A Day in the Life of Running Glow Theory

People ask what I actually do all day now, and I understand why - “colour analyst” doesn’t come with the built-in mental image that “accountant” or “teacher” does. Most people picture either a very glamorous, magazine-shoot version of my days, or assume I just sit around looking at paint swatches and calling it work. Neither is quite right. So here’s an honest, unglamorous-but-actually-quite-lovely look at a real day, start to finish.

Early morning, before anything else: I don’t start with colour, I start with coffee and Tandem Ops emails, because right now I’m running two businesses simultaneously and my brain needs the boring admin stuff done before the creative stuff, or it never gets done at all. If I let myself start the day with the fun, visual work, I will absolutely still be doing it at 4pm having never opened my inbox, and then I’ll be apologising to someone for a slow reply at 9pm instead. So: inbox triage first, a few client check-ins, the unsexy backbone work that keeps the lights on across both ventures. It’s not exciting to write about, but it’s the scaffolding everything else sits on.

Mid-morning: This is when I get into the actual craft. Some days that’s working through the colour analysis training material for my Toronto certification - yes, I am still very much a student in this, and I think that’s worth saying out loud rather than performing expertise I haven’t earned yet. There’s reading, there’s practical exercises, there’s a fair amount of staring at colour wheels until my eyes cross slightly. Other days it’s building out the season guides for Glow Theory, which means colour theory research, drafting long-form reference material, and then the fiddly work of building accurate palette visuals so the colours on screen actually match what I mean. That last part is more technical than people expect - colour rendering on screens is its own small nightmare of colour profiles and display calibration, and I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit making sure a “muted teal” looks like a muted teal on someone’s phone and not like a swamp.

Midday: Content. Writing Notes like this one, planning what’s coming up on the Substack, occasionally falling down a research hole about why certain undertones read differently under fluorescent versus natural light (this happens more often than I’d like to admit, and I regret nothing - it’s actually some of my favourite time of the week, even when it eats two hours I’d earmarked for something else entirely). I try to batch this work where I can, writing two or three pieces in one sitting when the ideas are flowing, because the alternative is staring at a blank page on the day something’s due, and that’s a bad system for everyone involved, especially me.

Early afternoon, a quick aside on the music thing: Some days there’s a chorus-related task wedged in here too - sheet music to review, a board email to send in my capacity as president, the occasional logistics fire to put out before a competition. I mention this because it’s easy to assume founders have one job. I currently have what feels like four: Glow Theory, Tandem Ops, chorus board president, and “person learning to run two businesses at once without dropping either one.” The afternoons are often where these collide a bit, and I’ve made peace with the fact that a perfectly clean, single-focus day basically doesn’t exist for me right now.

Mid-afternoon: Client-facing work - at the moment that’s mostly responding to booking enquiries, answering questions from the five-plus people already on my calendar for after my certification finishes, and refining what the actual consultation experience is going to look like. I want the first real session I run to feel like I’ve done it a hundred times, even though it’ll technically be my first. That means a lot of dry runs. I’ve draped friends, family members, and at least one very patient neighbour who agreed to “just hold this orange fabric near your face for science.” I take notes after every single practice session - what worked, what felt clunky, what I’d explain differently next time - because I really believe the gap between “technically certified” and “actually good at this” gets closed by reps, not by the certificate itself.

Late afternoon: This is when I usually do something visual and a bit more playful - testing palette combinations, photographing fabric swatches in different light, occasionally roping a very patient friend into letting me hold drapes up under their chin “just for research.” I’ve started keeping a small physical swatch book by my desk specifically so I can cross-check digital colours against real fabric, because screens lie more often than you’d think and I don’t trust any colour until I’ve seen it in two different lighting conditions and, ideally, touched it.

Evening: Depending on the day, this is barbershop chorus rehearsal, which sounds unrelated to colour analysis but honestly isn’t - both are about understanding how individual elements either harmonise or clash, just one’s audible and one’s visual. There’s something almost meditative about going from “is this teal too cool for a warm undertone” all afternoon to “are these four voice parts actually in tune with each other” in the evening. Different sense, same underlying question. I’m the board president for our chorus too, so some evenings are spent in meetings about risers and competition logistics rather than singing, which is its own kind of unglamorous, and a good reminder that even the parts of my life that are supposedly “just for fun” still come with admin attached.

