Lessons Learned: Reflections on starting a company.

Time flies!

It's been already 8 months since I started Breathlife.

So I reflected a little on the ride so far and what I personally learned that might be helpful for others.

I still stand behind my original point; I don't want to be a solo-entrepreneur and still believe it's definitely not for everyone.

I'm not interested in having people work for me or the pressure of having investors. 

It still sort of baffles me that we promote entrepreneurship so much, when something like 90% of new companies fail within the first three years.

Also, the loneliness that loads of entrepreneurs struggle with is very real. That's not really setting people up for success.

Which is why I'm fundamentally only interested in co-creating or facilitating.

However, it did also give me a lot.

The truth is that I started for myself because I needed to be in charge of my own time.

Not because "That'd be nice".

But because I physically wasn't capable to work full time for anyone or even deal with the idea of a boss expecting something of me.

Here's why:

About 2 years ago my body started to send physical signals that I'd been pushing too hard for way too many years.

I started to feel a continuous grind in my chest and wasn't able to calm down anymore, even in my free time.

Eventually I was even taken to hospital because I felt my body shaking in the office and the feeling in my chest got the better of me.

Everything was fine, the doctor simply asked one question:

"Are you dealing with a lot of stress at work?".

That's why I needed to be in charge of my own time, fully. Because I wasn't able to push anymore. I had to start to respect my own boundaries.

It was at this time I also become more interested in the breath, which has helped me tremendously. 

Looking back, this makes total sense since the breath is arguably the best tool to calm down the nervous system and process stress.

So as paradoxical as it might be, the only solution I saw was to start for myself.

Some other observations and rules that I try to stick to or things I learned along the way.

Pre-plan your breaks:

When I looked at my calendar for the upcoming year, the first thing I did was to plan my breaks and holidays. These had to be non-negotiable.

I booked the dates out in my calendar and planned all my work around them.

This is arguably the best thing I've done and will keep doing this for the rest of my career. 

I think it's the only way to guarantee you get the rest and take the breaks we so deeply need.

"The tour the France is won in bed" as Joop Zoetemelk said - former Tour the France winner.

"Network" when you don't need the network:

I don't like the word networking at all, it feels transactional to me, but I'm using it for lack of a better word. I guess "investing in connections" would be a better way to phrase it.

Not saying anything ground breaking here, but still so true for me.

I still have a lot of learning to do in this area, but I can't stress how much people have helped me along the way, who I'm very grateful for. You know who you are hopefully.

Most of these fantastic supporters I've met over the last 10 years. I truly hope that I'm giving as much (or even more) back.

I still strongly believe in a "give first" mentality, even if it might never come back you. It simply feels better. 

Advice: Open an excel sheet and write down everyone new you meet, what you appreciate about them, how you could help them and what they are good at.

"You'll be selling and doing marketing 80% of your time, so make sure that the leftover 20% is worth it"

Let's make this 90% - 10%...Especially when working on your own be prepared and willing to put in the effort.

Be extra present for the good bits. Otherwise it's simply not worth it.

Experiment to figure out how to enjoy this 10% even more.

For myself this meant focusing more on:

1. Co-creating - doing things together makes things so much more fun.

2. Live Facilitation - instead of endless instagram-ing I decided to focus in building a local community first and deliver in person breathing sessions.

3. The Breathe. Card Deck. I thoroughly enjoyed creating this product. I'll write a little more about that process later. 

"It's all been done before"

Whenever I hit a roadblock this is what I come back to. Especially in the beginning, setting up a company felt overwhelming and there was so much homework that needed to be done.

And then there was "legal" and "finance" stuff; these words scare the hell out of me.

That's when I go back to "It's all been done before, by millions of others", so there must be a way I can figure this out.

For anything practical I clearly remember being 19 years old, standing next to my best friend Hugo, looking at a broken rear light.

My suggestion: Take the car to a service. But this would be expensive for us and time consuming.

That's when Hugo said: "No, I'm not having this. Listen, we are two smart dudes. Tonnes of people have fixed lights before us. We are going to figure this out."

And so we did.

For anything legal I remember someone once asking me: "Can you read English? Good! If you can't read the contract cause it's so complicated, send it back and tell them to write more clearly, or get them to sit down with you to explain it sentence by sentence. If you can read it, simply read it."

Do the math

Simple. What's the minimum amount I need to survive and how do I get that to buy myself time to invest in products and services that will pay out in the future.

If that means you need to work somewhere part-time, do so.

If you do go all-in straight away, focus most your attention on over-delivering for these one or two clients. These are the people who believe in you and are making this journey possible.

Once that first survival stress is taken care of you'll be way more relaxed and creative. This is when you can truly start to experiment.

Social Health

I can't stress this enough to myself. Take care of your social health. Invest in your friendships and loved ones.

Yes, have good habits, food and working out etc. but without strong loving relationships you're still not taking care of your fundamental human needs.

Especially when working from home. I sometimes spend 23 hours in the same room "remote working" and sleeping/eating. How is that any different from a prisoner?

That's a big part of the "why" behind the one-month coliving experiment we're running with Innate in Portugal.

Living and connecting with other people is so vital, no morning routine can beat that.

Built it and no one will come.

Another thought that I often come back to. It takes a lot of pressure of and gives me a sense of freedom.

No one is sitting in their bedroom waiting for me to launch my service or website.

No one is sitting in a cafe talking to their friend about how they can't wait to see what one of their 3000 LinkedIn connections is about to announce next.

No one...

So relax, it's 11pm, go to bed.

Accountability

It really helped me to have some accountability partners, some people don't even know they are my accountability partner. 

For me that means deliberate monthly or bi-weekly scheduled catch ups with people who are one the same journey, in groups or one on one.

Another thing I do when I think of something I want to experiment with, try or launch is that I reach out to someone who I could co-create this with and I organise a meeting.

This "forces" me to develop the concept a little further to make sure I have something to show for.

Follow your gut

When you interact with people and it doesn't feel right - Stop!

Your gut knows, who ever annoying that may be. It knows when you are dealing with people who are, frankly, wasting your and their time or when you are giving away free stuff that might "Pay out in the future".

Also, this goes the other way around. I've done quite a lot of stuff that isn't financially rewarding, but simply feels good.

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That's it for now!

There must be loads of other things I learned but these were the first that came to mind.

Hope it's helpful and would love to hear from others as well.

What did you learn?

With warmth, 

Steven