Organizing my thoughts about work for the start of 2025

This week I had a dental hygienist cleaning and fillings as I alluded to in this post. That meant I took the best part of a day away from work. The workload is already I suppose too much and taking time away doesn't make matters better. To compensate and to stay sane I started work at 6.30am on Thursday and worked until about 6pm with limited breaks.

A little aside, I took this photo on the way that morning to text my friend about the new season of Severance, a brilliant Apple TV show - watch it if you haven't seen it!

I made some progress in the morning and the day got derailed with additional emails and phone calls.

Here's an example of an outstanding task - investor moved out of the country and no longer can own the investment so I have to negotiate with him to get him to find a Canadian tax resident to transfer his investment to, and then talk to lawyers to do the paperwork etc.

Other tasks are helping existing and new investors invest. We accept small and large amounts so one investor who wants to put in $2,000 will likely take up the same amount of my brainpower as someone putting in $200,000 or $2m we have to help the investors with paperwork. In my job I don't get commissions so I'm not overly incentivised to bring in many new investors or new capital in general. As a sales person I'm farming existing relationships and word of mouth rather than being a hunter who sources new investors.

The good thing about this is I don't have sales targets so the risk of being fired is lower by being operational and sales rather than pure sales. And the bad thing about not getting commission is that sales people on commission can make double my salary or more so if they bring in $2m it's financially worth while to them personally.

In my career I have been lucky and unlucky to have a person who is a master delegator, let's call him Dave, and he trusted my ability and delegated as much as possible to me over the past several years. This has helped grow my knowledge and ability and my career would not be where it is without Dave. I mentioned that I got promoted twice in 2024 and he was instrumental in making sure the higher ups knew I was worth motivating to stay.

But Dave's delegations doesn't come without stress because his standards are so high. Sometimes I hate to see an email or teams notification from him as he expects responses and it takes you out of the flow of what you were doing already.

That being said Dave is someone I would like to be able to shadow and follow in his footsteps to the maximum of my ability. In my mind I am sprinting to keep up with his pace and he is mostly jogging with everything under control. I know he gets stressed sometimes too as his role has loads of responsibilities but he hides it well most of the time.

Dave has gone from a my current role to a much higher paying position so I see the room to grow. If I'm loyal, work my ass off and am positive about growing the business etc then I can push myself forward.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by a good team, two girls who report to me and a new manager I report to. The new hire, one of the girls I hired in 2024 is hitting the ground running so I'm grateful how it's working out so far, enthusiastic, asks the right questions and has good attention to detail. She is more technically minded than me in a lot of ways and good at coding so will make things efficient and scalable.

I'm positive about 2025 work wise even if I feel like I'm suffocating or drowning sometimes. My biggest resolution for work in 2025 is to delegate and let go of as much workload as possible, especially work I do not enjoy. That way I can be front and center on new projects and demonstrate my ability and prove how capable our team is. I can also be grateful we are getting busier rather than being at risk of shrinking the headcount of the company.
I think I also need to learn to embrace suffocating and accept that it's a normal phase that won't last forever and avoid getting negative or upset about being underwater so to speak.

In the meantime my To Do list is probably 50-100 items long so if I can I'll catch up over the weekend for a few hours to make next week easier.

Tax season approaches.