What consulting has taught me about weight lifting, and vice versa

Since I left business school at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School for my MBA, I’ve taken on the scary move of working full-time on the startup I co-founded with friends, Body Boss Fitness.  In a couple months of full-time startup-ship without the funds to really pay me (or anyone) a salary yet, I got all scared, and dipped my feet back into consulting part-time.  It’s been a few months doing this to put some money in my pocket, and I’ve taken on now two different consulting projects.  All the while, I also push Body Boss including traveling for sales and marketing and writing up blog posts like I just did here at Starbucks in Brookhaven on a Sunday.

I do enjoy supply chain consulting for sure… but I’m going to dip back out of consulting and give Body Boss my undivided attention for a long while.  If I say it out loud and put it on a blog post, I’ll have to stick to my word, right?  Well, all this experience has also brought out this strange affinity for writing my thoughts, and it’s about time that I write another article for my SC Ninja Skills blog. 

Reflecting on my previous life as a consultant (okay, some of my current, too) and my passion in weight lifting, I’ve seen a couple important take-aways that have been highly leverageable in both worlds.

• Change is hard.  When you go to a gym for a few years consistently weekly, you see those who come and go, and those who stay true.  It’s clear those who are “newbs”.  They come in, sometimes work half-heartedly, and then either stick around and wonder they’re not seeing the gains they want or they just disappear as quickly as they arrived.  In consulting, similarly, companies who are looking to change make a difficult decision to embark on change.  However, it’s so easy for companies to lose sight of the goal and milestones to bring about sustainable change.
• Even if you’re seasoned in the gym, you need to change to keep improving.  Companies who don’t embrace the necessity to change as the world evolves are likely to see growth become stagnant, and is most often the case, fade away.  It’s so easy for companies to keep going about their business managing the day-to-day without thinking larger and more strategically.  However, without change, it’s even easier to then let competition come in and take everything away (think Blackberry, Kodak, etc.).  In the gym, if you’re doing the same routine over and over again, your body adjusts and you no longer see gains in your strength.  It only takes six weeks before your body adapts.
• Bringing an outside perspective can help.  As a consultant, this is almost the very reason we exist.  Similar to the point above, it’s so easy for companies to be complacent and continue to operate just as they have over the last 40 years.  However, bringing in fresh eyes from consultants, an outside hire, or otherwise, can easily give perspective from potentially competition, other industries, etc. In the gym, bringing a friend who is knowledgeable about working out can easily bring new routines, or even help spot when you’ve actually got poor form.
• Establishing goals helps you achieve greater.  One of the first things you do as a trainer with a client is to run an assessment.  This includes understanding a baseline or where a client is, and where the client wants to go (i.e. lose weight, add 25 lbs to her squat, drop your 40 time by a half-second). Without knowing where you want to go, it’s hard to really push yourself and make it timely.  In the consulting world, if you don’t establish a baseline of “current state” and plan for a “future state” (Shangri-la), how do you know what to do, who to employ, how your customers will react (if any)?
• Post-workout is just as important as in-workout.  In working out, it’s important to take care of your body after a workout.  That may include a post-workout protein shake to ensure you have the nutrients for recovery, or just daily nutrition in meals.  If you aren’t eating right and stretching and the like, it’s hard to sustain any gains you may have from a workout.  In consulting, implementing post-transformation catches is key to sustaining the change.  Tracking efforts via metrics is one way of ensuring change has sustainability; while establishing a culture embracing change is another sure-fire way of keeping the momentum going.

So what do you think about the parallels in working out and in consulting or even business in general?  How would you use the lessons learned in the weight room in consulting, or vice versa?

Bringing Intelligence to Fitness: How Body Boss helped increase my strength by 4.86% over two months

Okay, so I’m going to be one of the first to admit that I didn’t always believe in tracking workouts.  Thought it was just a pain in the rear, and a waste of time in the gym.  I tracked with a notebook back in the day in undergrad at GT, and found it not-so-useful.  I would also have to translate what I wrote in the notebook into Excel – big pain.  Too much work to track trends. 

