My alarm went off this morning at 6:55 for the only reason I ever get up early, golf. The bad news is that it rained all through the night. I remember waking up enough to hear it raining a few times through the night, and then at 6:55 it was still raining so golf would be a no-go today. The problem is that once I wake up I often have trouble going back to sleep. I’m on vacation so I’m not in my normal bed, so drifting back off to sleep was unlikely. But I tried. And failed. I looked at Facebook for a bit and tried again to sleep, but no sleep was possible. Once my brain gets moving in the mornings getting back to sleep is nearly impossible. So I let me brain wander. I am excited about life in general anyway, but right now I have some new things to ponder and spend a lot of time thinking through. I am in the process of starting another business. It is both exciting and a little scary. I have 2 successful businesses now, and my wife is an owner in a third business. We know how to manage and run these businesses, though much struggle and sacrifice went in to each of them. The businesses we have are service businesses. They require hiring and managing the right people. They also require more people and tools to grow since services have to be performed by people. The headaches of service businesses are that hiring and managing people sucks. Good people are hard to find. Honest people are hard to find. People who actually care about the work they do and the success of the company are hard to find. Finding people who are all those things, really damn hard to find. We have been fortunate to, over the years, be able to find a good core group for each business who possess these traits. Next venture is where I travel into a whole new world for me.
My next business, called Blue Frog Wear, is a product based business. I have a product line I have developed that I believe will serve a need for many in the US and hopefully across the globe. I will post more details once the product in produced and ready to be sold. This new venture takes me in a whole new direction from a business development perspective. While before I had to acquire the tool(s) needed to perform the job and then find the people to use those tools to do the work to make the company start turning and producing revenue, I now have to find a manufacturer to make what I want, almost certainly multiple manufacturers to make the couple different products in the initial product roll-out. I have to build, or more likely have built, a website that provides info, content and e-commerce, since this will be a product sold exclusively online. I will need to come up with packaging. I will need to learn how to market a product as opposed to a service. I will need to learn about warehousing and shipping and inventory management. All these things are new to me. I am excited, nervous and overwhelmed. I like the idea of a new challenge. In many ways I am bored with my other businesses. They are good, run smoothly (as smooth as one can expect). I have a fantastic GM in my Repossession company and a friend of 25 years running the other. Blue Frog Wear I envision will have no employees other than me, with my wife being a big help as she has been in the current businesses. Once it grows I hope to have just a small group of trusted people to help manage some aspects but I want to have 3rd party warehousing and shipping. I believe this will make the business easier to manage and the shipping and inventory management to be done by a 3rd party company who specializes in that area. I’m excited to bring this new business from ideas on paper to products people need and want.
Last night I wrote a blog about litterforcash.com or cashforlitter.com. As I do with all ideas I get, and I get a ton of wild ideas, the possibilities and the challenges and the logistics of a movement that could be huge and possibly global run through my head like a comet or freight train or a herd of buffalo or, well you get the idea. I see this idea of randomly finding someone cleaning up trash that someone else left as so simple but so effective. I see this as contagious. Like when in you’re the Starbucks drive-thru and you get to the window and the cashier says the car in front just paid for your coffee. My natural and immediate reaction is “well I will pay for the order behind me.” And I assume it goes like that for a while. How long? I don’t know. I can’t imagine being the person who says “oh cool” and drives off. Maybe it finally ends when there is no one in the line to pay for. Paying for someones coffee randomly seems like such a small easy gesture, but makes you feel good, that you’re doing something just because. It also makes the person who got their coffee paid for remember that there is good in the world. This may be seems like an extreme view, but I often get so discouraged with the way people behave, the evil I see in the news, the general selfishness of people that I start to think everyone sucks. And then some random person buys my coffee for no reason or saves a dog from a storm drain or a community going through a disaster steps up to help each regardless or race or class or political views and gives me that glimmer of hope that people aren’t jackasses in general, that maybe it’s not most that suck, but rather a few.
I begin to imagine what the future of a movement like this could look like. Starting in little ole Charlotte NC I do this once a week, take maybe $100, spend a few hours and find 5 people to say thank you and give $20 to. Maybe a couple post about it on social media. We all know how fast things travel on social media. Then someone across town or elsewhere sees a post and thinks “awesome, I could do that too.” And so they do and it gets posted and shared some more. Then people in other areas do it. And people who hear about it start picking up a piece of litter on their way into a store or while walking around their neighborhood hoping someone hands then a 20 or a Benjamin. The end result is less trash on the streets. As the idea spreads on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram someone like Conan or Oprah or Stern gets wind and talks about it and it grows even more. There is an unlimited amount this could catch on.
I’m going to start next week when I get back from vacation. I will post a blog entry about my experience. It should be interesting.
doing it different 