So Busy I Get Nothing Done, So Ambitious I've forgotten how to have fun - Doc the Journey Ep 87

Yo, it's been a very long while back in my very bipolar YouTube stage. I think the nine videos in like December, December, start January, and then I've had like four weeks off yet again. I'm now living in an Airbnb in London for a while, which is not where I want to be, to be honest. But it is where I am right now for a few reasons. Missing my old place, to be honest. Feel like my life setup used to be far more optimum than it's been the past five months because I made some bad decisions about leaving and then not knowing where I wanted to live. And then I'm back in London because kind of have to be here for a while. But now I'm living in an Airbnb which is costing me like three times as much for a worse place. But it's temporary, so it is what it is. Definitely felt a bit down in the trenches the past few months. The past few weeks since the start of the year. It's weird. Like I tweeted, I think literally five minutes ago about, I feel busier than ever, but I feel like I'm producing less myself than I probably ever have. I feel a bit of a creative block with trying to make the brand better. Got loads of product ideas I feel like I constantly talk about and constantly work on, but haven't launched anything new in far too fucking long. But I didn't make a 2024 review video. I might do that next week or this week or this weekend. Bit late now, but I think it's worth reflecting on for the sake of the series. The plan this year is basically high level to just massively change our product roadmap and expand and yeah, I don't want to share too much, but we're not going to be a mushroom brand anymore. It's not that we're going to be not a mushroom brand. We're not going to be just a mushroom brand. I think that's the wrong positioning. I don't want to give away all my secrets and plans because it's not negative, but my feel is that my vision for the brand now is very different to what it first was. When I start doing that stuff, maybe I'll talk about it a bit more. I also think we need not redo the brand, we need to refresh the brand and take it to the next level in many ways. I look at it now, I don't know if it's standard founder mode, but I look at it now and think, I fucking hate this brand. Like, I don't think it looks nice. I don't get what it is. And I think we've done very well to force our way to the scale we've been at, especially with largely one SKU, largely one product, multiple flavors and one country and one channel, primarily being UK D2C. But to go to like the 30 million and the 50 million revenue mark, which is where I want to be in the next few years, I don't think we can do that. We need new products, we need new channels, we need new countries and everything gets more and more complicated. And as a result I feel like I'm just. We've hired a lot of people, which is good. The team's in a much stronger place. But often people ask me, how do you spend your time? And it's often a good question. I've got to the point now where I've got currently right now 1063 unread emails and I basically don't reply to emails anymore. Me replying to emails is knowing that I need to reply to something and searching for it in the inbox and then replying. It's not like going through every single email. I don't know, I just feel incredibly overrun with shit to do. Even though hired more people, which seems to create almost more work in some ways, like less work in the sense that they do the things, but more work in the sense that I'm involved in everything still and I still want to be involved in everything. So yeah, I don't know what the theme for this video is. I guess it's just a little check in of things that things are going on. So hired a lot more people, including an MD into the business seems in a much stronger place. I feel like we can deliver, you know, 2 or 3x the revenue we're currently doing with the same team, which is there's two sides to that. But overall I think it's a good thing given the progression roadmap we're on. Secondly, massive change. Well, massive expansion to like the product plan. I've got a lot clearer on that. Thirdly, I really want to premiumize and update the brand. I did it all myself. I never really saw the value in a branding agency and so on, whereas now I definitely do. So speaking to a few of those right now I want to get more involved. I basically want to do product and brand only, but there's a lot of admin that comes with that as well. It's not just our ideas and stuff. I actually need to make it happen and then, you know, change the packaging, potentially implement it into all our website retail stuff. And then, yeah, the third point I think was, yeah, just question where my time goes and maybe I need to do a time audit. Obviously a lot of the stuff I'm doing is like speaking to the team and like guiding things, so that is valuable. But I feel like, I often feel like as a result, as I've become a bit of a manager rather than a doer, I often feel like I'm not that valuable to the business and I definitely am, but I feel like internally I'm not the one producing the product. I don't feel like we're creating much new stuff, which isn't true because objectively the business is doing way, way more in every way than it was two and a half years ago when I started. But, you know, at the