Don’t Try This At Home

Amanda Davie - 10 Sep 16

When you become a parent you gain new perspectives on life – some of which decides how you want to live your life moving forwards.

Back in the summer of 2012 I gave birth to a human being for the first time. But my first-born, my lovingly conceived business, was turning three years old.

It had been a thrilling first few years at the business, but the honeymoon period was over, London’s economy metaphorically if not literally took the summer off for the Olympics – you couldn’t get face time with anyone for love nor money – and it was getting harder to stay profitable as we expanded.

While I was at home breast-feeding my baby, the business fell off a cliff.

So in an attempt to save jobs I left baby in Starbucks with a kind aunty and jumped into sales mode – ran around town shaking trees in an attempt to drum up some more business. We weren’t able to save everyone’s jobs but we did return to profitability by Christmas.

For me it wasn’t reward enough. I was resentful that the business was keeping me spending those precious moments with my baby, Jacob. So I decided to sell the business. We found a buyer, agreed a price, the due diligence was done and legal contracts exchanged.

The deal was all but inked and I fell pregnant again. The deal was killed. Not even business owners are immune to gender discrimination.

Fortunately the business picked itself back up again and we bumbled along for another few months until I left for my second maternity leave in sixteen months.

I returned after six months out – this time my heart really wasn’t in the business. Worse-still, I was bored and began interfering in the day to day running of the business, making myself less than popular with the rest of the team.

So I threw in the towel and decided to do something completely different. I had some savings from previous years’ dividends so I retrained and set up as a ‘mumpreneur’, working a little less, caring a little less, working closer to home and around nursery school runs. This was me having a proper stab at the elusive work/life balance (or blend or bliss, depending on which you deem to be the most bearable of ‘b’ words!).

Practically, setting up a new business was a doddle – having a repetitive entrepreneurial itch I’d done it a few times in the last ten years. And yet this time around, with no office to go to and therefore no fixed commute and daily routine to keep too, and with no staff around me to give me that sense of belonging, it was much, much harder.

Here are some of the things ‘setting up a business’ books don’t tell you about being self-employed:

1. It’s isolating. Just look at how prolific the stay-at-home working women often are on Facebook. It’s their window into the outside world. There is a reason they are sharing so much. There are whole days when I don’t talk to or see clients. And if I don’t get my regular fix of conversation I start to get narky, that’s when my husband and kids get it in the neck when they come home!
2. No one criticizes you or praises your efforts. Feedback is an essential part of professional development, and indeed of building a business. How else do we know how we’re doing? And how to improve our product and service? Interestingly, whistle blowing is often prevalent in cultures where feedback is lacking. So is a loss of self-esteem. If no one is encouraging or supporting you, self-confidence starts to erode while self-doubt creeps in.
3. It’s limiting. Human beings are social creatures, especially those who are extroverted, like me. People fuel my curiosity and get my neurons sparking. We subconsciously derive far more inspiration and learning from each other than we are aware. Working alone can be boring. Or, at least, we have to be far more proactive and disciplined at pushing and developing ourselves.

Working for yourself, and making your career work for your family, is a privilege, and one that most of us self-employed types take for granted. Check out Anne-Marie Slaughter’s TED Talk on “Can We Have It All?”. It can be hugely rewarding, especially if we feel in control and inspired to play to our strengths and to become the best we can be in business. But working for yourself is not without its challenges.

My advice to an aspiring ‘go it aloner’ would be:

1. Don’t work from home. For too long at least. Find affordable working, or co-working, spaces where there are opportunities to meet and collaborate with other freelancers or entrepreneurs.
2. Create an advisory board of more experienced business people, those who may be willing to mentor, advise and give you feedback on a regular basis. If you can’t afford to pay them in cash or equity, try to find other ways to recompense them e.g. bartering skills or offering a lifetime discount on your product for their friends and family.
3. Don’t ditch the career plan and aspirations. And in the early days of setting up your business when you don’t have as much work on as you would like, keep learning. Do an online course, read a business book or watch a TED Talk. Pursue your passions, this will fuel your business success. And make time to ‘self-actualize’ as Abraham Maslow called it in his Hierarchy Of Needs theory. In other words, look after yourself, maintain your mental and physical well-being and do the things that ‘fuel’ you, so that you can perform at your best – for yourself, your business and your family.

Amanda Davie

Professional Coach - working with individuals and organisations to embrace change and help them achieve goals. Passionate Peddler of People Change | Emotional Intelligence Specialist | Digital/Tech Talent Junkie | Feminist | Mumpreneur | Ex-hooker | Karaoke Singer

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