Failure Forum: Learning from Redline Entertainment, Best Buy's Media experiment

This first appeared on Matt Hunt's blog. Reposted by permission.

In the early 2000s Best Buy launched their first entertainment media label Redline Entertainment.  The goal was to help grow the organization vertically into the entertainment industry.

As an entertainment label Best Buy would sign artists to create new material, produce the content, and provided distribution of the final products into retail outlets – Best Buy stores and others.  This was a new area for Best Buy but it was tangent to their core business of selling electronics, appliances, and media.  Coming off of a successful national expansion Best Buy had strong momentum and it was hungry for opportunities to continue to grow their business.

Jennifer “JJ” Schaidler had unknowingly altered her career when she took the lead role in building out Redline Entertainment.  As with many innovation projects the team had a good plan in place but without all of the pieces together it would be almost impossible to test individual hypothesis.  Redline’s success didn’t hinge on just one element but on a series of organizational errors that JJ documented for the company in what came to be known as the Redline Whitepaper.

What makes JJ’s story unique is that she not only was willing to own her mistakes but she was willing to document them and share them with others inside the organization.  Many executives would cower from this idea as career suicide but not JJ.  During my tenure at Best Buy, JJ’s Redline Whitepaper had provided an example of what good innovation work should look like: build your hypothesis, test your hypothesis, and share the results of your tests – good or bad.  This is JJ’s story.

1. So Redline Entertainment was going to be Best Buy’s entertainment media label.  How did that idea come about?

Our Senior Vice President of Entertainment, Gary Arnold, had the idea of growing our business by creating our own label and developing our own content.  This was right around the time that Best Buy had purchased Musicland (including Sam Goody) and Future Shop in Canada.  The idea had come from two concepts:  1) that the combined entities offered a huge distribution channel and 2) the artists were becoming increasingly frustrated with their labels and their binding contracts.  The plan was that Best Buy could go straight to the artists and offer distribution but allow them to own their masters.

At that same time, Best Buy was defining the ecosystems that they wanted to grow and expand into diverse businesses –even non-retail businesses.  Entertainment was one of those ecosystems.  Starting a label seemed like an adjacent idea where we could bring the leverage of the enterprise with all of the storefront assets.  We had been developing direct relationships with the artists and had connections within the manager community.

A critical piece to the puzzle was that Redline also had a distribution relationship with RED distribution (no affiliation).  RED was the independent arm of SONY distribution and they were in theory able to get Redline products into Target, Wal-Mart and all the rest of the music retailers.  That foot print would allow us to offer the same distribution as a major label.  The advantage would come from additional marketing and advertising from the Best Buy entities.

Ultimately the competitive nature of the other retailers was the undoing of Redline.  They knew that the products from Redline came from Best Buy and they didn’t want to support a competitor.

2. When you committed to the project did you consider what would happen if you failed?  What kind of odds were you giving yourself for success?

I actually thought there was a likelihood of failure but it didn’t concern me.  My perspective was that the company was growing so fast that it would find a place for me.  In retrospect, I should have been more concerned.  Only after I had taken this new role was it clear to me that going back to my old role as Vice President of Advertising wasn’t an option.

3. Where there ever expectations set by the company for what would happen if things didn’t work out?

No.  Truthfully we had never done these types of innovation projects before so it wasn’t discussed.

4. How long did the project last?  What was the ratio of the time spent planning vs. executing?

Around two years.  The planning phase was really getting the business plan approved and that took 3-6 months.  Execution or “signing” of artists and projects were started before the plan had full approval.

5. Was there ever a clear indication that they project wasn’t going to succeed?

Yes, there were several factors that popped up where we knew that we had problems: 1) our inability to get significant radio air play for our artists – radio was still a driving force behind sales, 2) the resistance/refusal from Target / Wal-Mart to buy Redline products, and 3) the lack of incoming revenue while signing on new projects.  If we were starting our own external company we would expect there to be a lag while building the portfolio of business but within a corporation there quickly needed to be something that was showing a positive return.

6. What was the most difficult task in shutting the business down?

For me the most difficult task was letting go of our people.  The truth was that they didn’t do anything wrong.  It wasn’t their fault.  Many people did find other roles at Best Buy so we were pretty successful at transitioning but for those that didn’t make the transition it was painful.

