One of the things we promised when we started our company was that we would remain transparent in our operations and candid in our communications.  Part of that is talking about our own experiences as we go through the process of starting up and growing our new business.  Here’s one of those moments…

One of the biggest growing pains for me, along with the constant “pinch-me-am-I-dreaming” feeling associated with working for ourselves, is the reality of running our own company.  That’s right, it’s the operations where I have my daily ah-has.

Should this be unexpected?  Absolutely not!  Part of starting something like this is to get the business experience. But no matter how well prepared we think we are, we run into those little extra things that need to be done.  Or even better yet we worry more intensely about things that we only partially dealt with working for someone else – legal issues, site maintenance and up-time, internet access, phones, accounting, insurance…and the list goes on.

At the same time, I am growing and learning every day.  My biggest moment recently is learning that I have a high tolerance for making mistakes.  I consider myself a fairly typical A-type personality – driven, perfectionist, competitive, and, at times, impatient.  These characteristics are a double-edge sword and overdoing any of them leads to complete paralysis.  It’s the perfectionist part where I usually need to be extra careful, so it should be no surprise that making mistakes is not something that I would typically accept in myself.  Surprisingly, this is the one place where I find that I am actually able to roll with the punches.  I’ll admit it, we’ve made a couple of missteps here and there as we’ve walked down this path, but instead of having a meltdown I’ve been able to put these into perspective, learn, and move on.  That’s huge.

This is all invaluable stuff in my opinion.  I wouldn’t be learning as much as I am about the business of doing business or myself if I were working for someone else.  But the best thing about this whole experience is that my worst day at JobSyntax is better then my best day anywhere else.  What can beat that?