Sometime earlier in the year, I discussed the idea of having an automated deal of the day system put in with Adam. The concept was pretty simple, take a random item out of inventory, reduce the price, and put it back to the regular price at the end of the day. At the time, we were unsure of the best method to approach this nor was sure how to program this feature so we put it on the back burner. Well we’ve been revisiting the idea the past couple weeks and realized the many benefits of implementing this type of system:

• Our customers will check our homepage more often to see what the daily deal is
• Our customers can opt in to a daily email that notifies them of which product is on sale for the day and keeps us in constant contact with them
• We get a chance to move through inventory quicker
• Google sees a brand new homepage every single day, which can help with our crawl rate and search engine benefits
• The new product featured on our homepage gets a quality link back which will help improve the ranking of the individual product page
• The product on sale gets listed as the lowest priced product for that day on Google, Yahoo, etc.
• A brand new way to market some amazing products

Lots of good things to come out of this feature that was once a puzzle. I’m always impressed with the growth of Adam’s programming abilities. He estimated this system would take him about 3 weeks to implement, we were live in less than 1! It’s things like this that overtime will make our company that much more valuable, efficient and increase revenue.  Check out Detailed Image’s Homepage to see the Daily Special in action, with the timer counting down how much time is left before the special changes.

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted on here and I’m disappointed in myself for not keeping up with my blog.  Today, I’m going to start fresh with a new outlook and a new vibe on my blog.  I’ve gone through a lot in the past few months, both personally and professionally, and learned a lot about who I am and what truly makes me happy.  I never dwell on the past and try to learn from every experience I encounter.

One of the things that I took away from the past few months is that I really haven’t organized my schedule, set short term goals for myself or used my time as efficiently as possible.  My new short term goal every day is to do one thing that either betters myself or my business (above and beyond the day - to - day tasks).

Today, some of the things I accomplished were:

• Spoke to the owner of Autopia.org about becoming a sponsor of the largest auto detailing website on the net.  This will be huge exposure for Detailed Image and is our exact target audience.  I look forward to posting more about the relationship that we develop between Autopia and Detailed Image.
• Officially kicked off my new diet by doing some grocery shopping.  While I try to keep my portions in check and eat roughly 6 times a day, I suffered on picking the right food.  Another problem I encountered was that I found myself eating out 80% or more of the time.  In my early twenties (wow that feels weird to write), I was very much into bodybuilding and had a great physique.  One of the things I want to get into is my health and fitness and kicking off a new diet was a great way to start.
• Lately, I’ve been starting a new workout with some fitness equipment from Tastefully Driven.  I want to prove to myself and others, that you don’t need a gym membership to get the body you wanted.  I know that 70% (or more) of peoples results come from dieting, but I simply neglected exercising and working out ever since I tore my Achilles tendon, just over 4 years ago.  About two weeks ago I started doing some pull ups every day I was at the warehouse.  Recently, I added more to my routine and now that I’m in the swing of things, plan on starting a new organized routine along with my new diet.
• I started reading The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss, which was highly recommended to me by my business partner Adam, as well as many others.  I only got through 1 chapter today, but I’m excited to read more.

I look forward to making some big strides in the future, but it all has to start off with small steps.

So with the recent launch of Tastefully Driven, we know that one thing we want to focus on is shooting some high quality videos. After doing some research, we decided that the Canon HV-20 would fit our needs perfectly. I’m excited to learn how to shoot quality video and document as much as possible.

I’ll post an update after I’ve had a chance to use the machine. As with my digital SLR equipment, we also purchased the Canon HV20 at B&H.

Between launching Tastefully Driven and picking up the HD Camcorder, that’s 2 more things to knock off of my things to do in 2008.

Finally, just shy of 3 years of starting up Detailed Image with Greg, we moved out into a much bigger warehouse.  In my things to accomplish in 2008 post, my goal was to move into a warehouse by February 1st.  That didn’t happen, but we picked up our keys on February 21st.  If you follow Adam’s blog, you may have read how we turned down two other leases we looked at.

The first place we looked at, we really weren’t sure what we wanted.  We were still doing some service work for clients and Tastefully Driven wasn’t even in the picture.  We tried to barter with the lady who owned the property and she was insulted by our offer and jacked the price up.  Needless to say we didn’t accept the offer and I’m glad we didn’t because we found out that she had a history for being a pain in the ass.

The second place we looked at, we loved.  It was a brand new building, decent space about 2500 sq ft., but the kicker was there was a TON of hidden costs built into the lease.  Our lawyer had a laundry list of things to try to get in our favor.  We decided that there were too many things to negotiate that we told them we weren’t interested.

So the search continued and finally we found our diamond in the rough.  When we decided we were going to focus primarily on Detailed Image and Tastefully Driven, all we wanted was wide open space.  We finally signed our lease with the Galesi Group for a spot in the Northeastern Industrial Park about 15 minutes from where we all live.

