Slogging Through Indiana

Well, IBI is over, and I am zonked (to sum everything up in a single word.)

IBI was great. I broke through a lot of hurdles in my life, the biggest one being that I really need to let go of the business and hire other people to help me run it. To that effect, I now have a COO position open in my company (and a couple people who are really interested in it.) I also broke through a few items in my personal life that were causing me some problems (namely that I didn’t have much of one.) I hope hiring some more people will help me balance my life; right now it’s work-work-work and people calling about server problems 24×7 and that’s not the way it should be.

I am now in Indiana with my family. My parents are doing okay. My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer last week, and my mother is really stressed about it. The only benefit of her being stressed about that is that she is not stressing about me or my life. That is good.

My parents are also both workaholics (my dad will be 61 in a couple days and he is still working 10-12 hour days.) I am trying to help them figure out what they can do to balance their lives. My dad in particular is really unbalanced; he’s on various drugs (currently Ritalin) and he is convinced that this or that medication is all he needs to keep going. What he really needs is to develop a personal life (yes, the same thing that I have been working on) and stop working 24×7. I told him I started kung fu a few weeks ago to help obtain balance in my own life, and he thinks I am nuts. He needs to do something like that as well, though, and stop relying on “wonder drugs” to give him energy.

My mother is, well, my mother… she is being stubborn about her hearing loss again (although Dad told me a couple weeks ago that she is finally ready to give in and get a hearing aid so we can all stop having to yell in her general direction.) She’s also being stubborn about hiring a personal assistant; I told her this story last night about that (story courtesy IBI):

An man decides to start a business and receives a $50,000 investment from an investor as seed capital. With the investment, he hires a few employees to help him with his business, and uses the money as salary for himself for the first few months as well.

One Friday, the investor walks in and says to the business owner, “What are you working on today?” to which the business owner replies, “I’m doing payroll.”

The investor says, “You’re wasting my money.”

Surprised, the business owner puts his pen down and looks at the investor. “How am I wasting your money?” he asked.

“Because,” the investor says, “I invested in you to run this business and develop your product. Instead, you’re spending valuable hours of your time doing payroll, which is something you could easily delegate to your employees or an outside company.”

This is one of the real gems of IBI for me, and it’s one I pass on a lot. Figure out the value of your time. Are you (as a business owner) doing something that you can outsource or hire for $8-$25/hour?

I took this lesson to heart and spent a day writing down exactly what I did that day. To my surprise, I found I was spending 4-6 hours a day doing things that someone else could be hired to do for as little as $12/hour. In other words, I was not using my time effectively. I was wasting up to 35 hours a week doing menial jobs…and I wondered why my company wasn’t going anywhere!

IBI December, for me, was all about planning. I sat down and wrote pages of notes on where Simpli was now and where I wanted to go from here… what I wanted to be different, what I wanted to stay the same, and what I wanted to focus on for the future. It was the first time in months that I had time to do that. I’m planning on going back (I’m doing the whole week again!) in February. By then, I hope to have a COO and an intern on board, and I better have my own time planned more effectively so that I can really grow my business. IBI acts as a great milestone for these sorts of things; every time I go back, I expect to have certain objectives completed, and that week gives me an opportunity to re-focus my own goals and my company’s goals.

I’ll continue to update this week as my time in Indiana progresses. I’m around on my cell phone if any of you want to chat. (Yes, my voicemail box is full. No, I don’t care. 😉 )