When you are young and in business, it is VERY easy to fall into the trap of people finding it so impressive that you are even scraping together a living for yourself they engulf you in praise and congratulations.

This isn’t actually that helpful and while I accept that owning a business in your 20’s SOUNDS super fantastic, the reality is that normally it’s just another job… But a job where unless you seek help, you don’t get it. There is no senior management staff out there to guide you through, so you really rely on outside people to offer criticism and identify weaknesses and teach you how to improve.

Yesterday , Emma and I met with our favorite branding person Simone Lennane from Maxim. The intent was to go through the beginning of a fairly grueling process of discovering WHO WE ARE.

And man oh man is it difficult!

Even with plenty of warning and stories about how she will go straight to the jugular (and to be fair I think she was pretty soft on us…), It was pretty hard to sit down and HONESTLY point out flaws and weaknesses and even the good bits.

It is something we have needed to do for a while, we have managed to get by with a lot of hard work, but it really is time to do as she says and stop thinking comfortable and start thinking world domination - even if only to make the business so well managed that we can work less.

But it struck me yesterday after the meeting, that I have come to expect surface slaps on the back and even though I know everything we pointed out yesterday has been sitting there in the back of my mind, I’ve never actually had to acknowledge it. That’s a pretty weak and dangerous position.

So. Simone (if you are reading this), I am sorry in advance for the tantrums I will probably pull at some point when the process gets hard, but Emma and I are VERY excited and pumped about the next month, we love your work and we are stoked to have met someone who really seems to care enough about our future that you are willing to tell us the stuff that’s hard to hear :)

Can’t wait to see where we get!