We could tell instantly that dealing with them was how we hoped everything went.  Since this was a large industrial park (over 1 million sq ft of space) they treated all the tenants basically the same, which gave us a steal on our space.  Our space measures out just over 5,300 sq ft, perfect for years of growth for our company.  We estimated that we were working in less than a fifth of that size before the move.

I don’t think the move could have went any smoother.  We rented a Penske truck and it only two 2 trips with it to get everything we had into the warehouse.  Our once crammed inventory seemed to be a drop in the bucket in our new space.  We’re very excited about the growth potential and to make the warehouse the new home of Pure Adapt, Inc. for years to come.

Well, the past 3 weeks probably have been the most hectic and stressful weeks of my life.  It first started out that in the middle of February we finally signed our lease for the new warehouse.  A week before the move I came down with a severe cold / mild flu that took a toll on me for an entire week.  My productivity was low, but I knew a lot had to be done to make the move a success.  I’ll go into detail and catch you up to speed with what’s been going on in my life.

I was playing around with my camera the other night and snapped a few photos of my girlfriends cats.  I’m looking forward to shooting new pictures for our Tastefully Driven site, so I’ve been practicing a little here and there when I can.  Here’s a few of my favorite ones.

More business related posts coming soon, I promise.  A lot has been going on and I have a lot to write about.

As of yesterday, Adam emailed all of our previous and current clients telling them that we no longer offer website design, marketing, optimization and hosting.  What does this mean?  Pure Adapt will only consist of sites that we own. While the money from clients was good, it often led to lots of emails, phone calls and sometimes headaches!  This would always take away from advancing sites that we own and occasionally negatively impacted employee moral and mood.

I am glad that things have gone smoothly so far with saying goodbye to our clients.  It gives us the opportunity to focus on one thing, growing the sites of Pure Adapt.  I am looking forward to seeing the impact of having 4 owners wake up every day and say what can I do to better our business, rather than other peoples business. Moving forward with our new warehouse, we plan on focusing on e-commerce, specifically Detailed Image and the exciting new Tastefully Driven.

I’ll be sure to reflect back on this decision in a month or so to see how far we have progressed.

A few days ago I decided to call it quits with Verizon and made the jump to the iPhone.  I was anxiously awaiting the 2008 Mac World Expo which happened mid January, to see if they would announce the second generation iPhone.  They didn’t, but did announce a new update that added some cool features to the current iPhone, one of them included a better map integration which was a feature I was looking for.

I pulled the trigger on Monday of this week and received the iPhone the next day.  It’s still new to me and I’m sure I haven’t played with all the features yet, but it definitely is a great machine.  I was slightly worried about the size of the phone when I looked at it, it was a lot taller than my previous phone, but also a LOT thinner.  After having it for a few days it easily slips into my pocket and I often don’t even realize it’s in there.  The graphics and screen are just gorgeous, nothing like any other phone I’ve seen.  The interface is very user friendly and it doesn’t take long to get used to the touch screen, even when typing out a text message or browsing the web.

I plan on utilizing many of the features of the phone to help keep me well organized, specifically the calendar feature, notepad and keeping full contact information handy.  I realize that most phones do this as well, but I never utilized those features until now.  I think the fact that it is like a mini-computer in the palm of your hand makes you want to use it more, at least for me it seems.

I also love the fact that my phone is now my portable source of music.  While my previous phone had mp3 capabilities, I never bothered to use them.  I would have needed a micro-SD memory card and card reader to sync the files, compared to a quick USB connection and syncing with my existing music player, iTunes.

So far the service with AT&T seems to work better than Verizon.  In places where I’d frequently drop calls, I haven’t yet with the new iPhone.  I’m glad I pulled the trigger on this phone and knocked off another thing to do in 2008.

As we roll into 2008, it brings about new and exciting things as a company. One of our massive projects we’ve been working on is a site called Tastefully Driven.  Tastefully Driven is going to revolutionize the e-commerce industry in so many ways.  Our expected day of opening is going to be April 1st, 2008.  If you’d like to be notified with when we launch the site and qualify to win a $100 gift certificate to the site, just visit www.tastefullydriven.com and submit your e-mail address.

Stay tuned on more info about Tastefully Driven as this will be the primary site Pure Adapt will focus on for years to come.

I got the idea of creating after regularly reading one of my business partners blog, Adam McFarland. The other day, the third Pure Adapt blogger emerged by Michael Li. Now, three of the four owners have their own personal blogs to give various view points on our business and journey as an entrepreneur.

I’m excited to read Mike’s viewpoints and thoughts as we share a lot of similar hobbies and interests. Mike has emerged as the companies best designer and has put a unique spin on how he laid out his blog. Here’s a snapshot of the current homepage on www.Michael-Li.com :