After Tech, I was a management consultant specializing in supply chain management. I actually developed reports, dashboards, and metrics for several Fortune 500 companies, and it was then that I learned how successful companies always had their fingers on the pulse of the business.  They knew the state of the business from Execs on down to Analysts through structured, actionable reporting.  The companies that were less-than well-managed had poor reporting capabilities.  It dawned on me that with successful companies WHAT GETS MEASURED, GETS IMPROVED.  Enter a new world for myself and the Body Boss team… porting over intelligence though analytics to strength and conditioning.

In my earlier post about how we started, I mentioned how we built Body Boss with sleek and sexy design on top of statistics and regression modeling.  With the growth of technology especially in the mobile space, we could now remove the painful, time-consuming notebooks from the Stone Ages into the new digital era.  And the results are AMAZING. 

Where many coaches have created their own spreadsheets with percentage calculations, we’ve designed an application that does all the calculations for them. We’ve designed a tool that automatically takes what Coaches currently do, but makes everything that much simpler and that much easier to read while also engaging and MOTIVATING the Players.  Players have to execute afterall, right?

We’re updating our current Player Profiles soon with a new Stats page that is going to change the game – see the design below.  Now, we’re going to be able to provide Coaches and Players a quick and easy-to-read Stats page showing the progress of players.  No more messing around in spreadsheets.  To do this today for most coaches, this would take AT LEAST 2-5 minutes PER player.  To gather all the workout data, keystroke those numbers into Excel, and create charts to track trends?  If you’re a coach with 10, 20, 100 players… that’s a lot of time.  No longer is the game just working out harder, but working out SMARTER. 

We’re still implementing the new Stats page, but I built it roughly in Excel, and the below is what I saw.  So this tells me several things.  1) I’m a beast, and I’m getting stronger. I’m creeping up to 30 years old and still after some injuries, I can achieve greater. 2) Building this in Excel was a PAIN.  I can’t wait when this is automated with Body Boss. 3) As much as I love Excel from consulting days, it’s ugly. 4) Tracking workouts WORKS.  Intelligence is knowing where you are now, and challenging towards a goal.  That’s what Body Boss does.  It challenges you to NEVER settle… to always strive for greatness.

Testing and original layout of the proposed Stats page in Excel -- a bit ugly, a whole lot of work

The new design of the Player Profile and new Stats page -- much sleeker than Excel and much easier, automated

So for Coaches, Trainers, Players everywhere… we hear you, and we’re here for you.  We’re going to change the Strength and Conditioning game to help you focus on strategy and player development, not spreadsheets and number-crunching.  We’ll do that for you.  Customize your workouts how you want (percentages and all), and we’ll help you with the analytics.

- Daryl "D-Train" Lu

You can email me at daryl@bodybossfitness.com or message me on Twitter @TheDLu

Body Boss: Who we are and how we started -- from Daryl's point-of-view

It occurs to me that Body Boss has a great story.  A great story of why we're here today with Body Boss trying to disrupt the “industry” of Team Strength and Conditioning.  

Darren Pottinger really started us on this path back in 2010/ 2011 of bringing more intelligence to working out – bringing regression and statistical modeling/ forecasting to training with a simple Excel model... yet can be built better and stronger.  Being the zealous and extraordinarily gifted problem-solver and programmer, Don Pottinger joined in on the fun looking to build the spreadsheet into something greater – an app for the masses.  

For several months, the brothers Pottinger iterated, and it was in the fall of 2011 when Andrew Reifman joined the team to bring his black magic of Design Creativity to the fold.  Andrew and Don were long-lost friends from Dunwoody High School.  After learning Andrew had built award-winning sites while working at various design agencies, Don asked Andrew to join.  Definitely loved his personal website.  I mean, how do I get little power bars like the X-Men cards I used to collect???  This Andrew guy is LEGIT.

