The Freelance Mum: A flexible career guide for better work-life balance. Annie Ridout
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Think big but start small
My dad is an optician and ran a small chain of his own shops when I was growing up, but before that he tested people’s eyes from the bedroom of his and my mum’s flat in the evenings, while working for an established optician in the daytime. He knew that he needed customers if he was going to start his own business. In time, he was able to open his first shop, round the corner from that flat. All the customers whose eyes he’d tested in his bedroom joined him at his new opticians. He did the building work and painting himself, and called in favours from friends. My dad didn’t have start-up funds so he had to keep everything as cheap as possible. Once he was making a profit, he was able to re-design the shop then buy a second one. He grew that business, too, and a few years later he bought a third shop.
He told me about an old friend of his who had also decided to start a business. This guy wanted to be his own boss. My dad advised him to be frugal, at least at the start, and perhaps to even stick with his existing job while trialling the new line of work. Get some clients before you commit to an office space. But this guy didn’t want to hear it; he invested in a fancy central London office and bought a nice car to impress clients. Only, he never got any clients, so the business failed and that was the end of his dream to work for himself.
When you’re finding your feet, keep your spending to a minimum. Whether you’re starting out as a freelancer or launching a new business, if you’re able to set it up from your kitchen table (or sofa/bed), do. I’m now earning enough to pay for a shared workspace, but for me, it’s more important that I keep building my business and freelance career, so I’m still working from a corner of the kitchen table and spending that money in different areas. If I get bored and need a change of scenery, or if my husband’s looking after the kids and I don’t want them to distract me, I pop to a local coffee shop that has wifi.
You might be tempted to spend money on smart clothes when meeting potential new clients. Of course presentation is important, but don’t get carried away; you can look smart without blowing a month’s income on a designer jumpsuit. If you keep your hair washed, your shoes clean and your clothes ironed, that’s probably enough. It’s more important that your personality shines through with your clothes than your income. You’re no more likely to get the pitch in an Armani suit than I am in my £35 Lucy & Yak dungarees. In fact, spending a small fortune on clothes when you have young kids is a waste of money; I bought a lovely pastel-pink cashmere jumper for a talk I was doing and it was soon destroyed by my children’s mucky hands and tugging. So now I’m back in my high-street clothes and affordable ethical brands.
Put simply: don’t spend all your money before you’ve made it.
Holly Tucker MBE, founder of Holly & Co, co-founder of Not on the High Street, launched the now multi-million-pound business from her kitchen table in 2006. I asked how she managed childcare in the early days. ‘He was with me, sleeping under the table!’ she says. ‘I look back on those days with such fondness, because he grew with me and my business in those early years. It was funny, because with launching Holly & Co came more years of hard days and late nights, and Harry was there again, sleeping under the table. My biggest supporter.’
Ask any entrepreneur or superstar freelancer and you’ll hear the same thing: think big but start small.
Getting the ball rolling
Now that you’ve come up with your freelance career focus, you need to turn yourself into a brand. Will your freelance work be under your name, or will you create a more general name? For instance, my copywriting and consultancy work is under Annie Ridout (annieridout.com) while my digital magazine is called The Early Hour. Down the line, you might want to expand your services and have other people work for you, so this is worth bearing in mind. That said, Arianna Huffington had no issue turning The Huffington Post, clearly named after her, into a multi-million-dollar enterprise, so if the brand’s really strong, and the work is respected, that will be what matters most.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, said in his autobiography that the idea for his business name stemmed from him being on one of his ‘fruitarian diets’. He’d just come back from an apple farm and thought the name ‘Apple’ sounded ‘fun, spirited and not intimidating’. The name for the BlackBerry phone – the first device that could send and receive emails wirelessly, initially via a pager and later a mobile phone – came about following a brainstorming session with Lexicon consultancy, who are devoted to naming products. Having the word ‘email’ in the title sounded boring so they looked outside of the box, at unrelated things that make people feel good. Someone suggested ‘strawberry’ but it was rejected for sounding too ‘slow’.1 ‘Blackberry’ was suggested, as the device was black and this sounded snappy. The name stuck and the company rocketed.
So it’s worth having a good think about names and not choosing anything that will make people pigeon-hole you in the wrong way. I wanted The Early Hour to be for both mums and dads, which is why I didn’t use the word ‘mum’ in the title. I decided on the concept of publishing articles early in the morning, at 5 a.m., for parents who were up with their young babies or kids, and the name followed after a brainstorming session with my sister. We listed everything we could think of associated with mornings, early, parenting, babies – and this one stuck. Well, initially we thought of ‘early hours’ but there were too many existing brands with this name. And in the end, we liked that it was more rhythmic-sounding and that it was as if ‘the early hour’ was our hour; we owned it. It also felt this name would still work if the brand expanded to include consultancy, which it has, or other branches of work.
Make it your domain
Before committing to a name for your brand, check whether the domain is available for your website – e.g. theearlyhour.com/annieridout.com – and the social media handles. You can check domains by googling ‘domain checker’ and using one of the sites that pop up. Ideally, you also want your website name to be your handle. Or if your work is under your own name, try to secure social media accounts with your name (e.g. I’m @annieridout on Instagram and Twitter). There’s more on social media in Chapter 6, but for now, I’d recommend Instagram and Twitter for starting out. In terms of finding a business name that you’ll be able to own the domain for, you will need to think outside the box. If you choose ‘The Mummy Blogger’ as your brand name, the likelihood is that both the domain and social media accounts will already have been snapped up. So opt for something more original that you can use across platforms.
When you’re checking domains, you can put in the brand name you’re toying with, followed by .com and you’ll be told whether it’s available or already exists. Ideally, you want the .com, as it’s good for SEO (getting to the top of Google searches, see here) and it’s what people automatically type into Google. But if you’re totally set on a name and can only get .co.uk or .org or .co, it’s not the end of the world. As long as you build a strong brand, website and following, these things will supersede your top-level domain (TLD) – the last few letters of your URL.
Website hosting
Now you’ll need to decide where to host your website. I chose to buy my domain through Tsohost – they have great tech support, and were