The last couple days

Thursday the last travel day

Points:
-5 large sub and bag harvest cheddar sun chips
-10 A double cheese burger fries and a soda at Five Guys

Grand total: -15

Notes:
This was he last day of traveling it was pretty ugly but it was a hard day to diet when you have to grab what is available.

Friday back home:

Points:
+ 1 a fruit and whey protein smoothie for breakfast
+ 1 vitamin suppliment at work
+1 side of fruit at lunch
-2 25oz. Bud light at the outdoor amerks game
-1 cupcake at Ashley's party

Grand total: 0

Notes: this is alittle better then traveling but trying to get into the pluses and it's been days since my last vegitables apparently.

Saturday:
This was a big party day, pig roast all after noon and then had Chinese food for dinner followed by a party where I consumed a bunch of beers.

Grand total: lets call It -25 and move on with fine memories.

Notes: Sunday will be ok but this week will be the time when I really make an impact on my diet.

On The Third Day of Diet...

Points breakdown:
-2 Bacon at breakfast
-2 White Cheddar mash potatoes with dinner
-1 Light Lager at the chop house in DC
-1 Tall Hot Chocolate at Starbucks with whip cream

Grand Total For Today: -6

Notes:
I hade a nice breakfast of two scrambled eggs, 3 strips of bacon and breakfast potatoes. And a glass of orange juice. For lunch I only had a hot chocolate and mid afternoon I had more trail mix. At dinner I had tenderloin tips and mushrooms in a stout sauce with white cheddar mashed potatoes. And a light lager.

On a negative side I ate a bag of soft of healthy trail mix with 15 servings in it in 3 days which kills the point of the kind of healthy snack but I didn't eat a lot of meals so I might have equaled out more than it sounds.

Day 2 on the Second Attempt

Simple updates this week while I travel
Points break down:
+1 banana mid morning
-1 Cheetos with lunch
-1 a craft wheat beer with dinner
-3 meatballs stuffed with cheese
+1 fresh cut fruit side with dinner
+5 simple lift with a half hour on the elliptical.

Grand Total Today: +2

Notes:
I had trail mix for breakfast and an orange juice. Lunch was a very dry turkey wrap and a bag of Cheetos. Dinner was a bee cheese stuffed meatballs and a avocado shrimp wrap which was good. Never had that before.

Back Again on a Diet

After a year I have regressed into my old habits. Snacking, fast food, pasta dinners and a soda almost everyday.

My weight is back up to roughly 176 still below the 181 I started at last time I tried my diet but not the below 170 range I hope to maintain so here is day one which I am actually traveling in DC so the first couple days might be a little rough.

Points break down:
-1 A Stella Artois with dinner
-2 fried Mac and cheese appetizer at dinner
-1 French fries at dinner
-1 the last of a cookies and cream Hershey bar at breakfast
- 1 cheesy check mix for lunch at the airport



Today's grand total: -6 Points

Notes:

I had two cups of fruit in the bottom Greek yogurt for breakfast and a chipotle turkey club for dinner. I also had a bottle of mitts apple juice at the airport. Not sure if that is worth a plus one but it's better than a soda so it's not negative.

Launching Products on the Internet

 How to launch a profitable internet product in 3 hours

This article was written two months after the launch of keynotopia, Keynotopia is a software template system that allows you to build and test app prototypes to test with out having to write code for them. in there own words its:

Keynotopia is the largest collection of user interface design templates that enable you to prototype and test your app ideas in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote, Microsoft PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Impress.

The idea for the app was based  a very successful blog post that had produced 10,000 fews in a very short amount of time 10,000 pageviews in 3 weeks. In the first 60 days the application was bought by 1,491 people. The first customer bought it with in 10 minutes of the site going live. A few of the things that the inventor learned along the way were. 

1. Some times you can sell the by product of your work,
2. Start trying to build a customer base before a product launches 
3. Focus on the benefits of a product not the features
4. Give away something that has value and keep your customers committed to your site
5. Never stop testing
6. Don't be afraid to charge for your product

I won't go into all of the details of each piece of advice but I highly recommend the article it is very interesting and worth reading. a lot more interesting then my blog at this point.

