Since my parents live in Texas, my good friend and trusted adviser Liz Heller serves as my L.A. mom, helping TOMS in numerous ways. She is also the one who taught me so much about free help. TOMS borrowed her vocabulary as well, coining new terms for free stuff: a free lunch became a “frunch,” as in “I got a great frunch today.” “Frinsurance” is free insurance, “frinstillations” are free installations, “fregal” is free legal advice, and “frent” free rent. Still more—“fromotion”: free promotion. “Frar”: a free car rental. “Framples”: free samples. And whether we got what we wanted or not, this mentality helped keep us frugal.
In those days, I was spending a lot of time at a coffee shop called Cyberjava, on Hollywood Boulevard, where the waitstaff and I became friendly. I made a deal with them to let me print their address on my business card and start receiving my mail there. I also used their fax machine; one of the waitresses would even answer my phone occasionally, saying, “Mycoskie Media, how can I help you?” As far as the world was concerned, I had an office on Hollywood Boulevard.
Office space is the single biggest waste of money when businesses start out. As the examples of garage-based ventures show, most start-ups don’t need physical administrative space or expensive long-term leases, which are both unnecessary given today’s easy telecommunications and executive services. But when you need an address, there are creative ways of getting one.
I have never believed in conventional titles. At one of my previous companies, my title was Believer. People would ask why, and I would reply that I really believed in the value of what we did. An interesting title can go a long way.
At TOMS, everyone has a title containing the word “shoe.” I am Chief Shoe Giver. Candice Wolfswinkel, who in the early days helped hold our company together, is Shoe Glue. My super assistant, Megan, is Straight Shoeter.
Some of our other shoe-related titles: Shoe Chef. Shoe Lace. Cash Shoe. Shoe Dude. Shoe-per-Woman.
When you dispose of formal titles, no one knows the pecking order. Both an executive vice president and an intern can have solid-sounding titles. This framework forces people from outside the company to treat everyone they meet as though they were the most important person in the company—because they don’t know they’re not. Innovative titles offer a great way to gain access or tap resources from nothing: I can let a recently graduated twenty-two-year-old with the title of Shoe Provider talk to the senior buyer at a major department store. The latter sees only a funny title and for all they know, the person on the other end of the phone has twenty years of experience.
Also, if you are starting a new organization by yourself, calling yourself founder and/or CEO makes your company look small, clearly identifying you as the only person within the organization. At another of my earlier companies, one that I founded and led, my card read “Vice President of Sales.” If you call yourself a vice president, it implies that there’s also a CEO and/or president out there and you’re just one part of a larger staff.
In the long run, titles are simply a way to get the job done. If a new employee can call herself the vice president of partnership and can use that title to get in the door with a big prospect, why not let her be vice president of partnership? Tomorrow she can be something else.
When you’re starting out, a business card may well be the only thing that leaves a lingering impression. Here’s one area where it might benefit you to spend a little extra money. A truly interesting card can be impressive and help someone remember you who otherwise might not. Cards can be in strange shapes, funny sizes, and weird colors. I once saw someone whose business card was a metal coin imprinted with his information. I bet few people threw that one away. Another card I will always remember was made of biodegradable paper and a seed, so you could plant it and watch it grow.
But you can also take advantage of not having a business card at all. The most interesting thing I ever did with business cards was to recycle someone else’s. While working on a new media venture, I had a meeting with a group of potential investors; afterward we all exchanged business cards. Instead of handing out my own cards, I took the cards I’d collected at other meetings, scratched out the names, and wrote mine on them—this is what I handed out. The idea I was trying to convey was that if I was cheap enough to repurpose business cards, I clearly wouldn’t be spending money needlessly. And the cards I used were all from very important people I’d met in the entertainment world, so the cards also showed prospective investors that I was meeting their competitors.
In the early days, you might not be able to pay people well—if at all—but if you feed them well, you’ll have a happy staff. Interns with full stomachs are happy and productive—and they value the gesture. At TOMS, therefore, we’ve always served good food; for interns and kids just out of college, a great barbecue or Tex-Mex lunch is a big deal and a sign that even if they’re working for little money, they’re appreciated.
We would also get creative with gifts and prizes. For example, every Friday at two o’clock we used to stop working to hold our weekly outdoor bocce-ball tournament. I put up $150 as a prize for the winning team, and the game would turn into a fierce competition; when it got dark outside, we turned on car headlights to illuminate the backyard.
Because I love tea so much, other businesspeople tend to send me large quantities of it—far too much for me to drink. So I make sure everyone at TOMS has lots of tea available, all the time. They also have plenty of outfits to choose from, because people send me closetfuls of clothes, hoping TOMS will use them in a photo shoot. Several times a year we hold a “Blake’s Garage Sale,” in which everything is free for the taking; everyone takes a number, and even those among the last to choose get to walk off with something.
