You have dreams in which you have dinner with the parents of your contractors.

This one isn’t on the original list, but I thought it appropriate to add it. Yes, you might be an entrepreneur if you have dreams in which you have dinner with the parents of your contractors. But that’s not even half the story.

Yesterday I was thinking about one of my contractors and thinking “You know, if this contractor would just change one or two things, he’d almost be perfect, and if he learned another thing or two, he’s be very valuable to me.” (Sidenote: The only problem with “valuable” contractors is that they end up getting more work than they can handle and then they don’t have time for me anymore).

Then I went to bed, and last night I had a dream that I was invited to dinner at the home of this contractor. Now, for what I’ll tell you next you have to understand that I’ve never met this contractor, which is the case for most of my contract employees. So, when I arrived at his house, I found out it wasn’t “his” house so much as his parent’s house. My contractor happened to be all of 10 years old (he kind of looked like “Alex” from the Signing Time videos, which my 16-month old daughter is addicted to), and so as would be reasonable, he still lived with his parents. And I wasn’t the only one invited to dinner. Some of his other clients were also invited to dinner. And apparently the reason for us being invited to dinner had something to do with the fact that his parents didn’t know he was doing all sorts of web programming work in his spare time, and wanted to meet these people he was conducting business with over the Internet.

It was one of those dinners where extra tables that don’t match the main table are put next to each other in the front room and different people are assigned to each one. There was a family of three at one table, and apparently they were as bemused as I was to find out that that not only was this employee managing to do work for several other companies, but that he was, as I mentioned, a 10-year old kid.

I was introduced to the parents, who seemed to understand the awkwardness of it all, and my contractor himself was very shy and didn’t seem to want to meet me. I had come all prepared to tell him the things I thought he could improve on, but then I wasn’t sure whether I should be telling him or his parents, and then I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything at all because hey, what “needs slight improvement” when it comes to a 20-something year old is pretty freakin’ amazing if it’s a 10-year old. Plus, how could I sit down and tell this kid with a straight face that if he focused on gaining some SEO skills and having an eye towards detail in his code that it would improve things 100%?

There was no resolution to the dream. It just kind of ended there, before we even got to eat. The funny thing is that I didn’t realize it was a dream until later today when I was talking to the very contractor and realized that hey, wait a second, he’s not really a 10-year old! Anyway, weird stuff.