Diary Of A Business Owner

Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.

Katie McCade is a freelance Digital Project Manager, mum and coffee lover navigating freelance life one thoughtful, strategic step at a time.

Name: Katie McCade

Business: Digital Project Manager

Location: Newcastle upon Tyne

Business Owner Since: January 2021

Go-to Coffee Shop Order: Caramel Latte

Where we can find you: You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn

Navigating motherhood, redundancy and going freelance in a pandemic

Being on maternity leave and then being made redundant sucks… throw in a global pandemic and well, you lose all sense of normal...

Everything you used to define your life is gone.. a career, financial freedom and independence, socialising, wining and dining, lying in on the weekends. 

All of that changes when you have a small human totally dependent on you. Now don’t get me wrong, our little boy is so very loved and I love being his mum but that’s not all that I am. 

I was fortunate enough to be able to take the full year off for maternity. When I started feeling like I was ready to use the work side of my brain again, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do that. 

You see, just as the pandemic hit we’d moved up North to be closer to family, which meant I no longer had the role I was in pre-baby to go back to (never mind the fact that they made me redundant anyway). I’d be starting all over again in this new city that I wasn’t overly familiar with because we’d spent most of it in lockdown. 

I flip-flopped between getting a new role in an agency where I’d be given the chance to get to know the city better and make some friends but since most agencies were working from home, it wasn’t as attractive anymore.

Then, an old colleague reached out with a freelance opportunity that would be totally flexible and meant I could dip my toe into the freelance world whilst still working out how I’d even be a freelancer. 

That first opportunity made me realise that I’d definitely like to see where I could take freelancing and now I’ve been doing it for 8 months all flexibly around my little boy and my husband’s work (plus all the usual home life responsibilities). 

Some things that have really helped me get going include: 

This is a real business

Treating my freelancing as a business helped me get out of the mindset of this just being ‘something I do’. It’s a business that affords me the lifestyle I want and gives me the flexibility a full-time role never could.

Working to a routine

This is something that I’ve had to work hard at since my time for actual work is around my son napping, when he’s at nursery or in the evenings once he’s gone to bed. Switching my brain from mum mode to work mode can take a little time but when I get my rhythm going, it’s so nice to be working. 

Know your worth

Sitting down and really working out what I wanted to earn each month after all expenses, helped me decide on what my minimum day rate could be – anything over that minimum is a huge bonus.

Keep things separate

Setting up a separate bank account so work and life are separate makes things very clear – I chose Starling bank because it’s online and was super straightforward to do. 

Save for that tax bill

Immediately saving 30% of any paid invoice into a separate pot for when I need to pay tax. I don’t know what my tax bill will be yet and I’m dreading paying it when it does come but this definitely helps alleviate some of the worry.

Previous relationships

Don’t burn bridges as you never know where you might pick up work – thanks to Will and Dan for being my first clients and helping me get going on this path.

Network

Create new relationships through social, newsletters, podcasts and Discord; I’ve reached out to people to connect, thank them for putting together great content and just chat.

Be organised

You wear so many different hats freelancing so keeping track of everything is a must! Using tools like And.co for managing my business, invoices, proposals, Todoist for keeping me organised and Monday.com for project management.

Going freelance can be daunting especially when you’ve always had the safety net a full-time role provides. That said, nowadays, no one’s role is 100% safe (as my second redundancy shows). 

Having control over how I work, when I work and who I work with is wonderful and means I still get to be there for all the firsts my little boy is still yet to experience – and that is totally priceless. 

Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.

Emily is a business and life coach and founder of ‘Emily Button Creative’, which aims to support women exploring self-employment in order to live a life on their own terms.

Business: Business and Life Coach

Location: Hove, Sussex

Business Owner Since: 2019 on the side and fully from 2020

Go-to Coffee Shop Order: Oat latte (iced at the mo!)

Where you can find me: You can find me over on LinkedIn, on Instagram or via my website

When people talk about BIG. CAREER. CHANGES they tend to focus on the change itself – what they did before, how they pivoted and what they do now. Rarely do I see anyone talking about the huge shifts in identity and mindset that you go through when you make these big changes.

