My first summer of self employment

Spoiler: I did too many things.

The seasons are changing, the weather is getting cooler, the mornings darker and my cosy jumpers have come out of their under-bed storage. Summer is well and truly over. And I’m not mad about it. My first summer of self-employment was fun filled but hectic.

I’d heard that summer can be an interesting time for freelancers. With many jetting away to sunnier climes, or working parents having to juggle the demands of long school holidays, all in all people are doing less work and projects can be harder to come by.

I decided to take advantage of this pre-empted slow period by planning a three week holiday. I tried to figure out the perfect time to book it, but soon realised that even when you’re self-employed, there’s still never a perfect time to take a holiday, and if I didn’t plan it, it might not happen. Plus we had an Italian wedding in June that felt like the perfect thing to anchor our trip around.

In the lead up to my holiday, I worked hard and tried to make as much money as possible, saying yes to everything that came my way. When holiday time rolled around I was met with a sudden influx of new and exciting requests. I asked if they could wait 3 weeks, some said it wouldn’t be possible, and others suggested I check back in when I was home.

So, I wrapped up all my projects and sailed off into the sunset (or took an easy jet flight). I had no concrete work lined up for when I came back but was confident I’d find something quickly on my return, especially with 8 months of consistent work and a growing list of clients under my belt.

The Italian wedding was beautiful. It overlooked this incredible vineyard. The food was insane, a table with burratas piled high, cocktails on tap and a midnight gelato cart! After the glorious wedding, my partner and I hired a car and spent two weeks exploring Tuscany. We stayed in remote villas overlooking rolling hills, artsy city AirBnbs and a cosy mountain lodge. We ate our body weight in cheese, pasta and pizza and drank copious amounts of Italian wine and beer. It was dreamy, but very indulgent, and we came home craving routine, vegetables and exercise.

For our third and final week of the trip, we had planned to cycle from south to north Wales. A gruelling and hilly route called the Lôn Las Cymru. We saw Italy as a kind of intense carb-loading to set us up for the challenge. Although on arrival home I started to doubt the integrity of this plan. I felt like a potato soaked in wine and the thought of cycling for a week up steep Welsh hills was daunting to say the least.

The week of our cycle was forecast to be wall to wall rain. Considering we would be cycling all day and then camping at night, it was starting to sound even less appealing. The morning we planned to leave, my partner checked the weather, then turned to me and said, ‘Shall we cycle around Europe instead?’ I laughed as I thought he was joking, but he was not. ‘I think it could work’, he said, ‘I’ve just looked up the ferry to France, it’s only around £30 with a bike.’

‘Emmmm Ok, sure!’ I responded. Then came a manic morning of re-packing, Garmin re-routing and frantic online bookings and before I knew it we were eating a curry on the Dover to Dunkirk ferry with our bikes fully loaded sitting safely on the deck below us.

We arrived in Dunkirk to a very atmospheric storm. It turns out we hadn’t managed to avoid the rain completely. But we had managed to avoid the hills. The majority of the route followed canals, which were lovely and flat and took us through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and Lille. It was a great trip and felt like even more of an adventure thanks to our last minute change of plans.

I successfully switched off entirely from work in those three weeks. I barely thought about it once, and on my arrival home in mid July I opened my laptop and naively thought it would be a matter of days until my next project kicked off.

In reality, it took me six weeks to find a new project. And those six weeks were full of social plans. I attended two weddings, three hen-dos and a festival. All of which were very fun, but none of which were very cheap. To be honest I don’t think I could have done any work anyway, I was too busy ping-ponging across the country raising my glass to the happy couple and drinking out of willy straws.

But eventually, I did find a new project. It was with ZOE, the science and nutrition company. And thankfully it started before my bank balance got dangerously low. I kicked off a six month project with them at the end of August, right before my final two events of the summer: another cycle holiday, this time to the south of France with my family and a wedding in sunny Scotland.

Both events were lovely, it was great to spend so much time with family cycling around the south of France, and beautiful to see one of my good friends get married by a stunning Scottish lochside. But by the time I landed back home at the end of September, I was exhausted. Collapsed in a heap on my sofa, and scrolling on my phone, I realised it was the autumn equinox, which felt like a symbolic end to my crazy hectic summer.

Although my summer was amazingly fun, I definitely did too much. Having an unlimited holiday allowance left me with no constraints and meant I said yes to everything. Kind of like when you go to uni and all of a sudden have complete freedom over what you eat. You spend a week or so living off Haribo, chips and Pot Noodles before realising you feel like crap and it might be a good idea to eat a vegetable.

A big driver behind my transition to self employment was to have more freedom and take more time off. So in a way, this summer was the perfect realisation of that. But in future, I would love to take more time off just to chill, to be at home, with very few plans, instead of cramming it to the brim with holidays and social events.

Another thing I would do differently is to be more tactical about how I line up work after a break. The hard thing is that a lot of clients look for freelance support right when they need it most and often aren’t willing to wait 3-4 weeks for a project to start. I would love to find a way to go on a long holiday, be able to switch off completely whilst I’m there and come back to work quite imminently. If you’ve done this effectively and have any advice, I’m all ears.

So all in all a very hectic, very fun, very low earning summer. I am so ready for a quiet and cosy autumn. I can’t wait to get back into a routine of healthy eating and exercise, get my teeth stuck into work and earn some money to boost my sad looking business bank account.

How was your summer? And how are you feeling about autumn?

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Dover to Dunkirk ferry, Italian vineyard, pasta, rolling hills of Tuscany.

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