I remember the times when I used to have time, to watch the sun set. Ponder the colours as they intertwine over the top of the great dividing range, turning bright blue into off tone shades of grey to black, leaving me with a dulled blue, almost purple in between the night and day, that tells me the day is done and the dark night is about to begin.

That dark night breaks into speckled light, a deluge of stars and galaxies, nebulae of new born brightness in the galaxies above. I would spend hours simply watching the stars and how they moved across the night sky. Often I would bring out the telescope, gazing upon Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. Delving deep into my mind about our existence and where I actually fit in. Wondering what all this means, always with more questions than answers.

I find myself now, in the present, wondering where that time has gone. Wondering why I now seem to miss all the sunsets and by the time I get the chance to look into the night sky, I’m too tired and it’s time for bed.

I wonder is it just because I’m at that time in life where everything is so busy. I’m at the stage where work and progress must come before the simpler things, even family to some degree. For the modern world dictates this. It drives me with no other choice but to keep pushing. For to stop, and take time, only brings more pressure from society to push even harder next time I start again.

I want to see my daughter more often. I want to spend time with her and teach her of the Orion Nebulae and the beauty in the birth of stars. I want to show her the Centauri system and how beautiful they are in the sky each night, how in time, they may all be drifting apart, but still appear so bright to our eyes each night.

I want to take more time with my mother to sit, quietly and just listen to Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria” while I watch her Dementia filled brain float into his lyrics. I want to hear the memories she still has left come trickling back about her childhood with her own mother. Just sit. Take time, and listen.

I want to grasp onto one of the few fond memories I have with my father and dive into that aqua blue water to pull a crayfish out, start our fire on the beach and dine like we’re kings of Babylon and simply forget, about time.

I want to share those childhood memories with my sister before the world started to stretch and skew from much too young of age, turning children into adults before their time.

But for all these things I want, I simply cannot take. For a tall, strong adult man in this modern world of ours, there is no ground for failure, no soft cushion for our fall. There is no spare time, only lost time to push harder and sacrifice everything that makes us, us.

So for now, in this middle part of life, where time is at it’s lowest, we must keep pushing harder. Maybe one day I’ll find time to gaze upon the stars again. Maybe my lack of time will not keep me from fond memories for when I’m old.

If only I had more time.

Can you guess why I’m sitting around again this morning? Surely it’s not because of another rain day today….We’ve had our share of them this year so far for sure. But it’s given me some time to reflect on last year. Covid. Increase in trade demand. Massive increase in our services. I touched base on this slightly in my last article recognising an area that needs improvement after receiving some bad feedback, then sitting down with Camilla and doing some self evaluations on our business to understand the problem and try learn from it.

You see, I’ve been around a long time now, over 23 years in fact in and around the Gold Coast concreting. The business has been operating here for about 16-17 of that, at a rough guess, and we’ve always been at worst steady, leaning towards very busy at any given time. But last year was something I’ve never seen before and to be honest, something I’m only coming to terms with now since we’ve been a bit slower from the constant rain delays.

I’m always someone who tries to look further into situations, evaluate them as a whole and not just what I’m seeing or hearing on the surface. Analytical I suppose. But the whole Covid debacle had me completely confused. I saw so much of the country going into a recession, similar to what I saw in 2008 with the GFC, but then for us, business kicked along running at probably 150% greater capacity then normal. I really couldn’t make heads or tails of it, all we could really do is put our heads down and asses up and make hay while the sun shines. We went from being booked for around 3-4 months at a time and getting maybe 10 calls a week for quotations, to having to stop bookings at 6-7 months because anything after that was unrealistic, while we were still getting 40+ calls a week for new work.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not complaining about being busy while a large chunk of the world had slowed down dramatically, or stopped in a lot of cases, completely first world problems. But it had me in a position where 70 hours a week on the tools was common place. That amount of work hours on the tools is no problem, I’ve done that hundreds of times, but it was the consistency throughout the entire year of doing this that I nearly broke down from, both physically and mentally. This reflected back through our scheduling and some clients at times, getting long delays in their bookings, which of course caused frustrations to them as well, which we completely understand (although didn’t appreciate being yelled at on a few occasions because of it.)

I wrote a few articles about this at the time throughout the year as well, but feeling as though we’ve finally settled down a bit, I can reflect and try and make heads and tails of what was happening, trying to improve our booking and scheduling process in the future.

It’s a really difficult situation, because although mentally I wasn’t at my best last year from stress and burn out, some of the work we put out was by far our best overall. The quality of work remained, that did not drop away, which I suppose I can take a positive from doing everything I can to keep my standards high. But it was the back end of the business that dropped away. Camilla did a great job holding things together, she really is my rock, but we just inevitably found ourselves with scheduling problems throughout that we just couldn’t overcome.

The funny thing is, this is exactly what I didn’t want the business to become when I moved away from commercial work and into the mind set of, “quality over quantity”. We want to be the “little guy”. We want to provide residential customers with something that isn’t overly available in this industry. We have worked really hard over the years to deliberately not grow and not be the business who simply takes on mountains of work and throws sub-contractors at it to complete it. The quality of work and customer service goes completely out the window when that happens.

I guess you could say last year though, that exact thing crept back into my business that we don’t want where we simply just took on too many jobs and Camilla and I couldn’t realistically handle everything effectively. Something had to give and on this occasion, it was our customer service on a several occasions.

Although we are still heavily booked for a long period, we have stretched our schedule out with more room in between jobs, which not only helps with the rain delays we’re getting at the moment, but also helps with us coming back into the business model that see’s our customers receiving the best of us again, on all occasions.

I really do enjoy still learning hard lessons at 40yo. Or am I just dumb and have already learnt this lesson? Camilla thinks I’m just dumb. :p

Hope you’re having a great 2021 everyone and if you got this far, thank you kindly for reading. Take care.

Room for Improvement

Just thought I’d write up a little blog on something I’ve been noticing over the past year since the economy kicked along around the start of Covid (sounds weird to be saying it like that for sure).

As with most of our followers and anyone who comes across our website really, they know that we’re a small business by choice where Camilla and I are onsite and in charge of each project. We’re not a business that is looking to expand and grow into an entity that simply throws manpower at projects trying to make as much money as possible.

We’re a small setup focussing on quality. We want that job satisfaction in our lives and in our clients lives. We want our clients to know we care about the outcome of their projects. But we’re running into some negative feedback because basically, we’re just not keeping up with demand.

I can use the excuse that working seven days a week is taking it’s toll, and it is, but at the end of the day, there’s a shortfall from us that we need to figure out a solution for.

I’m going to be sitting down with Camilla over the next month or so and figure out how we can combat this problem. We’re still in the position that we do not want to expand, but the rapid influx of new enquiries that are never ending and the large demand for our services, is starting to take it’s toll.

Kind of the opposite of what we want to achieve. Previously working towards good reputation by staying smaller and keeping the quality of work high….but we’re at present refusing to grow and getting bad feedback because of it. Where is the balance I suppose?

There is the other option of just riding this out because it will slow down again, I just don’t want keep having our clients let down by our time frames that seem ever harder to control.

The best I can do for now, is learn something from this feedback and work hard to improve ourselves so we can keep moving forward.