Achieving the dream corporate position…or so I thought

So let’s take a quick look back to 2017 (oh what an uncomplicated time). I was newly promoted to a Director position at a large global financial services company, where all my peers were 10-15 years older than me. I had worked mega hard to progress through the ranks from a lowly graduate, to where I am now and thought I’d feel a huge sense of achievement and alignment, but I just didn’t.

I felt proud of my efforts, don’t get me wrong, it certainly wasn’t an easy journey – but I never felt the feelings that I thought I’d feel. Spur a few years of working with a coach and soul searching and fast forward to early 2020, where whilst on maternity leave with my 5-month-old son, I finally handed in my notice to fully focus on my coaching business and being my own boss.

I was always someone who was able to detach myself from work and because in the later years I became clearer on the fact it didn’t align to who I was as a person, I truly felt it wasn’t a part of my identity. How wrong I was!

Escaping the corporate conditioning

When you’ve worked your way up the ranks at a young age and attained that societal view of having made it, you almost enter a no man’s land when that is stripped from you as you enter into something new, with no one knowing you and feeling like an amateur in everything! I think for me, also combining that big lifestyle change (as becoming self-employed is usually much more than a work change) with becoming a mother for the first time, meant I was almost starting again to build myself up to the Emily that I am now.

As well as spending time doing the inner work to help shape my new identity, I also found I had to do some MAJOR corporate re-conditioning about how I responded to work. I think there is a societal view that “work is work”, you are not meant to enjoy it as no-one does and you just work, work, work until you retire and can enjoy life.

I think the pandemic has positively had an impact on this mindset and taught us all the value of the lives we are living today and how important the small things like friends, family and health are to each of us.

Why I left the corporate world and became self-employed

One of my main drivers for becoming self-employed was because I actually wanted to do work I love and was passionate about, not ‘busy’ work that was useless and had no meaning.

I spent time in the early days working through what that looked like for me and what my work manifesto consisted of – for me this is a set of criteria that I compare all work opportunities and packages against in order to check it aligns with what I actually want – doing work I love, supporting women, allowing me to work flexibly and 3 days a week, aligning to my inner foundation.

My tips for embarking on your own big career change

For those of you embarking on your own BIG. CAREER. CHANGES, or just looking to align the work you do with who you are, here are my top tips:

Build a strong inner foundation

This is one of the fundamentals that many miss when they are going through a change process, we tend to focus our efforts on the what but forget the why. Having a strong inner foundation is something that I spend a huge amount of time coaching my clients through, as it’s integral to living not only an aligned and happy life but also to ensure that the work you do is helping to support that.

For me, the foundation looks like exploring your why (why are you making changes? What is the bigger purpose here?), your passions and your values. Having a good understanding of these are integral and something to check in on regularly, as well as something to help centre you if you feel like you are moving down a path that isn’t right for you.

Understand your drivers for work

Understanding your drivers for work can be done by exploring questions like:

• How does my work support the life I want to be living?
• Why do I do the work I do?
• What changes can I make today to better align to the work I WANT to be doing?

Allow yourself to really get deep into your drivers for work. Quite often work is just something that is crow-barred into our life, with no real thought on how it connects, supports and elevates the other pillars. Having a deeper understanding of what you want and how you work can support can be so useful.

Map out your ideal working environment and criteria

If there were no rules or guidance, how would you best work? Thinking about how to do your best work and how you’d like to work, helps you step into your power and take control.

Sometimes things don’t need to be done the way they are done, so focus on a utopia and working through how you can build that into your day.

Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.

Oli is the founder of The Sporting Blog and CMO at Championship Horse Racing. With a love of Sports, he’s turned that passion into profit.

Business: The Sporting Blog/ Racing League

Location: England

Business Owner Since: 2017

Go-to Coffee Shop Order: At the moment something stronger!

Where you can find me: You can find me over on LinkedIn

We’ve all heard a million times about how if you enjoy your work, you won’t work a day in your life. Well, this I can tell you is not quite the case! But, it does go a long way. For 10 years I worked in the City, in a job I didn’t enjoy, but I did enjoy the company of people in an office, in a vibrant city etc.

