Key Idea #1: Make Your Work Your Life

HATTIE: Hi. I'm Hattie Bryant. If you want to understand how businesses are built and how they grow, stay with us for the next 30 minutes. Jim Morris doesn't look like a businessman; he looks like a hippie. Jim doesn't talk like a businessman; he talks like an environmentalist. Don't be fooled. After 20 years, he has learned that for him to achieve his huge goal, to save the Earth, he has to be a businessman. We say that small-business owners are the new American heroes, because we are the creators of work. Jim is also a hero to the environmentalists of the world. And if you want to run a business for the purpose of advancing a cause, as so many of us do, he can be your hero, too. Here's Jim Morris.

On the edge of Boulder, Colorado, and close to a walking path, we found Jim Morris environmental T-shirts. In one year, this catalog company will sell $2 million worth of art on a shirt and, at the same time, help environmental groups raise money and awareness.

Unidentified Woman #1: I'll take the darker one.

JIM MORRIS: OK.

Woman #1: It's more of a green and he likes that. Yeah, we just love the good graphics and the good pictures.

JIM: We try to make it so that people will see something in the wildlife that they want to respect or identify with, maybe the way you identify with a teddy bear when you're little. When you grow up, you want there to be bears and wolves for you to listen to or know that are out there.

Woman #1: Kirsten, do you like the shirt you're wearing?

KIRSTEN: Mm-hmm.

Woman #1: You want to show them your bears? Yeah.

HATTIE: Jim, this company is 20 years old and you've done a lot, but I want to understand how you started. Where did the initial idea come from? What was the light bulb?

JIM: It was to try and help wildlife, to help endangered species. When I was a grad student, we were interested in--I went up and saw a slide show and speech and video--some movies and videos about whales and the need to protect them, how they were close to extinction. And after we'd done that, I thought it was sort of fun writing letters to Congress and giving slide shows to fifth-graders and all the things that we did in this little group.

HATTIE: That was more fun than math?

JIM: It was, in a way, more fun than math grad school. So I finished my masters, but then started making up T-shirts outside of the group. I made a business out of it, running an ad in an environmental magazine and making up a little catalog myself.

HATTIE: OK. Did you make money on the first project?

JIM: Actually, we did. It was right. I was the only employee at the beginning and I just printed the shirts and, with the help of friends, would make up ads and--their suggestions, friends would drive me down to Denver where we'd buy a light source to cure the ink and...

HATTIE: Did you do the screening yourself at the beginning?

JIM: Yeah. You know, the traditional thing ...piled the boxes of shirts on my sofa and my home phone was the office phone, and I thought that was the only way you could run a business.

HATTIE: So, Jim, you were making these by hand in your basement, right?

JIM: In a garage of a neighbor, I was actually printing them on an old wooden thing I made out of 2-by-2's and hinges.

HATTIE (Voiceover): And, in fact, Save the Wolf was one of the first ones, right?

JIM: Yes, this is one of the two that we started with, the Save the Wolf. On the back, it has an eagle, and then the other one was about saving dolphins and saving whales.

Review the study guide

Key Idea #2: Sell a Cause

HATTIE: Explain to me now what we see here. This is...

TON DAT: What we see here, this is to cut out the design. ...is called the Songbird, and this is four-color process.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Ton Dat runs production.

TON: First, we put the yellow down. Then we put red on top. This just makes it redder. The third one we have is the blue on top of it, so you can see a little more brown right here on this bird's brown. And the fourth one is black, so that's the complete design.

HATTIE: There's the four colors.

TON: That's the four-color process.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) John Goyer does the custom artwork.

OK. So tell me what you're working on right here.

JOHN GOYER: I'm working on a shirt for Conservation International, designed by Steven Nash.

HATTIE: So these animals actually look like they really look?

JOHN: Absolutely. They are correct.

HATTIE: People get tons of mail, they get tons of catalogs. They get yours. Why do they buy from you?

JOHN: Well, I think the artwork speaks for itself. I think that's the starting point. They like the artwork. And anything that I can do to sort of enhance the artwork on each page is going to maybe bring them to our company. We just keep working with the catalog and trying to do new things, trying to punch up the color a little bit. And this year's new catalog will be even bettter... we will go even further.

HATTIE: What do you mean go even further?

JOHN: Something that Jim is moving along, the company is moving along. There's going to be that many more designs, new things to look at, so hopefully, it will be more exciting.

