[00:00:39] – Frankie
Hello, you’re listening to the Doing It For The Kids podcast, where we swear a bit too much and talk a bit too fast about freelance life with kids in the mix. My name’s Frankie and this is Steve.

[00:00:49] – Steve
Hello. Yes, welcome to episode ten!

[00:00:54] – Frankie
Double digit, double digits. Double, double, double digits.

[00:00:57] – Steve
Each week we take a question asked by the Doing It For The Kids community. Do our best to answer it, and then the following week, collect up your responses and your experiences to that question and share them again before moving on to a new question. If you’ve got a question, by the way, we’ll tell you how to get in touch at the end of this episode.

But for now, let’s go back to last week’s, when it was Ben. Ben the Illustrator. His question was how to keep his business bobbing along nicely, sustainably during the summer holidays, in particular, whilst also being there for his son.

[00:01:30] – Frankie
Lynda Kendall got in touch. Hello, Lynda.

Lynda says,

“Good tips for the six and a half week summer holidays this year, which stretches out like a tundra in front of me. I love the idea of challenges for your kids, like treasure hunts and games, but I’m assuming this only works for children whose main aim of any day isn’t just to see how much trouble they can get into/how much damage they can inflict on their sibling?

I’m going to have to bring out the big guns this year and make the husband have a day off each week so I can do some mother flipping work to save my sanity more than anything.

P.S. I love my kids, but they sometimes whittle me down to my very nerve endings by the end of the day.”

[00:02:04] – Steve
Good use of word tundra, by the way.

Another one came in from Janthea Brigden. They say,

“I home educated whilst running my second business when my daughter was aged seven to nine. She worked out PAYE from the old tax booklets, hand wrote for staff envelopes, made posters for the business, reminded me when I needed to stop to pick up her little brother from school and — when inspected — got top marks for the work and subjects covered. She went on to gain a first at uni and is now a company director!”

[00:02:40] – Frankie
Yes!

[00:02:41] – Steve
Well, I think what we’re all thinking is, Janthea — can we all bring our children around to your house please and you can teach them?

[00:02:49] – Frankie
Final comment from Ben himself. Ben the Illustrator, hello.

Ben says,

“Oh, my goodness, guys, thank you so much for this. So many good ideas here that I can use. I’m almost looking forward to the holidays now.”

[00:03:00] – Steve
We answered a question right, guys!

[00:06:35.070] – Steve
This week’s question comes from Nicky Raby. Nicky Raby, who is an actor and business and life coach, writer, speaker, podcaster… Crikey that’s a lot of things.

Nicky says,

“Something that’s coming up a lot with my clients at the moment is the idea of dream life versus real life.

How do you continue to expand and grow your business when real life circumstances change? Like you’ve had a baby, or another baby, or you suddenly have to care for an elderly relative, or something happens in your relationship and life takes a different turn.”

So basically, how do you continue to expand and grow your business when real life circumstances change?

[00:07:20] – Frankie
My first reaction to this… And this sounds really negative but… Do you need to expand and grow your business? Like, we’re all obsessed with growth, aren’t we? It seems to be a massive, sexy, buzzword. You know, ‘six figure business’ and all that. Everyone’s aiming for the six figures, or they are in my sponsored content on Facebook. Bleurgh.

Do we need to grow? Company of One, right? You gave me Company of One, Paul Jarvis’ book. I haven’t actually read it, Steve, I’m not going to lie. But that’s about that, right? It doesn’t mean you’re unsuccessful to stay small, right? You don’t have to grow.

[00:07:53] – Steve
Yeah. Basically, we get to create what our own level of success is and what success looks like for us. And his whole point is that you don’t have to aspire to growth. You can just make a business that works for you, like to build a better business rather than a bigger business.

[00:08:07] – Frankie
To me, it feels like if you’re going through a massive life change and real life is getting in your way, why put that pressure on yourself to feel like you need to continue to grow? Just keeping level and sustainable is enough at that stage. Don’t add more stress on top of whatever else is going on. Good enough is enough, right?

[00:08:25] – Steve
Yeah. I think at certain times in your life, it’s okay to almost go into survival mode. It’s okay to sort of batten down the hatches and get through that thing, just get by with your business rather than having to grow right there and then. It’s hard, though, isn’t it, when there is that constant noise online of people smashing their businesses?

[00:08:49] – Frankie
Oh, yeah, that’s a good one, isn’t it? ‘Smashing it’.

