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An average guy?
I'm a routine person. Coffee, shopping, arrival times for flights - I know what I want and how I want it.
I'm a white, 45 year old, Tory voting, heterosexual - so I'll let you decide if I'm either a) pathetically stuck in my ways, or b) just very self-aware. Actually, please don't!
The small boosts add up
Something bad must have happened in my formative years to leave me in constant need of self-affirmation.
I've designed my morning routine accordingly. The smell of my shower gel, the cut through I've found on the journey to work, the hot steaming coffee and the lame joke I make with the barista, and the dodgy music I play before the office starts arriving - all personal little fillips that mean I'm generally in a brilliant mood by the time the normal working day starts.
Not quite a fairy-tale but...
One of the other things I do is check the Nanny Share bank account to see how many people signed up the day before.
Let me tell you the Nanny Share story... I was sitting with the head of childcare in Hounslow. She was saying how difficult it was for people at British Airways to sort their childcare because of the funny hours they worked. They obviously needed the flexibility of a nanny but at half the cost. I mooted the idea in the office and one of the clever web guys who spent too much of his time on Match.com said "I know what we should do..." The rest is history.
Move on up
It's a great little business. Every day parents sign up, paying £25 each for the privilege. As the site (almost) runs itself, the margin is amazing. Amazing, that is, until someone in marketing decides we should spend the money increasing our sign-ups from X parents to Y parents a day. Whatever we do, it stays at X. And yet, as Journey urged me, I "don't stop believing".
We've just bought the only competition, we're re-skinning the site and we're about to make NannySharing more accessible to the thousands of working parents we already have on the books.
This time it will be different. Honestly!
Ben Black
