Wow, been a while since I’ve seen you blog. How are things?

This post may be a little self fulfilling. But I’m not really looking for accolades as much as I want to record the thoughts and realizations I have today….

HOLY CRAP I’VE LOST WEIGHT!!!

Somewhere around summer of 2006 I went to the doctor for a physical. The nurse asked how much I weighed as I stepped onto the scale. “270 or so….” I was scared, shocked and sad when she pushed the marker past 300….

309 pounds that day around 6 years ago. Today, I weighed in at 238 before breakfast. So, about 70 pounds and change. But, I’ve dropped 35+ of that since last May.

The numbers are good. And I’d like to get to around 220 with less body fat. That’s why I’ve been at the gym weight training lately. Should be able to hit that goal by summer time or so I think thanks to a my friend and trainer Bryan Eidem.

Anyway, what REALLY shocked me was the clothes I pulled from the closet this morning. You see, I have a shopping problem. Since I buy clothes 2-3 times a month (I know….) I don’t really see how they fit differently as my weight and sizes drop. Today I had to make some room for a few new purchases…..

Tangent…… I picked up a rad grey denim jacket from Ralph Lauren’s “Denim & Supply” line at Macy’s. Normal price was $220, I paid $36. It’s a motorcycle cut- angled zippers, waist buckle and all. There’s a sale on sale items happening through tomorrow in the Men’s department.

And back to the story….. As I grabbed the shirts that have been pushed to the end of the closet and not touched for a bit I figured I could start the elimination process by seeing which of them didn’t fit well anymore. Here is the first shirt I tried on-

And on it went until I had a large pile of shirts, a few pants (still more to go through) and a couple of jackets that are too big to even have tailored down. The good news is that I get to do some more shopping!!! The bad news is that most of these clothes are quality labels. Shirts from $80-200 that have been worn a few times at most. Some of them once….. Labels like Visconti Uomo, Joseph & Feiss, Claiborne, along with some more everyday wear mid line stuff. I cleared out 23 hangers so there’s close to a couple thousand dollars worth of clothes there….

Anyone wear a XXL or 18.5/36-37 shirt, 40X32 pants or 52 tall jacket that needs some clothes?

In other news, this marks 100 posts on the blog!!! I going to celebrate by grabbing burgers and cocktails with some friends over at CommRow. Then tomorrow, back to the high protein, low carb world of fat burning goodness.

Cheers!

Business, a lot of times, boils down to balancing expenses and income. Good business folks are good at bringing income up as expenses go down. That’s efficiency. Great business folks are great at leveraging expenses into income. There’s a line to be drawn somewhere.

Here’s the difference- Great business leaders realize the cost of doing nothing. They lack the fear of spending money to a point that they realize the instances that an expense can be used as a tool to make more money.

Marketing comes to mind. An accountant will tell you it’s an expense. A businessman will tell you it’s an investment.

Labor is an expense. But, it’s an expense that you can manage and leverage into profits. A business owner’s time is invaluable to their business. Anything that they spend time doing that could be done by someone else is an expense. Hiring a person to do those tasks, while the business owner works ON the business leads to profits.

Consultants and advisors are expensive. Good ones cost a good chunk of change. Great ones cost a lot more. But, their time is leverage to build more profits with less money. The $100+ an hour seems ridiculous, until you realize the profits from the investment.

My dad, who has taught me more than I could ever imagine, has a saying “Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies”. I don’t think it’s his original, but it makes sense.

Every second of every day I think about business in some form or fashion. Every store I enter gets evaluated in my (admittedly biased and cynical) mind. I see handwritten signs with misspellings, marketing materials that don’t jive with each other, employees that aren’t trained in their jobs, a business owner that works IN the business 70-80 hours a week to save from paying someone $10 an hour to do a job.

In my own business career, I struggled a bit. I learned in the school of hard knocks. I learned a lot by trial and error. At 26 I was running a $10 million a year business with 72 employees. We lost a chunk of change that year. Our sales dropped by 40%, and then we made money. 6 figures a month at one point. Unfortunately, we borrowed a lot to get it done and we ended up closing due to the debt that couldn’t be repaid.

In that time, about two and a half years, I saw the turning point for me. I stopped doing things the same way. Or, more importantly, I started doing new things. I did them quickly, figured out if it worked and went forward accordingly. Scrap the bad ideas, keep the good ones and keep moving forward.

Keeping the old systems doesn’t work anymore. Doing nothing costs a lot of money. Watching a business struggle due to the fear of change makes no sense to me.

Let me give you a real life example from my last business.

Part of my business was a deli/restaurant. Really, it was a glorified deli that did some things differently than your average sandwich shop. A restaurant revolves around the menu. We would launch a new menu about every three months.

The process went as follows-

Look at trends, competitors and products.
Brainstorm new ideas with the crew. From management to employees.
Test new recipes with staff and get feedback.
Run the new ideas as specials and get feedback from customers.
Adjust as needed and start serving the new menu for a few weeks.
Use sales info to make changes. Get rid of the dogs, market the stars. Run for a few weeks.
Look at the costs. What takes too much time? What are we wasting product wise?
Adjust the menu again to it’s final form. Run the menu for a few months.
Start over, again and again.

(notice that customer feedback and sales come before the cost portion. Who cares what it costs if no one buys it? Of course, the prices were based on our best estimate from the get go, then adjusted to real life numbers)

In the tech world, they call this iteration. Build a product, test it, refine it. Rinse and repeat.

We saw increases in profits every quarter from the time we implemented this strategy……

It’s easy to blame the economy these days for a lack of business. Every one else is doing it, why not you? To this day that’s the excuse I hear from others of why my last business closed. But to me, I know that it was because I waited to long doing nothing. I waited too long waiting for everyone else to change instead of making change myself. That’s a mistake I will never make again.

Side note: I used “I” a lot here. It was more of a “we”. In the final years Butcher Boy had an amazing crew that would do whatever needed to be done to be successful. They broke their backs for my family and I’m eternally grateful for that.