A week I won't get back
I live in London and mostly work in Europe. I have a few North American clients and would like more and I have one in Asia. The rest of the Asia-Pac business is handled by an erstwhile business partner who lives in New Zealand. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at long-distance collaboration.
This week I've been dealing with two quite different men who want to do me the favour of taking my work to new clients. One is setting up a consultancy in the Middle East and reckons that he can generate a demand for our IP in the region and the other needs my skills to round out a product offering that he's making (speculatively) to a Canadian company. Both men are entrepreneurs who have identified potentially lucrative opportunities that would never come across my radar. But each has inserted himself between me and a client and I'm unsure how I feel about that because like most Headcount: 1 types I'm a control freak. If anyone's going to be in front of a client or an audience it will be me.
This control freakery has been going on so long that I've learnt to treat it as a strength rather than the flaw it is. Being unable to delegate means that my business will never, ever be scaleable, ergo it will never be saleable. And as I've said before on these pages, when I get down about this I feel trapped. If I can't relinquish control of the marketing interactions with clients in far-flung places that I'd never meet otherwise then when can I?
Isn't this just 20th Century Thinking? Wasn't one of the key learnings from the life of Saint Steve Jobs that an overweening sense of control is a positive thing? Merlin Mann recently described success, apropos of Apple, as: -
You get to decide who pays youI suspect that my erstwhile partner doesn't care who pays us for our residual IP. He sees this incremental (and essentially unearned) income purely as a bonus, as an undiluted good, and especially in markets like Egypt and Saudi and the Gulf. I'm not sure I agree. I want my collaborations to enhance not diminish what I do. I want to finish a project with a stronger brand, a more interesting product and a new set of experiences.
And before we've even gotten to a proper pitch meeting each relationship has gotten bogged down in a separate legal morass. I've spent the last week proofing licensing agreements and drafting cautionary emails. The last seven days' efforts have been about protecting what's mine now instead of creating a better, cooler something for tomorrow.
My business is such that I can't license my way to wealth and I certainly can't sue my way there. A week spent neither developing new ideas or delivering existing ones is a week wasted