From Liquor Store Owners to Internet Moguls

 WinesTilSoldOut.com

Two friends owned a liquor store and had little ambition about being anything more then simple shop keepers after their efforts to launch a big book arts and craft store failed. that is until one of their sons showed them a website called woot.com.  Woot was one of the first flash sites ever created they sold electronics at a discount until the inventory was sold out then the site shut down. this gave the duo the idea that they two could start a website selling product.

The first products they started selling was a lot of Australian wine that they had bought at  a great deal. They continuely tested there website until they found a formula that worked for them. They tested how many bottles to sell at once, the shipping policy and the copy on the site. Slowly but steadily they started learning from their mistakes and began to gain traction in the marketplace.  When they finally got the mix right they were able to grow the company into one of the top online retailers with over $50 million in revenue.

Check Out Their Site Here

Tips for B2B Business Start-Ups

I have been on a real Inc. magazine kick lately. They have a lot of great articles. This article focuses on a start-up called PlanGrid. The company's product is an IPad app for the construction industry. The app has been out less then a year yet it is already profitable. they built a system that allowed builders to place blue prints on the cloud and share any updates with anyone that has the plans when updates happen. Preventing contractors from working off old plans. .
                                              Read it Here: PlanGrid

The founder of the company has 3 points for building a company that helped him the most.

1. Expertise in your industry
2. Don't be a Afraid of the Market. 
3. Join an Incubator if Possible.

It is important to understand the market that you are entering, its hard to make money in an industry you have never worked in. If the founder of this company didn't know how the different contractors worked off of plans or that people working off different plans was the root of most problems, they wouldn't have been able to build a product that filled a need. Research your market thoroughly before entering it and know what customers are doing currently and whats a constant struggle. Similar idea to the Lamp Post Group from one of my previous posts.

While you should become an expert in your field before starting a business or entering your company into a new niche. You most also not be afraid of a market. Just because a market might not be preforming well currently, which is the case in the new construction industry. Doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to work with those companies. There will always be companies looking to try new things and open to ways of improving their operations. Don't write off an industry because it isn't hot right now.

Incubators, every city seems to have at least one, PlanGrid found its way into one of the most prestigious ones in the Y Combinator.  There suggestion was that an incubator can help the process of starting a business along. It is easier to build a team with the help of experts in an incubator then it will be trying to select your own team through trial and error. You can also use an incubators application process as a tipping point indicator if you should take the plunge and start the company or if you need more work before starting. if you get into an incubator make a full time commitment to the start-up if not continue to work on the start-up or go back to the drawing board.

It's like 'let's apply and if we get in, we'll jump in full blast,' rather than 'let's quit everything right now and hope that we can get basic funding.'"

People Really Do Live the 4-hour Work Week

I recently found this article on Yahoo finance about a man that used the strategies that I have read about in Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week to live the ultimate free life then got caught and fired. This article found a man that had figured out how to get his company to let him work remotely from home and after he started working from home was able to outsource most of his work to freelance workers in China that would do the work for far less an hour then he was making. He paid them to do the work and then spent his time relaxing and watching cat videos. Enjoying what was left over of his salary.

                                    Read the Article:  Outsource Your Job

It is a very short article without any really interesting information in it to help me move forward but it does make something click to think about for the future and take a way from this. There is nothing so far in the partner project that couldn’t have been farmed out to someone in India.

 I could buy lists of prospects hire out a company in India to “clean the lists”, find the websites of each company look for any email addresses they can find. Split the lists into groups based on parameters that I create. Leads that make sense for us and ones that probably would not need our services and which ones might be a medium probability of working.

 I could then use a cold calling facility in the Philippines to call all of those prospects and figure out who the proper person in the company is to contact about doing some of their manufacturing. When they found the right person they could send their contact information into our CRM and our call center could set up a conference call or we could follow up ourselves. We could approach hundreds of companies every month magnifying our sales efforts and potentially our revenue. After they make the initial calls , using a system like Karma CRM I can lay out a follow up system so that starting two months after the initial call we can be following up with a handful of companies every day via phone or email. Companies that keep hearing from us then will remember us when they have a need.

