In previous startups I got too involved in one aspect of the business to the detriment of the other areas. It became unbalanced.
When I had a fully working admission booking system for the UK Theme Park industry, I focused completely on customer support and product development. I failed to look at the bigger picture. And I failed to think about sales and marketing.
So when the 2008 financial crisis began to squeeze the UK Theme Park ticket market, they got dissolved within a few years and I was left with no new customers for the booking system.
Likewise, when I was running a web design company in London, I failed to do proper talent scouting so I could build a team. So I just ended up burning myself out by trying to do it all.
In hindsight, in both instances, I was in a great position, but didn’t realise it. And that could have been fixed simply by making sure I put time into different areas of focuses.
It’s not rocket science, it’s just realising that you just need to repeat certain actions with consistency in order to build up the results that you want long term.
Generally speaking you have these aspects of your business:
- admin / finance / hr
- sales / lead generation / networking
- marketing
- research and development
- production
- people
These all depend on the overarching vision you have, but once you have that you can focus on those areas. Even if you just put in 20 minutes to each of these a day, that consistency builds up.
Starting Point – Getting the basics right
It’s really important to support the business side of your life, with a positive and healthy personal side. If you treat your body poorly for the next decade just to try and get to some hallowed gold at the end of it, you are potentially in for a shock. Not only do you miss the point of life, but poor health is more difficult to reverse than maintaining good health.
Last year I began implementing some basic life habits:
Step One – Keep Your Life Clean!
- Clean your home / office up
- Declutter & organise
- Process & organise paperwork
- Have a digital tidy
- House & garden maintenance
It might seem a bit ridiculous talking about these things on a Startup Blog, but the point is, these things cover the bases. If you can do fifteen minutes per cycle (choose … 24/48/72 hour) … and the amount of times I can remember feeling super overwhelmed by an untidy office and paperwork everywhere. Likewise, even now my laptop is becoming a bit of a mess and I need to streamline things.
Also if you ever watch Kitchen Nightmares you’ll know that most of the restaurants are absolutely appalling – they don’t get cleaned simply because the owners haven’t created consistent cleaning habits.
A recent job at a startup on my first day the desks were just caked with dust. It just needed a bit of attention. I’m not saying it will change your business into a super success, but keeping your life clean is far more preferable.
Step Two – Life Admin
- Personal admin & errands
- Personal finance
- Business admin & errands
- Business finance
- Investments and crypto
Doing these things regularly really does help keep on you top of things. The challenge is doing them consistently, but they are nice and simple tasks that you can apply your willpower and discipline to.
In my early years I left accounts to the last moment, but now I keep on top of things.
Anyway thats enough for today.
Today’s Work
A good day… I did some more R&D work with AgenticAI – the python library for building virtual agents. Quite interesting really. And I started building out some migrations on the laravel project. Whilst I will be using python a lot more, at the moment it still makes sense to make the most of Laravel’s very solid functionality and integrate that with a python API.
See Agentic work diary for today
Really good news on one of the projects but wont jump the gun there.
Since I’ve had a cold winter without adequate central heating, I took the opportunity to warm up and sat and meditated with breath-work in the sun again in the garden. Honestly, being your own boss does have its benefits.
There’s a lot on at the moment. But when there’s too much to consider, it’s not productive at all … and so you need a better solution.
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