Acre (my business) turns three in September; we turned over a million dollars in the last twelve months, and growth is now slowing (maturing!).
All three of those things are true, and only one of them is the kind of fact people post about. The million is the headline, the birthday is the excuse, and the slowdown is the part I actually find interesting, because it is not unnatural and it is not a crisis. We are maturing.
Three years is also long enough to have formed some views, so here are a few, and a fair amount of honesty about how far I am from having any of it right.
What I got wrong for years
I spent a long time trying to get balance right, which is a polite way of saying I spent a long time feeling guilty. I actually still do feel guilty.
Guilty at my desk for not being somewhere else. Guilty somewhere else for not being at my desk. I assumed for years that this was a discipline problem. So had a go at the better systems, earlier starts, harder boundaries. I tried all of it and none of it touched the guilt, because the guilt was not coming from poor scheduling.
It was my star sign; I am a Virgo. An eldest daughter one at that. If you know, you know.
Ok, joking, it was coming from measuring myself against a promise that everything in a life can be given roughly equal weight at roughly the same time, or in short, the pursuit of balance. Michelle Obama explains this really well in a marriage setting.
Nothing I have built has ever worked that way. I don’t know a single person running a business who would tell you otherwise if you asked them honestly at nine o’clock on a Sunday night.
So I stopped chasing it. Not the work, the framing. And as I said, I still feel it.
None of this is mine
Almost nothing in what follows is original.
Seasons instead of balance, rhythm instead of routine, alignment as the thing that determines whether hard work costs you something. These have all been said better and earlier by people with more authority than me, and I have absorbed them from podcasts on long drives when cursing a lack of reception, books I have painted in highlighter, and conversations with people further down the road than I am.
Which raises the fair question of why write it down. Or add to the noise.
Well, I’ve had a crack at applying the theory. It is a very different exercise to run a real business that way, with actual clients and actual payroll and a quarter that did not go to plan, and then report on what held up and what did not. The honest version is unflattering, and the flattering version is fiction.
So pleaseeeee, this is a progress report, not a framework.
Seasonal priority
Some months the business gets everything, actually, most months. (read: every month). A launch, a capital raise going out, a client in genuine need, three new business conversations that all land in the same fortnight, another new starter. Other months the people in my life get it properly, not as a scheduling concession (don’t ask about last Friday).
The shift was not that it evens out over a year, because it often doesn’t. The shift was deciding in advance what the season is for, and saying it out loud to the people it affects. A hard season everyone has heard about (not necessarily agreed to, though) is a completely different experience to a hard season that has quietly crept up on everybody, including you.
Guilt thrives on ambiguity. It has much less to work with once the season has been named. So say it outloud.
Intentional rhythm
Rhythm, not routine. I gave up on routine because routine is fragile (and it makes me more fragile too). One client emergency, my sister needing me (we laugh, my dependent), one week that goes sideways, and the whole scaffold comes down, and then you get to feel like you have failed at the thing that was meant to be helping.
Rhythm is what genuinely recurs. The Monday reset. The quarterly retrospective where we put the numbers on the table and actually look at them. The walk. The handful of things that happen whether or not the week went to plan.
Rhythm survives a bad month. Routine does not survive a bad Wednesday.
Core alignment
This is the hardest one, and it is the one that does the work.
A hard season inside work you believe in is survivable, and often genuinely good. A hard season inside work you have quietly stopped believing in is corrosive, and no amount of rhythm or boundary setting will fix that. I have had both, and the difference is not subtle.
It is also why I have become careful with the language of values alignment. Values alignment matters enormously and it is not, by itself, enough. Plenty of people will tell you they share your standards. Fewer will hold them when the standard is inconvenient. That gap between what people say and what people do has been the most expensive thing I have learned in business, and it has nothing to do with values on a page.
The ideas were free at the dinner table
My dad is from Narromine, and mum is from Tamworth, both from farms.
Nobody in either family has ever used the phrase work life balance. You go hard at harvest. You go hard at lambing. There are weeks where nothing else exists and everyone knows it, including whoever was hoping you would make it to the thing on Saturday. Then it turns, and you get the other months back.
Nobody feels guilty (generalisation, I know), because nobody expected it to be even.
But the part I have come to think has set me up for success, and in a lot of ways matters more is not the seasonality. It is that the work is not responsive to how you feel about it. Stock gets fed whether or not you slept. Whether or not you are grieving. Whether or not it is your birthday, or the day the rain didn’t come, or the week the price fell through the floor. There is a job that has to be done, and the job does not care about your emotional state, and I have never met anyone raised around that who needed a productivity system explained to them.
Nobody applauds it either, right? There is no recognition architecture on a farm. No performance review, no promotion, no post about the milestone; hell, you’re lucky to get an hourly rate. Which is kind of relevant to know our worth. You show up at five because the work is there, and the people who ultimately benefit from it are hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, buying the milk or the lamb or the bread with no relationship to the person who produced it and no visibility of what it took. The work is almost entirely invisible to its own beneficiaries.
That disconnect is one of the reasons I do what I do. Closing even part of it, telling the story properly, is genuinely useful work.
