Guiding Principles

Someone just sent me a “life credo” by the great marketing guru Joe Polish this morning - it contained 100 principles that he believes are essential to living one’s best life. I think he forgot the principle that if you show people a list of 100 things, they’ll remember about 5 of them.

It was fitting that someone sent that list to me this morning because I’ve spent the past 3-4 weeks refining a new personal set of principles that I try to live by. I didn’t force them, I just let them come to me.

For me, it had to be a very simple set of broad principles that I could easily remember - through these 8 basic principles, I can make almost any decision. To help me, I had some bracelets made with the acronym SOLIFAGY written on them. SOLIFAGY is the best “word” that I could come up with based on what the principles were. They’re not in order of the acronym in the list below, but SOLIFAGY at least helps me remember them. Feel free to use these yourself - they are not copyrighted =). But I think it’s best if everyone take ownership of their own principles.

The underlying principle beneath all of these is that I’m striving to live each moment more rather than living in the past or the present. This is especially hard for entrepreneuers since we are inherently yearning to “build something greater”. Whether it is an exit, a sales milestone, or earnings targets, none of these things are good or can bring us happiness if we don’t actually enjoy doing what we do on a day to day basis. For me, that used to be plunging our office toilets myself, eating expired protein bars out of our warehouse and answering customer service phone calls from angry customers who were upset that we didn’t ship their order within 4 hours of placing it. If I was thinking about “someday things will be better” the entire time, I wouldn’t have enjoyed that experience for what it was - a tremendous growth period, a time spent with my best friend and loyal employees building something that we were passionate about. The fact is - I was thinking about “someday things will get better” the majority of the time, and I let a large section of that part of my life pass me by while I was waiting for something to happen, something that didn’t really exist.

It’s in the process of building that I learned to really find great pleasure, and it wasn’t until then that I feel I was a true entrepreneur. I’ve been thinking about that experience a lot lately, which prompted me to do some introspection and come up with these.

Here are my principles - I ended up finalizing them on the back of a golf scorecard while I played by myself one day last month. When I was done with my round, I was in such deep thought that I left the scorecard on the steering wheel of my cart. When I went back to the golf course with a friend a few days later, the guy in charge of golf cart maintenance handed it back to me and said he couldn’t throw something like that away, as he happened to notice my chicken scratch while he was cleaning the cart and could actually read all of my notes. That is one of the most flattering compliments I’ve received to date (the fact that he could read my writing, not the fact that he took something away from the principles).

1. Open up to all possibilities. Rid myself of rigid mental models and accept that things can unfold in unexpected ways, and those ways were the way things were meant to happen. Open up my heart and my mind and let everything in.

2. Accept outcomes and things I can’t change. When waiting for a decision, don’t let it consume my life. Don’t place my happiness in anyone else’s hands. Become comfortable with not being in control.

3. Focus on the love and the good in everyone. Recognize that everyone is good at the core, and my job is to bring it out. Shower people with light even when they seem mean or angry. Don’t focus on negative qualities in people.

4. Give something positive. Do not part with any person, thing or place without having left them better than they were before I came in contact with them. Leave everyone and everything a little better off.

5. Interest of the greater good. Team first. Be a servant, be humble. Think only of how the team, or community, can be better off, not what makes me better off. Remove ego from all decision making and make all decisions based on what benefits the whole. Life is not a zero sum game.

6. Yearn to build nourishing relationships. Strive to make every relationship nourishing, nothing superficial. Go out of my way to ask people about their passions, desires and needs. Get beneath the surface and build human connections with as many people as possible.

7. Live in my heart. Live an authentic life, be true to myself and rid myself of social norms. Listen to what my heart is telling me, and trust it fully.

8. Simplify. Live simply, and do not let overly complicated things cloud my mind. Make decisions based on key points, those that are most important to me and consistent with these principles, and don’t look back once I make it.

Whether you need to take a fly fishing trip to Montana or spend a weekend doing something you love, or maybe nothing at all (silence is extremely valuable!), I’d encourage everyone to spend some time thinking about what is really important to you in your life.

