Rest.

It's not like it's news to me - my entire business proposition and marketing revolves around the fact that busy urbanites need a place and time to recharge.

Thing is, so do us county guys, it appears.

This year has been busy, and busy isn't just that 'moving forward kicking ass' experience we all love to reach on occasion for all our effort,  But it's also the busyness that keeping it all from derailing, especially businesses like I run, where we are always pushing the envelope in terms of effort and growing the businesses - it's never a dull moment.  It's constantly like a rapidly spinning machine where the pieces of the machine are always in danger of just breaking, flying off,  and disintegrating spontaneously.

Perhaps its evident to everyone else who runs a business but it's something that I always assumed would not be so difficult, even in the face of 10 yrs of counter-evidence, but the management of people, their issues, abilities, good days, bad days, etc... is a lot of frickin work as you grow a business, especially true as you grow one in where the talent pool is shallow indeed.  So a lot of my work this year is putting together a new team, and making a commitment to retain those people who are in these positions now.  As the owner of a business who needed to keep things going, I've taken one for the team for years in terms of working with people who didn't gel with me, or my style, but they got the job done to some degree and the fear of chaos was much greater than the fear of being irritated on a second by second basis.

Turns out I was totally wrong - you got to surround yourself with complimentary people - in style, personality - every company has a culture, and people either fit or they don't.  And to think that my general emotional well-being was less important growing a business was just an amateur calculation to the core.

The more rested I am, the more energized by those who surround me, the better our business is and after all the fights, struggles, wins and losses on the personnel front over the last 10 yrs, nothing is so sweet as fitting the right people in the right slots.  All of sudden, it's like magic - the businesses just explode.  I've been driving them all around, but when you hit that perfect RPM where the companies just fire effortlessly (yeah right, keep dreaming Petersheim), that is a reward like no other (besides maybe an unexpected happy ending after an in-house massage by an unexpectedly hottie masseuse).

So, what I'm realizing is that after a lot of stress and hardwork this year as I reinvent my companies once again, and as I got screwed out of my long anticipated vacation at the last moment by friends of mine, and are closing on 5 houses in 6 weeks, and have grown all 3 businesses by at least 40% each, I've pushed too hard.

And as I now regain my balance and humor and patience and general emotional and intellectual geniusness (boy can I hear the ex on that one as I write it - in fact, pervertedly, it's almost why I wrote it), I am reacquainted with something that is so obvious -

Everyone needs rest to perform well (that's what she said) - and to ignore that simple fact is to miss an important truism of business.

And miss to many of those truism (hello Henning of Henning's Local) and you won't be around for long.