people we hire (contracted or full-time salaried) will need to see that critical information.

Part of me wants to open up all the information to every employee and contractor that we hire (be completely open in our collaborative environment) and part of me really wants to control who sees what to prevent someone from posting our critical passwords on their blog if they become disgruntled. Problem with controlling who sees what is eventually you'll lose control of that - people will share passwords to restricted pages, or employees with permission to view one restricted page will need to access another restricted page, and we'll have a nightmare on our hands. A pissed off employee can screw you regardless of the precautions you take.

The overall Wiki is password protected so only members of Pure Adapt can view the home page, but after that should I password protect certain key documents for owners eyes only? Would that be protecting our best interests or destroying the collaborative nature of the Wiki?

Finally excited about marketing iPrioritize

Yesterday we had our weekly Pure Adapt meeting (still getting used to regular “status update” meetings). We re-discussed our short and long term priorities, and I think we came to an exceptional agreement on the goals of our business. The core components are clearly SEO and Detailed Image, but those are SUCH a given that we don't discuss them much – we know we've got great processes for each and we know they work because they are already very profitable.

The discussion focused primarily on the other 10-20% of our time – how to use it to grow our business the way we want to grow it. We went person by person and site by site, and came up with very simple growth plans for all of our sites. Obviously I'm the most excited about iPrioritize – even SportsLizard to me is largely unexciting compared to the potential I see for iPrioritize, particularly the mobile version in the years to come.

But since the day I conceived of it, I have had one HUGE problem – how to I go about getting businesses to use the damn software? It's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to get influential people in a business to listen to you. I was on the train home from NYC last weekend after visiting some fellow YE's when it hit me – the best use I have for iPrioritize right now is as a tool for my client work. I create a list for all of my clients, and give them the URL to monitor the list (one of my favorite features). It gets business owners seeing a real application of the software's potential for making communication within an organization or between organizations easier.

So why not offer free business accounts to all web developers/designers/SEO's with that same purpose as the selling point? I could use a few prominent web worker blogs to communicate the free accounts, and also start creating a spreadsheet of developers and emailing them using a mail-merge. I'll also create an affiliate account exclusively for web professionals. In THEORY they will try it out on a few clients, see how well it works, and eventually end up using it for all of their clients...who are all business owners, effectively reaching my target market! The affiliate program will just be an added incentive for them to get their clients to sign up.

Considering it's been about a year since I conceived of iPrioritize, and I didn't have this “ah ha” moment until last weekend, I'm pretty damn excited. It won't take up a ton of time (I can email as few as 5-10 developers each week and it will slowly grow) and it won't cost me any capital other than the capital lost from me programming an affiliate program (half a day at most). I'm pumped, and I think this is the way to slowly but surely grow this tool for business use.

Thoughts?

Keeping sites on second thought

A few posts back it appeared we were leaning toward selling off our secondary sites (iPrioritize included) to focus on our core – Detailed Image and SEO work. Well, upon second thought I've changed my mind and I'm all for us keeping our sites and growing them (slowly) concurrently while focusing the majority (90% or so) of time on what's making us money now.

In theory, a business model like iPrioritize is the PERFECT one. There's no selling and no tangible good that needs to be packed and shipped. Free users are supported by advertising, and paid users pay monthly on a subscription basis. The site uses next to no bandwidth or storage space. When I compare the model to the Detailed Image model or the SEO model that we're making money with, those look just plain worse.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) we are much, much better at attaining customers for our core. And while it still makes sense to focus on our core, I think we should always be spending sometime investing in sites like iPrioritize that have the potential to grow at an enormous rate. If tomorrow 300 businesses decided to sign up for an iPrioritize account, it would be automated and our system would have no trouble handling it. Other than customer service emails and regular maintenance/upgrades there's no work required. If 300 businesses decided they wanted my SEO services, I'd have to turn away about 295 of them because we don't have the infrastructure to handle it.

I don't mean to bash DI and SEO, because right now that's what's paying our salaries. I just don't want those two to be paying our salaries five years from now. I mentioned this conundrum to a bunch of entrepreneurs that I confide in and two of them on two separate occasions said the exact same thing: smart entrepreneurs would take the money from their SEO and reinvest it back into a site like iPrioritize. That was enough for me – whether it means me spending one day a week or hiring an intern, I'll find a way to give it some time and help encourage it's growth.