The Origins of Dick

Wikipedia defines intelligent design as the assertion that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process. . .”

On Wall Street, nothing is an undirected process. Everything is by design. In fact, if Wall Street were a business—let’s call it Wall Street, Inc. —then its C.E.O. would be a guy named Dick.

Dick is the unmoved mover , the puppeteer, and the intelligent agent. He’s the guy we despise and the guy we aspire to be. In life, there is always a prick named Dick.

Dick has always been the C.E.O. of Wall Street. If you’re a Wall Street historian, then you may be surprised to learn that Dick is the father of modern finance. If you’re not a Wall Street historian, then I’m going to save you the trouble of reading a history book.

Here’s what you need to know: when Dick created the first investment banker, he saw that the investment banker was good. Since the investment banker was alone, Dick gave him company. Back then, companies were good too . Dick showed the investment banker a tree on which money grew plentiful, and he told him that he was forbidden to pick from it.

Within days, the banker was wearing a Hermes tie and driving a Maserati. The Company wrapped itself in a $10,000 shower curtain . And they both swore they were innocent like a hot date who walks out of the bathroom with toilet paper hanging out of her skirt claiming she just touched up her eyeshadow.

Dick saw that this was good.

My Boss Dick

In life, there is always a prick named Dick.

In my elementary school, kids measured intelligence by math level. For instance, if you were in 5th grade and taking 5th grade math, you were average. If you were the schmuck in the back getting tutored by a 7th grader because you were one year behind, then you were an idiot. If you were in 5th grade and taking 6th grade math, you were smart. Sooner or later, though, you realize that being one year ahead in math isn’t cool anymore because some guys are two years ahead in girls. In other words, you’re screwed.

Those are the smart guys. Those are the guys you saw under the bleachers at the football games ready to have a giant orgy with every cute girl that you ever wanted to ask out. When you came home from class, they were coming home from getting to fourth base with Molly Brown. You listened to their stories and you took notes because you never got the memo.

But sooner or later, those guys mess up. They get married. They make a baby before they’re 22, and they spend their evenings learning how to wipe asses. Meanwhile, you’re drinking champagne at your friend’s bachelor party thinking ‘thank God it’s not me’.

Now, you’re the smart guy. Your buddies come to your house on Sunday’s to watch football. Their wives made the seven-layer dip. You’ve got the pad, the car, and the career. You’ve never wiped an ass. You’re the man.

Two weeks into your new job, you meet your ex-girlfriend’s fiancée, a prick named Dick who invested in fiber optic cable in ’97 and cashed out at the top of the bubble. Dick’s sitting on a pile of cash and attends Hampton’s soiree’s on the weekends where he mingles with half-Brazilian girls that drive Mercedes and don’t seem to have a job. Your ex-girlfriend is suddenly looking stunning, and you’ve got a splitting hangover that reminds you that you’re getting fat. You wonder if there will ever be another dot-com bubble and what your boss will say if you ask him for a raise. In the meantime, Dick has invested in municipal bonds that pay him more in interest than you make in a year.

Dick’s a fucking genius.

A Few Culture Thoughts

I spend 50% of my time dealing with internal company issues - namely culture - and 50% of my dealing with external issues, like customers and vendors. Today, I feel an urge to write about company culture and how a focus on culture can go wrong…fast.

I’ve said on several ocassions that the culture I admire most is that of Goldman Sachs - it is best defined as a “culture of success”. Having interviewed and been offered a job at Goldman, I have an appreciation of the process. During the interview process, I met with 15 people, including a ’super day’ of interviews that lasted 8 hours. At the end of the day, all 15 people had to agree that I was a good fit for the company. They clearly take culture very seriously. Everyone at Goldman seems to have that weird ‘Goldman thing’ about them; humble, scarily smart, kind of reserved and team oriented. The model has certainly endured.

It is mainly a culture of performance, and that is what I believe should underlay any company. At Fit Fuel, we screen every single employee to make sure they are culture “fits” - we have margaritas for lunch as a team, BBQ together on the weekends and are like a big family, and it’s important that new team members are part of it…I’ve had to turn away many, many candidates who I really “wanted” to hire from a purely skill-set perspective, but couldn’t because they would destroy our awesome chemistry. With that said, the most important point that I’d like to make is that cultures predicated too much on “getting along” without enough of an emphasis on performance can suffer serious consequences.

