Reflecting on two years in business
This week marks two significant dates for me - my birthday (hello to any fellow Scorpio babies!), and also the anniversary of taking my business full time. Two years ago, on the eve of my 30th birthday, I handed back my laptop and key card and turned my back on the corporate career I’d spent a decade building.
I remember sitting at the champagne bar in St Pancras, having a solo glass of fizz before I boarded my train home and feeling like for the first time ever, I’d done something truly monumental. I was scared and apprehensive and unsure of what the future would hold, but I also felt wildly optimistic - it felt like I’d just opened this huge, heavy door that I’d been knocking at for a while, and now the adventure was about to begin.
And what an adventure it has been! I wrote last year about my first year in business - the one where just as I was finding my feet, a global pandemic came along. But today I wanted to focus on the last twelve months, or what I’ve heard other business owners refer to as “the difficult second album”. It hasn’t been any less eventful or full of learnings, but I’m grateful for all of it. So let’s dive in…
If I was to choose a theme to describe this last year in business, it would be “strengthening the foundations”. What’s interesting to me is that if I were to compare the business I have now to the business I was running this time last year, from the outside it might not look like all that much has changed. I still offer 1:1 coaching, I still talk about joy, my group programmes still feel pretty similar. But internally, things feel so much different.
This time last year, I was still very much in the stage of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. I think this is a stage that everyone who starts a business has to go through, and it can be the catalyst for some brilliant ideas and opportunities, but I remember feeling unsteady in it. As I approached my second year in business I was craving more stability and safety, and so it’s perhaps not unsurprising that the last 12 months have taken on the theme of “strengthening the foundations”.
Strengthening the foundations of my business hasn’t always been the most exciting thing to do. It has involved a lot of tedious and incredibly unglamorous work - setting up as a limited company, becoming VAT registered and getting proper legal processes in place have all featured on my to do list (I feel like I’ve done an awful lot of paperwork this last year!). But taking this action has made a huge difference to how I feel as a business owner - I feel more rooted and safe within my business now, and I know that this security will provide a solid platform for more growth in the coming years.
Another important piece of strengthening the foundations was my return to uni. I had a coaching qualification and tonnes of experience from my previous career, but there were areas I wanted to learn more about, and knowledge gaps I wanted to plug, and so in September last year, I started a Master in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology. I’ve studied full time alongside running my business this past year (until July when I handed in my final research paper), and it was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but I’m so glad I did it. The content of the programme has undoubtedly made me better at my job, but it has also changed me as a person - I am more confident, more ambitious and without a doubt, happier, as a result of what I learned. As I look to the future I can see just how much my study this year is shaping the vision I have for my business, and that makes all of the hard work feel so worth it.
So, let’s talk about the future and what’s next. One of the big shifts I’ve experienced as a business owner this year is that when I think about the future, I’m no longer thinking just about the coming weeks or months - I’m thinking about where I want my business to be in 5 or 10 years time. This change in perspective feels exciting to me because it means I can be far more ambitious, but it also feels like a permission slip to simplify things. When I remember that not everything has to happen in the next 12 months, doing less stuff in a much better way feels far more empowering.
And I suppose that pretty much sums up my strategy for the next year or so - less stuff, done in a more impactful way. Again, it might appear that not all that much changes from the outside. Joy will remain at the heart of everything I do, and my mission will still be all about giving people practical tools to help them make positive changes in their lives, but the ambition this year is to spread that message even further and create a greater impact. Coaching will remain at the heart of my offerings, my signature programmes will continue to evolve and improve, and there will be a handful of workshops or mini projects throughout the year to keep things accessible. No big shake ups, no huge launches - just more of the same joyful goodness, and a desire to keep on making things better.
I hope that by this time next year there will be a few new team members helping me to spread the joy message far and wide, and there are a couple of secret projects I’ve been working on that I’d love to be out in the world by then, too. But other than that, my hope for year 3 is to just keep on doing the work I love and having a positive impact - I really can’t ask for more than that!
Thank you, as always, for supporting me and my work - without you lot engaging, sharing and cheering me on, none of this would be possible. Right, year 3 - let’s do this!