Making the move

my account of shifting gears in life and business

About 4 years ago my wife and I were driving through a beautiful neighbourhood on the way to visit our family. It was located in the old Galt part of Cambridge, Ontario. We passed a small century home that was having an open house. For fun we decided to stop and check it out. We both had always dreamed of living in an older home and this one fit the bill perfectly. We ventured inside and it was really something to behold. While small, it didn’t lack in any type of character or charm. We could easily picture ourselves living and raising a family there. After hearing the price things got a little more real. We could do it; it was a home we could afford. One major problem, it was an hour outside of where we lived at the time and where my business was centred.

After a verbally turbulent ride home, we eventually came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. There were certain values my wife and I wanted in life and this move would have fulfilled so many of them. However, we had firmly set roots in the place we lived; downtown Toronto. The dream forced us to look big picture and think about what we really wanted to do, but we felt immovable because we were so firmly invested in where we were. We knew it was an impossibility to try and have our cake and eat it too and we let the idea go.

The experience put into perspective the importance of understanding what motivated me at the core. Why did I feel that I had missed an important opportunity? The experience I had that day started me down a road of self discovery that would lead me to make important decisions that would eventually reopen the book on this dream.

Cambridge? Are you nuts!?

When we told people we were moving from Toronto to Cambridge some people congratulated us and some were bewildered. They couldn’t imagine the idea of moving from a city like Toronto to a smallish city of 127,000. That part played into our fears. What were we doing leaving this thriving metropolis for the simple life of a small town?

Toronto had so many things that we loved. It offered diversity and what seemed like unlimited access to the best opportunities right outside the door. It had great schools, great communities and the food — oh, I do miss the food. My wife and I loved the ability to walk anywhere to get what you need. We met great parents through our daughter’s daycare and we had some amazing friends. In a lot of ways Toronto was an outstanding place to be and to raise a family.

We were living right downtown and I walked to work. My daughter was turning 4 and my son was about to be born. Life was fantastic, so when the time came to sign the offer papers my wife and I were rattled with doubt about the decision. What the hell were we doing changing our current life? Something different? Why? We opted to not listen to the paranoia and we signed. Something else was driving us.

We’ve got to turn this ship…

My line of work is technology. I had been running a design company that specialized in making really nice web sites for our customers. My business partner and I had been running the company for about 6 years and had grown to a staff of 5 in a beautiful office on Queen St. West. It was an amazing space to be creative and get work done. Our business grew organically based on need. We went where the winds took us and helped people when they needed it. We made some amazing sites and our model proved to be successful.

We were careful how we grew and never really took on more than we could chew. It may have been subconscious at first but we were concerned with creating a trap for ourselves. By letting demand dictate our workload, we would always be guided by it. We knew this model worked but was not sustainable and more importantly we knew it would become that trap we were scared of. We had to change to avoid it, but we weren’t sure just how to do it.

Our business carried on, but we put the breaks on growth. We tried different approaches to business to see if something stuck. We were trying hard to orient ourselves and find our true north. The process we went through was a lot of trial and error and eventually we had to stop ourselves and start looking inward for answers instead of outward. We had to start working smarter. We both knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t understand the core of why we were doing it.

Two for One

While I was going through a discovery process with my business, my wife and I found out that we were expecting our second child. We were beyond happy. Soon after, we spent the weekend at my wife’s parents place in Cambridge and broke the news; naturally everyone was thrilled. Things got even more exciting when a week later my wife’s sister announced she was expecting as well. The due dates were 2 weeks apart.

My wife and her family are extremely close. It is a supportive unit that above all else placed priority around being with each other. It was something I felt with my own family as well, but in different ways. Having my wife expecting at the same time as her sister meant a lot to them. Having that bond would no doubt bring them closer and the idea of their children growing up together so close in age was undeniably awesome.

This news made my wife and I think about that house again. Had we made the move years ago we would have been blocks away from her sister. They both knew having children so close in age was going to bring them closer as it was, but the idea of their two kids growing up side by side changed everything. It was becoming clearer to my wife and I what was most important to us and we wanted to live that idea instead of just thinking about it. I now understood why I had felt like I had missed an opportunity a few years earlier.

