More than six years ago, I was looking for a new role. Little did I know that what I ended up finding was a friend and business partner with whom I’ve been having a regular standing one-on-one from day one of us working together.
Fast forward to the end of 2024, and that standing appointment and the quality time it’s given us, have lasted through us working together as CEO and CTO, through several acquisitions, us starting our own business, and now being close to publishing a book that we started working on four years ago. The book started out as a tool to help us stay connected, to work together.
Along the way, the book has turned into a manifestation of our commitment to each other, just as much as the standing meeting time in our calendars is. From our very first conversation, we knew we had something different here and we wanted to hold on to it.
We live nine time zones apart, so our time together is crucial not just to get work done, but also to keep our bond and partnership alive. Throughout the last twelve months, this has manifested itself in sessions where we worked through pages and pages of edits and also nitpicking over the use and meaning of specific words and language in the book.
Now that we’re getting really close to finally publishing our book, a labour of love spanning more than four years of our time together, I can’t help but look back at the last six years and admire that we’ve had this standing meeting every single week.
But it’s just a regular meeting, Mathias, is what I can hear you say. Everyone’s got plenty of those. Indeed it is, but this particular meeting is about maintaining a nurturing a relationship, a partnership, a friendship. We spend at least a third of our time with a personal checkin to just see what the other has been up to. All this happens in addition to the regular texts and updates we sent each other about the goings-on in our lives. This meeting is about staying connected, about having a reliable space where we can vent and celebrate, and where we can also just say that we’re tired of reading the book over and over for the umpteenth time but still be excited for it to come out soon. The meeting is a space for emotions as much as it is a place where we can discuss the gnarly stuff and share thoughts and ideas about the future.
In the hustle of everyday work, personal connection is easily overlooked, maintaining of relationships is given low priority. We rush from meeting to meeting, always buzzed, with little focus on the person in front of us. This kind of culture is what both of us have been committed to proving wrong from our very beginnings, way before we started our meeting six years ago. It’s what got us to write this book that we’re this close to sharing with the world. We can’t wait!
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