A year in business

My business started with plums. Katie asked for some visual references for the website and I said, Call Me By Your Name, Italian summer, fruit hanging from trees. I downloaded Pintrest for the occasion and we both created mood boards. We swapped links and I imagine smiled scrolling through each others’, they were the same, they were exactly the same. I don’t know how it is that the visual theme for the website came before the idea for the business, but it did. 

Tom shot pictures of plums hanging from my parents tree, tanned skin, me swimming in the creek. And then Katie put it all together and I wrote a doc with the copy, it came out as I was writing, part one of my idea. It took a couple of months for something else to click into place, but then suddenly it did and I had the thing. This is what I am putting out into the world. This is my business. 

For seven or eight years before, I was running another one. But it never felt like this, instead, it felt like mad paddling to stay afloat. Working for yourself is one thing, but working for yourself working for other people is another, and that’s what I had been doing. Nothing actually felt like mine, and the only time it did was that golden hour in lockdown when I was the front man, the middle man and the man at the back counting. 

Being a freelance yoga teacher is actually the worst of both worlds. Not enough work in any one place, so a miraculous split of yourself is required between several third parties who offer you not an ounce of security in return for your soul/service. I have started to think that this split causes a kind of fragmentation of self. You have a boss - actually you have loads of different bosses. And ultimately you obey their rules: no music here, xx amount of notice for cover here, hugs and kisses at the door here, and so forth. But the annoyances of having a boss are not out-weighed or even equalised by an assurance of sick/holiday/maternity or any other kind of pay that might enable you to rest or move forward with your life.

Someone said to me the other day that someone had said to them: ‘aren’t yoga teacher’s just rich men’s wives?’ And I thought wow, well yes, the successful ones are, and wow never a truer word had been uttered. Anyway, the actual point I am grasping for is about how in a year of my current life I have learnt more about business than a year in my former life and that is because my former life didn’t let me see past the hamster wheel I was living on.

I used to feel bad that the days where I only had say one evening class were basically redundant apart from that one hour of service. How was it that I could get nothing else done and spent most hours in thick dread and counting down the hours rather than doing all the things that might help me move forwards? What I have learnt is that moving forwards is quite slow. These slow solid steps that take time and patience to even place down in the first instance. The other thing I have learnt I need is belief in and autonomy over my cause. The drain from my paragraph above always threatened my belief in the cause of my former life. So I’d have spurts of imagination and belief, followed by periods of looking at the rain batter against the window and wonder how I would get on my bike, again. 

I think a certain amount of dread is part of the deal of being a human allowed to live this life, but in those years, the dread came every morning, after every pre-6am alarm. The energy required to perform and absorb in equal measure subtracted my life force for the rest of the day, and then all there was left to do was, pasta. And of course a certain amount of life force draining is part of any human life, I’m not delusional - not about that anyway. 

Right so, I am trying to explain something very specific. Marketing consistency? Probably that. My own erratic energy meant that my own consistency was wacky and non existent. It was all sudden burst of rainbows and world peace, followed by silence and to be honest, some Spotify links to sad songs I wanted him to know I was listening to thinking about him. That might be another part of it. My focus was one eye forwards, one eye somewhere else, and head very much turned to look back. Perhaps a stable life during those years would have built the stable business (back to the wives of rich husbands then aren’t we). I suppose the point is, if you are employed during the years of your Saturn Return, then any erratic behaviour is excusable if you manage to show up to work more or less on time most days. Even if at times you are dead behind the eyes.

When I was about 11 or 12 and in one of my campaigns for a horse, could have even been 10, Serena, one of mum and dad’s friends who knew about horses, said, you may as well dig a massive hole and pour all your money in it. And the thing is even though I remember her saying this, I didn’t listen, or I did and then I disregarded it because I wanted to dig the hole more. If someone had put their hand on my shoulder as I handed in my notice of my job in the media that I’d recently landed and had the words Digital Editor in it, and said, if you pick this road you will make no money and just about scrape by, and always be astounded by your tax bill, and never save a penny and never progress, do you still want to pick it? I’d have merrily and giddily picked the path and skipped down the road. 

