Reflections on one year in business
It’s been one year since I started my own business (a corporate affairs and public relations consultancy). I know this only by the number of LinkedIn messages I’ve gotten this week congratulating me on my work anniversary. I’ve spent no time thinking about it. Amazing. Where did the months go? I do not know.
What I do know that is that I’ve wanted to write more. Not just the commentaries that reinforce what I do and (ultimately) help my business. I do that. But, I’ve wanted a place where I could send my observations about what I experience in the world out into the world. Not directly related to the work I do, not that comes across or is intended as a soft sales pitch, not targeted to my business network. I’ve decided this could be that space. And where better to start than that obligatory “what I’ve learned in my first year in business post.” Here goes.
If you’re not hearing from anyone, you only have yourself to blame.
I remember a day of self-pity, when I was questioning why my phone wasn’t ringing or my inbox was uncomfortably shallow. Why isn’t anyone getting back to me? Then I checked how many calls I’d made or emails I’d sent. Aha!
It’s nobody else’s job to keep you busy. Make your own action happen. Which leads to…
If there’s something you think you should do, do it. Now.
When I was first getting started, I sent out early updates to my network letting them know what I was up to. Of course I didn’t get to everyone right away. One I hadn’t contacted yet was a former client, someone I’d worked with five years prior who I thought would be able to give me some good insights. I don’t know why I hadn’t contacted her yet, though the fact that we hadn’t worked together for five years was likely part of it. But something was telling me to just send her that note already.
So I did. And got an immediate response that she’d love to talk but was heading out of town for a few days and could we do it in a couple weeks. Fair enough. Of course, I said.
Three days later, I got an email. It was from that former client’s best friend. They had been together over the weekend (remember “heading out of town for a few days”?), started talking about public relations, and my former client told her about me and that she should call.
The email that I was initially hesitating to send led to my first official client. If I hadn’t sent it exactly when I did, she wouldn’t have had any idea that I had started my own business and would never have thought to refer her best friend my way. Which leads to…
Spend time on your network.
Every single client I’ve worked with in my first year came from a relationship. Every. Single. One. Best friend of a former client. Former client. Best friend of a current client. Former colleague. Former colleague of a former colleague. Husband of a client that was a former colleague of a former colleague.
Relationships go beyond getting work. My accountant came from a referral from someone I’d hired before who was now on his own. I reconnected with a childhood friend, who shared her start-up stories with me and was doing work I thought would be interesting to another childhood friend, so I connected them. Relationships have pointed me towards others who have done the build-the-firm-from-the-ground-up thing, and they’ve given me extraordinarily valuable advice that has shaped many of my actions.
Spend time on your network. Build it, nurture it, give back to it, and it’ll give back to you in countless ways. Which leads to…
Make time for the work.
One of the most interesting things about starting a business is that you alone need to build the business, operate the business, and do the business. And those three things can bump up against one another. In the early stages of hustling, you might be spending more time on business development (networking: see above) than anything else until one day when, oops, it works and you become a victim of your own success. But if you can’t do the work you’ve worked so hard to get — and do it well — you’ll be the victim of something else.
Fortunately, there are 24 hours in every day, seven days in every week, and 365 days in every year. Take full advantage of that. My sense of space and time has completely changed over the past year. Time management techniques help some. But there are times when everything is crashing together. I’ll get to work early when it’s quiet and I can bang things out. When I sit down in my home office after putting the kids to bed, I joke to my wife that I’m doing the nightshift. I carve out time to get big chunks of work done early and all at once rather than spreading it between now and deadline because something else will inevitably come up. That gives me something to come back to it, edit, tinker, etc. Do I love it? Yes, but not always. Which leads to…
Give yourself a break.
That might mean a walk, a day off, a weekend trip, or even a full-fledged vacation. Whatever you can do, more power to you.
It also means cutting yourself some slack. Yes, there are hard deadlines that you have to hit, some self-imposed and others driven by external forces. And, yes, you have to meet those commitments.
But there also days when you don’t get everything done that you wanted to do, a project was more complex or took longer than anticipated, or when the creative juices were simply tapped. It happens. Don’t beat yourself up about it. There’s always tomorrow. Just be ready for tomorrow.
