I had to replace the queen in one of my bee hives last week. It ended up being a bit more complicated than anticipated because, as it turns out, queen bees are good at hiding. And they don’t look immensely different from the other 79,999 bees in the hive. In the end it took a couple of hours to find the old queen who needed to be removed before the new one got installed.
I felt bad about replacing her, but she’d mated with some drone with bad genes and the whole hive was super aggressive. Very productive, but super aggressive. In the end the best solution (according to all the various people I consulted on the matter) was to replace the queen. Replacing the queen is default solution to bee problems.
Over the past few years I’ve worked with a few businesses where they’ve had key executives or business partners who really weren’t working out like they should have. It occurred to me (about an hour and a half into trying to find that elusive queen) that it would be nice if you could just freeze problem business execs and replace them with a fresh one from the store. Sadly, in this day and age bumping off problem executives is generally frowned upon.
Speaking of business consultants and bees, there’s a friend of mine who is a business consultant who is also a wonderful human being, and who is much beloved by bees. He’s had a number of swarms appear in his yard in the past couple of years, and bees (as we all know) are excellent judges of character. Anyway, the reason I’m writing about him today is because over the past couple of months I’ve introduced quite a few people to him and I thought this would be a good way to let people know a bit about who he is and why we like him.
If you’re wondering why I’d be referring people to another business advisor, it’s because 113 Partners are the Industry Advisors to Screen Australia for the FY24 Enterprise Program, and so we can’t work with people on their applications like we normally do. The Enterprise Program is a really great initiative that’s been re-vamped completely thanks to the huge amount of effort that Louise Gough, Harry Avramidis, and Dr Jonathan Messer (amongst others) have put into it. Check it out if you haven’t already, but get your skates on as Round 1 for business applicants closes 5pm AEST Thursday 9 March 2023.
Anyway, back to my bee-friended mate. His name is David Sharpe. He is a lovely person. Here are my top 5 facts about David.
1. David is the optimum size for a human. That is to say, he’s not too vertical. Which means that his head is at a lower altitude than excessively tall people which means he gets more oxygen so his brain works better. That’s Science.
2. David smiles a lot. Maybe he just does that around me because he thinks I look funny. Maybe he’s right. But people who smile a lot live longer than other people (refer to fact 6 on this page) and you want a business advisor who’s going to be around for the long haul.
3. David is trustworthy. There are only about eight people that aren’t immediate family that I would really trust with my nuclear launch codes: The guy who baby-sat my vinyl collection for 10 years; those two people in my office; J-Lo; The Cheeseman; my ramen buddy; Count Hobbles McGee; and David.
4. David has a tattoo of a garden gnome smoking a hookah pipe on his left butt cheek. I made that one up, but I want it to be true.
5. David is creative. He writes plays. I’ve been trying to write a book for the past two years and can’t find the time to do it. And my book is about investing in films so it’s just stuff that you can learn. He has to actually make stuff up when he writes plays, so he’s genuinely creative. So he doesn’t just understand creative people – he is one.
There are lots of other things to know about David, and if you’re lucky enough to get to work with him you’ll get to discover those for yourself. The fact that he has his own theme song, for instance.
Anyway, if you’re planning on getting an Enterprise application in stop reading this and go and get stuck into your planning docs. And if you need David’s help then reach out to him. You may even get to discover what his actual tattoo is and where it’s located.