Welcome to Joy HQ.
Population: two humans, assorted visiting animals, approximately nine million jobs that need doing and one recurring sentence:
“This seemed like a good idea.”
Building The Joy Bringers from a house on a Greek mountain sounds extremely picturesque.
And sometimes it is.
There are sunsets. Mountains. Long outdoor lunches. Birds. Olive trees. The sort of views that make you stop halfway through a sentence.
There is also reality.
Things break.
Greek bureaucracy happens.
Weather happens.
Animals appear.
Deliveries develop personalities of their own.
A simple job somehow requires three shops, four phone calls and a man named Giorgos who knows another man named Giorgos.
What people imagine.
THE GRAND PLAN
The plan is to build a business about creating more joyful lives.
Naturally, this involves spreadsheets.
So many spreadsheets.
Retreat schedules. Menus. Rooms. Suppliers. Costs. Legal requirements. Website pages. Activities. Guest communications. Things to buy. Things we've bought. Things we apparently bought twice.
Joy, it turns out, requires project management. Fortunately, we have opinions about project management.
WHY SHOW YOU THIS?
Because polished brands are so boring.
Everything looks inevitable after it's finished. It wasn't.
The Playground is where we're going to show some of the bits that don't make it into the brochure.
- The experiments.
- The decisions.
- The disasters.
- The things that worked.
- The things that absolutely did not.
- The moments when one of us says, “I've had an idea,” and the other one develops a concerned expression.
We don't know exactly what Joy HQ will look like a year from now.
That's part of the fun.
For now, we're building it.
Occasionally competently.
Frequently enthusiastically.
And almost certainly with more spreadsheets than the word “joy” should reasonably require.
