How to know if you need a day off?

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After working so hard on the launch for so long, I really thought that I was feeling pretty good despite it. However, two things have happened in the last 24 hours that tell me that I need a day off – a rest day.

First, I forgot I had groceries in the car yesterday and had to toss it all away. This happened a couple of months ago too.

Then I was scheduled to do a podcast interview today and had to toss the whole interview away because of way too many technical issues. Part of it was my fault, and part of it was because of the venue I chose to record the interview. I found myself stuttering with my questions way more than normal too.

I felt so bad afterwards for wasting my guest’s time that I offered to do some graphic design work for free that I knew they needed done.

So tonight, I had a massage and now have written a checklist to force myself to go through about 7 steps before starting each interview. I think I’ve also identified a better venue.

I’ve been working such crazy hours for so long now that I really don’t know how to switch off other than going to bed. Exercise used to be my other outlet, but I’ve been recovering from an injury since June which has limited my activities drastically. Hopefully the MRI on Monday will give me a way forward to recover.

Ultimately, I think I need a day off, and honestly I’m struggling to do that because I forgot how to turn off my business brain. I might just need a little bit of help from my friends once again.

Trip to Brisbane

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I’m in Brisbane the next few days for a conference. Since I was already in town, I scheduled coffees with a couple of old contacts.

The first one was with someone who I think might be really useful on my future board of directors. She didn’t know that was partially why I wanted to meet with her until then. After all, I really don’t have much to offer her in exchange for her time and advice yet. Still, it was worth having that conversation early to give us both time to think about her potential contributions for the future.

The other person was an old contact from my last job. He’s a successful entrepreneur himself, and it was good to test my product ideas with him, as well as ask for advice about picking the right investors. It was ironic when he recommended my Manufacturer #1 to me without any promptings as he has done business with them before. Small world.

It doesn’t look like my schedule this trip will align with Manufacturer #1 to see their factory, but it was good that my friend also endorsed me to them – saying that I was serious and “not just kicking the tires on this idea.”

My friend also introduced me to someone who appears to be the founder of a social impact accelerator. I can’t tell if it’s only for Brisbane, but it does seem to be a fairly mature group. In any case, I’m always happy to gain more advice about attracting investors to my social enterprise. So, we’ll try to meet in the next few days.

The scary part about being Employee #1

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I’m used to running fairly large organisations. Since, I’m not an expert in anything, it actually works out pretty well for my generalist skill set. Instead, my job is usually to figure out everyone else’s strengths, and then to get the best out of them to meet our company’s or organisation’s goals.

So now that I am a staff of one, it’s pretty scary. There are no redundancies in skills. There’s no one else to get my work done if I take the day off. There’s no one holding me accountable for schedule or progress. And other than friends and family I confide in or the market research I do, there’s no one to even tell me that I’m heading in the wrong direction.

Currently, I’m the inventor, the website designer, the market researcher, the procurement officer, the social media strategist, the IT support desk, the brand manager, the manufacturer liaison, the bank, the logistics officer, the head communicator and the coffee runner amongst all other things.

It’s a pretty heavy burden being Employee #1 when I’m used to sharing the load.

Right now, I notice it most when I don’t have any contractors doing work in the background. It doesn’t matter if they are designing logos, preparing manufacturing quotes or fixing issues with my website. Whenever, I’m the only one working, I get nervous (and fewer emails).

Of course, it costs money to hire others to do work. Therefore, I only do this for activities where I clearly don’t have the skills to do it myself. So far, taking this approach still means that I’m usually waiting on others to complete something before I can either make a decision or progress the company forward. Yet, in a weird way, I feel better knowing that I can work on something else in the meantime.

So while I’ll continue to march forward mostly alone right now, I hope to have a team working with me next year. For I know that this business will be far better off if I’m spending my time as a manager than trying to do everything myself. I just need to start bringing in income before I can do that.

How to bring on investors?

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The Constitution template that I used for my company has 20+ different kinds of shareholders identified – from ordinary to founder to nearly the entire alphabet. While I had a few companies in the past, I’ve never brought on investors to help fund the businesses before. So, this is all new to me when the capital required for my new business exceeds my savings.

It’s incredibly common to hear start-ups talking about bringing on investors whether in person or in books and interviews. We also talked about this at business school too, but I naively thought shares were issued in order of the time of when you received in investment i.e. A to Z. This doesn’t appear right.

Why is it that no one really gives you the step by step of how to bring on an investor for your business?

For instance, which of the 20 different shares do I try to “sell” first? Some have voting rights, some have dividend rights and some have both. Also, if I use convertible notes (loans that eventually change to shares), what kind of shares would they normally convert to, and what about employee share options? Which ones should they get?

If anyone knows of a good book, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll share on this blog as I gather more info. I still have so much more to learn.