In addition to all the hard work they put into the company, they also helped me learn and grow as a manager.  Specifically, today I am much better prepared to work with all of our future interns that come through the company. To help ensure all parties get as much as possible out of the internship we now have a few established practices.

First, we require that all incoming interns fill out an entry evaluation.  This allows them an avenue to communicate their expectations for the position and what they want to get out of it early on.  We can use it to temper expectations and catch any potential issues early on.

Second, we are now holding bi-weekly team meetings on Mondays and Fridays.  We have always held a weekly meeting with our team, but by increasing the frequency to twice a week I hope to increase the accountability of everyone (including myself) to get as much as possible done during the week.  On Mondays we go over the weekly expectations/projects for the week and on Friday we see how everyone did.  I like a little pressure to perform and this helps add it.  These meetings have also proven to be great times for brainstorming and cross-pollination of ideas.

Third, we are requiring some in-office work hours.  This was tough to do in the past as we didn’t have an “official” office.  I am a fan of remote work environments, however I think the accountability of required hours will improve performance.  On top of this it gives them an opportunity to have each other and myself near by to bounce ideas off of one another.  We are requiring that everyone spends about 1/2 their time in the office.

Finally, we have established an official exit review.  All the interns were informed up front that they will have an exit review and they were provided a template of what they will be reviewed on.  This should again increase accountability.  It also provides us another great opportunity to receive feedback on our internship positions, management style, and anything else that is on their mind.

This week we welcomed 3 new interns that will be here for the duration of the summer.  Hopefully these new additions to our internship program will really allow them and us to maximize the value of the internship experience.  I know we are getting better and better at it every day.

In case anyone is thinking of starting a company with a similar model I thought I would throw a few of the issues you may run into.

-All of your suppliers have different fulfillment periods.

• If someone orders products from two different suppliers it is very likely that the products will arrive at different times.  This tends to make the client think we forgot a portion of the order.
• We can’t actively advertise that your product ships out in “x” days since they all ship out in different amounts of time.

-Suppliers have different return periods.

• While we accept returns for 100 days, they only accept returns for 30 days typically, thus anything that is returned to us becomes inventory.

-They all have unique order entry systems.

• This makes it impossible for us to have a standard order entry process, resulting in more time spent on this task.

-We do not always receive tracking numbers.

• If a client calls to see the status of our package sometimes we do not know it.

-You are managing several relationships.

• Just like anything else the relationship is important, especially for the smaller companies.  The better you treat your account reps the more they will take care of you.

• If you need some rush work done, you can’t do it yourself, you are depending on another person to come through for you.

-We don’t have the ability to put anything in the box

• All that is shipped with the item is a packing slip, it is not unique and pretty obviously does not come from us.

• We can’t use the shipment to market our products further

There are a lot of issues that arise from a drop-ship model.  Unfortunately, it is our only option right now.  Inventory costs money, and right now, we have very little.

To keep the details brief: For the last eight years Selecta Corporation has had the rights to manufacture and wholesale Dickies Medical apparel to your favorite retail uniform stores, like scrubadoo.com.  As of just a few weeks ago this is no more.  Selecta lost the rights to produce anything under the “Dickies Medical” brand.   Dickies Scrubs won’t be going away, the rights for these products has been awarded to Strategic Partners Inc., who also produce scrubs under the Cherokee, Baby Phat, Sketchers, and other well known brand names.  Strategic Partners will take over full time on the Dickies Medical brand June 1^st.  Unfortunately Selecta has already had to lay off over 100 employees due to the change, with more to come.

These layoffs, which amount to more than 75% of the account service reps and 50% of the warehouse people, have caused customer service to slow to a crawl (our rep was laid off) making it very difficult to get orders processed and once you do get an order through, shipping times have become extremely slow due to lack of staff.

On top of this there are issues on what inventory Selecta can ship right now as they are trying to lock down a price with SPI for the purchase of everything.  This has made matters worse. SO the question became, what do we do, if anything?  We have really only taken 2 major steps.

1. Turn off all active advertising for Dickies Products
2. When a client does purchase product let them know about the issues immediately and give them the opportunity to exchange their order or even get a refund if they can not wait the extra week or two fullfillment will take.

