Hot air balloons rising over the Melbourne skyline on 1st January 2020, taken from our apartment in Southbank. A fitting reflection of how my life is starting to take off right now.
Something feels different about 2020. Every year, I look forward to starting afresh and reaching some of my stretch goals, but it always felt like I was barely keeping afloat amongst the turmoil of life.
The past decade has probably been the least thrilling 10 year block of my life. I lost my Dad, and my wife lost her Mum in 2009, and I guess that sort of took the wind out of our sails, and the grieving process and recovery from that really took a lot of energy out of us, and left me personally directionless and demotivated for many years.
But in 2019, I felt a change in the air. I felt more alive, and filled with purpose that I had in a long while. A lot of things also fell into place to help that impression. My startup began to grow well, I finished an excellent accelerator program with Catalysr, and I had a new, brilliant co-founder join my business as well.
On the personal side of my life, I managed to shed a couple of ‘friends’ who proved to be more hard work than they were worth. You know the ones - who are always only contacting you once or twice a year to ask for favours yet never doing anything to help you move your own life forward. As much as I don’t actually miss them, I wish them all good luck. The mental freedom that has come from not having to care for them any more has given me more brain space to focus on the important things.
We just had the biggest quarter ever for my startup, in terms of customer growth and revenue. I also managed to take a couple of weeks off over Christmas (and so did my co-founder), and things worked well while we were away because we now have a fantastic team who can keep the lights on without us having to be here all the time.
It was a pleasant surprise to come back from holiday to see new sign ups by large companies. We were even contacted out of the blue by a large vendor that we had been wooing for over a year. They decided this week that we were a serious player, and offered us a partnership out of the blue, off their own accord. That was really flattering.
Additionally, I was approached a couple of weeks back for the first time by a VC firm out of the blue asking about investing in my startup. (We declined, but after a long time of me asking and not getting great responses from various firms, it was cool to have one of them reach out on their own initiative). We also have an HR consultancy wanting to resell our HR SaaS and indeed they have even redesigned their website to match our branding as they want to act as a close partner to our company.
All this has set up 2020 to be huge, and I am really excited about where we can go from here. Oh, and I also started earning a regular salary from my startup after nearly 3 years of living on savings. That one fact alone has put me in a better head space as I move to double my salary over the next 12 months.
Onwards and upwards for this new decade. I am excited.