7. After you had shutdown Redline you did something that had never been done before at Best Buy, you wrote a formal whitepaper on what had been learned through the project.  Can you explain why and how that happened?

In a budget presentation with the President, he commented that “I’d be happy to lose $7m dollars on Redline if we really learned something from it.”  In addition, he was always referencing the Clay Christensen book – Innovator’s Dilemma.  I read the book and believed that Best Buy was exactly in that classic problem.  So I wrote the white paper as a way of illustrating to the company that we would need to change how we do innovation if we wanted to succeed.  At that same time Best Buy had hired the consulting firm Strategos to help build out an innovation process.  I participated in that work and witnessed many of the same problems repeating themselves.  When Best Buy hired Kal Patel, he read the white paper and encouraged others who were trying to innovate read it.  It ended up taking on a life of its own.  That was good because in one sense – it was a $7m white paper.  Too bad I didn’t get any royalty payments on it!

8. Have you used the lessons from Redline’s failure in your work since then?

I still get emails from time-to-time from people asking me to send it to them.  The frequent comments are that not much has changed since it was written in 2002.  The bottom-line is that innovation inside of large organizations is very difficult.  It takes people that are willing to take risks and willing to fail.  When a company is growing and has the funds to support innovation it makes it less risky.  Public corporations that need to report quarterly profits are also extremely tough.  When the numbers aren’t looking good, new ideas that just haven’t had enough time to turn a profit are the easiest to cut.  In our estimation Redline needed five years.  It only had two.  There was no appetite to wait that long.

Following her role with Redline JJ went on to lead many other strategic initiatives at Best Buy, including the initial launch of the Best Buy & Carphone Warehouse joint venture – Best Buy Mobile.  She continues to take risks in order to drive innovation in her work and in her career by continually defining new opportunities.  JJ is currently General Manager for Brightstar – the world’s largest specialized wireless distributor and mobile service company.

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "The China Twist"

"The China Twist: An entrepreneur's cautious tales on franchising in China" is a first-person account of the launch and eventual failure of pretzel outlet franchiser Auntie Anne's in China.

The book takes into account the role cultural differences, bureaucratic red tape, language issues, and an unfamiliar food (pretzels are alien to Chinese palates) played in the difficulties encountered by Auntie Anne's first franchisees in the world's biggest market.

NPR has a profile on the author here, and Knowledge@Wharton has a review.

Small business takes prior mistakes to heart

This is from the wonderful "She Owns It" blog in the New York Times, by Adriana Gardella. Ms. Gardella talked to her women's owner group at the end of 2012, gathering some of the lessons they had learned that year. One notable story came from Bari Jay fashion owner Susan Parker:

[Ms. Parker] said she was most pleased that her company had gone from being reactive to proactive. “Every year, we seem to learn from our mistakes and try to plan and do things better,” she said. For example, December is typically when Bari Jay starts shipping its dresses for the spring season (there are spring and fall seasons).

Normally, when Christmas rolls around, she said, she worries that shipping may spill over into January and that stores may no longer accept Bari Jay’s dresses. This year, however, Bari Jay shipped most of its dress samples in November. This meant that stores had more time to re-order dresses and also that stores that budget poorly were less likely to run out of money before ordering.

Timing is everything: inventors' product returns 10 years after initial failure

From the "Prototypes" column in the New York Times, a discussion with Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos, inventors of the Elephant Trunk, a lockable home mailbox for parcels.

Back in 1999, when [Ms. Troyer] and Mr. Farentinos dreamed up the Elephant Trunk, it was designed to be large enough to hold the television-size computers that people were ordering as e-commerce began to take off. But while it was still in prototype, flat-screen computer monitors came along, defeating its purpose.

“It was deflating,” Ms. Troyer said. “All this time and money and energy had been wasted.”...

Even after shoving the Elephant Trunk into the proverbial drawer, the couple were convinced that it would eventually see the light of day; it was just a matter of when. Sure, computers had become skinnier, but more and more people were shopping online for a wide range of products, and they often were not home to accept the packages.

Beyond the annoyance of coming home and finding those packages “behind a planter,” Ms. Troyer said, or wet from the rain, there was the danger of parcel theft.