The Leap 2.0

After making significant changes with my company, the rebuild was fully underway. The office was much quieter and we opted to rent a portion out. We no longer had staff so it was just my business partner and I filling the remainder of the space. We reduced the amount of work we took on as to balance the load between paying work and researching what our company would become in the coming months.

Our strategy was to learn as much as we could and then create a new approach to offering our services. My business partner and I really connected with the idea of letting the ‘why you do what you do’ guide the vision and decision making of the company. It placed the values of the founders at the core with the idea that it would attract like minded people to you. The common values would enable you to work together in a more meaningful way. To be successful at this we needed to take our reboot a little deeper.

We opted to take more time to discover what we wanted to do with the business going forward. It needed more incubation, which meant lowering overhead even more. The office was next on the chopping block and within a week or two of making the decision, it was gone. It was sad to close the door for the last time, but exciting because my business partner and I knew the next chapter had begun. We were completely free from our old selves ready to rediscover how to offer what we did to people and businesses who had a common vision.

Opportunity Knocks

I had set up my home office in the den of my 2 bedroom townhouse. Some things had to be moved around, but for the foreseeable future my business command centre was going to be located in what I used to refer to as ‘my man cave’. Working from home provided some obvious benefits while at the same time offering some atypical challenges. Given that I was raising a family, most of my home was dedicated to that. Carving out a little professional space from that 1000 sq. ft. proved difficult but not impossible. I knew it wasn’t a long term solution.

Through the process I had gone through with my business I started to ask my wife similar questions about our personal lives. What did we really want long term? When you picture yourself in 5, 10 years what does it look like? The questions lead us to similar answers that I had experienced with my business. While everything was good in a lot of ways, it didn’t match the big picture we had in our heads. This lead me to wonder: if you’re not on a path to go where you want to go, why keep walking that way?

Through this discovery and cutting the tether to an office in Toronto, I suggested that perhaps we look at houses back in Cambridge where our family was and where we had originally found that house we both loved so much. Looking is completely noncommittal and we set our goal on perhaps moving within the next 2 to 5 years. I started following homes on MLS and eventually spoke with a real estate agent in the area. The search was on. Three weeks later we found our house.

Converging Ideas

After committing to disrupting the way my business works and learning that it was essential to doing anything meaningful; I opted to do the same for my personal life as well. With my business the approach in the beginning had been very un-strategic in the sense that we put up a sail and then were guided by the prevailing winds of demand. In life you can choose to do this as well and the results will be exactly the same: complete unpredictability. You’ll end up going wherever the wind takes you. If you’re lucky enough you’ll end up somewhere you like, and in other cases you’ll end up in places you don’t.

After arriving at a greater understanding of myself and where I wanted to go, I was no longer comfortable with the winds taking me in directions away from my goals. Occasionally I would feel on the right course, but then would be blown off the path. I dedicated myself to setting a proper life course and that meant being strategic about when to put up my sail. Obviously there would still be course corrections, but with a sound understanding of my personal values I would try and avoid being sent off course for too long.

The added benefit of setting course is that you meet people along the way that share common values. In those circumstances you might be fortunate enough to share some of the journey with those people and in other cases you might meet people who can speed up your trip by helping you avoid common problems they’ve encountered along their way. The only way these great connections can be made however, is if your intentions and goals are visible enough for others to take notice.

The Journey is the reward

While I’m just starting this journey, the process is already showing its worth. Being more self-directed and making decisions based on core values has lead me to a place where I feel oriented in the right direction. It’s empowering to know that you are the one guiding the outcomes instead of the world around you dictating them. It’s allowed me to repurpose energy that was once used to spin my wheels to being creative with my work and my life.

There is still a lot of work to do now that the dust has settled from the renovations that have taken place over the last 12 months. It’s one thing to orient yourself and it’s another to move the ship forward. However, it’s incredibly motivating to know that even small movements now are more meaningful than the big ones in the past simply due to having a guide.

The best part of the whole experience is being able to enjoy the art of sailing instead of being lost at sea. The story is just getting going and I look forward to sharing more of it as time goes on.

I am the Co-Founder of GRAND, a digital design company that specializes in customer focused Websites, Apps and Social integrations. Check us out at WeAreGrand.com or connect with me on Twitter @IamMattQ.