a new world
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
As of this week, I'm no longer officially employed. In fact, I'm "retired" and am now working full time on a startup.
Yes, I'm trying to build a company in a country where I don't speak the language. What's more, I'm doing so in a field that I don't know.
My days are filled, essentially, with three things.
First, building the business agreements, sourcing the products, and meeting people who can help us in many different ways. These are what I think of as externalities. Oddly, these actually take up the least of our time, or in any event they have until now. And while each one is highly educating, it's almost been a bit anticlimactic if only because absolutely everybody has immediately understood what we're trying to do and has been immensely helpful. That said, our contacts have a way of multiplying, and the rate of information input seems to be accelorating. I imagine that this component of the overall body of work will continue to grow in scope and importance.
Then there are the internal pieces: the bits that make up the store and the marketing tools that will drive people to that store; understanding how we'll make money and what we need to do to set certain income goals (starting with 'breaking even'); deciding what we need on day zero and what can wait for the days following that. This is a surprisingly fluid piece of the work and my partner and I find ourselves returning to this more than we'd imagined. Every time we encounter a new wrinkle in the way that a given supplier does business, it has a ripple-back effect on our internal planning. It's fascinating stuff.
Then there is the third type of work. The seemingly endless amount of work that it takes to establish and run a company in this country. Paperwork. Decisions about things we've got no interest in deciding at this stage in the business. For instance, we have to establish how much we're "paying ourselves" right now, even though we're paying ourselves nothing. We need to establish an income because the income level decides what we pay for health care premiums. And we have to have an internal health care system because of the type of company we set up. It's all very alien to me as a foreigner here, and to my dismay it never really seems to fully go away.
But I wouldn't trade any of it for my life in the corporate world. If I had to identify the improvements I've made in my day-to-day existence by returning to startup mode, I would some it up this way:
- I can use my brain. It's been so long since I used my brain on a constant basis to solve problems and plan my activities that it took some adjusting to get back into startup mode. But now that I'm back, I'm hooked. This business might fail and I might have to return to the world of IT-for-finance (or something even worse), but I'll never be able to put the genie back in the bottle now.
- I can use my energy. There's a type of fire-fighting foam used in computer data centres that I'd like to use as an analogy. I don't know how the foam works, but it's released into a space where a fire burns in an aerosol form. When it comes into contact with fire, it suddenly congeals into it's foam form, and because it can't burn the fire is extinguished. It's attracted to the thing that it's designed to extinguish! In the corporate world, there are armies of naysaying morons who are drawn to the site of accomplishment the same way that the foam is drawn to fire. And just with the foam, these morons do their best to extinguish the accomplishment in progress. I have a good friend who related to me the saga of his previous job; he had essentially been hired with the specific purpose of fighting the extinguisher morons, a job that caused him to drop a lot of weight and left him literally exhausted (but which made him such a hero in the office that he was literally showered with parting gifts). Now that it's just me and my partner, there are no accomplishment-extinguishing morons to descend with thousands of reasons that something can't be done. It's great.
- No wasted time. Here I'm not just talking about having no commute and none of those useless late nights clearing up make-work clutter. I really mean that I'm not wasting time: I have no meetings that I don't want; I perform no unnecessary processes and activities; I undergo no audits. When my work is done for the day, I stop working. When I have more work than I can accomplish in a day, I decide on the one or two most important today-size tasks and do them.
- No wasted effort: if I spend a lot of time producing something we never use, it still taught me something about the business I'm building. Compare that to the corporate life of working on some dismal project for six months to have it cancelled for reasons as unknowable as the project's original purpose.
- Overtime is an investment. I still work overtime, of course. The nature of that overtime work has changed drastically -- for instance I now do dinner meetings and other former unknowns. But whatever the kind of overtime, every second of it is a welcome investment in my future, not an unwelcome intrusion into (and theft of) my life.
That's my new life in a few hundred words.