So far that is all we have done.  Hopefully we do not need to stop selling the products all together.

Until next time,

-Brett

I realize that this probably isn’t an incredible revelation to anyone out there.  However, it is really hard.  Especially with what adds up Marketing budget that could be exhausted with one big night on the twon.  There are really only so many free avenues to market your product.

We have tried, gift cards, flyers, direct mailing, emailing lists, promotions, addwords, approached nursing groups on Facebook, and more.  Turns out that none of these are a magic bullet.  I have come to realize that there probably isn’t one.

As you can probably tell, when I started advertising the site I decided to take the approach that I would throw a bunch of cheap darts at the board and see what works.  So far we have had very mediocre results.  They have gotton us to about 150 unique visitors a day, which isn’t terrible, but it isn’t going to make us.

We are actively trying to come up with new ways to market the company.  I am looking for any media outlets that will give me 5-10 minutes, the chance to write a blog post, or a quick write up in a magazine or newspaper (let me know if you have any for us!).  It doesn’t matter how big or small.  I have also started approaching prominent bloggers in my industry to see if they will help us spread the word about our win free scrubs for life promotion.  I hope that some of them will help me out (we need it), I figure we are just asking them to spread the word about a contest that is beneficial to their user base.  It’s not like I’m selling crack.

We have also attempted to set up partnerships with hospitals and nursing schools to help market our site.  Basically we give them a discount for their students/employees and they spread the word about it, a win win right?

Finally we have approached other web sites that target the same market.  The goal is to try and set up partnerships with them such as this one (where our link will be shortly).

Hopefully all of these things will slowly build our base.  If any of you have any ideas for me it would be great to hear them as we are always looking for fresh new ideas.  There is no bad idea.  We are thinking about chalking sidewalks and shoveling our site name into the snow along the major highway…..seriously, so let me know what you think!

Despite this I am almost to the point where I am going to discontinue our relationship with one of our manufacturers.  This company has been nothing but difficult to deal with since day 1.

When we first started I wanted to sign them up as our lead supplier for our “scrubraisers” brand.  However we needed a price point that was lower than their standard wholesale pricing.  I figured since we would be buying in bulk we may be able to get preferential pricing.  I knew for their involvement to be feasible we needed to get our pant cost to $9.00 a pair, which was roughly  a 25% discount to what they currently offered me.  I spoke on the phone with our account rep and he said he had to check with the higher ups.  He gave me a call back and said as long as we were hitting certain minimum order sizes they would work with us.

A few weeks later I emailed in our first order and I received an email back from a name I didn’t recognize stating that my rep had left the company.  They then told me that they didn’t offer pricing as low as what I had mentioned in my email.  I called in to explain the deal we had agreed to between our companies.  At this point I started looking for an email chain, which I didn’t have….in fact I didn’t have anything in writing (lesson learned there).  Eventually after many phone conversations, it became my word about a conversation I had on the phone with an account rep that was no longer with the company which didn’t end up being enough (mind you Mer, my partner, had actually visited this company personally, met our account rep, and the CEO).  After going back and forth I actually got on the phone with the CEO about all of this and he basically questioned my integrity.  Which really pissed me off.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to drop them as a supplier as they were pretty much my only option at the time.  They also have a fairly unique product that we have since done fairly well selling.

The problems didn’t stop there.  The supplier specializes in “collegiate logo” scrub apparel,  has 16 base colors and really only 4 cuts that they sell.  Which is VERY minimal compared to the large companies.  When adding their scrubs to our site we needed some info from them, such as what colors come in what sizes and what schools do they offer.  Turns out that no one in the company has an exhaustive list of either of these things.  I asked for this list over 6 months ago and still haven’t received anything that is even close to what we need (I have been promised it many times, most recently I have been told we will get it in February….we will see).  It has turned selling these products  into a trial and error game.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there.

A few weeks ago we sold a set of “Army, Black Knights” scrubs and when I sent the order in I was told they had just terminated carrying that product (we weren’t told).

