19 Apr Lone-Wolfing : Bravely Roaming the Hills in Search of Your Dream Team

It’s better to have a sidekick than to have to do everything by yourself isn’t it? If it wasn’t better we wouldn’t bother having friends or getting involved in relationships. Of course, sometimes it’s harder to work with others. You have to check-in and sometimes you get misunderstood.  And then you get to misunderstand. Seems like kind of a hassle.  There’s usually a ton of evidence to suggest that we never work with anyone.  Nevertheless we want to make a connection.  Those that pity people like us are called loners, but you’re not a loner.  You don’t want to do this thing by yourself. The best case scenario is to have a sidekick in your biz, but prepare yourself. Sometimes you’ll find yourself lone-wolfing for a while until you can convince people to join you.

Just because you’re starting your business by yourself doesn’t mean that you’re a loner. It means you’re bold enough to roam the hills by yourself until you find your sidekick, someone that you enjoy spending time with and knows how to do the things you don’t. Or maybe you just want someone around to laugh at your bad jokes. Until then, you can climb the mountain of success all by yourself because you are brave and wild enough to make your idea work.  You are a lone wolf – Ahhuuooooo!!

I remember the day I met my wife like it was yesterday. She thought I was a little pretentious and I thought she was Canadian. The thing is sometimes when I’m trying to be impressive I come across as out of touch. She’s from a Northern part of the Midwest, so sometimes when she talks she sounds Canadian. We still laugh about that till this day. We were in sync on everything in the beginning. As time went on we started to land on different sides of the conversation. It was like we were on Law & Order. I was the DA and she was the Defense. We both tried to represent our Clients interests to the best of our ability –our own interests.

One day I came to her with an idea. Let’s sell the gift boxes that we had been giving away for free to our friends for the holidays. It could our own little side-hustle. To go from gifts to sales, I needed her help making more candles. The comment she came back with was: Good luck with that. For a couple of weeks I let her lack of interest get me down. Then I picked myself up and started shopping for more professional cookware. On-line shopping tends to cheer me up. Once everything arrived I set out to make more candles. It wasn’t long before she was buzzing around my ear trying to improve my process. I resisted and she persisted. Then life got in my way and she needed to take-over. Did she consult my recipe? No. Did I insist that she was doing it wrong? Yes. Was it really wrong? Well, I think you know the answer to that one. Once you have a picture in your mind about the way something works all other possibilities are wrong. It’s one of the joys of working on a team.

The way she was doing it was fine and it took me a minute to see that because for so long it was MY baby. I was certain that I was the only one who could raise it especially since I was the only one who wanted that baby. My wife cut the prep time in half and I was grateful for that. She persisted in other ways as well. A side-hustle by definition means it comes second to everything else going on in the world. In her career she has time to focus on things she enjoys outside of work. Her work is very process-oriented and she never has to take her work home. Whenever my work goes beyond office hours I put the side-hustle to the side. This is pretty much all the time.

Running a business on the side comes with the same challenges as being dedicated to it. Sooner or later you are going to run into a hurdle. Sometimes you’ll look all over and you won’t find a decent solution. For us it was:

• margins
• then container sizes
• then the cost of shipping glassware
• and then packaging

With each roadblock, we took turns wanting to throw in the towel. That’s the other benefit of being on a team. Usually, you don’t both want to give up at the same time. When one of you gets near the cliff the other one summons the wolf to pump you up again.

Lone-wolfing has its advantages. For one thing, you don’t have to ask for permission. You call the shots and everything comes out as you think it should. Of course it’s harder to go-it-alone. When you run into roadblocks, no one else is around to help you out. And when you get discouraged, no one is there to cheer you up. Most importantly, you can only see one way to do it when there may be a better way. My least favorite part about lone-wolfing is no one is around when you nail the punch line. Now what’s the fun in that?