Early mistakes

Over the past 20 years, I've gone solo 4 separate times.

Leaving relatively safe, steady jobs to do my own thing, until my own thing stopped working and I'd have to go back to being employed again.

The first time was in 2005 (damn that's a long time ago!).

For about 4 blissful months from August 2005, I enjoyed a quick influx of referrals and support from family and friends to get clients signed up, and managed to replace my salary in my very first month of going solo...

...then lost about 60% of my income overnight when one client had to terminate their contract with me due to a conflict-of-interest.

I had no idea about running a business. No concept of lead generation or marketing, and thanks to some early support, was now sitting on a fully tapped-out network (or at least I thought so).

The following year I went back to employment, and would go solo and fail two more times before finally learning the important lessons about what it genuinely takes to go and stay solo.

I made so many errors and overlooked so many important things (hello taxes 👋).

The past wont change, but I now know how I could have avoided all of the fatal mistakes with complete clarity.

As we start counting down the last 100 days of 2025 (99 as of today actually!) I'll be sharing all of my biggest f-ups in detail, starting with that conflict-of-interest one that killed my first solo attempt, and what I now know could have avoided it.

Feel free to reply with your boo-boos if you feel like it - sometimes it's therapeutic to laugh at this stuff (while also planning to never let it happen again) 😃