The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek – 2 years on

I’m two years on from launching my business today – where did that time go??!!  I have to admit I’m a bit of a reflector on such occasions.  It’s a bit like New Year’s Eve – I’m definitely not one for new years resolutions (I prefer to make resolutions at times that work for me) but I always take time out to reflect on the year and think about what matters for the year ahead.  So it feels right to do the same on the anniversary of starting my own business.

My 2nd Business Birthday

Reflecting 2 years on from taking the bold step

My first experience of running my own business was age 25 when I set up a vegetarian delicatessen.  It was “out there” at the time when most veggie shops were dusty wholefood shops.  It did OK for a while but ultimately it didn’t work out.  When I look back it was probably a combination of wrong location, some local decisions that affected the footfall to the area where my shop was based and a lack of flexibility on my part to listen to what customers wanted, and be willing to compromise on my view of what my shop should be.  It was a tough experience.  I lived on the breadline, worked all hours and got very little back in return.  After that, I decided I needed a bit of stability and safety in my life and I started what turned out to be a very long career in local government. 

What I now know is that the learning we take from failing is often more powerful and more informative than when everything goes to plan.  I didn’t know that at the time.  I just thought, “I’ve failed, I’m not much good at this, I need to do something else”.  I thought I’d never work for myself again.  I never wanted to be that skint again or feel that trapped. 

I had a wonderful, varied and at times, exciting career as a local government employee.  It was an amazing privilege to work with so many values-driven talented people who were all connected by a desire to make a difference to peoples’ lives.  I learned so much, I was enabled to push at boundaries, I understood the challenges and became adept at working round and through the hoops that come with public sector life.  And the truth is, when I went through shitty times – like we all do sometimes – I felt incredibly supported and looked after and I’ll be forever grateful for that. I felt like I was part of a big family and actually I still feel like I’m part of the local government family because most of the freelance work I do is with councils.  But now it’s different.

Now I get to work with councils up and down the breadth of the country and I love the variety of people and places I get to work with.  I’m constantly learning and that’s a huge part of what I love about what I do.  I continue to be fascinated by how my relationship with the people I work with feels different to how it did when I was directly employed in local government.  There’s some nuance in this so I’ll try to explain.  I’ve always felt trusted – trusted to do my best work, trusted to deliver, trusted to be loyal, trusted to keep confidences.  Some of my frustrations came from not necessarily feeling trusted – or maybe it’s empowered – to bring different.  I’ve talked before about the time I take to ensure I bring a wealth of evidence and some of the latest thinking to my work and yet when I tried to land some of that in new ways of working, it felt really hard, as an employee, to get the trust needed to try new things.  I felt stuck in trying to bring what I know works into places that seemed bound by a need to  maintain too much of the status quo – albeit they had a strong desire for different results.

That’s different as a consultant.  I feel trusted to bring different.  In fact, that’s what people usually pay me for.  I know from the network of other people I worked with as an employee how many of us felt like “outsiders” because of the responses we got when we proposed new approaches.  It can be a lonely place.  And yet, as a consultant, I feel that one of the things my clients value most about the work I do with them is precisely my ability to bring different, new and fresh thinking and approaches.  I find that liberating.  This isn’t a criticism, it’s an observation, and I think it’s an interesting dilemma for any large organisation to ponder.

One of the really fun things about working for myself is that other people confide in me.  I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me on the quiet that they’d love to work freelance.  The biggest thing that holds them back is fear of it not working out.  The financial stability of a paid role is very attractive and let’s be honest, there are times in most of our lives when we simply need stability and aren’t in a place to take risks.  Years ago, when my children were little, I had a vision of creating an “internal consultancy” in the council I worked in.  A place where people could opt to work on a flexible basis – a willingness to work on different types of work and projects either as change agents or to fill temporary gaps in capacity - playing to their strengths and continuing to develop their skills - and the flexibility to choose the hours they worked.  I believed it would attract some of the very best people.  I never managed to make it happen but I still think the model stacks up and wonder whether testing something like this would help councils – and other public sector organisations – to hold on for longer to those people who are pondering a freelance life.  I’d love to work with a place to test this out.

Great Auntie Janie

She taught me and my sister that we didn’t have to conform

One thing is for certain as I continue to navigate my path, I find freelance life liberating.  It’s completely changed how I think about my security.  I know what matters to me – and choose not to work with people who don’t share my values, I know what my baseline is that I need to secure to live the life I want to lead and crucially, I know that if things do ever go belly up, I’ve a plan that means I’d be OK.  So I continue to channel my inner Great Auntie Janie who lived to be 100 and was an incredible role model to me and my sister because she was a rebel who was stylish and brave and funny showed us that we didn’t have to conform to what society in the 1970s and 80s said we should be like when we grew up to become women.  I’m proud to be celebrating my second business birthday and treasure the life that it enables me to lead.  I’m truly grateful to all the people who continue to support me on my way and look forward seeing where this journey takes me next.