Hello lovely
Occasionally, you recognise moments in your life at which the train has left the station. For some reason, you hadn’t noticed that it had even come to rest, much less that it was taking passengers. By the time you step up into the afternoon sunshine on the quiet platform, resting your worn baggage next to you as you ease into the wooden park bench alongside the offices, it’s long gone. Except, you thought you had plenty of time.
Eventually, you look around and get a feeling that the place is eerily quiet.
Surely, you think, there ought to be more people here than there are?
This is kind of where I am right now with Brutal Pixie.
Since the COVID hoax, and the subsequent frightening of many B2B buyers away from buying anything (because they, themselves, had the rugs pulled out from under them), I’ve had all kinds of wild ideas about sales, new revenue models, and ways to leverage the coming wave of spending on consumer goods.
But there’s a problem.
You see, darling reader, I’m currently 20 weeks (5 months) pregnant. This means that I’m going out on leave in under four months.
This means that I’ve hit a legitimate barrier, which is that I can sell services as hard as I like, but I’ll be leaving people in the lurch for six months in very short order.
While I had taken umbrage at the comments I’d started to receive way back in April - things like, ‘Call me when you’re back at work next year’ - now I am the one putting the brakes on.
Would you engage someone to support your publishing output if you knew they were disappearing soon?
Unlikely, right?
So to say that finding the motivation to get off my spreading backside and into the saddle is tough, is the Understatement Of The Year.
And while my accountant can’t understand why I was talking about selling the company, I am fiercely aware of the fact that if I end up in a position where I’m trading insolvent, that the penalties (as a director) are immense. I’d rather sell the brand and its assets and end up financially liquid than in an unenviable position of personal liability.
Therefore, rather than get stuck in this dark little place, I decided to take some real action.
On the one hand, I engaged an analyst to examine the software stack I’m running and see if there’s a business case for ditching it, or for ditching the Frankensystem in favour of an all-in-one system. I’ve been that Horrible Client who wants to poke the analyst every five minutes to ask where they’re at, but know that I really have to wait and let him do his job. Ha!
And on the other hand, I know full-well that I could bail out of almost all of the platforms I’ve loved for the past five years and go back to spreadsheets, documents, and repos with which to do what almost everything else is doing for me.
I’m in this strange in-between place.
Much of what’s going on, I can’t control.
Many of the attitudes of the clients I’ve had (some of whom are still freaking out and behaving in weird, uncharacteristic ways), I can’t control.
And if I end up with no revenue?
That’s when you pull out the Startup Tookit you’ve used four or five times before, go back to the beginning, and know that she’ll be right.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve found it difficult to learn the lesson that you can’t control anything except your own actions. It seems that 2020 is the year in which life teaches it to me instead.