Writing this from Starbucks. Grande iced Americano and the same table as always. Training at lunchtime then working from David Lloyd this afternoon.
Ten weeks to HYROX Jakarta. This newsletter is officially a week old. Both feel significant. Let's go.
Two businesses. Two completely different games.
I run Toucan, a 40 person Amazon and TikTok agency. I co-own Twenty One Beauty, a brand we're building toward exit. On paper, they're both "businesses I run." In practice, they operate nothing like each other.
Toucan is a service business. What we sell is expertise and execution. The product is people. There's no asset sitting in a warehouse. Just a team that needs to show up and be excellent every week for clients who are paying precisely for that. A strong run of new business can shift an entire quarter.
Twenty One Beauty is a product business. We manufacture something physical, ship it, store it, sell it. The product exists whether or not we're at our desks. A good November generates December revenue without anyone actively doing anything additional. But a strong single month? Barely a data point. You need six months before the picture is clear enough to act on.
“The mistake isn’t running two different businesses. It’s running them both the same way.”
The agency rewards speed and relationships. The brand rewards patience and compounding. They're different games with different clocks and different rules.
The mistake I see founders make constantly is applying the same operating rhythm to both. Expecting a brand to respond the way an agency does when you push it. Getting frustrated when it doesn't. The sooner you recognise which game you're in, the better every decision gets.
Ten weeks out. And a curveball I couldn’t plan for.
Hyrox Jakarta is June 27th. I'm doing a Pro Doubles with my mate Neil, who I met in Bali. We've been training separately and trading strategy over messages for weeks. That changes things completely. This isn't about my individual time. It's about us not letting each other down on the day.
I'd rather drag myself through a session I don't feel like doing than have to explain to Neil why I wasn't ready.
The weak points in my race are the running and the wall balls. I've always been stronger on the functional stations - the sled, the lunges. The 8x1km running segments, after your legs have already taken a beating from the stations, that's where time gets left on the course. In a doubles format that matters even more. You can't mask it. You can't make it up on the sled.
So the bulk of this training block is built around the thing I'd rather avoid. Running when I'd rather lift. Outdoor intervals instead of the treadmill. Getting comfortable with the specific kind of uncomfortable that Hyrox produces when your body wants to stop and the race isn't finished.
I fly to Bali on June 2nd, a three-month stint. So the final weeks of the build happen in 30-degree heat and humidity, which is a different kind of challenge. The first week or two in warm weather is always rough. Heart rate runs higher at the same effort, paces drop, your body is working hard just to keep you cool. Most people mistake that adjustment for lost fitness and start forcing it. It's not. It's adaptation. You come out the other side better if you trust the process.
More importantly, those weeks give Neil and me the chance to actually be in the same place at the same time and refine the race strategy properly. There's only so much you can do over messages. In person is different.
“Everyone wants to train their strengths. True progress is always in your weaknesses.”
The parallel to business: accountability changes your output. Whether it's a business partner or someone racing alongside you, the standard you hold yourself to rises the moment someone else is in it with you.
The thing nobody tells you about starting something.
The newsletter has been out for seven days. I've had more replies than I expected. Not hundreds. A handful. But they're real. People who read something and felt like it landed.
I spent longer thinking about whether to send issue one than it took to write it.
The planning phase feels productive because it carries no real risk. The moment you actually publish something, it becomes real and it can fail. So people stay in the planning phase.
The only way to find out if something works is to make it and find out.
So if there's something you've been sitting on, a newsletter, a business, a side project, a conversation you need to have, just go. Not when it's ready. Not when the logo is done or the website looks right. Now, in whatever state it's currently in.
An imperfect thing that exists beats a perfect thing that doesn't every single time.
That's issue two.
If you forwarded issue one to someone last week, thank you. That's genuinely the whole growth strategy right now.
See you next week