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One of the conversations I had after last week’s event in Philadelphia has me revisiting a book I read in part earlier in the year and that has been sitting on the table beside my recliner in the months since. The book was first recommended to me by one of our referral partners who is building a well-oiled business machine. That was sufficient justification to buy Buy Back Your Time and skim through it searching for ideas. I’ve implemented a few of the basic concepts already and have looked over the mental frameworks a few times, but we’re about to embark on a real quest using the book’s framework as version one of a new trial. The goal over the coming months is to tackle that most insidious of modern time sucks, the email inbox.
The email inbox can be problematic in many ways. My biggest problem is not that I’m drowning in volume. We’ve implemented some routing flows that have addressed that issue and it’s not like I was getting hundreds of emails per day even before that. My biggest problem with email is that I have it open almost all the time, a residue from a past life.
When I worked for a big law firm, I grew to fear email. We had to be on all the time and if we didn’t respond within a few minutes we could face quite the hiding from our bosses. One of my good friends even developed muscle spasms in his leg from the anxiety of waiting for the next vibration notifying him that another work email arrived. When people ask me why I left the big firm, that little vignette is one of the anecdotes I tell. Despite all of that, immediate responsiveness was so deeply engrained that it is still a mental battle. And this even knowing the benefits that await on the metaphorical other side and after having turned off email phone notifications.
Has anyone gone through the steps outlined in the book, email-related or otherwise? If so, feel free to let me know which parts have worked well for you, what you might have tweaked, and if anything didn’t work at all. I’m more interested in the first half of the book than the second currently but I appreciate in advance any thoughts or comments.
In addition to the work trip this week and juggling multiple closings, I spent a few days at a resort in Puerto Rico. It was not a destination I would have chosen and probably not a place I’ll return to anytime soon, but that wasn’t the point. There were red flags on the beach consistently and warning signs about rip currents anyway. I took a short walk on the beach one morning when I woke up way too early, but otherwise stayed out of the sun and returned just as pale as I’d started.
I went for a retreat through a community of entrepreneurs with online businesses. I am the only attorney as it is a group of people running content, digital agencies, ecommerce, and SaaS businesses, but the way we operate our business looks a lot like many of the digital agencies and I’m able to share a perspective on the M&A process that is otherwise absent from the group. I’m not in the group for business development (though I have assisted members of the group with transactions), but for me it’s more about exposure to cutting edge ideas and being around my people.
The event was two days of sessions, a mix of presentations and hot seats to help members with particularly pressing issues, and an excursion day where we went into Old San Juan and kayaked into a bay filled with bioluminescent plankton. I skipped out on the morning coffee tour and instead sat around talking with other people who decided not to schlep up and down hills in the sun; I don’t drink coffee anyway. The notes I took during the sessions will take weeks to fully process as I mentally turn over the ideas in my head and think about how they might translate into my own context.
I’ve attended several events with this group, both in-person and virtually. At this point, I know most of the people and even if we only see each other once or twice a year we’re able to have conversations as friends. It is the sort of community that I’ve not yet really found in any one place, a group of people who understand the business and life challenges that come with the path I’ve chosen. It’s a group of people with whom I’m able to have conversations that just aren’t possible elsewhere. It says a lot about the group that I’m willing to leave North Carolina during what is some of the best weather of the year to go to tropical humidity and that I’m willing to go to Las Vegas every year for the main conference even though Sin City is hardly my speed.
Over the past week and change, I’ve had two dinners with friends. They’ve been quite a salve during a time when I’ve needed it. The meals themselves were very different. One was at my apartment. I cooked venison, roasted cauliflower, and used my fancy new rice cooker. Since I added sour cherries to the rice, that was the hit of the evening. It was a calm meal with relaxed conversation. The other was at a new small plates restaurant aiming for a Miami feel—art deco décor, Latin food, and tropical plants. Everything was close but not quite there. They have, however, definitely nailed the way-too-loud music element that is quintessential Miami.
