The Courage to Change: My Experience of Leaving my 9-5 Career & Embracing Entrepreneurship at 32
Are you feeling stuck in your 9-5 job and yearning for something more? Are you dreaming of starting your own business and following your passion but worried it's too late? As someone who made the leap at 32 and with so many clients in their 40’s who’ve also leaped…
I'm here to tell you that it's never too late to chase your dreams and be brave.
In 2018, I left my career in Fashion and started my Personal Branding and Squarespace Web Design Business.
After 18 months, I decided it was time for another big change. I made the scary decision to leave behind the bustling city of London, which had been my home for over a decade, and move to the tranquil countryside of the Cotswolds. Being surrounded by nature has been good for my soul, and I've discovered the joy and happiness in the everyday. I love my job and am more present in my life than ever before.
If you're feeling the urge to take the leap, I’m here to say, it's time to just go for it!
In this article, I'll be sharing my career journey and how I made the transition and hopefully inspire you to do the same. It's time to follow your passions, be brave, and create the life you truly want.
The Fashion Years
I thought I’d start where all good stories begin - ya know, at the beginning!
I trained in fashion design and spent ten years working for a high-end, London based, fashion brand, selling in Selfridges to Saks Fifth Avenue.
As the business grew, so did my expertise: personal branding, website design, email marketing and assisting with the brand photoshoots - all with the purpose to inspire real women to feel confident and sexy, inside and out.
My story of how I became a website designer was kind of funny and totally accidental.
2 years into my working at the fashion label, The CEO & designer of the company appeared on Mary Queen of Shops, a national TV show in the UK and it was basically an infomercial for the business.
The evening Anna appeared on the show, our website crashed.
The next day I found myself as the new website designer!
As we were a small, family style biz, we were all very scrappy and did what we could to make the business a success which meant taking on numerous different roles. This is what I find the most fascinating about the start of my career / journey - I loved where I worked BUT I worried so much about the fact that I wasn’t mastering one specific area in fashion like my friends were.
When you work as a designer in fashion you begin to specialise and progress. For example, this would look like becoming an assistant knitwear designer > junior knitwear designer > knitwear designer > senior knitwear designer > design manager or you’d specialise in woven tops and dresses or outerwear or tailoring etc. That’s what it was like at the big corporate style companies.
Not Me. I was designing the website and blog one week as well as the twice weekly email marketing newsletter AND designing the floral prints for this season's dresses AND designing the clothes AND then photographing them AND then uploading those products onto the website. AND repeat!
I would always have this niggling worry in the back of my mind that I wasn’t doing things the right way. That I was going to get left behind. Not progress. Not get the pay increases that come with specialising and mastering one discipline. BUt fuck, did I love my job and everyone I worked with. It was pure magic! Hence why I was there for 10 years. My boss was my best friend and so were all my work colleagues.
What I now know to be true, is that everything happens for a reason and we can only connect the dots looking back and everything I was doing was my crash course into owning my own business - learning how to be scrappy and be the wearer of many hats!
The meeting that changed everything for me
Every November we’d hold a sample sale in our offices for our legion of loyal fans, it was legit my favourite day of the year in the biz. I LOVE meeting our customers and playing fashion stylist for the day.
I am brutally honest if something looks good on you or not and would just love picking out the right pieces for our gorgeous, amazing customers. It literally made my year being with these brilliant, often not so confident women (I mean who of us are at times) and making them feel incredible in our beautiful clothing.
It was at one of these sample sales that I met Imene. She was this vivacious, badass woman who was a VP at an investment bank in Mayfair, London - basically, totally different from myself and all of my creative career based friends.
We hit it off and she said I must join her for a drink at her members club, so I did. She told me that she thought I was a super positive person but that I seemed a little flat.
And she was right.
I was starting to feel like I was just coasting in my life but I didn’t know what to do about it.
Is this starting to feel a little familiar??
She told me that all the CEO’s and people high up in the biz world read books about how to be better, do better - personal development style books.
She recommended I read this book she’d heard about called You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero, I’ve written a post in more detail about this if you want to learn more about the book, Reading Jen Sincero’s, ‘You Are A Badass’ Changed My Life..
GUYS, THIS BOOK LITERALLY CHANGED THE COURSE OF MY LIFE!!!!
I would never ever ever ever had a read a book like this if a friend in my circle had given it to me. I was super cynical at this stage of my life. But this woman from nowhere did.
So I read it.
They say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I believe this to be so true in my gut, as over the coming years, whenever I’ve been ready, that guiding mentor has ALWAYS showed up.
I remember being on a London red bus, on my way home from Christmas break, reading the book and having this epiphany.
“I can do and be whatever I want to be.”
Holy fucking shit!
Now to you, that may not seem like rocket science but to me it was.
I thought I needed to get a new fashion job but looking back, I had in fact spent the previous 5+ years pissing my friends off saying I couldn’t come out because I was working on my portfolio everytime they wanted to do something. Clearly this was me procrastinating because I actually didn’t want to get another job in fashion. Again. Connecting the dots.
This is what led me to the next stage in my life, I like to call it…
The Figuring Out what the hell I wanted to do with my Life Years
This is where, for some, it gets reallllll rocky.
You, like me, maybe had that same epiphany, where you know that your life isn’t doing it for you right now.
You WANT MORE.
But fuck me, what the hell does “more” even look like, right?
I’ve found that to find this elusive “more”, you HAVE TO follow the intuitive nudges. They’ll first appear like little whispers, until they get so loud you’ll inevitably have to start listening to them.
You'll want to start taking little steps and actions, following those whispers and YOU WILL GET THERE.
This is such a delicate and beautiful process my love, I’m telling you.
