Author: James David (Page 5 of 20)

I’m about halfway through the third season of Clarkson’s Farm. For those who haven’t seen the show, the premise is straightforward. Jeremy Clarkson, longtime host of Top Gear and an individual who is banned from many countries for having insulted them over the years, moved to his countryside estate in the Cotswolds and began farming full time just before the global pandemic. To paraphrase the man himself, he is the world’s worst farmer. And there is a film crew with him to record the lunacy. And it’s hilarious to watch. This is especially true when he gets lectured by Caleb Cooper, his young farmhand who is in many ways the show’s real protagonist, for his latest ridiculous idea.

This season is framed as a competition of sorts between Jeremy farming all of the non-arable land on the farm and Caleb farming the arable land to see who will have the best balance sheet at the end of the year. Jeremy tries all sorts of things—pig farming, mushroom cultivating, berry harvesting, planting mustard, and selling (well, trying to sell) nettle soup to name a few so far in the season—and Caleb takes a few risks of his own to save on costs. Caleb has a lifetime’s knowledge of how to farm, though, so that is a major advantage over Jeremey who spent much of his life in London.

Beyond the hilarity of it, the show does a very good job documenting how difficult it is to make a living as a farmer and has received a great deal of recognition among the farming community in the UK for that reason. That sets it apart from other shows that lean hard into voyeurism but lack any redeeming value (e.g. reality television). Since it is grounded in reality and peppered with a bit of cowboy bristling at government overreach, the show is worth a watch if you are in need of escapist entertainment this summer.

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.

On one of my (too many) zoom calls yesterday, during the introductory chit-chat, the topic of discussion was how everyone spent the holiday weekend. Of the nine people on the call, seven had eaten hamburgers during the unofficial start of summer. These were all Americans, but Americans who live all over the country and a couple who are ex pats living in Mexico. No matter; almost everyone ate burgers this weekend. As for me, I ate a smashburger at a local place by the baseball stadium that I hadn’t visited before and tripled down on the meal with a ginger ale and some tater tots (on a related note, every part of it was better than Shake Shack or In-N-Out. Fight me). My burger wasn’t on Monday, but I still wanted a hamburger for Memorial Day weekend.

This early conversation was a little humorous, but it also reflected something deeper. It was an example of one of those deep cultural connections that we have as Americans. It’s not the only one—turkey at Thanksgiving anyone???—but we often aren’t given any chance to contemplate them. I didn’t even have time to contemplate this one until much later as the meeting proceeded quickly after this introduction and then I had two more meetings stacked afterwards. When I finally did think about it for a few minutes, I chuckled just a little. These were very different people, joined together by a desire to learn how to use AI better in work and life, yet we’d all had the same meal around the same holiday because summer has the same shared meaning for us all. It would be naïve to wax poetic about how things would be much better if we focused on these shared meanings and experiences, but maybe taking in less political content would be a good start.

From Thursday evening through Sunday, I participated in a tango encuentro, a festival of sorts. I danced with people from all over the country during the weekend, which still seems a little crazy but I suppose I’ve traveled to do things like watch a few baseball games.

After I spent a few weeks reintroducing myself to tango at the start of the year, I found out about this event and set participation in it as an internal target. Since this wasn’t a competition it was not the easiest to create a measuring stick for success, but I settled on something like being skilled enough to participate comfortably (squishy though that standard may be). I’ve been dealing with some muscle injuries that limited my prep, but I feel satisfied that I achieved the level I wanted for the event. I still feel I was among the worst participants, but so be it. I did receive positive feedback from multiple other people so maybe that’s more accurate than my own internal monologue. As for demographics, I was definitely on the younger side. Stated differently, I was almost certainly one of the ten youngest people out of the two hundred or so participants. In some ways that was freeing and older women are more willing to tolerate my two left feet anyway.

I then followed it up by going to a concert last night where I stood for several hours letting country rock music wash over me. This was actually my second time seeing Paul Cauthen in concert as I also saw him perform when I was in Montana last summer. I was very glad that I brought my concert earplugs with me; those were a great find by my brother a couple of years ago. It was a great show, but it did prolong my inability to resume my normal sleep schedule. Choices.

