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