Awalon
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What's with the day job drama distractions?
🕑 Added 2024-10-30 20:58:20 +0000 UTCAlright, storytime. 2017 up until now, whatthefuck is this whole day-job chaos thing I've alluded to. I'll keep the details out of this for obvious reasons, but give y'all the gist of everything.
This is quite cathartic for me, but I also feel that you deserve a bit of context to all the support you've given over the years. I'll likely delete this after a few months when I've moved on mentally from the situation and it's no longer relevant for the workshop context. For now though, y'all get the story of why I've been so off'ish from the suits every now and then.
Without further ado, longpost ahoy.
Early days:
I finished uni back in 2013, and immediately got a pretty okay job. Stuck around at the same employer and performed well, so I became a known face there.
Around 2017 a colleague approached me and proposed we fork out, start our own business in a related field. The colleague in question had several successful side-projects, and managed to get another four people into the proposal besides me. I ended up saying yes, and we kicked it off late 2017.
Startup days (2017-2019):
When we got the ball rolling, we had the following founding main character founding partners:
Me, the jack of all trades, with significantly more legal knowledge than the rest.
Sales Guy, who could sell sand in sahara.
Paperwork Guy, who carried all mandatory roles and kept the papers in order.
Project Manager, with domain expertise and project driving skills.
Innovator, with a shitload of energy and inventiveness.
Domain Expert, that could be thrown at any domain problem and resolve it.
We kicked things off nicely. It's a field where quite a lot of the business depends on having both skilled people and raw human numbers, and we got a decent set of employees hired within the first year. Decent growth, good news all the time, etc. By the end of 2019 we had 35+ employees, which was a genuine "whoa, we're actually doing this"-moment.
During this time we also did a few projects that required tool overlaps with my workshop projects, so I was able to snag discards and reuse things. Was good, got me kickstarted quite nicely on all the suit/hood projects.
After 2-3 years we were big enough to start stabilizing, offloading founders and starting to sort out actual administrative staff to carry the base loads. Still no actual money out of the business because we'd reinvested everything constantly, but now was the time. The future looked pretty okay...
Pandemic days (2020-2022):
...but yeah, if you've paid attention, you can see the timeline. Pandemic. Boom. Hit us hard in unexpected ways. Sales guy, being mr. meetings, was hospitalized very early due to his social ways. Large amounts of the staff were furloughed via our national scheme, which supported with salaries but screwed us via our fixed costs that were usually covered by contract runover.
All these things got even worse when the Ukraine war kicked off, as we had staff members from all sides of that. Ukraine, Russia, Belarus. Good people, but as you can imagine there was a LOT of stress factors involved regardless of their own personal views on things.
We made it through these horrible years, but with basically all company savings depleted and quite a lot of extra debt. The worst part was how it broke the people though. A few of us made it out with just stress, but others really had their brains broken in fundamental ways from the extended isolation and stress.
Me, got over-stressed to the degree of having a car accident and long-term sleep issues. A bit of burnout too, quite clearly, as I very much lost patience with "compromise solutions"
Sales Guy (CEO), complete burnout from working 16h-days to save the business. Ended up zombified for almost a year.
Paperwork Guy, lost touch with reality and started believing we were failing due to Sales guy skimming money. Not the only conspiracy theory he had. Started prioritizing witch hunting instead of doing his paperwork. The lack of paperwork caused even more failures, which he saw as even more proof of nefarious deeds. Cannot overstate the ridiculousness of this all - accusations of coffee money sketchiness while he downprioritized and lost enormous customer contracts.
Project Manager became a radical communist, declaring that any profit for the company was immoral, all profit should go directly to involved employees. The word "budget" was not allowed to be mentioned. Tried to create a "culture council" that would interpret a "company culture text" and financially penalize the CEO for issues. Overhead costs, safety margins and future financial plans would be resolved by... unknown. Absolute nutjobbery, literal totalitarian cult stuff.
Innovator lost touch with reality in his own way. The projects innovated were no longer even remotely realistic, with zero understanding of whether they would generate any money whatsoever. Genuinely believe he hit a bipolar manic episode or something, that's how out of touch with reality they were.
Domain Expert, joined me and Sales Guy in over-stressed with consequences.
So yeah, in the end we made it through, but we were seriously wounded both personally and business-wise. The debts in particular would be an issue, as we'd had to commit to a few of them personally in order to secure business continuity. If the company went bankrupt, we'd be personally liable as individuals.
Post-pandemic (2023):
The journey continued. Sales guy was out of commission from burnout, having done a magnificent job to save the core businesses but left a humongous administrative mess. Since he was also the CEO, we needed a new one. In the end a core employee was promoted, and Paperwork Guy continued to run the board. His schism with Sales guy was no longer a thing whatwith the latter recovering, so hopefully we could return to some degree of normalcy.
During this time I spent an extreme amount of effort and energy setting up the new CEO structure, sorting out administrative routines and helping out all over the place. By the time the new CEO landed I was pretty burned out myself, so I took a bench-break from the 'overhead work' and stuck to my small corner with all management-contacts instructed to only contact me in case of emergencies.
As it turns out, Sales Guy and Paperwork Guy did not have a schism. Paperwork Guy had, as you can perhaps guess from this hindsight-writing, gone genuinely insane. In my absence he revived the witch hunt, drove the new CEO to the brink of quitting, teamed up with Project Manager on declaring profits immoral, and so forth. I was in no-communication out-of-the-loop recovery mode on a field project while this happened, so I was only informed when Innovator, Sales Guy and Domain Expert literally resigned from the company.
