Choose your own business adventure
Small businesses can be vehicles for achieving a multitude of social as well as economic goals. During this talk at Alterconf I tried to convince the audience that doing their own thing can be extremely rewarding and fun.
This is the transcript of a talk I gave in April 2017 at Alterconf London. Lightly edited for clarity and to improve the grammar.
Hi, I’m Nat. The problem with being my friend is that I only ever give two kinds of advice.
One of those bits of advice is “dump him!” Works 90% of the time.
The other is “quit your job”. A friend mentioned to me yesterday that this is really the same kind of advice. It’s all about taking back your responsibility for your own freedom.
It only really works when people are already prepared to dump him or quit their job, and they just need to hear it from somebody else. Statistically, I think some of you probably need to hear to quit your job and start your own business. This talk is all about scaling this advice to reach a wider number of people.
Before I tell you how you should do it and why, and why I did it, I want to put it in perspective.
I present you with this quote from an artist and writer I greatly admire, Ingrid Burrington. I want you to notice I put it in a really friendly typeface to soften the message a bit.
There’s a finite amount of time we have on this planet. You have a finite number of days and hours, and your loved ones also do. And the time we spend doing stuff is not replaceable. We don’t get to have it back. I’ll never be this young again, and neither will be my friends.
This is why I took my own advice. I wanted to start my own company because I was sick of having a job. A while back I was working at a company which was not too bad. It was pretty sweet in a lot of ways, but there was an unspoken expectation that I would represent the business on my personal social media accounts, that I would act as an ambassador for the company, and represent it in the things I do outside of work. There was also some unspoken pressure to attend meetups and represent the company at events. I resisted those expectations successfully and it wasn’t a big deal, but I didn’t enjoy having to set boundaries. It made me think that, for me, some line has already been crossed. No one can expect me to give up my spare time to do things that are work-related. And that really bothered me, that somebody had the power to even make me have to establish those boundaries.
Jobs are essentially a lottery. I realise that many of you have great jobs, where you are supported to do your best work. Your bosses and colleagues accommodate your needs and challenge you to become better and grow, and that’s amazing, and this talk is not for you. But a lot of jobs many people have are actually really shit.
Sometimes these things change over time. You join a company, and everything is great: the team is fantastic, you have autonomy, you’re learning a lot, the work is interesting. All of that could still change over time. The team might grow, or people who make the workplace great might leave, and suddenly you’ll find yourself in a whole new world that’s totally changed around you. That was something that I also felt — that I didn’t really have enough control over these things.
The third thing that really bothered me was that I didn’t want to perform passion. I’m not actually passionate about my job, and it feels a little bit radical to say it out loud. I don’t work evenings and weekends. I don’t stay up and code until 3:00 a.m. in the morning. Nothing I do at work is ever an actual emergency that requires immediate attention. The expectation that I have to be passionate about my job to be good at it and to be competent makes me cringe. It’s just so unnecessary. So I wanted to live in a world that didn’t have those unreasonable expectations. I wanted to have control over what those expectations were.
Creativity
I actually want to do a slight detour, because my work is extremely creative, and I assume that since you’re working in the tech industry, you also probably see your work as very creative. I want to talk a bit about how creativity actually happens in the human mind, and what are the prerequisites for it, to help you understand why I think changing how you do work is really important.
While I was still at university I read this amazing book by Margaret Boden, who’s a leading cognitive and computer science researcher. She wrote a book titled The Creative Mind. In this book she investigates how creativity occurs. There are three ingredients required for you to have new ideas. The first is that you have to be already working on some kind of problem. There’s something you’re trying to solve, and you’re thinking about it really deeply.
The second is that you have to feed your mind all sorts of new experiences: read books, do fun stuff, talk to new people, look at interesting things, watch films, go new places, and so on. Have all these novel things feeding into your mind. This is the material from which your mind creates new ideas. Your mind takes the problem that you’re working on and it takes all those new ingredients and sort of mashes them together.
This is a diagram of how ideas are produced, and I think it’s actually scientifically accurate.
This sort of free association occurs only when you’re in a state of relaxation. It only occurs when you’re not specifically working on your problem, but when you relax and you’re daydreaming. You have all of these cool things in your head, and suddenly your mind starts making new connections. This is why people often say that they have amazing ideas in the shower, because being in the shower is quite conducive to entering this relaxed state.
So how do you replicate that relaxed state every single day from 9 to 5, in any given job? It’s actually really difficult. And for me, personally, it’s extremely difficult if I don’t have the time to do the things that I am actually passionate about—the things depicted on the slide.
