Both of us. Every day between Christmas and New Year’s. A full edit of the manuscript, front to back, one line at a time.
Victoria gave up skiing with her family. I gave up the beach with mine. Our kids were home for one week and we spent it at a laptop.
We had sworn we would never do this again.
We did it for years in the consulting business. Deals that had to close by December 31. Client presentations due the first week of January. Every year we told ourselves it was the last time, and every year the calendar found a reason.
So we built rules to stop it. The 4:45 train. Both of us staffed on the biggest accounts so one could cover for the other. An honest conversation before taking on a client who was going to eat us alive.
We wrote about those rules. They are in the book. And we broke every one of them to finish the book.
Then we found out the changes were gone. All of them. A week of work, and none of it saved.
The part that stung
We have run client projects for more than twenty years. There is no version of us that lets a team spend a week on a deliverable without confirming where the file lives and who owns the master. We would have caught it in a fifteen-minute status check on day one. We would have caught it at kickoff.
We skipped all of it because the book was ours.
That is the pattern in almost every services business we talk to. The rigor goes to the client work. The internal projects run on good intentions and a shared folder nobody checks.
Think about what is sitting in your own business right now. The website refresh that has been ninety percent done since spring. The new pricing model. The case study library. The partner agreement nobody wants to open. Those projects have no client on the other end asking for a status, so they get none.
Your own business deserves the process you sell.
Three things we changed
One owner, one file. Every project we own internally now starts with the same question the client work starts with. Who owns the master, and where does it live. It takes ninety seconds and it is the only reason we have not lost anything since.
Split the roles, not the work. We used to both be in the same document at the same time. It felt collaborative and it was the problem. Now one of us originates and one of us sharpens. I draft. Victoria makes it hit harder. The handoff is explicit, and whoever is holding it is the only one editing.
Put the deadline and the holiday on the same calendar. We did not lose that week because the deadline was impossible. We lost it because we never looked at the two things side by side until December. If the date does not work with the life, move the date or move the scope. Those are the two options. Working through the week your kids are home is not a third option. It is what happens when you skip the conversation.
We persisted anyway
We rebuilt the edit. It went back in. The book came out.
Here is the honest version. We wrote a book about refusing to sacrifice your family for your business, and we sacrificed a week with our families to write it. Both of those things are true. The rules we wrote are still right. We were the proof of what happens when you stop following them.
If you run a services business, you already know how to do this well. You do it for clients every day. The work is turning that same discipline on the thing that belongs to you.n accountant) will think you are cooler for having done this. But this really unglamorous strategy, we guarantee, is going to make you richer.
Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER is out September 22. Pre-order it here:
P.S. And if you want the rest of the story of how it got made, the rounds of edits, the argument about who the book was for, the cover fight, that is what we write about every week in Founders Files – click here to subscribe!
