I spent a few years in Dunedin when I was a kid. When we first moved there I took a paper run mainly because I’d had one in Christchurch. A few key differences: Christchurch is flat and you have a bike with a paper container on the front. My newspaper round was after school. Dunedin is hilly, so papers were delivered on foot. The only newspaper was the Otago Daily Times, a morning daily. That meant early starts, and in Dunedin an early start in winter is cold, dark, and really cold.  

The only upside, and it wasn’t much of an upside, was that at 6am my footprints were the first in the snow. And that was zero consolation for my poor parents who had to get me out of bed, shovel breakfast into me and wrap me up for the polar blast. 

I was thinking of that when I stepped out on a bright frosty morning in Mapua recently, and the thought occurred to me that being the first is always a mixture of a sense of achievement and really hard work. We’re building our own training management system because our model is different from traditional training companies and we have to automate for scale.  We’re developing a channel to market through advisors and coaches, and we’re trying something on social media that hasn’t been attempted at scale before.  

Lots of people have done some of these things up to a point, and we’re always keen to learn, but we have to have our own version (all software does 80% of what you need). And how do we find these partners? And what if we’re just first? 

Success and growth doesn’t make it any easier. As Ryan my business partner said, it’s the joy of higher quality problems. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. 

What higher quality problems are you facing today?