I love spending time with my partner and my friends and my family, eating food, knitting, sewing, doing all these kinds of things. This is the kind of stuff I will be thinking about when I’m on my deathbed. I’m going to think, wow, I’m so happy. I’ve done all of these amazing things!
I’m not going to be thinking — I wish I’d replied to more email.
Given how fleeting life is, and that none of us strive to respond to more email, I wanted to have a work situation that I would be really comfortable with. One that would never coerce me into doing the stuff that I didn’t want to do.
I also wanted to have more creative control. If you think about any kind of project, it starts at an early stage point, where nothing is really defined yet. Ideas meander, move around and stay up for grabs, and eventually you start reaching some sort of clarity, and by the end you have an outcome. I used to be invited to participate in projects at this late stage, where ideas have already been defined. People would ask me — can you just build this thing that we’d thought of? And that was often fun, but I wanted to be involved at that initial stage, before things are already defined, and before we know what it is that we’re actually going to make.
Starting Buckley Williams
Luckily, I was sharing an office with my friend Dan Williams, and it turned out that Dan had really similar ideas about what he wanted from his working life. He also didn’t want to have to work evenings and weekends, and we wanted to work on similar kinds of projects. We have a similar history, and we like the same kind of work. So we decided to team up and start a company, and do the kind of work that we want to do, and do it the way we think is appropriate.
We started a tiny consultancy, Buckley Williams. Very cool name. We spent so long trying to come up with this unique name. If we ever do grow, it’s going to become a little bit of a problem.
We aim for a 35 hour workweek. We take plenty of time off. When either of us feels ill or, you know, really not in the mood to go to work then we stay home. Our wellbeing doesn’t stand in the way of ambition, because those things are not in opposition.
We make speculative objects, like this one-off internet connected radio that plays ambient notifications every 15 minutes. It’s an exploration of voice interfaces that are different to what’s currently out there. It’s all about personalised notifications delivered by audio, but in a passive way. You don’t request information from third party services, but they arrive continuously, and don’t require your active participation.
And we make tools for helping people imagine the future. Last year we worked with a charity called Doteveryone, in partnership with another design company — IF — to make prototypes of health record systems that visualised how those records could be communicated to patients and clinicians in the UK. Currently most patients can’t actually access their health records right now, or the access is actually quite difficult. The project was about trying to influence policy-makers to do the things necessary to make these kinds of approaches possible.
For Dan and me the company is a way to achieve multiple goals. One was to have a sensible work-life balance. The other was to work on the kinds of projects that we always wanted to work on.
A company as a tool for change
I want to show you a few more examples of people and companies who have used this sort of idea of the company or the business as a tool for doing something really interesting — either external change or some kind of internal benefit.
Projects by IF was founded by Sarah Gold. We collaborated with IF on the project I showed you just a moment ago. IF aims to change the conversation around privacy and digital rights.
One example of how they do it is their Consumer Advocacy project. IF built a prototype which explains to you the security risks involved in purchasing internet connected products, directly at the point of sale.
Another example is a series of prototypes exploring how to communicate data trade-offs in different scenarios. IF explored patterns for asking people for private information, and informing them about how the information is going to be stored and shared, with whom, and how long that sharing is going to last.
Some companies have an external goal, like IF, about making change in the world and using a for-profit business in order to be able to do that. Others aim to change how work itself is conducted.
Feeltrain, founded by Courtney Stanton and Darius Kazemi is a workers coop. They don’t really like how in capitalist systems, people are being exploited by the companies they work for. Making a company that is workers-owned was the only way to counteract that. They’ve also decided that the company can never grow larger than 8 people, because for them that’s the maximum size of the company you can have where people communicate directly and make decisions together.
Pentagram is a design firm founded in the seventies. A few of designers who valued their independence as practitioners felt that they were missing out on some useful stuff that working for a larger firm gives, like pooled legal, HR and other resources. Pentagram is a firm where those individuals are equals sharing those resources and retaining their practice at the same time. There are no executives, and no board. New members have equal voting power to those who have been there for a long time.
Why
I think those are really powerful examples of what can be done if you just let your imagination run wild. So why should you quit your job and start a company?
Because you’re amazing and perfectly capable.
Your ideas are valuable. There is already a saturation of similar voices out there. Certain narratives of how people start businesses and how those businesses succeed are being talked about a lot more than others. It’s a shame because even within the constraints of capitalism an infinite variety of different approaches is possible. Without your ideas about how things should be, and without you enacting your values in the world we are all culturally poorer.
