This article is as much for me as it is for anyone else. It’s an attempt for me to capture - in this moment - my excitement, hopes, and ambitions that led me to joining Open Path Partners. This meant leaving behind my full-time architecture role at a respected employer and accepting all the uncertainty that came with it. To some degree I hope this entertains, but the real value will be for me to document what I knew and how I felt so that I can reflect upon it at some time in the future.
As of last week, I’d describe my career as being on-track. To be fair, I still consider it on-track, but let’s get to that in a bit. When I first started out in the Engineering profession working for a global materials company, I felt like things were on-track. I joined as a junior Engineer, attained my professional status, became a facility manager and was enroot to becoming a provincial area manager. I stood out amongst my peers and my career looked promising.
The truth is, I was missing something, and ultimately I threw in the towel. At that time, I wasn’t looking for a career change, I was looking to better align my holidays with my wife’s (she’s a teacher and gets summers off). Summers in Saskatchewan are great, being able to spend parts of them together would also be great. My construction career made summer holidays rare and that wasn’t likely to change. In the end, I did find a career change. Long story short, I re-training to work in the tech industry. This last summer, I took plenty of holidays to spend with my wife and family and I’m glad I made the transition.
My on-track career experience continued in the tech industry where I started out in freelancing, landed a full-time job with a growing company, moved through technology stacks and up the management ranks becoming a technical lead and team-lead. I eventually transitioned companies and landed in an architecture role which I held up until last week. Had I stayed longer, I surely would have transitioned to a lead-architecture role.
So to summarize, my current state was a good career trajectory, stable job, good pay and benefits, and a bright future ahead.
So here’s the bug. I’ve seen fantastic software projects. Projects that provide real benefit, unleash creativity across the team and delivery high quality software fast. These projects were fun to work on, incredibly rewarding to be apart of and something I want to do more of.
I spent a fair bit of time reflecting on how these projects came together, what made them special, and how they could be recreated. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading books and research articles, watching videos, and having discussions with people I consider to be thought-leaders in our industry. And I truly believe that there’s a set of repeatable practices that can put projects into the lauded category I’m looking for.
So here’s where the company (Open Path Partners) comes in. Not everything in tech is a project. In fact to be a project, it’s got to be something that’s new, has a defined start, a defined end, and provides some benefit as a result. There’s certainly some of that at a typical tech company, but there’s a lot of not that as well. If I were able to work with more companies and focus on delivering high value through projects, I’d be able to make a much larger impact in the software industry. That’s what I really want to achieve.
So I had an idea, start a company to help companies build high-value, high quality software, fast. But I still didn’t know a lot of stuff. Is it a good idea? Will companies be interested in working with me? Would I actually enjoy doing the work? How do I go about finding a company to work with? How can I communicate the value and why I am doing things differently than they are used to?
Early on, I synced up with a group of people who were also looking to start a company in the custom software space. Originally there were 6 of us sharing, learning, and trying to explain our goals to each other. We wanted to see if we would be a good fit together. For months we chatted and had regular video calls. And through it all, it wasn’t really clear if we would be a good fit or not.
Eventually, we brought in a great facilitator and had an in-person day to go through the details in a structured way. That was a game changer. It became apparent that not all of us had similar aims or experiences. One by one the group dwindled from 6 to 5 to 4 to 3. Eventually I gave up on the idea as well. I went so far as to incorporate on my own. I believed at this point that I’d need to figure it out myself.
During this time of “figuring out” how to start a company, I found I spent a lot of time talking with a subset of our original group, Gabriel and Jeremy. And as I worked through the details of setting up my bookkeeping, fleshing out a website and trying to narrow in on how I could offer my ideas as a thing that could be purchased, I found I was continuously talking to and bouncing ideas off of Jeremy and Gabriel.
It turns out that the three of us had a lot in common in terms of experience, goals, and a passion for valuable software. We formed Open Path Partners in April and have been working together ever since.
