…continued from Part II
2007 From Voluntary Exile to Forced Exile
So I arrived back in Portland, Oregon just in time to ring in 2007. I had somewhere in the neighborhood of $37 in the bank as I mentioned before. You know the moment when you start trying to figure out if there’s an ATM that dispenses cash in denominations smaller than $20? Yeah, I was at that point.

For those keeping score, that’s two legit businesses started… two businesses rendered illegal by the government. This is but one reason that if you see me in another country and lecture me about how stupid I am as an American for electing Bush twice, we are not likely to be fast friends. The fact that I never voted for him is not even important. It’s called “tyranny of the majority“. Make Wikipedia your friend for a few moments you’re not familiar. And in this case… Heavy on tyranny… Light on majority.

This was one moment in my life where I’d almost had the entrepreneurialism driven from me completely. I can’t say completely, because if I had $137 in the bank instead of $37, I’d probably have tried to turn that into $237. I’m not cool enough to eat and start a business on $37, so I caved and started thinking about getting a (cover the children’s ears in case they can spell) “Jay” – “Oh” – “Bee”.

I wasn’t going to go down easily. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I started sending resumes to a bunch of online places and slogging through newspaper classified ads. A friend worked at a car dealership as a finance manager. His dad, who I also knew, was the GM. He mentioned in passing that I could take a job as a salesman if it got to that point. While appreciative of the off and a worst case scenario one notch above starvation and destitution (prostitution?), the idea of selling cars makes me throw up a little every time I think about it. That’s not entirely fair to car salesman. Sure, they have pretty much the worst rep on the planet. Sure, lots of them are sleazeballs, but that’s not the problem. I’ve just seen “Say Anything” about a hundred times too many. You know the scene…

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a
career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy
anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or
processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as
a career, I don’t want to do that.”

Since my personal philosophy has been shaped as much by about ten movies as all of the post-modern thinker pap I’ve crammed into my skull, I take these things very seriously. Point being… I didn’t want a job, and if I had to get a job, it wasn’t going to be a sales guy. The one good thing about sales is that they tend to supply coffee measured by the gallon rather than by the cup.

At this point, the wheels were spinning. I headed to my parents for a couple weeks for the extra attention and cooking effort that often accompanies the “thank God you didn’t die in a foreign country, we were so worried about you” moments. I spent zero time looking for jobs and a lot of time trying to figure out a solution that would be acceptable to me.

During the thinking process, I checked out the website of the car dealership I had a tentative job offer at. I’d say it was the worst website I’ve ever seen, but I’ve since seen other car dealership websites, so it’s no longer in the Top 50. Also, we totally rebranded the company before I left, so the original wouldn’t be around even if the rebranded company didn’t go out of business in the great car industry collapse of 2009 (well after my departure). The point is that the sight of the site instantly kicked my mind into gear. I knew from pure intuition that websites had to be the cornerstone of car shoppers’ shopping arsenal. So I ask you… Do arsenals even have cornerstones? Wait, no… wrong question. Nevermind.

In my subsequent research, I discovered that the number of car buyers who started their shopping online was something like 85%. Yes, the motivation to avoid salespeople is strong. I was formulating a proposition. The company clearly needed help with their web presence. After a little questioning, I also discovered that their process for handling leads from the website was cumbersome and resulted in people getting contacted days later… if ever. From there it was just a matter of connecting the dots between my education/training, sales experience, and internet marketing. Once the dots were connected, I had to wrap a cohesive story around it and mentally diagram an Andrew shaped hole in the minds of those at the company who signed the paychecks. A week or two later, I was hired for the position I created for them.

I don’t want to slog through all the details, but within a year, my position morphed from Internet Manager to Internet Marketing Director to Marketing Director. It wasn’t a huge company, so that might not be super remarkable. What you might find interesting is that in the process, I also managed to stop going to work.

Much fuss has been made about Tim Ferriss and his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Penelope Trunk apparently hates him and her legion of sycophants agree with her that he’s a fraud and a big meanie. The list of doubters who point out that he works more than four hours a week is a mile long. Ad hominem, red herring, and necessity fallacies may fly unchallenged in religious or political discourse, I have little tolerance for them. I read Tim’s book shortly after it came out in April 2007. For those of you not drawing a timeline on a napkin, that’s just four months after I returned from a life similar to the one idealized on the cover of the book. People tend to have a strong reaction to the book, but my first reaction is probably in the minority. The first thing I thought was… “Fuck, I should have written this book.” I’d been practicing some of the same things Tim writes about while he was writing about it. In all fairness, there’s a ton of stuff I wasn’t even close to discovering at that time, but I respected what he had to say because a lot of it was stuff I’d lived… sort of. Since I knew a lot of it was true from my own experience, I sought to implement some of the other tactics.

The steps about how to free up time by removing yourself from the office while stilll keeping your job were the first I tried. You already know the gist of the outcome. For the bulk of that job, I went into the office maybe two days a week. On those days, I showed up largely according to my own schedule and left largely according to my own schedule. I made this more possible and more acceptable by taking the lead on a lot of IT related initiatives as well. I made sure there were communications tools in place that allowed me to be out of the office. I didn’t ask. When I saw communications system problems, I dug through dusty closets and found manuals and resurrected them. When new options were being considered, I built test systems so the decision-makers could see exactly what I needed and why they should want it to. The “IT guy” didn’t like me very much by the end, but the people who used the systems for their jobs  loved me. I’m okay with that trade-off.

By the end of the first year I’d reloaded the bank account. The business was starting to decline because of the credit crunch. I was ready to go and the company was having a harder and harder time making payroll so we parted ways amicably.

I intended to wrap this series up in three parts, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to fit a semi-hostile takeover of my next company and starting an ad agency into this without making it so long that your scrolling-finger falls off. So go grab a drink and mentally prepare yourself for Part IV!

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