8 lessons from starting 3 businesses in one year

Oh hi, I changed my mind again...

Oh, hi! You’re receiving this email because you subscribed to the Quiet Leaders Club email list or downloaded one of our free career guides. I’ve now rebranded (details of why further down this post), but will still be sharing the same career advice and insights here.

So…I started 3 businesses this year. I also have a full time job. And did I mention I had a baby in February?

This year has felt like I’ve been on the wildest personal development rollercoaster, on fast forward, with no seatbelt on. It’s been a brilliant year of meeting my daughter, learning how to be a mother and working with some fantastic clients. It’s also been unbelievably stressful due to an unusual and frustrating situation at work, which is what led me to resume my entrepreneurial journey (long story short: I ran a community for female founders from 2017 - 2021, started a branding design studio in 2019 and packed everything in at the end of 2021 to take a dream job opportunity after becoming extremely burnt out and disillusioned with self-employment).

To set the scene for how this all started, in March 2023 we had a new hire at work. This person not only bullied and abused pretty much everyone they came into contact with, but set into motion a series of events that resulted in my department being made obsolete just before my daughter’s due date, and my entire team (except me, because maternity leave) being made redundant one week after giving birth.

As you can imagine, this set of events, which took place in just under a year, made my pregnancy and maternity leave incredibly stressful.

The aforementioned new hire seemed to take a particular dislike to me and my team, and so last autumn I decided to start offering freelance design services again in case they fired me. The responsibility of not only providing for my daughter, but making sure she has a comfortable, carefree childhood weighs heavy on me due to my own upbringing. So I was (and am) determined to do whatever it takes to make sure she has a joyful life.

Then of course, my team got made redundant and I had no idea what I would be returning to at work, which really upped the stress of work alongside navigating new motherhood.

Anyway, that’s more than enough background information! Let’s get into it.

1. Things won’t adhere to your timeline

My journey back into freelancing started brilliantly - I posted on my personal Instagram account to share that I was taking on design clients again and someone booked with me immediately. As in, got on a call the next day, signed the contract and paid the deposit by the end of that week.

Amazing! I wasn’t even on maternity leave yet and I already had a client, with a whoel year until my leave finished. Surely things would continue this way, right? Right??

Actually, no. That was at the end of 2023, and I didn’t book another client until June 2024. Six whole months of ghosting, enquiries that didn’t quite work out and mostly silence. It’s safe to say that by the end of spring, almost four months into maternity leave, I was feeling like a huge failure.

What I should have done was continue on, remember that it takes months to build enough trust for potential clients to decide to work with you, and look into ways to broaden my marketing strategy, but instead, I decided that things weren’t working out and I needed to pivot (more on that in a minute).

2. Don’t put all your eggs in social media’s basket

I used to think I was really good at social media, Instagram in particular. I’m good at graphic design, and I can take a pretty picture. I also used to be quite the oversharer, which helped me to build friendly business relationships.

However, Instagram has changed hugely since I last used it as a marketing tool, and my execution never seems to live up to my vision when it comes to video content. But I love social media and have experience of how powerful it can be for business.

The thing is, while I was trying to make, edit and post Reels and TikToks every day (with a newborn! Is she insane?) and receiving radio silence in return (which is normal FYI - it takes longer than you think to build traction), I should have been focusing on reaching out to leads, making connections locally and honing my skills.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding that every time a post flops, every time my follower count is stagnant, I feel like a huge failure. The thing is, there are loads of very successful businesses with tiny social followings. I just have this idea in my head that I need a “k” next to my follower number to feel successful.

I was actually reminded of a message I shared on my Instagram way back in 2019 today - engagement isn’t a true metric of whether your message is valuable of not. Yes, it’s a good indicator of whether the message is resonating, but I also believe that if just one person finds what you’re saying helpful, or it makes them feel less alone, it’s infinitely valuable.

3. Encourage feedback but don’t take it personally

As I continued to post my design work on Instagram, I did get some enquiries, they just didn’t work out. In the post-partum haze, I took this very personally.

I’ll be honest: I find prospective clients who ghost extremely rude. I know, I know, it’s part and parcel of running a business, but is it really that difficult to reply to a bespoke project proposal with a “thanks, but no thanks”?

Anyway, always, always, ask for feedback if you don’t receive a response, or an enquiry doesn’t work out. Most of the time it’s nothing to do with you but more to do with timing or cash flow, but when it is about you, it allows you to improve.

The other side to this is that when I sign a new client, I feel simultaneously thrilled and terrified. For some reason, I always think this is the time I’ll run out of good ideas. That the creative juices will stop flowing. That the client will hate my work, even though that has never happened before. My worst fear is someone telling me I’m bad at my job, because deep down I fear that I am, even though I know I’m not.

This has held me back from marketing my services as well as I should have, and I’m working on not doing that anymore.

