Big Deal Small Business: Always On vs Never Off
April 16, 2022 | Issue #66
It’s been a month since my last newsletter post. Not because I didn’t mean to write more and not because I didn’t have stuff to write about.
Honestly, it’s just been a grind of a month.
That’s kind of the subject of today’s post. I come from an industry (institutional investing / private equity) that is known for being a meat grinder from a work/life balance perspective.
I knew leaving finance to become an SMB owner-operator was not going to be a work/life balance improvement in the short or medium-term.
That said, I’ve been surprised at how different the “grind” feels as an SMB owner-operator than it did in PE.
The only way I can describe it is that in PE, I was never off. In SMB, I feel like I’m always on.
In PE, even if I snuck away for a vacation, there was always a chance something would blow up and they would call me to work on something. I traveled with my laptop and wifi hotspot and answered emails every morning & evening of vacations. If a partner suggested a meeting on Sunday at 10am (or 2am), I was there.
In other words, I felt like I was never truly “off” for the 5+ years I worked in that industry. Of course the occasional 80-100 hour work weeks sucked too, but the constant knowledge that you may be called upon generated a different kind of stress.
In SMB ownership, the pressure feels different. I don’t have to answer a call from a partner on a Saturday or Sunday. But if a customer calls the office line on the weekend (which auto-forwards to my cell phone), my choice to answer feels like the difference between generating a sale and missing out on it.
When I go home, I can’t stop thinking about the business. The holes on our team I need to fill, the ads I need to run, the website that needs updating, the trucks that need new license plates, etc.
The potential task list is endless, so each day I have to cut it off at some point in the day and then hope everything else will keep to the next day.
Every waking hour could be dedicated to the business if I let it. But I’m only a couple months in, so it almost seems too soon to be drawing boundaries or establishing work/life balance.
To be clear, the business is doing fine, the employees & former owners have been great through the transition, and the bumps along the way have been manageable.
I’ve just been surprised at how my brain / emotions seem always “on” now that I have this business to focus my energy on. On the one hand, it’s energizing to have such a singular, all-encompassing focus. On the other hand, it’s exhausting.
Long story short, it’s been hard to justify sitting down and writing newsletters - an hour spent writing feels like an hour I could have spent researching a new vendor, a new benefits plan, a new customer channel.
Those tradeoffs are endless of course. It’s clear to me that I need to figure out an internal process for ending the workday and “turning off” the business.
But it still feels too early for that - there’s a lot to do before the business will feel “stable” or that I’m in a groove. So I’m writing this post as more of a flag to document the notion, even if I don’t think I’m going to work on it right now.
In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing well in your respective searches & businesses! I’ve been less active online over the past couple months, but please don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to chat.
Thanks,
Guesswork Investing