I discussed this with my partners and they agree – to a certain extent. I don't think that they'll really “believe” in a business model like iPrioritize until it starts generating more revenue, and it's my job to help open their eyes to the potential.

My invention and my entrepreneurial start

I read Dave's post on Mind Petals earlier today entitled What Sparked Your Journey To Becoming An Entrepreneur and it really got me thinking because I didn't have the traditional entrepreneurial start. I wasn't one of those kids that had a lemonade stand when I was 5, or sold candy for profit in high school, and I am not one of those people with business in my blood.

It all started for me on my engineering co-op in 2003. A co-op, for those of you who don't know, is a paid internship that usually spans a semester and a summer, but could be longer. Most students co-op close to graduation, and the pay is usually closer to an entry level job compared to an internship. The idea is that you get to test a company for 8 months and they get to test you doing real world work. In the end, both parties learn a ton about what they want.

Before my co-op I had several internships that, in hindsight, have helped me immensely as a business owner, and I had a few relatives in business, but I had never even considered running my own business. I just wanted to get my degree, get my 60k/year job out of school, and then focus more on my personal life and less on my professional life - I viewed it as my "reward" for busting my ass in college.

But all that changed during the first week of my co-op. I was a quality engineering co-op for a large consumer goods company (that I'm sure you've all heard of) and my job was to design and implement quality tests and procedures to help ensure the product released was safe for the consumer. This included product testing, packaging and shipping testing, environmental testing, and just about everything else you can think of.

In the first day I shadowed a QE that was performing an impact test on the product - by repeatedly dropping it from 5 feet in the air! I was shocked that a large company still relied on such rudimentary tests that are highly uncontrollable and yield no tangible data (other than broken or not broken). I asked about a device to do that, and the answer I got was "we've looked into it and nothing really exists." I didn't believe it, but the more research I did I realized they were correct.

I told this to one of the design co-ops, and we quickly whipped up some CAD drawings for such a device. I pitched it to the director of engineering and he loved it. Over the course of our co-op, we solicited quotes for the components and by the time we left to go back to RPI, we we're given a 10k budget to build the device and told we'd be paid $20/hr. We had the best job ever! We spent the majority of the semester building this thing in my partner's spare bedroom and reporting our hours on the web - our bosses were 200 miles away. The lab we built was probably the most unsafe environment ever (we once shot a LinMot slider through a wall), but we were innovating so we didn't care.

Fast forward to now - the device and the software work well (but not flawlessly to my knowledge) and there is a patent pending (it's literally the only one in the world and that continues to amaze me) that WON'T have my name on it since I left my job with the same company last year. We tried to get permission from the company to market and sell the product ourselves, with a proceeds going to them and also with a promise not to sell it to their competitors, but we were denied.

As I was going through the process though, I realized that I had so much more potential than just working for someone else. I realized that I could see problems that other people couldn't, or at least come up with solutions that other people couldn't. That director of engineering came up to me at all of 20 years old and told me that he thought my best potential was as a business owner.

Although my partner and I failed at turning this invention into a commercially viable one and we also failed at another business (for another invention), I realized that before I graduated I wanted to start a business, any business, because I knew I could do it. A few months later the idea for SportsLizard was born and I began learning how to program. I took a few classes my senior year in college, and it was on.

I suppose the lesson in all of this is that there is no set way to become an entrepreneur. Some are born into it and some have a life-changing event like my invention that open their eyes to the possibilities.

What's your story?

Turning down a client

The majority of SEO clients I get contact me after reading an article that I wrote. The last article (published in mid-December) has yielded such a steady flow of business that I haven't written one since. A few weeks ago I received a "typical" email from someone overspending on PPC looking to get some organic traffic. I had a phone chat with him and prepared a quote. He was an extremely nice guy, but he kept saying that he wanted me to get him on the first page of Google. The more we talked/emailed, the more he just kept saying "I want to be on the first page of Google."

