Happy birthday to me
Reflections on a first year in business.
Two weeks ago, People Equals Purpose turned 1 year old. I celebrated, purely because that's when we happened to go away, on a fancy sun-lounger with an audiobook, a bottle of cava and a view of the sea. Which sets the bar quite high for next year.
It has taken me a long time – truly, nearly a year – to allow myself to recognise that this business is important to me. It took me so long because 'running a business' or 'entrepreneurship' or even 'wealth beyond the dreams of avarice' (ha) are never things that show up when I do one of those exercises to figure out what you value. And so I gave myself a hard time when I prioritised marketing, or networking, or thinking about branding, over the things I knew I did value - community, nature, making, writing and thinking, adventure.
But I realised a few weeks ago: freedom is one of those values. I left my job two months ago to focus on the business full-time, and I already love it. I really don't want to have to get another job. Even for just a bit. I love being able to go for a swim in the lake in the middle of the day, or to sleep in because I was out late climbing. I took a week off without asking a single person! It was marvellous.
Related: there is a wonderful poem by Barbara Kingsolver called How to drink water when there is wine. I have it pinned over my desk.
So I realised: I do want to run a business, even if that's not the same as wanting to be a business owner. I can, and should be prioritising the work of building a business, celebrating it for its own sake, because it allows me to leave my desk and barefoot cartwheels over the grass (read the poem!) with the sun.
So where am I, regarding doing the work of running a business, one year in?
I still don't know why someone would hire me.
If you work with me, what do you get? What does that allow you to do? I know what I'm good at, and I know the problem that I can solve, but I don't know what that means in terms of the value I deliver people who might pay me to deliver it. I certainly don't know it well enough to be able to articulate it clearly and narrowly: I do this, for people who need this. And that means I don't do that, or that.
Part of that is fear, for sure: but what if I say I only do X to someone who might have hired me to do Y?
But most of it is that I was too biased, too excited about the prospect of starting my own thing, during the first round of conversations I had to test the proposition. I am a researcher by training. I am a good one!
And yet. That was by far the worst research project I've ever done. I took every piece of data that was even slightly positive to be a clear indicator that I should proceed, despite the fact that none of it tied together into anything coherent. Communication difficulties here, values alignment there, but nothing big enough or consistent enough or common enough for me to confidently say: this is what I do.
Too small a sample size, by a lot. I saw a problem, theorised its impacts, applied it to a new market without checking its fit, and started trying to sell the solution to people who didn't recognise the problem. Exactly the sort of thing I warned clients not to do, when I was doing research for other people.
I want to be having those conversations again, now that I have the distance to be (more) impartial. I want to approach it like a discovery, not a validation exercise. Tell me about your business, how is the people side of things? Not, Do you think this is a good idea?
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The numbers
In time:
Months between...
- deciding to do something, and registering the business: 3.5
- starting the business and leaving my day job: 10
- now and when I have to get a job, if everyone pays their bills on time and I never find another client again: 6
In money:
The business costs me £240 a month in accountancy fees and software subscriptions, plus another £600 a year for web hosting and insurance. It's pretty cheap to run, so far, but that's because I haven't started paying myself yet.
When I was registering for VAT, I had to guess how much money I thought the business would make. There's a flat-rate scheme that's a better option if you make more than - I don't know, £90k? Anyway, I thought, to hell with it, I'll bet on my own success. I've found one client, how hard can it be to find another one? Very hard, it turns out. My actual revenue for my first financial year was £11,310.
Obviously, it would be very nice to have more money (maybe enough to pay myself, for starters: that's the goal for this financial year). The cost of all that time and freedom I mentioned above is that I'm budgeting much more carefully than I have for a long time. The transition down to 60% salary and then to living off savings on roughly the same amount each month has been hard, and requires a level of vigilance I'd enjoyed not needing for the few years I was paid enough not to. I haven't paid anything into my pension since April.
However! I feel so differently about that now, compared with how I felt while I was still in my job and looking nervously at my end date. I had SO much worry leading up to leaving my job – what will I do? should I just get a contract now? what if, what if, what if? – and then I woke up on the first morning with no job and poof! all that worry was gone. My circumstances weren't materially different – I had an interested client but no proposal agreed; I had a tender application out (which we didn't win in the end) – but I felt different. Work had weighed heavily on me, it turned out.
Related: I haven't been ill in the five months since I handed in my notice. Last year, I was averaging a cold every three months – June, September: one which somehow lasted the whole month, and then another in December which knocked me out for a whole week's skiing and then some. Plus a UTI, my first, in January. Every time I took a break, I got sick. My job made me ill. Not constantly, but enough.
