Leaping into lethargy

One stale afternoon, while I was standing in line at a store in an airport terminal, an “Aha!” moment zapped me right in the head. This proves that my brain operates best with no sleep and plenty of caffeine, or, perhaps, that I spend way too much time in airports, but in any event, such was the genesis of my new business idea.

I had a full plate at the time, so I tried to smother my idea with neglect along with the stark fact that this was a manufacturing idea, while all of my background is, by contrast, in the service sector.

But the idea wouldn’t stay down for long. One afternoon, motivated by an inspiring piece that Rik and Janel Villegas had run here in the Saipan Tribune, I starting working on the project. I didn’t have the energy to even try to write a financial model for the venture, so I just scratched out a crude budget on the back of an envelope; such was the extent of my planning.

Thank goodness for the Internet, because one shock of need runs the whole world round. As luck would have it, a business owner e-mailed me, asking if I could write some English-language advertising copy for her. I cranked that out, and, as more luck would have it, she mentioned that she had worked for a European company in the very same industry I was planning to enter. We wound up striking a deal: She’d advise me on some technical aspects of the business, and I’d do some copy writing for her.

This is a small scale business, but, like a conceptual black hole, it seems to suck a lot of time out of me, probably because most steps are new to me. Product design, product manufacturing, product shipping, packaging design, packaging art work, packaging shipping, warehousing, shipping to customers, providing for returns from customers, UPC labels, those are some random things that come to mind. And, of course, marketing and sales, but I’ve been exposed to them before, albeit in different contexts. Anyway, most of this stuff isn’t hard at all. But if any link in the chain gets broken, the whole thing is broken.

Just as things were starting to come together, and just after my sample product was being shown around, a link in the chain did break. That was last week.

I’d like to claim that I leapt into action and heroically rescued the schedule. But I leapt into lethargy. I don’t know where the time goes with this little project, but, somehow, it just disappears, and I reached my threshold of tolerance.

Maybe there is some secret law of economics: The more seemingly trivial the endeavor, the more time it will absorb.

Is that merely a function of insufficient scale? If so, you can try to improve your time economies of scale by simply scaling up the project. More bang for the buck. And more bang for the backfire if something goes wrong. There is certainly some optimal scale, large enough to make it worth the effort, but small enough not to involve too much risk. And I’m sure entire books, or perhaps papers, have been written on the relative hazards of overproduction vs. underproduction, but just thinking about it makes me lapse back into my torpor. Ha!

Oh well, August is usually a stinker of a month anyway. It’s never a good time for thinking. It’s too late in the calendar to salvage the year. It’s too early to really care about the upcoming year. And it usually means miserable weather in just about any place you’d care to go.

So I’m taking a break from all this. In fact, I’d take a break entirely, but I’m on the hook to write marketing copy for that lady today, so, even when I’m not working on my little project, it is still eating my time.

Some things just seem to take on lives of their own, which is the hazard, and opportunity, of getting ideas.

Ed is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday. Visit Ed at TropicalEd.com and SaipanBlog.com.