Holy snails balls Batman!
I’ve only been at the Coworking space near my home for a week, and my whole mental energy has shifted.
It is my ’15 minute city” dream come true.
In the coworking community, we’ve been talking about shared workspaces in local towns; now everyone has a different outlook on the commute.
Read “What if everyone could walk to work?” PDF download by Town Square here.
By Town Square
Somehow I’ve gone from hanging on by the skin of my teeth to, okay “bitches, what’s next?”
Our home is a home again, instead of looking like lousy police stakeout in the corner of our living room, and I did not feel very ‘COO’ sat there!
What I think is going on.
I hate to go all cosmic on you, but I’m approaching this new ‘Chief Operating Officer’ thing like I know I’m going to make it.
Living in hope and on edge has been my default setting for years now.
I’ve been dead set on knowing all the answers before moving forward, which of course you never have ALL the answers.
On this new journey, I’m looking at it like I’ve won already and I only need to work through the list to get there.
Like in the Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds where she gives the whole class and ‘A’ and they have to keep it.
We’re going to make it.
I had a micro ruck with our account manager the big CRM that sounds like “snails course” if you were in a French Restaurant.
I calmly said, “we’ll either be the next ‘TransferWise’ or we won’t, and I’m okay with either.
There was more to the conversation, but it would take another three paragraphs to say what it was all about, and it is not that interesting.
But my feeling was like the moment in the Matrix when Morpheus says “he’s going to make it” as Neo is jumping from building to building for the first time.
Neo misses, and Morpheus still keeps faith – that is where I am daily.
Keeping the A
All I have to do is make sure it works, get stuff on the internet, so people know how we help them.
And I have people to do that with me.
I’ve done so much on my own in the past I’m confused at having people help me.
And they are better at it than I am too!
I’m loving having a legal department, someone to pay for things that I didn’t know we needed.
Being able to lie down at night knowing other people understand the bits I don’t.
Purpose and why
There is a considerable purpose underlying why we do, and I hate to drag Simon Sinek out again.
But we did accidentally start with the why.
I can’t help thinking that if we’d brought the book and then started a company, it would be a honeycomb affair, hollow in the middle.
But Alex, the founder is so pissed at how the banking system works and Escrow he built something to fix it on his lunch break back in 2018.
He was a member of my mate Jeannine‘s coworking space in the Netherlands and now we all run a company together.
Onboarding and getting paid problems
We started to talk about the problems coworking spaces have with onboarding and payments.
Also how people who are members of coworking spaces, especially freelancers, micro and small businesses and makers who trade internationally.
I’m one of those people and only 1 in ten of the times I get paid is it simple.
I’ve worked with people all over the world around 15 years now.
And each new invoice is, and payment is like a trip to Mars and back.
Banking and international trade favour big business; us little people have to navigate it on our own.
I invoiced someone through PayPal once, and they paid right away, to my horror I’d paid 15% commission on a $3000 invoice, which is something like $450!!
Yes, I cried.
And yes I should have read the small print, not the marketing print.
See all three of our products here:
Cowork.tools – AML and KYC and GDPR for onboarding new members for shared workspaces.
Velvet – collaborative payment platform for freelancers, YouTubers, podcasters and makers.
PayPugs – Manage all your global payments from a single-access, highly intuitive platform.
The worst of times
So all the above is great, mind-blowing and so exciting I have trouble sleeping.
Every weekday I wake up before my alarm and can’t wait to get going.
But the indecision in the world is killing me.
This time of year is always when we get together for Coworking Europe and the Indy Hall retreat, none of that.
I am locked in this eternal vortex of anxiety attacks, not because I work with a group of maniacs.
But because my mind and body are so in the habit of panic when the stakes are high.
My wife spends all week working with young people with mental health issues in a secure NHS ward.
It is a high-pressure environment and gets more intense as the long term effects of COVID and lockdown start to reveal themselves.
I want to click my fingers like Iron Man does in End Game and return everything to like it was.
