I have a plan for where this whole thing is going, but candidly it could come to a dead end. Regardless I am excited to get started.
Perhaps I should provide a little backstory to give better context.
Way back in 2005 a recruiter at Grainger found an old resume of mine posted on Monster.com and gave me a call to see if I was interested in joining a newly formed consulting team focused on supply chain analysis for large customers. Less than a week later I accepted the position. Through my work I discovered a series of insights related to MRO (i.e., maintenance, repair and operations related) procurement and material movement, then devised strategic models for MRO continuous improvement and inventory management. I incorporated all of this into a couple of extensive research reports written in support of an executive customer council.
That led to being tasked with rebranding Grainger’s inventory management service. I devised a core value prop and then designed, built and deployed suite of applications for reporting, analytics and value demonstration. Eventually I got moved to a new team to work on go to market strategy full-time and then spent five years refining messaging, creating digital content and building infrastructure to enable data-based features and benefits. In 2017 I was assigned to co-lead the design, development and launch of a new service offer and that work necessitated a redesign of the service portfolio and new go to market messaging.
During this 15-year period of MRO-focused work for Grainger, I found myself searching for the “right idea” to invest my entrepreneurial energy. Since I function like a walking think tank there was no shortage of concepts or notions, simply a lack of confidence in any of them. I spent considerable time researching and designing a podcast/blog content based business, but never had enough conviction to put plans into action. I spent a couple of years rebuilding and reselling Apple MacBook Air laptops (an odyssey you can read about here) but that amounted to an hourly job with a revenue model that couldn’t scale.
Now admittedly, I have a long history of dreaming about many things and acting on few. It is not that my ideas are quixotic, I just struggle to convince myself of their long-term viability. It really comes down to limited resources—namely time. Being a full-time employee, married with three kids who all play sports and homeowner with 2.5 acres to maintain leaves few extra hours to pursue something additional that has a 50/50 chance of success. So if someone isn’t paying me to run a race—regardless of outcome—I’m content to wait for a race I’m confident I’ll win.
But that mindset changed in 2021 when executive level leadership change at Grainger and subsequent reorganization of management eventually led to the elimination of my team. My years of service were recognized with a very generous severance package in exchange for a signed non-compete agreement and at the end of July I was a free agent looking for a new challenge. I pursued a few opportunities to stay with Grainger before coming to the realization I would need to move on to a new organization in a different industry. And that meant all of my unused MRO-related ideas, concepts, frameworks, models and analogies would never be put to use. That bothered me.
It bothered me because I wasn’t ready to delete the content. I believed there was a leaderless, unorganized and disconnected tribe of MRO professionals scattered across the country who wanted it but had no idea it existed. There are few—if any—independent, third-party experts for MRO topics and there is a dearth of credible advice and guidance IN ANY FORM: books, videos, podcasts, blogs, etc. Plus the useful materials that are available are provided largely by distributors and suppliers—like Grainger—and thus often come in the form of sales collateral, white papers or byline articles with a very clear advocated solution. This leaves individuals tasked with improving MRO related procurement and inventory management with limited options in terms of education, learning and reference. In short, I contend there is an underserved market.
And so over the next 60 days I did what I do best: I thought about it and designed a solution. I hashed it out in my head, poked holes in it, played devil’s advocate and attacked it from every possible angle in an effort to prove it could not work. Ultimately, I failed. And there I stood, in my basement office staring at my whiteboards and Post-it® Notes (Super Sticky, of course) with the framework and foundational components of a really great idea for a new premium content website. But unlike so many of my previous incarnations, I decided to further invest and start building it; that is, I’ve taken off the sweats, placed my cleats into the starting blocks and decided to race with no guarantee of success.
No one knows about it but me. No one cares about it but me. No one is waiting for it, expecting it, desiring it or demanding it.
Yet.
And while the path in my head appears straight forward, navigation is continually threatened by a never-ending brainstorm. There is a constant desire to try something different, learn something new and explore alternative possibilities. Indeed the greatest barrier to the grand opening and launch of rigourspursuit.com is myself.
So as I stated upfront: I’ve got a plan for where to go, but it could terminate in a dead end. Nonetheless, I am excited to make the journey.
