Wayfinders

View Original

ALIGNED: A New Start

Mike Brcic

Last year I wrote a book.

A whole damn book. I surprised even myself.

I started in March, committed myself to writing half an hour every morning, and by early September I had my first draft. I spent the rest of the year doing some initial editing until I was happy with the (semi)-final product.

It was a firsthand account of the gut-wrenching process of taking my company from near-bankruptcy to removing myself from the day-to-day of the company, to finally selling it in February of 2019 - along with all of the systems and tools I used that allowed me to step almost completely out of the business.

Via a few mutual connections I connected with a fantastic agent, who took a liking to the book. He suggested I spend some time getting feedback on the book and building up more of an audience for the book’s eventual release (something the publisher would appreciate).

So I decided to release the book as a 15-part weekly ‘Entrepreneurial Freedom’ series on the [ALIGNED] blog back in late February of this year, along with all of the aforementioned systems and tools.

I released the first two articles and then, well… the world sort of imploded.

I surmised that in those first chaotic, swirling weeks of covid-19, lockdowns and business shutdowns, what entrepreneurs needed more than advice on how to remove themselves from the stressful day-to-day of their businesses was to actually deal with the stressful reality of how to keep their businesses alive. So I paused the series.

I took some time to focus on my own business, make sure that things were stable, and look after my customers, many of whom have become good friends. I hosted Community Chats, webinars with experts, and launched Wisdom Circles (online peer-to-peer forums).

I took time to look after myself, and gave myself the space and time to think about how I can best be of value to my audience and network.

With my thinking time, I thought about how my experiences might be valuable to other entrepreneurs in the context of everything that is going on.

I realized that in addition to the lessons I’ve learned in getting my former company - a fairly large, complex business with employees and customers all over the world - to the point where it ran almost completely without me, there were some additional lessons - and some additional wisdom - that might be valuable to other entrepreneurs.

These were hard-fought and hard-won lessons about resilience, about feeling deeply aligned with one’s work and finding profound meaning in it, and in approaching business from the perspective of creating fierce value for one’s customers.

To that end, I am re-launching my weekly emails and blog writing, with a slightly different approach.

Every Tuesday I’ll publish articles in the new [Aligned] series, with alternating weekly streams:

Autopilot articles: tools and systems for building a resilient, self-managing company (what was previously my Entrepreneurial Freedom series).

Calibrate articles: my thoughts about how to build an aligned company and life.

I’ll also put out a short Friday Findings email every week, with resources and interesting findings from my quest toward the aligned life.

If you’re interested in following along, and not already subscribed to my Wayfinding mailing list, you can do so here.

If you’d like to read the overview of the series along with the table of contents, you can do so here. The first article was published today (Tuesday May 05).

What’s Next?