Three years ago, my first book The Accountant Marketer was published alongside a live book launch in London. We booked out a beautiful library venue, invited clients from all over the world, and celebrated “in style”. This included straws with my face on them, edible cocktail toppers of the book’s cover, speeches, custom drinks, and book signings. Success!
For this second book, Accountants, You Are Creative, I went along to my village’s “Cafe and Books” get together on launch day, and ate cake and chatted to my neighbours. They placed my book proudly in our little library. Last night, I went to dinner at a restaurant up the hill (about 10 mins walk from my house), which is run by my two neighbours and located literally inside their living room.
We brought champagne, courtesy of my book publishers, and my neighbour (who knew about the book) literally brought every single course out with a flourish and things like “Here’s your celebratory amuse bouche!” and “Your celebratory starters”, and so on.
At the end of the meal (literally four hours later), we stood in their living room and talked about how important it is that accountants know they are creative, and what creativity looks like, and how we love living on the island and why we each moved here. We also celebrated my neighbours’ award they’d just won, being the top 3 out of 100 best local restaurants in Britain.
The two celebrations were very different. The first matched what many of us think “success” looks like. An official book launch event, in the heart of London, with many guests and drinks and speeches and flowers.
The second has been much quieter. Neighbours, small venues, a remote island. One or two people.
I enjoyed them both, but I think the second one fits who I am much better. Certainly who I am today, and what matters to me.
Moving to the island was a choice I made for myself: for my mental health, my physical health, and my creative headspace.
I remember the week of the London launch. I was flying around (literally), rushing from one meeting and event to the next. I dashed off to a hairdressers to get my hair done for the launch, and they did such a terrible job I had to dash back to my hotel, take a shower, and redo it all myself, then rush to the venue so I wasn’t late to my own event.
This week, I was working from my home office, taking walks in the evening around my village, recording podcasts about my new book, welcoming visitors to my Airbnb rooms, and celebrating my book at a local restaurant. It was quieter. It was much more slower paced. And I loved it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about imposter syndrome, and how it’s connected to what we think we “ought” to be doing, or where we “should” be. (Most of you know by now how much I despise the word should.)
Have a fun hobby? Turn it into a business! Have a business you run solo? You need to start scaling it! Hired a few employees? Hire more! Won an award? Apply for more!
I distinctly remember the year we hit £1 million turnover in my agency. I had 21 team members, everyone remote, and had been running the agency for over a decade. Team and clients worked from countries all over the globe. We had a Board, with a nonexec business coach and a finance director and a leadership team. We ran expensive, in person team retreats. That year we hired an operations director and paid for new laptops for every single team member. The day we hit the £1 million revenue I knew we needed to celebrate it, since the team had worked hard, so I created a video with a clever little series of signs (a-la Love Actually) and music, and shared it with the team, and we all celebrated our success.
And ten minutes before I posted that video in our team Slack, I was (literally) crying in my office, because I was so exhausted and stressed and worried. We had so much money coming in, and yet so much going out. I had become a glorified HR manager, dealing with team and hiring and role descriptions issues more than anything else. Every week another team member was sending an email or a video explaining why they felt they needed another salary rise, or creating their own new job title and role description and asking if the Board could review it. I was under immense pressure: but from the outside, I had it made.
Every single person I met who asked about my business, expressed literal awe when I shared our exclusive niche, our 21-person international team, our turnover. I didn’t, of course, share my net profit numbers, or lack thereof. I didn’t tell them I kept giving team members salary rises and denying them to myself. I didn’t explain that I kept putting off my lifelong dream of moving to an island because the business profits weren’t enough to make the leap yet. And I didn’t even admit to myself yet that everything was amazing, and nothing was actually working – for me.
I kept trying to take care of the team so they would take care of me – I’d been given or seen that advice in so many places, and I kept waiting for it to come true. And it never did. The team members were good, talented people. I blame absolutely none of them for their requests, their ambitions, their desire to keep progressing. I take full responsibility for my own decisions and for letting things go on as long as they did.
And I take great pride in knowing that at a certain point, I hit my limit, and changed everything so that I could have the life I want.
I reduced the team size massively – cut down from 21 employed people to 3, with a team of trusted contractors and outsourcers to do the creative work. I increased what I paid myself. I bought my house on the island, and moved there. I changed our services and pricing. And I made every single one of these decisions based on what would help me, first.
It’s very hard to do. I had many months where I wondered if I would figure it out (and yet, with the classic entrepreneurial mindset, somehow I knew I would).
So much of it has adjusted and settled now – not perfectly of course, and there’s still debt to repay and systems to rebuild and scaling to do so I’m not doing as much of the client work. But we’re making progress, and this brings me full circle back to my second book launch.
It was smaller, with less fanfare. There were fewer people and quieter celebrations.
And I absolutely loved it.
So whatever your goals are for how you want your business and life to look – you stay rock solid on those. When you find yourself impressed to the point of envy by someone else’s business, someone else’s life, and you wonder if you need to be pushing more. Hustling. Being more ambitious. Achieving more….
….Remember that it’s entirely possible they were crying in their office ten minutes before that post, that video, that launch. And that success isn’t what kind of accolades everyone else is getting, but the kind of life you want to have.
Build that. That’s what success looks like.
And just keep going.