I’m not sure when I really joined because I was consulting and always traveling.  Tell you what – if you can travel while trying to do your own startup, props to you because I don’t recall when I was adding value on a consistent basis.  SO enter me, Daryl sometime in that glorious assembly of the Dream Team.  Having played soccer at Tech with Don, we had become best buds for a while.  I bring to the field the execution and drive as well as some patience for the business administration – makes sense since I was entering Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in the accelerated One-Year Full-Time program May 2012.

Gifted with an extraordinarily talented team who also lived and breathed personal fitness, we entered Startup Riot as one out of 30 startups competing in a pitch-off of sorts in Atlanta in February 2012.  Many to this day will never forget our presentation where Darren stripped off his shirt to the hoots and hollers and affection of women… and men.  We were voted into the Top 5, and at the time, we were aiming to be a B2C company.  We were going to build an app based on the principles of intelligent personal fitness leveraging the growth of mobile and technology.  Though, we didn’t even have a product to show.  All we had was a dream.

After meeting with Georgia Tech and re-evaluating our strategy, we decided to shift to the B2B market – focusing our efforts on helping improve the feedback loop between Coaches and Players in sports teams and organizations.  As we reflect on our own past experiences, workouts were disseminated from Coaches to Players via sheets of paper and rarely, if ever, were those workout results ever returned to the Coaches. Even rarer was when the Coaches would take those sheets of workout results and plug them into something like Excel spreadsheets.  Tracking pieces of paper, writing it all down, transcribing the number into Excel… that’s about a 2-3 minute process for a single player.  If you’re a Coach of a team with 50 players, you can do the math and that’s a lot of wasted time.  Add to that other competitors' focus on just the Coach... that's not how TEAM sports are played.  We wanted to create a tool that engaged everyone on the team from the Coaches, Trainers, and the Players.  Afterall, Players are the ones who have the execute come game time.  That’s when Body Boss was really born.  

We built towards a vision without actually talking to too many other players or Coaches, but in August, we met with the Athletic Director of Centennial High School in Roswell, GA where we presented the initial design and vision of Body Boss.  Excited for what we were working on and seeing an immediate value, he invited us back after a few enhancements.  In December, we really locked in with the Head Football Coach and Head Baseball Coach at Centennial High School to trial Body Boss with their players starting January.  Everything since then has been... shall we say, history.  

So here we are, a bunch of Georgia Tech nerds + a talented Graphics Designer from University of Georgia.  Our home is Atlanta, GA, and our dreams lay in the stars.  Our backgrounds in soccer, weight training, certified personal fitness training, expertise in data and analytics, technical programming and design know-how, some great business sense, and a whole lotta drive… we’re aiming to change the world.  We're not just a team... we're a family looking out for one another.  We're proud of the family and friends we've earned over the years, and we will make you all proud.  We’re here to disrupt the team strength and conditioning space with Body Boss.  Be excited.  Visit us at BodyBossFitness.com. Follow us.  @BodyBossFitness

Consultants saving the world? Yes, that's why I'm wearing a cape.

Wanted to share this article I read on LinkedIn: Management Consultants Can Save the World.  I'm not trying to toot my own horn because of the very title and my own ability to consult, but because I want to wear a cape as I help companies.  No, I'm kidding.  Instead, I think the article highlights some insight into consulting or rather, effective management.

The article touches on a consulting firm's (Accenture in this case) ability to bring tangible benefits to Indian textile firms.  Many firms throughout the world lack formal and effective management, and stick to the plans that have gotten the firms to where they are such as the Indian textile firms in the article.  I can't help, but imagine if simple business processes were shared more to willing ears in some of these "old school" firms throughout the world, how companies and the world would change.  I say "willing ears" because change, as we've all heard it, comes from the top.  If you don't have a coalition of leaders wanting to change, then no matter how great consulting can be, change and benefits will never be realized.  Hence again, the important of effective management.