Other countable nouns:
Podcast appearances: 2
Speaking invites: 3
Events attended: too many to count
Events run: 1
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What did I do wrong?
Hiring an assistant before I could afford one, and trusting that the money would work itself out. It didn't, and I had to let her go after six months, even though she was wonderful and did all the jobs I hated and made them all look easy.
Deciding to run events. For me, these are so stressful. The idea of throwing myself a birthday party brings me out in a cold sweat, and I don't have to email 200 strangers to get people to come to one of those (I presume. I have never actually thrown one).
I decided to run an event because someone suggested it, and the first one was great – I had a lovely time, people gave nice feedback – but the process of marketing the second one was so stressful, and sucked so much of the air out of the rest of my life, that I decided not to go ahead with it. I bored Ben silly with the decision-making and then felt truly awful about it for a little while.
For some people, events might be a great way to gather like-minded people, or to build an audience. For me, I suspect it will only work the other way around: first the like-minded people, then the events.
Deciding what to sell. Did I do this wrong? I'm not sure I'd do it differently – I still believe that this is a problem that needs solving, and that I can help – but it's definitely made my life harder.
There's a classic innovation four-box grid – the Ansoff Innnovation Matrix, it turns out – with markets (new / old) along one axis, and products (new / old) along the other. You can carry on selling your same old products to the same people, which = no innovation. Or you can sell your existing product to new people, or you can sell a new product to your existing customers. OR, you can sell a new thing to new people. Which is the hard one. In the diagram accompanying the Wikipedia article, this box is red. Only an idiot would try this. Enter, me.
It would have been easier, I think, to start by selling what I was already known for (service design) to people I was already connected with (health and finance, primarily). Instead, I decided to sell something I could do but which wasn't what I was known for (people & culture, defined terribly, see above) to people who didn't know me from Adam (literally almost everyone). As I said, I am an idiot.
Focusing way too hard on finding clients. Because my first client came through a coffee introduction by someone I met at an event, and I was so worried about finding my next client, I set myself targets for events attended and coffees had. I set up a tracking system in Airtable to automatically spit out my stats each month and make me feel bad about myself. I made myself go to more and more events, multiple a week, and had coffee with everyone I could. And I got so exhausted I almost quit the whole thing.
And, it turns out, after I'd decided I "probably wouldn't do the business any more", and went to the events I'd booked anyway with the mindset of fuck-it-let's-see-if-anyone's-nice rather than I-need-to-find-a-client: poof! My second client appeared.
Coincidence? Probably not. Lesson: if someone thinks you might be the solution to a problem they have, they will chase you down the hall for your phone number. If you're trying to persuade them to call you, that's not a good look. Just let them say, "Let's talk after this!" and reply, "Yes, that sounds great," with a smile. That's all.
This last bit is a reminder to myself, still. I learned it the hard way, and I nearly didn't learn it at all.
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What am I still figuring out?
A routine. All my weeks look different from each other, and sometimes the things that are important to me (writing, deep thinking, working 'on' the business not 'in' the business) get squeezed out. How do I stop that from happening?
When to invest in growth. Before I have enough money in the business account not to worry about needing to get a job? Probably: that seems like the exact right time. But it's scary (what if it doesn't work? what if I run out of money sooner as a result?). I know this is the right answer; I know I'm missing out on opportunities because I'm not doing it. But I'm still not paying for extra marketing capacity, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or anything else I could be doing that isn't me, slogging away on my own.
Relatedly: Marketing. I have a lot of ideas. I think they're pretty good! And then I don't do them. Especially the ones which involve posting on LinkedIn; especially the ones which involve video. I am working with some students on something else at the moment, and they have offered - with looks of genuine eagerness! - to help me with my social media. And yet, I am not asking them to help me with my social media. Why?
Shame, probably, about being seen. Pre-emptive embarrassment about putting my actual face saying actual words on the internet for all to see; worry about my currently scruffy hair 'not looking professional'; a life-long avoidance of cameras.
Also, investment, again: I'd need decent mics and lighting. A friend has offered to lend me both her mics and her lighting setup. And yet.
Movement building. I strongly believe that this is an area that needs more discourse, more coherence – a name would be a good start – and more visibility, and that there are other people out there who feel the same way, and yet I don't know what to do with those facts. How do you go about raising something's profile? How to build community and momentum around something?
