My Simple & Spacious Business Journey So Far

Let me take you on a little walk down memory lane and share my simple and spacious business journey so far…

Simplicity and spaciousness are the very heart of my approach to business. They’ve been my anchors and my guides as I’ve walked this road of being my own boss these past eight years and they haven’t steered me wrong so far.

But what exactly is a simple and spacious business you may be wondering?

Well, it’s hard to define because it’s going to look different for each and every one of us depending on what simplicity and spaciousness means to us. But at the heart of it, I believe, is a business that is built in a way that truly works best for us, that honours our humanity, that facilitates the space we want and need to thrive and live and navigate our work and our life at our own pace.

For me a simple and spacious business is one that allows me to prioritise my health and my family life first, that doesn’t ask more of me than I’m willing and able to give, and that orbits my life instead of being something I have to compromise my needs for so it can thrive. It’s also a business that feels deeply aligned and meaningful, where I’m doing work I believe in and in a way that feels joyful too.

For you it may be a business that gives you space to travel, or focus on your art, or that facilitates the freedom you ache for each day in your work and life.

I’m not here to tell you how to build and run your business, instead I want to support you to build and run your business in whatever way truly works best for you.

So let’s take a little walk down memory lane so that I can share with you my simple and spaciousness business journey so far.

Because it hasn’t always been easy, nor has it always been this simple and spacious, and it’s taken a whole lot of trial and error and learning and learning some more to get to where I am today.

So let’s go all the way back to the beginning - and bear with me here because it’s been almost a decade and I’ve had a baby since then so my brain is definitely not what it once was so some of the years have got a little jumbled together in my mind - but let’s take it all the way back to January 2015 when I opened up my doors for coaching clients for the first ever time.

Now this is what I’m calling the naive and messy beginner stage. I was 22 years old and in all honesty I didn’t really know yet what I was doing with my business. I had graduated a couple of years earlier with a degree in social work - a degree I had no desire to actually use in the end - and I had been on a pretty challenging mental health journey where I was unable to work a traditional job in that season so I was living back home at my parents and I had this little blog I had been running and an online lifestyle magazine with a friend too.

So I had a few years of experience of creating content online and building up a blog community and I stumbled across the world of creative coaching and immediately had this deep feeling in my gut that I wanted to do that.

So I started out back in 2015 offering blog and content coaching services. I think I charged around £150 for three sessions - it was extremely low priced as back then I remember my goal was to somehow be able to make £1000 a month as that alongside my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s income from his day job as a barista we would be able to scrape enough together to move out of my parents and get our own place.

And looking back what happened next was really beautiful in so many ways because my business slowly but surely started to grow.

I started to get booked out with clients, I built a small but really engaged community around my work, and little by little I built up my experience and confidence in my work.

But, something to keep in mind here, is that I didn’t really have a clue what I was actually doing as a business owner because I’d never actually run a business before. But by the end of the summer of that year my husband and I had moved into our own tiny apartment in the city and I remember in the May of that year, so five or so months after starting my business, I made £3000 that month which was crazy as I had never made or had that much money before and that was this moment where I thought to myself oh maybe I can actually make this work.

And then, like so many business owners, my first taste of burnout hit.

Because yes I was making money - I think that my first year in business came in at around 25K for the year which for my first ever year completely blew my mind and was thankfully enough to pay my bills and help me get on my own feet and out of my parents house - but I was also having to take on a lot of clients to make that possible. I think by the end of my first year in business I was doing about 15-20 client calls a week, I was completely spread too thin and exhausted while also still healing from the really challenging mental health crisis I had experienced a few years earlier too.

And then this is where a very key piece of not just my business journey but my life journey in general comes in. Because around the end of 2015 I started to experience some health challenges that would become very significant in my life moving forward. A little background here is that I was born with a chronic neurological condition called Chiari Malformation which I was diagnosed with at sixteen when some pretty nasty migraines I was experiencing were being investigated. Back then the migraines were the only main symptom I was experiencing, but by the end of 2015 things started to change and I developed a more symptomatic condition and honestly my health hasn’t really been the same since.

It’s so funny to me that I started my business on the other side of a mental health crisis because I wanted to be able to making a living on my own terms in a way that worked best for my mental health and then it became the infrastructure I would need to be able to make a living while living with a very symptomatic chronic illness.