This morning, too, I had breakfast at Chick-fil-A with most of the group from my men’s bible study where I had a regular chicken biscuit. Even though the sessions have concluded for the spring semester, it was nice to get together with those guys as that has been one of the few consistent places where I’ve been around men who are further along the journey of life than I am. Since I own my own business and we work from our apartments, I don’t get that from work as might have happened in an alternate universe.
None of these three meals was really about the food. They were about the conversation, the jokes, and the what-did-you-just-say moments. These are the sorts of things I haven’t done enough, the sort of things I’ll need to do even more as spring turns to summer and I have more free evenings. One of the reasons I chose Durham when I came back to the Triangle was because it has better and more varied restaurants than Raleigh. I even have a spreadsheet of places that I update occasionally and share with people who want local inspiration. Maybe I’ll finally start filling in more of the rows in the notes column of that spreadsheet.
Spring is always a time of change. I felt this in many positive ways during a nice long hike on Saturday through a mix of hardwoods, loblolly pines, and prairie meadows at a nearby nature reserve that I hadn’t visited before. It was a lovely walk, the weather was great, and there weren’t many people around. My allergies even held off until the very end.
There seem to be even more transitions than I expected this spring. I knew curling was wrapping up (Monday after I played one of my best games of the season), that my morning bible study was ending, and that there would be a lot of work travel that has really only just started, but there is more. Yesterday, the SBA announced new rules governing the 7(a) program that rein in some of the flexibility that was introduced into the system last year. We’re still processing the changes, but I don’t expect the net result to be positive. I could say the same about a number of other things. These collective changes make our 2025 growth initiatives even more important and those are focused on adding different types of customers, a planned transition but on an accelerated timeline.
I’m also coming towards the end of my current lease, which is always a time that causes a little pause. Following my historical pattern, now is about the time to move somewhere else. That isn’t necessarily a pattern I intend to perpetuate, but I can’t help thinking about possibilities in ways that I wasn’t even in March. I can’t be the only one who has these sorts of thoughts every couple years.
There were lots of meetings and plenty of work at the back end of last week as we only returned from Las Vegas late on Wednesday night. It is part of the process and we’ve made things better by clustering meetings, but meeting days can turn into exhausting days quickly. This is especially true when my sleep is disjointed as a result of being between time zones.
When the normal workweek finally ended, I walked to and ate dinner at my favorite Thai spot. At this point, the waitresses definitely recognize me. I had my usual pad see ew with chicken. Then I had mango sticky rice for dessert as a nod to the passage of time. Mango sticky rice is one of my more recent culinary discoveries, but boy oh boy is it good. I’ve even purchased sticky rice at an Asian grocery store so that I can make it at home though I cheat and buy precut mango when I do so.
After dinner, I went to a gathering at one of the many downtown taprooms that I can walk to but hardly ever visit. It was organized by my church small group as an extracurricular group activity. I wasn’t planning to attend as birthdays are something I stopped looking forward to several years ago. But I also received a text message that people from my men’s bible study were also going and I decided the social costs of no showing two groups were more than I wanted to pay. I arrived late as the restaurant was busier than I’d expected, but I’m glad I did. It was a great chance to get out of my own head and a welcome reminder that I do have a little bit of community here.
I don’t gamble in casinos. That is a decision I made several years ago and so don’t need to revisit when I walk through the casinos when I’m in Las Vegas for work, a situation that has arisen at least once per year for a few years now. It saves mental energy not to have to think about it, not that I’m attracted by the slot machines anyway with all their light and motion and noise.
I am gambling in Las Vegas this week, though. We have a limited budget of time, energy, and money for business growth. When we made our plans for the first half of 2025, DealMax was an event we circled. It marks a different path, an attempt to press more into a different client avatar and to diversify our client origination mix. That is largely the theme of the events we’ve chosen for this season as we probe different ways to evolve the business. This builds on the exploration of 2024 and hopefully will benefit from the lessons learned through those efforts.
