I'm Sleeping with My Boss: What My Engagement Taught Me About Business
I'm Sleeping with My Boss: What My Engagement Taught Me About Business
Let's start with something unexpected: I'm sleeping with my boss, and this week, we got engaged.
This is not the scandalous affair you might be thinking of. My partner is not actually my boss, but like a boss, she challenges me, supports me, and makes me better every day. Our engagement has been a masterclass in lessons that extend beyond love and into business.
Lesson 1: Patience
Good things take time. When I met my fiancée, I was immediately attracted to her and knew I wanted to be with her. However, she quickly cemented me into the friend zone, a man's worst nightmare.
For the next year, I spent much time working on our friendship: texting her regularly and keeping up with her during our weekly FaceTime calls.
I made a significant effort to become an important part of her daily routine. The progress was invisible, and there were days when I thought we would always be just friends. Eventually, she felt the same way about me, too, once I showed her my subpar dance moves. Joking aside, the two main factors contributing to this were time and effort.
Similarly, I've had to wait for results in my business journey. I look back at the first house flip that I did. I initially bought the house with all my savings from a year of baseball lessons and my salary coaching minor league baseball. I bought the house with a plan to rent it to the other coaches on my team.
We were supposed to stay there for six months, which would have allowed me to cover my mortgage and have some nice cash flow. However, COVID had other plans.
That year, the minor league season was canceled before it even started. My tenant coaches returned home, leaving me with a vacant home and a hefty mortgage.
With an empty home and wallet, I decided I wanted to sell the house, but it needed some serious renovations, including adding an additional bathroom.
As the months went by, we worked on the home. The renovation looked more and more like a black hole that sucked up time and money.
Daily efforts involved phone calls with contractors and material suppliers to coordinate activities and solve problems.
We failed multiple inspections on the bathroom addition, and the whole process took every bit of six months to complete.
Finally, we listed the home for sale.
Over the next week, my phone would not stop ringing with realtors wanting to see the house. Then, I found myself with six offers for the home; mind you, the market in Florida was starting to boom at that point.
Four of the offers were over the asking price. Thirty days later, we sold the home. At that point, it was my biggest payday ever, twice my yearly salary.
Things turn out well if you put in the work, but we cannot outrun the clock. Patience!
Lesson 2: Balance
One of the things I admire about my fiancée is her carefree attitude. I am, by nature, hard-wired to be in go mode. I become fixated on what's in front of me and cannot stop until it's done. Once the job is finished, I start to think about the next job, and so on.
She, on the other hand, is very free-spirited. She loves having her free time and enjoys every minute but gets after it when it's go-time.
She is an architectural designer by trade, and one of my most fond memories of this was showcased by our late-night sleepovers while she was in grad school. In one instance, she stayed up until the next day, working on a school project. After she finished, she took the next day off, worry-free about her next assignment.
Similarly, we now spend most Saturdays together in our home office grinding away—me with these blogs and her on a fabulous church renovation she's working on.
Sundays are a different story. Not a thought about her project; all her attention goes to our dog, herself, and me.
On the other hand, I wake up thinking about my business and what work needs to be done. I finish editing my blog and look for new ways to improve my business.
Often, my thoughts stress me out. It's too much work, and my brain space isn't clear. My fiancee has a way of pulling me out of this brain space into hers, where nothing else matters but us, even if it's only for a few hours.
In the past, I would keep going day after day, which led to many days where my judgment was cloudy, and I was not excited about what I was doing.
The balance she has helped me attain is refreshing and makes me even more hungry once I return to work. I come back with great ideas and am excited to return to my element.
Lesson 3: Time
I always thought this meme was funny.
Funny, but very accurate.
Our time is never completely balanced. In the last section, I spoke about balancing our lives by allotting some of our focus to actions that help us regain balance. Still, complete balance is impossible. Your time will always go to specific activities disproportionately.
Every day, we make decisions that determine where our time will go.
Those decisions are shaped by:
Our current life circumstances
The future life circumstances that we want
My fiancee and I are young and want to be financially stable once we get married and have kids, so this year, we've sacrificed a lot of leisure and personal time for work and development time.
Our lives are constantly changing, which, in turn, changes our time decisions.
I think back to when we got our dog, Hamilton. Before Hamilton, we could go out on Friday for drinks or spontaneously go to the beach after work.
After Hamilton, we had to nail down our schedule around his exercise, eating times, and potty breaks.
That doesn't mean we never get "play time" (coined by my fiancee) anymore; it just requires an adjustment.
We make sure we go on weekly dates and plan some getaways to have extended alone time while the dog stays with the sitter.
I assume the same happens when couples have kids, but we have yet to get there. In either case, it requires intentional choices about where our time goes.
In my business life, I constantly make decisions about my time allocation. Over the last few months, I spent all my time with our project managers and superintendents who build our homes. Together, we created a system to improve the quality control aspect of our construction, resulting in a better end product. I paid no mind to any of our other departments during this time.
Similarly, while developing our software, Acristo Engine, my main focus was launching the software to the public, ensuring the features worked, and being more focused on the technical side.
After a significant time commitment to developing the product, I must now allocate my time for both businesses to sales and marketing. Armed with a better product, I want to distribute it to more people and grow the business.
Time is like grains of sand, and your life is a set of buckets. There is finite sand, so you must choose which buckets to fill and to what amount. My relationship has taught me how to juggle these buckets and ensure that every area gets adequate sand under the right conditions.
The Bigger Picture
Relationships and business are challenging.
I am very grateful to be involved in great ones.
There is something very human and very fulfilling about committing yourself to a purpose that involves working with others to achieve excellent outcomes.
In my business, we solve clients' needs and move the industry forward.
In my relationship, we grow, enjoy life together, and build a family that will become outstanding additions to our beautiful planet.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
Adan