As a reward for working so hard, the entire TOMS family goes on a ski trip to Mammoth Mountain each year.
Similarly, when I moved onto my sailboat a few years ago, I cleared out most of my material possessions, including clothes, and offered them to my employees. My style tends to be very distinctive: plaid pants, funny shirts, outrageous jackets. People took as much as they could, and for the next year I’d randomly see many of the men in the office dressed exactly as I did. To a stranger, it could have looked like TOMS had a mandatory uniform of funny plaid pants.
There are also a myriad of free tools out there to help you with everything from Web development to public relations. Here are some that I’ve used productively and strongly recommend:*
• Read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (free at the library!); it has excellent practical information on stretching your resources.
• Check out Lifehacker.com. The blog has tons of tips and tricks for increasing your productivity.
• Read Seth Godin’s blog, www.sethgodin.typepad.com. One of my marketing mentors, Seth is full of innovative ideas for using new media and other accessible, guerrilla techniques for marketing your work.
• Boost your serendipity by using Twitter. When it comes to getting a job or discovering new things, you might be surprised to learn how much you can gain by following friends of friends on Twitter. Our immediate friends already go to the same parties we do, know the same people, and listen to the same music. Not so with our weaker links (friends of friends of friends), who can turn us on to new things.
• Compete (www.compete.com) and Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) can tell you how many monthly visitors your competitors’ websites are getting and the search terms that are generating the most traffic for them. If you know what’s working for your competitors, you can make it work for you too.
• Similarly, SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) can help you find out competitors’ online advertising spending, plus keyword and ad-word details. If their strategies are working, it’s likely they’ll work for you too.
• Book trips through Kayak (www.kayak.com), the easiest site on which to find and buy plane tickets, car rentals, and hotel reservations. Kayak aggregates other travel search engines like Orbitz.com and CheapTickets.com, saving you both
time and money. Another great new site in this space: www.hipmunk.com.
• Do Doodle (www.doodle.com): This is a great tool for setting up meetings with multiple people who have busy schedules. Send a link with proposed times and dates to the people you need to meet; check back later and Doodle will tell you the ones that work for the most people.
• Check out Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), a digital library of more than 30,000 free eBooks to read on your computer or PDA.
• Tap LibriVox (www.librivox.org), which lets you listen to thousands of audiobooks for free.
• Look into iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com), the Net’s largest source of royalty-free photos, vector illustrations, videos, and Flash files.
• View Footage Firm (www.footagefirm.com), a great source of free and low-cost royalty-free stock video footage.
• With FreeConferenceCall.com, you can get a free, personalized conference-call number. The service offers inexpensive international numbers as well.
• Try LegalZoom (www.legalzoom.com), an inexpensive resource providing documents for company formation, trademarks, patents, copyrights, and other legal issues.
• Access Weebly (www.weebly.com), a platform similar to WordPress that allows you to quickly and easily create websites, even if you have no HTML experience.
• Participate at 99designs (www.99designs.com), which provides a very inexpensive way to get logos, business cards, and websites designed. The service is based on a contest system in which you fill out a simple form about what you’re looking to design (e.g., “I want to create a logo for my company, with XYZ specifications”) and set a budget for what you’re willing to pay. Designers from around the world then submit concepts based on your requirements. As designs are being submitted, you rate the ones that you like the best and give feedback on how the designs can be improved. After a set amount of time (usually seven days), you choose the winning design and pay the designer the prize amount.
THE CHELSEA INN
Whenever I have to spend a night in New York City, I stay at what I call the Chelsea Inn. This is my friend Rachel Shechtman’s couch in her Manhattan apartment. Over the years, the Chelsea Inn has saved the company tens of thousands of dollars—and it lets me reconnect with a good friend as well.
As you can see, TOMS takes resourcefulness seriously. It’s a habit successful enterprises never lose. Earmark this part of the book, and I promise you will go back to it over and over again as you go forward with your plan.
* You can find an updated version of this list at www.StartSomethingThatMatters.com.
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the
supreme excellence is simplicity.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Michele Sipolt Kapustka loves the mail. Michele, the middle child of five kids, still lives in the same blue-collar Chicago neighborhood where she grew up, is married to her high school sweetheart, and now has a large family (four boys) of her own.
Throughout her life, Michele has loved getting, sending, and working with mail. She fondly remembers the birthday cards she received as a child from her great-aunt Zoe, even though she saw Zoe regularly, because they “made the birthday special.” And when she was ten years old and her best friend moved to Florida, she enjoyed writing letters back and forth all the time, making every delivery day potentially special too.
