From Pulp To Paper

Running a business in Ottawa is weirdly isolating these days in ways I don’t think anyone really warns you about.

On paper, it sounds great: beautiful city, smart people, tech money floating around, a million federal departments, coffee shops on every corner. In reality? Half the time it feels like I’m running a business in an empty office park at 9 p.m. on a long weekend.

Everyone working from home is part of the problem. And I say that as someone who also works from home.

Before everything shifted, you could at least feel the city breathing during the day. You’d see people on Bank Street grabbing lunch, bump into someone you knew in the Market, run into a client on Sparks.

Now, a lot of days, it’s you, your laptop, and endless Google searches.

The isolation hits in a lot of small, stupid ways.

There are moments where I wish I could lean back in my chair and ask an actual person, “Does this idea make sense?” or “Am I overcomplicating this?” Instead, I’m pacing around my living room or talking to my friends about it.

In a normal office, you have built-in sanity checks. In Ottawa right now, so many of us are in these little pockets around the city, working in condos near Lansdowne, townhouses in Riverside South, whatever, trying to build something sizeable while also not bothering the neighbours with one more Zoom call.

The decision fatigue gets loud.

Should I raise prices? Offer this service? Rent a coworking space downtown and hope people actually show up to meetings in person? Is it worth driving across town to meet one client, or do we default to another video call where everyone is slightly blurry and pretending the audio is fine?

Each question is small on its own, but together they’re heavy. By mid-afternoon it’s less “I don’t know what I’m doing” and more “I’m out of brain.” I would pay good money some days for a coworker to pick between two options and say, “Do that one. It’s fine.”

And then there’s the whole “how am I really doing?” question.

If you worked in a regular office in downtown Ottawa, you’d get feedback in a hundred tiny ways: a quick “nice work on that” from a manager, a nod in a meeting, someone asking you to help on a cool project because they trust you. You’d see people’s reactions in real time.

When you’re running a small business from your spare room in Nepean, you ship something and then… silence. Maybe an email comes in later. Maybe it doesn’t. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is full of people humble-bragging about their “record-breaking quarter,” and you’re over here proud because you finally updated your Google Business profile.

One thing that’s actually helped more than I expected is joining online groups where people in Ottawa are talking honestly about this stuff. Not the glossy “crushing it” threads, but the messy ones: Slack channels, small mastermind groups, Discord servers, little private Facebook groups where people admit they’re tired, lonely, second-guessing their pricing, or debating whether to get a tiny office downtown just to see other humans. It sounds backwards—fighting isolation with more internet—but trading real stories with other business owners who get it takes the edge off. It reminds you that you’re not the only one building something from a spare bedroom and trying to stay sane.

Running a business is hard. Running a business in a city where everyone you work with lives 25 minutes away and rarely leaves their house? That adds a layer.

If you’re sitting in a home office somewhere in Ottawa, wondering if you’re the only one refreshing email too often and overthinking every decision: you’re not. You’re building something in a city full of people doing the same thing, mostly behind closed doors.

Maybe the next step isn’t another online course or another productivity hack. Maybe it’s one coffee in real life with someone who gets it.

// posted by From Pulp To Paper @ 11:02 PM