Thanks For Being There For Me

With Father’s Day firmly behind us for another year, I took time out this week to reflect on what it is to be a Dad and conversely what it is to be a son who works for his dad in the family business in the strangest year ever, 2020.

Father’s Day is an important date on the Adina Watches calendar. Over the past decade we have built a campaign around our iconic work watches: the Adina Country Master.

With that said this year, 110 stores nationally chose to join us the Father’s Day journey, resulting in over 5000 new Adina Country Masters finding their way on to Dads’ wrists across the country. A great result sure, but what does that really mean?

The first thing that resonates is that even in a year of extreme adversity, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters have chosen a watch to say “thanks for being there for me”.

This is all really powerful stuff but how does that relate to me? I didn’t get a new watch, it was all socks and jocks for me!

In our family business I work alongside my Dad, it’s no secret that a close working relationship can have its ups and downs but at the same time, in the whole scheme of things, who would not like to be working alongside their Dad sharing the success and lamenting on what we could have done better? It is rarefied air when you look at it, this way.

Unfortunately, so often we don’t. We are so focused on running our business we forget what the business was started for, in the first place. You are of course doing something you love, but at the core of it, you are working to put a roof over your family’s head and to put food on the table, providing stability for the next generation to thrive. That’s it and that all.

As a father of four myself, COVID has taught me that now more than ever I need to balance the relationship I have with my own father in and out of work whilst being a dad myself, and it has become very obvious to me that the greatest gift of all is time! Stop laughing! That is the oldest cliché known to man but it is so true. For me over the past months, some of the most powerful moments with our children have come at the most innocuous times where we just gave each other our time.

It makes me very proud that so many Australians have supported our family business in choosing one of our watches to celebrate what it is to be a Dad.

Hopefully that gift of time will unlock more, in the true sense.