Before I get into it. A quick “thank you!”
I’ve had a lot of positive feedback and comments on these newsletters and I don’t take that for granted. It means a lot, more than you probably realise, so thank you for taking the time to read and to say so.
Ok, so this week’s newsletter is short and sweet (Jonny will be happy about that!).
It’s August, the inbox has gone a little quiet, and half of LinkedIn is either on a beach or pretending to be. I used to treat this quiet spell like a warning sign. Growth stalls the second you stop pushing, so any week where the phone isn’t buzzing felt like a week wasted.
I don’t believe that anymore, and it took 3 companies and 3 exits to unlearn it.
The pattern I see in founders I work with, and the one I used to recognise in myself, is mistaking continued motion (or busyness) for progress. We try to keep the machine running because stopping feels like admitting the machine can’t run without us. Which, if we’re honest, is usually true, and that’s exactly the problem I help founders solve.
I’ve stopped believing that switching off means giving up on ‘the thing’, because most of the clearest thinking I’ve ever done about a business happened when I was nowhere near my desk, not grinding through another week just to prove to myself I could.
The decisions that actually move things forward, i.e., that hiring or firing decision you’ve been putting off, walking away from a client that was costing more than it paid, backing myself to price differently, all came from a moment when I’d stopped long enough to actually think. Never from the frantic sprint.
This time of year is an absolute gift, if you let it”.
A quiet inbox isn’t necessarily lost time, for many it’s the only time we get to properly recharge and ask whether we’re building the right thing, not just building the wrong thing faster.
I’m not switching off completely this month, there’s client work that needs me in intervals, but I’m protecting the gaps in between properly rather than filling them with more noise because I don’t know how to sit still.
If you’ve got a gap coming up, however small, take it seriously. That’s where the good thinking happens.
Onwards! Simon