Month: June 2024

Wednesday was the main business day of last week’s London trip. We had both breakfast and lunch meetings with nice meals and good discussion at each. The networking event that was the raison d’être for the trip was Wednesday evening. My desire to speak to as many people as possible is why I pushed for my business partner to join the trip. The event was packed and the ultimate success of the trip will hinge on how well we build on those conversations. There were several that were promising. That said, the event was over four hours of constant conversation and completely drained me. My business partner has a temperament that handles such environments much better than I do.

I built the event up, but I had decided we should fly across an ocean to attend so that probably isn’t surprising. I hoped for immediate results, but that was never going to happen. As with almost everything we do, we are playing a medium to long-term game and chasing short-term wins isn’t the way to succeed. Anyway, to help recover mentally and physically we finished the night with a kebab and lemon Fanta. I wish that I could have that meal here too.

Thursday brought a reversal. When we’d discussed what we might want to do while in London, my traveling companion named only one thing. He wanted to see a play in the West End. Based on a recommendation, he chose Hadestown, a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I went into the show having done only cursory research and hoping to see great production value, the equivalent of watching an expensive live action Hollywood blockbuster. He had done ample research and was hoping to watch a show that would have enduring artistic and literary value. One of us got what we wanted. Well, as long as you don’t count the subpar fish and chips that we ate beforehand.

Since we did not book any additional business meetings for Thursday or Friday, we had more time to be tourists than we’d originally planned. So we ambled about different parts of the city from Thursday to Saturday—Westminster, Southbank, Battersea, South Kensington, Regent Street, Soho, Exmouth Market, Liverpool Street, Hyde Park, etc.—eating as we went but without going in anywhere that required advance tickets. It was the sort of whirlwind overview walking tour of a place that I have moved away from in recent years. I’m sure I’ll visit London again, but I have no immediate desire to return and was ready to depart when we did. Then on Sunday we awoke at 5:30 and headed off to Heathrow.

On Monday evening, I boarded a flight from RDU. Some seven hours later, I deplaned on Tuesday morning at LHR. I could blame the small children around me on the plane for my inability to sleep during the flight, but that would be disingenuous given my own history of not sleeping on airplanes. We took the underground into the city and made our way to our lodgings a little before 9 AM. I had harbored some ideas of sleeping for a couple of hours during the late morning, but our room wasn’t ready yet so those notions were scuppered. Instead, we decided to push through the day and not sleep until nightfall. This meant that we walked to stay awake. A lot. Miles and miles with only vague directional goals. We stopped and sat on benches in multiple parks. We ambled down some of the twisty streets in the British capital. We struggled to adjust to which way we needed to look before crossing the street (even if there are painted instructions at nearly every intersection).

We went to the British Museum in the early afternoon since it’s close to where we are staying. I even listened to a nearly four hour podcast about ancient Egypt on the flight as a way to kill the time so I listened to a lot of stories about pyramid building as I knew that there were rooms of Egyptian artifacts in the museum. The timing of the visit might not have been the smartest choice in the struggle to stay awake. Beyond the Rosetta Stone, very few of the items on display were enough to hold my attention. The museum was a good idea, but was the wrong choice for a day like yesterday when extra stimulation was needed.

We did a few of the stereotypical British things that I cannot do where I live currently but could when I lived in DC, namely eat breakfast at Pret-a-Manger and eat lunch at Nando’s. I feel obliged to say that this was the worst Nando’s experience I’ve had of the four countries where I’ve had the peri-peri chicken, which was a disappointing surprise given its cult status in the UK. That said, I still ate all of it. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

After the museum, we returned to our lodgings and handled work matters sufficiently to survive the day and create more time during which we could recover and come back to them today. Then we finished the day with a fancier dinner, complete with dessert as a reward for staying awake, at a restaurant near the top of one of the towers in Central London. From the terrace just above it, we overlooked Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral and looked across the river at the Shard as the sun began to set and drenched the city in golden yellow. London is not as pretty from above as a city like Paris or Vienna, but its oddly angular buildings do still have a certain visual appeal.