Still, when they floated the idea of a mailbox for packages, the response from retailers was, “I think it’s too soon for that,” Ms. Troyer said....

Last year, good timing was compounded by luck when Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos met with Theresa Graham, a merchant for the builders hardware category at Home Depot. As they chatted, Ms. Graham explained that she was a working mother who often came home to boxes strewed all over the porch. She said to Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos, “You know, what I’d really like to see is not a mailbox, but a parcel drop,” Ms. Troyer recalled.

“Chris and I looked at each other and our eyes lit up. It was like, O.K., it’s time.”

The Elephant Trunk is beginning a 3-month sales trial in selected Home Depot stores. Will it become a success the second time around? We'll have to wait and see.

Zappos site messes up pricing, then shows sense of humor in dealing with it

This is a posting from Zappos' site 6pm.com dated May 2010.

Hey everyone – As many of you may know (and I’m sure a lot of you do not), 6pm.com is our sister site.  6pm.com is where brandaholics go for their guilt free daily fix of the brands they crave.  Every day, the site highlights discounts on products ranging up to 70% off.  Well, this morning, we made a big mistake in our pricing engine that capped everything on the site at $49.95.  The mistake started at midnight and went until around 6:00am pst.  When we figured out the mistake was happening, we had to shut down the site for a bit until we got the pricing problem fixed. 

While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million - ouch) selling so many items so far under cost.  However, it was our mistake.  We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up.  We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers.  We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at6pm.com. 

Cheers!

Aaron Magness

Director of Brand Marketing & Business Development

Zappos Development, Inc.

Twitter: @macknuttie

Update: Upon further investigation and clarification with our merchandising team, I realized that the statement about "capping everything on the site at $49.95" was not 100% accurate. There are some items that are sold on both 6pm.com and Zappos.com, and those items were not affected by the pricing mistake. The pricing mistake applied to items sold on 6pm.com but not Zappos.com (the vast majority of inventory available on 6pm.com). The actual dollar figure of our loss is accurate - over $1.6 million. Let's just say this was not a boring weekend for us.

Update 2: We've received a number of inquiries asking for more details as to what happened, so here are more details from Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.):

We have a pricing engine that runs and sets prices according to the rules it is given by business owners. Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols were missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exclusively on 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95. (Items that are sold on both 6pm.com and Zappos.com were not affected.)

We already had planned on improving our internal pricing engine so that it will have a much easier-to-use interface for our business owners. We are also planning on adding additional checks and balances to hopefully prevent this type of thing from happening again.

To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired - this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over

$1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.

PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet (

http://twitter.com/zappos/status/14576863056 ), I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night.

Tony Hsieh

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zappos My new book:http://deliveringhappinessbook.com

Hat tip to Positive Sharing.

Doug Rauch of Trader Joe's: 1 in 100 new products becoming "big successes" is a good performance

In this HBR video, Doug Rauch, former president of the Trader Joe's grocery chain, describes the need to fail often in order to create "exciting, adventuresome products."

Urban Outfitters apologizes for web outage, with kittens!

Urban Outfitters ran an online sale this week which they promoted with an email blast (see below).

During the sale, their website crashed. And to their credit, the company sent another email out apologizing for the outage, and adding free shipping. If I had tried to order something that day and was unable to, this email would have made me feel better:

This is evidence that you can turn a negative into a positive with some humility and a sense of humor. A deal-sweetener doesn't hurt either.

Thanks to the Listrak Email Marketing blog, which posted on this (and from which I got the screenshots).

Jerome Chazen from Liz Claiborne: "We allowed the growth potential to overtake the company"

This mistake story is from Knowledge@Wharton's interview with Liz Claiborne co-founder Jerome Chazen, author of "My Life at Liz Claiborne: How We Broke the Rules and Built the Largest Fashion Company in the World."

Knowledge@Wharton: What would you say your biggest mistake was running the company, or even before you became CEO, during that whole 30-year tenure?

Chazen: Well, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have worked harder to moderate our growth. I think we allowed the growth potential to overtake the company instead of us being in charge of it. It's a hard thing to explain. But you know, it was so exciting, for me anyway, to report better and better numbers, especially after we went public. I mean I loved it. I loved those quarterly [numbers] that were up 20% or 40%, whatever.