Despite James Lang giving us pretty much a how-to for this, I still don't know what I could do, now, to start this. (Do I believe anyone else cares about this enough to join me in building it, brick by brick? Maybe that's the crux of it: fear of putting out the call and getting silence in return.)
Confidence. James mentioned this too, in last month's interview:
What I found is that I would really over-index on the interactions that I had with people. If I had a conversation with somebody, and they were interested in this thing that I was working on, I’d be like, Great! This is the best idea ever! And then I would have another interaction with somebody, and they were just disinterested, not really into it. And I’d be like, Oh, this sucks. I’m an idiot for ever thinking this was a good idea.
I got to the point where I just thought, I have to stop using interactions as a signal of what I’m doing, which ironically means that I have to take even more of it from myself.
I'm still not quite there. I had a conversation earlier in the year that really – for several months – had me feeling that I couldn't do this, that I'd got it all wrong, that I was stupid for even thinking that I could.
I don't have a solution for it yet, except perhaps: it's okay to say no, thanks, to an offered introduction. It's okay to be careful who you let into your head, especially when you're feeling vulnerable or on shaky ground.
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What I've learned: how to do hard things.
For the last many years, I've had climb a 7a* on my wish list. I started climbing, and enjoyed it, and wanted to get better at it, and then the pandemic happened. They shut the climbing centres, and the aerial training spaces, and Wales (where most of the climbing we knew about was), and slowly, I lost enough of my strength to lose confidence in my body.
When I got back on the rock, I started having panic attacks. My nervous system was so aware of the threat signals everywhere (masking! 2 metre distancing! queuing for supermarkets! not being able to see more than X people at once!), and I was so un-trusting and uncertain of my own abilities, that I'd get to a tricky move on a route I would have found easy two years earlier and I'd start hyperventilating and crying, my legs shaking, unable to talk myself into making the reach across to the next hold.
This year, I'm finally as strong as I was. I know when I can trust my fingers to hold, the tension I can put through a heel or a knee, the sideways holds I can hang onto and those I cannot. I trust the rope to catch me. I'm enjoying climbing again.
Still, for a while, I had known there were routes I avoided because I wasn't good at them. Anything with an overhang, or a big drop underneath. And I just sort of ... accepted this. "I'm not good at overhangs." Which was fine. Until it wasn't.
One day, in about May, I decided that I was going to pick out, on purpose, routes containing things I was scared of, and I was going to climb them until I wasn't scared any more. It took one go. One decision, and one attempt, to step out over the void or reach up around a blind corner and make a move that I'd told myself, from the ground, for years, was too scary. And I could do it over and over again, on multiple routes, indoors and outdoors. Not always, not with 100% consistency, but all it took was that decision, and something I couldn't do turned into something I could do. And about two sessions after that, I climbed a 7a. Easy.
About the same time, I realised I did want to "do the business" (I need better language for this, I realise). I knew I felt uncomfortable with sales, especially cold outreach, and marketing, and being visible. I knew that these were important parts of running a successful business. I knew that 'uncomfortable' is really, in this case, a euphemism for 'scared'.
So! I made a plan. I would look at the things I didn't want to do, and I would learn how to do them, and then I would do them, intentionally and repeatedly, until I wasn't scared of them any more. In this way I will, I hope, become a good business-person, instead of just accepting that I am not a very good one, and oh-well-what-can-you-do.
It's still new – but I'm telling you this because I want to be accountable. I want to be able to say, this time next year, that I'm not scared of sales and video content and offering my time for money any more, and that I'm doing those things well and confidently and frequently.
And then, of course, because what would life be if we learned one thing and were finished, by that time I'll have noticed the next three things I'm avoiding.
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*Sport climbing routes start at 4 (1-3 are considered scrambles, not climbs). Olympic routes are typically set between 8c and 9a. I know lots of people who can climb much harder routes than I can, but a 7a felt super ambitious, like maybe-I-will-never-be-able-to-do-this ambitious, to me.
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An offer
I read once that the best mentor is someone who's 18 months further along your ideal path than you are. I've benefited so much already from all the people who have been generous with their time and expertise, and I want to pay it forward.
Are you six months from starting a business? (By which I mean, if you're anything like I was, do you feel like none of the other options are particularly appealing but there's no way you could start a business!) Would you like to talk to someone who's already there? I can promise to be honest, and encouraging, and ask you difficult questions until you figure out your own answers. I can recommend a great coach. If any of that sounds useful, drop me a line at hello@peopleequalspurpose.com.
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As always, thank you for reading. xo