Vicarious parenting

Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve been fascinated about looking at the world through the lens of parenting. On many accounts, it’s a helpful lens because it shows that deep down we’re all inner children suffering around and trying to stay safe when dealing with other inner children. My therapist says so, and it’s a worldview that I think helps reconcile a lot of the pain we see out there, especially when we’re looking at who inflicts it.

Anyway, this has led to many beneficial conversations over the years about the nature of parenting, as I try and become the best dad I can be. But also parenting can help us become better strategists, as I wrote about here. More recently though, this analogy came through in my client work as well.

I’ve been working with a B2B business who targets SMBs, and among one of the early revelations we worked out that running a small business is basically like raising a child. Sure, people say their companies feel like their babies, but I wanted to riff a bit more on the topic.

So, here are 10 aspects in which running a small business can feel is like raising a little person around the house who you can both love and hate at the same time, because these things have stopped being a contradiction a while ago. It feels like a string of moments making up the experience of vicarious parenting. If you have a kid, you see the parallels. If you don’t have kids, it’s a preview.

Sleep

When you have a newborn, you enter a cycle where sleep becomes more of a series of little moments rather than a full episode. Irregular hours, 3am panics, the unsettling feeling that we’re reacting to things we don’t yet understand. When you see distress, you worry (why are they still crying? Why do I need to keep spending 4 hours putting out fires instead of building the business?). When things get quiet, you wonder if you’re missing something important (are they still breathing? Have my leads dried up? Have I coasted for too long?).

Fragility

At any given moment it feels like it could all end. The business could implode because you got lucky. A missed detail, bad call or moment of neglect could create the scars they will be trying to sort out in therapy decades later. Of course, this is all a matter of looking at consequences in an outsized manner, but worrying about tiny things is still worrying. You’re trying to create solid foundations while worrying that at any given moment a butterfly can flap its wings and destroy months of hard work.

Belief

Everything we achieve as parents or small business owners feels like a unique experience the world deserves to know. For everyone else, it’s either just part of what is expected (so you calmed a tantrum, welcome to the club) or worse, things just look messy, half-formed or chaotic (this is how you run the thing?). We run on a hyperactive cocktail of belief, cashflow and coffee that means the world is now made of little victories, and the occasional loss of perspective about whether they are even victories, but deep down we can’t afford not to see them as such because the alternative would be to admit something worse.

Energy

Different from sleep, because you can be moderately well slept (lol what’s that) and lack energy to do stuff anyway. Or you can have terrible sleep and yet wake up energised because what you’re doing feels meaningful. The answer is often somewhere in the middle, because what you’re trying is investing into something that will take time to deliver returns. The endless request to hold a fork like this, not like that, pays off after 517 days of repetition until on day 518 it clicks. The management of your energy after another new business meeting that felt great and led nowhere, is as part of the job as doing new business is.

Opinions

The moment you say you have a child, the theatre of opinion sharing begins. You swap innocent notes about how you do things versus how someone else does things, but you’re always an “well actually” away from someone insisting they’ve found the way to get them to go to bed on time, or you finally cracked how to manage screen time and they really ought to try it with their little ones. Or perhaps it’s that you definitely should think about marketing your business through trade shows, not social media, except this other person found great success using social media so you should give it a go as well. Maybe start a newsletter or build a LLM to get your name out there, but also watch out because this other person did this and it just resulted in a bunch of wasted time.

Milestones

Everything feels like a big deal for a hot minute and then you’re back on a form of the hedonistic treadmill. First sale, first smile, first profitable month, first step, the system works, and then… ok onto the next thing! There’s a rush of relief (I’m not a total failure at this!) followed by a rush of insufficiency (what is the next thing, and what if I can’t work that out now?). Milestones feel at the same time like moments to celebrate (we made it in the end!) and commiserate (it’s not the end, there’s a million more things to do), and this becomes another bit of texture on the template that you experience contradictory feelings every hour of the day. There are moments of contentment, but they often happen between the milestones, never while the milestones are actually achieved.

Identity

Where do I begin and my daughter ends? Of course, at an atomic level, the answer to this is relatively straightforward (though some quantum physicists might disagree), but at an identity level things get tricky. Sure, we’re different people, but between seeing myself as a parent that needs to be broadly alert to my child’s needs every hour, alongside my partner, suddenly you start seeing yourself not as a person who does parenting, but as a parent who also happens to do other things. With a business, you’re now a business owner who also has a life outside of work, rather than a person who happens to run a business. Identities get muddled and before we know it we’re co-existing with different versions of ourselves, like a multiversal episode of The Office, The Bear or Silicon Valley, depending on which business archetype you subscribe to.

Growth

Everything you do should ideally outgrow you. A process you create should allow other people to use the process when you’re not in the room, even if you don’t have particular ambitions to scale massively (or at all). But this of course only lasts so long because you then discover new variables you need to account for, and the process needs to change. So getting ahead of what operationally needs to change is important, because otherwise the operational problems find you when you least expect and now you’re in crisis management mode. Or the parenting style you thought you had cracked now needs to change because the child changed the brief, and they can use their words to negotiate with you, and their logic actually… makes sense? To create the environments for someone or something else to flourish also means to acknowledge that the seasons constantly change and therefore so does the nature of the soil.

Autonomy

You don’t want to have to manage everything forever. Sure, some things are truly enjoyable and therefore not something you’re willing to outsource (the research, the writing, the presenting, the ability and energy to play with your kid whenever they need you), but by and large we’re designing a new organism that one day may not need us at all. And when that happens, that is a positive outcome, because a child that grows through increasing levels of autonomy and independence grows into a self-confident adult who’s not afraid to do things their own way, without desperately worrying about mum’s or dad’s approval. A business that runs autonomously from you is not so much a function of you not being necessary, but rather there is a baseline through which other people can operate without you needing to be consulted every step of the way. This is how other people grow. Ironically, it’s how we grow too.

Villages

And yet, all of this is the result not of your sole effort, but rather your ability to coordinate with others how you distribute effort and make the whole stronger than its parts. Constant conversation with your partner or spouse or parents about how we do things here becomes essential. Consulting with other parents who are further along from you is helpful, as is to reflect with parents who are a bit further behind, because sometimes when we talk about our experiences out loud we learn something about them too. Finding a metaphorical village through which you can raise your own child (the human or business one) reduces the feeling of isolation, because even if ultimately it’s on you (individually or as a couple) to make the call, the confidence and conviction that results from having the reassurance of others pays for itself in gold.

On the parenting front, it’s why I rely on voices and platforms like Good Inside, Daily Dad or Nurtured First, contact with a few other parents in my circle to help me make up my mental village as I help raise a strong young woman in the best possible way I know how. On the business front, it’s why I created the Salmon Crew, because we all go upstream if we swim together.

No person is an island, but we’re not mainland either. We’re archipelagos.