Does It All Have to Be Me?

We’re building a system around indoor events & trunk shows for our jewellery business. Finding them, qualifying them, outreach, follow-ups, nurturing, booking. There’s the sales rep side to figure out too.

Some events perform extraordinarily well. Others don’t. For us to pay someone to sell at them profitably, the sales and contribution have to reach a certain level.

So we need to learn what makes an event work, then get good at repeating it.

I started thinking about how different those two jobs feel.

Exploring means entering something you don’t understand yet. Trying this. Trying that. Looking like a fool because you genuinely don’t know what you’re doing.

There’s a fear in that. Some image of myself I might lose by being wrong.

But if I’m willing to be wrong, get feedback and change something, I can start finding a way.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Slightly less wrong. Oh, this is okay. Actually, this is working quite well.

Then repeat the fucking thing.

Build the system around what works. Make it reliable. Have the organisation do it again and again.

The business needs both discovery and repetition. I don’t see why both have to be me.

One mode feels like a scrappy explorer. The other feels like a systematic engineer, trying to make an outcome dependable.

I can feel both instincts in myself. I’m still figuring out how to move between them, and how much each belongs with other people or agents.

Manual, AI, hybrid. We can work out what suits each part.

The repetition can be boring. It still needs doing. Once we’ve found something that works, repeating it is how we get more of the result.

But even saying “I’ll explore, then hand over the repetition” leaves an assumption sitting there.

Why have I assigned myself all the exploration?

I seem to have absorbed this program that, at the early stage of a business, I have to do the work. I have to struggle through incubation. Later, perhaps, I can build something around myself.

When I look at my strengths, weaknesses and nature, that seems stupid.

There isn’t one way to be an entrepreneur. There’s the nature of the person and the nature of the business. Surely those belong in the arrangement from the beginning.

Krishnamurti’s phrase, “truth is a pathless land”, keeps coming back to me.

It even applies to business. Bloody hell.

There are useful principles. Practical how-to. Good thinking partners could be useful too. I’ll never have a mentor. I want to keep examining what I’m being told and whether it makes sense here.

But giving other people room to figure things out means something quite practical for me.

More patience.

They need time to try something, see what happens and come back with what they’ve learned. They need some of the same room to be wrong that I want for myself.

I still want to feel close to what’s happening. There’s the map we’re working from, and then there’s what actually happens at an event. I want those feedback loops. I want to understand what we’re finding.

Giving more space and trust while keeping that closeness is something I’m still figuring out.

And the trust seems to have several parts.

Capability. Alignment. Integrity. Energy. Incentives that make sense.

The feeling that this person actually wants to find out what’s true, has the ability to make progress, and will tell me honestly what they find.

Including when it disagrees with what I thought.

I can imagine having more patience with someone being wrong when I trust what they’ll do on discovering it. They can tell me. We can change our understanding. Keep going.

That makes room for someone else to participate in finding the answer.

I used to assume I had to do that part myself.

Now I’d like to give other people more time to figure things out, learn from what comes back, and build the reliable repetition together.