Pushing stuff into each others calendars is a routine daily thing for us, part of the job. Our workflow has me doing part, then her then me. So tasks get pushed back and forth all the time.
That’s the extent of where what we do overlaps. I do my stuff, they do there’s with no input for me. That’s how we stay married for sure. I don’t actually as her boss.
I’ll do a job that requires say paperwork to be completed. I just push a task into her calendar saying ‘process paperwork for this’. Hit send, and I never have to think about it again.
And I love working with my spouse. They do their part of our business better than I would. A whole area of crap that I don’t have to deal with. And they love it, and our clients love her.
Anyway, this was more ironic than annoyed I guess.
I mean, if there’s more to talk about than “this paperwork needs to be taken care of” then it’s often easier to have a conversation about it IMO than put details in an email or calendar invite or other technological tool.
That’s great for retaining information but not for obtaining it IMO.
I was doing some light yard work, didn’t notice a low branch of an oak tree, and it snagged my glasses, and popped out the lens. The lens fell a couple feet onto grass, so it’s okay, but I’m going to want a better repair than the bailing wire thing i did today.
(The lens costs hundreds of dollars, and takes weeks to have made, so it’s a relief it’s okay. I’m still annoyed.)
We are too busy for this conversation and remembering stuff old school way. And everything needs to be documented. And we are building to scale rapidly , so having chitchats isnt going to.work when our volume quadruples.
In an actuarial environment, yeah, the conversation needs to be had because stuff is complex. In our biz, it’s the same thing every time so I create a process designed not to be dependent on conversations or memory.
Even my sales process is documented. I say the same thing every time. And it gets noted in our client database that I said it.
What i do isn’t generally done as a cookie cutter approach but I’ve made it that way. Creating processes is something I’m good at, and we have to do it that way to scale to large volume, which is our goal.
I actually sold my last business because I didn’t know how to.scale. I didn’t even know that I had to set up processes to scale, I just knew that I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I got mentorship to show me what I needed, and how to build the tools to scale. It’s quite eye opening, doing this startup thing for an old small business guy like me. I used to think startup was just a millennial word for ‘business’, but it’s not. The approaches are different.
One of my local likker stores rearranged their shelves and put a whole bunch of stuff (including single malt scotches) along a bank of windows that get a fluff ton of sunlight in the afternoon. Sumbuddy no yooz there .
Yeah, I was the guy that never called in sick. Went to work 100% of the time. Not as a bragging thing, just the way I am. Looking back it’s a bit embarrassing that I was that socially unaware.
There was a week post-COVID where the entire team was required to be in-office for a team-building event. Somebody came in hacking up a lung and looked like death.
I took PTO to skip my non-working team-building events.
Back in 2002 or 2003 my wife and I got the flu, it was bad. But I had quarterly reporting to do! I showed up every damn day and got it done. I could have killed someone.
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