Six Buckets, Seven Books, and the Business That Finally Feels Like Play

I recently finished working on seven pretty big books. I started writing them about twelve years ago, and when I say finished, I mean they're finally ready to become printed books. I've already made test copies. I've turned them into e-books. I've edited them so many times that I no longer want to look at a single sentence.

So, naturally, with nothing left to write, I spent tonight bombarding LinkedIn with business ideas.

Before I go any further, let me be clear about something. I'm far more experienced than I am wealthy. I might even be a better professor of retail than I am a retailer, because I think about these things obsessively. And I'm a Capricorn, which I suppose explains at least some of my enthusiasm for organizing things into categories.

When I exited my previous juice company and began building goodsugar, one of my first priorities was to find project management software. Before I rented a location, before I built a store, I wanted a place to take the hundreds of ideas floating around in my head and make them visible, organized, and actionable.

I chose Trello.

For me, the important part wasn't the software itself. It was the discipline the software required. A thought in your head can float around for years, change shape, and disappear. Once you write it down, give it a category, and assign yourself something to do, the thought begins to become a business.

My earlier experience had taught me that this particular type of retail business could be divided into six major categories. These were the buckets I built my work around.

ONE: FINANCE AND LEGAL. The money, the accounting, the reporting, the agreements, the compliance, and all the other matters you cannot afford to ignore simply because they aren't particularly glamorous.

TWO: OPERATIONS. How are we actually going to do this every day? How do we produce the products, maintain consistency, open the store, serve people, order supplies, and keep the machine functioning?

THREE: HUMAN RESOURCES. Who is going to do all this? Who is going to help me? How do we find, train, support, and organize the people who make the business possible?

FOUR: BRANDING, MARKETING, AND SALES. To me, this is the nucleus of the business. Everything else exists in support of giving people something worth buying and communicating its value. This includes the name, the graphics, the copywriting, the store experience, the customer relationship, and the entire mechanism of selling.

FIVE: PRODUCT INNOVATION. What exactly are we making? How do we make it better? What new products make sense, and which ideas should we leave alone? A business needs a reason for customers to keep caring.

SIX: CONSTRUCTION, MAINTENANCE, AND REPAIRS. The physical business. How do we build it? What equipment do we need? Who fixes the thing that breaks at the worst possible moment? In restaurants, this category can sometimes feel like a full-time occupation all by itself.

That's it. Six big buckets. There are hundreds of tasks within them, but those are the categories that made sense for my particular business. A different company might need three, ten, or entirely different ones. I'm not presenting a universal law. I'm describing a system I know how to use.

Long before goodsugar opened, I had populated these categories with an enormous amount of writing, concepts, and work. I have so much artwork and so many ideas in the branding section that I could probably start ten more businesses without running out of material. That doesn't mean I should start ten more businesses. It means that writing things down creates a resource you can return to instead of reinventing every idea from scratch.

Monday through Friday, early in the morning, I work in Trello. I write, organize, simplify, clarify, and make decisions about what needs to happen next. For me, writing about the business is not separate from operating it. Writing is one of the ways I operate it.

I recommend that founders become prolific writers about their businesses. Write down what you know, what you don't know, what went wrong, what the customer said, what the staff noticed, and what you want to try next. Keep it somewhere you can find it. Then keep simplifying the writing as you simplify the business. The goal isn't to create a museum of your own thoughts. It's to get out of the chaos.

In the first couple of years of my previous business, the finances were a mess. Too many people, including me, were learning important lessons while the business was already moving. At goodsugar, I wanted to get that part right from the beginning. We were much more organized financially from the day we opened, in large part because I had the right team.

Peter Kay, our COO and CFO, is phenomenal at what he does. He has strengths across these categories that I don't have. I bring my own strengths. Morales, who you often see at the front counter, is excellent at the work she does. A good company isn't built by one person pretending to know everything. It's built by people whose abilities fit together.

I'm grateful for this team. And I'm grateful for how willing I was to do the work before there was anything impressive to show for it.

I wasn't sure I would ever reach this point. Along the way, there were so many milestones. Finding a store. Building a beautiful store. Making products I was proud of. Finding customers who genuinely loved them. Watching sales grow. Eventually operating profitably.

You might think each milestone would switch off the fear and leave me feeling permanently satisfied. It didn't. I would reach one point and immediately see something else to do. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that part of myself, because there is a fine line between enjoying the process of building and using endless activity to escape an anxious feeling.

I still don't know what would make me feel completely satisfied with a business. I know it's not simply accumulating more money. I want to build something that contributes to people's lives. I want the products, the people, and the place itself to be useful and meaningful.

That's what gets me onto the 5 train when I'm tired or don't feel particularly good. I get up and go to work because I want to be there. There are plenty of difficult days, but I no longer experience the entire enterprise as something I have to drag myself through.

I've matured a lot. In my twenties, I mostly wanted to play. These days, much of the time, work feels like play.

Don't tell that to my wife.