All I need is to figure out how to head up the project and how to get paid commissions on all the potential business it brings in.

How to Make $400 Million in 10 Years...Really?

How to Make $400 Million in 10 Years

That’s the title of an article I found in the inc.com archives’. I really am a sucker for an article with a title like that. In 10 years I can be how rich? I’m in  Of course it’s never as easy as it seems and it takes a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck.

The article talks about a company called the Lamp Post Group which is an incubator of sorts that is also part of a company that offers shipping logistics. The company wanted to build something bigger then just a logistics company. So the company used excess revenue to build an incubator where they launch or take over start-ups and organize them around one back-office structure. The idea behind the concept is that the people running each of these businesses can worry about building great products and marketing the crap out of those products. Let someone else worry about the accounting, web design and all other aspects of the business. Just grow baby!!

The article has 5 rules to set up when searching for explosive growth. The 5 rules are:

1. Invent New Revenue Streams

2. Empower Employees

3. Remove Barriers

4. Capitalize on What IS Already Built

5. Identify a Specialty

The Company is always on the look for new revenue streams based on issues that they have if they find a problem that they need fixed they go find a small company that sells the service they need then they acquire the company and figure out how to sell it to other companies. Some of these companies have been involved with helping companies finding entry-level employees coming out of local colleges as an example.

They empower employees by building work teams known as Pods that have both revenue and cost goals and focus on specific functions. This allows employees to really own and fix different parts of the company. Would we be able to enter the retail or high end goods market if we had a 3 person team that focused on one or both of these projects? How far could we go in just a few years? What would happen if they focused on improving our manufacturing processes. Two years a go we found a piece of machine that has saved us big on our material cutting  by automating cutting weg replaced 3 cutters with one and reducing out material waste per yard by 30 to 40 percent. This adds up quick.

Less important but time consuming tasks become barriers to growth. The entrepreneurs that should focused on growing a business can get tied up on all the day to day things from HR and web design to accounting. Any time not used to growing a new business is slowing down its grow.

The last thing is find a specialty that you can use to your advantage like your ability to develop certain types of products.

The article is very good and worth checking out. I suggest you give it a read.

 

The $10 Million Dollar Popsicle Stick business

Popsicle Stick Empire

Small Business Opportunities Magazine is a  great publication that has lots of stories of people who have built multi-million dollar companies that you would never think of. I found one of these articles this morning and felt like sharing it.  Trey Higdon fell into the opportunity to supply popsicle sticks to a customer of his while he worked in the food industry. He ran the small side project of selling the sticks to one customer before he realized that he could turn this into a real virtual business with no employees but some serious revenue. He has built his little business of importing sticks into a $5 million dollar business in just under 12 years. and has been expanding it toward the $10 million dollar mark. Today he has 5 employees in his headquarters and  has warehousing facilities around the United States.

"Using the Internet, Higdon got contact info on ice cream makers and worked the phone tirelessly for hours cold-calling prospects"

Its articles like this that make me think that if I stick to this partner network project that it is going to pay off in some way for the company. I hope it can prove that we should be using cold calling more in our marketing efforts then we do currently. The success rate is worth the extra time to takes to make all the calls if we just get to a few of the right people. maybe the partner network and be a $5 million dollar business in a few years.

Making the First Calls of the Project

We have officially made our first call of the project. We called a design firm in the New York area and told them what we did and pitched our service to them. I let one of the account reps that wrote the call scripting do the first call and listened in to see how it went and what changes needed to be made. The first thing that we found was that you have to look at the companies website for potential talking points and samples of products they made that we might have been able to make a product for. Just something to associate our capabilities to there work with so in the future they might think about our products as part of there offerings, not sure how effective that will be but its better then nothing and takes little effort on our part.

