Boss Life (5 page)

I had hundreds of meetings with clients and developed table, chair, and server designs that addressed their needs. The more clients I worked for, the more designs I developed. The more designs I had, the better the chance that the next buyers would see something they liked. Feedback loop in action.

My shop grew throughout the 1990s. By the end of that decade, I had six employees and six hundred thousand dollars in annual sales. My salary would fluctuate between thirty and forty thousand dollars annually. I was getting very tired of face-to-face sales, though. Selling custom furniture to affluent couples was a multi-step endeavor, and at some point the husband got involved. Most of those guys had day jobs, so I ended up doing a lot of evening and weekend meetings. At the same time, I was trying to be a helpful husband and father. My wife, Nancy, and I had been blessed with twins in 1994, and had another boy in 1996. One of the twins was born with severe autism and my wife needed a lot of help. So I would work a long day in the shop, rush home to a house full of little kids, and then go out again in the evenings to clients. I worked most Saturdays as well. Then I heard about this wonderful thing called a “Web site.” I could display my entire portfolio along with the prices. Anyone could view it anytime and decide for themselves whether they could afford my work. And I could introduce new designs as fast as I thought of them.

I started work on my first site in 1999. By the end of that year, I posted more than a hundred and fifty pieces, each with pricing. I started showing my Web address in my magazine ads. It worked—easier shopping inspired more calls, and I spent a lot less time on tire kickers.

In 1999, an architect who had bought a dining table from me was renovating the offices of a local company. They wanted a flagship boardroom table with the latest power and data connections, so he asked me if I was interested. The table was twenty-four feet long, and five feet wide at the center, with contrasting panels of cherry, bird's-eye maple, and curly anegre. It was a spectacular design.

The biggest table we had made, to that point, was less than half the size of this monster. But it wasn't beyond our capabilities. I fine-tuned the design a bit and gave it to Steve Maturin to build. This was before we had any CNC machinery. In an astonishing feat of craftsmanship, Steve built the entire table by himself and beat the time estimate. We installed it and I photographed it with my first digital camera. I put the photo and specifications onto our Web site in 2000, labeled “Lippincott Boardroom Table.”

Fast-forward three years. My ads are still running in the local magazine and sales continue to grow. And the Lippincott Table is going viral. Google started showing it as a top result when people searched for “boardroom table.” Suddenly, people all over the world had found my Web site. And in 2003, we started getting the first calls from people who wanted a conference table, along with those who wanted dining tables. The online channel was far more effective, and cheaper, than the print ads. In 2003, less than 5 percent of our business was initiated by a visit to the Web site. By 2005, that percentage had risen to 95 percent, and I abandoned print forever.

Being the top search result for “boardroom table” gave us the opportunity to make money at no cost to us. Apparently we weren't the only ones getting this free lunch, so Google monetized its traffic with the introduction of AdWords. This program reserved the best positions on a search results page for paid advertisements. Here's how it works: a potential advertiser (such as Paul Downs Cabinetmakers) identifies search terms that potential customers might be using (like “boardroom table”) and offers to pay Google a certain amount to show an ad whenever someone searches those terms. If we offer more than anyone else, our ad is shown at the top of the search results. If we offer second highest, then our ad appears below the top bidder, and so on. We started using AdWords in 2004—we were very early adopters. I started buying a range of search strings, concentrating my budget on dining tables. But the boardroom table inquiry stream was growing fast, and those buyers were much easier to deal with than residential buyers. I needed to decide between dining tables and conference tables. Eventually I realized that if we were really going to sell conference tables, I would have to rethink the way we designed the product, our sales methods, how we built them, and how we safely shipped them to the customer. Design, Marketing, Production, Logistics, Warranty Administration Service: every function of the business would need to be reinvented for the new world we had entered. That effort consumed me for the next years, right up to the crash in 2008.

This condensed history makes the opportunity presented by the Internet look obvious. Am I a farsighted business visionary? No. I was lucky. Google, itself growing at chaotic speed, used an algorithm to read the whole Internet, and it chose a page on my little Web site as the best depiction of a particular thing. And Google also provided an efficient channel between a world of strangers and me. I had nothing to do with that. At the turn of the century, my day was taken up with ordinary tasks. I was doing all the selling, which took up most of my day. I was also doing the marketing, engineering, scheduling, project management, material ordering, bookkeeping and payroll, banking, hirings and firings, and also driving the truck and making all our deliveries. That was ten to twelve hours of work each day, and then home to a house full of little kids. There is no broad vantage point in that existence. No retreat from the daily grind, no view of the big picture, no time to figure out what it all means and what to do next. Big decisions get made for picayune reasons. I created a Web site so that I could stop working on the weekends. Watching couples bicker over which chair they liked best drove me to create new designs. I took a partner because I was lonely and wanted a mentor to teach me the business skills I lacked. I started thinking about conference tables because people suddenly started asking for them. I made lots of uninformed choices. The good ones turned out a little bit better than the bad ones turned out badly, so the company survived.

My experience with a partner is a very long, complicated story. The extremely short version is that I sold some of my ownership stake to one of my clients in 2002. I was warned that this was a bad idea, but I felt trapped. The company needed to expand so that I could hire some people to help me with my workload, but I couldn't make it bigger without increasing my hours, and I was already tapped out. The partnership seemed like a solution. The Partner, as I will call him, had a good reputation for honesty and fair dealing. He brought an infusion of capital to the business, which we used to move to larger quarters, upgrade our information infrastructure, and introduce CNC machines to the shop floor. We also hired shop workers, willy-nilly, to keep up with our growing sales. All this was expensive and disruptive. During those years, the company made no profits. In fact, it lost substantial amounts of money.