[00:08:51] – Steve
It’s useful to have those things to look at. And this isn’t just about the six figure sponsored posts. It’s about people you see on Instagram stories who are doing really cool things and blah, blah, blah.

What I bet you don’t necessarily always see is when they’re going through a tougher time and maybe they then scale back what they do on Instagram Stories. Like, do you ever notice somebody you follow on Instagram stories maybe just disappears for a little bit?

[00:09:16] – Frankie
Well, no, actually that’s part of it as well.

[00:09:19] – Steve
Oh really?

[00:09:19] – Frankie
It’s like, people always worry about not being seen, but in my experience, if I don’t post on Instagram for a while, like nobody messages me going, you alright? I’m just not there.

I don’t know. There’s a pressure to always be uploading stuff and being visible. And being visible is great when you run a business and you’re a freelancer and you want to get work. But equally, you’re not going to drop off the radar entirely if you just take a break from all of that.

And it can be good for your headspace when you’re going through something difficult. Stepping away from that can be better all around because you’re not only slowing down yourself anyway because of the circumstances, but you’re putting less pressure on yourself because you’re not surrounded by everybody else seemingly doing amazing stuff.

But God knows what’s going on in their lives. You don’t know. You just don’t know.

[00:10:01] – Steve
I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but just in case you haven’t heard of it — about how our life goes through different ‘seasons’ and that we therefore have to adjust for each season. Having a newborn baby is a very different season to having a toddler, which is a very different season to having a five, six, seven year old at school. Totally different again by the time they’re ten, by the time they’re 13 or 18 or getting a degree, like-,

[00:10:25] – Frankie
Yeah.

[00:10:25] – Steve
It just keeps on changing. And if you think about what your life was like, if you can, before you had kids-,

[00:10:32] – Frankie
No idea. What did I do with my time?

[00:10:36] – Steve
That was another season. And that season when you were constantly trying to date people, that was another season. But it’s good to sit there and see it like that. The way that you look after yourself will change in those seasons. The way that you look after others and what they will need from you will change. And view it as a fact that at some point this is going to end and change into another season. And then my business will have a different season as well.

[00:11:02] – Frankie
Because a lot of people go freelance after having children, right? They weren’t necessarily doing it before. And there is that like, “oh, I’m building the dream life”. Like, “oh, I see all these people working around their kids and it’s amazing” and it’s sold as this working parent nirvana that will solve all modern parenting struggles — which we all know is not necessarily the truth. But I guess part of it comes down to, like, managing your own expectations?

So rather than feeling like a change in your real life is getting in the way — be prepared that real life is part of that experience. And so when stuff happens, it’s less abrasive, you’re less frustrated about it in terms of growth of your business or whatever because you’re kind of prepared for those moments, for those seasons to happen.

But as we said already, so many people don’t talk about that stuff that it feels like nobody else is coping with having insane morning sickness and trying to go to client meetings or having an elderly relative that needs looking after. People don’t talk about that stuff. Some people do, but the vast majority don’t.

Yeah, I guess managing your own expectations, if you see what I mean.

Having like a real talk with yourself or a mate or a coach, if you’ve got one, like Nicky or whatever. Having somebody to kind of keep you in check as to what life is actually like and bring you… not bring you back to reality, that’s the wrong phrase. But remind you that you’re not the only person going through this stuff.

[00:12:26] – Steve
And you really aren’t the only person going through this stuff.

[00:12:27] – Frankie
No.

[00:12:29] – Steve
Going back to Nicky’s question, she says, “How do you continue to expand and grow your business when real life circumstances change?” I mean, the thing is it’s all well and good for us to say, you know, scale it back and so on. Don’t concentrate on growth. But if, particularly as you just mentioned, if you’re going freelance or you’re starting your business at the same time, then to a certain extent you do have to put energy into that. Otherwise, you’re just not going to have anything.

In which case, I think my advice would be to choose one or two things to help market your business and do them really well. There’s Twitter, there’s Instagram, there’s LinkedIn, Pinterest, there’s YouTube, there’s podcasts, there’s videos… There is so many things to choose from and it can be really overwhelming and you feel like you need to be doing all of the things. In fact, I would say if you’re in that point of your life where something is going on like that, you are better off focusing your energy into one thing, ideally one thing where your potential clients are.

[00:13:28] – Frankie
Yeah that’d be good.

[00:13:29] – Steve
From a marketing point of view, but also hopefully something that you enjoy doing.

[00:13:33] – Frankie
And do it really well basically.

[00:13:34] – Steve
You’ll get a much better response from the time that you put in rather than spreading yourself out.

