The Story of the Rubber Rooster (and other lessons learned)

This month marks seven years since Cody and I launched Team Outsider (originally, Land Lease America) following a tasty lunch at our favorite pizza shop on Mulberry Street in NYC.

What you might not know is that our entrepreneurial journey began in college at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. That business was a text message-based reminder service called MyRooster, and while it didn't exactly take flight, it taught us several things that have been foundational in getting us to where we are today.

And I'd like to use this occasion to share a few of those here:

1. You can't manage what you don't understand. Back in 2007, our core strengths — if you can call them that for a couple of kids whose real-world work experience was limited to lifeguarding, ice-cream-scooping, and a few summer internships — were in finance, hospitality, and business operations. We were not technologists (still aren't!), and if we'd played that role on TV — we’d have looked a lot like Big Head on HBO's Silicon Valley, minus the parts where he gets lucky and makes tons of money.

Since we didn't have a technology-focused co-founder, I went online and found a company based in Newark, New Jersey who agreed to build the product of our dreams. Our interview consisted of asking them: a) “can you build the product we've just described to you by phone", and b) “can you do it within our very limited budget". They said yes to both (shocker), and so off to the races we went. Months later — and after several revisions #ScopeCreep — they delivered a just-functional-enough version for us to share with the world. Out of money — and therefore, out of additional change requests — the product would need to either work as is, or it wouldn't work at all. #WritingOnTheWall

When we started Team Outsider, one thing was extremely clear. For anyone we were going to manage, we'd need to sit in their seat first. So when we purchased our first campground in Dubois, Wyoming, Cody and his wife Kris packed up their belongings, moved to Dubois, and served a full season as the property's managers. And when we purchased our next two campgrounds (one in Nashville, Tennessee, and the other in Columbus, Ohio), I held the role of "management company" — doing my best to learn what capabilities a management company would need to possess before we hired a third-party. (Encouraged by the possibility of “doing things differently”, we ultimately decided to build our management platform in-house.)

2. Ideas are like unicorns (or in our case, rubber roosters). One of my roles on our team was to create and execute our marketing plan. So I did what seemed like a good idea at the time — I went online, purchased (maybe 1,000) rubber "roosters" from Alibaba, and shared (littered?) them throughout the Cornell campus. Two things I missed there — a) the robust and vibrant rubber roosters I thought I was buying looked a lot more like the limp-necked toy chickens you’d find at a gag store and b) without context, no one knew what they were or had any desire to pick them up. (I'm pretty sure most were thrown out by Cornell's maintenance staff within a few days, and luckily — or likely due to the fact that no one knew what they were — we avoided any punishment.)

While I still think that marketing idea was directionally accurate, my execution was seriously lacking. As was pretty much everything else we did with that business. And so when a little company out of Palo Alto called Obvious Corporation (later renamed Twitter) became the undisputed leader in short-form cell phone messages, it wasn't at all surprising. Ideas are exciting, but without great execution, they're little more than a limp-necked rubber chicken.

3. Integrity is a non-negotiable. You learn a lot about someone when you go through tough times with them. And so working again with Cody was a no-brainer. Though we'd watched our barely hatched rooster quickly find its proverbial butcher, our relationship only grew stronger, and along with it, our trust — unlike what often happens with co-founders whose ventures fizzle.

When Cody mentioned during our all-team meeting this year in Denver that integrity and honesty are not listed as our core values because they are simply prerequisites to being on our team, I was reminded once again why I feel so grateful to work alongside him. You can buy many things in life. Integrity isn't one of them.

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Props to my dad for storing a few boxes of "rubber roosters" in his closet until my wedding day fifteen years later, where he gleefully shared the story of the rubber rooster — and to Cody for gracefully passing them out to our guests. #HappyAnniversary #LessonsLearned