As a teenager I got into listening to Pink Floyd, as any self-respecting kid who wasn’t in the cool group but also wasn’t in the uncool group and who wants to be perceived as a tad edgy does - particularly when I started playing guitar.
20-odd years later I am still a big fan. 20-odd years later the only physical thing I ever regret not purchasing is a Fender custom shop relic Black Strat (as played by David Gilmour) as I’ll probably never get the chance to buy one again. I regret that decision more than not buying some kooky sounding thing called ‘Bitcoin’ when I first heard about it in 2011. No big loss, music is more important than money.
As is the way when you are very young and only look forward (and not back) that line from “Time” - ‘and then one day you find, ten years have got behind you’ seems a bit, well, lame. I guess the preceding line holds the clue as to why - ‘you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today’.
I had one of those moments recently - when the realisation dawns that ten years have got behind you - when I saw that my business is officially ten years old.
Admittedly I didn’t start doing it as a full time thing until 2018, but I did set up the company in 2016 and was actively side hustling at the time, so I am technically correct, the best kind of correct. (Futurama fans will know this reference).
According to the sloppiest of AI research, approximately 65-70% of businesses fail by year ten, so I must have done something right. Or, at the very least, I have not done too much wrong. I’ll let you be the judge.
Anyway, most self-congratulatory posts of this nature tend to focus on sharing insights or learnings from the business journey, or sometimes a laundry list of accomplishments, accolades and successes.
I’m not going to bother with that. Instead, here’s a list of some of the most memorable things that have happened to me in the last 10 years of business.
Flying all the way from Christchurch to Sydney, getting up at some inexcusable hour, only to arrive to a text message telling me that the meeting I had flown over for was cancelled (luckily Sydney has Uniqlo).
Being told - in no uncertain terms - by an ex-client that “you don’t get to take holidays as you’re a contractor”. The holiday in question being my honeymoon. Having a client kindly let me sit in their car when dropping me at an iffy train station as there was a man on the platform being arrested by numerous armed police for brandishing a machete at his fellow passengers.
Getting to the zoo that is the Auckland airport domestic Air NZ lounge at peak dinner rush hour, going to have a shower (because there were no seats so ‘why not’), and not realising in the process that the shower was leaking water onto my light coloured chinos - the only pair I had with me - meaning I had to walk out looking as if I had just wet myself.
Receiving an email from another website owner, telling me that they wrote first about a particular topic and therefore the fact that I was writing about the same topic and outranking them in Google meant I was infringing on their copyright, and they would sue me if I didn’t take my completely original post down.
A taxi driver taking me back to the airport, who in their combination of haste and singing along to the radio drove straight through the airport arm barrier and smashed up their windscreen. Having a dispute with a client (one of the only times this has happened, I might add) about an outstanding invoice, only for them to claim that they had engaged the services of a ‘top secret group of industry experts and advisors’ who - within the space of mere hours - were able to assess that the work I had charged said client for (and which was always paid up until this point without complaint) was approximately 10x overvalued, despite the client having signed a contract some years prior where they were happy to pay a much higher value than the now-claimed ‘lifetime value’ of all the work, just for an initial project. Needless to say, this client couldn’t possibly share the report or its contents as it was for internal use only. How convenient.
This same client also accusing me of conspiring to get their accounts payable team to pay me under their nose over the course of many years by trying to effectively ‘wine and dine’ them through pleasantries and various other CIA-esque brainwashing tactics (I don’t think I’d ever actually met them, but that didn’t seem to matter).
Being genuinely terrified of telling clients my wife and I were expecting twins last year, as I was worried it would be seen as some kind of sign I was not going to be reliable or helpful. Instead, everybody was beyond understanding and accommodating, some going so far as to want them brought into video meetings for ‘progress updates’.
Looking back, the main thing that sticks out to me is that despite many late nights, early mornings, and long hours, in working with hundreds of businesses and probably thousands of different people at this point, I can genuinely count on one hand the number of individuals who I’ve not enjoyed working with.
Outside of these select few, I’ve enjoyed the company, the learning, and obviously the custom of many great people and great businesses - so thanks to all who’ve helped me along the way … I’m excited to see what the next ten years will bring.