My business origin story

How this wild ride of entrepreneurship began a decade ago…

Photo credit: Unsplash

Do you ever look at someone who is quite a few years into their entrepreneurial journey and wonder: but how did you get here?

If so, today I thought I’d go all the way back to beginning and share with you a little more about how my business journey began.

Because if you’d have told me way back in 2013 that this is where I would be a decade from now there’s not a chance in the world that I would have believed you.

Back in the summer of 2013 I had just graduated from university with a degree in social work and I was drowning a little in a tough mental health crisis.

After graduating I wasn’t interested in moving forward with a career in social work (mostly due to the state of my mental health) so I got a retail job and decided to just take it a month at a time as I figured out post-university life.

But my mental health continued to go from bad to worse so my then-boyfriend-now-husband Alex and I decided to move back up north (we had moved to the midlands after graduating to live with my husband’s family for a little while as our assumption back then was that we would want to live and work in London at some point) to live with my parents so that I could have space and time to get back on my feet.

Looking back I’m so glad that we built our life up here - all of our friends are here, my family is here, and Manchester is the perfect sized city for us to live in too.

But back then moving back in with my parents felt like such a personal failing - all I wanted was to be starting our post-university life but here I was falling apart and in need of slowly putting the pieces of my life back together again.

I’ve also always found it so fascinating that I started my business whilst I was recovering from a challenging mental health crisis, in the hopes that I could build a working life for myself that honoured my needs each day, and little did I know back then that the neurological condition I was born with was going to become a whole lot more symptomatic and disabling in my adult life and my business would be the container for how I would be able to live and work alongside my health.

And as challenging as that season of my life was, I know looking back that I needed to go through it so that I could heal and learn to live alongside my mental health instead of battling with it each day.

And a key piece of this story is a little blog that I started back in 2013.

Back then I was a little (okay, a lot) obsessed with reading my favourite beauty and lifestyle blogs. I had such severe acne that I was always trying to find the skincare that would cure it and the makeup that would cover it.

I’d post my little heart out, sharing the products that were working for me and also moments and stories from my own life too and little by little my audience grew.

I started to build relationships with PR companies and I was sent products to test and review and I started to have opportunities for sponsored content too which helped me to make a little income. I also sold advertising space on my blog to small businesses and other bloggers - it wasn’t enough income to fully sustain my life yet but in a very challenging season of my mental health where I wasn’t well enough to have a traditional job it was so encouraging to start to see glimpses of how I could make a living for myself.

It was also during this season that I started an online lifestyle magazine with a friend - we had multiple contributors, posted fresh content daily, and built an engaged and thriving readership and that project was such an awesome experience too.

Heading into 2014 I started to write more about creativity and blogging (very meta, I know) and what I was learning from my own experience of building an audience online.

And that’s when I started to discover the creative coaching world.

People who were helping others to build audiences and start blogs and prioritise their creativity - this whole world that I had no idea existed and it felt like something I could perhaps do too.

It was clear to me back then that I didn’t want to pursue a traditional career - from both a health perspective but also because I wanted freedom and autonomy over my time.

So in 2015 I decided to offer my first creative coaching packages. I focused on blog coaching - helping others to build and grow their blog and plan and organise their content, as this is what I had experience in.

I think I charged £150 for my first 1:1 package and as I had already built and nurtured an audience for the past few years it didn’t take that long for some bookings to start to come in.

And the truth is that I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing in the beginning - I was just sharing what I had learned and supporting my clients to take intentional action towards their goals.

(And a big shout out to the Being Boss podcast which really kept me company each week and cracked open courage and momentum in my business in those early years with the insights and encouragement that they shared)

It took me quite a while in the first few years of my business to really start to charge more and put my prices up but in many ways I think that’s exactly what I needed to become the coach that I that wanted to be.

A few months into offering creative coaching services I had started to make a steady income and alongside Alex’s day job as a barista we felt ready to move out of my parents house and into our first tiny apartment in the city.

Over the first couple of years of my business I naturally evolved into offering more business coaching as my business and experience grew and by 2017 I was in a place where I was earning enough so that Alex could quit his day job and start his own freelance career as a podcast editor too - our dream of living a self employed life together becoming our reality.

I look back and see how every time I was willing to follow my curiosity, to be brave and try something new, and to put myself out there with no guarantee of success is how I was able to get this business off the ground and find my feet in self-employed life.

And a decade later that continues to be true: my business still needs me to be brave, to follow my curiosity, to be willing to show up and try even when there’s no guarantee of the outcome I desire becoming my reality.

I’m so grateful that 21 year old me decided to start that tiny beauty blog, that blog that would change my life forever.

That tiny blog became the business that has supported me to live my life at my own pace alongside my health, to go on beautiful journey’s with my clients and customers that I’m so grateful I get to call my job, that puts a roof over our head and food on the table, and that has allowed us to travel to some awesome places and have autonomy over how we spend our days.

I’m also so grateful for my parents who let us live back at home for a couple of years whilst we got on our feet, and for Alex for the way he loved and cared for me through that challenging mental health season and every season since too.

And if you’d love to know more about the journey since then, the moments and lessons that have shaped and defined my business journey? I shared all of the nitty gritty details in a blog post last year about all of the key moments along the way.

What about you? What’s your business origin story? What desires, experiments, and courage kickstarted your entrepreneurial path?

Until next time,

Jen xo