Return on Action #1 (21/30)

Thirty essays in thirty days, number twenty-one

The extent to which the most basic of action is rewarded never ceases to amaze me.

As I mentioned in my lacrosse series, I’ve co-founded a company that is working to solve an equipment-related challenge¹ in the sport. This journey has produced example after example of receiving outsized rewards for action.

It started when the partnership was formed. A close friend had come to me with the initial idea, and because neither of us are engineers or product designers, we had to look for outside help. Our plan was to enlist a design firm to work up some concepts, but there were a few problems with this approach. The first had to do with the nature of the engagement. Design firms typically charge clients on a per-project basis, so any work we paid for would have a finite scope. This meant that the project would come with a limited number of iterations on the initial concepts—not ideal for a new invention.

It also meant that we would have differing incentives. The design firm’s goal would be to secure the project, and once they did that, the quality of the work would be a secondary concern. Sure, reputation and client satisfaction are important to them, and they would try to do a good job in an effort to get more work from us down the road, but at the end of the day it was our product, not theirs. They wouldn’t have a direct vested interest in the product’s success.

The second problem with the design firm route was that of education. Lacrosse is still a niche sport, and the problem we are working to solve is something of a niche within the niche (which is, incidentally, an element of the problem). This meant that it would be virtually impossible to find a design firm that already had the requisite baseline knowledge. We would have to educate them, which would eat up a ton of time—time we would be paying for.

We talked to a few firms and consulted with some connections in the design world, but none of the options felt like the right path for bringing our idea to life.

One day, while doing some research, I came across the portfolio of a designer who had worked on precisely the problem we were trying to solve for one of the biggest lacrosse companies in the world. He had come up with a really elegant solution, which he had outlined in detail on his website. But it didn’t quite solve the problem in the way we thought it should be solved.

While digging around on his website, my partner came across two notable pieces of information. The first was that this designer hadn’t worked for that other company for a few years, which meant that his non-compete had probably expired. The second was that he had his phone number listed on his website.

After spending a number of years in sales, I had learned that calling people out of the blue and asking very forward questions was both less risky and had more upside than our brains would like us to believe. This seemed like one of those situations. I called the St. Louis number that the designer had listed on his website.

“Hey Mike, my name’s Alex Michael. A partner and I, both former college lacrosse players, are working on creating a product to solve [the problem]. We came across your website and love the work you did for [the company], and we’d love to talk to you about partnering on a new product.”

He was interested. A few more phone calls and a trip to St. Louis later, the partnership paperwork was signed. We’ve now been working together for about three years. Mike has done incredible work in taking our amorphous idea and turning it into a product that we think will change the sport of lacrosse, and we continue to be amazed at how lucky we got with this guy.

When we direct our will toward something, the universe starts to turn walls into doors. It’s up to us to open the knob and step through.

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Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the next massive outcome that resulted from a simple action about a year into our company’s existence.

1. We hope to launch our product in the coming months, at which point I’ll share more details!