Last night, or quite possibly two nights ago, I was very bored at night. So much so that I watched Street Customs on Discovery Channel. For those who don’t know, it’s a show about a very cool entrepreneur who got a 3000$ loan from his gramps and transformed them into a huge worldwide car customising business in a few short years.

Brilliant guy; the show though isn’t quite up my alley.

Anyhow, watching that I noticed they’re using a very cool motivation device in their shop. Up just below the ceiling is a plastic timebomb-like device with a giant LCD display counting down days, hours, minutes and seconds until the deadline.

It’s a great way to put some pressure on the team. Everyone can see how little time is left. The countdown timer is a whole lot different from some insane boss/founder/CEO person who keeps urging you along and saying how little time there’s left. Hell, sometimes even that guy might have trouble feeling the pressure.

Introduce the timer!

Therefore the next natural step was taking one of our whiteboards at Preona and turning it into a huge Countdown Board. Huger even that the one Ryan Friedlinghaus uses at West Coast Customs. We weren’t using it much anyway because the sofa gets in the way of comfortable writing.

But to make things even more interesting … our Countdown Board includes a list of the bigger milestones we have to pass before the time runs out