Hey Chris,

I hope that you’re having a good day so far.

I have been struggling with a difficult decision for quite some time, and feel that I need to simply address things, rather than continue as I have been.

I joined the IB team in 2007, after AcuraZine was purchased. I started my internet moderator ‘career’ back in 1999 on Honda-Acura.net, another now IB owned community. We started AcuraZine in late 2000. In the past three years, during my full-time tenure I’ve had a lot of fun, worked with some incredible, and some not-so-incredible folks, and forged relationships which I hope will last a lifetime. I’ve been able to watch our team grow from just Alvin, Jon, Eric, myself, Biddle & Anders to what we have today, and I’m proud of where we’ve grown to. Heck, the network I oversee has nearly doubled in my time, and despite continued challenges, we have persevered, and continued to grow the business and our communities. I feel confident in your leadership for our team. The questions you pose, and areas you are focussing on, will surely create better experiences for our community members. My only caution is to please, never forget the value of people. For without the people within our communities, our business has little left. This is especially true with our volunteer site leadership teams. It’s imperative that H&F recognize the value of these assets when making business decisions.

With all of that said, I really need to make some adjustments in my role, and life. Working from home, in a job like this where it’s my role to support volunteers, it’s very difficult to create an adequate life/work balance, as I am never really ‘away’ from work. My iPhone certainly doesn’t make this any easier.

On top of my role with IB, I am also the volunteer President of two local non-profit Organizations, one of which has Charitable status. Through these Organizations, I have received nearly $600,000 in funding, that I need to spend. I am falling so far behind, that I feel like I’m sinking. This work, is all voluntary, so it’s not hard to do IB stuff first, but I have a responsibility to my Organizations, and my funders to follow through on things. I underestimated the time which would be required of me, to get things in motion, despite having detailed plans and processes submitted as part of my funding applications.

In addition to these voluntary responsibilities, I want to have time to enjoy life, ride my bike, and actually get away from my office from time to time. Since joining IB in my full-time role, I have not been very successful at any of the above, which leads me to my tough decision. I think that for me, it’s now time to drastically reduce my time commitment to IB, if not eliminate it altogether.

I really love this job, and the people I get to work with every day. I know that I provide value and benefit to IB. I don’t feel that anything IB could have done would change where I find myself today either. I would be willing to continue contributing to IB, and our team, if that is something you, and the company feel would be beneficial. I could commit to 40hours/month of dedicated IB time. Whether that is used maintaining administrator relationships, providing strategic advice to our team, or working directly with Nolan, Renee & Paige would be up to you.

This has been a much harder note to draft than I ever anticipated it would be. Thank you for taking the time to read this far, and I look forward to your thoughts, and comments on it all. I would like to make this change after next week please.

cheers,
robb