The call went alright but had the account rep spent more time on the website and planned a few talking points we may have gotten a little further with the call. The other thing we will have to do is make sure that we set up reminders to follow up every call with an email 6-8 weeks from now.just to check in with every one of them no need to one and done any of these efforts.

Number of calls: 1

Number of PDFs sent: 1

potential projects: 0

Partner Project Week 2

The project is a little behind schedule so far, but is a good way, I have gone through all 309 leads and figured out which ones fit and which ones do not make a lot of sense for us at this point. I have also been using the design directory that I found to beef up the list which is currently at 267.

As of right now the actual PDF is not yet done but it is getting very close it needs some last minute touches from the graphic department. Then it should be ready to send.

 Had a meeting Thursday to discuss the project with a few of the account reps in this division to get a feel for how to proceed with the calls. There was some initial push back because historically these design firms tend to be difficult to work with but if we could get a few to work with us we might be able to generate a nice pipeline of new business from them which would make the project worth it. overall everyone is on board with the project and one of the account reps is working on the call scripting and we now have 6 people who will be making the calls which makes each person responsible for roughly 44 calls over the next few weeks, at 3 calls a day that is 14 business days until its completed from start to finish.


I have been debating what to do with the companies that don't really fit our profile that we look for, do I pull together all of those leads and email them the PDF with a short note with my contact information? Do I not waste my time on these leads that likely will go no where. The jury is still out on this one.

Side note:
After 45 days of my first life hack experiment I managed to drop 10.5 lbs. and plan to keep it off plus drop a few more pound and build some muscle along  in the coming months. Added some kettle bells 3 times a  week to my work out routine.

Interesting Story of a New Billionaire

Found a great article from a few months back on Forbes about a German man who recently became a billionaire after turning around the engineering company that his father worked for when he was growing up.

Check Out The Article
Wolfgang Leitner was the son of a machine fitter in germany that wanted to do bigger and better things with his life so he went to school to get a doctorate in chemistry. After school  he ended up as a consultant working for McKinsey. While there he got the chance to work on the project of fixing his fathers employer Andritz AG that had fallen on hard times and needed restructuring. A few years after the project started he took a job at the company. In his career he has done a lot to transform the company and build it in to one of Europe's largest engineering companies.

 "Leitner has spent the past 25 years helping to boost sales to $5.9 billion, up from $194 million, and propelled profits  from $1.2 million to nearly $300 million."

 From humble beginnings to graduate degrees to turning around a troubled company and building it up into a multi-billion dollar company. It points to the fact that hard work and good strategy can build a company to incredible heights. And also that you don't have to start the next facebook to do it you can turn a regular company into something massive or turn a struggling company into a sprinter. the article is a good read.


Also check out an unrelated but interesting book:

Billion Dollar Turnaround: The 3M Spinoff that became Imation

Howed Our Supplier go From $10 million to $350 million Without Us Noticing?

It feels like everyday...well actually it is every day the CEO asks "What are you doing to grow the business?" and frankly while we are working at growing our business we never have anything in the development that is going to get our $10-$15 million dollar business to that magical $100 million dollar that seems so out there and lofty a goal that we might never get there. Never the less it is the company goal I mean how could a small carrying case manufacturer possibly hope to grow that large in a short period of time its not possible. Our thinking has been recently we have to diversify into a whole new market that is much larger then carrying cases...or atleast that was until I read the 2012 Inc. 500. While scrolling thru the ranks wondering how we could possible make it to this level of growth I saw a familiar name. Otterbox a company that I knew as a maker of plastic carrying cases a small guy I had always been told like use in a niche market you could never get big in,  and here they were on the Inc. 500 as one of the 85th fastest growing company in the U.S..(5th straight year on the list)  They had grown from $10.2 million in 2008 to $347.5 million in 2011 or 3,312% in 3 years.

