July 2025 round-up

Hari reflects on the wins, challenges and numbers that made up 13 Times’ July 2025.

Wins

Munich has now taken the lead for non-UK city we have delivered the most courses in. It had been Paris (city of lights, city of love, city of easy Eurostar related travel) but delivering two Storytelling for Business classes for our client Siemens, pipped Paris to the post (say that three times fast).

As much as I love travelling to new places, there’s something remarkably reassuring about returning to a city you’ve been too before. I know how to buy the train passes on my phone, where the good local Italian restaurant is and exactly how long it takes to get to the airport when finishing teaching at 5pm. Both July trips I was able to shift my 9.30pm ticket onto the 7.40pm flight, which was a real win for me as getting home from Heathrow at 1am is not as easy as it is in Munich.

CLO Lens - due to an opportunity facilitated by L&D Free Spirits 13 Times was able to place our first ever advert in a magazine this month. Check it out in their digital edition!

How much LEGO®? - Thanks to the dedicated support of our unofficial work experience teenage neighbour, we now know that our LSP kit bags contain exactly 1911 bricks of 212 different types. Which we genuinely didn’t know before as they were a mixture of several different kits across several different bags.

But now, we have an excel that documents it all, and I’m off to pickabrick to stock up on the rarer pieces!

Challenges

Travel delays - there’s not much you can do when air traffic control goes down and you’re waiting at an airport to see what’s going to happen. In the end it all turned out well but try telling the StressWatch app on my Apple Watch that. Note to self: I need to get better at handling unexpected delays and not panicking.

Everything that’s not teaching, coaching or consulting - I’ve been tracking my time for the past 2.5 months as I really didn’t understand why I felt so tired and so busy but it also seemed like I wasn’t getting anything done. The to do list has been unending.

Overwhelming even.

And it turns out I have been getting things done, but mostly all the stuff around running a business and less of the training, coaching and consulting that I love.

If anyone out there is thinking about starting up a business because you only want to do what you love, I would like to say, be prepared to spend a lot of time not doing what you love because business require a lot of upkeep.

Think rare and sickly cat breed level of upkeep. So much upkeep, so many things to do. I’m going to need to shift these percentages, I just don’t quite know how yet.

Interview management - this month I conducted 13 interviews as part of some consultancy work I’m helping out a client with. It was a treat to speak to 13 brilliant product managers from all across Europe but I mis-managed the scheduling and ended up completely exhausted on day one. I’d only put 5 minutes between each interview call. Big mistake. Huge.

So on day 2 of interviewing we expanded that to 15 minutes between calls and I wasn’t quite as wiped out at the end. There are people who do this professionally…. how and also, wow.

The month in numbers:

3 x one day sessions of Storytelling for Business

1 x Data storytelling masterclass (3.5 hours)

Random numbers including:

1911 LEGO® bricks in one of our LSP kit bags

4 flights

13 interviews

1 advert