Week 1 - Halifax Select 2018

September 1-8^th

As I begin to transition into running CANcube full time, I’m going to learn a lot about the limits of what I am capable of accomplishing and learn more about the strengths and weaknesses I have in regards to productivity. This was the first week and hence I’m only getting into the swing of things.

On Saturday the 8^th, I organized and ran my first cubing competition of the term, Halifax Select 2018. In this post I’d like to document the things that I did leading up to the competition, as well as the things that I learned and should apply to future competitions.

The first is that travelling while trying to run the business is manageable but it does not come without it’s difficulties. Here are some barriers that I ran into in regards to travelling and running the business:

• Motivation – Trying to find the drive to do my daily activities such as shipping puzzles, managing inventory, and especially writing emails, is very difficult to do when you’re in an exciting new foreign city.
• Organization – Fitting as many puzzles as I did into my two luggage bags was pretty impressive, but the disorganized mess that it lead to was very difficult to deal with. My mind found it very difficult to focus and work strategically and logically through tasks. I was constantly worried that I was forgetting or missing something
• Structure – Not having defined checklists and processes for everything involved made everything much more chaotic and wasted a lot of time. I need to have defined checklists in place to ensure that a competition can be run and organized as efficiently as possible

To solve the issue with structure, I have begun to right out a detailed document and instruction guide on how to run an CANcube Select cubing competition.

In regards to how the competition was ran, I think that it went amazingly well. As expected competitor turnout was relatively low compared to a southern Ontario competition. The end number for registrants was 31, myself included. I was originally aiming for a number around 50, so this number was considerably below my expectations, mostly due to the fact that there is another competition being run in New Brunswick in two weeks from now.

Despite the low turnout, we still had enough people to judge, and scramble, and we finished the competition right on time, which is an impressive feat that not often accomplished by cubing competitions.

One of the reasons that this ran so well though was because Liam, the WCA delegate was incredibly helpful, and my friend Victoria, who travelled with me, helped a ton in running the store and ensuring that I was free to manage the volunteers. In the future, I will have to figure out how to run a competition without relying on a friend to travel with me, or a delegate to help run the show. I believe the solution to that may lie in finding reliable local partners that are mature enough to take on responsibilities.

While I was busy planning and preparing for this Halifax competition, I was also panning and preparing my next competition to be announced. On September 4^th, we announced that Vancouver Select 2018, will be taking place on September 30^th at BCIT. Three days later, we sold out of tickets for the competition and have 100 paid registrants that will be attending. I’m super pleased with the response that we’ve received on that end and hope to take the lessons I learned from Halifax and apply them to Vancouver.

In the coming week, my focus will be mostly on settling into a new routine and ensuring that I can be productive in my new workspace, establishing goals and a start on CANcube Corporate (custom puzzles for corporate companies) and finalizing processes for running competitions.