itsalrightumadeit

Sunday, before the report

It’s Sunday morning, 9am, and there’s a report that has to go out first thing tomorrow. I haven’t even opened it yet, and I’m already scared of it. Not because the work is difficult, but because I know what I might find when I open it: a number that doesn’t match, a slide nobody updated, or a month that just looks bad. And some months do look bad. No amount of formatting is going to save that. So I’m lying there worrying about the report, and then I remember something that was supposed to be done two days ago. Two days. Nobody reminded me, because the person who is supposed to remind everyone is me.

Small, new, first time

Let me say this first: this is my first business, and it’s small. There’s no layer between me and anything. No account manager, no project manager, no senior person I can escalate to. Whatever goes wrong comes straight to me, and whatever needs doing comes straight to me too.

So on a weekday I’m taking client calls, briefing the team, checking deliverables for mistakes and proofreading things someone else was supposed to get right in the first place. Sometimes I catch the mistake. Sometimes I don’t. And sometimes I decide, okay, I’ll trust this person, I won’t check this one. Somehow, that is always the one that comes back to find me.

Somewhere in between all of this, I’m also the project manager. We can’t afford a separate one, so project management isn’t really a role here. It’s more like a headache I carry around, and it goes off at completely random hours.

The day that doesn’t count

Here’s the funny part. At the end of a day that was entirely calls, messages, and conversations, I’ll tell someone or myself , very seriously, “I didn’t work today. I was only talking to the client.”

Which is ridiculous, because client management is the biggest part of this business. I know that. I even tell other people that. And I still don’t count it as work. I’m running the whole business, and at night I can’t point to one thing I actually made.

Oh my, the exhaustion is real. But honestly, it isn’t even the hardest part. The mismatch is. Some weeks I do everything: every call, every check, every late reply, every follow-up. And the result is still a disappointed client. I always assumed effort and outcome would line up. They don’t. If I’d worked less and the result was bad, fine, at least I’d know why. But working this much and still not being able to stop the disappointments? That’s so much harder to deal with. The reason and analysis is part is not for this blog piece. Another time.

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The call I can’t tell you about

I can’t tell you which call it was, and there have been enough of them that it doesn’t matter. The client is frustrated and disappointed with something the team delivered, and I’m the one sitting there listening, head down, [wondering why and how this happened on my watch]. It’s my name on the work. My reputation. Sitting through that again and again is worse than anything else in this job.

The whole time, one thought keeps coming: I didn’t do anything wrong. And right behind it, another one: but that’s exactly why I’m the one on this call. I trusted my team to take ownership, and owning it was my job. Both of these are true. I still haven’t figured out how.

For the client, none of this matters. Which is fair. It’s their business and their money. Nobody on the other side of that call is wondering how I’m doing, and I’m not even sure they should be.

“I did my job”

After the call, the client’s frustration, I talk to my team, and they will tell me they did their job, and did it well. Sometimes they did! But doing your task and caring about what it does to someone’s business are two very different things, and only one of them puts you on the phone when things go wrong.

What they can’t do is have that conversation, the one where you rebuild a client’s trust while they’re telling you that you broke it. They’ve never had to. And when I ask for more ownership, what I usually get back is a conversation about more money. Which, if I’m being fair, is a reasonable response. I’m asking for an owner’s worry on an employee’s salary. I’m still annoyed, though.

Nobody told me this part before I started. I thought finding clients would be the hard thing. It’s not. Finding a new client is easier than finding people who think like owners when they’re not owners. I can pitch my way into a new account. I still haven’t figured out how to hire someone who cares.

Two jobs, one person

A good entrepreneur isn’t automatically a good manager. These are two different jobs, and I’m doing both, taking turns being bad at both some days. It’s harder when you’re new, and even harder when you’re scared of taking risks. But you can’t call yourself a business person if you don’t take risks. So basically, I’m a business person who is scared of the one thing that makes someone a business person. This is so weird. I am new to this, and the qualities of ownership and responsibility comes so naturally to me. So here I am, an Entrepreneur for the last 3.5 years.

The client who trusts me

Some months the client is unhappy. And honestly, I work my ass off to make things right. The irony is that most of the time, it isn’t even that much effort. It’s understanding your client properly and doing the basic things right. You’d be surprised how many agencies don’t. And once the basics are solid, that’s when you get to do the good stuff: the bigger, more creative ideas, the things that actually take a client’s business to the next level.

But sometimes the basic things that were supposed to happen just don’t. [One small example, like a post that didn’t go out or a number nobody checked.] That’s when the real frustration starts, because the hard part never failed. It was the easy part.

So why do they stay? I’d like to think it’s because they can see we’re doing everything, and that we’re better than the agencies they’ve had before. Maybe that’s true. But we are also not expensive, so maybe it’s a bit of that too. I don’t know which one it is, and I’m not sure which one I’d rather be true.

Just calendar it

People who work at MNCs and big firms love telling me to calendar it. Calendars work when things happen at the time they were scheduled. In a small business, any call can come at any time, and I answer every single one. Calls, messages, anytime, all the time. Although I’d be a lot more convincing in this argument if I hadn’t forgotten to put Monday’s report in the calendar.

And then it hits me: I made that rule. Nobody told me I had to pick up every time. I let my clients take me for granted by answering every call, every time, and then I got angry at the calendar.

The part I can’t put down

The worst part isn’t the clients or the team. It’s this sense of responsibility: the ownership I feel for things that aren’t even mine, the report I’m scared of on a Sunday, the mistake I apologise for that I didn’t make. Most days it feels like a curse. But it’s also the only reason the business keeps going. I can’t switch it off, and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could, which might be the actual problem.

I’d like to know if this ever turns back into the thing I loved at the start. My phone’s buzzing. I’m going to answer it.