Journal

Alignment and making things easy

Five years ago I realised with a shuddering lurch in my gut that I was running Snapdragon in a way that did not align at all with my values. I wanted to live life in a simple, easefilled way, in a way that was light on the planet, in a way where everyone was welcome. I wanted time and freedom to create and travel, I wanted time to contribute to the community, I wanted to be able to talk honestly about the things I care about.

Yet somehow, over fifteen years or so I had let that slide - I made assumptions about the way to run a 'proper business', there were lots of things I did to fit in or pay staff, many topics that I did not talk about because I worried that they would upset gatekeepers.

I had expanded the business, taking on more staff, making more and more of the best selling products, taking part in promotions based on scarcity. I didn't do anything illegal or dishonest or even particularly bad - but I certainly didn't always act in full alignment with my own values. And that caught up with me in my gut.

I've talked a lot about this on various business podcasts because I suspect it is something that effects a lot of business owners, as the general business advice is all about growth. But now I believe that even people who don't have a business are also effected by this, they make tiny compromises bit by bit - often for really good reasons - and then they wake up one morning and realise that they have drifted away from their core values. Life isn't quite as it should be. It is overwhelming and somehow 'off'.

Gaps and Fire Breaks - simple tips for when life is too busy

It is now a long time since I was diagnosed with chronic auto immune diseases. A long time since I began to really study what things sap my energy and leave me slumped and sad, what things build me up joyfully.

It is a long time since my annihilated adrenal glands gave me the super-power of being able to detect these things incredibly accurately.

Over the past decade I've realised that it isn't just people with chronic illnesses that are effected by energy depletion, but everyone.

What I am going to share in this letter is the tiny thing that I found the most debilitating and the ridiculously simple things that I found helped. I warn you that they are so ridiculously simple that they sound as though they couldn't possibly work. You are just going to have to trust me that they do.

I have an auto-immune disease called Addison's disease where neither my pituitary nor adrenal glands work at all. I take replacement steroids each morning and that keeps me alive and functioning. In a healthy body however the adrenal glands provide steroids on a minute by minute basis, depending on what you are doing, how much activity, how much stress.

I, on the other hand, get a certain amount of steroids each morning - kept on the lower side of normal to avoid nasty side effects - and, when that runs out, well so do I and that is the end of my day.

I quickly found that mental stress gobbled up my steroid allowance even more quickly than physical stress. My brain can't tell the difference between worrying about something and actually facing it - I suspect that yours can't either.

What I found to be the very worst gobbler of my energy was the panicky feeling of being 'too busy'. It wasn't the actual busyness - and I was busy, I had two small children and a cut flower growing/floristry business - it was the feeling of mental overwhelm.

Five good things I've learned from having a chronic auto immune disease

Last week I met a young man whose partner had just been diagnosed with an auto immune disease. He was worried, stressed, clutching at cures.Someone had told his partner that her life was ruined, that she would never be able to do anything worthwhile ever again.

I tried to tell him that just wasn't true. For me having an auto immune disease has brought many frustrations, I have had to change the way I approach things - but it certainly hasn't left me with a ruined life.

If fact I think in a number of ways it has transformed my life for the better. I thought that I would write some of them down.

How shrinking my business increased my income.

In September I was recorded in conversation with Fiona Barrows for her podcast There Are Other Ways - it was a chat about shrinking a business, deciding what was 'enough', about being really intentional in making a simpler life with plenty of freedom and joy.

In the wind down chat afterwards, I happened to mention that it had made money much easier too - and it was obvious that Fiona had assumed that my income would have gone down with my workload, and that we both really regretted not having covered the topic of money in the recorded part of our conversation.

So this mini-post is a way of addressing that omission.

When I first set up Snapdragon as an online business it grew fast - it grew from just me to a team of five, it changed from being at my kitchen table to in a bespoke wooden workshop in the field behind the house. I had big goals - income goals mainly - and they required constant growth. The way I ran Snapdragon was the perfect example of a capitalist business - scale up, employ staff, increase turnover, leverage profits to grow ever faster.

If you know my back story you will know that in 2016 I realised with a thump that the business I had built went against pretty much everything I aimed for in my personal life. The slow, simple, seasonal life I had created for myself was completely the opposite of my constantly growing, rapaciously hungry, business. I screeched on the brakes, moved myself out of the day to day running of the online gift side of the business, and set about creating something new.

In the end, the actual stopping took a while - and it wasn't until January 2020 that I completely disbanded the Snapdragon team and became a Company of One. I chose to work a lot less, I lopped off a lot of income streams, I employed skilled freelancers only when I needed them, rather than having anyone on a payroll. Most importantly, I formally decided on what 'enough' looked like for the business, ensuring it didn't have ambitions to grow bigger than that (for my natural inclination is always to scale things up, to make them bigger, more impressive, more like a 'proper' business).

And what happened was really interesting - instead of the rollercoastering 'boom or bust' stream of money of the old business something much gentler and reliable appeared. Where I had always seemed to be chasing my tail, borrowing from myself to pay people, betting tens of thousands of pounds on future sales, now my income was steady, predictable, nurturing. My connections to customers became stronger, I could ask them directly what they wanted, I made fewer mistakes.

However, now that I have almost a whole year's financial figures I can be confident that it is more than a gut feeling. My personal take home income doubled, I was able to drop down to working four days a week, I had time to prioritise my health - more importantly the quality of what I am doing has gone up, I feel very proud of what I am working on now. I am full of enthusiasm.

Best of all, business donations to charities have gone up - aside from the percentage of profits that go the The Snapdragon Foundation, Snapdragon Life has given significantly to 23 other charities over lockdown - some were donations in kind but most were cash.

It is as though there was something magical happened when I aligned the values of my business to those of my personal life, I kept wanting to talk about it but worried that it was maybe just wishful thinking.

Over the past couple of centuries the way people have been advised to run their businesses has been to aim for a state of perpetual growth - the cult of the entrepreneur over the past fifty years has overlaid that with the idea that you need to work constantly, putting in long ours at the expense of all other parts of your life. This may be true if you want the kind of multi-national business that can be sold, or one that has shareholders and multi million pound deals. My experience suggests that it isn't the case if what you want is a small business that funds and is in harmony with a lifestyle you love.