Today I Ship

Back in 2007 when I was first married, I had sat down with my young wife and told her that I wanted to start a part time business to “win in the margins”, a phrase I had just learned from the book, The 5 Lessons A Millionaire Taught Me by Richard Paul Evans. I can remember the whole scene as if we just had that conversation.

I was no stranger to the entrepreneurial life, having started a business, at the age of 23, that supported me for close to two years before I folded up shop and finished my degree in Computer Science. Since then, I have always had a business idea or three percolating. I’ve filled countless notebooks, napkins, Google docs and random brainstorming apps with grand plans. Whole businesses that lived and died in my head. A lot of those ideas sucked, but a few of them have been great and I’ve actually watched others bring very similar ideas to the market over the past decade or so.

Fast forward six years and I’ve spent a lot of time dreaming, a lot less time doing, and absolutely nothing of substance to show for my entrepreneurial desires. I’ve been sitting on the side lines for close to a decade, nursing my wounds from my first and only great business failure. I’ve learned about sales, marketing, accounting, outsourcing, and virtually every other discipline, skill, hack, trick, and shimmy that you need to be a small business owner.

I’ve learned a lot over the past ten years. Enough to know that there’s no use in waiting for the perfect opportunity to knock on my front door. Let it knock. I’ll be out back building the imperfect, getting it out into the world, taking my licks and driving forward.

Today I ship.