Some of our prior initiatives have been grand slams. More have been strikeouts, with a smattering of singles and doubles and one or two I might describe as balks. With each we search for the potential of leverage or nonlinear success, the opportunity for one talk, program, or sale to result in multiple transactions or clients. This event brings together private equity funds and investment bankers in a manner that might be unreplicated elsewhere. A single success here could mean multiple transactions for us, so we made the trip.
We may not know if this gamble will pay off for six months or longer. But our growth budget is about making bets and we liked the potential asymmetry of this one. Will we approach things differently if we come back next year? Sure, but overall we’ve accomplished what we came to accomplish. Now we will win the follow up and open some of the metaphorical doors that we’ve cracked ajar.
In the last six months, my brother has moved back to Kentucky from south Florida and a new nonstop service has launched from Raleigh/Durham to Louisville. It is one of the new air carriers and so only offers a couple of flights per week, but it allows for a Friday to Monday stay. This helped create momentum for a short family bourbon trail trip. Illness again affected the plans as a few members of the family had to stay home. That wasn’t good, but everyone else decided to proceed with the trip given that tickets had been purchased and reservations made. It did lead to a few tweaks though, as I suspect we would not have gone to a brewery on Friday for dinner had everyone been there.
Saturday was the big tour day as we visited two of the major distilleries in the central part of the state. All distilleries have similarities, but these two showed different sides of the industry as Woodford Reserve is a much smaller facility than Buffalo Trace. Since it was the weekend, neither was actively bottling and as many of the warehouses aren’t on site with the distilleries, we didn’t get the full scale of how large the operations really are during either visit. I’d toured both facilities before, but the smell of the angels’ share is always pleasant in short bursts. The tastings aren’t bad either. I prefer the standards more than the variations that were on offer, but that isn’t likely a surprise. We then drove back into Louisville for dinner and a calm evening, followed by a lazy Sunday with brunch and a pleasant walk on a pedestrian bridge over the Ohio River (and a fast-moving squall line storm that took out the power for a while during the night while I was working to finalize a transaction).
On the descent during my return flight, we came down into a yellow-green fog as it is the time of year when the trees release all of their pollen in central North Carolina. Carwash owners rejoice. I haven’t been outside enough for any allergies to flare up, but it will happen at some point during the spring. It always does.
This weekend was the club spiel at Triangle Curling Club, an internal championship of sorts. This year, the rules required more experienced players to pair with less experienced players in an over-under format. Just like last year I somehow missed the signup email, was late to get on the list of people looking for a team, mentally wrote off the idea of even participating, was contacted right before the event to form a team with the last people left on the list, and then played skip since I was the only one who had played the position before. For the second year in a row, I was the least experienced skip on the least experienced team (we were all “unders” and I didn’t even meet two of my three teammates until just before our first game).
Objectively, things went better than a pundit might have predicted. In our first game on Friday, we were overmatched yet led after four ends before the wheels fell off. In our second game, on Saturday morning, we gave up five in the first end and it was over before it ever got started. This team wasn’t capable of making a big comeback. The third game was the best for my front end players and we steadily built a big lead. Then the same dynamic that I wrote about a few weeks ago played out and I very nearly found a way to choke the game away. My last shot was just good enough, though, and we held on. That surprise win meant that we played a third game on Saturday night. That was a bridge too far for us and I was left trying to play hero shots in almost every end. They didn’t come off and we were soundly beaten, ending our journey.
After our fourth and final game, I helped move some tables and chairs back inside to help close down for the night. One of the organizers of the event and someone I’ve played under during multiple seasons was also moving the tables and leveled with me about my behavior towards my teammates. I had let my frustration show too much and the criticism was merited. They are new curlers and were just trying to enjoy themselves; I enjoy competing and can be very hard on myself when I don’t execute as I intend. They didn’t always understand what I was asking them to do or why I was asking them to do it, resulting in more than one confused situation that led to bad outcomes. I cannot fairly blame the losses on these mishaps as I missed shots that I know I can make, but they didn’t help. I don’t expect that they would ever want to play under me again after this weekend, and that is an area where I’ve got to improve.
