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If you've ever been a small business owner where you have people depending on you the following might sound familiar to you.
It's one in the morning, your eyes are burning, you're mainlining Monster (the energy drink) as you hunt an issue.
Something is broken, it's not the system or product you've built but the problem is still very much yours... well if you care it is, you could choose to park it in someone else's lap if you wanted with a "it's not the system".
But you care, so you don't.
You understand the inner workings of the system in a way nobody else does, either because you built it or you've been holding it together with hope and if-statements for years.
At that moment it feels like getting the short end of the stick, not like you're "winning".
It took me a long time, longer than I would like to admit, before I realised that the thing that FEELS like losing is the reason a business like mine gets to exist at all.
Feelings are often not quite the truth.
The comfortable end of the stick
Picture the "long" end of the stick. The big players with their names on buildings, with oceans of support staff and resources to run a small empire.
When you are that big the incentives slowly erode. It happens over a long period, and nobody even notices. Well... internally nobody notices, but the clients do.
Many clients will stick with the devil they know. They weigh up the risks, and many times the cost is too high and the time investment involved in switching can be higher still. It's easier to control the "known" shortcomings of a provider than to sail into the unknown of a new provider. The pressure to perform slowly becomes a thing nobody feels... as long as the performance is at least "okish" and nothing burns down that pressure all but evaporates.
And when that pressure fades so does the reason to care about the small things. Not really because anyone decides to stop caring. There's no team talk where people sit around a table and decide to reply to mails later, not to worry too much about this small issue or that small issue.
At least one would hope not.
Time and the broken window effect (blog coming about this principle and how I've patched some of mine) is how you end up with an organisation that is big enough to know better, doing things that would get a junior developer a less than stellar performance review, but feeling no pain from it at all. That pain is real though... it's just not theirs. It's crept over the wall to the customer.
That's the comfortable side of the stick. And to be totally honest: sometimes at 1am it looks extremely comfortable from where I'm sitting.
Why the short end is the sharp end
The paradigm shift took a few years to happen, and when it's tough at 1am it helps to look through the lens of caring.
The caring is not a weakness I suffer from because I am small. The caring is the entire product.
When you go with a one-person shop or small team instead of a giant. You don't get more resources. You don't get a building with fancy signage or a 24-hour call center in three time zones.
On paper it LOOKS like you get less of almost everything.
But just like feelings, looks can be deceiving.
What you do get is this: when something breaks, a human being who actually gives a damn picks up the phone. You aren't ticket number 1067 in a queue.
When the mails stop going out I'm not going to throw my hands up in the air after finding out the mailbox itself, that isn't my responsibility, isn't working.
I'm asking "can I contact your provider so I can find out what is going on?", "Can I get involved from a technical perspective so we can get things moving ASAP?".
My name is on the thing that isn't working and even though it's not "my fault" I go in to bat.
You cannot buy that at scale. You can't even get to a mid level exec unless you are spending a LOT of money with most large companies... and that's even if you are lucky.
In a large organisation, anything short of a nuclear explosion doesn't impact anyone within that organisation more than a stern email or someone getting hot under the collar on the phone.
That same safety very easily leaks empathy.
I cannot hope to match the man hours or multi-timezone call center.
I compete where the giants cannot, with someone who cares.
Don't get me wrong, there are often people inside organisations who care deeply about their clients... but they are often tied up in red tape.
And they often end up cutting that tape and going out on their own.
I salute everyone that bets on themselves.
The midnight oil is the moat
I burn a lot of midnight oil, it used to frustrate me. It felt like a small team tax because I am too small to have a night shift.
It's not actually a tax, it's part of the product.
I'm always willing to be the person who goes the extra mile to keep things held together. If that thing is a 20 year old hope and if-statements system or something we're busy rolling out into production, I'm there. It doesn't matter what the reason for the wheels coming off (and where the rubber meets the road they do sometimes come off and roll down the road) I am there to help, even if it's outside of the scope of our "engagement".
Being that person, burning the midnight oil or stepping in outside of my "scope" to help out can feel like losing. But that's the thing I'm selling, because it's just who I am.
That is not something a giant can replicate.
The part that is genuinely hard
I'm not going to try and act superhuman (although my profile picture is me in a superman t-shirt...) and act like the paradigm shift makes the late night pushes fun.
They aren't.
Knowing that the thing that is your strength is also the thing that is tiring is not a huge comfort at 1am with a headache, dry contacts and a system on fire.
It does however change what that tiredness means. It's not the pain of losing, it's the pain that proves you're still doing the one thing the giant can't.
It's like the DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) you feel after a solid gym session.
The day that I'm not willing to get my hands dirty in a mess that isn't mine is the day I have nothing left to offer that a bigger, less interested company couldn't offer instead.
So if you, like me, are running a small thing (or if you're starting one) and you're feeling tired and you feel like you always get the short end of your stick... look at what you have in your hand, the short end is the sharp end.
That is the bit that cuts, the comfortable end doesn't cut anything which is why people tend not to be afraid of comfort (except in movies when they are like "it's quiet... too quiet").
Care more than is reasonable, with less than is fair. It does not feel like an advantage at one in the morning.
It is the only one that matters.
So, a genuine question, and I'd like to hear the answers.
If you're running a small thing that other people lean on: which part of it still feels like the weakness? The bit you'd hand off first if somebody handed you the resources to do it.
I had mine backwards for years. I'd bet a few of you have too.
If you're just plain running your own thing I want to hear your story. I really enjoy hearing people's wins too!