4. When you have a baby you have all the thinking time in the world and a tiny amount of execution time

So the thing with babies is, they obviously require a lot of your time. But they also can’t talk. So I had allllll this time to come up with amazing ideas and plans, and very little time to actually do concrete work on it.

What this resulted in was a hell of a lot of guilt at the fact that I couldn’t do the work I wanted, and I was spending some of my precious time with my baby thinking about work.

If I could go back, I hope I would be a lot kinder to myself. I would tell myself to write down these ideas and work on them when I had the time and energy, because I will only get this time with my baby girl once. Again, the stress of the situation with my employer added to my feeling of urgency here, and I’m still quite angry about them impacting what should have been a period where I could simply focus on my baby.

5. Persevere and don’t get distracted

Okay, let’s talk about my hasty decisions.

I have been playing around with the idea of doing some kind of career mentorship offering since January 2023 - I know this date specifically because I remember talking about it with my then colleague and friend, now boyfriend and father of my daughter.

But I was happy at work at the time, and adamant that I did not want to be self-employed ever again (lol. I know).

When I decided to start freelancing again, it felt only natural to offer design and branding services, since I already had a previous client base, testimonials and experience in this field.

But once I started to feel like I wasn’t getting anywhere with my design business (and again I want to reiterate that this was about six months into starting freelancing again - not long enough at all to expect to have a fully booked client schedule. But again, I was stressed, I was sleep-deprived and it felt like nothing was working).

I also wanted to write more, and for whatever reason I didn’t feel like writing about design and branding was unique enough.

It was at this point that I decided I wanted to branch out into mentoring, and when a friend pointed out a perfect niche in my being someone who is pretty quiet and shy but has been successful in building a career in leadership.

Thus, Quiet Leaders Club was born. A way to help quiet people to feel confident in their careers, have the opportunity to write, and, hopefully down the line, start mentoring and public speaking.

6. If it makes you cringe, it isn’t right

One of the things I wanted to do when I started Quiet Leaders Club was not have my name or face on it, for personal safety reasons.

I did a lot of market and customer research for the branding and content. It had nothing to do with my own taste or personal preferences. The name and the branding were strategically crafted, and people loved it.

But I didn’t.

Every time someone asked me about it in real life, I froze up and changed the subject. I cringed. It just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like me.

I still want to talk about these topics, and I still want to help people progress in their career. But I need to do it in a way that feels true to me.

7. People see you in a much more positive light than you do

Can I be honest with you? I feel embarrassed about pivoting so much over the last couple of years. I wish I just had my one thing that I was focused on.

But I have lots of interests and skills, and I like being able to pick and mix my work based on that. I do think that my blend of skills (design, branding, community-building, leadership and project management) makes me uniquely positioned to help my clients (and hopefully you, the person reading).

When I’ve mentioned this shame to anyone, the first thing they say is that they admire how creative I am and how I’m always adding new skills to my roster. Which always surprises me in the nicest way.

I assume people see me working on a new project and think “good lord, can this woman not stick to one thing?” and maybe some people do, but for the most part, they don’t.

After all, none of us are one dimensional.

8. Having a personal brand has been crucial to my success

Objectively, my foray back into the world of entrepreneurship has been fairly successful. No, I didn’t replace my corporate income with freelance work before my maternity leave finished, and I’m quite sad about that. But I made a fair amount of money, I’ve worked with clients who love the work I’ve done for them (some have become retainer clients) and I have learned so much about myself and what success looks like for me.

As you can probably tell from this post, I have a habit of pivoting, and honestly I would like to change that. However, I have a lot of interests and I can’t pigeonhole myself. I’m passionate about brand-building, creativity, project management, careers and a load of other things, and I think I’m starting to accept that I’d rather have space to work on all of those things than niche down and get bored.

The red string that’s helped me to navigate this journey is my personal brand. I’ve been building my personal brand since before I knew what a personal brand was, and it’s the reason people know I’m good at what I do and I’ve been able to build this community of the loveliest people I could imagine.

Your personal brand is more about your values, opinions and approach than what you actually do, and wherever your career journey takes you, they are likely to remain the same.

What’s next?

So, what’s the point of this post?

Firstly, I wanted to let you know that I will be pivoting away from the Quiet Leaders Club brand and sharing the same content under my own name and this newsletter, Next Draft.

I’ve continued to do design and brand strategy work for clients while focusing on QLC, and I’ll be continuing to do this as I return to work. So, if you know anyone looking for branding, web design or creative direction for their business, feel free to point them my way.

Finally, I’m launching a product business! It’s under wraps for now, but if you know anything about me, you will not be even a tiny bit surprised to see what I’m launching. I always felt like I wasn’t capable of the complexities of selling products, but this year has taught me that I can handle whatever comes my way.

I hope you’ll stay with me along this journey.

Have a great week ahead,

Julia xx