About
I started Cofruition as a way to get back more time.
From my own experience, and speaking to friends, we were all in a similar situation:
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Work is stressful: people find themselves perennially busy meaning work subsumes life
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Tasks can be delegated: with services like Upwork it's possible to outsource time-consuming things
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... but, people don't: it ends up feeling easier in the short term to just "do it myself"
and as such, the cycle continues.
After finishing my job in 2019 I decided to invest the time and effort to get good at delegating. I trialled working first with a few different virtual assistants and after setting up the relevant processes we got to a place of working well together.
Podcasts
Next, I began thinking about how we could help others reclaim time. In 2016, I had moved to East Africa and started a podcast. It was incredibly rewarding, but the deluge of time-consuming tasks meant I'd completely lost the love for it.
Working with my virtual assistant and an audio editor in Kenya we began to systemise the production of the show. In a few weeks it'd gone from taking me 5+ hours/ week to less than 15 minutes.
This outcome felt like something others would want too. I began speaking to companies wanting to do podcasts and offered them this service. These became Cofruition's first clients.
Other services
The principles that came from our podcast service were:
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Source experts
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Systemise the work
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Do whatever the clients doesn't want to
This can obviously be applied in other areas, and our clients began asking if we could do other things such as videos, newsletters and getting them more customers.
I hired experts in these areas too and expanded our offerings.
Our principles
All of this leads to how we work today. In simple terms, I offer "done for you" services to clients by project managing domain experts. This means:
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Do the thinking for the busy person: we get in sync with our clients so the services we offer don't become another thing for them to manage or worry about
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Be great, or don't bother: our strengths lie in doing the strategic thinking, turning it into a process and then executing the tasks every time
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Source internationally: having lived in East Africa I feel a strong affinity to international development. The best way I've seen is to pay people to do great work and so wherever possible we train and hire people from low-income regions
Why do I do it?
I find the work I do very fulfilling.
Life is short, and the unhappiness caused by doing things you don't want to really isn't worth it in the end.
We all know that different people are suited to different types of work, and being able to let clients and domain experts focus on what they do best means overall happiness is increased.
Making that a reality for people every day is really rewarding.