I think, looking back now, that I got carried away, that we should have done things more moderately. I very much appreciate, and I do mention in the book a couple of times, that the Ralph Lauren model was a much better model long range. He's still around and still cooking, and things are going well. Now of course he's primarily in the men's business, which is a much different business and in many ways a much easier business. But he balanced out. I wanted our company to eventually become very important in our own retail business. Unfortunately, we had grown so fast with the department stores and we were so locked in and dependent upon those people -- not only for the clothing we made, but for every other division in the company, including jewelry and fragrance and accessories and so on and so forth -- that we just couldn't move anymore. We couldn't make any moves.

Knowledge@Wharton: Too big, too fast.

Chazen: We did open some stores, but we were never able to be successful because, at that time, we were getting caught in the whole sale mentality of the department stores, which is another thing.... I tried very, very hard to stay out of those messes with the department stores, but it just became impossible.

Chazen vividly describes here what a seductive mistress growth can be. It was "exciting." He "loved" it. But at the end of the day, growth was a trap.

The company called Liz Claiborne will change its name in May 2012 to Fifth and Pacific. It owns the Juicy Couture, Lucky Jeans and Kate Spade brands. The Liz Claiborne brands have been retired.

Learning by experience: "I would not leave until they would teach me what I was doing wrong"

There's a nice little learning story from Daniel Lubetzky, who started KIND, the snack food company. In this Wall Street Journal interview about growing his business, he describes how he learned to sell to grocery store owners and managers:

WSJ: What experience did you have in food manufacturing prior to launching Kind?

Mr. Lubetzky: Kind evolved out of my first company, PeaceWorks, [an importer and manufacturer of Mediterranean spreads] which I started in 1993. At that time, I had no training in the food industry whatsoever. I took my legal briefcase and filled it up with jars of my company's spreads and I would go store by store. They would tell me 'Get out! You have no idea what you're doing.' I would not leave until they would teach me what I was doing wrong.

This says something important about rejection. It's OK to be rejected, or to fail, if you get something out of it. In Lubetzky's case, he got a graduate-level course in retail and selling. If Lubetzky had simply left a store after being told to get out, he wouldn't have learned what to do differently, he wouldn't have had the incentive to keep "learning," and he certainly wouldn't have ended up where he is today.

Remember to leave the bill on top of the till

It was more than thirty years ago, my first day working at Silliman's Hardware (now closed) in New Canaan, and I was ringing out a customer at the register. He gave me a ten-dollar bill, which I put in the drawer and gave him change.

"I gave you a twenty," the man said.

I could feel my face reddening. "No, sir," I said, "you gave me a ten."

"I'm certain I gave you a twenty."

My pulse started to race. Could it have been a twenty? Not in my mind. I opened the drawer. There was a pile of twenties and a pile of tens. The manager came over. He pulled a ten out of the drawer and gave it to the customer. "Sorry, sir," the manager said.

He closed the drawer and looked at me. "Always leave the bill on top of the register until you've given the customer his change. Then put it in the drawer. That way, there's no question what kind of bill it was."

Two lessons learned. One, leave the bill on top of the till. Second, it is hard to win an argument with the customer--and sometimes it is not worth winning.

To this day I watch to see if a cashier waits to put the bill in the drawer until the change is counted out. Many times, they don't.

Losing $25 million on Linens 'n' Things

In a profile of real estate investor Richard Baker, the New York Times inserted a brief but instructive mistake story. Baker is now the CEO of Lord & Taylor, and his NRDC Equity Partners focuses on retailing investments.

[NRDC's] first deal was a dud. After losing out to a consortium of real estate and private equity investors on Toys “R” Us in 2005, Mr. Baker and his partners invested $25 million alongside Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm, in its $5.1 billion purchase of Linens ’n Things. They lost their entire investment when the company, a housewares retailer, collapsed three years later.

Richard Baker says the fiasco taught him a lesson. “Where I failed was that if I’m going to invest in a transaction, I need to control it,” he says.

Of course, it's only been a few years since that experience. Perhaps as time passes Mr. Baker will learn that investments that you control can also fail. If that happens (or doesn't happen), it'll be a great story. Stay tuned.

