Will Hurley

About Will Hurley

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Can Stress Be Productive?

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As the school year ended and the summer commenced, my work-life drastically changed. Just a month ago, I had deadlines every week, goals to accomplish, and people relying on my work. Teachers were expecting me to complete assignments, and when I did, I was rewarded with a physical grade. Now that summer has started, there’s no one to keep me in check with no deadlines. So how do you remain productive when no one’s watching you?

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There’s always one person in your life, whether that be a teacher, parent, or boss, that burdens you with a certain amount of stress. It can be extremely annoying, even unhealthy, but don’t you get more things accomplished with that person around? I do think there’s a certain sweet spot to this problem, however. Although I don’t think many people have acquired this skill, I think you can be the one to police yourself and remain on track. There is a sharp difference between yourself and that boss, parent, or teacher – they can give you real punishments. They can fire you, take away privileges, or give you bad grades. Those are the things that motivate you to give your best work so you can avoid the punishments. So how can you apply this kind of stress to yourself?

The key is to stay disciplined, and when you stray from your path, you become disappointed in yourself. Training yourself to be unsatisfied with your quality of work is the key, but it takes time to obtain this skill. As a high-schooler, summers are the only time to practice being independent, and with a little effort, it can be super beneficial to have this trait when I enter back into the world of deadlines and exterior stress come September.

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Dealflicks Closes Its Doors

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Once dubbed the “Priceline for movie tickets”, the company Dealflicks closed its business in 2018, shortly after our interview with founder Sean Wycliffe back in 2017.  Sean and his team created a movie ticket marketplace for smartphones. The ticket prices would change in real-time with supply and demand in order to sell out theaters. The idea was brilliant, and the company had major success. Raising more than $4 million in addition to signing on 13 of the top 50 theater chains, the company was thriving. Run by the co-founders and their team, the company got theaters to become clients by traveling around the country in their minivan. However, the big movie chains started to chip away at Dealflicks’ business after realizing the potential of the idea.

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After years of revolutionizing the movie industry, Dealflicks was forced to stop operations. With big businesses such as AMC offering new subscription services, Dealflicks was squeezed out of the market. The story serves a valuable lesson, however. Even if there’s enough funding, a motivated team, and a great idea, some businesses will still fail. It’s important to study the companies that fell short just as much as the ones that were successful to appreciate how difficult it is to run a business from start to finish.

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Juggling

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No, not juggling balls. But, I do hope to give some reflection on the more important definition of juggling: learning how to manage multiple aspects of life. In high school, the game is a balance. Family, friends, school work, clubs, and sports are playing tug of war for your attention. The common frame of mind is that there can only be one winner. High school is all about putting the students under a high-stress environment and seeing how well they can perform. Although I’m still a kid, I can reasonably assume this is the same in the adult world.

There’s this one story in particular that I can’t seem to forget about. My dad told me that his coworker’s son drew a picture of his family. However, there was one thing missing. The son drew all of his family members but didn’t draw his dad. Heartbreaking to say the least. I asked my dad why this happened and he said his coworker was too involved in his work and saved no time for his family. Does this have to be true for every successful businessman?

Obviously not. Someone can certainly be involved in different activities in their life without making major sacrifices. As discussed in our previous blog posts, prioritization and time management skills are extremely important. You can easily get too involved with your work and forget about family dinner. An easy fix would be developing a schedule and following it religiously. However, even if you are left with a small amount of time for your friends, family, or work, make the most of it. Personally, a major pet peeve is when an adult is around and checking or sending emails at a social event. Obviously, I don’t know what it’s like to have a micromanaging boss with strict deadlines. But what’s the worst that can happen if you let your superiors know upfront that you are unavailable during certain time frames? If they don’t hire you because of this, you dodged a bullet! Who would want to work for someone who doesn’t comprehend that the work isn’t the only important thing in life? However, sometimes this isn’t as simple for everyone. Even with a rigorous job, you can still be aware of what not to do. The behavior to most avoid is mixing different parts of your life. When it’s time to do work, put down the phone and get to business. When it’s family time, try at all costs to not get involved with work. Once parts of your life start to mix, it’s the first step towards not being in the family portrait.