Leaving the job I hate to start a new career

Some years later, having left that world to start a new career, I decided that my experiences were worth more than my skills. Perhaps you could argue that those experiences became skills or helped me upskill, but my point is that the soft skills you gather through experience are worth more (IMO) than the hard skills you learn when you are 18-21. 

My experiences outside of my day-to-day work were numerous, but by and large, sport had always played a part in my daily life.

Whether watching, playing or visiting, I had engaged with sports all over the world and had a useful list of contacts in the industry in a broad sense. My enthusiasm for all sports, therefore, led me towards creating a website, as a hobby, which could indulge my passions, whilst using my experiences to make it a useful resource for others.

Turning my passion into a profitable business

So I started The Sporting Blog, and for a year or so I was into it, the grind that every website creator knows, yet it was fun.

The Sporting Blog however led to one thing and another. Including interviewing someone about football, who then pitched to me about working with him on a new project in horse racing. We quickly set up a new business with two other partners, raised investment and 3 years later in July 2021 we are on the verge of launching the Racing League.

This has been totally all-consuming, and growing the blog took a backstep, although COVID-19 meant a bit more time at home to indulge myself, so the site is growing month on month and one day may well become a business that can sustain itself entirely.

For now, the moral or point of the story is that passion can certainly take you further than you originally think.

Working in an area you love opens doors as you are more likely to go and find them to step through. The grind of a day to day is one thing, but if you are grinding because you really want to make an impact in an industry that is another. I really believe that enthusiasm and ambition are great bedfellows, and with a good dose of both, you never know what can happen. 

Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.

Helen is a freelance Events and Communications Manager with over 11 years of industry experience.

Business: Freelance Events and Communications Manager

Location: Preston, Lancashire

Business Owner Since: August 2020

Go-to Coffee Shop Order: I’m a sucker for a gimmick, I love a pink hot chocolate

Where you can find me: Over on my website or on Instagram at @helenvbrady

The day in a life of an Events and Communications Manager

I am a freelance Events and Communications Manager, working with a wide variety of clients on both virtual, hybrid and in-person projects. After 10 years with an event management agency and a period on furlough, in August 2020 I found myself newly self-employed. It’s been a nervous, but exciting time of trial and error, testing the waters and taking chances while I find out what works for me in the freelance world. 

Typical daily morning routine

7:45am – 9am – I’ll be honest, I’m not up and out this early every day of the week, but one of the few good things that came from Lockdown was the introduction of the daily walk.

In my old job, I could quite easily get up, jump in the car, get to the office, sit at my desk the entire day, jump back in the car and head home again. I could barely scratch the surface of a couple of thousand steps. When the only thing we were allowed to do last year was go for a walk, I made sure I got out of the house as often as I could.

Now life has got a little bit more back to normal, and work is busy once again, I’ll admit that the daily walk has gone out of the window. My friend Nicola and I, another freelancer, do try and book in a weekly early morning schlep whenever time allows. We try and go mid-week, usually grab a brew on route, and talk about everything under the sun.

Nicola and I run a collaborative platform called Make Do Drink that usually hosts pop up creative workshops with local makers and independent venues. We switched to Zoom workshops throughout lockdown, but we are hoping to start making plans for in-person events from September onwards. We had a good old natter about new ideas and future plans. Sometimes the old creative juices work a bit better when you’re not stuck behind a laptop! 

9:30am – 10 am – Catch up on emails! I can’t cope with a messy inbox. I’ve got to read it, deal with it, put it in a folder. 

Client meetings, events and zooming around

10 am – 11 am – Client Meeting, Kick-Off/Intro to a Cvent, a virtual event platform 

One of the clients I am working with has a large-scale virtual event coming up at the end of June and they have just signed a contract with the digital event platform Cvent. There are a whole host of virtual event platforms available, and the developments in them, even in the past 18 months. Although many of the platforms operate in a similar way, they do all tend to have slightly different back systems and can take some getting used to in order to fully understand the functionalities. This client has just switched event platforms, and I am helping them implement a digital rebrand. This kick-off meeting was with the Cvent team to get an introduction to the platform, and an initial explanation of what it can do. 

