Diary of a start-up - Keeping the home-fires burning

By Alison Grieve on Jun 7, 10 09:30 AM in Diary of a Start Up

I have so far only spoken of the business side of our project to date. As with many start-ups on the brink of trading, much of the deals we are currently working on are complex and commercially sensitive, thus preventing me from revealing a great amount of what we are doing. As a consequence, I thought I might take a moment this week to talk of the impact that starting up a company has had on my personal life.

I am in the lucky position to have extremely supportive friends and family but I would be lying if I said it was anything less than a logistical nightmare to coordinate the care of my children whilst whizzing up and down the UK for the various meetings that have been necessary over the past few weeks.

Any trips, particularly those involving a couple of nights away, require forward-planning of military proportions. Letters are scribed to my boys' teacher to explain that Student A will be picking them up but Family Member B will be dropping them off and that either Student D or Understanding Neighbour C will be doing the run the following day. The rota of required homework completion requires a bulging administration folder of its own.

The other week necessitated a trip down to Manchester on a Tuesday (train to Glasgow, drive with Alan Suttie lasting four hours, a one hour meeting, another four hour road-trip to Glasgow, train back to Edinburgh). My sister, Cathy, had picked the boys up from school to have them stay with her for the night. A call from her at 10pm informed me that one of the boys (Lewis - youngest of the two by one hour) had spent the entire evening vomiting.

The next day I was due to fly down to London for a packed day of meetings on the Thursday. I picked up a wilted Lewis from my sister and spent the day running back and forth from my computer to prepare for my meetings, to Lewis in an attempt to nurse him back to some semblance of a normal five year old boy. The poor thing looked like someone had forcibly splattered him against the floor (Lewis, not my computer, as tempting as that might sometimes be).

I rushed to the school's 'Kidz Club' at 5pm to deposit him back with his twin Joshua and my ever-enduring sister, and swallowed down the guilt of leaving him looking ashen-faced with sunken eyes and a shrunken body.

The day in London went well and I managed to squeeze in a couple of check-up phone calls (trying hard keep the cooing noises down to a minimum while men in Savile Row suits bent their ears in my direction) before returning home at almost midnight.

I quickly typed up a feedback report the following day. In the absence of a CRM system, I currently flick between an Excel spreadsheet of contacts and lengthier Word documents.

I'm a big believer in knowledge retention after having spent over a decade working in sales roles. Administration and note-taking can be time consuming, and is an area often neglected by sales teams, but this discipline has always proved invaluable to me when returning to prospects to further a deal. The resulting database also makes handovers significantly easier and can add a huge amount of value to a company.

Anyway, zipping through the report allowed me enough time to pick the boys up early - one of the advantages of having my own business.

I'm a hard worker - I always have been - but sitting in an office, staring at a screen, demotivated (thinking that my time would be better spent at home with my loved ones during their waking hours, making up the time during their sleeping hours) has always struck me as being a little bit bonkers. Shouldn't it just be about getting the job done whichever way suits you best?

Some would say that this sentiment makes me a little bit bonkers. Others would say it makes me an entrepreneur.

Lewis, although much improved, looked tired and accusatory on my arrival. I thought an explanation as to why I had been relinquishing my parental duties might be in order.

"Do you know why I had to go away this week?" I asked.

"No."

"I had to go to meetings to sell my invention." (The boys call it my 'avention'.) "And do you know what?"

"What?"

"I think that maybe - just possibly - someday, because of my invention, we might be..." I leaned forward to whisper in his ear, "...rich."

"Nooooooo!" he screamed, tears bursting from his eyes.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" I asked, surprised (and somewhat humbled) by his apparent early-stage anti-capitalist sentiment.

"Just you, Mummy, or me and Joshua too?"

"All of us, sweetheart, you and me and Joshua."

A wave of fresh tears gushed down his cheeks, his chest heaving with sobs.

"But, darling, what's wrong?" I asked again, half expecting him to whip out a red flag and beat me down to the ground with it.

He gasped and stuttered to push the words past his wailing: "I... I... I don't want to be French."

I could write a million forecasts and shake on a million deals, but whatever Safetray's financial future might be, it will never be enough to buy moments like these.