A sink on crack was delivered to our office!
It arrived on a pallet, delivered by a huge truck.
We had been waiting for this sink for a month. You have no idea how excited we were.
I am 57. My business partner, Mark, is 67. We are starting a media company. No debt. No inventory. No credit line. We are bootstrapping it with our own money.
Mark has started companies like this multiple times. For me, this is number three. Ten years ago, I bootstrapped my first property management company, which I still own 100%. Five years ago, Mark and I started a second property management company together. Neither company has debt. Both are running on autopilot now.
So we decided to start another one.
This time, however, it is different. We need stuff. Lots of stuff. Cameras. Speakers. High-definition screens. Lights. Control boards. Cables. Thousands of cables.
Our studio is 550 square feet, with 12-foot ceilings—perfect for media production.
We have no neighbor on one side. On the other is a well-known tailor. She is 75 years old, has been a tailor all her life, works six days a week, and still moves like a spring chicken. When we need a costume made or an alteration, we walk out of our office, turn left, and there she is. The perfect neighbor for a media business rooted in satire.
When Mark decides to do something, he works like a madman.
Within a couple of months, we had cameras everywhere, lights hanging from the ceiling, multiple devices pointing toward the stage Mark designed and built, and control boards with more than 60 buttons switching scenes from one to another. Mark works 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
The only time he takes a break is to use the common-area bathroom in the alley. I think.
It is perfect. Well - almost perfect, except one minor detail.
Mark sometimes eats three meals a day in the studio. He uses a microwave to heat up the food he brings from home, prepared by his long-suffering wife, Julie.
One day, I stopped by and opened the microwave.
OMG, how could you live like this? I screamed.
The microwave had food particles from eons ago dangling wildly in front of me. At some point, he must have exploded the guts of an egg and did not clean up. It was disgusting!
To be fair, it wasn’t entirely Mark’s fault. According to Julie, Mark has always been a clean person.
The problem was simple. No sink. No running water. No easy way to wash anything. Mark even had to bring bottled water into the office just to make coffee.
One day he casually mentioned that it would be nice to make scrambled eggs in the morning or cook some chicken in a skillet—if only he had water to wash everything afterward.
Such modest wishes!
The man works 15 hours a day building our media company. Surely I could get him some water. But how do you put a sink in an office with no plumbing?
Then we discovered it. A pipeless sink.
It looks like a beautiful modern kitchen sink, except it doesn’t need plumbing. There are two hidden tanks underneath—one for clean water and one for wastewater. You fill the clean-water tank, plug it in, and hot and cold water comes out of real faucets.
Magic!
Whoever invented this thing is a genius.
So we ordered it. Then we waited. And waited.
Finally, a huge delivery truck pulled up. The driver lowered an enormous pallet. There it was.
Our sink.
After all the cameras, lights, screens, microphones and control boards we had bought for our new media company, you would think one of those things would have been the most exciting delivery.
Nope. It was the sink.
At 57 and 67, it doesn’t take much to make us happy.
Just a little running water.
And we’re ready to launch!
