Not only did we get the required back flow prevention valve installed at Oddyssea today, we also got the sink hooked up. (I can do many things, but plumbing is not one of them. Everything I touch leaks in a DIY context.)

We are excited to have the sink so that the create activities have access to a place for customers to wash up as required while working on or finishing projects. Another step toward getting to the opening. And another step toward completing the required activities to comply with the municipal code is finished.

I’ll build a wooden cover to mask the pipes, give some structure under the sink, and a little counter space to the right under the fire extinguisher. Speaking of the fire extinguisher, it was re-certified (annually) and re-built (a 6 year cycle.) So we’re good to go on the fire protection front too.

Meanwhile, inventory and stocking continues. It takes an unbelievably long time to get these details worked out. But, it’s fun!

I’ll be working a little more on consulting this week and so I’ll be depending on Spouse to advance the state of the shop over the balance of this week.

It was just about a year ago I decided to “try” Twitter again. It was my third attempt and I wasn’t optimistic about it (in fact, in previous content I called Twitter a fad and dismissed users as narcissistic broadcasters of trivia.)

Well, a year in and I can say I’ve found a way to make Twitter valuable for me – and maybe for the people who follow me. You can see the growth in followers in the chart to the right (click it to embiggen) over the past year moving from around 60 to just under 1,100 today. I presume there must be some value as the number of followers is going up consistently as I add content to the twitter-sphere.

Another aspect of this is “who you follow” – in the same time period, the people I follow has increased from about 100 to 225 a factor of 2x growth (vs 18x for people following me.) My approach to following is this: If you are family or a close personal friend, I’ll follow you no matter what (even suffering a low signal to noise ratio.) If we are in business together or have a long standing business relationship, I’ll follow you as long as the signal to noise ratio stays above 0.5. If you are any other person, I may follow you if you have something interesting to contribute to the conversation. I tend to give people I follow a week or two to make that determination and then I am ruthless about unfollowing if you have a low-quality tweet stream.

This approach to following has yielded a high-quality, interesting tweet stream to draw from. It doesn’t matter what time it is, or where I am in the world, there is always something interesting and thought provoking to read and/or engage in as a discussion.

It was that last bit that escaped me on prior Twitter attempts: discussion and quality of tweet stream. The startup curve to get efficient is a bit steep, but once there it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to broadly engage, educate, discuss, and debate.

So if you’re a Twitter skeptic like I was a year ago, give it a whirl. It’s like the Facebook status line without all the other dancing cheese and the culture of rampant douchebaggery. YMMV.

Oh yeah, and if you’re not doing so already, follow me on Twitter @mah1.

One of the side effects of stocking up is the inevitable packaging that the inventory arrives in. As you can see from the photo, we’re’ accumulating a fair amount of cardboard and plastic that will need to get into the right recycling stream.

The way vendors choose to pack their wares is highly variable. For instance, we had one seemingly indestructible item wrapped layers of plastic and paper, cushioned by bubble wrap, secured in a double cardboard box. That item survived the trip. On the other end of the scale, we had some glassware arrive that was simply placed in a cardboard box with simple paper insulation and labeled “glass – fragile.” Unfortunately, not everything in that shipment survived.

Another interesting observation is how vendors choose (or not) to extend their own brand into the product. If it’s discreet I don’t really mind and leave it as shipped. However, the other end of the scale can be scary. One item that arrived had the look of a NASCAR stock car with all the stickers, labels, and tags hanging affixed to it. Which of course took some time and effort to remove without damage, but made the item palatable.

Well, that’s the update from today. Going to avoid parking tickets and go help Spouse out at a fund raising event for Daughter’s school this afternoon. Hopefully, I won’t miss the delivery guys with a few shipments we expect today….

One of the great things about doing consulting work is the ability to see a perspective outside the boundaries of a single company. That means trends and failure modes can be spotted and used. This is a well known failure mode, but I’ve been reminded of it recently in some of the engagements I’ve been working.

If you don’t have a clear, tangible, communicated, and agreed-upon destination, you are unlikely to arrive where expect. If we keep with the travel analogy, would you ever consider taking a business trip without knowing where you arrive? (Travel for pleasure is a different deal, sometimes travel for pleasure is moving about with no clear destination ;-))

Yet with projects, large important, high visibility and high impact projects, it seems that this task is one of the most difficult to complete. Sometimes because there is not agreement on the destination. Sometimes because the general zip code of the destination is known, but there is not yet enough information to specify the arrival address. There are many other reasons too.

So how can you avoid this pitfall?

So, if you are running a project great or small, take a moment and ask yourself:

• Do I know what the destination is?
• Can I clearly communicate that to others who care about the result?
• Have I clearly (and repeatedly) communicated the destination to others?
• Do those other people agree with the destination? (If not, must they agree?)

And do..

• Periodically evaluate that the journey you are taking will actually end up at the destination.
• Provide proactive status updates about where you are and when you expect to arrive.

This is a simple list with simple questions and tasks, but they really do form the foundation for success in any project. Good luck with your project!

One of the most interesting and time consuming things we’re doing for Oddyssea is finding, testing, and ordering product for our inventory. It can also be a little frustrating.

For those of you who are familiar with retailing, you’ll know all this so forgive me for chatting about it. For those of you unfamiliar, perhaps this will be interesting. There are 2 ways to interact with vendors when purchasing wholesale, the first way is straight-forward by establishing a “direct” relationship with that vendor, placing the order (via a person/representative, website, telephone, mail, fax, or carrier pigeon – only slightly joking about that.)

While there are no “middlemen” in the relationship (meaning you should be getting a lower price) it is time consuming to do this as typically the orders are relatively small from a relatively broad set of suppliers. It requires a fair amount of follow-up but you tend to interact with the principals and that helps with quality and timeliness of responses.

The second way to interact is through a distributor, a company that is in the business of representing some number of other companies – typically called “product lines” or “lines” where you place the order with the distributor and then the distributor passes the order along to the origin supplier for fulfillment. You pay the distributor a small markup over the wholesale price that you would be able to negotiate if you had the direct relationship with the vendor of origin.

What I’ve learned is that many of the direct relationships don’t provide the best price or service and that most of the distributors are convenient and helpful. That’s not 100% true, but it certainly seems to be the trend. There are several suppliers who have been wonderful, but mostly they seem a little overwhelmed to be able to do the simplest things like provide payment terms and instruments.

The conclusion I’ve drawn thus far into the experience is that dealing with a distributor is worth the small uplift in wholesale price when factoring in your time.

Meanwhile, we passed our fire inspection. We’re waiting for some plumbing work to happen. We’re waiting for “explore” room fixtures. I’ve built another display case for the create room to complement the apothecary counters. We’ve got a fair amount of inventory that has arrived and the lion’s share still in transit or under order. We had a presentation at the Half Moon Bay Chamber of Commerce Education Committee today. Helped a shop neighbor hang two signs 20′ high on the building yesterday evening too.

Overall, progress is being made, but it seems almost invisible and that it’s proceeding at glacial pace.

It’s been a real adventure! We’re still hoping to be able to meet our June target to open. Fingers crossed…