Michele, who worked as a creative director at a direct-mail company for seventeen years, eventually saw her interest in writing letters develop into a passion for mailing objects. Wherever she might be, if she saw something she liked, from a sugar packet to chopsticks, she’d think to herself, Who can I mail this to? After all, she says, “Lumpy mail is exciting—when you get a stack of mail, isn’t the one with something unusual in it the most fun?”
One day in 2000, Michele was in a drugstore, buying a greeting card for a new mom, when she saw a bunch of balls in a bin and decided it would be more fun to send a ball than a card. She bought it, wrote on it “Have a ball with your baby!,” and off it went to the post office, with no further packaging. And then, because her friend loved it so much, Michele started sending balls to other friends for other occasions—fun, but not a serious business.
Three years later, Michele was at the post office, mailing yet another ball, when the man behind her in line asked what she was doing. Michele showed him. He loved the idea and asked if she would do the same for him. She said, “Hey, it’s easy—just run on over to the drugstore, pick up a ball, grab a Sharpie, write a message, come back here, and mail it.”
But he wanted her to do it for him. She said no. He pleaded. She declined. Finally he offered, “I’ll give you five dollars.” She consented.
“Lady,” he said, “you’re selling yourself short. I would have given you twice that.”
She smiled. Bingo!
Michele immediately called her sister Melisa, who said, “Mich, we are really onto something here.” Melisa went online and bought a website, www.SENDaBALL.com, and a business was born.
Michele and Melisa live across the street from each other, and for years they had been trying to figure out a way to allow at least one of them to stay home with the kids (they have seven between them). Now they had a home-based business that would let them do that. Their brother Marc offered to help as well, and soon they were sending balls all over the world and making a living with their new company. In 2010, SENDaBALL shipped over 20,000 balls—in 2011, it will be 25,000 to 30,000 and they will break a million dollars in total sales.
The SENDaBALL sisters received constant offers and advice from people suggesting ways to expand, change, or grow—even how to develop a manufacturing arm. But Michele’s philosophy for the business is based on baby steps: “I can’t take those giant leaps. I don’t want to branch out. I just want to make this simple idea better.”
The only change SENDaBALL has made has been to expand into the corporate business marketplace, sending out custom balls to mailing lists. In the meantime, the business remains pure and simple: an order, a ball, a Sharpie, and a couple of stamps.
In fact, Michele still writes some of the messages on the balls herself. “It’s not complicated. You have to have good handwriting and a sense of humor. That’s it.”
Simplicity is simple.
Perhaps this sounds redundant. But it’s true, and it’s important. If you’re searching for success—whether you’re starting a business, already working in one, or thinking about switching to a new career—think simple. Businesses like Michele’s SENDaBALL long ago realized this wisdom and have used simplicity to make both waves and money.
At TOMS, this philosophy guides two primary areas: simplicity of product design and simplicity of business model. The latter value applies to all businesses. The former pertains only to businesses that are design-oriented. If your business is a service, there are ways to keep your service simple as well. More about that later.
Let’s start with design: TOMS’ design is based on a shoe, the Argentinian alpargata, that has been around for more than one hundred years. The shoe’s straightforward, comfortable design makes it an easy fit for everyone: It’s a piece of canvas draped around the foot and attached to a sole. It looks good, it’s easy to slip on and off, and it dries quickly, which is important for the Argentinian farmers who have to deal with sudden summer showers in their fields.
To create TOMS, we translated that basic design into an American version by creating a more durable sole and insole. But at all costs we preserved the shoe’s basic simplicity.
Look how well other shoe brands in the same category have successfully relied on a simple, traditional design: UGGs are based on a simple sheepskin boot used by sheep farmers in Australia; Havaiana flip-flops are based on brightly colored rubber shoes from Brazil. Both types of footwear are the essence of simplicity, and both have become cool and popular with urban customers.
Style Your Sole parties have always been an easy and fun way to spread the TOMS story.
In design, simplicity rules. Look at the world around you—many of the most successful design concepts are also the simplest. The most obvious and ubiquitous examples can be found in Apple’s product line, and specifically the iPod. When it was introduced, the small music player wasn’t the first of its kind, and it lacked some of the features offered by its competition, like a radio receiver. It’s also comparatively expensive, and its battery system is harder to replace than that of its rivals.
But the iPod has something the others don’t have: simplicity of design and ease of use. No product looks cleaner and is less complicated to operate. This has always been Apple’s forte: creating straightforward designs that even people who are timid with technology can embrace. By 2010, nine years after the iPod was launched, Apple had sold 250 million units—many to people who never dreamed they could so easily master the art of storing and listening to all their music in such a minimal device.
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