One of our first customers from OCTOBER, just recently reached out to me and said they never received the Stanford scrubs they ordered.  I contacted my new account rep and sure enough the package had been returned to them because it was lacking an Apt #….It was returned over 4 Months ago and they failed to contact me so I could alleviate the problem and reach out to my customer to let them know about the issue.

Two weeks ago we had a client order a UGa scrubs and wanted the rush delivered.  I called my rep and asked if we could do it (we paid the rush shipping charges etc) he said no problem.  5 Days later I get a call from the client and they have yet to arrive.  I called my rep and he found the scrubs sitting in a “ready to ship” pile that they had been in for 5 days.  They promised to rush them out that day.  4 days later I get another call from the client, and the scrubs he received didn’t have the logo on them, they were just blank scrubs.

The list goes on.  I would guess that  1/2 of the orders I have taken for this company have been mis-managed in some way.  This makes us look really bad.

I don’t know where my breaking point is with them, but I think I am close.  It is a lot of trouble to sign a manufacturer and then get their scrubs available for sale on scrubadoo.com.  Which makes it very difficult for me to cut the ties.

I haven’t done anything yet, but we may be close.

Our first big manufacturer to sign up was Landau Medical Uniforms.  I went through the normal channels and steps you have to take  to speak with a sales rep including sending in all my application forms and credit forms etc.  However, I didn’t have any strong credit references in the uniform industry, which is what they specifically asked for.  I used my banker, lawyer, and a screen printing shop I had done some business with and that was all.  On top of it I was forming as a drop ship outfit so they knew there would not be a large up-front order for me to get my inventory up (this would prove to be and still is an ongoing issue to sign up new suppliers, as no one really wants to sign up more drop shipment only retailers).

After a week or so I received a call from the head of sales at Landau, which I imagine is a little unusual.  He started asking me questions about our business model etc.  It then came out that he was a UVA graduate, At the time I was still a student at Darden (UVA’s MBA School) which is why he called me personally.  We hit it off and talked about the school a bit.  After the conversation he approved our account.  He never said that was the reason he gave us a chance, but I am pretty sure it is strongly correlated.

Once we signed up Landau (who also owns the Urbane Scrubs brand) I moved on to Dickies Medical Scrubs.  I was able to use my new-found Landau agreement to help convince the Dickies people they should let me sell their product.  It was still a tough sell but since I had one of their major competitors on board it was much easier to convince them.

Finally, I re-approached Cherokee Scrubs (who had initially told me I had no chance at signing them up).  They saw that I was selling the scrubs of their two biggest competitors and realized that they were probably losing business.

Signing up these suppliers was a ton of work and a huge sales job all on its own.  Today, I am starting to get fed up with the operational lackings of one of our smaller manufacturers…which I will talk about in my next post!

Until then (it wont be as long a wait as the last time!)

-Brett

We originally planned on carrying only Softscrubs brand scrubs but quickly realized that this would significantly limit our target market.  In order to be a major player in our industry we need to sign up the big boys, Cherokee, Landau, and Dickies.  Early on I thought that this would be one of the easiest tasks, looking back on it, it was one of the most pivotal.  The first time I contacted Cherokee I was pretty much laughed at.  Dickies and Landau were not much better.  It was your classic Catch 22, I couldn’t get any uniform suppliers to sign with me until I had other uniform companies to use as a reference.  Once you broke into the circle it seemed like it would be easy to sign everyone up, but breaking into the circle as an online provider is extremely difficult.

I was finally able to sign up Gelscrubs, a much smaller company in the uniform universe.  My references: a screen printing shop in Charlottesville that I had done about $200 worth of business with, a buddy of mine who had done some pro-bono legal work for me, and my friend  Frank who I was starting Conrohl.com with (another one of my ventures).  They were willing to give us a chance early on, but we weren’t really doing any business with them, making it difficult to use Gelscrubs as a reference.

As we improved our site and a few sales I again decided to attempt to contact the big boys.  However, if it wasn’t for a bit of luck I don’t know if we would have a signed anyone up.  That luck?  In the next entry I’ll let you know how we signed our first big one.

-Brett

I am proud to announce that scrubadoo.com and scrubraisers were selected as a finalist under our umbrella company ScrubSquared LLC.  You can listen/follow our progress in the competition here.

