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Saturday, September 26, 2009

WHAT I LEARNED AT BUSINESS BOOT CAMP

Steve Cole Reports:

During 23-25 September, I attended the Amarillo Business Boot Camp, which was run by the local university (WTAMU) and economic development corporation (along with a lot of other groups, such as a Chamber of Commerce, the economic development councils of several towns, the Panhandle Regional Planning Commission, and other organizations). This was held at the adult education center for the local college (Amarillo College).

We had serious grad-school level business courses and talks by local businessmen who turned one-store start-ups into $50 million businesses with dozens of stores.

The best of it was talking to other local businessmen who (despite being in very different businesses) were facing the same challenges: efficiency, expansion, sales, marketing, and so forth. My lab partners (as we called ourselves) included Joe (his wife runs a bakery, and he handles the business end as a second job), Kelly (who runs a crew that paints oilfield equipment and a lot of other things), and Chip (who runs a local car wash). Others in the class included a young couple who run a cheese factory, a lady who plans weddings, a person who is an interior decorator, a guy who runs a winery, a guy who installs sprinkler systems, my own bank officer (who wanted to expand her department), a lady who runs a spa, a lady who runs a wilderness adventure camp, a guy who runs a data-backup company, the regional sales manager for my phone company, a guy who runs his father's oilfield-equipment-manufacturing company, two guys who run a website-development company, several guys who run various restaurants, and many others.

I cannot say I learned a lot about business; frankly, I already knew 99% of the course work. What I did learn was a lot of experience stories about other businesses, their challenges and failures, their innovations and successes. I even learned what a female boss says to female employees who need to act like adults ("Put on your big girl panties"). I guess that's something like "Man up".

It's not so much that I came out of the class with a newly inspired idea to revolutionize the way I run ADB, Inc. Actually, I went into the class with the intention of using my three days there as an excuse to force myself out of my mental rut. I have five jobs (design, administration, customer requests, deal-making, and marketing) and all of them constantly try to rob time and attention from each other. The answer is to define the amount of time each day, and each week, that each of those five jobs can have. Each job then gets its allotted time, and ONLY that time. If I don't get all of the deals made in the allotted time this week, the deals will have to wait for next week. If I see one category falling farther behind, it will get more time in the next cycle, or I will delegate some of those duties to someone else, or (at worst) I will prioritize and the less important ones just won't get done at all. That's sad, to be sure, but if it means that more important things in other categories DO get done, the company will be all the better for it. As the system evolves, the design time will be divided up between the different game systems, so that none of them get forgotten.