We have recently begun a search for our 3rd permanent employee.  First I tried to send a job description out to friends and colleagues locally.  We did not have much luck so, three days ago (on Friday) I posted it on Craigslist.

Needless to say, hiring a complete stranger is incredibly nerve-racking.  Bringing someone new into the company is like bringing someone into my family.  They will quickly learn everything there is to know about our company.

Over the weekend we have already received at least 30 applications. We are going to do some phone screening and have any applicant we decide to interview in person fill out a few forms so we can collect more information and really do our diligence on this hire. Unfortunately, we do not have an HR department nor do we have these boiler plate forms.

I started Googling in the hopes of finding something usable (and free) and I came across an unexpected site with some great resources.  It turns out that Office Depot provides a slew of corporate forms that are all free.

What a great resource for a start-up.

Oh, I am sure I will let you know how the hiring goes!

I have recently had some people ask what they can do to provide better customer service on the cheap.  Aside from “people cost” providing unmatched customer service can be surprisingly easy.  It is actually kind of sad, but it doesn’t take much to stand out from the pack.  If you do what is basically “expected” of you you are already ahead of the game.

Here are a few of my tips:

#1. It needs to start at the top and flow through the entire organization. When people ask me what kind of a company we run the first thing I say is a “customer service company.”  We could really be selling anything. In my emails out to clients my title is always “Scrubadoo Customer Service.”

#2. Use common sense. If there is an issue with a client, put yourself in their shoes and then make your decision based on what you would want to happen if you were the customer.

#3. Communicate. This is probably the easiest and most impressive thing you can do for a client. Anticipate questions they may have and answer them before the ask. In our situation we preemptively send out emails to all our clients with a REAL customer service person’s contact email and phone number, tell them when their order will ship, follow up with a second email telling them their order has shipped, and finally we ask them to reach out to us if they have any questions at all.

#4. Follow up. If someone calls or emails, respond to them ASAP. We try to respond within an hour. At the very least you should always be able to respond within 24 hours. Follow up is really so important.

You would be shocked at how just executing on #3 and #4 will bring you to the top of your industry in the customer service department. Great customer service does not have to be incredibly difficult.

#5. Wow factor. It never hurts to have a “wow factor” to put really rank your customer service amongst the elite in your industry. This can be your shipping and return policies, a unexpected gift, etc. At Scrubadoo we hand write thank you notes to all of our clients (and we service thousands of clients a year). We also have a free return policy that is head and shoulders above what our competitors offer.

These are just a few simple steps that I believe can be executed on by any small company. In fact, we are proof that anyone can do it!

About two years ago I wrote a post about major issues I was having with a supplier. I wish I could tell you a fun happy story about our relationship with the same supplier (who happen to specialize in collegiate scrubs) but two years later we are having almost all of the same issues.

TWO YEARS!  that is a long long time.

They have had all kinds of internal inventory, staffing, and basically any other kind of issue you can think of.  Or at least those are a lot of the reasons they have provided me for their two year long ineptitude.

I need to be clear hear and say that our current account rep is actually very responsive and I truly think he is doing his best, but he being provided very little reliable information and support.  There really isn’t too much he can do.  Like me, he is overwhelmed by the issues they are having.

We have literally had orders that until recently have been on back order since December 2010!  We still have orders that are on backorder from APRIL!  We are doing everything we can to keep these clients informed, have provided them with very very deep discounts on their order and are sending gift cards to all of them to help salvage their relationship with us (after some negotiations these gift cards have been subsidized by our supplier (theoretically).  We have also refunded anyone who has asked and sent a gift card to them for future orders.

What makes these delays worse is that on over 15 occasions these clients have been told that their orders are about ready to ship out…..15 times!  How are they still waiting?  I would have demanded my money back a long time ago!

Some of their issues are so ridiculous that I literally went 3 months trying to pay them for orders they had fulfilled for us and I couldn’t get anyone int he finance area to call me back to take a payment!! It eventually had to fall to our already over-worked account rep to handle.

About 5 months ago I sent the CEO of the company (with whom my relationship got off to a rocky start with when he questioned my ethics in one of my very first interactions with his company….never question our my or our companies ethics!) a very long detailed email that was very cordial in the hopes of opening up a little more communication between our companies in the hopes that we could better serve our mutual end clients.  I believe it was a 4 page email with the issues we had have, how I thought we could help them, and a few ideas of ways we could work together to move forward to improve our relationship and the client experience.  I put a lot of time into this email with the intent of making us all stronger.  I received a two sentence response from him that was very curt.  Needless to say none of my ideas were implemented.

