We're back, baby.
The Reactor is Blogging
We’re back, baby.
June 26, 2023
Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I sat down to write a blog post for TRIC; just about 3 years based on publishing dates. Sea duty is an exhausting endeavor; the demands of being a part of an operational submarine crew took most of my time, energy, and brainpower. I’m glad to be done with it. Shore duty is everything I was promised so far, and I’ve been using my reclaimed time to get back to doing the things I enjoy in life.
One of those things has been running TRIC LLC. I took a good, hard look at TRIC earlier this year and decided that I really wanted to give this company a shot at excelling. I had proven that our business model was profitable and sustainable in years past, but I never had the time, energy, or maturity to make it come to fruition. Opportunity is a fickle woman and I decided that if I didn’t take my chance now, I might as well commit to never taking it all.
Unfortunately, life had done quite the number on TRIC and there was going to be a lot of work in getting the company back to an operable state. In January 2023, I had no one in the company beside myself, no inventory, and no plan. We had been running for years prior to this. What happened?
We incorporated in 2018 with a casual mindset of making some fun products for members of the Facebook page to enjoy. We had our successes and bumps in the road, but all-in-all we approached this business with the attitude that it was (and was always going to be) a side hustle. The commitment levels to TRIC were proportioned accordingly with that mindset. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse in April 2019 when my co-founder and friend, Andy, passed away from a battle with cancer.
I’ll be frank. Andy was the salt-of-the-earth and glue that kept us grounded and operational. His dedication to TRIC was tantamount to my own and his passing affected me greatly. Andy’s departure was a cataclysmic event for TRIC and I didn’t even know where to start with filling the duties he kept on. We brought on some people- some were good fits, some weren’t. We chugged along as best as we could with life tugging us in a million different directions. However, as the realities of sea duty gnawed away at whatever time and energy I had for TRIC, things continued to deteriorate.
By March 2022, I was in quite the pickle with respect to TRIC LLC’s solvency. All the founding partners besides I had all moved on to focus more on their families and/or careers. My ship was about to get underway for another deployment and my Operations Manager just submitted her exit notice so she could double-down on a new career she embarked on post-Navy. I don’t bear any ill-will about what transpired; people had their lives to live, and I always made it clear that TRIC shouldn’t be the golden goose they rely on. However, I still had a choice I needed to make and not a lot of time to make it.
I couldn’t stomach selling the company to someone who didn’t have my vision or placing it in the care of someone I didn’t know with such short notice before a deployment. So, I decided to offload all our inventory and ship what was left to a friend in Virginia who had some interest in joining up with TRIC in the future. I didn’t know what the future would hold for TRIC, but I didn’t want to close the door forever.
Fast forward to January 2023. I’ve come back from deployment, transitioned to shore duty, and moved 2,800 miles across the country. Life is looking up. I had endured a lot of stress and life-changing moments the past few years and decided that if there was ever going to be a time to take TRIC as far as it could go, it would be now. I needed to do a few things to prevent repeating the past, though.
If there is one thing the Navy has taught me, it is that there is no substitute for a healthy organizational culture. I didn’t know enough when I incorporated TRIC in 2018 to truly respect the nuances of making a good organizational culture, but I think I have a better understanding of it now. There is always areas to improve but for right now, these are the principles I try to embody with my management of TRIC:
1. Value people’s time. This is one of those value vs. virtue topics that I think many organizations miss the mark on. I’ve always paid people for the work they do for TRIC. However, there is more to respecting someone’s time than by throwing additional money at them to do more work. People aren’t just machines you can put money into and get productivity out of. My goal is to make every person who works with TRIC to feel that:
a. They are adequately compensated.
b. Their input is welcomed and acted upon within reason.
c. That no one should know their job better than they do.
d. That if there is too much work on their plate, we can bring in additional resources to lighten the load.
2. Be predictable. eCommerce is a feast-or-famine business. Things move rapidly and unpredictably at times. Rapid changes in an operating environment makes people panic, and people do dumb things when they panic. So, rather than investing all my time and energy in training people how to react when things go wrong- I’d like to spend most of my time ensuring that things go as planned. I want everyone at TRIC to know what my next action is going to be before I take it. I want them to know what questions I’m going to ask before I even ask it. I want them to know how much work there is going to be this week because I’ve been boring them with it for a month prior. Surprises come up, especially in this corner of industry; however, that doesn’t mean I should be a surprise.
3. The Good Idea Fairy should be molded, not squashed. I’ve always had a bit of a creative purity streak (I know, ironic to hear that from a meme-maker) and that has truly hindered TRIC in the past. I still have my red lines, but I focus more on shaping a well-received notion or quip into a fully realized design than trying to push what I think is great. “Buy-in”, as it is called in the Navy, rarely develops from a top-down push. It is far easier to reap dividends from shaping an idea that people already want than to artificially drive a concept no one is thinking about.
With all this in mind, I made some material decisions. I gave our long-time artist and creative guru, Meagan, an owning stake in the company. I hired a new operations manager and developed a catalog of products for initial sale. Once we got through our grand re-opening and had some cash flow, it was time to get to work.
The “Shim Fast, Eat Ass” phenomena brought it to the forefront of my mind that there was no way TRIC could continue to operate out of spare bedrooms and garages. Furthermore, doing logistics work is a painfully tedious process- and that process is done more efficiently and with more accuracy if you have more than one person doing it. After banging our collective heads against the wall for a month as we dealt with the growing pains of getting 300+ orders at once, I decided that it was time to proactively prepare for the next time we had a huge influx of orders.
I talked the team into signing our first lease, got the place furnished, and drove to Portsmouth to help move in. Then, instead of waiting for the next tidal wave to hit us, I secured another logistician to assist with fulfilling orders. I stopped beating around the bush and hired a professional accountant to keep our money straight and the taxes paid. I put TRIC on a weekly meeting drumbeat where all of us- accountant, artist, logisticians, and marketing- could sync and know the gameplan moving forward.
It worked wonders! When lightning finally did strike twice with the Hot Rock Tumblers, my team absolutely crushed it. They let me know when they thought there was too much work to be done to meet our turnaround goals, asked for additional help before we even started making tumblers, and then met every single deadline along the way for getting them turned out. It was a complete reversal of the chaos that success had brought in the past. Sales were exciting and profitable- not something to be feared as you pondered if logistics could keep up with the demand.
Frankly, it paid off.
A little bit of emotional intelligence and commitment to driving culture before results has gone a long, long way toward TRIC’s bottom line. In the past 6 months, we’ve made more money than the entire history of the company prior to that. It’s been a great feeling, but the truth is that I’m more anxious about trying to sustain performance than basking in our laurels. I used to think 6 months was a long time, but 6 months might as well be a statistical anomaly as far as an assessment of an operating portfolio is concerned.
I’m no financier or economist, but I think that focusing on driving to a good culture with TRIC is what has enabled us to make it so far this year and I am counting on it to keep us pushing forward. The explosion in sales and social media traffic this year has propelled us into a new tier of business with an office, dedicated working hours, and offers from small-time investors. Those material challenges are things I’m still working through and a post for another time. However, I don’t think we would’ve gotten here if we focused on the products before the people behind them.
I’m confident that we’re going to continue to grow and learn and meet these new opportunities with an unshackled certainty of ability. We’ve come a long way in just 6 months, but we’re just getting started.
Thanks for reading.
- Wayne