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The Importance of a Mission Statement

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One message has been made clear after hearing entrepreneurs share their business stories: a mission-driven company is more likely to be a successful. The mission statement is one of the most vital aspects of a business as it allows the company to build itself around a common vision. When debunking the difficult question of, “how do I start a business?”, a mission statement should be created first to guide the business after conception. The mission statement shouldn’t be lengthy, but it must clearly define the business’ purpose and explain to both the customers and employees why the business exists.

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Patagonia’s mission statement is a perfect example of a well-crafted mission statement and clearly demonstrates what it means to be a mission-driven company. Its mission statement is simply to, “build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use the business to protect nature”. Sure it is brief , but it is packed with an inspirational punch: selling a great product while nurturing the environment. By having a clear and inspirational mission statement, companies like Patagonia gain three distinct benefits and set themselves up for future success.

Mission-driven businesses will have employees who work hard, loyal customers, and trust from investors. First, mission-driven companies find it easier to recruit well-rounded employees; people would rather work for a company that is making a difference in the world rather than a company with no vision. Furthermore, having a mission will make it easier to attract the right type of employees. Take the Patagonia example – their employees share a common interest with the leaders of the business: protecting the environment. This creates positive chemistry in the business between workers. Not only do they get along better as like-minded individuals, but the employees work harder for a company with a mission that they believe in. For Patagonia, the employees aren’t just selling clothing anymore. They are saving the planet. People work harder for a larger goal – like saving the environment – compared to employees in a company without a mission whose only goal is to make money.

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The company with a mission statement finds it much easier to find a loyal customer base than the company without one. First, the marketing of the product is much easier because it’s not just saying, “buy this product”; it’s sharing the company’s mission. For example, Jamie Siminoff, the founder of the video-doorbell company Ring, notes that he found the initial marketing of his product to come naturally. He broadcasted the message that his product reduced crime in neighborhoods, which was the company’s mission statement, and customers soon followed. He said that a common thread between successful businesses is a mission statement because “that’s what they can always answer to”. When posed with a difficult decision within the company, the mission statement will give guidance if it truly expresses what the company seeks to accomplish.

Businesses with a mission statement also have an easier time finding investors who trust and believe in the business and its product. Across the board, entrepreneurs note that they primarily look for investors who believe in their mission. Investors who want the company to succeed in its mission are not only financially tied to the business, but are personally connected and willing to go that extra mile for the entrepreneur. Not only will it be easier for the entrepreneur to pick investors, but more people will want to invest in a business that is set up for success. As previously mentioned, a mission-driven business acquires loyal employees and customers. This checks multiple boxes for investors since the business is more likely to be successful in a shorter period of time. Thus, mission-driven companies have less difficulty finding the right investors and take the next step towards succeeding in the market.

Once a strong mission statement is created, the founders must not put the mission on the back burner. As soon as entrepreneurs violate their mission, the entrepreneur loses their way in the business world. For example, it’s easy to accept an investment at the beginning of the company, but if that investor doesn’t believe in the mission, the relationship fails. Everyone in the business must align with the mission to be successful – the founders, managers, employees, vendors, customers, and investors. Once the mission is neglected, the company loses its competitive advantage and becomes just another company looking for money.

Ultimately, if there’s one aspect of a business to get right, it’s the mission.

 

To read our last article with FutureFuel, go to this link.

If you’re interested in the most recent business secrets, check out our latest Business Knowledge page.

Contact us to get your story heard!

 

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Ring

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After graduating from Babson in 1999, Jamie Siminoff established Edison Jr., the nickname for his garage where he worked on his inventions. Jamie started several businesses during and after his time in college, including Unsubscribe.com which allowed users to stop spam emails and PhoneTag which transcribed voicemails. However, none turned out to be long-term ventures.

One time, while tinkering with ideas inside Edison Jr., Jamie was unable to hear the doorbell. He searched for a product that would send the video of who was at the door to his phone, but he couldn’t find one. Jamie remembers saying, “screw it, I’ll just build my own [doorbell] that goes to my phone”, and his company DoorBot, the name prior to Ring, was conceived. At first, Jamie couldn’t see the value of his product. In fact, it was his wife who told Jamie she felt safer in the home which made Jamie decide to take it on as a “fun little side project”, but it quickly became much more than that.