[00:13:39] – Frankie
The worst is when you go — particularly on social media — you go to somebody’s page and there’s no updates, there’s nothing on it. It just looks so neglected. It would be better to have no Facebook page than a Facebook page that is dead, but I’ve got a Facebook page that’s dead so I should probably get rid of it…

[00:13:56] – Steve
Also, the same goes with blog posts on your website. Either take the blog off if you are not updating it or — and this is much better advice — remove the dates.

[00:14:07] – Frankie
Yeah. I guess the heart of this question is about unforeseen things happening to you, things that impact on your day to day life. I would argue one of the joys of working for yourself is that you can change to adapt to those situations. You’re not forced to go and work in a place on set days and set hours. You can change the days you work, for example, if you need to be in a certain place. If you need to see that elderly relative on a certain day, you can move your hours around to accommodate that. Or even change the way you work and the type of work you do to make yourself maybe more portable or less time intensive, whatever that is.

That is one of the joys of being self employed. Yes, the other side of it is, those things can impact on your business to the point where you’re not earning as much because you don’t have as much time to earn the money, but equally, if you’re creative with it — you can try to be proactive about it depending on the situation. Yeah, adapt. Adapt to survive, right? Change your business in some way for that season. You can always come back to the way you run your business before and maybe you’ll learn new skills and add another string to your bow and earn money in a different way.

[00:15:12] – Steve
And that’s the thing, right? It doesn’t have to be a negative in adapting to survive. People evolve and so your business might evolve. You might find a new way of doing something off the back of adapting rather than just keeping going.

[00:15:25] – Frankie
Or, for example, a classic is having a new problem to solve, right? So when people have kids they come up with all these problems that need solving around being a parent and suddenly they’ve got a new business idea about that. So if you’re creative with it, you might discover that the challenge or whatever’s happening in your life creates a new business idea. That you’re tapping into something that doesn’t exist yet that people need help with.

[00:15:50] – Steve
One thing you might want to do is look at your processes and systems. Now, feel free to slap me for saying that out loud but yeah, basically there are ways in which we can work smarter. Be it client onboarding or the way you do your social media. Everything you can possibly think about in your life can usually be streamlined or bettered in some way. So it’s worth, I think, just taking a little moment, if you’re going through something like this, to reflect on that as well.

Also, what’s quite good is when you do something like that is if you end up writing down what that process is, it makes it easier then to hand it to someone else. You can even record a quick video.

I have some particular processes where writing it down is one thing, but actually, if I just make a video of me doing it once and then store that video away, then I can say, “Oh, would you mind doing this? Here’s a video of how I do it” and then they can just do it.

[00:16:45] – Frankie
Nice. Yeah. That involves being organised on a day to day basis, though, doesn’t it?

I can barely use Trello, let alone like-,

[00:16:52] – Steve
Yeah, well, maybe we should go back to what we’ve said in the past, though, about breaking that down.

So that whole thing I just said sounds a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it? But if you think, right, okay. Do you know what? Next week I’m going to look at my social media processes. You might even want to break social media down further. Okay, what do I do to put my business on Twitter?

[00:17:11] – Frankie
This is different and maybe not relevant and also quite morbid, but that reminds me…

Me and Rob have been working on a black book type situation where we each put in all of our bank details and our passwords and all the important information that’s in our heads that each other don’t know about. In case, for whatever reason, one of us isn’t around to tell the other one.

[00:17:37] – Steve
I hope you’ve buried this physical black book, like, in some sort of Da Vinci Code-esque treasure hunt.

[00:17:44.550] – Frankie
I’m not sure if Rob did that, I’d work it out though. I’d just be like aimlessly wandering around.

[00:17:49] – Steve
Just digging in every church in North London. It’s here somewhere…

[00:17:56] – Frankie
Talking about seasons. You’ll have the-, F-F-F-F-F. What do we call it? You know?

Feast and famine? Feast and famine.

[00:18:08] – Steve
And there ends round three of Guess What Frankie Was Thinking About. If you got ‘feast and famine’ from F-F-F-F-F, then you are in contention to win the big cash prize. See you after the break.

Just one more thing though — to look out for yourself. And I know it’s that much said trope, about the oxygen mask or whatever. You know, like that whole thing, right? But there’s a reason it’s much said, and that’s because it’s really true that you do have to look after yourself. Be it as a parent or a carer or going through relationship problems, you do need to look after yourself or everything else is just going to unravel in every part of your life.

So, yeah. Group hug, guys.