HATTIE: You know, we're not buying a Hanes T-shirt, we're buying your artwork. How do you find these artists? How do you get them interested in working with you? Do your customers, like the Sierra Club or what other--these people bring this art to you? Because it seems to me you've got some great art that's on T-shirts around here. You know, how do you convince people to do that?

JIM: Partly 'cause we're already doing it; that we will have a catalog that we mail out. We'll have ads in environmental magazines. So artists will see those and send in letters and samples of their art. Sometimes it's accidental. It's--when I first started, I saw someone carrying an artist's portfolio and I walked up to her and asked if she could--if she did wildlife art. And she may--it may have been Ellen who did--I mean, she did do this design. I think that's how I met her. She did many of our designs in the beginning. Most of the artists seem to be really great people.

HATTIE: OK. So, Jim, did you write this phrase, `Share the Earth'?

JIM: I came up with the phrase a long time ago for our newsletter about environmental alerts, but one friend calligraphed it and another friend had done the artwork, the different creatures there.

HATTIE: And these are animals and plants, even though it looks like stained glass, initially, to me.

JIM: The idea might be that if we can see a pattern, then we can sense something bigger than ourselves or sense how we fit into things and find our rhythm. I don't know whether it's being centered or what, but you can be more confident. A math professor of mine said that if you can learn to do one thing well, if you can see pattern in math, for example, then you have confidence that you can learn other things. You can see other regular beauty in nature, and you can show it to other people and be more upbeat about what's going on in the universe.

Review the study guide

Key Idea #3: Let Your Mission Attract Employees

HATTIE: Can we make money, can we make a business out of joy and love, out of spreading joy and love?

JIM: Well, it's partly--there's a lot of great people who work really hard here. They come in early and work late and work weekends and go to trade shows and are friendly to customers on hot days, and they really--they like each other, they're nice to each other, they socialize with each other. They're great people here.

HATTIE: And how many employees now?

JIM: I think we probably have about, oh, somewhere between 18 and 20.

HATTIE: OK. Give me some advice. What do small-business owners need to do when it comes to getting the right people? How do you get the right people?

JIM: Boy, it seems like they just sort of appear. Maybe if you have an ad saying what the focus of your business is, then they may apply...

HATTIE: Do you run ads?

JIM: We do sometimes. But some of them are also sort of accidental. Some of the people like Kathy are through ads and have turned out wonderfully, and others are friends of friends and turned out wonderfully, too.

ROB LOUT: I like to ride a lot, and, you know, it is a win-win situation. It's good for the environment and it's good for myself.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) So how far do you ride from home to work?

ROB: It's just about five miles. Five miles there, five miles back.

HATTIE: No big deal unless you're going straight uphill or something.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's even funnier that way.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Bob Baumgartner calls on individual customers. Well, how is it that you know Jim and that you came to work her?

BOB BAUMGARTNER: Well, we met hiking about eight years ago. And Jim is an environmentalist and I'm a hiker and, you know, environmentalist, too, so we get along well.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Cathy Kischneider does accounting and customer service.

CATHY KISCHNEIDER: I really like the--what Jim stands for in the company. I like the environmental awareness, and that's the main reasons I'm here. I really like what I do.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Keegan Perkins is the purchasing manager. I mean, we see all these boxes, all these stacks and all these colors, all these sizes, scoop necks, regular, whatever. How many kinds of T-shirts?

KEEGAN PERKINS: Every color you could think of: white, ash, natural, black. We got your colored scoops. We got your youth shirts, long sleeves in three colors, sweats in four colors. We try and keep stock levels to a minimum. Order only what we need for a week. You're looking at $40,000, $50,000 worth of T-shirts just sitting there doing nothing. So it's better to free up that money.

Review the study guide

Key Idea #4: Ask Vendors and Customers to Finance You

HATTIE: You're doing $2 million in sales today. You have all this stuff. You have this equipment. You have all these employees. And you don't have a banker that--you don't have loans? You've never had a loan?

JIM: No--well, we did do--you see, partly, we're getting credit from our suppliers, like T-shirt mills would give us credit and T-shirt wholesalers would give us credit, so we would have 30 days in which to pay them back, so...

HATTIE: So you use the float?

JIM: We'd use the float on. They would send us inventory, we would have 20 days before it was due to be paid. And as long as we were steadily selling things, we would have--or when we'd have a really large order for $10,000 or $12,000, maybe we would ask someone to put down part of the money in advance.

JIM: Yes.

HATTIE: OK. So you have worked with your suppliers and your customers to finance the business.

JIM: That's it. We had to prove ourselves gradually. We started with Anvil and they've been great. We've been buying from them for 20 years. We started with them--21 years. And we--it was a gradual thing where maybe at first, we'd have to pay part of the order and then we could get more and more credit.

