Sometimes, life comes at you fast
What a year it's been
Hello friends! As a reminder, you’re getting this because once, perhaps many moons ago, you found yourself on the Substack page of a somewhat charming British bloke called Andrew. Intrigued by this man’s way with words and eager to hear more, you thus gave up your email address, and in exchange, opted in to receiving new posts by email as and when they appeared.
Thanks for doing that! It’s likely that when you did, this newsletter was called Human Capital, an attempt to capture the fact that I’d be writing about business, finance, self-improvement, and a few other things.
A couple of things are changing:
1) This newsletter is now a 2009-style personal blog.
I miss the freedom of expression that used to exist in the blogosphere about 15 years ago. Just a bunch of people — not media companies, but real people — writing casually and regularly about what they were up to. I can never bring that era back, but I can do one small thing, which is be the change I want to see. So that’s what this newsletter is from now on: a personal blog.
You’ll hear from me on a completely unpredictable schedule, about what I’m working on, where I’ve been, the things I’ve learned, the places I’ve been, and more. If you don’t want that, that’s fine — feel free to unsubscribe.
2) This newsletter is now called Off The Books
Because everything needs a good name, and this is the best name that ChatGPT and I could come up — a name that reflects that I’m still a nerd who loves puns and accounting, but that this newsletter is now more informal, more casual, than other things I sometimes write.
With that out the way, I last wrote to this subscriber list a year ago. Here’s what been going on in the meantime — it’s a list of activity that should explain why I’ve not published anything recently.
It’s been a busy year
An awful lot has happened in the last 12 months. I hadn’t realised quite how much until I sat down to write this, and reflected on where we were in April 2023. Here’s the rundown:
I started a new job
This time last year I was working at a company I liked, with colleagues that I got along with, but in a role that had started to become stale. I’d been in that role for two years, and in that time, we’d made a ton of changes to improve the company. Most importantly, we implemented EOS, which created a culture of ownership, accountability, and data-driven decision-making.
I drove a bunch of changes in the Finance team specifically, taking them off the paper-based system the former Finance Director used — literally, here are some month-end calculations he used to work out accruals and prepayments:
and implementing more automated, slicker processes, which also freed up some time to do a bunch more analysis and insight and figure out how we could drive bottom-line results.
Two years later, the company was improving and growing, and I was happy with the contribution I’d made, but I felt like my rate of learning had slowed down, and unless something changed, it would shortly be time for me to move on. I wrote a little more about that here if you’re interested.
So on a long car journey with my wife, we chatted about what my next role should be. After a decent amount of talking, we narrowed it down to:
a role as #1 in Finance, or #2 if the company is bigger and the CFO is someone I could learn a lot from
ideally in the tech or financial services industries
PE- or VC-backed high growth company
hybrid with no more than 3 days a week in office
doing something meaningful and positive for society
And when you make a specific ask, the universe answers. About 3 days later I got a call from a recruiter I knew from a prior role, who said she was hiring for a Head of FP&A role at a high-growth, PE-backed tech company, working for a fantastic CFO, with 1-2 days a week in office.
Bingo. I went through the recruitment process, got the job, and started in November 2023.
Having been there for five months now, I can safely say, I love it. I’ll share more in another post, but for a number of reasons, this role felt like coming home. It’s fantastic.
We finally finished our four-year home renovation project
In June 2020, we bought our first house, a 110-year-old Victorian-style 4-bedroom semi here in Nottingham. It’s a beautiful house, but it was in a terrible state of disrepair when we bought it. The prior owners had both passed away, and I doubt they’d spent a penny on it in the last 30 years.
And now, we’ve finished it.
I say ‘finished’, but the homeowners among you know that no home is ever finished — like painting the Forth Bridge, once you’re done, you basically start again at the beginning — but we’ve now got to the point of having decorated every single room of the house, as well as the front and rear garden, in the last four years. Through painful issues with incompetent builders, battles with building control depts, and the literal theft of several thousand pounds of materials from one particularly unpleasant tradesperson, we’ve done it.
Again, I’ll write more about this in future, but there’s such a tangible sense of achievement from doing things with your hands in the real world. When you spend your entire working week staring at a screen, manipulating numbers in spreadsheets, writing emails, or talking in endless Teams meetings, it can be hard to point to any real accomplishments. By contrast, when you’re doing renovation or construction work, you can point to the physical evidence of your work. In particular, doing this was incredibly satisfying:
I dug all that out, put down all the rubble, compacted it, then mixed all the mortar, and laid the slabs down level. Later (not pictured), I also added grout, tidied it up, added stones down the side, and a little more. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, author Matthew Crawford writes:
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.
He’s right. It’s been hard work but we’ve loved it — and now we have a beautiful house too. (More content on Instagram if you want it.)
We went on a cruise around the Mediterranean
My wife and I felt like we wanted one last big holiday before the last thing on this list happened (see below), so in September we went on a cruise with Virgin Voyages around the Med, stopping in Barcelona, Marseille, Cannes, Mallorca, and Ibiza.
It was excellent. The food on board the ship was fantastic, we saw some beautiful cities, we enjoyed a day at a beach club in Cannes, and we went to see David Guetta in Ibiza. The only minor complaint was the lack of activity at the poker table on board, but aside from that, it was excellent all round.
We had a daugher
Lastly, and most importantly, we welcomed our daughter into the world in April 2024.
This general update post is already long enough, so I won’t go into all the details of what the pregnancy period and the first two weeks of parenthood have been like, but if you’re a parent, you already know. And if you’re not, then nothing I say can truly explain it. Which is the sort of annoying shit people used to say to me before I was a parent, but unfortunately, it’s 100% true. Suffice to say, I’m a very happy and proud #girldad.
Thanks for reading!
Phew. What a year it’s been. Thanks for indulding me, and let me know what you’ve been up to as well. And if you want to follow me elsewhere, you can probably find me on LinkedIn, or find me on:
My other newsletter, Net Income (deep dives into interesting companies)
Speak soon.