I'm having a baby not giving up my life….
Like most women, when I first found out I was pregnant I wanted to tell the world. Unlike most pregnant women, my ‘world’ consists of thousands of people I hardly know, hundreds I know really well and a few close friends, along with thousands of people who know me but I don’t know them at all. My online ‘contacts’ are a big part of my world and my first instinct was to announce it to everyone on Facebook, Twitter and a few other networks.
Luckily I restrained myself, and told people slowly, starting with family (obviously), close friends, then people I knew well and clients.
The reaction of clients and potential clients tended to fall into 3 camps:
1 – “Wow, congratulations, that’s great” (you know who you are, thanks guys!)
2 – “Oh, well we weren’t expecting that, but congratulations anyway” (Thanks to you lot as well!)
3 – “Who is going to run your business and service us?”
It’s to the third group of people I’m addressing this post.
In order to answer them I need to take you back a little while – 15 and a half years to be precise.
I was a naive 21 year old single parent. I was divorced and lived in a pretty hovel like council house in Northamptonshire with my 2 and a half year old daughter, Leigh.
I looked around me at others in my situation and knew that I didn’t want to be on benefits for the rest of my life, or taking the temporary jobs I was taking in order to make ends meet. I needed a career not a job. So I looked at what was happening in the business world. I knew nothing about business, nothing about working for yourself, and had no discernible skills. I was 21, had dropped out of A levels, become pregnant at 18, given birth at 19, got married at 19 and was divorced by 21. I was a statistic, nothing more and nothing less, with not much hope of being anything else.
And then I discovered the Internet. I worked double shifts at temporary factory jobs and got together enough money to buy my first computer. My mother looked after my daughter, without her I’d still be in that same council house wondering when I could ‘get out’ and ‘make something of myself’.
I set myself up as a web designer. I was rubbish. But I found I was good at promoting sites and seeing what made them sell, making them work. In those days a webiste was a huge part of a marketing budget and largely unproven, so I made calls, I went out and networked, I knocked on doors and I sent out mailshots.
I stayed up until 4am putting stamps on envelopes. I waited until my daughter was asleep to post ads online and send emailshots. I worked around her, taking her to playschool every day and rushing back to do a couple of hours work, picking her up and spending time in the park, making calls while she had her afternoon nap, putting work to one side while it was dinner and bathtime, and picking it up again when she was in bed.
And slowly and surely I built a business. A reputation even. Me, on my own, with a 2 year old child, a mum who babysat and helped out where she could, and no other real support. (And let’s not forget, with no real knowledge of what I was doing – we were all learning as we went along in those days!).
I also built up a bank balance and moved out of the council house, rented offices for my business and started hiring. I was taken on by a marketing company to integrate my company with their web business, and paid well for it. I decided to branch out again on my own in 2003.
Now let’s fast forward to today.
I’m 36, have a fantastic 17 and a half year old daughter, a great partner who understands the odd hours I work, and a team around me who I believe are second to none.
I still get up early and work ‘the early shift’, followed by a couple of hours of downtime, a burst in the afternoon, and often work long into the evening. It’s what I’m used to, what I’ve always done, and it works for me.
With Rob doing Adwords, Mark writing articles, Leigh and Helen doing Admin, Shaun and Bob selling and me doing the promotion and SEO, our little team works well together and we have quite a well oiled machine going.
I don’t have to build a business anymore – I’m lucky that I have people enquiring about my services all the time, and the leads keep coming in. We take on the clients we want to work with and turn away those that we can’t or don’t think we can help.
So yes, I am going to have a baby, and the hours I work in the first few months may be even odder than they are right now (I don’t think I have a client who HASN’T received a work related email from me at 1am!), but I’m still loads better off than I was 15 years ago.
So to answer your question of “Who is going to run your business and service us?”
I am.
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nikki@nikkipilkington.com
Twitter: @NikkiPilkington
