“A cubicle farm is a monotonous office environment characterized by white collar slaves wasting their lives in pseudo-offices with four-foot walls while slowly morphing into zombies,” website Urban Dictionary says.
Rejecting this cubicle-based life is A.J. Leon, a former certified public account, who founded the LaC Project, a New York City-based Web agency, in October 2009 and currently employs six people and several contractors.
Recently, Leon piled into a car with his wife, Melissa, and brother to travel across the United States and Canada meeting with entrepreneurs, “digital nomads,” small businesses, co-working centers and Web-application founders, to capture the stories of people leveraging technology in order to create innovative businesses and “empowering” work environments.
“We want to hear stories and understand how co-working, work-shifting and modern Web applications have changed how people manage their businesses and live their lives,” said Leon about his “Rise of the Cubicle Farmer road trip.
15,000 miles, 45 cities and 65 days later, A.J. met up with a total of 40 entrepreneurs. His last stop before heading home to the Big Apple was Providence, where he caught up with the BatchBlue crowd and Lullabot.
PBN: First, tell us about your inspiration for the “Rise of the Cubicle Farmer” road trip.
LEON: Three years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting in a corner office in Midtown Manhattan, making a ridiculous six-figure wage, with a year-end bonus that is more than most people’s salary. The problem was I hated my life. I despised that I had traded my dreams and aspirations away in order to play a game of Monopoly that the world told me I needed to “win” in order to be happy.
I was essentially prostituting my life away for a paycheck. And I hated myself for it. During that time, I would scour the Web for stories of people who had escaped the cubicle farm culture. Then one day, I finally did it. I left. But you know what? There are tons of people that feel exactly like I did.
This trip is for them. The entire purpose of the “Rise of the Cubicle Farmer” road trip is to provide empowerment to those aspiring entrepreneurs out there that are trapped in a corporate setting where they don’t belong. We wanted to travel the entire country and capture stories of entrepreneurs in different industries and geographical settings, who had leveraged technology to live life on their own terms.
We are hoping that these stories would serve as inspiration and education for people who feel stuck like I did. And judging by the response we’ve received, I feel like we’ve been successful in that quest.
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PBN: By meeting with startups across the nation, you’ve taken the pulse of the “digital nomad, entrepreneur and small-business people” community. How’s its health?
LEON: It’s fascinating to me that in a “bad economy,” there are dozens of entrepreneurs in all different industry types that are thriving. I feel that a common thread among these entrepreneurs – at least that we’ve identified in this project – is the use of technology for two purposes.
First, the use of emerging technology to reduce overhead expense: by using free or inexpensive yet incredibly useful Web applications – such as Batchbook, Box.net, Mailchimp, GoToMeeting, Less Accounting, Freshbooks, etc., entrepreneurs are managing to operate robust businesses with a tiny or non-existent overhead expense. By doing this, they are able to weather periods of slumping sales much better than traditional entrepreneurs and can even pass on savings to customers.
Second, the use of new media and social software to generate community around their product or brand. We met a married couple in Asuza, Calif., that started a restaurant called The Pasta Bar in the middle of the recession. They have never spent a dollar on marketing, yet have remained in the black every month. Why? Go on their Facebook page, Twitter stream or blog to find out. They have developed such a vibrant community around their shop, it’s beyond “loyal customers” … it is fanaticism.
PBN: What did you learn from the road trip?
LEON: Having the opportunity to meet with successful entrepreneurs using technology in a host of industries across the country has been like the MBA I never wanted to pay for. However, as an entrepreneur myself, the single greatest lesson was to focus on developing a “lifestyle business.”
This new breed of entrepreneurs we met with was not entirely concerned with profit. Several of them spoke about architecting businesses that were in alignment with their personal ideals and life goals – for some that meant travel, for others that meant being able to spend time with their family.
This made me spend a lot of time on the road looking at my own business model coming into a new year.
PBN: You stopped in Providence days before you returned home to meet with BatchBlue and Jeff Robbins from Lullabot. How do our local startups stack up?
LEON: There is an incredibly vibrant startup community in Providence, especially considering its size compared to other cities we’ve visited. The one interesting note about the startups we met with in Providence is their proclivity to develop solutions with small business owners in mind.
Take BatchBlue for example. They developed a Social CRM called Batchbook deliberately for small-business people with small budgets and no IT staff. During our trip, we actually used their new iPhone application, which allowed us to take mobile pictures of people we met during our trip, and automatically add them as contacts in our Batchbook account. It was dead simple to use, and allowed us to capture contacts and relationships we were developing on the go.
PBN: What’s the one thing you’ve written down from your meetings with them?
LEON: I know I keep on harping about BatchBlue, but our brief time with them was very meaningful. I was so struck by their emphasis on family and lifestyle. Typically, technology startups are incredibly fast-paced environments chalk full of 20-somethings on the verge of burn out, fueled by Twinkies and Diet Coke.
At BatchBlue, we found something entirely different. We even had the opportunity to attend (and by that, I mean crash) BatchBlue’s holiday party. Their entire team brought their kids, appropriately named the “Batch babies,” gathered at a local bowling alley for pizza, duck bowling and cookie decorating. It felt like a family. You could sense the love and affection they have for one another and the importance they place on “lifestyle.”
In our entire 15,000 mile trip around this country, we never met with a company that had this level of endearment for its employees.
Check out Leon’s on-the-go 120-second, small-business tips on Batchbook here.