The amazing thing about being in charge is that you’re literally the boss! You get to make the rules. I don’t understand why that just doesn’t seem like the most amazing thing in the world. If you want a four-day week, you have it. You want a rule where everybody wears pink on Fridays? Great. You want to decide that Jira is not allowed in your company? It’s your choice! Everything is literally up to you, from how you do sales and marketing to whether you’re even going to have business cards. All the things, big and small, are up for grabs.
You control your destiny. How many times were you working for the company where your superiors were making decisions that didn’t lead to good places, but you couldn’t influence them? In your own company that’s over. It’s up to you to figure out what you want and work out how to get it.
You decide what success means. This is really important. To some people, success is total obliteration of competition and destruction of the planet. But maybe you yearn for more human-scale goals. Being ambitious doesn’t mean you have to follow someone else’s ambitions. Your ambitions might be extremely amazing and huge to you, and be amazing achievements, but they don’t have to match to how the rest of the world thinks about what it means to achieve something. You’re free to make your own rules about that.
And to me and Dan success is the ability to live our lives outside of work to our fullest, and having the space to not think about work.
You decide what’s important to you. Some of the decisions you make have both pros and cons and it’s hard to work out how to make them. You can decide what kind of company you can be and evaluate options based on what matters to you. You get to embody your values in the world through the processes that you build your company with.
And finally, you have creative control. Not just over the bits of the work thought of as creative but everything else. The whole project of making a successful business is a very creative endeavor, and it’s up to you how to do that.
There’s one thing I want to say about this sort of divide between the real work and all the other stuff that we do in our jobs. If you start your own business, the work hierarchy pyramid pyramid looks a bit like the image above. There’s the work-work, which in our case is the designing and the coding and all that stuff that goes into producing tangible outputs. And then there are all of the relationships that you need to have in order to make your business successful. You have to do a lot of creating and maintaining relationships with other people. Finding out how other people do things. Finding advice. Doing sales and things like that. All that stuff takes up a lot of time, but is extremely rewarding.
How
So, If you’re going to do your own thing, how do you do that?
Make a plan. Make a plan for where you’re going to get work from in the short, medium and long term. What kind of clients are you going to have or what products are you going to build? Set intermediate goals you’re going to have, in order to take you to where you want to be in the future, if right it’s not exactly achievable.
Get paid. This is so important it’s worth saying twice. Get paid and double what you think you’re worth. When I first started out someone I was doing an internship with told me to double my day rate, because otherwise clients won’t value your work, and it will be much harder to get work. So it’s extremely important that you don’t work for free, and that you don’t work for exposure or whatever. Make sure you get paid. I’m not ashamed to admit that I love money (it keeps me alive and sheltered!), and you shouldn’t be ashamed either.
Value your time! Starting a business is really fun, and you get to learn a lot of stuff, but you can’t learn everything. At some point, you have to realise that there is a limit to the hours you have in the day, and there’s a limit to what you can realistically learn. If there are things you want to learn because you think they would be useful, that’s amazing. But there are lots of stuff it might not be worth learning yourself. It’s not worth you picking up the skill, learning it, doing it really slowly, instead of just paying somebody else to do it. Pay an accountant. Pay a lawyer to do your contracts. Pay people who are much better at doing certain kinds of things that you find necessary, and just free up your time to do the things that you’re really good at.
And don’t procrastinate at work. One key part of going home on time — for me — is that at work, I work. And outside of work, I don’t work.
Find mentors, because you’re going to need advice. Dan and I have both found two kinds of mentors. Some of the people we spoke to and got advice from are people who have already run their own businesses, who have sage advice to give us. We also found people who, like us, have only just started, and they are experiencing what we’re experiencing right now. They also have amazing advice to give us, even though they might not be more experienced.
Reflect. It’s also extremely important to give yourself space to do this and check in on yourself and check in on how you’re doing. Celebrate how far you’ve come. Congratulate yourself on your accomplishments. Give yourself the time to do that. Learn from your mistakes. Regularly review wether this is this still what you want to be doing. Is this where you wanted to be by now? It’s really important to make the time so that you can course-correct if necessary.
And finally, just do it.
Really, do it.
Okay, I think you get the message by now.
I just want to leave you with two references for inspiration. The first one is a book titled In the Company of Women by Grace Bonney. She interviewed lots of really cool women who run all sorts of businesses. Small, from one person, to large organisations. It’s a really amazing resource.
And the second one is a podcast called Woolful. It’s hosted by Ashley Yousling, who talks to mostly women who started yarn-related or fiber-related businesses. It’s very interesting to me, because all of them grew out of that need to either change their working lives, or make sure the work fits around the lives. They all go about it in completely different ways, and they have completely different structures, and there’s such enormous variety in why people do this and how they do this. So if you’re ever stuck for inspiration, that’s an amazing resource.
Thank you for listening.
