Finding our Focus

Welcome to Not Your Mama's 9 to 5 Newsletter, where we talk about the future of employment, workplaces, and org structure. It's become normal for a career to be nonlinear and for employment to be dynamic. Trends like remote work, AI assistance, employees having multiple jobs, or even creating their own consulting practice will only continue.

We at Uptown embrace these trends to create better environments for companies and those who work at them.

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It was late on a Thursday night in a Dallas speakeasy. Actually, closer to Friday morning at that point.?

2022 had begun uneventfully, stably as some would call it. Uptown had ballooned (by our standards) into a 20 person team. Our goal was to scale so, for better or worse, when we found good fortune our first instinct was to hire. It felt like the day-to-day was being handled, so the executive team focused less on the core business in order to pursue other growth opportunities.

Naively confident our biz dev business would continue growing on its own, we basically left the company on autopilot. Chris was consulting for large NFT brands, Conor was breaking ground in the Metaverse, and I was hell-bent on turning us into a full-fledged consulting firm; which brings us back to that Dallas speakeasy.

Part of me felt like I had finally made it, sitting in a private room with people who decide what cities look like. I was invited that night thanks to favors, friends, and a decade of drunk networking. That night, however, I had hardly said a word unless spoken to.

Sipping on the best old fashioned of my life, I noticed their conversation turn towards a new business some of them were launching. They were discussing start up logistics, renting office space, and hiring employees - I perked up.

The Window

“That won’t work” I laughed from the other side of the room.

I had their attention, saw my window, and used liquid confidence to deliver a two minute speech about how young talent demands a hybrid environment and cares more about the mission of the organization than the salary. I don’t remember everything, just that my last line was “no one will want to work for you just because you’re rich.”

The mogul funding the city's newest Real Estate Development company stood up, extended a hand, and offered me a job.

With Uptown in mind, I said off the cuff, “you can’t hire me, but you can hire my consulting firm.”?

Minor detail: I didn’t have a consulting firm yet, so after getting home I hurriedly filed Articles of Incorporation for Uptown Consulting.

A week later, I was driving into an office for the first time in nearly 3 years.

Fast forward to the end of 2022

After the most exciting summer of my life, Uptown Consulting’s first major contract was coming to an end. I was responsible for building the client’s internal operations and brokerage department. Believe it or not, it’s much easier to start a company with a budget! They were fully operational within a few months and towards the end of the year I found myself simply overseeing things from a managerial standpoint. Additionally, new consulting clients weren't appearing spontaneously as I had imagined; it was time to go.

After an incredibly rewarding experience, I moved my focus back to Uptown Creation. But around that time, our biz dev services were experiencing that dirty word again….CHURN.

Much of our clientele were small businesses, start-ups, or even solopreneurs. When the economic downturn hit, they couldn’t afford to invest in marketing services anymore and canceled.?

Something had to change

We told ourselves we had the perfect team in place, if only we could get back up to capacity. So month-after-month we continued to pay out more money than we were taking in; working hard and hoping things would turn around.?But hope and hard work alone can't fix the underlying problem so, once again, we knew we had to pivot our business in a major way.

It turned out that this crisis was a blessing in disguise since it forced us to reevaluate the types of businesses we were servicing. Just as importantly, Chris, Conor, and I each returned from our various “consulting” clients to put our full focus on the core business.?Together we began addressing the underlying problem - client churn.

In the book Traction by Gino Wickman, he describes a team running a business as pushing on a wheel. Momentum builds if people are all pushing in the same direction. After a year of unique experiences, we stopped putting energy in opposite directions and set out to find our ideal client profile (ICP).