My first ever appearance on any form of media was last Saturday (They should be posting a podcast of the show soon).  I did a passing job but hope to up my performance as the competition progresses.

It is a survivor type competition where they will be eliminating one company/week until there is one champion.  Each week they are giving us a new task that we will be judged on by a panel of professionals and some online voting.  Listen in this Saturday at 10:00 am EST to hear how we did in this weeks competition!  You can stream the station live from the link above.

Wish us luck!

-Brett

The catalyst for the revisiting of our plan was the hiring of two new interns.  I wanted to provide them with a document they could read and hold onto.  It would serve as a template of where our company came from, what we are about, and where they are going to help us get.  The best document I could think of was my business plan.

I hadn’t looked at the plan for 8 months and it was amazing how many things had changed.  Aside from the market analysis and the fact that we are selling scrubs to nurses and other medical professionals via an internet portal, everything was pretty much different.  It was good to go back and look at where we had come from and gave me the chance to reflect on how much we had already accomplished.

Revisiting the plan also provided me a check to see how we are doing compared to where we thought we would be.  Oddly enough back in February 09′ we did a pretty good job of projecting what our time-line would look like.  Without realizing it we have been right on track!  We expected our first internet sales of scrubs to medical professionals to happen in August/Spetember and guess what?  They did.

My recent revision of the plan also provided an outlet to get my future plans down on paper.  For the last six months our forward looking business model and marketing plan has been in my head.  I still have those steps and ideas up there, but now I also have them on paper.  In six months I will be able to come back to my plan and revisit our goals, successes and lack thereof once again.

While revising the plan was a lot of non-revenue generating work I think it was worth it.  A side benefit is the ability to search out and enter business plan competitions more aggressively and with more confidence.  If any of you have a young business I would suggest that you take a look back at the original plan you had laid out and see what you can learn from it. And guess what, in six months I will be able to come back to scrubadoo.com‘s plan; revisit our goals, successes and lack thereof once again.

1. It makes you start putting time into the company.
   1. A lot of people talk about a great idea or a company but that’s all they ever do.  To me a business plan can provide that needed spark to get you moving towards making it happen.
2. It forces you to think about all nuts and bolts of the potential company (not just the fun stuff like how awesome your product is and how much it will make you).
   1. The dreams of big money and all the fun parts of running a company are what make entrepreneurship great.  Unfortunately there are a lot of crappy aspect of running a company that you have to think about, execute on, and master if you even want to have a chance to be successful.  A business plan will not answer these questions but it will make you think about all the ancillary work you will have to do to make your company successful.
3. It can help validate your idea.
   1. When You write a plan you do a ton of research.  In doing this research you can validate that there is a great opportunity for you to enter the market.  With ScrubSquared our research did just that.  We found that the research we did backed up our gut feeling that selling scrubs to nurses and other hospital personel was a great market for www.scrubadoo.com.
4. It can help you realize the business is a terrible idea.
   1. If you figure this out in your research phase of a business plan you can save yourself a lot of time, stress, and money.  You also need to be honest with yourself if you do find this.  One of the plans I wrote sounded like a great idea but after an in depth look it really just would not have worked out.
5. It will point out holes that need to be filled.
   1. This goes along with better understanding the nuts and bolts of your company.  Another thing is it can help you realize your weaknesses as a CEO of your company.  I have no experience in the medical field.  I have no experience to selling scrubs or medical uniforms to nurses or anyone else in the medical industry.  I needed someone with that experience so we made a board spot for it.
6. It gives you something to hand to people.
   1. This can be for a bank, employees, or maybe investors.  There are a ton of competitions out there that you can enter to win money, publicity, etc.  If you don’t have a plan you can’t enter these.

I am not going to sit here and tell you I look at my business plans on a daily basis.  In fact, since I wrote the original plan for ScrubSquared LLC I hadn’t looked at or revised it until a few days ago.  It was amazing to see how much our business had changed from what we expected it to be.  But for me the Scrubsquared plan was important because it got me started and it got me moving down a road.  Anytime you want to get somewhere it helps to have a map.  A business plan can be the map that helps guide you to your goal.