Life isn’t always fair

It is 3am. Dark / cold outside. My wife is asleep – I should be as well. But my heart hurts, more than it has ever hurt before.

Today I am going to lose one of the best friends I have ever had.

9 weeks ago, our soon-to-be-eleven-year-old dog was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. It is basically bone cancer. And I can add that it is a complete, 100% bitch. The tumor is in the shoulder (at least the tumor we can now see), and has completely taken away the use of that limb.

Our kid dog (I’ll call him “T”), was only given 2-4 weeks to live when they first diagnosed him.  I don’t think “distraught” is a strong enough word to describe the emotions that were swirling around us that week. We spent our days trying to do all the things T wanted to do, spent nights crying as we tried to imagine life without chewy bones smeared in peanut butter and dog hair on everything. Funny part is, T never cared what we did as long as all of us were together. And as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t living if it didn’t involve peanut butter.

I had friends tell me how lucky we were to have 9 weeks to “get ready” for today… That they had to make that emotional leap in 48 hours. To that I say bravo – you could have given me 9 more YEARS and I wouldn’t be ready to make that last drive to the vet.  But I know that T gave us those 9 weeks as a blessing (hell the 11 years were a blessing) – he wanted to make sure we filled up our “love meters” as my wife likes to say…

For those of you that have a four-legged best friend, you should read this eulogy by Jameson Parker. Read it now before – like me – you find it as you are sitting at 3am searching Google trying to find the right words to express the emptiness in your heart. It can be summed up in one line:

If life is a system of balances, of yin and yang, birth and death, light and dark. then the proof of the great pleasures he gave me lies in the quantity of pain his passing has caused.

Goodbye T.

Something is wrong with this picture

Sitting in Boulder working, watching the snowfall, thinking that I should be up in the mountains making some turns… Seems like this Office Space clip is appropriate…

Tradeshow 101

This past week I was in New Orleans at a medical conference - the startup I recently joined had a 10 by 10 booth and we were literally “launching” the brand at this show. I don’t want to say it was a “make or break” show, but it was. We need sales, we need exposure, and we are literally a 2.5 person team running on adrenaline and hope. The show was going to tell us a lot about where we were going to be in 2 months.

The show went very well. I would say phenomenal, but we need to execute over the next couple months in order to make me say that (stay tuned). But, looking back, I did take away a number of key points about the tradeshow and how best to execute upon them going forward. There is no order to these, just what is coming to my mind…

1) Pick the right tradeshow – if you have limited resources you cannot waste the time and money on slow shows… Pick the ones that will have the most potential customers…

2) Spend the money to make your booth standout.. Don’t use the standard banner and table.. Lights help, lit signs are better.  A flat screen TV with a video reel is slowly becoming imperative.

3) Pay for padding. Simple. People’s feet will hurt (including yours). Make sure they want to stay at your booth longer just by making the padding thick.

4) Have something to handout. Brochures. Information cards. Something other than just a business card.

5) Bring water. Plenty for everyone manning the booth.

6) Put in the effort pre-show. Mail postcards to your target audience asking them to come to your booth. It works.

7) Be prepared to sell. Invoices, payment methods, shipping details.

8) Look out for guys that will go and knock off your product. You cannot avoid it. Make sure you have your IP in place.

9) Get in a day ahead of time. It will let you get comfortable with the area, and you have time to overnight anything to the show that you forgot.

10) Last, make sure everyone at your booth has the exact same sales pitch. Prospective customers will make multiple trips to your booth sometimes, you want them to get the same pitch each time.

Knowing when to let go

Since January I have been transitioning into the role of CEO at a start-up in the medical industry.  The founders approached me as an advisor over a year ago, and after spending many nights and weekends working to help them form a strategy, I finally agreed to take the reins.

Over the past few weeks we have gone through our growing pains, as the founders (2 of the 3) are having a hard time letting go of the steering wheel. While they definitely want someone else to make the decisions, they still want to have their hand on the shifter as we change gears and maneuver the course.

I saw this with a number of entrepreneurs in my previous (2 jobs ago) role as Principal at a private investment firm. Guys would come in with great ideas, but when we asked who was going to run the business and take it to the next level, the most common response was “me, of course!”  

The logic behind that is that who would know better about the business than the person (or persons) who started it? The flaw in the logic is that those who started the business are the visionaries, and are rarely the ones who have the acumen to make the decisions to move the company forward.

I spent less than 5 minutes searching online and found a number of different posts / articles on the topic. One of the best I found was Ten Lessons for Entrepreneurs By Kerry Patterson. While I don’t necessarily agree with the analogy to Steve Jobs (I think he has done a tremendous job running the company – both times), I think the key points are still valid. Business Week and the WSJ have also both ran articles on the topic.

The basic summary of all of them, the majority of true entrepreneurs who have the fortitude and vision to bring something from a simple idea to a working product are generally not the same people who can take that working product and launch it to the masses. There are the certain few that can, but at the first hint of difficulty, you owe it to yourself, your investors, and your customers to recognize the need for change and act on it.

Smoking Chicken & Ribs in March

This blog will not be 100% business, or 100% anything for that matter. I like to write about what is going on in the moment, and today that was firing up the smoker.

It was over 60 degrees today, and since our Dog isn’t doing that well (later post), we decided to just hang out in the backyard. Note the snow in the background – it is still March after all!

You can also vaguely make out the yard work that was getting done today, ripping out a rose bush, about to build a planter for tomatoes.

But the most important thing that was done today was letting those chicken thighs and baby back ribs soak up heat and smoke for about 5 1/2 hours (generally kept between 170 – 190 degrees.

We have friends coming over, time to make the sides, pour the drinks, and enjoy the BBQ.

What is that password again…

It has been a while since I last posted something on this small parcel of web real estate. I spent all of 2009 working as President / COO for a growing consumer products company. In one year, we accomplished a lot given the internal distractions that we dealt with (not to mention the macro environment that everyone faced).

In January I decided to take the role of CEO in another local startup. Ground floor. No revenue = no salary.

The past few months have been spent getting that startup going. A couple other big changes are set to happen in 2010 (all in due time), so I thought it might be a good idea to log in once again and get in the habit of publishing my personal journal to the world. If anything, it will give me a good way to look back and see how I handled each one of the upcoming changes. Who knows – it might even affect how I make decisions. We’ll see.