If this comes across as self-indulgent I apologise, it’s not meant to. My motivation is to explain why I want to help self-employed creatives and just like everyone’s journey, it’s a squiggly one. And longer than yesterday.
Feel free to skip today and I’ll have moved the spotlight off me again tomorrow.
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After the turning point in 2015, my mind was made up… but careers are hard to walk way from. We were still in London, I had no real network to start a business, so all my eggs were in the design basket. That was ok – I left that terrible agency behind, and took contracts with other creative firms and even a government agency, with a renewed drive to restart the business once we returned back home to Australia.
In 2016, after 4 years in the UK, we made it back to Sydney. I restarted the business before we returned ensuring some projects were lined up when we landed, and by this time, more than a year after leaving Awful Agency™, my fury had settled and I was back working on design projects with far more normal people.
I still wanted to change things up significantly, but I didn’t quite know what that would look like. I became more selective about clients, based mostly on personality than anything else – if the person was a bit yuk, I backed away slowly, but that didn’t happen often. I was your typical generalist designer with a slightly more tuned radar for red flags, but not much more. Despite that, business was growing and things were working.
In 2017, I decided – finally – to specialise in corporate rebranding. This was both a jump into specialisation and a jump into productised services. I continued working with my existing clients and taking on general design work, but all my focus with big pitches, “so what do you do” party talk, the very little social media I published, and the networking events I attended, was all around being a rebranding specialist.
I created a handful of fixed-price products that were much easier to talk about than general design work, and some great referrals and fun projects came from doing that. Even though most of the time I altered the service to suit the client, it was more than 90% defined from my product descriptions and accepted as is.
Between 2018 and 2020 I had some difficult family events, and a lot of my work went on the back burner. I continued for the most part, but I completely maxed out all the flexibility I had created and, thankfully, amazingly, I had very understanding clients. 2020 was 2020, we were all there. Work was ok and my son being born was by far the shining highlight of that year, but I give most of that period a big 👎
By the start of 2021 I was ready with the rest of the world to try and put 2020 in the rearview, and really kickstart this thing. I stayed with the rebranding specialisation, and started this here daily newsletter you’re reading. A few months into it, my passion for climate and solutions kicked into gear with a vengeance, and I started weaving in my thoughts about that into the emails.
By 2022, I was really enjoying the advisory side of rebranding with the climate angle, and had contracted a brand designer to take on the design work. We were working with awesome clients who were purpose-driven, in the sustainability space, and doing good stuff we were happy to put our names to.
☆ Turning Point: Since the very beginning, I believed I wanted to grow to a 4-5 person creative agency and this felt like a big step in that direction… hiring that designer turned out to be a wake-up call – one of those glass-of-water-in-the-face ones.
My designer was awesome, but I wasn’t built for managing staff. Despite managing teams in previous roles and enjoying it, I realised that the business I wanted wasn’t one where I was a) responsible for people’s livelihoods, and b) dominated by admin. I gave my designer heaps of notice, and happily let the agency dream go up in smoke – sounds sad, but it was the opposite. For 17 years I realised I had the wrong dream, and I was so thrilled to have realised it.
Through the years, I’d been helping clients and a few friends find focus, create services or craft offers with their businesses. Some of them were freelancers in creative fields – I had tried and failed at a lot of stuff, and was a student of things like copywriting and marketing, so I always had something to offer or point to in that area… and I really loved talking about it.
☆ Turning Point (last one): 2023 was the year I finally realised I actually enjoy running a business more than I enjoy doing design work for clients.
Design work – while I enjoyed it and had lovely clients – wasn’t truly sparking joy for me. Even rebranding with the new climate angle just didn’t quite feel like the thing.
What I realised I did love, was:
I had lots of experience running and optimising my creative business. Plenty of bad decisions, fails and wrong turns… and also, plenty that worked. Lots of stuff I did that made things simpler – things that, when I focused on them, created a lot of flexibility in my work week.
So I made a thing of it.
And brought the climate angle along with me.
Now, I teach self-employed creatives how to create that flexibility (mostly by optimising their services to be way simpler) so they can use the flexibility when times get tough and they need the mental headspace (like I did)… or for holidays, or family, or hobbies, or more work, or whatever they want.
And people like it.
It’s still coming together, but it’s really coming together.
There will be more products available at different price-points in the coming weeks (currently just the 3 links you see below).
Thanks for indulging me – it was fun to timeline this out and see where all the big moments have been. It’s taken me 19 years to figure this out (which means my business turns 20 next year… holy sh*t 😳).
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19 years of stats for fun:
For self-employed creatives, normal business traps are easy to fall into and overcomplicate things - but they’re totally avoidable when flying solo.
Learn how to keep things simple, enjoyable, and climate-smart in around 2 minutes a day by joining The Climate Soloist.