On a related note, the weather has been glorious—cooler than it is at home currently, sunny, little to no humidity, and dry. If the weather were like this all of the time, the British would have to collectively find something else to complain about. Since the word “if” is doing so much work in that sentence, though, I don’t expect the British humor to change any time soon.

Yesterday, we presented a webinar discussing letters of intent in small business acquisitions. We worked through a slide deck for around twenty minutes and answered questions for nearly an hour. None of the questions were too surprising, though a few of our answers likely surprised some as I hold some positions that run counter to those held by many others who work with members of this audience.

This was the first time I’d been on the presenter side of a zoom webinar. I’ve done several similar events times before, but those were smaller and were normal zoom meetings. This one maxed out around 130 people, which might be my biggest audience since my valedictory address during my high school graduation. The way things were set up on my computer, though, I could only see three people (myself, the host, and my partner who was also presenting) along with the PowerPoint slides we used as the lattice for our initial presentation. I did not even look at the Q&A tab as people wrote in their questions but left that to the host. In many ways, this made it very similar to the zoom calls I have multiple times per day. It’s just that this one was recorded and will be uploaded for people to watch later.

There was a time when I would’ve suffered for days in the buildup, needing to take antacids and struggling both to fall and stay asleep. None of those things happened. I have done the work to be ready to give a presentation like that as I’ve been doing these transactions for years now and have seen them shift along with market conditions. I was still anxious during the minutes before the event, though, because we hadn’t conducted a dry run of the initial presentation and my computer completely froze during a call the day before. As I’ve joked many times, technology is great until it isn’t. There weren’t any technical snafus.

My activity just before the presentation was much more limited. I wrote a few notes to organize my thoughts, but I only used them as a set list and not for substance. I watched the famous “F—it, we’ll do it live” clip right before signing on for a last little pep talk. Then I did the thing. Someday soon I’ll watch the recording and turn into my own harshest critic, but I’ll save that exercise for a few weeks after there is more distance from the event itself.

Yesterday, there was a major event for the local startup scene hosted by a publication that covers all things startups and early stage companies in the Triangle. It was an all-day affair. This was the sort of event that mixes people wanting to start businesses, people working in new businesses, people looking to invest in businesses, and people who provide services to new businesses. There were even keynotes from people who built and successfully sold some larger businesses. The event was about a six minute walk from my apartment. And… I only attended a few of the panels during the morning and chose to skip out on the afternoon to attend other meetings. I didn’t make any new connections; my heart just wasn’t in it.

Also yesterday, before I even ate breakfast, I had a meeting with a prospective client in Singapore and had another meeting with a prospective client in Dubai. Both of these meetings were through referrals from other people in the growing network of service providers facilitating the purchase and sale of digital businesses, and I have a verifiable expertise in guiding clients through exactly the sort of transactions that these prospects are pursuing.

Somehow, both of those things are part of my normal working life. As I’ve quipped on more than one occasion, we’ve had more clients in Australia than in North Carolina at Barlow & Williams. That was never part of my vision when I imagined my work life, but that’s the reality based on the practice we’ve built so far. It’s a reality that has its benefits—I can work from anywhere with an internet connection and increasingly wherever I go in the world I can reach out to someone I’ve worked with for local recommendations. It has also come with costs. It’s been almost five years now since I had coworkers in the same physical space, for example, and water cooler talk doesn’t work as well over zoom.

I haven’t entirely given up on working with startups and founders locally. It may never be in a paid capacity, but I have still contemplated posting up at the coworking space and hosting in-person, impromptu office hours. Or formalizing it more and having the coworking space implement signups. I should probably just try it one afternoon a week for a couple of weeks and see what happens. It could be an exercise in frustration and futility, or maybe I’ll make genuine connections and help a few people along the way.