Working Stiff

We are at a few weeks from golive at the Minneapolis client, and that means one thing. We are at a few weeks from our trip to Disney! My team keeps forgetting that I’m there to take them right up to the edge, but not across the finish line, and it’s a little odd to keep reminding them… but on the other hand, it’s forcing me to be smart about allocating responsibilities across the team: If I was going to be here, there are any number of tasks that I would have been tempted to say “I’ll just take that”, when in fact it would make better sense to farm it out.

So I’m trying to look at this as a positive. I mean, for me it IS a positive – I’ll be spending days in the sun with my family having fun instead of sitting 12-14 hours a day in a hospital basement manning a command center. So yeah, positive. And I WILL be in that command center the day I get back… but by then, the sheer naked panic should have subsided and we should be in crisis management mode.

I was afraid that my holding to this schedule would somehow impact my standing with the client, but oh look in my inbox, they just asked me to stay on to the end of the year. So they must not be TOO disappointed with me.

With the big golive behind us, and with me having a safe home base for the next 7 months, it’ll allow me to spend more time on building out other parts of the business. Specifically, we are starting to grow the data analytics line, which is MINE. I have one analyst already, and am looking for a second. We have one gig underway, a second one being negotiated, and clients 3 and 4 are identified and ready to go this summer.

This is the sort of thing I was hoping to be able to do with this company – to have the time to organically build out a practice area, while not being on the hook for DOING all the work myself. My boss/mentor Dan says it’s building a “long tail” – anyone can do work, but to grow you need to be able to find it, start it, and hand it off to someone you trust. It’s tough for a control freak like myself to trust that someone else can do work as good as I can… so I’m definitely keeping a close eye on the deliverables, but so far so good.

Business is on my mind because I’m flying home now from a leadership meeting in Philly. We spent 2 days talking about our staff, our growth, our strategic plans… and I was just happy to HAVE one. At the last leadership meeting, I was stymied because I had been trapped in Cleveland with a full time job and not really able to focus on growing my own work. Now I do have a big project, but I’m not on the road, and I have flexibility to take time out in the day to make things happen. Plus, it’s WAY easier to take a day trip out to Maryland or Philly from a home base, instead of tryng to work out flights from Cleveland.

I still love my company – whenever we get together for a few days, I leave liking us just as much as I did when I walked in. We have strong personalities, but we’re all competent in our own ways. There’s a good base of respect across the organization, and while we do go down the rabbit hole on minutae sometimes, it’s always a fun journey. And we’re doing GREAT – we have had 35% growth over the past 3 years, and are on track for that this year – we’ll be over $12m this year if we just work the business we’ve already sold. We could hit $16m easily this year, and over $20m next year. It’s not a bad place to be.

We do need to be smart, however: There’s a lot of business out there, and we’re not getting it at the expense of anyone ELSE: So while the growth is great, it’s not only because we’re good – we need to recognize it’s a great market. It’s that sort of humility and drive to keep ourselves tied to our core values and integrity that further cements my love for the company.

That and the fantastic dinners we have when we get together…

And now something a little different:

One of my co-workers is Gregg, who brought me into the company. He is an abrasive east-coaster who has a penchant for strange turns of phrase. From this trip we had two gems:

“Let me throw something else into the wrinkle”. This is like one he had last year “we’re all going to have to put our hands in the fire here”. The classic mixed metaphor.

“I’m superstitious – I’m the kind of guy who carries around a lucky rabbit head in his pocket”. This one had us completely unable to work for about 20 minutes as we tried to stop laughing.