How OtterBox Did What We Couldn't

Now they haven't done this just by simple selling more of their standard plastic cases. They did it by studying trends in the market and going after those trends as soon as they spotted them. They outsourced their manufacturing so that they could focus their time on marketing and product design. Today they are one of the biggest brands of protective cases for smartphones. They also have shown a willingness to kill projects that are not working before they become anchors as a former hit product becomes a forgot memory. When they realized a product line didn't have a future they abandoned it and moved on to bigger and better things. They have created an R&D team that focuses purely on predicting and build up the future pipeline, this team doesn't get bogged down with trying to hit home runs today they are focused on where the company should be looking 6 months to a year from now if not longer.

growth tips from Otter box

Can a Great Brand Rise Again?

My blog updates will be rather boring I am afraid, so in order to keep it interesting I will attempted to keep it constantly updates with link and reviews of articles that I am reading in an effort to continue my understanding of business and advance my career.

I found an article today on New York Times Dealbook email news letter:

For Some Dead Brands, a Tortuous Path to Resurrection

The article talks about two investors took over the bankrupt Chris craft boat company and have managed to turn it around. The interesting thing about this article is the mentions that nostalgia and money are not the only two things a person needs to turnaround a company. For every Chris craft that was nothing more then a shadow to coming roaring back as a luxury brand and status symbol of the lake house lifestyle, there are plenty of brands that have fallen off that may never come back.

Check back on Thursday for a post about, our supplier that has become a $350 million company while we were dreaming about being that big.

often times these timeless brands find there way on to products that do not have anything to do with their current values cheapening the brand. This is what happened to the Chris Craft went they slapped there name on two houseboats after a life time of being a speed boat company. Once a brand loses touch with what it stands for the beginning of the end is near. Its a great article that's worth a read through. Reviving a brand with the history of Chris Craft is probably as interesting and challenging of a Life's Work as you are going to find.

Working on the Partner Project Week 1

I have been working way at this project all week. Now that I have a list of a total of 309 design firms, I have to go thru and figure out which ones on the list really make sense and which ones don't. So far I am finding that 30% of list is probably not ideal for us, they design internal parts or do website design. The list cleaning is taking longer then Anticipated but ever good lead I find is worth it. because one good lead can become $200,000 year in new business possible. 

Two interesting things have come out of this process, the first is I found a company that focuses on inventors submitting there idea to the company. The company then starts developing those ideas that they like, then licensee the ideas to big companies and splitting the royalties with the inventor. They have had a few products hit the million units sold mark. It's an idea that we could use in the future for solely textile based products. To increase our "new product meetings" effectiveness. We have meetings about coming up with new products but those meetings never produce any hits and its time to try a fresh strategy instead of forced innovation.

The second thing I found was a design directory that has tons of other leads that might be valuable to us. there is no reason to think that any product design firm could not come up with a lead that is more then worth the effort to make an introductory call.

The Start of a New Project-The Partner Project

In December I worked on improving my eating habits by using a food journal. I would say I have made major strides in that department but tracking that information was completely frustrating on a daily basis, but in the process I have been eating less unhealthy high calorie meals and replaced them with far more fruit and a lot less soda I do have the occasional cheat, (just had oreos and milk) but I am not looking for the perfect diet just better.

 I am also been working back some extensive cardio into my workouts on the arch trainer. Currently getting 515 calories in 30 min up from roughly the 488 calorie average early last month. Consistently taking a multivitamin and stopping the snacking. Total pounds lost 9 and I feel a lot healthier overall.

The next challenge is a Career challenge:

The Challenge: 
Create a marketing program for industrial designers and packaging companies(two groups that we could partner with to work with their customers) to make actual contact via the phone and send them a PDF with information about our services.

Tasks to Complete:
Get a list of companies: Designers (Complete/295 names) Packaging Companies(incomplete/in progress)
Build a PDF/powerpoint (75 percent complete)  slides need pictures and fancying up.
Contact two companies per day
Potentially train two or three other co-workers to help make the calls. speeding up the process.


Measurable Statistics:
Number of calls made
Number of PDF's sent
Projects started
Revenue from projects



Project Goal:
To build a network of companies that recommend our services to their customers and become a an extension to our own sales efforts. I also hope to use this project as leverage for a increase to my salary later in 2013.

One of these accounts we already have does $74,000 a year and their customers can be worth in some cases $1 million per year.