Category: Mindset

Last month, I was incredibly busy in and out of work. An objective that I’ve been working on was pushed back multiple times and wasn’t completed.

When it comes to planning, we tend to plan with abstractions of the real world. The components are too perfect to be reliable. They assume:

• Our employees won’t get sick.
• There won’t be a market change.
• A customer won’t have an emergency.
• And etc.

But you can’t predict the weather. Invariably, new information is going to affect your plan.

The trick is to account for it.

We just launched a free video gallery plugin for WordPress. The goal is to develop it into a multiplatform software product.

Last night, I woke up with an upset stomach from drinking a couple of ciders and lay in bed thinking about its startup costs. We developed the free plugin in 50 hours with an average cost of around $38.50 an hour for around $2,000 invested.

At some arc in time, we’ll start to get a return on this investment. That might be 500 hours invested ($20,000) or a thousand ($40,000.) Or it’s possible, we’ll get to 500 hours and still see little opportunity and kill it.

In fact, years ago, we put over 500 hours into a WordPress product and sold just a handful before realizing the support costs were going to eat up what little revenue we had.

There are a few popular ideas that address this problem:

Thursday morning, at 7:55 AM, I stood on the sidewalk of a busy street and warmed my face in the morning sun. I was outside a freshly painted restaurant facade with a brand new neon side that said “OPEN” in the window. At 8:00 AM, the sign blazed to life, the door to the restaurant opened, and the owner of the restaurant, my friend James, stepped outside and shook my hand. I followed him in and ordered a coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

As part of my payment, I handed him a dollar and said, “You might want to frame that.”

I was James’ first customer for his new business, a counter-service cafe in our neighborhood.

Right after Christmas last December, James landlord evicted him from the space he leased for his coffee shop when negotiations over the next leasing period broke down. In the following six months, James found a new spot in the neighborhood and designed his next iteration.

He ran an online campaign on “Mainvest,” a micro-investment platform for small business and I was one of his first investors there too. His aim was to raise $40,000 to get the new space outfitted and ready to serve customers. He achieved that goal in around 10 days.

Five years ago, James started his business as a coffee cart at Saturday markets. He grew to a coffee shop and a roasting business and has now replaced the half-day coffee shop with an all-day restaurant.

Most of the people who invested or visited for his soft launch are relationships he built along the way. When I walked by the cafe this weekend, I was happy to see it as busy as it was when he opened the doors on Thursday.

I don’t think he could have started with an easy investment and a clientele like he did. He built all that good will over years of interactions. It’s a good reminder that the quick growth we often see has roots that stretch back years.

What are you building the foundation for in your interactions today?

James campaign is still open, check it out here: https://mainvest.com/b/denizens-cafe-portland?inNetwork=true

Featured image is the facade of Denizens.

The last couple of days I took a sailing course in the San Juan Islands (Intro to Cruising.) We sailed across Bellingham Bay in a 44′ sailboat and spent the night in a little cove on Lummi island. We were just four students and an instructor and so we all got to know each other. There was a couple on the boat that made their living as apartment landlords.

“How’d you get into that?” I asked them.

“Oh we just sort of fell into it,” the husband replied, “We were flipping houses and had a couple of close friends that were flipping them too. After doing that for awhile, we wondered what it would be like to fix up an apartment complex. So we bought a shabby apartment complex and did it. Our next piece of property was a lot nicer and it just went up from there.”

Right before I hopped onto the boat, we got our first lead under the new positioning for my agency. It’s not a homerun, but still a good fit for us. I didn’t put that much effort into getting that lead. It came from a day’s worth of research and cold outreach.

Four years ago, I tried to position our agency under a different brand name into the same market (member based associations.) It took us two years of effort on a wide variety of marketing tactics before we got our first lead.

I’ve wondered about the differences in the two efforts. The first time around it took two years, this time it took a couple of weeks. Why?

Entrepreneurs worship at the alter of imbalance. We proselytize the gospel of 80 / 20 and venerate our dear saint Pareto.

But is 80/20 ever the wrong tool?

I spent several hours last week working on a growth plan. My goal was to establish a list of things to focus on and anticipate decisions that would help grow the business. The parameter I put on the growth plan was that it wouldn’t be comprehensive, but a first iteration (V1 – shout out to last week’s https://knighterrant.co/version-done/ )

Or rather, a second iteration (V2), because I used a growth plan I developed several years ago from the program, “10,000 Small Businesses,” as the base.

After I worked on updating the plan a couple of days, I revisited my aim and smiled when I saw the parameter to avoid being comprehensive.

Yesterday, someone I connected with on LinkedIn said, “Hey, I love your blog. How do I subscribe?”

She wasn’t referring to this blog, but another one I write for association executives as part of our marketing. That blog doesn’t have a sign-up form. Not only that, but its formatting isn’t that great. It’s pretty basic and the visual elements need to be tightened up. If you look around the website, you’ll find similar examples where polish is missing or things aren’t laid out quite right.

This is because I work in iterations.

Our internal projects are always V- something. Version 1, 2, 3, etc.

Yesterday, I was asked to take over as chair of our Rotary Club membership committee. Like many community organizations, it was hit hard by Covid and is trying to rebuild. In considering what obstacles I might face if in that role, the major challenge is knowing what to work on.

Similar to a business trying to grow, there are many tactics the membership committee could do to rebuild membership. Coming up with ideas isn’t a problem. The challenge is in coming up with ideas that are viable. As Hamlet would say, “There’s the rub.”

In your business, when you innovate, or when you try to solve a problem that is new to you, you will generate unqualified options. They are unqualified because they don’t have any expectation of success. You don’t know if any are more or less likely to work than the others.

This weekend my wife celebrated her 43rd birthday with a birthday bike ride and a barbecue. One of the conversations I had during the party was with a friend who is working in a job she doesn’t like, but is sticking with it because the salary is good. Her plan is to pursue the things she really wants to do later in life after she’s earned a bunch of money (sort of a FIRE-esque approach.)

I told her that though money is important, there’s a huge risk in spending your life doing things you don’t enjoy. It’s a “this for that” trade where the cost is certain and high, and the desired payout is only one possible outcome.

Recently, I also spoke with a consultant, David C. Baker, about my goals with our agency. My aim has been to step out of the agency when all the systems are locked down and pass the reigns to a general manager or partner. Baker told me that, for whatever reason, that rarely worked. He said that the only two options for growth were to grow into a highly profitable agency I enjoyed running or to scale it to a size that I could sell. He estimated that scaling and selling was a five-year arc if everything went well (three years building and a one to two year earn-out.)

One of the challenges of entrepreneurship is that much of what you do is new. You have to create new value, find new ways to reach customers, organize new resources into new systems.

You can reduce uncertainty by building on past experience or by learning from the experience of others.

But at some point the road ends and wilderness opens before you. This is the terrain of the innovator.

You have to build experience. It’s expensive, slow, and necessary.

How do you know if you’re going in the right direction?