WordCamp San Francisco is an event that brings a lot of folks in the WordPress community together. And it starts tomorrow morning.
Recently I joined a WordPress agency full time – called Crowd Favorite. The company is actually the combination of several companies, as the original company, VeloMedia, brought their team, the old Crowd Favorite company in Denver, and Pixel Jar (from Orange County) together.
As you can imagine, any time you bring three companies together, there's work to do. And that's why I joined – to help it do the work that is required to help it grow and scale. Each company had their own challenges on their own, but also their own strengths.
How you bring disparate teams together to work from a common playbook is something I've spent the last ten years specifically working on.
I tell you all this to contextualize why the question I know I'll hear all weekend will be tough to answer.
“How are things going at Crowd Favorite?”
I bet it's a question you get too. We all hear it all the time.
And if you're like me, even as you ask it of others, we all hear roughly the same answer.
“Things are great.”
But can we be honest for a second?
The work of growth and scale is tough. It's hard work. And it's almost never pretty. It's never sexy. It's not the stuff you write about or hear during presentations.
In fact, if you were to listen to 200 entrepreneurs share their “success” story, you almost never hear the big part of the effort on the way to success.
“It was ugly and not fun. We almost killed each other.”
“It was a long grind and we made decisions that likely were stupid.”
“Whether they were the right call, I'll never know. But we got lucky.”
These are things you don't hear.
Instead you hear cute phrases about “pivots” and “crushing it” and presto – overnight success.
So as I prepared to think about answering the “how's it going” question, I had some conversations with folks I trust.
And every one of them agreed that this phase of the work we're doing isn't fun. It's not easy. And it's not glorious.
But it's required to get to where we want to go.
One friend observed this.
There are three kinds of people in the world.
Those who watch things happen.
Those who make things happen.
And those who wonder what happened.
When I think about it that way, I know which one I am.
It may not be pretty. It may not be easy.
But I'm someone who makes things happen.
What about you?