Quick investigation on my part revealed that we were deep down shit creek. Significant debts with personal liability still an issue, lost the critical people for business, and Paperwork Guy was on another witch hunt instead of finishing a massive customer contract that by now only required the paperwork to complete.
Seeing as we had debts tied to us personally, I felt I had to step up again, as the rest had either left or gone full muppet. I crunched legalities and pulled a coup supported by Sales Guy, Domain Expert and Innovator. Threw out Paperwork Guy from all positions of power (but not the company ownership alas), teamed up with the new CEO to finish the contracts, and secured the cashflow from it. Paperwork Guy got to finish the yearly books and then resign his chairmanship. Turns out he screwed that up with yet another witch hunt, so me+CEO JUST BARELY managed to clean his shit up before the company was force-liquidated due to legalities around the year-book deadlines and delays.
By this time, "jesus fucking christ what is wrong with that guy" was at the forefront of all our minds regarding Paperwork Guy. At least he was out of actual business, and he left the company (but remained an owning partner) shortly thereafter. CEO was happy, and despite us having a LOT of cleanup to do after both Sales Guy's burnout-CEO'ing during the chaotic pandemic and Paperwork Guys sheer weirdness, we had a bright future yet again.
Now (2024):
Having learned my lesson about personal involvement, I moved my own job out of the business at the start of the year. I'd still be doing the same thing, but completely solo and without dependencies on the "big firm". By this time Project Manager had also moved out, so the company consisted of only full-time employees and no founders. Far from ideal, but eh, c'est la vie. I was still at the top of the chain after the coup, and helped the CEO along with a little bit of everything.
The year started nicely, with solid business and healthy cashflows. We'd managed to reduce the overall company debts by 80% while cleaning up Paperwork Guy's shit, and despite losing a chunk of staff in all the chaos, we were very okay.
Cue the national legal changes. All of a sudden we were likely to have a big issue towards the end of the year, possibly rendering our entire core business unviable. Not much we could do but set up contingencies and prepare.
During this time, Sales Guy somehow managed to score a possible buyout-contract for all founders by a rival firm that was in significantly better post-pandemic shape. It wouldn't be for much, but it'd be SOMETHING and get us out of all responsibilities and personal liabilities regarding the company. The staff would be taken care of, we'd be out with a clean exit, etc. All of a sudden we had a new focus.
As you can guess, this was the 'big news' I've alluded to in previous posts here. The first set of paperwork I mentioned last month was the Letter of Intent, scored after 4 months of negotiations. The next and final paper would be the actual sales contract.
As you can also guess, based on what I wrote in this months post, that deal failed at the last minute. It got dragged out (intentionally or not by them, can only suspect) past the time when the new laws would take effect, and we got hit harder than expected by them. As of last friday, the prospective buyer formally bailed on the deal. The buyout would not happen.
There turns out to be a way out for me though. Sales Guy is convinced he can save the business, and offered me an immediate flat buyout with full legal/debt responsibility takeover. Symbolic coffee money, nowhere near the (already low) sum from the rival firm, but it'd be a clean end to things. All he asked was that I'd do my best to help him with the legal/paperwork stuff during the upcoming month and try to convince his nemesis, Paperwork Guy, to also sell. I said "hell yes" and signed immediately.
There's still quite a lot of legalities to deal with. I'm writing this on monday evening after spending more or less every waking hour during the weekend dealing with these things. Strange contracts need to be written, legal loopholes verified, Paperwork Guy talked to about selling (so far "no" because there's a conspiracy that needs to be witch-hunt'ed, in case you are wondering), etc.
I'll spend my last time in that context making completely sure that all potential fuckups are covered, so that if Sales Guy fails and the company goes bankrupt no one gets screwed over. I also need to clean myself out of all formal positions. He may have legally taken over responsibilities, but I still need to vacate positions that require a two week delay.
Once that's done... I'm finally free.
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So yeah. Roller coaster of a decade. As always there's a lot of stuff I simply gloss over, skip or otherwise omit. Tried to capture the gist of things, and especially the things that screwed me up to the degree that the workshopping suffered.
The workshop has always been my main goal and passion in life, but with all the above occupying my time, energy and creativity I've been quite miserable during the chaos periods. Instead of spending evenings working on fancy rubber projects I've had to angstily work on cleaning up other peoples messes, on and off for four years now (seven if you count pre-pandemic less-stressful stuff). If you're very bored you can probably correlate my posts to the above timeline. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Whatever the end results, I've still learned a lot from the business adventures. As with everything that didn't get first place with bells and whistles, there's dashed hopes and choices I wish I'd made differently. I can at least say that I got quite a lot of personal development out of this, and I've managed to put some lessons into practice with the workshop company already.
I started the Patreon with the intention of evolving the workshop into something glorious when it finally looked like I'd be able to relax from the startup-work. Coincidentally I also started it a month before the pandemic hit, go figure... While I haven't achieved those lofty initial goals, I dare say I've made quite a lot of cool stuff. Decent hood production, proof of concept suits and a lot of behind-the-scenes-stuff. I've also been completely stuck during periods due all my creative energy going towards the company chaos. My own nemesis, the "big rig" suit casting system, would probably have finished a lot earlier without it.
With freedom finally being a real thing, I am so goddamn excited. I'll be able to have a normal life again (albeit with a normal day job), and for the first time in seven long years focus fully on the suit projects during my free time.
Your support during this time has been so very appreciated, and I try to express my gratitude constantly. Not only have you helped with the workshop bills during times when I've been stressed out AF over finances, but also the fact that you're willing to support my crazy rubber suit passion helps keep me sane. I'm not crazy - I'm just eccentric, and here's the audience to prove it :p
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: thank you.