The United States has strong management processes in companies, but it's evident there are plenty of opportunities still.  However, there are tremendous opportunities abroad as the article highlights.  Especially in countries that are growing due to sheer population explosion such as India and China, there are tremendous opportunities.  

Well, nothing new really covered here; though, I wanted to share an interesting article.  Hope you enjoyed the article as much as I did.  I'm off to save the world now.

Cheers, 
SC Ninja

Bootstrappers, we don't have it easy, but Magic Pens gives us hope!

Today's post is a bit different... Not talking about any supply chain or job specifically, but I wanted to touch on something that's been on my mind a lot recently with my co-founded startup Body Boss Fitness.  That, and David Cummings has a great post about this: part-timing to build a product and company -- great post and tough lesson (see article here).  It highlights a few very important lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs especially the need to run full-speed on a project.  That being said, I'd also like to  point out a few take-aways specifically for those aspiring entrepreneurs (this list is not all inclusive nor exhaustive, just immediately on my mind).  

1. Building a business is tough.  Taking the plunge is not for everyone understanding there are life circumstances and personalities that necessitate bootstrapping a project.  Wheels may spin, and it'd be great to have that all crucial customer feedback soon and up front.  The key, I believe, is continuous learning along the way even if it's internally focused (learning how to code, dealing with the attrition of team members, etc.).
2. Be ready to commit at the right time.  Building on the preceding bullet, committing full-time to development of the product would be great, however, there are extenuating circumstances (yes, I'll include "fear" here) that may necessitate bootstrapping.  What will surely kill your startup is launching and doing nothing to nurture it.  I learned this when friends and I launched ABigEffU.com.  Huge failure.  We developed it in 30 days, but after it launched, we just sat back thinking it would just take off.  It was a stupid move, and one that I also didn't commit to because it was more of a challenge if we could build something but I wasn't passionate about it.  There's a big lesson learned -- startups don't go anywhere without care and attention (and some love).  It's kind of like having a baby... take care of the baby while in the womb, yes.  You can still work, go out with friends (don't drink, please), etc. while the baby's in there.  But when that baby comes, you better be ready to commit to parenting.  (Maybe a bad analogy, but you get the point.)
3. It's about you.  I love ABC's show Shark Tank.  Thank goodness I have a DVR so I can watch it and fast-forward through commercials.  Anyways, you hear some pretty wacky ideas on there, and some pretty good ones.  You can really tell who will succeed when you watch and listen to some of these presenter, nevermind their product.  I remember when I was in the Boy Scouts, I was at summer camp.  My friends and I started a "business" where we sold Magic Pens.  Magic Pens were nothing more than sharpened sticks with charred ends.  They let people write on the canvas of their tents and easily washed off.  We even dipped the end of the Pens in wax as a sign of authenticity and quality!  We sold them for a nickel with varying packages.  We ended the week with $10 in our pockets -- enough to buy several slushies at the Trading Post.  Something so simple and silly that all of our customers knew how to make, but they still bought it to the tune of $10 (99% profit).  I didn't know all the kids who bought the Magic Pens.  They bought because we did well marketing and selling charred sticks.  It's about you... not necessarily your product.
4. Be resilient.  And as David highlights, most startups fail.  Heck, Venture Capitalists pick 10 really, really good startups to fund with the hope that ONE of them will make it big. However, a key deciding factor of how a company will make it (potentially the ultimate) is the people.  Are they resilient?  Do those on the SharkTank take the hits and despite not getting love from the Sharks, do they learn, and are they passionate enough to succeed?  Spending weeks, months, or even years bootstrapping is one thing but once you launch, be resilient and focused to win.  Hear your customers, investors, and choose what you listen to.  Be resilient. Steve Jobs always had this notion that to succeed, you tell customers what they want.  Of course, you won't succeed if you always ignore.  But you have to know which to listen to and what to file away.  J.K. Rowling pursued 12 publishers who all rejected her manuscript for Harry Potter before finding Bloomsbury.  I think she's doing alright.

