Back when the Beast had only just hatched, in the days when the Wocky was young and first peered out into the big wide world, we wondered idly if we would have enough time to get everything done. I used to work a 9-5 rat-race type job at a big company. Each day I would go to work, do a mixed bag of nothing for 8 hours and then come home, exhausted, and crash on the sofa. Weekends were gone in minutes, and my existence seemed to be rushing past me so fast that I couldn’t possibly have time for an extra hobby.
The dawn of the Jabberwocky was mostly a realisation that having a business must be what it’s like to have a dog, or children, or perhaps an expensive combination of both that unlike the other two, we are legally allow to take to bits if we feel like it. We’re responsible for this limited company, a totally helpless creature that needs all our attention if we ever want to get anything back from it.
Rather like having a kid, it’s a labour of love. No matter how many bits of him unexpectedly come off or how many events we go to that don’t make us any money we’re still happy to put in the time, and it still doesn’t feel like work. The old adage that a change is as good as a rest actually seems to be true. This year I’ve not had a holiday since the honeymoon in may, and I’m still not taking everyone down in a fiery storm of stress-induced death. There is a pay-off to this magical ability not to kill people, though. I don’t really ever see them.
The Jabberwocky consumes time. He has munched his way through 2012 at such speed that I’m still absent-mindedly writing the date as June. Wednesdays come round so fast that I begin to think that all I actually do is write blog posts and the weeks zip past, then jumble themselves up in an odd order so that I can’t ever work out where I was the weekend before without a calendar. We have no time to see friends, we miss weddings and holidays and forget bits of our own lives that we probably should have taken care of months ago. We dived straight from our honeymoon in Cuba into the summer and are finally coming up for air for the first time.
This weekend will be the first weekend off since September, and we will be sorting ourselves out. There will be tea, there will be Christmas shopping, and there will finally be the other half of the thank you cards from the wedding. We had the cards made right after we got back in May, then there was a bit of a delay getting them written out, and then the summer happened and now it appears to be November. We debated not sending them at all, but there are all ready to go, we just need to attach addresses and accept that we are pretty rubbish at these things.
To answer the question I was thinking of when I started this post, in case anyone came here seeking wisdom (you never know): How much time do you need to run a business? I think the best estimate I can give you is: All of it.
Thankfully we’re only doing our business part-time with our two kids. However, in a couple years they will be free labour.