So at the end of my first year in business what I found myself with was a business that was viable and finding its feet but a body and a mind that was really struggling and needed some significant change to come.

So this was where I really had to start to think more intentionally about my business, about my offerings and my availability and my pricing. But back then, now around 2016 in my second year of business, I really struggled to have the confidence and self-belief to really increase my prices. I increased them enough that I wasn’t doing 20 calls a week anymore but I was still doing a lot more than what was probably energetically sustainable for me.

This was also when I started to shift to offer more business-focused services, so not just blog coaching but also business mentoring too and this is probably where some of my pricing insecurity came in as I knew I didn’t have tons of experience yet and I was still just building my confidence in my work too.

But in that second year of business something deeply had shifted in me in my work, I knew that I needed a slower, more intentional approach to my business and also I really felt like I started to find myself in my business too - my voice, my perspective, and slowly but surely my confidence too.

I also experimented with other income streams that year too, some smaller 1:many offers and group programs and self guided classes too. I doubled my income that year but didn’t feel as burned out by the end of it so I was slowly but surely making some progress in building my version of a simple and spacious business.

This rolled over into 2017 too. I started to build a lot more time off into my business - I think that year I took 12 weeks off and by 2018 I was taking 18 weeks off a year which was the deep spaciousness I was aching for in my work - and over those two years I really started to build up my confidence after working with so many clients at that point so I started to feel more confident in increasing my prices too. By 2017 I was working 25 hours a week max and I was earning enough that my husband was able to first go part time and then quit his day job so he could start his own freelance business as a podcast editor.

In many ways this was a really joyful season, we travelled a lot, we got married, we got a dog, and in my business I really felt like I had found a deep home in my work.

But, behind the scenes, my health continued to get harder and harder. Even the arguably wildly spacious business I had built for myself back then just wasn’t spacious enough to fully support me in the challenges that my health brought, especially during the particularly hard seasons and flares.

At times it has felt like what I’m asking of myself and my work is impossible - be profitable enough so I can continue to be the breadwinner for our family, but be simple and spacious enough that I can do that alongside a chronic illness that can cause daily pain and fatigue.

But that’s a puzzle I’ve refused to stop trying to figure out, and the longer I’ve been in business the more insight I’ve had into what I really need to make my business work best for me and the courage and confidence to actually take those scary steps forward too.

2019 was similar to the years before, I increased my prices that year again so I was able to reduce my workload a little more so I was working around 15-20 hours a week and continuing to take 18 weeks off a year to travel and rest and just be a human and that was the year we decided we felt ready to try and start a family too. My business really felt like I had found the simplicity and spaciousness I was craving - on the whole, unless it was an extremely challenging flare, my workload felt manageable and always so deeply joyful and meaningful to work with my clients, and I felt really at home and aligned in my business each day.

And something to mention here is that I adore this work, diving deep with my clients and bearing witness to their courage and growth and discovery, and also the flow I find in the content creation side of my business too and the business visioning of coming up with new offerings and marketing ideas. The challenging seasons of my business have not only been worth it because this business provides for my family financially but also because this work truly feels like home for me, and that’s why I’ve been so committed to figuring out how best to make my business work for me as a human along the way.

Back to 2019, which was a tough year personally as we struggled to conceive and learned at the end of the year that we would need to undergo IVF treatment to try and have a child. Looking back I’m so grateful for the stability of my business to afford us the ability to pay for that treatment and somehow with all the luck in the world and the odds against us we conceived our son August on our first cycle at the start of 2020 - which was incredible timing as just a few weeks later the pandemic hit and the world shut down including the fertility clinics too.

Pregnancy was beautiful but also tough. I had horrific morning sickness in my first trimester, a terrible flare of my chronic illness in my second, and could barely walk by the end of my third trimester thanks to pelvic girdle pain but thankfully I was able to work throughout because my business only needed me to show up 15 or so hours a week to get my work done. I won’t lie, some weeks were extremely hard, especially during the sickness of the first trimester, but I made it through and had lots of time to rest which I’m grateful for. I took 8 weeks off for my maternity leave - honestly I wish I took longer and if I have a second child I will make sure I do but as I had clients carrying over I felt a lot of pressure (and by that I mean the pressure I put on myself in my own head) not to disappear from my business for too long - and honestly the first few months returning to my business with a tiny baby were just pure survival mode of sleepless nights and feeling so grateful for a business that felt easy and simple to show up for each week.

