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WRITTEN BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS REAL TALK. Sometimes life is easy. Everything goes your way, the sun always shines, and roses spring up wherever you walk. Other times the sky's dark all day long, nothing works out right, and it seems like it probably never will again. Starting a business has been a healthy balance of both of these extremes for me. I am writing this article just a pinch over a year after Tyler, Chris and I let the world know that we were all giving notice, leaving our old jobs and embarking on a brave new adventure. Our eyes were wide with the hope of what might come, and our stomachs were nervous about just the same thing. It is moments like these that bring it all back as though it was yesterday, and at the same time makes it feel like decades ago. Fast- forward a year, to the present, and you can find us all here, still alive, but I' column, I'm going to paint a picture of the roads we have been traveling thus far and point out a few lessons learned. TOO MANY COOKS IN THE KITCHEN OR: HOW THE HANDSOMES LEARNED TO LET GO When Tyler, Chris and I were finally all together out in Los Angeles and taking those first steps into the strange new world of starting a company, we were together a ton. (Tyler and I actually even lived together.) It made for an interesting dynamic. None of us had very well defined roles, and anytime a decision was to be made, whether it was where we were going to put the entrance to the bar, what coffee to buy or even where we should go for lunch, there was a group discussion on it. At that point in the game, that was probably the right thing to do. There was a lot of waiting on next steps to work out, and we were all still kind of figuring out who we were in this new situation of running a business together. It was not, however, a model of operation that could last for long. In Tyler's words, we were essentially running Handsome the same way 8-year-olds play soccer. The whole team constantly running en masse after the ball wherever it went. Strategic use of our time was on the low priority side, and there was a sense of comfort in keeping together. Slowly but surely, though, we began to push into our own areas and take ownership of them. We really had no other choice. To say this was easy would be a lie, mainly because pushing into "our own areas" meant letting go of others. Yet, the simple fact was that too much needed to be done for us all to have a voice in every last bit of decision-making. So letting go was a must. There is something to be said for thinning the pool of perspectives and letting some sense of ownership go to other folks. Accepting this idea is the only reason that the coffee bar is already open; otherwise we would still be arguing over the color of the bathrooms. "THERE WILL NEVER BE A PERFECT TIME." Both Chris and I are fairly research-oriented gentlemen, hell-bent on always looking at all of the possibilities, so we can make sure our selection of options is thoroughly vetted and most likely to produce the best result. A few classic examples of this are the time when Chris took approximately six months or so to select a pair of sunglasses or the four months it took me to choose a clothing steamer. (They are better than irons as research shows.) Now granted, Chris looks damn good 72 barista magazine At top: The first time I ever got to see our coffee on shelves of a coffee bar at Caffe Streets in Chicago. Below, Chris looking great in the sunglasses it took him six months to decide on. in those glasses, and my shirts have never been better, but this is not a methodology that a business can survive on. From the get go, Tyler was obviously our company "gas pedal" doing a great job at pushing the whole team forward into situations we may have thought we were not entirely ready for (and sometimes truly we were not), but the end result is that we have covered far more ground than appeared to be possible to me at the time. Take roasting coffee, for example. Getting the ball rolling on this is obviously an essential step for a coffee company to take, but is also incredibly difficult. We had to find a location, find green, figure out what we were going to do with it once we had it, and on and on. We had to start filling in an empty canvas. For me, it was a little nerve wracking. For Tyler, well, he felt there was no excuse to not just jump into it already— "There will never be a perfect time, " he told us. And so we did. Hustling around town until we found a place to roast, road tripping up to San Francisco to buy some beans, and then launching, all happened within a pretty small window. Granted, we probably could have gone a little slower and made a few of our choices d say less hopeful/nervous and more seasoned/determined. In this