On Being Self-Employed

Yesterday was a day and a half. Literally. Moving from being employed by a large organisation to being a self-employed consultant is a culture shift. You have to take personal responsibility for everything – tax, national insurance, pensions and, crucially, work. While I charge much more for my time than I was paid as an employee, it compensates for the feast or famine nature of the work. I work when there is business to be had, and I don’t when there isn’t – at least, it isn’t paid work. Selling your business takes time and effort and the payback is not always immediately obvious.

Following my redundancy at the end of 2003, I endured a period of enforced idleness until my contract officially terminated on New Year’s Eve. During January and February I did a little work, but was relying heavily on my redundancy package for subsistence. By May, things were getting fairly busy. However, at this stage all I was doing was assessment – the real money is in training, so I was still not yet on the same level of income as I was during the previous year. Two four-day training courses in a month would see me breaking even on my previous salary. It takes sixteen assessments to make the same income.

Then came the summer. For most of June, July and August I hardly worked and again, I relied heavily on my dwindling redundancy payout. September was manic – I barely had time to breathe rushing from one end of the country to the other getting up at godawful times in the morning to meet clients. This was a slightly unusual piece of work as I was helping my erstwhile employer try to recover from problems with a training programme, so I was providing a day’s top-up training for the candidates. I did well that month, but the planned work in October collapsed when the client decided not to spend any more money. They concluded that the exercise had cost too much (but chose to ingore the cause; bad planning) – well, they were told that at the beginning…

November was pretty quiet and my redundancy finally ran out causing me to curb all unnecessary spending. December however, has been busy. Yesterday I had two assessments – one in Bournemouth and one in Salisbury. This meant setting out at 06:00 to get to Bournemouth by 08:00. I planned to be in Salisbury for 14:00. Unfortunately, assessment is not an activity that has set timescales – you are driven by the needs of the candidate and if they take a long time over their preparation activities, well, so be it. I set out for Salisbury at 13:30 – it’s an hour’s ride, so I walked into Salisbury Railway station at around 14:30. Like his colleague in Bournemouth, this candidate took around 4 hours. I was supposed to be back in Bristol for 19:00 to meet my wife and join her colleagues at 20:00 for a meal. We were an hour late. Not that that was a huge problem as we let them know. When we eventually got home it was gone 23:00. Shattered? You bet.

Yup – feast or famine – yesterday was one of those days that just didn’t have enough hours. I could do with a few more of those.