Not Finished. Better.

Our newest chickens hatched on July 13th. 

It’s the end of October and they’re still living in the house. 

That’s not the story I thought I’d be telling you. 

On July 29th we bought a shed to turn into a coop. Easy. Shed shows up, chickens move in, done.

The shed took three weeks to arrive, and somewhere in those three weeks Greg and I started talking. 

All the extension cords for the other coops are a pain in the neck to manage. Let’s add electricity. And wall board will make it easier to clean and keep out varmints. What about a cabinet for supplies. And I’ve always wanted a built-in cage, so when we add new chickens later we can introduce them easily. 

Then we looked at the floor and realized chicken poop was going to stick to it. Let’s install a vinyl floor, but not like the last one, something thicker. 

Then we built the run and realized it wasn’t big enough. We built it bigger. Then we built it bigger again, because we didn’t want the size of the run to limit how many chickens the new coop could hold. 

Greg took two days off work last week to finish it up. We’re close, but we’re not there yet. 

Here’s the thing that makes this all worth it. 

Every single one of those “wait, we need that too” moments made it a better coop. We didn’t know we wanted electricity until we thought about all the extension cords we’re already managing. We didn’t know the run was too small until we walked around inside. You can’t plan your way to knowing what you want. Sometimes you have to build your way to it. 

And that’s when it hit me: this is exactly how a business gets built. 

Nobody starts a Virtual Assistant business and gets it right the first time. The problem is that we think that’s how it should be. And when it’s not, we think maybe we’re not cut out for this. 

You land a client and realize you need a system for tracking your hours. You get busy and realize you need boundaries. Each step hands you the information you needed for the next one, and you could not have gotten it any other way. 

I hear it from my students every week: “I want to have everything figured out before I start.” I thought that too in 2010, with my spiral notebooks and my first client. Sixteen years later I’m still figuring things out. 

But if someone had handed me my mature business at the start, I couldn’t have handled it. I wouldn’t have understood how it worked or why. What I could have used was somebody who’d already built one, standing next to me saying “you’re going to want the electricity in before the walls go up.” You still do the building. You just stop learning every lesson the expensive way. 

The coop is taking longer than we thought. It’s also going to be a much better coop than the one we thought we were building. 

Your business will be the same. Not finished. Better.