A few years back, Rick and I drove down to visit my mom.
The plan was Tofino, then a trip down memory lane on Vancouver Island. All our old haunts, the houses, the places we used to go when I was a kid.
The day before we were supposed to head to Tofino, Mom wasn’t feeling well. She felt off, didn’t want to eat, and couldn’t hold anything down. She was running a fever and she was in a lot of pain, so we bundled her up and spent 12 hours in emergency.
Once she was admitted, things happened fast, and she got the help she needed quickly. She ended up in the hospital for two weeks.
Nobody schedules that.
I think about that trip whenever I hear launch advice, because there’s a question inside it that nobody says out loud.
Can you work more than usual, answer faster than usual and be more available than usual for about two weeks, on dates you picked two months ago?
If you can, great. Launching works, and I’m not here to talk you out of it.
But who gets to say yes to that question, and how often?
The dates you can’t promise
A launch needs some slack. Time, sure, but also spare attention, and a life with enough give in it that two strange weeks won’t break something else.
Some people have that most of the time. A lot of the advice was written by them, and for them it’s good advice.
The women I write to are mostly in their fifties and sixties. Maybe a parent needs more help than they did last year. Maybe an adult child has moved back home. Maybe your body has started having opinions about sleep and heat that it never used to have.
You’ve still got plenty to give. You just can’t always say which weeks it’ll show up.
So when a launch lands on the wrong week, you don’t think, “Well, that was the wrong tool for this life.” You think something’s wrong with you.
I’ve done this myself. For a long time, whenever something in my business wasn’t working, my first move was to say, “I think the problem is me.”
A lot of the time, the problem was the model.
What was already decided
What stayed with me from those two weeks with Mom is how much was already decided.
Months earlier, I’d sat down and worked out what would happen to my business if I had to step back. I knew my key tasks. I knew my non-negotiables. It took an afternoon.
So I didn’t have to work any of that out with my head somewhere else. I adjusted, and it held.
The worst possible moment to decide what matters is the moment you’ve got the least left to decide with.
It held again last year, when Rick took a new job and we had weeks instead of months to move to Northern Alberta. I was finding a rental in a town I’d never lived in and working out what fit in a car, with client work that still had to get done.
I dropped most of what I’d been building. But I knew exactly what I was dropping and what I was keeping, because that list already existed.
Here’s what the list didn’t cover. Once the boxes were empty, nothing was urgent anymore, and nothing was telling me what to do first. So I did a bit of everything, badly, for about three weeks.
Now I write down the way back, too.
We had friends stay with us for nine days this September. Before they arrived I wrote one page: what I’d parked, and the first thing I’d do on my first morning back. That morning, I read the page and started working.
Then I spent two and a half weeks away, out on the West Coast with Mom. Everything that needed to go out was written and scheduled before I left, which took most of a week. I told my list when I was going and when I’d be back, and I came back on the day I said.
The question I ask now
You could read all this and decide the answer is to automate everything, so your business never needs you at all.
I tried a version of that with evergreen products. I’ve since decided to retire every one of them. A business built to keep you out of it can turn into a business you don’t want to be in.
The question I ask now is smaller. What happens to this in the week I can’t work?
I don’t mean the estate-planning version. I mean when you simply wake up and the answer is no for that day.
Some things answer that easily. An email can be written ahead. A guide somebody buys at two in the morning doesn’t care where you are.
Some things need a bit of setup. A live call with a rescheduling policy agreed up front means a bad week costs you one email to your people.
And some things can’t answer it at all. That’s fine, as long as you know before the whole month’s income depends on you being upright.
I still want to be in the room with people. That’s a big part of where I’m heading. I just don’t want everything I do to need me on the same day.
What I’d put in place
None of this is exciting, which is probably why it doesn’t get taught.
Start with a short list of your key tasks and your non-negotiables, written while you’ve got room to think.
Keep a record of what you owe people, so if you go down, you’re not trying to remember from bed what you promised to whom.
Write one page for the way back. What you parked, and what you’ll do first.
Tell people when you’re going. I get a lot of email, and I can think of several businesses that went silent on me this year, then reappeared six weeks later with something to sell. The gap didn’t bother me. The disappearing did.
Then there’s the money, and I’m still working on this one. What I want is a few small streams that don’t all stop on the same day. I’ll tell you how it goes.
The test
Most business advice treats a bad month as an interruption to the real work. For the women I know, bad months are just part of a life.
So I’ve stopped asking whether my business could have a great launch. I ask whether it could have a bad February and still be there in March.
A launch asks how much you’ve got. A bad month asks what you set up before it came.
The week you can’t work is coming. It does not mean you did anything wrong. Set it up while you’ve got the room.
If you’re not sure where your own business stands, the Quiet Compass is a good place to start. It’s five questions and about two minutes, and it shows you the one thing to focus on next.
Life first. Work optional.It’s your business, your energy and your rules.