Nobody should excel simply because everybody likes them - though it is definitely an advantage to that individual. At Fit Fuel, we take likability as a given…people wouldn’t be here if other people didn’t like them. But at the end of the day, performance and success drive everything we do. It’s the ultimate meritocracy, and we intend to keep it that way. There is nothing more devastating to an employee to know that they got passed over for a promotion because their colleague had drinks with the supervisor a few days a week, regardless of being over bought on inventory and completely blowing a deadline.

I think one of the hardest things to manage in any culture is the balance between performance and fit, but if you assume that fit issues are vetted in the beginning and you discourage things that can doom chemistry - tons of internal personal relationships/dating, clicky drinking clubs, inter-departmental social rivalries, and employees who come to expect that they deserve a party everytime they have a good month - then you are well on your way.

We’re certainly trying to do that here, and we have Goldman Sachs quotes posted on our bulletin board to remind us of what is possible when everyone comes together and focuses on the success of the company first. That success is reinforced by our great personal relationships, but those relationships are more of a foundation than a focus. They are a foundation on which we built a culture where people know that the more they push our company forward, the more they share in our mutual success. When we refer to performance, we refer to company performance first and individual performance becomes something like a wheel on a car…and I think everybody realizes that. It is humbling to know that if a few of our key employees left, we would be in a bad position. But it’s that prospect that keeps us all focused on growing our company, growing our brand, and coming together as a team that recognizes that it is only together that we can truly accomplish great things.

Business Plan? All you need is Twitter.

Companies: this is a relatively easy way to think about how you pitch your business or idea and whether or not you’ve refined it to the point you need to…

Can you Twitter it?

Yes, that’s 140 characters or less. Just something that came to mind when I direct messaged a friend (on Twitter) about a quirky idea that just popped into my head this morning. After dealing with a lot of VC’s (and having been one myself), I think this is a cool way to think about it.

I am looking out for the first VC shop that abandons the usual form for submitting business plans and, instead, simply accepts direct messages via twitter to their business screening guys.

Putting Things Into Perspective

I’m lucky to have the best friends in the world. This blog post basically consists of a screenshot from part of a Skype chat with a friend who moved to China from Buffalo, NY and started a business from scratch. Aside from managing to be both a savvy business owner and world backpacker, he has always realized what’s most important in life, and I consider him part of my “Board of Advisors” (for life, not Fit Fuel).

Sometimes, I need a little nudge to remind myself of what I have and where I am going, and I’d like to share this snippet of a conversation with you all because I think it sums things up beautifully. I haven’t had a wink of sleep since I read it and wouldn’t be surprised if that lasts into tonight. Not surprisingly, I still managed to run 10 miles this morning, mainly on adrenaline. Good music and endorphins help me think…it’s when almost every good idea for Fit Fuel is born.

I hope everyone has someone who brings out the best in them and encourages them to pursue things they are passionate about.

Ben Skype Conversation

Fit Fuel Twitter Use in the Wall Street Journal

So it seems that my tweets on Twitter about crazy Vegas nights, being stuck in airports or my desperate attempts at cooking are finally becoming appreciated by someone, somewhere out there. Recently, the Wall Street Journal contacted us because we are one of only a handful of companies that truly embraced Twitter on the corporate level. They wanted to learn more about our use of Web 2.0 and social media tools to enhance our business.

Here is the resulting article and blog post that accompanied it:

Wall Street Journal Fit Fuel article:
Wall Street Journal Blog:

Since the articles didn’t have enough room to capture the full essence of why we all go out of our way to tweet at Fit Fuel, I thought I’d expand a bit on the reporter’s comments. Here are some of the main reasons Fit Fuelers tweet:

1. Internal Communication - it builds culture by encouraging our employees to interact in ways that they might not normally interact. This is, after all, how twitter was first conceived. It happened to grow into a social networking tool or micro-blogging tool, but it still has tremendous application at the corporate “intranet” level.