Everything might have turned out differently except for one piece of extraordinarily bad luck. Prior to teaming up with me, The Partner had owned several manufacturing businesses that had done well. I was looking forward to working with someone who could mentor me and help me learn new business skills. I was very good at design and sales but very bad at running the factory, figuring out our costs, dealing with my employees, and many other things that a boss must do.

After our partnership was formed, The Partner said that we absolutely had to clean up our books and properly keep track of our financials. And he had an experienced CPA to recommend: his wife, Jenny, who had been the money manager for all his previous businesses. I liked Jenny. She was extremely intelligent and diligent, very easy to work with. I was delighted to have her take over what had been a classic receipts-in-the-shoe-box operation. She got right to work and set us up with a chart of accounts with the data from my two previous years of operations. This took four months.

And then she died in her sleep, at age fifty-four. The Partner was devastated. And, although nobody realized it at the time, it was going to be a big problem for the business as well. In all their previous companies, The Partner and Jenny had been an effective team: he was the Great Leader and Chief Visionary, she was the Minute-by-Minute Navigator, keeping operations on track.

Jenny passed in April 2003. The Partner rallied, and over the next five years, he and I did our best to expand production and to respond to the changes in our marketing and customer base. We got along well. But without Jenny's guidance, we lost money every year. We did accomplish a lot. His investment (most of which he lost) helped me to get unstuck and take the business to the next level.

Returning to 2012: we can now build and deliver sophisticated tables anywhere in the United States and Canada. Those two countries are huge markets. Using Google, we cast a wide net to find customers over that large area.

Big nets capture some strange fish. We occasionally get inquiries from around the world. On February 13, an e-mail arrives from a furniture dealer in Kuwait looking for pricing for five tables. He's putting together a bid to furnish a new government facility in Kuwait City. He hasn't given us enough information about the design for us to generate real numbers, but I could send him a ballpark estimate.

If I can be bothered, that is. Does it make sense for me to spend any time on this? Does this job have potential? A couple of years ago, the answer would have been a resounding “No!” The difficulty of vetting a foreign partner, the problems of shipping and installation, and the risk of not getting paid: all would have been too much for me. But this time, by chance, I see the opportunity with new eyes.

A year ago, in the winter of 2011, I realized that my increased sales force was generating a lot of routine work—writing contracts, sending finish samples to clients, keeping track of payments. We had systems in place, but they took a lot of my time. I decided to hire an assistant. I'm always looking for the easiest way to fill a position, so I turned to my wife. She knows everyone. As soon as I described the problem, she had a person in mind: her friend Emma Watson. Emma and her husband had moved to the area a few years before, after he had retired from the diplomatic corps. She was looking for a way to supplement his pension.

I hired her and she was perfect: hard-working, smart, and diligent. I worked with her closely as I trained her, and bounced ideas off her whenever I wanted a fresh opinion. Unlike the rest of us, she had not spent her whole life in woodshops and had an outsider's perspective.

When I hire someone, my first consideration is whether they can perform the specific job. People are complicated, though, and often have personalities, skills, and experiences that aren't relevant to the positions I hire them to fill. In large organizations, nobody cares whether an employee might have the ability to perform more than one job—if a problem needs attention, another person will be hired to solve it. In a very small company like ours, employees' secondary abilities become an inventory of possible new functions for the business. Suddenly a boss can consider a course of action that would otherwise have been out of reach.

I mention to Emma that we got an inquiry from Kuwait and wonder whether we should bother with it. Her reaction surprises me. Why don't we contact the U.S. Trade Representative in Kuwait? I never considered asking the government for help and had no idea where to start. But Emma is familiar with the way things work in our embassies. She volunteers to get in touch with the Department of Commerce people in Kuwait. I tell her to go ahead. If their response is promising, then I'll decide whether to devote any of our limited resources to developing it. Emma goes to it with a will. She is seizing the initiative, something that my other employees have rarely done. She's only a part-time administrative assistant, but she's proving her usefulness by increasing her own responsibilities, may-be with hopes of a full-time job.

I've employed more than a hundred and twenty people over the years. I'm willing to assert that you can divide employees into two groups: the ones who want to perform their job competently then go home; and the ones who are always thinking about ways to get ahead. In my experience, the first group vastly outnumbers the second. One of my biggest problems, as a very small company, is to find ways to advance people. We aren't large enough, or growing fast enough, for a career path to be available to every employee. Instead, the shop is divided into various functions, people are hired to do that work, and they are going to stay in the same position unless a vacancy becomes available. And that's not common, particularly for the top-level jobs. Those are filled with people who have been with me for a long time and show no desire to leave. I know that some lower-level people are unhappy about this, but I don't know what to do about it. The size of the business determines our resources for trying new ideas and exploring other markets. But restricted resources limit our ability to increase our size. Catch-22, small business edition. The solution is to be more profitable. Profits become a war chest that could fund further expansion. But I've been particularly bad at making profits, barely able to find the cash to survive. Without an extra cushion, I have no way to move in new directions. It's nice to get good ideas, but I need to think carefully about potential costs to the company and whether we can afford to pursue the opportunity. I have often found myself in the position of having to squash an employee's enthusiastic suggestions that we do this or that because of lack of resources. It is discouraging to the worker, and discouraging to me. And I'm sure that it is one of the main reasons that I haven't seen tons of initiative from my people—I haven't been able to respond to their suggestions, so they stopped giving them.

I end up Skyping with the guy in Kuwait, who seems credible. I send him a short proposal, with some examples of our work and approximate pricing. And then I sit back to see what else Emma comes up with. If we start exporting, she will be indispensable, and we'll have access to a very large new market. Everybody wins! I have some doubts about servicing Middle Eastern customers—post-sale care might be a problem—but I'm willing to pursue the idea. The cost of finding out more is very low, and I have some cash on hand.