I explained to him, that his goal is probably not a good goal to have. First off, ranking for the term "Adam McFarland's Blog" is a hell of a lot easier than "Sports Collectibles" but there's no one searching for my blog so being on the first page of Google is pretty worthless. I also said that for really competitive terms (like the ones in his industry) it's tough to be in the top 5 or 10, but that there are also a ton of "long tail searches" for specific products that very well may outweigh the traffic for the key terms. In short, there's more to search engine traffic it than just trying to rank on the first page.

I also pointed out that all the traffic in the world is worthless if you don't convert it into sales. If you run your site like a business (which I hope is the case), your goal is to be as profitable as possible. The same traffic converted 5 times better is a more effective site (and a more profitable business) than getting twice the traffic at the same conversion rate.

In the end he just replied that he's excited to try to rank on the first page in Google and never accepted or declined the quote. Some people just don't get it, and the headache isn't worth their money in my pocket. If he called me tomorrow and accepted the quote (I doubt he will, it's been a while) I would turn him down. The more I thought about it, I just didn't want to work with someone who doesn't have the necessary perspective.

One of the most important things in a relationship with a client (or in any relationship in that matter) is setting expectations throughout the course of the project so that at the end nothing comes as a surprise. If you do a good job of setting expectations, you'll rarely have an unhappy client. And if they won't agree to your expectations like this guy, it should raise a huge red flag and make you question whether or not you want to enter into a relationship with them.

Pure Adapt acquires Detailed Image, adds a partner - tough decisions ahead

When I first mentioned Pure Adapt about a month ago, I gave a brief bio of all of the partners. George was a founder and 50% owner of Detailed Image, one of the largest distributors of automotive detailing supplies on the web. DI is probably the most successful internet business that anyone I know has ever started. A few weeks into Pure Adapt, it became obvious that George was going to have quite a tough time managing his time between the two ventures. Through his persistence and sacrifice, he was able to strike a deal to merge the two businesses - a deal that was very fair to all four parties.

Officially, as of yesterday, Pure Adapt now owns Detailed Image and all of it's inventory, and also has a new partner Greg Pautler. Greg brings a strong work ethic and a different perspective to the team - he's got an MBA from prestigious Union College and has a great understanding of marketing and high level business decisions. I'm excited to have him on the team and I'm excited to get my hands on DI - the real exciting thing about DI is that most of their sales DON'T come from search engine traffic, so I'm itching to see if I can double or triple sales by SEO-ing the sh*t out of the site.

As awesome as all of this is, there are some problems. We have four full-time owners and two part time contractors currently. We own seven websites and also do client work, and now are going to need a large warehouse by the end of the year (so much for my virtual office) to store all of DI's growing inventory. With the size of DI and the rapidly growing size of our client work, anyone can see we don't have the resources to fully devote ourselves to each and every one of our ventures.

I see three options:

1. Hire as many people as we can and put ourselves in a ton of debt to sacrifice for the future (so we'd put someone full time on iPrioritize, which is largely being ignored right now). Hint: we're not doing this, there are a ton of reasons not to, and I fear the company growing out of control too fast.
2. Hold all of our "secondary sites" (most notably SportsLizard, ChineseFoodAmerica, and iPrioritize) until we have excessive cash flow from DI and SEO/Design work. This could take years, and I fear that the "window of oppotunity" for those sites (particularly iPrioritize) will close by then. Any growing site requires attention and I don't want to see these sites ignored for too long.
   
3. Sell the secondary sites, focus on growing DI and our client work and don't buy or start another venture until we have that excessive cash flow. Essentially, grow our wealth with our bread and butter - very profitable things we know we can do well for years - and then take some chances when we can really afford to do it.

It pains me to think that something I poured my soul into like iPrioritize is just sitting there collecting dust after the fast start it had several months back. But I know my time is better spent on an SEO project that will earn my company $3,000 than on a marketing campaign that might result in a few hundred users and a few business accounts, and would be lucky to break even.

We had a long discussion about this last night, and we're leaning toward option 3, although we are highly likely to hold one of the sites and sell the rest. In a way it sucks, but it really will simplify our business and narrow our focus to the things that are truly profitable and eliminate everything else. As much as I love "innovating" I understand that I can become a much better innovator in five years when we've built our core into a sustainable entity that doesn't need me to be knee deep in the day-to-day operations.

What would YOU do?

This will all likely unfold quickly in the next few weeks, so I'll keep everyone posted.