Sunday post, written Thursday in the back of a plane flying down to Madrid. We drive out of Switzerland tomorrow into the southwest of France in the family INEOS, and I am pre-loading a few BIP posts so I can think about the road instead of the daily writing slot. That is what AI for founder productivity actually looks like in practice. Not a productivity slogan. An actual day where the work folds around the trip, rather than the trip folding around the work.
The thing about a lifestyle business is that once you have tasted it, it is difficult, maybe even impossible to go back. The thought of me walking back into an office, something I have not done since 2005, would feel like going to jail. At least that is the way it feels now. Maybe if I really did have to go in tomorrow morning it would not be that bad. Maybe there would be some security in showing up to a team and working together toward a common goal. Those moments at the water cooler where you laugh about what a colleague did at the last happy hour, the one that ran a little long into the night and ended in something supremely embarrassing for them, or you. Whispered about around the office until someone did something dumber. Or at least more recent.
A few months back I was helping run a 25 to 30 person team across 12 time zones. Virtual office. Slack as the water cooler, a tool I opened with dread most mornings, wondering what unreasonable task was being thrown at me. The hardest thing about that job was not the work. It was timing the announcements that I was going to be six time zones ahead next week, asking to move the weekly meeting because I was suddenly on Asian time. I would wait until the end of a meeting where there was a bit of laughter or some good news on a sale, then slide it in. Oh, by the way, I am going to be eight hours ahead on Monday. Can we switch the time of our weekly? I felt the judgement of it every time. That I did not have the project's best interests in mind. That I was the odd one out in a team where most people rarely strayed two hours from their home town.
My mobile life was not really suited to that, and after building my own way of life through work for twenty years, I cannot really imagine doing it any other way now. The good news is I am back to not having to. I traded the monthly known revenue number for the assurance that when I wake up at 6am on a Tuesday on the other side of the world, I can shuffle the schedule without telling anyone. Go enjoy the hell out of the day. Come back later and crank out the catch-up work with a fractional AI ops practice sitting underneath the day. AI handles the throughput. I handle the relationships. The schedule belongs to me.
Get used to extreme uncertainty. That is what I remember about my earliest years on my own. It is scary, and you get used to it. The trade for the unknown revenue number is what makes the next twenty years possible. The line most people miss, when they are looking at the gap and wondering how anyone lives like that, is that the unknown is the price of the freedom. The known revenue number is what you trade away to get to shuffle a Tuesday morning.
I would not have it any other way.
Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects 0, somewhere on the road south.