Innovation "Catalysts" view making mistakes as an essential part of the process

In 2009, I read a book called "The Catalyst," which describes the mindsets of people who've successfully built new businesses inside established companies. Renewing organic growth is a difficult task, and "The Catalyst" is a very useful book for anyone working in new business development.

One point that comes out quickly in the book is the necessity to experiment, "fail fast," learn and iterate. These points were also brought out in another excellent new book, "Discovery-Driven Growth." I see these two books as companion volumes. Both address growing new businesses within companies. "The Catalyst" focuses on mindset, "Discovery-Driven Growth" describes the methodology.

Here is one of the "Catalysts" profiled in the book discussing mistakes. John Haugh was hired by Mars Inc. and put in charge of growing its specialty chocolate line, Ethel M.

Haugh decided to focus on creating retail "lounges" where customers could buy and enjoy the chocolates, rather than relying on the fiercely-competitive grocery channel. Haugh also carefully listened to lots of voices--customers, suppliers and partners--to learn as much as he could, fast.


---------------------------

[Haugh] elected to launch with four different kinds of lounges: "We're not going to go out and have one perfected prototype," he explained, "because we don't even know what that would look like." The team checked in with consumers throughout the design process to determine the best color palettes, types of furniture, and overall ambience for the stores. They also asked suppliers, partners, and the vendors of their chocolate-making equipment for input. Their intent was to refine the new business as they went along:

We'd know within three days if a store was working. Are people coming in, are they sitting where you think they will, are they ordering what you think they will? You know very soon. And we'd test a slightly different design and layout for the next one to open. We did make errors--we knew we would. But we were prepared to react quickly and to fix them.

Indeed, Haugh viewed making mistakes as part of the process:

You know what? You're going to make a bunch of mistakes. What you want to do is to try and correct them. When you're younger, you don't like to make mistakes. You think that's the thing that is going to knock you off the track. You get a little bit older and get some gray in your hair, and then you realize it's OK to make mistakes. It's how you learn the most.

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From The Catalyst: How YOU Can Become an Extraordinary Growth Leader, by Jeanne Liedtka, Robert Rosen, and Robert Wiltbank, published by Crown Business. Reprinted by permission. (c) 2009. All Rights Reserved

"Verbal agreements don't hold up"

Another business mistake story reported by Marcia Pledger of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. This story is from MJ Lehman, founder of Nicky Nicole, a boutique for girls.

I worked for many years in merchandising before I decided to use my passion for developing new concepts in a business of my own. But when I finally took the leap, I got so caught up with finding new trendy items for young girls and tweens, that I failed to pay attention to contract details for a big purchase. Verbal agreements don't hold up.

I started Nicky Nicole because I knew I could offer an alternative to the chain store experience for girls 4 to 14. Soon after we opened our first location, a sales representative approached me about a brand new interactive toy. I told her I would take a chance on the stuffed animals that come with secret online codes, if I were the only store selling it in [my town].

We invested about $10,000 in inventory and spent a lot of time training employees how to sell the item. Sales exploded. It was insanely popular with people coming from all over Northeast Ohio.

Several months later, the toy started appearing in nearly every youthful business in town. When the salesperson denied our verbal agreement, I took it to corporate. I was told they would have never agreed to a deal like that.

One thing was certain: Trust should not have been part of my business arrangement. I lost my edge. We lost out on volume and had to lower our prices by $1.

From that point on I got details that mattered to me in writing.

Learning from a bad acquisition leads to success at Best Buy

There's a great mistake story at Strategy & Innovation told by Brad Anderson, former CEO at Best Buy. He discusses how they messed up a significant acquisition of mall record store Musicland, but applied those lessons to its subsequent market segmentation strategies, which helped the company emerge from the financial crisis as the leader in electronics retailing:

By 2000, Best Buy was reaching the limits of a growth strategy it had pioneered in 1989 with great success: selling consumer electronics -- computers, TVs, stereo equipment, and the like -- through noncommissioned sales staff in brightly lit, low-cost, free-standing “grab-and-go” stores. It was a simple idea, borrowed from the big-box general retailers, enabling Best Buy to radically undercut the leading competitors like Circuit City, which were operating according to the industry-standard business model: advertise loss leaders to get people into the stores and then use the talents of commissioned sales people to upsell to something far more profitable. 