Lets fast forward to the current situation. Here are the facts (as far as I know anyway!)

• I am pretty sure we have grown to be the largest web based client they have.
• Sales of their products (collegiate scrubs) represent about 15% of our business.
• There is a substitute for about 10% of that business from another supplier that we already have a relationship with (so if we drop them completely we probably stand to lose about 5% of our business)
• Issues with their products represent 95% of our headaches.
• Our account rep is tired of my emails every day I would be to in his shoes, but I really don’t have any other options other than emailing and calling him).
• There is really no plan in place for these issues to be resolved.

Now I am faced with a choice.  Do I drop their products off of our site completely?  Do I do a partial drop?  We are going to need to do something and I have done my best to manage my relationship with them to proactively improve the situation but this hasn’t seemed to work.  Like I said.  I wrote a post about the same company and many of the same issues two years ago!
One thing is sure.  We will be making changes shortly.

No matter if you sell scrubs or if you are an entrepreneur in some other random  industry, you will likely encounter similar issues, and anytime there are standard issues there are probably some general rules to live by.

On that note, I recently read a great article by James Altucher where he laid out his 100 Rules for Entrepreneurship. It is a quick read and is certainly worth it. Heck, it inspired me to tell you all about it.

Believe it or not I actually agree with almost everything he has written.  There are a few rules that I think can be very industry specific and don’t apply to scrubadoo as much as they may another company.  However, of everything he writes what really sticks out?

Rule #1 – ‘It’s (entrepreneurship) not fun.”

This is obviously a bold, blanket statement that is meant to inspire conversation and people like me writing posts like this.  I have gone back and forth on whether or not I agree with him on this, in the end I am pretty confident I disagree.   Altucher doesn’t feel the need to justify or prove it, but I figured I would give my two cents.

My argument against him is pretty simple.  If entrepreneurship isn’t fun, why would anyone ever really do it? It can’t be money, there are a lot easier ways to make money.  In a traditional job people will be miserable yet continue to go to work day after day and year after year because they work to provide for the rest of their lives. They don’t “live to work”  they “work to live”  if you will.

Entrepreneurs don’t have the luxury to do this.  Working is living and living is working.  If you can’t have fun with it then you probably won’t last in the start up game very long.  Am I passionate about the medical uniform industry?  No.  Do I love taking customer service calls every day of the week at all hours?  Not always.  But I am extremely passionate about entrepreneurship and building something that can be around for a long time.  To me that challenge  is fun.  To find the fun in entrepreneurship you can not concentrate on the day to day.  You have to look at the experience as a whole.  That is where you find the fun.

On the flip side, the supporting argument for Altucher is also pretty simple.  There are a TON of annoying day to day things that plain suck.  A lot of my days are not fun at all.  In fact the majority of the days are probably not very fun for me.  Why isn’t every day fun?  Lots of reasons; I have talked in the past about how lonely entrepreneurship is, which is probably one of the worst parts of it.  In addition to this, it is tough, you have a ton of weight on your shoulders, you never have enough money, every day is a struggle to be successful, and you deal with an immense amount of the unknown to just name a few. There are an uncountable number of things that can make you want to crumble into a pile and give up.  What makes it worse?  They happen on a daily basis.  It is a roller coaster ride.
All that being said I think the “fun factor” of entrepreneurship  really probably can be compared to  a roller coaster ride.

1.  It is certainly not fun for everyone.

2.  Even if you like roller coasters there are probably parts of the ride that suck (spending the money to get into the park, waiting in line, going up that first hill, getting knocked around, etc).

3.  But if the over-all experience wasn’t fun no one would ever ride a coaster a second time.

3b.  If  anyone tells you they love everything about it they are a liar or crazy.

Basically, all the parts of entrepreneurship may not be fun, but the total experience has to be.  Or else, you should probably get a normal job.

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since this post. A long care-free vacation still seems like a dream these days.  We haven’t automated enough of our site yet (we are working on it!) and I am still the only one that can do a lot of our daily tasks.

For those of you that are new to scrubadoo, we are well over a year old now (we went beta with the site in Oct of 2009 and live in Feb of 2010) and I still have yet to go on a vacation where I haven’t opened a computer to do work.