Review the study guide

Key Idea #5: Be Patient

HATTIE: OK. So advice you would give to people about money is, maybe, be patient?

JIM: That and I'd also say watch more carefully. Once or twice, I got greedy and lazy, too. I think a customer of ours had expanded to $35 million in sales in just a few years from when we used to sell them shirts. Suddenly, they started having their own line of shirts, and they were huge so I thought, `Well, I'll try and market to schools the way this customer is.' And I did a lot of mailings to schools. And they were very expensive and I should have done a few small mailings instead of several large mailings. So I'd say experiment. Don't imitate and experiment gradually unless you're really sure of what you're doing. When it's been something I'm really sure of, like buying a new piece of printing equipment or a new camera, then it's always been worth it to get the best quality we could, because quality's been what we really--we want people to be happy and to come back and order over and over for years. And I'd say, invest in the people. I need to do that more than I do. Some years, we've had great years and we've been able to give good bonuses and profit sharing and donations, and that's the way I'd like to have the company working every year. And then my employees say that they're happy, they feel appreciated and that's great.

HATTIE: A lot of business owners in all the management textbooks and all that say, you know, `Once you get the product and your process is in place, it's the people that's the hardest part of running a business.' I don't sense that from you.

JIM: Well, it's probably hardest in that it's hard if they aren't getting along if--and I get involved in that and I'm not patient. But if--either because the people who work here encourage me to relax or if I remember myself to relax, then it seems OK. Usually, people, if we talk together with, then they'll start getting along.

HATTIE: I think that the human spirit can only do so much so fast.

JIM: I think that there's a temptation to that. The speed and the technology can get me and other people all wound up. If something's not working right on the computer, I can get frustrated at it and start cussing it. And if things seem really urgent and it seems like someone hasn't done something, then you can start getting pissed or wondering whose fault it is and stuff.

HATTIE: But it's also the thing is somebody's going to come--some competitors are going to come in here and beat us, and they're going to beat us to the marketplace with their ideas. And we have to hurry, hurry, hurry. I don't feel that here.

JIM: It may be from the people who work here and their friends and every so often that people here have maybe the more natural--Sigurd Olsen writes in some of his books that if we can go experience nature or experience each other, if we smile at each other or are kind to each other, then there's a way that we may slow down and we figure out how we fit into a greater plan or if not a greater plan, a greater pattern.

HATTIE: OK. That's a value here.

JIM: I think so. It's not officially a value, but it's unofficially a value that a lot of people are friends or a lot of people have great work ethics and they're very clear about getting the work done, but they also know that what's really important is--or another thing that's really important is walking with their kids when they get home or relating to their family and...

JIM: I guess they're trying to help somehow. We do donate money to good environmental groups and sometimes shirts, and we try to have information on the shirts, like we'll have something explaining what the threat--on some shirts, we'll have saying here's a threat and here's what we can do and here's a--old growth forests are disappearing, and we should write Congress and ask them to save the forests.

Key Idea #6: Do It Your Way

HATTIE: It's not the T-shirt, it's the message and the cause on the T-shirt that people buy. It has taken 20 years, discipline, focus and a never-veering-off-mission commitment from Jim for this company to get where it is today.

Michael Gerber's books are popular: "The E-Myth" and "The E-Myth Revisited." He would probably laugh at Jim Morris because Jim comes into work every day. Gerber says your business and your life are two totally separate things. His message is we're stupid if we make our business our life. We say that's true only for business owners who don't care what business they're in. Jim's business and personal life are seamless. He lives the life of an environmentalist. And remember, he doesn't sell T-shirts, he sells saving the Earth. This same person attracts employees who ride their bikes to work and prefer to be at a place where they feel they are making important contributions. It's OK if your business and your personal life are totally integrated. If your goal is simply to get rich, read Michael Gerber. But if your goal is to build a business in perfect sync with your life values, as Jim Morris has done, that's a solid business strategy.

Review the study guide

Key Idea #7: Spend On Quality

Running a catalog company requires sophisticated technology. Greg Strevey is the systems manager.

Do you know how many names you have in the database?

GREG STREVEY: Right now, our existing customers and people that we keep track of, a little over 100,000.

HATTIE: One hundred thousand?

GREG: Yeah. And that's fairly small for a company this size. Many places will have many more, but we try and keep it as reasonable as possible. I don't like to keep a lot of extraneous names in there. We try and keep only people who are interested in buying from us because we don't like to mail extraneous stuff. It's too expensive.