Many founders have an “Aha” moments when they realize they have created a product that fits perfectly into an untapped market, but it turns out that Siminoff didn’t originally design the doorbell for a consumer, but rather a simple fix to an issue in his life. Jamie spent “over a year” playing around with the design of the doorbell for him to even consider it worth pursuing independently. He made an important point: it takes time for even someone sitting right in front of a product to see if it could be successful, and you have to “allow things to naturally happen instead of forcing them”.

It seems as if Jamie stumbled upon gold with his idea of the video doorbell, but rather his whole life had been building up to that moment. The founder of Ring created many companies before his doorbell invention, which was “equally as important [to Ring] becoming a successful and impactful business” since each failure taught him a different lesson. Jamie also mentioned it actually took “20 years” of being an inventor and entrepreneur that culminated to Ring becoming successful.

In 2013, Jamie Siminoff took his video doorbell company, known as DoorBot at the time, to the investors on Shark Tank. Siminoff rejected an offer from Kevin O’Leary, one of the Sharks on the show, and walked away without an investment. Although no capital was gained from his pitch, DoorBot experienced mass media coverage after the airing of the episode, and after rebranding the company as Ring, sales exploded. It was possible that Ring could have gone under if not for the help of Shark Tank, but Siminoff noted that he didn’t build his company knowing he would air on the show. Instead, he simply put himself in the best position to someday get lucky, and that’s all that entrepreneurs and inventors can do, he says. Siminoff compared his company to the lottery: “the more you work the more lottery tickets you accumulate, and at some point, the chance of you hitting the lottery is higher if you buy more tickets”. Most aren’t as lucky as Siminoff and his team with their opportunity to be on a national television show. Often, companies with great a great product, ideas, and business model fail. Siminoff’s experience shows that the best way to craft a successful business is to simply increase your chances of getting lucky because “lucky breaks are critical”.

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However, luck was certainly not the only driving factor with Ring’s eventual success, but it was also Jamie’s perception of competition. Jamie emphasized that an entrepreneur shouldn’t get bogged down with certain features of a competitor’s product, but rather what the customer is trying to tell you. As Jamie explains, at the end of the day, a customer will choose the product that reliably offers them the best experience. Siminoff says if you fail to build a satisfactory product for the customer, they’ll simply return it. That’s why he strives to “have [his] team say that the competition is the consumer and what they think of the product” instead of trying to one-up a competitor. Ring works backward from the customer and always has a central focus on two things: their mission and the customer. This is how you’ll put yourself in the best position to win the market.

Just another part of Jamie Siminoff’s business is the core mission that he’s had from the beginning of Ring, which is to reduce crime in neighborhoods. He strongly believes that if a company has a mission that the founders believe can positively impact the world, everything else about the business will fall into place. He summarizes the success during the early stages of Ring by saying that a powerful mission will be “better at getting employees to come work for you because people want to work for a thing that makes people’s lives better. Your customers are going to be more inspired by a product that is better for the world than one that is not. Your marketing is going to have more impact because your marketing something that is not just saying, ‘hey buy this product’”. His mission of making everyday people feel more safe is what helped him persevere through difficult times during the integration of Ring into the market, and his mission has helped him plan the next 20 years of his company. If there was one common thread between how Jamie Siminoff was able to take a Wi-Fi doorbell from Edison Jr. to finally selling his vision to Amazon, it was his main goal of preventing crime in his customers’ homes.

In the end, Siminoff and his team were indeed able to win the market. He was able to beat the competition at every stage of his company that attempted to copy his video doorbell idea. In recent year, he returned to Shark Tank, not as someone seeking an investment, but actually as a Shark himself. Eventually, Ring was sold to Amazon for over $1 billion, Amazon’s second-largest acquisition. However, this feat wasn’t made possible by just a great product, but rather by a mission that is making a difference in our world and by a strong leader that has guided the company through thick and thin.

If you want to learn more about Ring, you can find their website here. To read our last article with 23andMe click this link. If you’re interested in the most recent business secrets, check out our Business Knowledge page.

Contact us to get your story heard!