Month: April 2008

“When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout “cover me.” It means, “fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here.” It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.”

See Fire and Motion Article

Great article relating to business operations vs growth and how critical it is to keep improving your product. If you aren’t innovating you are losing ground.

And no, I was never an Israeli Paratrooper.

Anthony

Wasn’t that the famous quote?

So the slow season storm (Jan & Feb) has been weathered and things are looking up – way up. The weather is braking all over the country and our sales our climbing in tune with the ever rising mercury this time of the year. We have also picked up all but a few of the major brands we needed to carry to be a contender.

We are comfortably in the black, our Philadelphia store and dotcom are developing a solid following and the reviews floating around the net about us are nothing short of glowing.

At this point, we are a far cry from the day our first order was placed. After fulfilling the silver frame-matched paint ($12.50) and receiving delivery confirmation of the package we realized that after shipping we actually ate $4.00 on the order. It wasn’t the most fun part of the journey for our founding four – but we can now look back fondly at the moment our joy turned to terror surrounding our first order.

Right now we are concentrating on improving overall user experience and product selection, making key hires where need be, and smoothing out the supply chain via technology and methodical revision at any and all touch points.

Its a fun time to be a founder on a brisk pace to seven figure revenue in our first year – in an industry thats down 25% from last year no less. Booyah!

It also was especially sweet to recently get genuine excitement from one of our friends who built, branded and sold StubHub last year to eBay and is basically “retired” at this point.

There is definitely no lack of focus here either: Customer Service, Customer Service, Customer Service.

Young businesses are definitely Mr. Toad’s wild ride.. Fo’ Sheezy.

Anthony