The last six months…

I’ve talked about it a lot of times, I’ve had advice from so many people and I see so many posts – certainly at the start of the year – about business planning and what you’re doing this year and what’s this year going to look like and all of that. And I’ve said it before, I’m not the best at seeing the world in chunks of years or six months or everything. My vision to the world is a little bit more fluid than that. 

So, having five-year and 10-year plans, ‘Where are you going to be in 10 years?’ and all that, I never really had. I don’t often see things that way. I mean, obviously, this post is going out a little bit after my first six months of 2024. I should have had it out on 1st July and obviously, it didn’t! But this is a post just to allow me to go, “Yeah, that was all right, wasn’t it?” 

I don’t big myself up very much. I don’t know how to take praise very well and I think that’s very much an ADHD trait. And so, yeah, this is kind of my six months in numbers because I work better in numbers. I have spreadsheets and Xero and everything else running in the background with Rachel keeping on top of my numbers. And I’m always doing maths, I’ve always got post-it notes with random numbers on it. If anybody asked me what it was, I would be able to figure it out because that’s how my head works. But it wouldn’t be an easy one to explain. 

So, to write these numbers down as full numbers is always quite therapeutic. And I have tracked kind of yearly progress and year-by-month progress on how many jobs and that sort of stuff for a good few years. So, I can now look back and kind of see how months evolve and where my quiet months are and that sort of thing. But actually, this year has kind of thrown a spanner in that works. The amount of jobs that I’ve had between in this first half of the year, normally, it’s the second half of my year where I pick up the busyness. And this year, it’s been incredibly busy from January. Certainly January through to April has been crazy. Until the 30th of June, I’ve done around 155 shoots, which bearing in mind that that’s in 181 days. And that’s quite significant. So, just showing you how many jobs I’m doing. 

And overall, on top of that, number of jobs doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all good paying jobs in the sense that, obviously, I track the amount of money per job as well, which is actually always all up as well. So, those increase of jobs and increase in amount of getting paid per job is all incredibly positive. So, the key milestones for me over the last six months, I took Karl on as an actual employee rather than a freelancer. You all know Karl, he’s been with me for kind of four and a bit years now. And he’s done a lot of work for me and continues to do so. But just to formalize our relationship with a full arrangement with a full PAYE setup and all of that was significant for me in the business. Following on, I kind of felt like as soon as that happened within the first three months of that happening, that working from home, coming together for things, dynamic, had to change really, just as much that to make life easier for working between us. 

So, I started looking for offices. And in May, 22nd of May, we got the keys to the office. And that was, again, another significant milestone. I haven’t had an office for my own business for quite some time, just on the way these things pan out. It worked very well at the time. And then I didn’t need it. So, now I need it again. So, here we are. We’ve got an office. I’ve not really talked about the office at all. So, that’s on my list to tell you a little bit more about because there’s quite a few exciting things happening with that! 

And then after some discussions with my accountant, it was clear that, again, business changes needed to happen. I’ve been a sole trader throughout my business time. So, to be kind of nudged in the direction by the accountant, or at least he’d say he wouldn’t nudge, more ‘advise’ me. But I kind of put him on the spot because that’s the way I am. I need people to help me make decisions. But I made the decision with advice that I needed to go limited and I needed to get VAT registered. So, all of a sudden, again, within that six-month period, I’ve gone from sole trader on my own on the eve of the 1st of January to member of staff, office, limited, VAT registered. That’s a massive change for me and not something that I really did see in this time period. So, it’s a massive thing. And yeah, it’s just been great to kind of go on that journey. All the clients I’ve been working with have been absolutely fantastic and I’ve had some really, really good opportunities. So, yeah, roll on the next six months. And I’m going to have to get used to my year being a little bit out of sync to what it was before…