HATTIE: OK. You've been here...

GREG: Eight years.

HATTIE: Eight years. How has the technology changed?

GREG: The change in technology over the last eight years has been phenomenal. There were--of course, nobody had ever even heard of the Web eight years ago. When we first put up our site, it was pretty glitzy and it was pretty advanced, actually. We had online ordering capability, and so we were a little ahead of the curve. We let it languish for a while and now we are back in business, and we are really trying to increase our Web presence dramatically right now.

HATTIE: So you're mailing catalogs? Let's talk about how often do you mail those? Do you mail the whole 100,000 every time, and how often do you mail?

HATTIE: So this consultant--you hired him or her to look at your current database and to look at other options that are out there to help you expand your base.

JIM: Right. To refine our rentals of lists and of other catalog buyers and mix them together to figure out which sells work best and then to mail it to more of those sells. That's been working well for us.

 Review the study guide

Key Idea #8: Smell the Roses

HATTIE: Louise Tannenbaum is shipping manager.

Do you have a clue how many packages you send out of here on a day or a month or year?

LOUISE TANNENBAUM: Oh, gosh. At Christmas we sometimes send out 300 to 400 a day. Generally speaking now, at the slower time of year, it's almost maybe 100.

HATTIE: Now why are you wearing this shirt today?

LOUISE: I happen to love our local artist, Harriet Peck Taylor, the little sweet animals and the colors.

HATTIE: How is working in an organization that gives money to a good cause and working for truly an environmentalist like Jim--how does that affect the way you feel about being here?

LOUISE: It makes you feel good. It makes you feel good when people come to the front room, and they're sort of quiet Boulder supporters of the whole gamut. It's wonderful to send out T-shirts to children which are our little fans, our little small supporters. It makes us feel good. One of the nicest things about working for Jim is his environmental concern for us, as workers. He ships in good water to us. He is very concerned about anything toxic going on in our work environment.

HATTIE: So it's a teaching environment?

LOUISE: It also ends up, for a lot of people here, being a teaching environment. Another thing we've had teen-agers work here and that's another good, good way to be getting the message across.

JIM: And here's a mohair, which is a plant here in Colorado that grows in dry places, and people, I think, would smoke the leaves...

HATTIE: Really?

JIM: (Voiceover) When I started the business, I only subscribed to a couple environmental magazines. But I think I made the mistake of subscribing to 50 or 60, so there's horrible things happening all over the world and great things happening, but if you read too many...

HATTIE: And you want to do something about all of it?

JIM: Yeah, if I don't do something about it, if I just read about it, then I feel bad. But if I do something, even just writing a letter or going and feeling tentative and nervous at a hearing but saying something, it always seems to turn out fine, and then I feel much better. So I...

HATTIE: Well, what I'm getting at is, because there's so many causes still to come, guess what?

JIM: There will be lots of things to do. It would be wonderful, I could do that. I mean, there are all these heroes...

HATTIE: Jim, you can't quit.

JIM: Well, there's, you know, David Browes' in his 80s and he's still out there trying to prevent nuclear war. And I think the woman who was saving the Everglades just died two or three years ago in her 90s or 100s. And there's all these--there's place at any age for people to go and both sense the wonder in wildlife and nature and meet other people who will help them enjoy it and protect it.

HATTIE: So advice to a small business owner who's tired is?

JIM: Go re-create yourself by, you know, doing things with your good friends and the things you like doing. Interact with your customers, talk directly with them and your salespeople, and think about which parts you like doing yourself and do more of those.

The only times I've been arrested have been when friends have been--you know, friends of mine have been getting arrested trying to block an entrance to a nuclear weapons plant that's polluting, and I see them being a little bit roughly treated because it's a hot day and the police have had to deal with a lot of people. And I just see that it's so right what they're doing that I sit down to block the road, too. Or I see grandmothers walking across a fence line. So I'm sort of a follower of good people, and it's just look for good people and they're around. And you can follow them and it's not bad to be arrested to protect the environment or instead of arresting, you can write a letter or help some group. You can...

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Go out and enjoy nature. Look inside flowers. Smell the tree bark. Hear the wind and the trees and grass. Your spirit will soar.

Boulder seems to be an incubator for new ideas and so many of them turn into great businesses. Jim lives in a community full of entrepreneurs. If you find yourself surrounded by dull, negative people, go join your local Chamber of Commerce and get active in a local chapter of your trade association.

Remember, it's OK if your business and your personal life are seamless. That's the way it should be.

Review the study guide