The balance of earning vs building when you're self-employed
I am currently in my first week off work since February!
Besides the occasional Friday I've had off for a wedding or travel, where I've worked multiple evenings leading up to it to still ensure I am working “enough”, I haven't had a proper break in over 7 months. And given that last trip was visiting China, travelling across 3 cities in 6 days, I am not sure that can be counted as a break either.
Over the last 6 weeks especially, I have felt like I've been crawling towards this date in the diary. Feeling both exhausted and unproductive, meaning that elusive goal of ticking off my to-do list has felt constantly just out of reach. These are all tell-tale signs of burnout, but when you work for yourself and are the only employee, it's no longer as simple as taking your foot off the pedal and winding down for your break.
I've been self-employed for 2.5 years now, and the biggest difference between what I thought my freelance life would look like, vs what it actually does look like, is just how much I work.
Of course I didn't think working for myself would be easy, but having always been the colleague who came in earliest and stayed latest in the office, how much more work could I really do?
It turns out, a hell of a lot.
So what takes up all my time?
In year 1, I was simply trying to get as much experience as possible. Generally offering lower package prices than I knew my skill set was worth in order to test my processes, gain valuable feedback, and build up my list of clients (who were also then great referrals). I spent all my time saying 'yes' as much as possible to work out what I did and didn't want to do with this newfound freedom.
In year 2, I then needed to really put into action everything I'd learned. Along with the project work, I needed to redo my website, create a service guide, set up client hubs in Notion, fine-tune my processes, and experiment with new tools that could make my work better. With every invoice sent, I seemed to add more to my to-do list by constantly challenging myself to be even better the next time. Much of my corporate background is in customer experience, so I knew how important this was, but I did a frankly awful job of scheduling time for it alongside the projects I wanted (and had) to do to hit my income goals.
Now that I am in year 3, I am ready to scale. I've pivoted on my service offerings (now calling myself a brand strategist) and still aim to continually improve the process. I've been thinking about paid products and free products I can offer to get people into my world. And for marketing, I need to expand into paid ads, set up email marketing, write this Substack, and refresh my desperately outdated website. The list of things I need to do to keep scaling my own business is growing faster than ever, and yet I still haven't managed to carve out the time to do it all alongside the bits that actually pay me.
I'm finally ready to scale
4 days into my break, having actual time to reflect has shown me the obvious answer: I cannot do it all.
But that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it all.
In fact, I think finally accepting that I can't do everything alone is me proving to myself that I am ready to take my business to the next level.
With that, there will of course be sacrifices. But rather than sacrificing time, I need to sacrifice money, in the sense that I need to say no to paid opportunities to allow myself to properly focus on all the unpaid bits of business. The goal being that the latter will support me in increasing my prices and allow me to have the right balance of income and time.
So what am I doing about it?
I'm giving myself until the end of 2026 to reposition my business. I'm a big advocate of sustainable goals, so rather than pretending I'm going to redo my strategy, my website, and all marketing materials in the month of September, I've blocked out every Monday in my diary for the rest of the year to focus on my own business, and reduced my project spots for Q4 also (so that I am almost fully booked the entire year!).
I likely won't be perfect and likely will have to do the odd client call or email on a Monday, but my goal is to do my best to stick to this so that I can have as much time as possible to focus on the building rather than the earning in my business. Knowing that if I do that, the latter will naturally come to.
So if you're also struggling with earning vs building when you're self-employed, here's to a Q4 of putting our own priorities first, and hopefully freeing up some of that mental load.
Who knows, maybe by the time I have my next week off at Christmas, I may have even managed to schedule my Substack essay in advance...