2. Relationship Building with our Customers - what kind of relationship would you have with your girlfriend if you saw her once a month? it’s hard! as a business, we’re not into long-distance relationships. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of relationship that most businesses have with their customers - the customers might interact with them once every 2 months when they need to make a purchase. Twitter helps us interact with our customers on a daily basis (or, in my case, sometimes 5x per day), and it’s much easier to establish a healthy relationship that way. Long distance relationships entail having as much sex as possible on every visit (read: purchases), and sometimes that becomes the central focus (of the business); ours is more like vines winding and weaving their way around each other - we end of building solid, long-lasting bonds. We have a vision of a Fit Fuel 10, 15, even 20 years down the road. Will we still have some of the same customers that we have today? I think so.

3. Feedback - often times, we ask our customers and twitter friends for feedback on ideas and business decisions. And we take the feedback that we get seriously! We like our customers to drive our business, so when we are considering a new idea, our customers are the first place that we look. We are customer-centric in all of our processes, and twitter helps us in those efforts.

4. Personal Stuff - yes, twitter is 90% personal. I use it because I’m the type of person who enjoys sharing his experiences with others and hearing about the experiences of other people. That’s why I follow so many people on Twitter - I’m curious about the world, curious about what people are doing and generally interested in life and ways that I can improve my own life and our company.

The Wall Street Journal seemed surprised that I would tweet about being hungover and worried that customers might view that negatively. I responded that most of our customers, even the healthy ones, know what it feels like to be hungover, and that’s something we can all relate to. At the end of the day, isn’t being able to relate to people one of the most important parts of any kind of relationship building, even that between a business and its customers?

5. Find People - Twitter helps us vet potential employees and develop relationships with people who want to be involved with the vision of our company. We have hired at least one person from Twitter thus far, and we always give twitter inquiries strong consideration. Why? Because even though we are fundamentally a health company (that happens to have an online store), technology is a big part of what we do - a large portion of the back-end work that we do is engineering and tech related. So, if someone is having a hard time learning twitter (or video-conferencing with us on Skype, for that matter), we can safely assume they aren’t tech-savvy enough to work here. Twitter is also something that tends to attract the kind of forward-thinking, adventurous and extroverted people that we want to be a part of our team.

6. It gives us something to do while we’re waiting in lines.

I’ve been asked why I would waste my time with something so trivial. My 800 followers, after all, (at the time of this writing) is a seemingly immaterial part of our customer base. Those 800 followers are among our best, though. And I believe that relationship building takes time. I probably spend 10 minutes/day twittering. I value my time more than anyone I know, and am constantly looking for shortcuts or ways to free up more of my time, so I would not be twittering if I did not see a tremendous benefit for the “cost” of my time. That benefit is not easily measured in dollars.

At the end of the day, if one of my friends sees a tweet from me that I am at the Wynn playing poker and he shows up to join me, that alone is worth every tweet I’ve ever tweeted. The more I can spend time with people I enjoy being around, the better. If it enhances our company in any way, that is like icing on the cake.

The 2004 Blackberry - An Investment Banking Relic

so i’ve kept the blackberry i used as an investment banker to this day - a sentimental relic of the road not less traveled. but the day has come for me to beat the shit out of this thing as an effigy of sorts. it’s like tossing the final picture into the fire. it’s a rite of passage into true entrepreneurship.

http://twitpic.com/4h6i

yep, that’s it, gleaming on my desk this afternoon in all of its faded glory. little does it know that it’s going to get beat with a 9 iron. i swear that blackberrys - especially those with a history behind them - are living, breathing organisms. they just won’t die. they’re like cockroaches. you look into their eyes/screens and see a life of memories you’d rather forget, memories involving mind-numbing valuations and fwd’d finance jokes that aren’t actually funny.

since I can’t show the beating, i’ve included a small passage from my book (Intelligent Design: Wall Street’s Secret Program to Clone Humans) which describes how and why i left the Street to start a healthy vending machine company (before I got cloned, of course). In this particular episode, I’d just woken up on the floor of my hotel bathroom and realized I had to be at a Board meeting in 30 minutes across town in Bangkok. The blackberry pictured above is the replacement I was given after I broke my original company-issued blackberry in the Conrad hotel that morning.