Living in a downtown apartment, I don’t get as much time in nature as I would like. I feel it every time I’m outside the city. It’s one of the trade-offs I’ve made for this season of my life. Right now I prioritize walking and being close to activities. That probably won’t be the case forever. Anyway, I did something that many would consider crazy on Sunday, something that I myself would have considered crazy during most other seasons of my life. I went on a short hike with the primary purpose of being able to listen to the buzz of the cicadas. I had heard them during my Saturday activities and wanted to clear my head a little, so I drove about 20 minutes north to a lovely little park with a few hiking trails leading down to a riverbank. I’d been there before, but this time I took the longer loop trail for a pleasant afternoon stroll away from most of the other people who had similar ideas.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the cicadas in a while, the sound was not like that of a rainforest as one might imagine; it’s much too monotone even if the volume got close and there were occasional bird sounds to act as treble against the bass of the insects. Early May here also lacks the humidity of a rainforest, but that will set in soon enough as we move towards summer. I lingered on a bench at the riverbank for several minutes overlooking a tiny rapid thinking a lot about what should come next. Then I got up in what passes for peaceful calm and walked back up and along the ridge to the parking lot. One the walk back, there was even an adult black snake that slithered across the trail in front of me. That was the largest wildlife I saw during the afternoon, but wildlife viewing wasn’t the purpose of this trip. No, the purpose of this trip was a seasonal sort of forest bathing.

I made a quick trip to Kentucky this weekend. It was a chance to see family, watch the world’s most famous horse race with people who have some understanding of what they’re watching, eat a lot of food, and go turkey hunting. Well, at least go sit in the woods and call for turkeys. This turkey season wasn’t very successful for many and my one hunt of the season ended early when there was no activity.

On my way on Friday, I took a detour. It’s one of my favorite detours to take, turning south instead of north when I get to Knoxville. I left home early and rushed through lunch on the road so that I would be waiting when two of my favorite people got off the school bus at the end of their week. I even got a few minutes with their younger brother beforehand to continue my work to ingratiate myself with him. He’s easier to interact with now that he’s talking more, but it’s still a work in progress. At least now he has a few balls to play with in the house; throwing a ball is an easy way to bond with a little boy.

Once it stopped raining, the girls wanted to go outside and ride their bicycles. The older has been able to ride her bike for a while now and lazed up and down the driveway talking to everyone as she went, long hair flowing in her wake. The younger has been learning how to ride without training wheels. She was so very close to doing it all by herself. Once she got going, she could pedal and steer and go and go all the way down their long driveway. She was having difficulty, though, with starting and needed a push to generate initial forward momentum. She enlisted me to help. First, I had her change her shoes so that her feet would stop slipping off the pedals so much. Then we worked on the technique of positioning the pedals with one at the top and one at bottom. Then she practiced kicking off with her standing leg. Then she practiced kicking off and pedaling down hard with the initial motion. Then she put everything together, wobbling a little, and starting under her own power. It was amazing how quickly she progressed.

Later that evening, I received a video of her starting and pedaling and riding up the driveway all by herself. She was showing off for her dad after he got home from work. She was beaming. I’m not about to take any real credit for teaching her. All I did was give her a few final tips. No, the thing that stuck with me is that she had all of the skills in place already and just needed one more technique, that final 1%, to achieve her goal. I just wish it were easier to tell in my own projects when I’m that close to seeing results. And her smile; her smile stuck with me too.

I still haven’t taken the time to process all of the notes I took during the last two weeks’ conferences. Given the topic of this week’s missive, that will come across as procrastination. Maybe it was.

This was the first week without either travel or curling on Sunday and Monday for me since early fall. It was different. Combined with the longer daylight hours, it bordered on unnerving during those evenings. I am very much routine-driven, from my gym schedule to most of my meals to my target work schedule. Now I have gaping holes in my weekly evening routine for the next several months. It presents opportunities, but I must seize them.

I’m dabbling with speaking Spanish again by trying a few different teachers out this week who will speak with me over Zoom. That, though, is a morning activity and morning availability is more a reflection of the continued slow M&A market than anything else. So far, it’s been amazing both what I remember and what I’ve forgotten since I last spoke the language at any length some two years ago.

In addition to taking extra walks in the evening, I’ve begun watching The Parisian Agency on Netflix as a stopgap measure. One episode per evening as I’m not a fan of binging content. It’s a real estate show that if nothing else adds a little perspective to the prices I see on houses and condos locally. There are a few more episodes and a new season on the way, but that’s not even a medium term answer. Staying at home isn’t the answer at all actually. No, I want new activities to occupy my evenings, new chances to meet people and sink in roots here in the Triangle.