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• Soul glow

  January 05, 2010

  With the end of 2009 comes the final installment of my bootstrapping blog series (with a New Year’s resolution to blog more frequently and involve all our team members!). At the end of the day, you can plan, strategize, rationalize, work hard, and dream all you want, but so much of the startup experience comes down to intangibles. Luck is frequently mentioned as being a key ingredient. And you have to be in the right place at the right time. I’ll call all of this the “Soul glow.“

  At the heart of your startup, you need an authentic soul. It’ll carry you through all the difficult times and elevate you to new heights during the good times. What is soul? I’m sure you’ll have a different definition, but to me it’s a crazy combination of passion, surrounding yourself with inspiring people, working in places with things around you to spark new ideas, a desire to collaborate with others to overcome challenges, having fun to stay sane, bringing meaning to your mission, and staying grounded with reality while reaching for goals that truly excite you. Balance is a key theme.

  For me, starting FMYI in Portland was key in terms of livability and the balance between cost and work life benefits. For example, because of the public transportation system, bike paths, and urban growth boundary, commuting times are shorter here than other cities which helps the local economy. This helps reduce stress for employees and maximizes the productive hours people can spend at work. Much has been said about the population of cultural creatives in Portland. It’s important to be surrounded by creative energy and new ideas when starting a business to help you tackle all the challenges that stand in the way.

  Passion is a key element in keeping the energy level high. We truly enjoy helping people collaborate more effectively and are excited that 2009 brings us closer to a tipping point. We’ve also surrounded ourselves by people who are great at getting things done in a collaborative manner, whether they’re employees or vendors. Our commitment to sustainability has been a differentiator for us and brings a greater sense of meaning to what we do. We’re doing the Northwest Earth Institute’s Sustainable Systems at Work course and had a lively discussion this morning about how we can continually improve and help others. Doing the course helps us get into a different frame of mind at work. NWEI definitely has a lot of soul!

  And a key element is having fun since growing a startup is hard enough as it is. Working with great clients is the biggest factor, and is something we’re very thankful for over here at FMYI. Being located in the Leftbank Project building also helps with a brewery in the basement and a cafe featuring local/organic ingredients. Occasional karaoke sessions, although potentially dangerous, can bring some soul (literally) to the workplace.

  So as I bring this series of blog posts on starting up a business to a close, I’ll raise a virtual toast to everyone that 2010 brings all of us a “soul glow.“ May all your hard work be rewarded, and your dreams realized!

  Onward and upward,
  -Justin

  Links to the complete blog series on starting a business:
  • Intro: “Head west, young man”
  • Bootstrapping: These bootstraps are made for walkin’
  • Growing: Grow with the flow
  • Worklife: Does worklife balance exist in startups?
  • Tools: Startup bliss using online tools
  • Sustainability: Sustainable startups: the triple crown
  • Soul: Soul glow

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• Sustainable startups: the triple crown

  November 19, 2009

  I moderated a panel last week at the Net Impact Conference and came away inspired by the energy of 2,600 people from 40 states and 23 countries who attended. Net Impact is a membership organization of 15,000+ emerging business leaders committed to using the power of business to create a better world. Being surrounded by change agents and meeting Al Gore in our office building today has put me in a reflective mood about why sustainability is important for a startup.

  Earlier this year in my blog series on Economy 2.0, I wrote about how sustainability is an approach to sustaining innovation. For startups (either new businesses, small enterprises, or new initiatives within larger organizations), holistically integrating sustainability from the beginning is a competitive advantage for bottom line savings, building your brand, and finding new business opportunities. I won’t be talking about the definition of sustainability or a process for embedding it (refer to this great Natural Step PDF for an introduction). Instead, I’ll be focusing in on a basic sustainability innovation framework you can use that we’ve developed over the years here at FMYI:

  SUSTAINABILITY TRIPLE CROWN

  Operational processes
  The purpose here is to establish a sustainable foundation for your day to day activities. You could call this “corporate practices” and compare the mindset to efforts like Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing. But this is much more holistic and should touch upon all aspects of your day to day operations. Laying the groundwork for attracting and retaining innovative employees and customers is crucial to sustaining a culture of innovation, and having a commitment to sustainability has helped us do that. By having this kind of culture, the results you enjoy are innovative and sustainable product/service features which lead to new business opportunities. It’s a continual learning process and an opportunity to get ideas from employees, customers, and all your stakeholders. For some ideas, here’s what FMYI is committed to putting into practice each day:

  • Sustainable transportation options for employees (free mass transit passes for employee commutes, covered bicycle parking, showers, car sharing and bicycle access for company travel, and telecommuting opportunities)
  • Energy conservation (lights off at night, computers off when people leave, monitors turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity, purchase Energy Star appliances and EPEAT Gold computers, compact fluorescent light bulbs, linear florescent lighting uses T8 or T5 bulbs with electronic ballasts, emergency exit signs have LED or similar low wattage bulbs, outdoor lighting is on a timer or photosensor, renewable energy purchased
  • Minimize use of paper and disposables (digital collaboration on FMYI, printer paper contains 100% post-consumer recycled-content, marketing materials printed on at least 30% post-consumer recycled paper, durable plates/silverware/cups)
  • Recycling (paper, bottles, cans, toner, batteries, food scraps)
  • Climate change (business travel renewable energy offsets)
  • Education (all employees attend sustainability training and have the opportunity to participate in discussion courses at work)
  • Community engagement (headquartered in an office building with a sustainable community, employee volunteer time with nonprofits, grants to community groups)
  • Corporate commitment (FMYI’s corporate responsibility written into our Articles of Incorporation)

  Product/service features
  Once you’ve laid the foundation for an operational commitment to sustainability, next up in the triple crown is embedding sustainability-related features into your product or service. This is all about gaining a competitive advantage by increasing the differentiation between you and your competitors. Frequently, I get questions from people about how a software company or a service-based firm can be sustainable. At first glance, your internal footprint may be smaller than consumer products companies for example. But the greater impact is with your clients. As a software or service company, you have a major impact on helping your clients on a day to day basis, and on a strategic level. Here’s some of the features in FMYI related to sustainability:

  • FMYI platform helps enable paperless offices and reduces shipping (if you do have to print, we display a view that minimizes ink/toner and pages).
  • Commuting tracker embedded into each account.
  • Renewable energy offsets as you work on our site through CO2Stats.
  • Preference to work with clients with a sustainability committment.
  • Discounts on FMYI Pro Direct for nonprofits, government agencies, and schools.
  • Sustainability info included in most template sites.
  • Advertising on FMYI Free is only from organizations with a sustainability commitment.
  • Newsletter features sustainability-related opportunities and discounts for our community.

  New business development opportunities
  This is a big one. Everyone wants to find new business development opportunities, right? It’s an essential part of starting any new venture, especially bootstrapped ones solely relying on customer revenue for growth. This could mean going deeper with existing customers, finding new ones, or creating new sales channels and products/services. To tap into these new business leads, you could prepare marketing materials explaining your sustainability commitment, blog about trends in the sustainability you’re studying, hold a webinar about your sustainability product/service features, partner with sustainability organizations to help educate others about the competitive advantages with integrating sustainability, or find a sustainability-related need with your customers and release a product/service that addresses it. Our clients often mention that our sustainability commitment and features are a unique differentiator in the collaboration software marketplace. And we’ve created a new sales channel with our unique social platform for sustainability employee engagement.

  Companies like Hyatt are leveraging our template to help educate stakeholders about sustainability while giving them tools to share best practices and track results. Seeing more corporations, universities, NGOs, and government agencies use FMYI for their sustainability-related activities inspires so much. It’s the reason why I started FMYI five years ago based on my experiences with sustainability employee engagement at Nike. FMYI’s growth strategy is firmly rooted in the “sustainability triple crown” and relying on the support of so many people that make up the FMYI family. Thank you.

