South West eCommerce

It’s occasionally important to step back and take a look at what we’re doing.  In some ways we’ve been blessed with the situation where we don’t even have a vague feeling that we’ve got this all under control, so we have to take a look fairly frequently.

A little while back we had the opportunity come our way to attend the affili@sydney conference, and being from the west coast of Australia, it’s a major investment of cash and time.  If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that we aren’t overly resourced with either.

So the question was fairly simple.  Can’t afford the flights, registration, hotels and meals.  Can’t afford the days away from the office.  Do we think we should go?  The answer was a resounding HELL YEAH!  This business is about doing the things we should do, and it aims to free us from the constant slavery we have experienced in both time and money.  Accepting that there are limitations, but that being better at what we do is going to free us from those limits, we made the hard choice that only one of us would go.  Graeme is deeper into the business at present so it was obvious that he would learn faster and more.

Dave is pretty good at shaking hands, talking to people, seeing opportunity, finding the win/ win, so it would have been cool to have him along as well, but there’s still the resources thing.  Mark at this point didn’t even exist, so that wasn’t an issue.

First thing that was decided was that Graeme would not only go, but would make it as useful for himself as a real person as he could.  We are clearly part of this business, but we are both people and there’s more to life than the internet and the company.  So an extra day, an extra ticket, and a bonus at family level were factored in.

But back to South West eCommerce... how did it all pan out?  I’m sitting a metre away from Graeme most days, and I can say that a moment to develop him is something we deserve to do more often.  He returned with more bounce, more ideas, more energy, and a commitment to doing something that is now more real than it has been before.

That extra verve is sure to make us more money, and accelerate the process of getting to profitability, but there’s more to it than that.

The bottom line for today is that we gained significantly by stopping for a short while and doing something to develop ourselves.  Business is certainly business and we haven’t lost sight of the cash imperative, but the real reason we’re here is to live great lives.  Scripture says if you’re a slave and you can, you should buy your own freedom.  We’ll get clear if we determine to be the best people we can be. 

We don’t want to be free to have a lot of cash, we want to be free to bring our kids up right.  To love the people we meet in the street.  To see people in another street and love THEM.  To choose to only do things and buy things if there is some benefit to the world in doing it.  Focusing on ourselves just for a few days helped.  We’re back at work now, but the pattern is set.  The time we take away from the business will make us better people and the upshot of that is success in all sorts of ways.