So far, I believe this has been a huge benefit. All three of us have different perspectives and we are synergetic together. Having someone to talk things through with, who brings their own ideas and works to find the best path forward, has been a huge boon. So far I’m very happy that we decided to join up. I continued to operate my own business at arms length from Open Path Partners until I had fully committed to the idea, which I’ll touch on later when I discuss my framework for entry.
While all this is going on, I set out to talk to other Entrepreneurs. I still didn’t know if this would be the lifestyle that I’d want to have, whether it would be easy or hard, or really how to go about doing it.
I talked with family members who run their own small businesses, I talked to my neighbours who are self-employed running bookkeeping, plumbing, and safety consultancies. I talked to work connections, small contractors and large. I connected with friends of friends, I even went so far as to email an owner where our only connection was a 7 year old email chain about a job application that didn’t work out.
I got a lot of advice. How best to utilize valet parking at airports as a business expense, what types of insurance to carry, tips about business permit requirements to work from home, you name it. It was all useful stuff and I took notes.
Some of the advice and experience that really resonated with me at the time are paraphrased as:
You have to be in business to do business. Even if a magical opportunity comes up, if you don’t have a company, bank account, GST number and all the things worked out, you aren’t getting the job.
I started working in the evenings. It took a few years before I’d built enough of a business to transition from my day-job, but I’m glad I did.
What?! You mean you are still working full-time? There’s no way you can put in the effort to build a business in the evenings and weekends.
I don’t get paid as much as some, but I’ve got a house, my business is profitable and it feels secure, I take holidays when I need them, and I’m turning away more work than I can do. There’s lots of opportunity out there for you too.
And above all else, everybody was happy to talk about their experience. To be honest that group of entrepreneurs that I talked to seemed to be the happiest group of people that I’d talk to - maybe ever. Nobody said I shouldn’t consider entrepreneurship. When I reflect on it, it overwhelmingly felt like I was being invited into a family, with everyone wanting to help me out.
This experience gave me a lot of confidence that I could succeed and more importantly, if I did succeed, I could see myself being happy like the group I’d spoken with.
Open Path Partners is founded, I’m still fully employed, and the three of us, Gabriel, Jeremy, and I are out there looking for work. During this time, we landed our first job. It’s great, but we are out there looking for more. The thing I’m worried about the most are: Will there be more work? Is the work we are doing the “right work”? Can I sell this concept? Will I enjoy being a salesperson?
The truth was, I couldn’t sell. The first time I gave it a shot, I may as well of had a mouth full of marbles. I didn’t know how to articulate how we were different, I couldn’t answer basic questions about how we operated or would solve availability issues if we had multiple partnerships. I didn’t know what prices we’d charge. But I got feedback, I found the answers I didn’t have, I learned, and I looked forward to the next opportunity to connect with someone.
That combined with working with our first partner, delivering a successful project, and watching our business relationship grow pushed me even further towards going all in.
I knew by this point that I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing, which was largely watching Gabriel and Jeremy figure out process, work with partners on existing and new work, set strategy and really defining Open Path Partners. While I was catching up in the evenings, critiquing what they’d done and picking up some coding tasks here and there, I had this feeling like most of the excitement was passing me by.
I worked with my family, who have been hugely supportive, to develop a framework to help guide when it was time for me to make the move from my safe full-time employment into my new venture. I needed to figure out if I was going to go in deeper or bow out altogether.
The framework that my family and I came up with was relatively straight forward.
The first point was straight forward. We saved money, we did a household budget and we put together a business plan for Open Path Partners. Mathematically, we are going to be okay for a while. Should things not work out, we’ll be okay as well. So I got the first checkmark.
The second point checked for me when one of our partners said, “We’d like you to work with us to figure out the best way forward.” That was the ticket, they understood how we were different and how we could excel together.
The final point, was the explosion of interest in Open Path Partners. We went from a few warm leads coming from friends and past collogues to connecting with people through recommendations and our website. Even random encounters with strangers at sporting events were bringing in new opportunities. I believe now that there is demand for what we are doing, so I checked this box as well.
Once the framework had clicked, there was nothing left to do but make the move. I’d like to thank my partners, those entrepreneurs that shared their time and experience, and my family. I’m excited and looking forward to the future.
