The Benefits of Long Flights: Case Studies now live on Royal River Associates

When you have a flight across the country, it's amazing how much work you can get done (assuming it's not a redeye, of course).  It's a stark reminder how many intrusions we have in our daily work routine from the internet, email, phone, co-workers, the coffee maker....  When you are forced to stay in one space for six hours, a lot can get accomplished.  Today I flew from Portland, ME to Los Angeles, CA for the Natural Products Expo West.  I've come to love six hour flights.  I let my inbox build up in the few days before as I know I'll have time to go through it from top to bottom and reply to emails, file away and delete.  I build a "to read" folder and ignore the week prior to the flight.  

With a 4am wake-up call today (1am PST, I should be telling myself), I can't say I worked all six hours of flight time today, but after my double-bag green tea at Dulles (there is no direct flight west of DC from Portland, ME and regular readers will remember that I am addicted to green tea with honey), the second flight leg of the trip was all work.

Today's work was continued work on my new consulting firm, 

Royal River Associates.

  

It's amazing to see how little it can cost to start a company -- I incorporated online, designed a logo for $60 online, got 500 business cards online for $30 and a baseball cap with my logo for $10.  And I've spent around $150 to get my domain name, build my web site and get hosting/email services in place.  I don't think I had to spend even $600 to get everything in place.

Today's main task on the flight was to design and write the Case Studies section of my web site.  I wanted to effectively demonstrate the work I've done with both smaller, early-stage companies in venture capital and the larger, later-stage/mature companies that I worked with when I was with Bain & Co., Inc.  I'm not 100% satisfied with the end product, but it works for now.  I wanted to get the section of the site live before Expo started as I hope to make contact with many prospective clients.

Check out the Case Studies section of the site and provide some candid feedback.  Web creation is like writing.  When I was at graduate school at Duke, I learned a valuable lesson about writing: "There is no such thing as good writing; only good re-writing."  Life is the same way.  We start where we are, and then we try and improve from there.