When things don't go to plan

An imperfect start (which feels oddly fitting)

Sometimes things just don’t go to plan. Today we (me and my assistant, Courtney) were supposed to be launching our new offering, Making, Again. We nervously put the date in our calendars towards the end of last year, knowing it would be a stretch, but also hoping it would be possible. Nothing like a deadline to get things moving.

Making, Again is about rediscovering your love for sewing through play and curiosity, so what better time to begin than the start of a new year. When goals are forming. When energy is meant to be at its height. But also when our lives suddenly shift from blissfully free (for those of us lucky enough to have time off work over this period) to suddenly strict with routines. Back to daycare drop-offs, back to the desk, back to having to think about what’s for dinner… three days in and you’re wondering when your next break is coming.

It’s a good time to get realistic about how our hobbies and self-care can fit alongside our actual lives.

I was lucky enough to be able to take 2.5 weeks off work over the Christmas and new year period. I use the word “lucky,” but really my daughter’s daycare closed for that long, so sometimes that’s just the way things go when you don’t have a support system outside of paid daycare. It meant I had to put my computer down and be fully present.

My daughter is at an age where it feels like it’s all go-go-go. She may nap, she may not. And if I somehow miraculously get her down for a nap at a civilised time (and not the dreaded 5pm one when she decides now is a great time to fall asleep in the car), I have been choosing to nap instead of work. Because that’s what self-care looks like in this season.

A nice little mantra I learned when she was small, which has followed me through each period of change, is: “Can I do this when she’s awake?” Very quickly you realise that dishes can be done, laundry can be done, errands can be done, even a few emails can be sent with a child by your side…

What’s harder (or should I say impossible?) is having a rest while your child is awake.

I tried last week. She had refused to nap, so I put a movie on and lay next to her, hoping to squeeze in twenty minutes of rest to get me through the afternoon. But she somehow managed to wake me every time I just nodded off. “Mama, what’s happening now?” “Mama, can I have a snack?” “Mama, I need to go to the toilet.”

So coming back into my working life has felt both blissfully peaceful and a shock to the system. I miss my daughter, as I got used to her little footsteps running through the house at all hours of the day. And I miss having time to live unstructured. Late bedtimes, sleep-ins, no rush to get out the door to daycare.

But as it is with all things parenting, I was also excited to get stuck into something new in my working life. So much of last year was absorbed by working out what was next for me and the business, finalising our final Curated projects, and then wrapping up the subscription. Having it all tied up in a somewhat neatly tied bow at the end of last year was a relief.

Having it off the to-do list made space for this new thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Courtney was back to work a week earlier than me, so she got to work putting our launch plan into action. I came back to work on Monday and started on my end of things: fine-tuning our first playbook, putting the final touches on our messaging, and working out how the backend of this whole thing works.

I’ve talked about it in the past, but in short, the backend of Curated was a big hurdle that really got me down by the end. I launched it at a time when digital content subscriptions weren’t as prevalent as they are now, and it always felt like a bit of a hodge-podge of software stuck together. Our community platform sat outside our subscription platform. Our content needed to be sent by email. People couldn’t log in to access their past files. The list goes on…

Those things don’t seem like such a big deal when you haven’t launched, or only have a few subscribers. But as the numbers grew and time went on (and we added more and more projects to our back catalogue), these little issues became much more of a drain on our energy and resources. I was often spending more time trying to fix things, or make things run more smoothly, than actually designing patterns.

So when we came up with the idea of Making, Again, I knew that a smooth backend needed to be the priority, for both us and our customers. I had already started writing on Substack and the ease of the platform meant there was a low barrier to entry. Less decision-making. No piecing things together that didn’t quite fit. And it has a paid option, so it seemed like the natural fit for this new offering.

There was a learning curve to get things set up correctly, and I’d say this will continue for the first few weeks as we get going, but everything has felt fairly intuitive.

There was one little thing that would pop into my head at random times, which I had scribbled down but never prioritised looking into: “check how Substack manages GST” (the goods and services tax Australian businesses must collect from Australian customers once our business income hits a certain threshold). I knew it was important, but it also felt like something that would probably be easy enough to handle in Substack, so it kept slipping to the bottom of my list.

When I finally looked into it properly, I realised switching on GST collection on Substack wasn’t as easy as toggling a button. I needed to make an update in Stripe (the payment processor Substack uses), which was easy enough, but then I needed to reach out to someone at Substack to manually integrate the tax function with Substack.

And as you know if you’ve dealt with any software companies lately, getting through to a human is not the easiest thing. AI bots now rule customer service and will do everything they can to avoid passing your question onto a person. So I had a chat with this particular bot. It said it would pass my ticket onto a person. But then it said it could take days to get a reply…

So here I am on launch day, without the ability to launch. I think all our i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, but we are in limbo while we wait for the ability to make sure any payments we process are aligned with our tax obligations.

What is difficult when launching something new, or making a big change, is that you only get one chance to do it properly. It’s not like Curated, where each month we could fine-tune our processes and smooth out the way things were working (which I’m sure will be the same with Making, Again). Some things you can only do once. There’s no practice run. No dress rehearsal. And as your brand gets bigger, the number of people watching is larger. We ran into this when we closed off Curated subscriptions.

We had been keeping a list for months of all the things we needed to do before switching it off, so on December 31 when I sat down to do it, I felt fairly confident I knew what to do. What I didn’t foresee is that when I switched off the subscription, all subscribers would get an automated email saying it had ended, and I hadn’t thought to go in and update that email to explain what was happening.

So although most people knew that Curated was coming to an end, the messaging that was automatically sent out when it did was inconsistent with what we’d been saying to our customers for months. My heart sank.

When anything like this happens, I really take it to heart. I like to look professional and like I know what I’m doing. Like a competent person who has my customers’ best interests in mind at all times. I guess I sometimes want it to look like my business is more than just me and an assistant, and often, thanks to the internet and all the tools we have at our disposal, it can.

What I’ve learned over time though is that these are the moments when, instead of burying your head in the sand, you need to come forward and show your humanity. Before any more confused emails or complaints came in, I emailed all our customers and said: I made a mistake. I am sorry. This is what happened, and this is what I should have done.

I guess this is one of those lessons that applies in everyday life and in business life, and it’s just a matter of learning and re-learning it over and over again. Stepping up and taking ownership of our mistakes takes away some of the shame, while also reconnecting you to others (in this case, our customers). Reminding them that you’re just a person behind the screen, trying to do your best, helps.

As I read back through this essay before I published it, I can see that the person writing it is still living between two worlds: that of full-time mothering, which has consumed my life for the last few weeks, and that of being a business owner. I’m still in that in-between, finding my feet again at work for the new year, while also holding space for how much I miss having my daughter around.

And maybe that’s the point of this whole thing. Making, Again isn’t about perfection or polished launches. It’s about showing up with what’s real. So, in that spirit, I’ve paused the ability to sign up to a paid subscription for now, while we sort out a backend GST hiccup. The details are up though. You can have a read, have a poke around, and see what you notice. We’ll be ready for you very soon.

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