Origin Story Part 1

Hi there, I hope that you are having a great week!

I am doing some more work on Linkedin, and developing a ‘post cadence’ is a real challenge for me. For some reason sticking to a recommended ‘post schedule’ is also a challenge, but the habit is forming!

Here is my post that I shared on Linkedin yesterday – some things here that have not been shared before now.

I am often asked about the origins of Independent Agent. 

The final push happened on a ward in Starship Hospital. 

I can remember the moment just as clear as if it was yesterday.

My wife and I had taken a rare night out on a date. While my mum was looking after the kids, my daughter Skylah had started behaving strangely – she was suddenly unable to walk and was crashing into walls. 

The date night ended abruptly as we went from an A&E clinic, to Waitakere Hospital, and then finally to Starship Hospital via an ambulance. Skylah’s immune system was overreacting to a virus, affecting the part of her brain that controlled her balance and coordination. It was a form of meningitis, and it was terrifying. 

Skylah started bouncing back slowly but required a week in hospital. I was in a sleepless and restless state in the hospital room one night with Skylah. The lights were low and it was dark outside. During the long night I remember getting out my pad and paper and writing three column headings: 

• Stay where I am (managing a real estate office for someone else).
• Accept the job (commission only, recruiting for a remote work real estate agency. This agency had a few things that I thought would not work well in the market).
• Build ‘that business’ – that one that I had been incubating, combining the two roles above but working for myself. 

I used the questions posed by Tim Ferriss in his fear setting exercise and went through each of these three options. You can check out the process here, or skip the back story and get straight into the exercise here in my Linkedin article.

After doing the exercise I got myself some sleep, as the results were pretty clear. There was an obvious path. To create my own business was no less risky than working for someone else, and as one of the roles involved recruiting for commission – well I might as well do it for myself. If I made a mistake, I would find a job somewhere else. No big deal. 

Setting up this agency was more laborious than I initially thought. And keeping going in these times has been a challenge too. No surprises there really. Sometimes I think… what would life be like if I had chosen one of the other paths. 

But YES, all and all, I would do it over again if I had the choice. What I am saying is that it has been worth it, on many levels. 

I am also very pleased to say that bar an abhorrence of hospitals, doctors, and needles, Skylah is perfectly healthy with no lasting disability from her very real and terrifying scare. 

So I had an idea and I had made a decision. But I needed a structure and an implementation plan. Keep an eye out for part two next week, when I talk about the next steps and what informed them.  

Thanks for reading, have a great week.