Like in grade school, "In conclusion...", David's got a great post about committing full-time to a project.  But if you're a bootstrapper, you're probably a bootstrapper for a lot of reasons, but make sure you're learning along the way and you're pushing the company and product as fast as you can.  This is especially true if you know this area is the next hot market -- you don't want to start competing against the world, afterall.  Just know that at some point, if you really want it to grow, you need to devote your time, energy, and love full-time.  The company is yours so it's all about you and what you put into it, and how you can stay resilient to your product while knowing what to hear and what to listen to.  Like David said, it's "tough" but he never said impossible.  

Strive for greatness fellow entrepreneurs!

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[1] Body Boss is a performance tracking application for sports teams and organizations.  Coaches can build customized workouts for their players to ensure workouts achieve fitness goals and beyond.  Body Boss creates social competition, continuously motivating and challenging players while driving accountability.  With Body Boss, coaches and players now have a competitive edge to win the battle off the field to deliver results on the field.Visit us at www.BodyBossFitness.com or contact us at info@bodybossfitness.com.

[2] David Cummings is a serial entrepreneur and investor in Atlanta, GA.  Mr. Cummings founded Hannon Hill and Pardot. Recently, Pardot was acquired by ExactTarget for $95.5MM.  You can view his blog here.

Employee Morale to Make Black Friday (Thursday) Happen... Thanksgiving Thoughts and Tributes

Today's post, not so much supply chain specific, but just as ninjas should be, I'm going to be flexible and talk about employee morale and culture.  I just finished reading an article by Fortune magazine re-posted on CNNMoney.com titled "Wal-Mart and the perils of ignoring staff complaints" (article is linked here).  I know myself and countless others have been thinking about how Black Friday has not-so-subtly crept into Thursday with many retailers opening their doors at 8PM on Thanksgiving Day.  It's like 2013 car models have hit showrooms in August 2012 or Christmas decorations the day the spider web, pumpkins, and other Halloween decorations are taken down. But this time, creeping Black Friday into a holiday... that's interesting.

The article primarily talks about how unhappy staff members are kept out of the loop of big changes (i.e. opening doors at 8PM on Thanksgiving Day for Wal-Mart).  The staff are now forced to work on a holiday where we, the consumers, get to relax and have time off to spend with our families.  The staff used to have this same holiday and time to spend with family.  Not so much anymore.  Big companies such as Wal-Mart, kinda-sorta big RIM (maker of Blackberry devices), and the like have had track records of ignoring staff.  Without a means of discussing complaints internally and with the explosion of social media, it only makes sense for these same employees to voice their frustrations out in the open on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  And that just makes everything spread like wildfire.  And to make things worse, some of these companies just fail to even address the complaints, and instead, send a canned, generic response which then adds fuel to the fire as more staff jump in igniting more attention from the outside world.  See the vicious cycle?

As we think about great companies and the bad, we think about the brand image.  The article went further to highlight a Weber Shandwick study (see study here) on company reputation and found that 63% of Execs say their companies' market values are tied to reputations.  That doesn't shock me.  How much do we hold Apple, Google, IBM in high regard?  Look at their stock prices... 561.70, 665.87, and 190.29, respectively as of November 21, 2012 4PM EST).  If you're like me, you believe they have pretty good reputations and that they've got pretty good track records (in general) with their employees.

And you know what?  It's not just about the employees of Wal-Mart, too, who actually now miss out on some nice family time.  I mean granted, to get ready for Black Friday at 12AM or 6AM still calls for some work on Thursday, but 8PM on Thursday just forces staffers to move up that time table.  However, it's not just the staffers, right?  Thinking about it from a supply chain perspective, all the different movements in the supply chain also requires shippers, transporters (i.e. truckers), customer service centers (call centers), and the like to also move their time table up. 

