I'm taking the leap into freelance

it's scary

For 3 years now I’ve been working for Elvie as a User Researcher. I’ve loved it! Working for a company that designs products to improve women’s lives- yes. Spending my days interviewing women about their experiences in the world-amazing. For the first couple of years, it felt challenging and exciting. Then things started to plateau a bit. For months I tried to get the excitement back. Literally, I had on my task list “find something to get excited about at work”. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t make it happen. I felt stuck and stagnant and like I needed a change. It was hard to come to terms with because I’ve loved my time at Elvie. It’s been one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

So I started the daunting task of applying for new roles, not totally sure what I wanted but knowing I needed to do something new. One of the amazing things about working for Elvie is the trust and flexibility you’re given. You can work when and where you want in order to get the job done. If you need to dip out in the middle of the day for an appointment- totally normal and fine. If you want to start later that morning- no worries. It’s how I think the working world should be, and it’s led to me being more creative and producing higher-quality work. A lot of the jobs I applied for claimed to have “flexible working” but when you dug into it in the interview, you realised it really wasn’t flexible at all. You might be able to start an hour later if you follow this lengthy application process. You could work from home, but only 0.25 days a week.

It became clear how important freedom and flexibility were to me, so instead of carrying on with applications, I took a step back and started thinking about how to get more of that. I quickly realised a great way to do that was to become self-employed. It sounded scary, but I knew people in my line of work who had done it successfully, which showed me it was possible. Many things drew me to the idea, but I also had a lot of doubts, so I did what any self-assured person does when they’re trying to make a big decision and made a list of pros and cons.

Benefits:

• Freedom to design my week and year. Who knows if it will work out like this but I love the idea of being able to take a Wednesday off if the sun is shining, to take working holiday to visit friends/family in different countries or to take a month off to travel in between jobs. And generally make my work fit around my life not the other way around.

• More variety in my work. Having worked mainly for private companies that develop hardware/physical products I was craving more variety in my work. What was working for the public sector like? What about working on digital products or services? And I loved the idea of eventually being able to select work that felt meaningful to me.

• Making more space for my other passions like art, writing and my newfound fascination with life coaching. I love the idea of having a multi-hyphenate career. Emma Gannon was a massive inspiration here. Check out her SubStack The Hyphen.

• Challenging myself after a year of feeling a bit stagnant, I was ready for a new challenge and knew that being self-employed would lead to growth for me in so many ways.

Challenges:

• The stress of finding work and getting money: How will I find work? So I have to find the work and then do the work… isn’t that more work, not less work? Will it be financially stressful? Will time in between work feel like a break, or will it be filled with anxiety about lining up the next piece of work?

• Isolation: Will it be isolating working alone without a team? Will it be hard not having other people to learn from and bounce ideas off of?

• All the admin: How does all the admin of freelance work? Do I need to be a sole trader or ltd company? How do taxes work? What the hell is IR35 and do I need to be inside it or outside it? What do you put on an invoice? So I need to find the work, do the work, and then do all the admin involved in the work!?

• And a sprinkle of self-doubt: Am I experienced enough to go it alone? Don’t I need like 50 years under my belt?

There were a lot of challenges, but I felt really drawn to the benefits. So I spent some time thinking about what I could do to make the challenges less scary. Taking part in Sophie Rankin’s Training on freelancing as a user researcher really helped here!

• Looking at my finances: How much do I need to survive on a month? How long would the money I have keep me going if I didn’t get any income?

• Tracking available contract work: making sure there was stuff out there that I felt confident I could apply for and do.

• Building a network: Starting to write and share my work (it’s why I started this Substack!). Posting on Linked In and connecting with people. You’ll be surprised how many people are up for having a call with you if you reach out and ask. Thanks to everyone who has been generous with their time and advice! 🤗

• Reminding myself that if it doesn’t work out, I can hopefully just find another job!

All of these things made me feel so much better about the idea of going freelance, so after a couple more weeks of sitting on it and a lot of pep talks from my partner, I decided to go for it. I’ve handed in my notice at Elvie! I finish up at the start of September. Then my partner and I are taking the rest of September off to do a cycle trip around Corsica and Sardinia. I still get pangs of fear and doubt, but the timing feels right for me, and I know I’ll regret it if I don’t try.

So I’ll be available from October 2023 for freelance User Research work. Send me a message here or on linked in if you want to chat!

I’m going to be writing about my experience of transitioning to freelance, so subscribe below if you want to follow along 😊