  Onward and upward!
  -Justin

  Next blog post in my series on bootstrapping a startup: Do you focus on marketing or sales?

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• Does worklife balance exist in startups?

  October 19, 2009

  One of the goals I had when creating FMYI was to grow the business while offering worklife balance for our team members. This seems paradoxical and insane. But if you think about what a startup is all about, it’s putting ideas into practice. And the only way to come up with ideas or think strategically is to make sure your brain isn’t fatigued. Worklife isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential to coming up with new ideas and tackling all the challenges that come your way. You need to be able to take a step back constantly to evaluate where the startup is headed in order to make needed course corrections along the way.

  The irony of this blog post is I put it off in order to spend time with my family. Our second child was born a week before our FMYI 6.0 release, which presented some challenges. I touched on this topic briefly in the The Oregonian recently. I want to live a full life with family and friends, while contributing to the economy by helping to create jobs in a sustainable way. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it is a challenge to balance them.

  So how do you enable worklife balance in a fast paced startup environment? Fortunately, technology makes so much possible these days. A lot of attention is on real time tools like live videoconferencing, but most of your day isn’t meetings (and if it is, maybe it’s time to work somewhere else =) ). It’s emails and “water-cooler” chats. This allows you to reflect on what’s being said, rather than the immediate reaction required at meetings. Most of the FMYI team members were telecommuters in the early days and many still are telecommuters, and we rely heavily on our own collaboration system to make everything run smoothly. Similar to the phenomenon of Facebook where you can stay up to date with what your old friends are doing in between phone calls and seeing each other face to face, browsing your FMYI site keeps you up to date on what’s going on — but at work.

  In the end, it’s all about the quality of your work, not how many hours you’re investing, and whether you’re in the office or not. This applies to startups and big organizations (definitely check out Best Buy’s successes with results-oriented work). We’ve found that offering your team worklife options like telecommuting, flexible schedules, fewer meetings, family leaves, and involving friends and families with events and work opportunities can help. Of course, there are times when balance is difficult due to new projects. But it’s the new projects that enable you to grow and provide worklife benefits.

  Next up in my series on starting a business: leveraging technology and social media. In the meantime, have fun enjoying your own worklife balance with friends and family!
  -Justin

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• “Head west, young man”

  August 14, 2009

  Twelve years ago, I embarked on my own Lewis and Clark Expedition, going from the East Coast to Oregon. My journey featured a plush ride in a 1991 Ford Taurus emblazoned with neo-hippie band stickers. Portland drew me in, with its promise of rugged adventure, and the potential to do things differently. The other big reason for the move was getting a job at Nike, a culture that to me epitomized an innovative, entrepreneurial, and irreverent spirit. And free shoes of course!

  Combine the two together, and I had a perfect platform to incubate my business ideas spanning the intersection of design, organizational change, and technology. From the early days of exploring BBSes to putting my university newspaper on the web, to working on intranet projects at Nike, I was fascinated by how to connect people online, help them communicate, and catalyze action.

  But ideas aren’t worth much unless you can bring them to life. Once I had refined the concept enough through meetings with friends, basic drafts of the (now useless) business plan, and developed some connections, the vision came together. Bootstrap a company through client revenue, have an authentic brand, build a great team, and integrate sustainability. In short, our “common sense” plan born out of not knowing any other way of doing it.

  Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging on the top ten things I’ve learned through the startup experience. I don’t think any entrepreneur feels like the startup feeling ever ends. You’re always looking for new plateaus and solving new challenges. So why am I writing about it now? With the worst economy in generations and so much continued attention on VC/Angel funded startups, I figured this was the time to focus on a topic that’s all about finding opportunities and going after them the old fashioned way when resources are tight — bootstrapping. You may not need to head west to do it, but I can guarantee it’ll be an adventure!

  -Justin

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