After a day off, I returned for my normal Monday league. I focused on staying calm above all else and proceeded to have the best game I’ve ever played both in terms of accuracy and weight control. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, but it’s hard to argue with results.
Daytime high temperatures were unseasonably warm this week. Some of the flowers and trees are already blooming and with the exception of a stormy Sunday the skies have been blue and clear. It is one of my favorite times during the year. On Saturday, I went to a new area to hike in Duke Forest. This was actually my second new trail in the past few weeks, but this one was more enjoyable. I scouted a little online, checked some maps of the roads through the forest, and took off in my car. Had I done a little more research, I would have parked at a different entrance gate that would have trimmed the worse parts of the walk but I didn’t want to let perfect be the enemy of accomplished. For the first quarter mile or so of the hike there was quite a bit of road noise, but beyond that the walk was quiet save the crunch of gravel under my feet and the conversation of the few other hikers I came across. After winding along the gravel track for a while, I descended down a gentle slope to a bridge. I couldn’t resist a detour off of the gravel path and along a rougher trail beside the flowing creek when presented with the opportunity. It wasn’t the route I had originally mapped out, a route that would have taken me on a loop further north, but flowing water is nature therapy in the best way.
There were several bits of the creekside trail that required scrambling over rocks but there was no scree so the footing was always sure once you got through the fallen leaves. It wouldn’t be a walk that everyone could do though. At one point, there was a pair of Mallards foraging in the creek moving in the same direction as I was walking. Such was the terrain that we moved at roughly the same pace, not that I minded given the beauty of what was around me. It was a lovely scene with the creek set below some low rises maybe forty feet above the water on each side, plenty of tree cover, and sunlight sprinkling through to the floor. Overall, it was a very pleasant walk. I just wish I’d worn shorts.
The Durham Performing Arts Center punches well above its weight, both as a venue and as a draw for events and performances. It also helps that I can walk to DPAC, which I did twice in the past week. My first visit was to see Shucked, a touring Boadway musical comedy. My second visit was to listen to a lecture from Dr. Jordan Peterson as part of his current tour.
My Shucked visit was not as originally intended. Illness forced a change in plans as my expected guests were unable to come and my weekend plans were scuttled. In an era of digital tickets, I was still able to go and managed to find a home for one of the others. I knew very little about the show going into it, which was probably for the best. The premise bordered on the ridiculous but that was deliberate and the writers leaned in hard to the corn motif with what is surely the highest concentration of corny jokes in the history of musical theater. One of the minor character’s monologues were the piece de resistance of this corny humor and he got the biggest laugh of the evening with a joke about how politicians are like diapers. I haven’t seen Book of Mormon but a few people said Shucked was like a toned-down version of that show. It had some vulgarity but wasn’t blasphemous. I’m glad I didn’t travel to New York to see it (especially after seeing Hamilton when I was in New York in January), but it was a nice change of pace on a Thursday evening.
Dr. Peterson’s lecture was much more what I anticipated it would be and more impactful. It was a solo trip and the second time I’ve seen him give a lecture. And while I wish he (and everyone else) would refrain from Twitter/X, his writings and his recorded lectures have been of great value to me during the past few years. The lecture focused on conscience through the lens of the stories of Elijah, Jacob, and Jonah and how those Old Testament stories offered a preemptive repost to Nietscheze’s idea that man would be able to reconstruct a value system after the death of God, how the existence of conscience itself points to problems with Nietscheze’s claims. The lecture paralleled the thoughts contained in the prologue to his latest book, which I started reading just this weekend so it was almost like spaced repetition of the ideas as you might study flashcards in order for the content to seep deeper into memory. These two exposures to a particular passage of scripture aren’t even the only ones I’ve had recently as one came up in my church small group as well a few weeks ago. It has all left me thinking about creating still and quiet instead of crowding it out with noise and stimulation at all times since that quiet is where the best things come from.
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