So as you consider Wal-Mart and other retailers' employees, consider the holistic view of everyone involved who makes Black Friday happen.  I guess we should start calling it Black Thursday or Black Thanksgiving.  Not sure how I feel or if I'll be out elbowing my way to the latest and greatest deals, but I'll take the time now to give thanks to the hardworking men and women who make commerce happen, if you wanted to work or not.  

And of course, I give thanks to YOU for reading... stay tuned for my thoughts on culture.  I ended up writing more than I thought so I'll make this part 1 of... a couple. Cheers and Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks,
Supply Chain Ninja

Second to market is the way to go (but don't tell me that)

Going hand-in-hand with my most recent post about how everyone copies one another (How to Survive: Read the Market or Just Simply Read What's On Your R&D Presentation), I received this in my email as part of my newsletter subscription to Strategy+Business -- the article is titled "The Value of Being Second" by Oded Shenkar (see article here).

In the article, I nod my head in agreement with every word.  Shenkar cites a chapter from Eli Broad's The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking.  I like to think I'm a thinker (else, why would I have a blog?), and I'm also a perceiver of the world.  That is, I like to sit back -- no wait, I lay in bed unable to sleep at night -- and reflect on the world around me.  And so I sit there and I think about how so many of the former companies of great stature, great products have just disappeared out of existence while new companies just take the world by storm.  Again, going back to my previous article where I talk about the Xerox's and Best Buy's of the world, it's no longer needed or even desired to be the first kid on the block with a new product, service, or whatever else.  

As an aspiring entrepreneur, too, being a Co-Founder of Body Boss Fitness, I get to network with other entrepreneurs and hear lectures and presentations from successful entrepreneurs like Charlie Goetz (a Professor at Emory University's Goizueta Business School), David Cummings (Founder and CEO of Pardot who just got acquired by ExactTarget for $95.5M after only a few years in existence!), etc.  They all say the same message that Shenkar speaks of in his article and what Broad wrote in his book -- the market is changing and no longer is innovation and first-movers necessary to be successful.  Instead, it's the guys who follow the first-movers who capitalize on the first-movers' failures and mistakes, and they get to leverage the companies coming in second don't have to educate the market.  Of course, second-movers come in with a new twist as the many entrepreneurs I've spoken to would say, including myself.  I especially like the analogy Shenkar cites from Broad: it's like hiking.  The guy in the front has to clear the brush and is getting cut up and does all the hardwork.  However, he paves the way for the guy following who just simply walks the same path with less investment.

Of course, there are many benefits, too, of being the innovator and first to the market including brand name and access to the technology and more.  And then there's me, whom I very much hope to be a builder of the future, and wouldn't mind being the guy at the front of the line hiking.  I want my name out there because if done right, too, the first-mover can keep its place as number 1 in the market place.  The key here is the need to also continually innovate.  (I'm finally getting around to tying this post to my previous post.)  If you can continually innovate, you'll keep ahead of the curve and you'll reap the rewards and leave second, third-, n-movers behind you.  Don't be stagnant.  Or be stagnant and be content to play second fiddle in the future (or no play at all).

And so in closing, I want you all to appreciate coming in second because when done right, coming in second just positions you for first place next year.  But if you're willing to invest and keep innovation high and strong, keeping the pole position is certainly achievable.  When I hike, yes, I like to lead.  I may be the cut up by the brush and I have to be the one to clear it, but I like that. I like the challenge.  I'm okay with paving the way for others to follow because in the end, it's for the good of the group.  Do know, though, that while I'm in front, I'm running.  So I'm keeping my place at the front.  You'll just have to work that much harder to keep up.

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[1] Shenkar, Oded. The Value of Being Second.  In Strategy-Business. [Website]. Retrieved November 1, 2012, from  http://www.strategy-business.com/article/ac00041?gko=ba14e&cid=BL20121025&utm_campaign=BL20121025