Looking for avenues of growth, Best Buy could see potential in malls. Musicland, which sold CDs in malls, looked like a smart entry point. “We sold CDs; Musicland sold CDs,” Anderson explained. “We knew CDs were going to disappear; we weren’t that stupid. But we also knew an awful lot of product was being sold in malls.” 

The strategy wasn’t nearly that simple, of course. In 2000, Musicland was a $1.7 billion company generating about $100 million in cash. Since everyone knew CD technology was terminal, Best Buy was able to buy the mall retailer for a bargain price of $600 million. At the time, Musicland, like all the other music retailers, turned over its inventory twice a year. But Best Buy had learned to double that rate in its own stores, and sales had gone up. “So we thought, ‘Wow, how much cash could we create if we go buy the guy that sells it in the malls and move his turns, which were two, to four?’ ” If Best Buy could apply its merchandizing skills to Musicland to double its turnover, the theory went, revenue gains would pay back the investment quickly, and as CD demand declined, Best Buy could bring in its other products, which it could sell for far less than they were currently being sold in other mall stores. It looked like a no-brainer. 

But, as Anderson put it bluntly: “We misread totally what was going on.” Best Buy had increased turnover by decreasing selection, something its customers were apparently tolerating but Musicland customers would not. When the selection declined in the Musicland stores, sales dropped. What’s more, Best Buy initially maintained Musicland’s CD prices, which were $5 higher than at Best Buy stores. Customers assumed that if they were paying mall prices for CDs, they were overpaying for all the other merchandize Best Buy brought in, even though in reality the company was selling its other goods for the exact same low prices it was offering in its stores outside the mall. Dropping Musicland’s CD prices way down to Best Buy levels didn’t shake that impression, nor did rebranding stores under the Best Buy name.

Eventually Best Buy realized that it didn't understand deeply who its current customers were, and who its non-customers were. When they studied that issue, they learned that women, who shopped in mall stores, recoiled from Best Buy's selling proposition. With that knowledge in hand, the company retooled, and focused on female shoppers as a key buying segment. It was too late to save Musicland, which was shut down in 2002, but soon enough to re-energize Best Buy, the success of which drove its nearest competitor, Circuit City, into bankruptcy in 2008.

(Hat tip Rita Gunther McGrath)

The accidental filing system

Patsy Bates thought the deal was dead, so she could clear her files. Then her boss called...

Edited Transcript:

I was a buyer for a catalog company, actually two, run by the same person. We were not only buyers, but investors in the company, and we were also finding investors in the company - because we wanted to grow. And I remember introducing the president to one of our very good friends who was an investor. And I thought he'd be a good one to connect with Bob.

We got the meeting together, and they interacted. It was a positive meeting, I thought. But anyhow, at the end of the day, we did a lot of paperwork but it just never came together.

So, time went on, it was probably six months later, and I was working at home. My son was visiting us. It was a Saturday, a weekend. And we were sitting around, I was cleaning up my office. I cleared away a lot of papers that were no longer valuable to me. And I put them in the garbage.

Later in the day I got a call from the president of the company. He wanted to get back together with this investor; he wanted the names and he wanted to get all the paperwork I had on it, and would I please call him within an hour with all the information. Of course, this was all the information I'd just thrown in the garbage. I couldn't possibly tell him that on the phone. So I said of course it was in my file. If he would give me a minute I'd call him back, I'd get the information from my files, so we could connect these important two parties together. I went to my garbage can and pulled out all the papers I'd just thrown away. It took me a while to dig through the garbage to find it all.

I called him back with all the information. He was just so impressed with me, that I'd had it on file, and I'd got it back to him within an hour.

I got a big raise out of it. He thought I was such an incredible important part of this company because I kept such incredible files. Of course, he didn't see me pull it out of the garbage can. Which was a lesson for me. I shouldn't just say it won't connect, it's never going to work, so let's just clear out the papers and get them out of here.

It's good to hang onto papers for maybe two years, because God knows what going to happen down the line. Something might work when you think it doesn't work.