Hustling and Doing Things That Dont Scale

Hustle. Is it an over used term? Maybe. It’s a word I’ve been hearing all my life, from when I played basketball to now in the startup world. It’s something I believe in 100% and enjoy going the extra mile and putting in the extra effort. Something that @willwasburn heard and really resonated with is to “do things that don’t scale.” Our event this last weekend is a great example of both hustle and doing things that don’t scale.

What do I mean? Picture this: me speed walking to the UPS print/copier store at 6:50pm, (they close at 7) to print out 30 “fact sheets” for our happy hour event at 8pm. We had to individually create each fact sheet for each person coming to our event. Scaleable? Absolutely not. Our goal is obviously to have that digitally available but we are testing our assumptions to see if people actually want this.

I make it to UPS start printing out a few files that I had on the flash drive but since we were doing everything manually all of the files had not been finished yet. @willwashburn was in the apartment, copying, pasting, exporting and frantically emailing the files as I was hurriedly printing, then awkwardly waiting for him to send more- all the while getting mean mugged by the UPS workers like so:

To them I was just sitting there, not doing anything and then sparingly printing - 15 minutes after they were closed. Meanwhile, I’m sweating pretending to do things while I waited for the next round of emails to print. Five apologies later and more awkward silence while I checked out, I sheepishly walked out of the UPS store, ran back to our apartment, and rushed to the event, and somehow made it on time. 

All is well, that ends well, and the event went great. I know that this experience is just a teaser of what else we’ll have to do and go through. If we keep to our “do whatever it takes” attitude I know we’ll be ok, and our Rick Ross “everyday I’m hustlin” mantra - we will continue to experience success.