But as I started to come out of the haze of new parenthood I realised that it was same old business but a brand new me and nothing could ever truly go back to how it was.

And that leads us to where we are now - as I record this my son is almost 16 months old and I’ve spent the past year or so digging deep and finding clarity for this next season ahead in my work.

Because in many ways I have a wildly simple and spacious business. I now work around 10 hours or less each week, I take regular time off from my business including three months off from client work this summer, and I have so much freedom in my days to live and work at a slow and gentle pace.

But something has deeply shifted since I became a mother, and so now I’m in a season of gently making some pretty big shifts in my business and after eight years I think I’m also just ready for this change too. I don’t want to stop working with clients, I find so much deep joy and purpose in that work but I am craving less scheduled time in my calendar so my hope is to move to more of a hybrid business model with a flagship 1:many offering that I’ll be launching in the spring and then a smaller client workload moving forward too. But that’s all a story for another day as I’m sure I’ll be sharing the behind the scenes of this business journey with you along the way too.

There’s so much more nitty gritty to get stuck into here about my simple and spacious business journey so far, the lessons I’ve learned around marketing and building a business model that actually works best for us and finding our voice and building routines and most of all everything I’ve learned from supporting hundreds of my clients in building and running their own simple and spacious businesses too. I’ll be diving into all of this and my own behind the scenes journey in the episodes ahead to come so stay tuned for those.

But to wrap up today I want to share three of the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far about building and running a simple and spacious business.

First, there is no such thing as the perfect business.

There will always be hard days, weeks, and even months and years sometimes too. The goal can’t be to never feel stressed or overwhelmed, we’re just setting ourselves up to fail if we do. There will always be tasks we don’t enjoy as much as others, the odd stressful client or customer, the weeks when we’d just rather nap than show up and get the work done.

The goal, instead, I’ve found is to build a business that feels like home. Where my work feels deeply rooted in my values and aligned with how I want to show up in the world. Where my workload and schedule is suited to my energetic needs and desires, and a business with breathing room so I can be flexible as and when I need to be. That’s the place I’ve been in my business for many years now and that’s the place I’m so deeply grateful to have found. I’m able to navigate the challenging moments without them knocking me down too much because I have such a strong foundation to come back to in my work.

Second, I’ve found that the most important thing is to build simplicity and spaciousness into the heart of our business.

This is what I’ll be focusing on most throughout the episodes ahead to come of this show, the nitty gritty pieces of our business that shape the simplicity and spaciousness we crave. If the foundations of our business are rooted in a deeply focused vision for our work and shaped in a way that is aligned with our intentions for our finances, lifestyle, and purpose in our work too then we have everything we need to build a business that thrives and feels like home.

We can get so distracted by other people’s noise and ideas for what a successful business should look like when I’ve found in my own business and my clients too that the magic really starts to happen when we dive deep into the adventure of our own business and carve out a path forward that truly works best for us.

And finally, new seasons will ask for new shifts and evolution in our business.

A simple and spacious business is never done, we’re always shifting and growing and evolving as we go. Take me for example, before having my son I had a business that was functioning in a way that truly worked best for me. And now that I’m in a new season of life I have new desires for my work and life that are shifting my focus and priorities in my work, and I’m sure as I navigate new seasons of my life things will continue to evolve in my work too.

But I’ve found that if our foundations are strong then they are able to support us as we shift, evolve, and grow along the way. All we can ever do is make the most intentional decisions we can in the season we’re in and trust that we will figure out future ones when we’re in them too.

Okay, that was a lot to dive into and I so hope it gives you a little insight into my simple and spacious business journey so far. I have so much I’m excited to dive into in upcoming episodes, they will be in your podcast feed every Wednesday and I so hope they can be supportive for you in this season of your work.

Before I leave you today I have a question for you to ponder if it resonates with you to do so.

What would a simple and spacious business look and feel like for you?

See what comes to the surface and dive as deep as it feels aligned for you to do so.

This is the question that changed everything for me, where I started to give myself permission to want more than a business that thrived on the outside but asked more of me than I was willing or able to give. It’s been my path to a business that holds space for all of my humanity while also thriving financially and being deeply joyful to run and my hope is that it can do the same for you too.

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Jen Carrington16 February 2022