I am getting married July 9th of this year and like most couples we wanted to take a honeymoon to help celebrate.  Unlike most couples, I run a young start-up.  The fact that at least 1-2 hours of work would need to get done every day played a significant factor in deciding where to we we should go, what to do, etc. We even considered postponing a honeymoon until this winter, largely because of Scrubadoo (also because it is really cold in Minneapolis in case you hadn’t heard).

I have found that bootstrapping a start-up company engulfs you. No matter where you are or what you are doing, it is very, very difficult to get away from it. I was a commercial banker at with BB&T for a while and when I went home from the office or went away for a weekend, I could easily leave work at work. It was pretty easy to separate yourself. Now, it is tough to take 2 hours in the evening to work out and have a nice dinner, let alone go away for a week. I honestly think it is just a part of it.

Perhaps we are an extreme example as we focuses on customer service and are open 24/7 (this doesn’t leave a ton of downtime). I honestly still feel that if I’m not working we aren’t serving our customers. Until we get to a point where we can bring on more staff, I think this is the reality.

It certainly does take its toll on you.  Research has shown that vacations are a great way to re-vitalize yourself and get “excited” about work again.  When you are an entrepreneur you need to find new avenues.  Rather than vacations I refuel by getting “wins.” A win can be beating last months revenue numbers, signing up a big client, or just receiving appreciative emails from clients.  Loving entrepreneurship or your industry is a must.

I love making decisions that effect the strategy of the company and find that when I am stuck doing the daily work and not am not working on larger initiatives that will move scrubadooo forward I tend to get beaten down even more.  Entrepreneurship is certainly a roller coaster ride, there are ups and downs every day, sometimes every hour. The wins and the greater goal of building a sustainable business from scratch have to fuel the fire at this stage for me.

Last month I put together a 2010 annual report for a few of our “stakeholders.”  To be honest, it was as much for me as it was for anyone else.  It had the basic rundown of where we are, where we were, and where we want to be.  While this was good to put down on paper, I always feel like I have a general idea of where I want to be in my head.  Writing out projections and goals can be a good practice though, it gives you something to shoot for.  I don’t have a board, investors, or anyone else to answer to.  Nor do I have any real benchmarks of how a company like mine should look this far into its life.  Thus setting goals at least makes me answer to myself.  It gives me checks and makes puts some pressure on me to keep chugging along.

While all of this goal setting was great practice, the real point of putting the report together (and why I would recommend everyone do something similar even if, like me, you don’t have a true “board”) was to garner feedback from everyone I sent it to on the challenges that lay ahead.  I figured I would throw a few of those challenges out here to see if anyone had any ideas for me! Thus, direct from the scrubadoo.com 2010 report:

How do we answer our ever present need for consistent development work?  Do we hire full-time?  Try again with yet another development company?  Does anyone know anyone?

Should we create a scrubadoo private scrubs label?  Is it worth the inventory risk?  This would cost an initial investment of around $15,000.  Where do we get that cash?  What do our sales levels need to be prior to taking on this endeavor?

What are some creative, yet inexpensive ways to expand the brand recognition of scrubadoo?

How do we increase wholesale scrub orders?  Specifically, how do we attract orders from Private practices?

When is the right time to bring on another full time employee (aside from myself)?

These are a few of our most pressing questions.   None of them have a magic bullet but many of them can be improved.  Any thoughts would be appreciated! On a side note I would recommend that everyone put together a similar report for their “stakeholders.”  It helps keep people engaged and supportive of your endeavors.  Keeping that conversation open is always important!

I was recently informed of haro.com, or “helping a reporter out.”  It is a pretty cool concept. Basically reporters from all over post a quick snipit of ideas they are working on and ask for “expert” opinions and quotes.

As anyone trying to build a company from scratch knows, getting your name out there is extremely difficult to do.  I wish there was a magic bullet that I could use to send thousands of people to scrubadoo.com, but there isn’t.  Every little bit of publicity helps.

Haro.com is a great way to achieve some free publicity.  I have been following the feed for about 2 weeks now and you can check an article out here that I have already been quoted in.

Moral of the story: Every little bit helps and you never know what will come of small stories like these.

Last week we said goodbye to our two interns that had worked with us for 6 months and really helped us take some big step forwards.

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.

Scrubadoo.com is a drop-ship operation, you can read about our supply chain and how we got our start as a drop-shipment company here.  We are trying to differentiate from our competitors based on our service, not an easy thing to do.  It becomes even more difficult when you have a limited amount of control over the fulfillment of your orders.

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.

It is difficult to drive traffic to a website.

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!