On Employees

My Dad (my entrepreneurial inspiration) jokes that business would be so pleasurable if it weren't for the customers and employees. While the customers can be trying at times, I think having employees is one of my favorite things about being a Muttrepreneur. I don't even like the term employees, I think it implies some hierachary which doesn't exist in my company. I see them as team members, and I'm very fortunate to have a successful enough company that we are in a growth stage and have been able to recently add more members to the team. And sure if you compile a bad team, then you might dread going to work, and may have the same sort of feelings my Dad expressed about past employee experiences. But either I'm a good team captain or I've just been really lucky or probably some combination of both, because we have a great team.
http://www.muttmart.com/about/meetthemutts.htm

Generation Gnat

If your a "Type A" like me, then you are constantly making lists. I make lists on daily to do's, weekly, monthly, new business ideas, I have lists organizing my lists. And yet, I never seem to have enough time in the day to finish my lists. Or is the problem focus? I have the admitted attention span of a gnat, you know small animal insect, little brain, buzz's around, etc. In fact I think rather than silly non sensical names like generation x or y or whatever, my generation would be better named Generation Gnat. We are all considered ADD or ADHD and they have given out Ridalyn, Prozac and Paxil to us like they passing out samples at Costco. We don't read, because reading would entail focussing on something for more than three minutes, which is impossible. We demand high speed internet, and we have become so accustomed to download speeds of 1.5, 3.0 etc. that if it takes more than three seconds for a page to appear, we simply don't have the time to wait. I mean who can sit around waiting three seconds for a website when there are forty three billion other sites that can offer us the same content. We can't be bothered with commercials, so we never dare watch t.v. in real time. We simply fast forward on our tivo, our dvr, and get to the good parts. We want the cliff notes, the highlights, the widgets, the short cuts and we want it instantaneously.
So whats the problem with that. Nothing if you are part of it, because that's just the way it is. That's just how you see the world. If you aren't part of it, if you are my Dad's generation then its all very odd. They say "hey I just read this great book, do you want to borrow it?" and you think for what, should I use it as a coaster, maybe I can put it on my lap and put my laptop on it. My attention span allows for limited access. I can hit up digg and read snipets, highlights, brief articles, and that's about as far as my brain is willing to focus on.
I'm looking on Itunes at the moment for audio books. Because I know books could be useful, I know there is so much out there to learn, but I have tried time and time again to buy them and they sit on a shelf and collect dust. Maybe if I listen to it in the background while I'm doing something else they will just soak in without the labor of having to dart my eyes back and forth. Sounds like a plan, time to download.

Meowwww

Well a day after I just got done introducing myself, we have evolved. I was the Mutt guy, I'll always be the Mutt guy, they are my roots, and I'll bark, howl and wag my tale for years to come as the Mutt guy. But all good business's must evolve and that's what we are doing right now. With the success of it occurred to me recently that why can't we do the same good thing we have been doing for dogs and dog owners, but for animals of a different breed.
So we took the plunge and after months of development, strategizing and sleepless nights we launched the first in a series of what we are calling My_Mart.com sites. The first of which launched late last night is MyCatMart
Why the my, you may ask? Because these sites are about the user. We want our users to take ownership, pride and fall in love with these new sites. They are your sites, hence the my. Why else, because its damn hard to find a clever web url these days. We got lucky with MuttMart.com, it was available and we snatched it up. But CatMart and BirdMart and others were taken. So we came up with the idea of what if the names are MyCatMart.com and MyBirdMart.com? They were all available and we bought them all.
So the next few months will be exciting times for all the Mutts here. We will join hands and welcome in our brothers and sisters from the feline, winged, and swimming categories of animals and we hope to build one of the greatest pet product webs on the web.

Who am I and How Did I Get Here?

My name is Justin Hertz, but in some circles I'm simply known as the Top Mutt. I didn't get the title through a military coup; I didn't win a battle, not even a fight. I didn't pay through some scam of an online mail order title, and I wasn't bestowed the honor by a King or Queen. Nope, I got the title by accident, and if you ask me, all things that happen in life and in business are just a series of accidents. 
You see, I was just working for the family business straight out of college. I would travel the world, from South America to Europe and back, all of which sounds awfully glorious, but when you take into consideration my primary job function was to source leather goods by visiting tanneries, which are some of the most disgusting places on earth, you will see there was little glorious about what I did. Google tanneries and you will see what I mean. Anyhow, I did this for about two years until I realized that I wanted nothing more to do with the family business. I wanted to make my own mark, carve my own niche, and hang my own shingle. 
So, as it goes, one of the tanneries by coincidence, in addition to making cut soles for shoes, upholstery leather for jackets and cars, also made rawhide dog bones. I thought, “Maybe there's something here.” I asked them to send me some samples and a price sheet. Six months later I developed a line of rawhide called Happy Bones and started selling them wholesale to independent pet stores throughout the U.S. Two years into that project I had over 1000 accounts and business was doing as well as one could expect. But there was always these issues with overstock, actually a clever name that Overstock.com came up with, and it's too bad they still remain a dwarf in comparison to the big bad dynasty that is eBay. But I digress. So, we would have all of this overstock of goods. Shelves and shelves of rawhide that would sit, and it would mock me. It became the bane of my existence. Because you are constantly changing the formulation or the packaging or whatever, you are constantly left with merchandise you can't sell through the normal channels. 
So, I thought, why not throw a pack of rawhide up on eBay and see what happens. Like the guy who first pitched "lets sell 200 rolls of toilet paper at Costco," (then Price Club) and all the execs looked at him like he was nuts, I said to my little team of myself and two employees, “Let’s put a pack of forty dog bones on eBay and see what happens.” Well, they sold, and at a significantly higher margin then I was making selling them wholesale. The wholesale gig is tough, you have to be ridiculously price sensitive and you end up working in the slimmest of margins. But, if you sell direct to the consumer, you don't have to be as tight with your margins. Also since they are buying direct rather than having to pay the retailers mark, you can offer them unbelievable pricing. A rawhide bone of average size (6-7") which sells at Petco, Petsmart and the like for from $3-$5, by buying in bulk from us, their cost was less than a dollar. 
What started as one experiment, soon became 30% of our revenue from eBay alone. So we developed our website went after the direct to consumer market The rest as they say is history.