Where the comfort came from
Around ninety five percent of our clients are family businesses, and in almost every case the person I deal with is the owner. Not a marketing manager with a budget and a reporting line. The person whose name is on the debt.
Running a business is lonely in a way that is difficult to explain to people who haven’t, and it is loneliest at the moments that look most like success from the outside. The week something lands is often the week there is nobody to say it to who fully understands what it cost. And often when you have the biggest successes, you feel the heaviest weight. That comes from the reflection.
The people who have understood have overwhelmingly been clients.
Not peers, not friends and not family. The owners on the other side of the table, in a tough industry, and often with as thin margins as agencies run. Some of the most honest conversations of the last three years have been with people who are technically paying me for something else. That is not in any consultancy textbook and it is not a relationship model I could have designed on purpose.
It has also clarified how I think about the work. Consulting is about relationships, mutual benefit and respect. It is not about serving, and it is certainly not about performing expertise at someone. The people I do my best work with are the ones who also chose to build something, with the same risk I have, and there is a specific solace in that which I did not know I was looking for.
What it does not fix
The tidy version of this essay ends there. The tidy version is not honest, and I am trying to be.
Naming the season did not remove the guilt. It reduced it considerably and it gave the guilt somewhere to sit rather than letting it follow me around the house. That is a real gain, and it is not resolution.
It has not removed the sacrifice, because that is not a framing problem. Things have genuinely been given up, milestones have been missed, or, to be real, I have shown up physically, but not actually been present. I have been taken advantage of by people I trusted. I have watched people romanticise the idea of building something at an ambitious level and then be entirely unwilling to do what it takes, and I have absorbed the cost of that more than once.
None of that is solved by a better relationship with your calendar. It is the trade, and I would rather say so than sell the reframe as a cure.
What still needs serious work
Too much of this business still runs through me.
Not just operations, finance, people, new business, but also face-to-face client servicing (nature of consultancy, I have sold my capabilities and thought processes well).
A significant share of my year goes on work no client will ever pay for, which means the highest value things I could be doing are the things that get pushed to 6am in the morning or 10pm at night. Some of the growth slowdown is a natural function of scale, and some of it is simply that new business sits with one person who is also doing ten other jobs. New business is also not really the focus, so kind of an irrelevant point, but you get the message.
I don’t know it all, but I know exactly what the fix is here. I have known for a while. Building it is a different project to naming it.
I have also modelled behaviour I am now trying to correct. We have a culture of saying yes past the point of good commercial judgement, and I built that culture personally by being the first one to do it. You cannot ask a team to hold a line you have spent three years stepping over in front of them.
And my standards are simultaneously the reason the work is good and the reason I am the bottleneck. Those are the same trait viewed from two angles, and I have not worked out how to keep the first without continuing to pay for the second.
Perfect was never available. It is also not the goal. I am reporting from inside this, not from the other side of it.
What I am not giving up
There is a version of the restructure conversation that ends with a business running beautifully and producing work I am not proud of. I am not interested in that, and think we are already achieving both.
So a few things are not on the table. The standard of the work. The people who show up to the first conversation being the people who do the work, with no layers and nobody learning about a client’s business at the same time the client is explaining it. Direct relationships with owners, because those relationships are the job.
And the long days, when the season calls for them. A twelve-hour day is often what the work requires, and I am not going to apologise for the ones (more like twos, threes, fours and fives) I have done or the ones still coming. You cannot build something like this without an element of hustle, and anyone telling you otherwise is either not building the same thing or is quietly doing the hours and choosing not to mention it because it is currently unfashionable to admit.
The important part of that sentence is the second half. No one else has to accept it except me. People will have an opinion regardless of what I do, and the moment I let opinion make my decisions is the moment the business belongs to somebody else. I am also the harshest critic in the building. Nobody is harder on me than me, which leaves the external commentary very little to add.
What it is pointed at
I am not motivated by money, and I know how that reads, so let me be precise. I am extremely motivated by a business that is commercially sound and I have no patience for the idea that caring about profit is unseemly. Money has just never been the thing that gets me up at five.
Two things do.
Being underestimated, which has happened often enough to have become a reliable fuel source. Yes, I am competitive. Recognition has never been the aim, though I will admit it is always appreciated when it comes.
And watching other people succeed, which is the bigger one by a distance. Clients whose businesses are worth more than when we met them. Team members loving their job. Producers and regional operators who have spent entire careers being treated as a secondary market getting the same craft and the same rigour any city business takes for granted.
If I could make it three things on second thought. No one is coming to save me. I don’t have a fall-back, financial or otherwise and have a pretty strong penchant for independence.
That is what Acre is for, and three years in it is the only part I have never had to reconsider.
Balance was never the goal. Alignment was, and I am still some distance from having it right, which I now suspect is the permanent condition rather than a phase I am passing through.
If your version of this looks similar, you are not doing it wrong.
Ok, you reached the end of the essay.
First one of these, so a quick word on why.
I did not set out to start a Substack. I set out to write one thing down properly, got a few hundred words in, and realised LinkedIn was going to stop me somewhere around the third paragraph. So here we are.
