Do It Right!

Today's Marketing Cookie is about doing a job right.

Twelve years ago, my wife and I bought an old button factory and began transforming it into our home. The factory was completed in 1832. Just as a frame of reference, Andrew Jackson was re-elected for a second term, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, passed away that year at age 95 when my house was built.

The factory does not look like how you might imagine a traditional factory might look. It has a very steep roof and was made from oak logs which were cut to length by a portable, steam-powered saw mill that had been temporarily brought into town via railroad. The building frame was constructed without the use of nails but rather by using heavy squared-off logs as beams and posts, which were then carefully fitted, joined together, and secured by large wooden pegs. The most unique part of the building is that each of the three stories is held up by the outside walls. The "balloon construction" allowed me free reign to reconfigure the floor plan of the house, without needing to worry about load-bearing walls.

We didn't have much money, and because the house needed a lot of work, the asking price was very low. I'm pretty sure it was considered the least desirable house, sitting in the center of the most desirable area. We bought the house just after I had founded my first company and because I was working from home at the time, I was able to work on the house a little bit nearly every day. The only problem was, I had no experience in construction and had no idea what I was doing. So, through the use of Google, YouTube, and taking out books at the library, I set out gutting and rebuilding my house one floor at a time.

Several years later, I was still at it, but business had been good so, I began hiring contractors to help me. This is the moment when I realized the true benefit of professional experience.

For example, originally, the building had twin spiral staircases, one on each end of the house. This was very charming, but the building was not wide enough to accommodate a central hallway. In order to get from one end of the house to the other, you would have to walk through room to room like railroad cars. It's never good to have to cross through a bathroom to get to the next bedroom when someone is already in there.

To fix this situation, I moved the staircase to the center of the house, so there could be a proper landing with doors to each of the rooms beyond. The idea was great, except the new stairs crossed directly in front of a window. I didn't realize this until I had already started building the stairway. Well, an experienced contractor would have recognized this problem much sooner and would have figured out a way to have the stairs flow from the reverse direction.

Whether it's your business or your home, it really is as today's fortune says, "The efficient person gets the job done right. The effective person gets the right job done."