Late evening, if I’m being honest: Sometimes I’m back on my laptop answering one more enquiry email, because I enjoy hearing from people who are curious about this, even when it costs me twenty minutes I’d set aside for winding down. I’m working on getting better boundaries about this. Ask me again in six months.

What surprises people most when I describe a day like this is how much of building a colour analysis business is not colour. It’s admin, training, content, and a slow, deliberate build toward a launch that I want to get right rather than rush. There’s no version of this where I skip the unglamorous middle and arrive fully formed. But the parts that are colour? Those are the parts that remind me why I started this in the first place, and they’re worth all the inbox triage in the world to get to.

A few of the actual tools and habits behind the scenes, for anyone curious about the operational side. I plan to keep a running spreadsheet of every practice (and real) drape session, logging the person’s general colouring, which drapes I tested, and what I observed, partly because I find patterns more visible in aggregate than in the moment, and partly because it’s good training discipline to document your reasoning rather than relying purely on instinct. I also keep a separate document of “explained badly” moments - instances where I tried to articulate why a colour worked or didn’t and fumbled the explanation - so I can go back and refine how I talk about this with actual clients later. Teaching something well is a different skill from understanding it well, and I’m trying to build both deliberately rather than assuming one comes free with the other.

My week also has a rough rhythm to it that took some trial and error to land on. Mondays tend to be heavier on Tandem Ops admin, since that’s when client weeks are kicking off for the people I hope to support there. Midweek is when I do my deepest Glow Theory content and training work, when my focus is most reliable. Fridays are lighter and more flexible, often spent on the smaller, satisfying tasks - replying to comments, tidying up a guide, scheduling the week’s Notes. It’s not a rigid system, and chorus commitments or an unexpected Tandem Ops fire will reshuffle it constantly, but having a rough shape to default to means I’m not reinventing my priorities from scratch every single morning, which is a kind of decision fatigue I’ve learned to actively design around.

I’ll also admit that running two businesses at once is, some days, exactly as chaotic as it sounds, and I don’t want to present this as a perfectly balanced, serene existence. There are days the Tandem Ops side eats the whole day and Glow Theory gets twenty rushed minutes before bed. I’m working on the balance. I suspect I’ll be working on the balance for a while yet, and that feels like an honest thing to admit in a newsletter that’s supposed to be the more personal, behind-the-scenes side of this whole project.

Weekends look different again, and I think that’s worth mentioning too. Weekdays are fairly structured, but weekends tend to be when the more exploratory, less deadline-driven parts of Glow Theory happen. That’s when I’ll spend an entire Saturday morning experimenting with a new palette layout, or just playing with colour combinations that have nothing to do with a specific deliverable, purely because I find it relaxing in a way that surprises people who assume “more colour work” would feel like overtime to me. It doesn’t, most of the time. It’s closer to how I imagine other people feel about a hobby that happens to have turned into a business, which is a strange and lucky position to be in, and one I try not to take for granted given how recently I was in a much more uncertain spot.

Sundays are usually quieter and more protected - chorus-adjacent admin aside, I try hard to keep at least one half-day a week where I’m not working on either business at all, partly for basic sustainability and partly because I’ve noticed my best ideas for both Glow Theory and Tandem Ops tend to show up during the unstructured time, not during the scheduled work blocks. There’s a lesson in there about not optimising every single hour, even as a founder building two things from scratch, that I’m still actively learning to trust rather than just intellectually agreeing with.

If there’s one thing I’d want anyone reading this to take away, it’s that there’s no single “right” way a day in this kind of business is supposed to look. Mine is a patchwork of admin, craft, training, and the occasional barbershop rehearsal, and it’s still finding its shape. I’d rather show you the real, slightly messy version of that than a tidied-up highlight reel that doesn’t actually reflect what building something from scratch looks like.

All this said, if you’re still reading - thank you! And if you’re interested in getting a colour analysis done, either virtually or in person, I am hard launching on July 1st and if you register interest before then, I’ll add you to an email list with some discount codes (think 25%-50% off for the first handful of clients!).