Founder and Father: 3 Lessons on Building Your Business While Starting a Family

Making my first $1 million, the first time I saw my wife, winning a rugby grand final, making my first $10 million – none of those milestones compare to the feeling when I learned my wife, Alicia, and I were going to be parents. Of twins, no less. Being an entrepreneur is a rocket-ride of constant discovery. You pivot quickly when needed, grappling with unforeseen problems while trying to stay on course. That’s a pretty good description of fatherhood, too. Here are some key lessons I’ve learned building my business while starting a family: You won’t mind cleaning poo when it’s ‘your baby’ The hard work required to start your own business foils many wanna-be entrepreneurs before they even start. And they’re not wrong to worry — after you start your own business, if you’re awake, you’re working. But here’s where fathers know something that daydream entrepreneurs never discover: You won’t mind cleaning up crap – both at work and at home – when it’s your baby. Before the kids were born, I was terrified of the idea of changing a nappy: poo, spew and all those other bodily secretions have never really been my thing. Now, I am a shit-cleaning machine. It’s the same when starting a business. It’s a good thing in the early days most entrepreneurs can’t afford to hire an employee – they’d quit inside two weeks dealing with all the unexpected shit you face. You slog through it, just as you slog through endless nappies and 3 a.m. feedings, because you love ‘your baby’ so much. That’s a joy you can’t know until you actually start a company or a family. Focus on what’s in front of you Almost any new father who has strapped their newborn baby into the car seat for the first journey home from the hospital must think: How are they letting me take this child home? Are they crying because they’re hungry, wet, tired or hurt? You have no idea. This is a familiar feeling if you’ve started your own business. Customer service, marketing, PR, finances, recruiting, hiring, managing – all of these things you will learn on the fly. You have zero experience until you have to do it, and then try to learn it all in a hurry (only to discover you can’t learn it all in a hurry). You will fail before you succeed at each step of the way. But if you focus on what’s in front of you, you won’t get overwhelmed. Just as you learn to quickly diagnose every mysterious cry from your baby, you’ll learn and mature with each new learning curve you must climb with your business. Take it one step at a time. Stephen Covey talks about distinguishing your Circle of Concern versus your the Circle of Influence in his seminal “7 Habits For Highly Effective People.” Proactive people focus on things you can control; reactive people focus on things they are concerned about which they have little or no control, like “the national debt, terrorism and the weather,” Covey notes. When I leave the office, I focus only on the things that I have influence over in that moment… anything else that worries me, but is weighing on my mind is shelved into a place that I know to deal with tomorrow. It’s a difficult skill to master, but if you take home every issue with you every day, you will drive yourself and your family mad. Stop managing, start leading You can’t do it all. If anything, running my own business for so many years has made it more difficult for me to be the family man that I aspire to be. Personally, I have always found it difficult to work with partners, but over the years I have become better at letting others make decisions. The biggest adjustment I’ve made since becoming a father was letting others in the business take on more responsibility. I was used to having final say on most decisions across the business. Having kids really forced me to change the way I managed people in the business, releasing the reins and empowering responsible individuals in the team to make decisions on my behalf. In a way, becoming a father has forced me to quit being a manager, and focus on being a leader – to empower employees to take ownership of the business. It freed me to work more strategically and less tactically. Now I am focused less on operating the business as I am focusing on the future of the business. I can thank my twins for that growth as an entrepreneur. Thomas Hegarty is founder and CEO of Ready Flowers, a market leader in online flowers and gifts. Founded in Australia and now headquartered in Hong Kong, Hegarty’s company has served half a million customers in 90 countries.