ON BEING SELF-EMPLOYED

I’ve worked from home since 1995, when I gave up my job as Editorial Director of a nationwide children’s book club. The company had moved most of its operation to Uxbridge, keeping a satellite office in Gloucestershire, where I lived. Suddenly, I was required to travel to Uxbridge at least twice a week, not a journey I would recommend in rush-hour traffic. I was a single mother to three small boys, and though I had a degree of flexibility in my work, I was still at the beck and call of others, and I was often torn between the demands of the job and the desire to be with my children. I was already an established author by 1995, so when it became clear that it was in nobody’s interest – neither the company’s, nor those of us manning the engine room in Gloucestershire – to continue a fragmented and impractical relationship, I seized the opportunity to accept a substantial payoff and work from home as a full-time author. The freedom! Wow! No more travelling up and down the M4! Suddenly it was up to me to decide when and how I worked. Suddenly I could take the boys to and from school every day of the week. I could play tennis when I wanted, and discovered art classes. I could have coffee with friends and even go out for lunch. I had so much more time, and I wondered why on earth I hadn’t become self-employed several years before, though I had always loved my job.   Of course, the bills still had to be met, and my severance pay wasn’t going to last for ever. It was important for me to establish some sort of discipline in my life now that it wasn’t being defined by a job. That’s not something that came easily to me (it still doesn’t!) because I’m a bit of a free spirit, but I discovered enough self-motivation to overcome even the occasional crippling fear of the blank page that writers are prone to, and produced a steady stream of successful manuscripts. When I took on a new challenge in 2002 – to come away from picture books and write my first children’s novel - I floundered badly at first. It’s a completely different discipline. Writing picture books is a lot to do with bouncing an idea around in your head – sometimes for weeks and months - then molding it, shaping it, paring it down, until it is ready to spill onto the page, almost fully formed, where it is shaped some more, given colour and pace, before heading off in search of an illustrator. Where novels are concerned, there’s a lot more hard graft. I’m not good with synopses, planning and plotting, so I literally have to sit down with a thread of an idea, start writing and see where it takes me. That’s where the real self-discipline comes in, because writing is not an easy profession, and the temptation to go off and do something else – anything else! – is massive, especially when you haven’t a clue what is going to happen next in your story. In general, self-motivation, planning and persistence are far more important when you are self-employed than when someone else calls the tune. There’s nobody there to backstop you when you’re having an off day and, quite simply, if you don’t work you don’t get paid. That’s never truer than where holidays are concerned: if you take a holiday, it comes out of your own income. If you’re ill, there’s no sick-pay buffer, so you’re more inclined to keep going, unless that’s just not possible. And there can be major swings in turnover/profit/income from one year to the next. Many people who start their own business are run ragged until such time as the business has become established well enough that they can begin to reap the rewards – if they haven’t fallen by the wayside before that day. A few years back, and much to my surprise, I became involved in a network marketing company. I had no idea there was such a thing, but I was looking for a second income around my writing in order to solve a cash-flow problem, and it offered the flexibility I needed, not to mention the possibility of a royalty-style income if I wanted more than just a bit of extra cash – which, in the event, I did.  One of the things I hadn’t expected was the degree to which emphasis would be laid by top trainers in the company on self-motivation and planning and, above all, persistence and goal setting. I thought, rather arrogantly in retrospect, that it was simply a question of finding a few customers and a few team members, and that once I had done that the money would roll in. How wrong could I be! Network marketing is a phenomenal opportunity for people from all walks of life to have their own home-based business, without the investment needed in traditional business. A good company will provide ongoing training and support and will work hard to help its distributors to be successful. But you will nevertheless be found out if you lack discipline and self-motivation, which no external agency can supply. And that’s where many people fail – they just don’t have the dogged determination that it takes to pick yourself up and dust yourself down whenever the going gets tough, which it does, regularly, for anyone who works for themselves. Which means that they never benefit from the positives of being self-employed: the freedom, the ability to do what you like when you like and fine-tune your work/life balance, the joy of having more time, the satisfaction of being able to look in the mirror at the end of the day and say, ‘I did a good job today and I would employ me again tomorrow’. I could never return to being employed. No, thank you. I don’t want someone to decide for me how much I can earn. I don’t want to have to wait to be patted on the back for a job well done by a boss who may never think it’s necessary. Ultimately, being self-employed is about taking control of your own life rather than putting that control into the hands of others. That suits me fine, and I’ll happily take the rough with the smooth, because if you work hard enough for it, the smooth far outweighs the rough.   ON BEING SELF-EMPLOYED