Day 2: Egg Baskets

The Employed Self Employed

Day 2: Egg Baskets

Dear hard workers,

Yet again the infamous writers block is back, I’m starting to wonder whether or not I should actually be a writer as it seems to be an on going battle to put the words on the page.

I hope those of you who are in the same position as I am, are having a bit more success than I am. Following up from last week when I was asked to provide a motto of my life, I haven’t yet heard back from FHM to say that my article was unsuccessful due to being too pompous, so I can only assume I will be in the May copy.

In the mean time I am attempting to befriend all PR agents in order to gain more editorial in other popular magazines by offering to buy them drinks, babysit their children for free and even clean their cars, just for the possibility of getting our name known to a few more people. As all of you are probably aware, start-up business’s tend to have significantly smaller budgets than those multinational corporations that dominate the market, therefore we need to find ways and means to get ourselves noticed without dressing up as Batman and scaling Buckingham Palace (although you could argue that he did achieve what he set out to do, effectively). 

If I could say one thing from this previous week its that, always treat anything that happens - entirely as a learning curve, be it crashing your car – you’ll soon learn to just drive a bit faster in the hope to have not been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or getting caught for being at the West Ham – Burnley football game when you should have been at work – again you’ll soon learn to make sure that you call Mr Furdell who was down on that day to be shown round #3 Temair House to inform him that when your boss calls to find out where the bluddy hell you are, he covers for you. Instead of denying ever wanting to view a studio flat in South London, especially when he’s after a 4 bed in Belgravia.

I’ll get to the point now…..

Over the past week we were asked to organise a huge event for a major client, one that would put us on the map a hell of a lot more than we are now. So when the opportunity arose, naturally I took it with both hands without so much as thinking about anything else I had going on. Unfortunately as always in life, things didn’t go quite to plan and without any warning the company pulled out. Leaving us in a rather sticky situation. After a day of blaming it on everything including the dog crapping all over the house, I soon came to realise that not only was it only partially the dogs fault but maybe this was a good thing for the company. Maybe we weren’t quite ready for such an event so in some ways it was a learning curve as before long we were bound to come a cropper when we’ve booked 1200 hotel rooms and 3 days before the event we’ve only got 7 people to put in them with no deposit as security. Since then we have all our terms and conditions in correct order.

As lessons go I feel this was an incredibly valuable one as its times like these that sort the wheat from the chaff and instead of giving up and going home which a lot of people may have done we decided to get back on the horse (excuse the horse pun it comes with the job description – see blog 1) and keep going.

So if I could give you any piece of advice it’s that life never takes a turn for the worse, its just life in general its never actually going well. You’re just being naïve. Also make sure all of your paper work is in order and without turning into a dodgy insurance company you are covered in every sense so that when something does go wrong or someone does try and avoid paying you are in the position to turn round and make sure they play by your rules. After all this is a company you’re running, so don’t go downloading a generic terms and conditions template off the Internet. They’re bespoke for a reason!!

Please feel free to comment as I would love to hear any problems or interesting stories you have from running your own company.

Still going strong,

The employed self employed.

x

The employed self employed - Day 1: First blog

The employed self employed

Day 1: First Blog

So writing a blog….. I’m already discovering the infamous writers block on my first line and beginning to wonder whether I will spend the next 10minutes babbling on about writers block, which to be honest isn’t the best of starts.

I decided to write a blog as I felt it would be another great way to express ones self and continue to inch my way to worldwide success. But for the time being I must continue the long hard slog as one of many employed self employed.

So what is an employed self employed you may ask? I consider myself an employed self employed because although I am employed full time by a major company I do run my own company in my so called spare time, not entirely sure why its called spare time as there’s nothing spare about it. I now even class sleeping as a chore as it has to be done in order to function and have started attempting to train my body to rely on less.

So to those of you out there who have been unfortunate enough to stumble upon my blog, hopefully if you don’t find it at all useful you may find some slight amusement.

By day I am a marketing director, by night I am an events organiser, you may think those 2 go pretty hand in hand, until you discover that marketing horse supplements doesn’t give you the best grounding for organising events. So why do it; the simple answer is because I don’t like horse supplements very much.

Running your own company does come with its perks, not only can you work the hours you choose, the amount you get paid is entirely up to you. However in layman’s terms this corresponds to the less hours you put in the less you get paid.

Now we have got passed the point of what I do we can start actually making some sense.

Today I was emailed by FHM (did I forget to mention they’re writing an article on how brilliant I am) asking me for 3 lessons I had learnt from running my own business, 1 fatal error I had made during my time running my business, and my motto (we’ll come back to that). The first question was a tricky one and if I had been brutally honest I would have just written, “don’t start your own business” 3 times, however I had to appear to be switched on, driven, and entrepreneurial so I put something about how hard I work. The second question was fairly easy; it was just a question of choosing which fatal error to write down. The 3^rd question however was the interesting one, what is my motto. At first I just replied to the editor at the magazine with the business strapline, to which he replied “no, your own motto, not your business strapline”, this threw me somewhat as I don’t remember as a child having to have a motto to live by just in case the question arose. So here I was trying to sound all inspirational but not too much like a political activist on speed. I had a quick browse of the internet to steal someone else’s but decided shortly before hitting send that he did ask specifically for mine, not for Albert Einstein’s (I wish he had), so decided upon the following 9 words (8 if you don’t count the letter a) “If you start today, you're already a day behind”.  This I felt was fairly to the point and easy to remember if someone else were to ask when I become famous. But I would like all who are reading this that I was first to write this at 16:24 March 28^th 2011.

Unfortunately that is the end of my allocated blogging time, but there will be more to follow shortly.

Yours reluctantly,

The employed self employed