11 am – 12 pm – Client Meeting, Introduction to the Team 

I try and have a gap between video calls, so you have time to grab a brew but sometimes everything happens at once so today it’s back-to-back Zoom/Teams/Skype!

One of the most complicated parts of freelancing I’ve found so far is getting your timings right. As one project ends, ideally you want another one just starting up to take its place, and that’s what’s happening today. A contact I have worked with previously at another organisation has moved roles, and they very kindly got back in touch with me about supporting some events over Summer 2021. This meeting is so I can meet the rest of the team, so who I am going to be working with, introduce myself and get some more details. 

I work with clients in a variety of ways, by the hour, by the day, or by set project fee’s, so I do try and find out as much as I can about a project before it starts however sometimes, even the client isn’t sure exactly what is they want until we get started. 

Kick-off meetings are great to get the ball rolling, start asking the right questions and try and begin to plan out the key deadlines. When it comes to event planning, I find it useful to start from the event date itself and work backwards, highlighting key milestones and actions that need to be taken along the way. Contracting suppliers, sending invites, registering guests, communicating instructions, event promo, ordering swag, everything has a lead time and that needs to be factored into all delivery. 

12:30 pm – 1:15 pm – Back on to Zoom once again! (Hopefully, the last big video call of the day, they’re way more exhausting than ‘in-real-life’ meetings, do you reckon?)

Although this time it’s for a short learning virtual event hosted by Fiona Grayson from CanDid, formerly know as She Can. She Did.

CanDid is a business network built for women who are tired of the ‘overnight success’ hype online, the blanket advice that often lacks substance and the misleading idea that we have to consistently ‘win’ to be a success. The events are normally for members only, but Fiona explained that this topic was such a popular one, she decided to make it available to everyone.

The session was “A How-to Guide…Getting on the Property Ladder When You’re Self Employed”. Having only been self-employed since August 2020, I’m fairly new to the game, and with buying my own house very much on the list of next big steps for me, I thought this session could be handy. 

My preconceptions are very much that it’s impossible to get a mortgage on your own when you are self-employed, and although it’s definitely not as straightforward as if you have a permanent full-time job, it definitely can be done. 

Screen-free time, gourmet toasties and afternoon organisation

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm – One of the ‘self-employed’ perks is being able to arrange your own diary and pencil in some catch-ups with friends and family a little bit more flexibly. After a morning in front of the screen, I decided I wanted to get out for some dinner and there is a great new food truck not too far away that I’ve been meaning to try out. It’s also near my parents’ house, so I dropped my Dad a quick call to see if he wanted to join me. 10 minutes later, we’re sat outside with gourmet toasties and loaded fries! Result! (He also suggested a swift one in the pub next door so I may have had half a Guinness as well. Another Result!)

3 pm – 6 pm – Back to work for a few hours to catch up on all the bits and bobs that I should have been doing while I was in meetings this morning. I currently have about 6 different projects ongoing, both a mixture of Events and Comms work, each with different time commitments, deadlines and actions that take up my week. Normal ‘work’ can involve anything from email admin to delegate communication, to building registration and events sites, to research and sourcing, to venue finding, and everything else in between. I have a wall planner with all my key deadlines and meetings on so I keep track of what’s happening with each project, and if I ever get behind on something or an urgent/unexpected deadline comes up, I know that I can work late/weekends to make sure it gets done. Freelancing means I can get that time back later down the line when things aren’t so busy! 

Flipping tyres and winding down for the evening

7:30 pm – 8:20 pm – I hate the idea of exercise, but I have been going to this Bootcamp class twice a week since before Christmas. The actual physical exercise is horrendous, but I cannot argue with the fact that it makes me feel better when I’ve finished, and I sleep like a light when I get home. I’ve not missed many classes at all but when I do, I can really tell the difference. (And not just because I’m less tired! It’s more in my head, I can let some secret anger out smashing gym balls and flipping tyres. Exercise works. Who knew? 😊)

9 pm – It’s probably a bit late for food really but if I eat before I go to Bootcamp, I will definitely throw up! Ha-ha! So, it’s tea and some TV catch up for me. I’m currently working my way through This is Us and would highly recommend it.