The lovely Katherine is now recovered from her hangover, and is feeling better about the world. She’s got some work, she’s going to be paid for it, and she and the cats will be fed for another 3 months on the proceeds. Life is looking up.
We find Katherine puzzling over the content map she’s created for her new client Oliver. She’s done about half of the work already, and she’s waiting to hear back from him about what she’s put together so far. In fact, she’s itching to get back to working on it, she’s been loving writing, setting up lead magnets, auto responder emails and creating a calendar for him to release various chunks of content. She feels like her old self, and she’s dressed in her old work clothes this morning, even though only the cats will actually see her in her smart shirt. She has got her slippers on though.
Katherine adds another blog series to the content map, figuring it will only take her a day to write some more content for Oliver, and reasoning that it will improve his Google footprint if he has a lot more content up there. But she can’t do any more until she hears back from Oliver, and she only emailed him the initial batch yesterday. She starts to get twitchy again.
Now she’s back in work mode, she remembers that she used to really enjoy juggling several clients at once, and that she used to have a team of people to write the posts for her, not do all of this herself. Her right foot begins to tap. Katherine is bored again. She can’t go back to watching House of Cards in the day. It doesn’t feel right. And everyone she knows will be at work, except for the guys in the pub, and she’s not going there mid afternoon again.
The sun is shining over Hove, so she goes for a walk along the seafront. She bumps into Julia Chanteray who is walking very fast along the Hove Lawns row of beach huts. Julia looks lost in thought, in another world completely. “Hi Julia” Julia jumps, and stares vaguely at Katherine. “Oh, sorry, I was thinking about, well I was thinking about acceptable ranges of gross margin for a new client I’m working with. Doing maths in my head, while I head to Sugardough for lunch.” Katherine has no idea what Julia is talking about, except that she’s going to Sugardough. But she jumps in with what she was going to ask Julia the other day, before Julia told her that Oliver had agreed to the work she was doing for her.
“Er, Julia, I was meaning to ask you…on your website it says that you do a consultation for cake. I know you mostly work with proper businesses, but I was wondering if I could come and see you and talk about whether I should be going freelance. Everyone keeps telling me not to, but I don’t know what else to do.”
“Yes, sure. I’m always happy to talk to people starting up, they often come to me for advice later anyway, so it’s a good investment for me. There’s a widget on my website, where you can book a time to talk, why don’t you have a look and book a time that suits you.” Julia walks off at an astonishing pace, and Katherine strolls over to a bench in the sunshine. A time that suits me, she thinks, that’s silly, I have way too much time on my hands these days.
Well, what do you think Julia is going to say? What would she say if she knew that Katherine was already over servicing her first client? Will Katherine finally commit, or has she already gone over the precipice of self employment without fully realising it? Will her life ever be the same again? Click here to read the next instalment, or let me know what advice you would give Katherine.
PS: If you recognise any of these experiences as the ones you’re going through, maybe you should book in a consultation with me too. Cake is optional. Here’s the widget I was talking about, which makes booking in really simple
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