—————————-

………

I made my way to my feet, slipping and sliding in bodily fluids. I nearly lost my balance, but I had a steady grip on the counter with one hand; my other hand was clutching my vibrating Blackberry. It was my only link to reality.

The first thing I did when I steadied myself against the counter was check the time on the screen.

FRIDAY, APRIL 14TH, 7:30 A.M.

A deep hatred toward the Blackberry began to swirl inside me. It represented everything that was wrong in my life at that moment. It told me the time, it gave people access to me whenever they wanted and it saddled me with responsibility. It represented structure , and it represented work. It was evil.

In that instant, standing in the bathroom, I was a warrior. I represented all Blackberry users who had been prostituted and exploited. I was a martyr; I was a crusader. With the light on my Blackberry blinking feverishly to signal new emails, I wound up and hurled the device against the wall as hard as I could. It shattered into hundreds of lifeless pieces of plastic.

For a moment, there was peace and quiet in the world. I found it cathartic, even sobering. In this one selfless act, I had liberated all junior financial analysts from a life of responsibility.

As I made my way out of the bathroom, I swear I saw the reflection of a red light blinking on the floor behind me…

*Home* Inventory Management

so i went grocery shopping last night - the hardest bit of inventory management that i do all year.

i’ve realized that i suck at that middle part of life that involves grocery shopping, showing up at the dentist every 6 months and making sure my guests have towels in their bathrooms.

when it comes to grocery shopping, i’m particularly bad. before i even left for whole foods, i threw out 80% of the crap in my fridge. the most interesting find was a half-eaten hamburger wrapped in aluminum foil from our fit fuel “west coast gangsta” party…last month.

luckily, we don’t let 80% of our products in the fitfuel warehouse expire, though i know it doesn’t increase your comfort level by telling you that the ceo can’t manage a refrigerator. well, take comfort in the fact that i’m not the inventory manager at fitfuel.

it occurred to me last night that most people’s experience with inventory is really at home. i definitely wasn’t paying attention in home-ec class. actually, pretty sure my school didn’t have one.

the stats:

- 5% inventory shrinkage - due to my friends stealing the only worthwhile things in my pantry…Cheerios and pistachios

- 30 day inventory turns. considering that most product expires after 7 days, i should probably cut these down.

- out of stock items: very bad. most of my fridge inventory really consists of “kits”, or things that need to be paired with something else to work. i.e. hotdogs with no buns. not serious.

- space management: items thrown into fridge and pantry so that i find the hotdog buns crushed under a jar of pickles 3 weeks and 3 shades of green later.

to my credit, i don’t have any roommates, and it’s not easy buying efficiently for one person. it’s not like i can go to costco and throw 5 bags of tortilla chips to 5 ravenous little kids to chow up before they go stale. if anyone has any kids that i can rent to eat expired product before it goes bad, please volunteer them.

so my new strategy for grocery shopping - focus & efficiency. #1: i no longer shop while listening to my ipod when i haven’t ate for 15 hours. when i do that, i start thinking that i will actually eat an entire jar of pickles and forget that i don’t actually like pickles. and if i’m listening to house music, i tend to get hyperactive and throw things into my cart while i’m really thinking about something completely different. last night, i think i accidently bought cat food. i don’t have a cat.

i buy party platters like veggie bowls and bean dip meant for 10-12 people and i just graze off it when i’m at home. i can’t be bothered to stick something in the microwave for 3 minutes because i’ll start twittering or emailing in those 3 minutes and forget it was there. nice!

i suppose it’s kind of like most things - people pay attention to the beginning and end, the top and bottom, the front and the back i’ll continue focusing on those things and try to hedge against fridge shrinkage by not fooling myself into thinking that i’ll actually find the time to make a gourmet breakfast because “those exotic mushrooms in the produce section must make a great omelette”.

in other words…i need a personal shopper.

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