Month: April 2024

Two full days being “on” at a conference sapped almost all of the energy I’d stored up from my work vacation last week. It’s something I’ve decided is necessary for the next phase of building my business, but my introversion makes it a challenge. I do my best work at conferences during the early mornings and in-between times when there are fewer people present. Then I’m able to actually focus on a conversation and not be at risk of mentally shutting down. This conference was no exception.

The sessions themselves were informative. Sure, I run a services business and not a SaaS company, but many of the concepts translate and the better I can speak the language of SaaS the more I’m able to win customers. I took pages of notes that I’ll transcribe and then chew on in the weeks to come. This is a secondary purpose of attending industry conferences, but this conference was better than most as it wasn’t just SaaS companies trying to sell SaaS to other SaaS companies. There was even an excursion portion of the conference where I went and made some biscuits, though the highlight of that culinary experience was the peach marmalade that I had no role in producing.

After each day’s activities finished, there was a happy hour. Happy hours are rarely happy for me. There are usually too many people and it’s almost always too loud. This conference had three. At the first one, I worked the room and had conversations with a few different people. The conversations were a roll of the dice (most people don’t come to a tech conference to talk to a lawyer) but I put in the repetitions. The second one was the busiest and most crowded. I made it a little over an hour until I could no longer tolerate the cacophony and so left for an early dinner. For the third one, I couldn’t even bring myself to participate. I was spent and so just turned around. There was a time not so long ago when I would’ve beaten myself up for that for the next two weeks, but not anymore. I know that I would not have been effective during the final happy hour and that’s okay. I did what I needed to do earlier in the conference and that’s good enough. Now it’s time to consolidate the new connections made and process my notes.

Before last month, I’d never been to Mexico. Now, I’m here on my second trip. I’m staying at a resort adjacent to Puerto Morelos, a little town about twenty miles south of Cancun. This is a very different Mexico than CDMX, one that in many ways is just an extension of the United States with Latin American style poverty tucked away but not quite hidden. There may be a time when I want to see the Mayan ruins that are scattered throughout the Yucatan Peninsula but otherwise I’m unsure why I’d return. The purpose of this trip was to attend a Rhodium retreat, a business community I’m part of that puts on what I consider to be can’t-miss events.

Yesterday was the excursion day, and also the only time I’ll leave the resort grounds until I leave for the airport. It included going snorkeling over a coral reef for the first time since I was in Australia one summer during college with my family. Highlights included seeing a sting ray and not getting sick. I don’t have the greatest track record on that latter point. That part of the day also saw me set foot on the beach to get to the boat dock, so I did technically walk on the beach this trip. We then traveled by bus inland to visit some cenotes and finished the day riding four wheelers through the jungle getting caked with dust.

The excursion activities aren’t the reason I came, though. I came to be around people who have taken similar business journeys to myself. It’s a concentrated chance to take in lessons and glean insights from people who are years ahead and to help those who are going through things I’ve gone through. I also gave a version of what I’ve begun calling the M&A weather report, a sort of market update I give to different groups in which I participate. I feel that’s a meager contribution relative to what I receive from everyone else, but I’ve had multiple people ask me follow up questions so it seems like at least someone found it useful. That’s a marked improvement from when I first started attending these events. I still have the feeling of an outsider that I wrote about after the most recent Rhodium event in October, but maybe now I’m at least contributing more from my outsider perspective.

There was one full day of working sessions on Monday and another today. I will have to make do with less energy today, but I’m still looking forward to it and scrambling to jot down notes that I’ll begin processing once the current round of travel ends later next week.

Within the bounds of needing to be responsive to clients and making sure that work product goes out on time, I am in control of my work schedule. With this modicum of control, I’ve been able to experiment with different workweek patterns in order to find rhythms that work best for certain periods. The normal version of my public availability is half days most days of the week (balanced between mornings and evenings to ensure better overall availability across a full week) with Tuesday being meeting free. Mind you, it never seems to actually work out that way but it looks decent on paper and it’s better than previous iterations.

Currently, Bill is on vacation. To better cover his absence, I modified my public calendar availability so that people could book meetings with me at any point from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays. This was an unsuccessful experiment, one that reminded me why I limited my public-facing availability in the first place. Don’t misunderstand me—I’m always grateful for the opportunity to pitch a prospective client. I’m even more grateful when those meetings get batched together as I find it preferrable to have two or three hours of solid meetings rather than to break them up. This week, though, there have been several 30 minute breaks between 30 minute meetings due to more overall availability and that has caused stop-start days. It’s not the worst thing in the world; it just means that I’ve had to push the “real” work to the early mornings and the evenings. If I had more of a social life filled with evening activities, then my current work schedule would be more of a problem than it actually is. Maybe that’s the real reason I’m a little embittered about the whole thing; it’s definitely not the vacation thing. In any event, I’ll have a new iteration of my calendar by May after a few work trips during the rest of April. It is my hope that I’ll return to the path of incremental improvement after this misstep.

In February I wrote about watching some of the short films nominated for this year’s Academy Awards. Last week, I watched the winner in the documentary category after I stumbled upon a free showing while searching for evening activities.

That film is 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary filmed by Ukrainian AP journalists during the beginning of what became a brutal siege of the Ukrainian city. I knew what happened in the city, but I did not know what to expect from the film. The film hit hard. This is not a film for children, those with weak stomachs, or those wanting a relaxing, feel-good story. The filmmakers based themselves at a hospital and filmed what transpired before them. Things also grew increasingly dire at the hospital as supplies ran out and the gruesome injuries kept coming. There were a few poignant, painful images in those scenes but I won’t describe them here. At one point the filmmakers were even behind Russian lines and recorded Russian tanks blasting away at apartment blocks. The filmmakers also edited in some of the Russian language coverage of their footage espousing conspiracy theories about how parts of it were faked, a reminder that information control remains a key part of conflict even if it’s more difficult now than in the past.

The weather that evening was appropriate too. It was an unrelenting downpour that lasted from before I left my apartment until well after I returned. The experience was not uplifting, but it was still a very worthwhile few hours. The whole film is currently available for free on YouTube and lasts about 90 minutes if you want to watch it.