Wouldn’t have it any other way :) :) 

So perhaps I was just a slow starter and I needed all those loop the loops to be able to say: this is the price so you have to pay the price of this if you want to do it. Rather than, don’t worry about the price, it’s more important that you get access to yoga than that I pay my rent. I always find it funny (not in a haha way more in a scream into an abyss way) when people who have jobs that pay them a salary ask for creative people who run 10 miles a day in the desert for a discount. It happens all the time. A part of me even delights in it, hehehe. Every time someone asks Tom for the cost of his print or to shoot with him they send a cheeky wink, mates rates version please. And I want to ram something into their teeth. Do you not know that this is our job? Imagine if your boss said can you do your normal day work for mates rates today buddy? The trouble is we are so braced for this version that we lost all sight of our value a while ago. 

I think a lifetime of hearing that makes you think your silly little contribution is a silly little contribution and just say thank you when one of your friends with a salary picks up the bill. 

Even in this essay I call myself a slow starter like I am dim witted and caught up with frivolous things like boys who don’t like me or candy floss, rather than, I followed my passion, was really good at it, tried really hard and then found myself changed and unwilling to try anymore. In a diagram God might draw at the end, we could see all the lessons I learnt then and how they made who I am now possible. And now I can’t yet pick up the bill for the table but I can say, I’m doing well with my work. And I can say I’m good at what I’m doing. 

In a year of my business I have built more confidence. That is worth writing down in my appraisal. I’ve also learnt about consistency and explaining what you do rather than trying to be cute, sexy and funny on Instagram. I have learnt about believing in what I am doing. I have learnt that things take time. Making a brand takes time and it has to have time and air and water to evolve. It’s not something I can think of in my brain, it’s something that grows in the direction it’s growing in because of where it is in relation to the light (or something like that). 

The part of me it takes to write exquisite essays and memoirs is different to the part of me who runs a business. Opposing forces. But I have learnt that it is possible to do the things I don’t think come naturally to me. Like make a spreadsheet, like send follow-up emails, like reply to emails. It was easy to say I am THIS way and all THESE things aren’t for me so I am stuck in this box forever. But with a bit of effort and focus I can say, I can do these things too. I can keep trying and even invent chaotic strategies of trying and see what works and what doesn’t and live in the mystery of how you really never know but you can keep trying. 

The difference for me was the choice to take myself seriously. It sounds like such a simple thing, but it took a long time to get there. My reflex is to minimise myself. In most conversations I will prioritise making the person I am talking to feel better about themselves, often by making them feel comfortable in the knowledge that I know I am very silly. I suppose the truth is it is very embarrassing to try and fail and much less embarrassing to not try and stay put. To say what you really want and risk people knowing that you didn’t get it, that you want something you don’t have, that it didn’t work out. But really, if you look all the way into that, that’s not actually embarrassing at all. 

Earlier this year I had a book proposal out on submission. It came after signing on the dotted line with an agent which is a moment I’d waited a lifetime for and a moment that felt inconceivable. And I celebrated it. One time I went on a run around Hackney Downs and whispered my thanks to the air and to Jesus or the magpies, or whoever it is. I marked it. No one offered on the book and it was DISAPPOINTING. Strangely less disappointing than I’d imagined it would be when I was imagining that I would die if I didn’t get an offer. It didn’t linger, the disappointment, I would say max a day and a half. And it didn’t touch the other disappointments I’ve had before. And the thing is, I really tried, like I worked hard on the proposal, I know it was extremely good and I learnt the next best lesson I’ve learnt about business: it’s not personal. Use it like a mantra, I have. 

Cracking onto the next thing came quickly, pendulum real quick on its return. Don’t linger. Before now I’ve spent a lot of time lingering in the wake of things. Like a lot. Identifying with the state of it more than anything else. I am THE heartbroken girl for example. But I was and then I wasn’t. I had to be something else, living? That’s how I’ve changed, ONTO THE NEXT. It isn’t linear but look, it’s moving forwards. 

A year ago we took photographs of plums, and now I have the foundations to my house.