start I created Rainbow Dust and that was the output of like a few months is that we actually launched a product. Whereas now I feel like there's a lot of planning, there's a lot of more admin, there's a lot of more reports and stuff because of team and investors and so on, which is all valuable. But I sometimes feel like I'm getting away from the core of what made me good at this stuff in the first place, which was 0 to 1, creating stuff, owning the process and doing it myself. And it's not that I want to do everything myself, but I trying to strike the right balance between hiring and delegating to grow and build the foundation for a bigger business, which you need to do, but also staying founder mode and involved enough so that I'm not just managing people that are doing things that I used to do, which is not where I want to be. So, yeah, crazily enough, it's already the 13th of February, which is like six weeks into 2025. Yeah, I felt a bit uninspired, to be honest. The past few months. Don't know if it's like internal issues, probably largely, or it's my environment, definitely also that, or it's just like the end of the honeymoon phase, you know, the first like year or two of building a new business is very exciting and it's all, all growth, growth, growth. And then you realize that growth, well, at least for me, feels like it gets harder because it gets more complex and then it feels like you're in that difficult middle. I'm like, ah, I really want to get a business to 50 million and sell it for 200 million quid. And that, that is my goal. But I feel like we've got so much to do to get there and it's not even. It's probably not even that far away for to stay focused. But sometimes it feels, oh, fuck me, like I've. You create a business initially for like creative. At least I did like creative time, location, freedom. And now I feel like I've become. Not necessarily in a bad way, I'm just observed, just an observation. I feel like I've become a bit of a prisoner to my own business in the sense that I'm not living where I'd like to live really and in a place that gets the best out of me, to be honest. But isn't just. That's not just because of the business. That's like relationship stuff as well. Now I work seven days a week, pretty much definitely feel burnt out a lot of times even though I've got a team and I kind of feel like I work more than I used to, even though I've got a team. And then obviously feel a lot of pressure because as you do as a founder anyway, but especially with venture investors and that's not a bad thing. I think I prefer to have pressure because it's pressure in line with a shared goal. But yeah, it's definitely felt like a bit of a grind recently and I kind of definitely felt I've lost the excitement and I'm trying to get back into doing the stuff I enjoyed originally and was actually good at originally as a result of enjoying it and vice versa, which was product and brand and being less involved in like the operational side because we've got a competent team that do all that. But I still feel like I'm probably scared to fully let go. You know, I'd love to spend a month just working on product ideas, like literally a month. But the problem with that is then someone chases me for an email or an invoice approval and then I've got to look at a financial model, then I got to look at the P and L, then I've got to do a report for our investors, then I've got to check in with a new hire we've got because I feel like I'm not being hands on enough with them. And then before you know it, you've not done any of the stuff that you want to do and are good at and enjoy, which is probably just the reality of being a founder, especially a solo founder at this stage. Then the goal post always moved because now, two years ago, if you said we'd be at this scale, oh, amazing. Whereas now I genuinely feel like we're doing fucking nothing. And I'm starting to look at and brands I used to look at as competitors, many of which we've surpassed or don't consider as a threat anymore. I now look at sort of American brands, much bigger businesses, and then think, oh, fuck me, we're so small because we are small, but I guess we're quite big for a UK brand, which is why I think getting away from the UK mindset is actually really positive for growth, I think, like how the Americans think. Americans talk about 300 million like we talk about 50 million do. I mean. So I don't know. Yeah, I'm kind of kicking myself because I said I'd post a video every week this year and I'm already off that pace. But maybe I need to accept that I'm just a bit. I'm a bit reactive with it. If I want to film stuff, I will and if I want to talk about something, I will, and if I don't, I probably won't. It's just kind of my style and I think it's important to document it because I look back on this and hopefully three, four, five years time when the business is sold to nestle for 250 million quid, and I'll laugh and I'll take joy in looking back at the harder times and the more empty times and the more dull times. So, yeah, that's all I've got for now. Just checking in, hope everyone's well. Subscribe to the pod. You always know there's more videos coming. Even if I go for like a month, I'll always come back to do something. So on that note, I gotta get on with a lot of work. Very long list and I'll catch you in a bit. Peace, Sam.