Page 76 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

SORRY, WE’RE NOT HIRING ANY VISIONARIES TODAY
Back in the early ‘90s my husband said, “You know how you said you would return to work to pay for school fees? Now is the time.” I found work in the consultancy field. I was delivering a service and product that was all about nutrition education. I eventually got utterly sick of the rules. It was so rule- driven. I also recognized that what works for one person doesn’t work for someone else.
I decided to work as an individual and began to contact the doctors in my area, and I started working with them, with their patients who needed to lose weight to, say, have a hip or knee replacement. So I talked to a friend who’d also been working for the same company, and we decided to strike out on our own. We did that for five years. I really enjoyed it, but it was incredibly stress- ful, and it probably wasn’t the entrepreneurship part that was hard. At the end of each week, when you’ve seen 36 people, you’ve had to write out a meal plan for every single one of them.
This is the point where I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. When I came home on a Friday night, my kids asked, “What’s for dinner?” I just looked at them and said, “McDonald’s.” I could not have put together another meal plan if my life had depended on it. This was when I realized that it’d become too big. It grew quickly, I hadn’t planned for that, and I should have managed it better. When my husband gave me the out, I said I would go and find a full-time job because this was only supposed to be part-time. I was fitting a 40 hour week into school hours and only four days a week.
I’m not great at bookkeeping either, meaning I was swamped at the end of each month. The government brought in new taxes. They started adding in all these value-added taxes, and I just looked at it all and said, “I can’t do this.” So I stopped.
Looking back I can see I’ve almost always freelanced. Freelancers are entre- preneurs. I’ve just found my way. I think I’ve only ever applied for a job once, which was the one at the IT company. The rest of the jobs I’ve found, or they’ve found me, and I’ve freelanced. So that’s given me the freedom that I need, which entrepreneurship would give me, but without the responsibility of managing the minutiae of a business. That’s not my strength. I realize I could
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