So the last few weeks/months have been pretty stressful.

Stress is a funny thing. It sneaks up on you, it changes the way you feel about the world, and it can make you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

Running a business in this climate changes things. We have been lucky not to experience any real changes, but when we go a month without getting any new work, or when I’m too bogged down to be getting new work, instead of thinking ‘ah well, next month’ you start to panic that it’s a sign of things to come.

On top of that, we run a very free and happy ship here and when that leads pretty quickly into being too free and easy and mistakes get made and no one is accountable, you start to question your fundamental beliefs about how a business should be run and WHY you bother in the first place to expand beyond being a freelancer.

I noticed that I started to change. I didn’t feel like ‘me’. I didn’t feel happy, motivated or even like I wanted to talk to anyone. I just wanted to go home every night and sleep.

This kind of stress is new for me. I am in control of it. I KNOW I can work out of it. I just need to get my act together and motor through everything on my plate, then find something I feel excited about and run with it. The thing is, despite the groans from everyone I know that I can’t just drop everything and head to Thailand, or the US or Michael Jackson in London, I’m actually not fussed about what I have to miss out on to make this happen.

This is what I want to be doing. I love it. But I need to find a way to ensure I don’t get stuck in this stress hole, I need to get some danger signs.

In the meantime, I ‘dealt’ with it by abandoning my cellphone, computer and all internet and electricity and went to the Marlborough Sounds for Easter. Despite having a million messages on my answering machine and more emails than anyone could handle on my return, I think it was worth it.

My head is clear, I remembered that the reason I do this is so that I can do that. And when you are faced with a pod of bottlenose dolphins desperately showing off, or leaping off the wharf into the pitch black ocean in the middle of the night, or dashing up and down a bush track finding clues for our easter egg hunt, it kind of puts stress in perspective.

Lesson of the month: Stress is awful. Getting de-stressed is top priority as is taking FULL advantage of the brilliance of your friends and business mentor to yell and scream and vent on for weeks on end until you see the light again.

As per ususal, I owe you guys a great big thanks.

Update (thanks to postsecret)

I’m normally a great proponent of tax. It’s an important part of a functioning society with a decent health system and support available for those who need it.

But when I get hit with a massive tax bill (which I was kind of waiting for) it does get me thinking.

After my accountant had me sit down so as he could deliver the tax blow, and after I stopped gasping for air, he explained that EVERY TIME you get paid $1, put HALF of it aside for tax.

That’s a lot of money.

I’m going to split my rant in 2. I think that personal tax is pretty much at a state where everyone hates it equally (which is probably the best you can hope for).

But profit tax is where I have my issue.

The profits that Decisive Flow makes are not taken out of the business. They are left in the business to enable us to have some cashflow, some ability to work on other projects (i.e powerkiwi). This money is not lining any of our pockets, it’s going towards getting some other cool things started and will eventually go towards trips to the US to build on the export revenue we are already bringing into the country. This money is being used not just to help me, but in it’s own little way, boosting our economy.

We are tiny. The profit we make is probably what a lot of government departments spend on stuff like corporate lunches. And it hurts when so much of it leaves our account.

I’m really appreciative to have been given a grant by NZTE but it did strike me as a little odd today that the money I got from them is far less than the tax I paid, money I WOULD have spend on the same stuff anyway.

I know I’m not the only one who suffers from my tax bill, and I would hate to be the guy who has to figure it all out. However, it does seem to me that especially now there would be some benefit in significantly reducing company tax or removing it altogether until it is removed from the company by means of dividends or anything that doesn’t go towards growing it.

And I am only talking about small businesses. We could limit it to the first $50-$100,000 in profits or something and everything above that is taxed as per normal.

Is that totally selfish?

Last week I dragged the team along to meet with Alan (business coach extrodinare) for a team strategy meeting. The others are used to my weird ideas and I believe they were a tad hesitant to believe that spending an afternoon away from Photoshop would be, in any way helpful.

I think Alan converted them.

Outside of all remarks as to how wonderful and nice he was in response to our (well probably ‘my’) stupid questions, the process of sitting down around a big table and figuring out what we are all about was hugely eye opening and really beneficial.

Out of the 2 hour meetup, we came away with some stuff that we have blatantly been just plain stupid about, some stuff that we realised about each other, and some easy, quick ways to restructure the whole business to sort them out:

1. Have daily team meetings. Yup we are a small business, we thought we were too small to need them. But there is a difference between yelling at each other across the room (or skyping each other) and moving away from our keyboards, facing each other and plotting our day’s plan for world domination. The latter is much more effective for resolving issues, staying on track and knowing where each other is at.
2. Setting daily goals. Why think big, when you can think small? I think we’ve probably knocked out 25% more work today than any other day in the past few months. Knowing what’s on your plate and setting aside time to fully explain it to each other prior to kickoff is saving us huge amounts of valuable time.
3. Time tracking. It’s not the time tracking that really matters (although it’s a helpful tool to aid in understanding pricing levels and profitability). It’s the way you automatically re-structure your day into more productive blocks when you manage you time. Gone is my 5 second attention plan. Now I focus on one thing for at least 15 minutes and set aside TIME TO DO SMALL TASKS in a block. Which means NO MORE DISTRACTIONS.
4. Work with people you like. I rave about my co-workers daily. I enjoy going to the office because I KNOW I get to catch up with some interesting people and work on cool projects with talented designers. I also like how we share the same philosophies on sleep, money and ethics. It means we are on the same page and we have a clear idea of who will and will not be working with us in the future. We may even get together a list of interview questions for the next hire!

Every time I go to meet with Alan, I convince myself I have 900 more important things on my plate at that exact second. Every time I leave, I’m convinced that there was nothing more important.