Don’t try and rush this stage trying to try to get to an end goal.
YOU MUST ENJOY THE JOURNEY.
I have a friend at the moment who is going through this EXACT same process that I did 7 years ago, as of writing this.
She feels a little lost and is desperately trying to figure out what her next step is. She has lots of things she’s interested in but really isn’t sure which one to pursue because what if she picks the wrong one? This then leaves her static, going around in circles and doesn’t end up going anywhere.
That’s why I’m hoping the next part of my story will inspire you to take that first step because I can tell you now, it’s probably not going to be the thang you do for the next 5-10 years but boy it’ll lead you there and you’ll have fun doing it. Maybe not all the time, but life’s a journey right?!
(I’ve got to say - sorry for how much I repeat the word, the next step and journey haha but bear with me)
My own next (small) step led me to take an online course by the author of my life changing book and it was called, 8 Weeks to Awesomeness. The principal being that you have 8 weeks to achieve one bigass goal.
Now, I’m telling you, you won’t always get things right in these first stages - I didn’t.
I was still in the… I’m going to become a print designer if not a fashion designer stage - because it’s all I knew and thought I could do.
So my one bigass goal was to get a job as a print designer.
One week into the course and I was looking for an inspiration quote phone case online and they were all cheesy as fuck and I was like, ummm nah, I’m not having what is already a cheesy af quote case that my mates would laugh at with birds all over it and handwritten font a 5 year old would appreciate.
So I thought, I can design something better than this.
And so that’s what I did! My one big ass goal had changed. I was going to design and sell inspirational quote phone cases.
I taught myself calligraphy. I did a huge poll about which quotes all my friends liked best. I got samples made in China. The photographer that would shoot our campaigns at the fashion company said she’d shoot my product for free. My best friend did hand modelling. Her twin sister, also my bezzie, was a fashion stylist at Harvey Nichols and Net-a-Porter and she said she’d helped me style the shoot. The twins mum, also a friend, said we could shoot it at her beaitful house.. And all of a sudden I had….
My First Business
I created and sold smartphone covers with inspirational quotes and messages to add a little zest into my customers' lives and to remind them of the incredible person they are deep down. And they weren’t cheesy af! As mentioned above, with my design skills from my fashion career, I created an eye catching brand for my lifestyle business.
And it was (ahem…not to toot-toot my own horn) rather successful! I went all out with this business, it was just so exciting to have something that was mine, that I was passionate about.
I researched journalists from all the UK national magazines that would maybe be able to get my cases on their magazine pages. I’d find their Instagram accounts, see if they’d posted any quotes on their grid and then match them up with a case, write them a personal note and post it off, hoping they’d love this little bit of positivity they could carry throughout their day.
And it worked. Within months my business was appearing in loads of national magazines and I even got a full page feature in Cosmopolitan with a custom case they commissioned.
It was an incredible experience because it opened my eyes to what beautiful photography and elevated branding can do for a small ‘start-up’ business in terms of positioning and status.
To outward eyes, it was a sure thing, but in reality my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to sell products for a living.
What lit my fires, sparked my imagination and zone of genius was the BRANDING PROCESS. I knew I wanted to take that element of my skillset and create a business around it.
Like everything I’m chatting to you about here, I didn’t know where to start so I took the next step in my journey and started looking for a business / life coach to help me.
Now again, this is where the magic happens and what happened next is what has led me to the business that now lights my soul on fire.
Taking the next little step…
I was Googling Life and Business Coaches in the London area and during my search I realised, I am not emotionally connecting with ANY of these women’s websites. And I’m a massively intuitive person and if I don’t connect with you from your online home, I’m out!
That’s when I knew I was onto something! I KNEW I could create awe inspiring websites or beautiful photography for all of these coaches and service based entrepreneurs. If you’re selling a service or a product with a story - you HAVE TO engage with your audience.
With this idea in hand, through some more magic, my next teacher appeared. Jen Sincero, my fave author in this story, had released a second book and a friend of hers was hosting an intimate lunch for 26 people in Somerset. I knew I had to go. I did. And I asked her if she could recommend any coaches to me. She recommended her friend, the host of the lunch, Kat Dever. Kat would become my first coach and to this day I work with her sporadically and have also recently finished designing her second website and brand uplift.
With Kat’s help and guidance, I made the scary decision to leave my job of a decade. With the product based business, I would need to sell a hell of a lot of cases to leave my job, with this new business idea, I could have one client a month and I could do it!
It wasn't an easy decision, and there were certainly moments of doubt and fear. But I knew that I needed to take the leap and follow my dreams. So, at the age of 32, I left my fashion career job and started my own Personal Branding and Squarespace Website Design Business.
The transition wasn't always easy. Starting a business from scratch requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. But with each day that passed, I grew more confident in my decision. I found joy and fulfillment in my work, and I knew that I had made the right choice.
My Passion, My Purpose… My Perfect Dream Business
So what exactly is it that I do now???
I create energetically aligned brands for ambitious, passion driven business owners using my intuition and epic design skillz. Giving my clients the confidence to step fully into their power & get more visible online with the absolute knowing that their branding reflects their expertise.
Nothing gives me more joy than seeing others like me, rise and become financially free, knowing that I played a small part in their transformational journey.
I’ve had sooo much fun writing this blog post for you and by sharing the small steps that have led me to where I am now. My hope is that you feel inspired to not stay stagnant. To take that first small step. And then the next. That there is so much joy on the other side.
Do you know, what’s really made me giggle about writing this, is that now I’m at the part in my journey where I’m insanely happy with what I’m doing, I find I don’t want to write much more. What’s lit me up about this article is telling you about how I got to where I am now.
Life is all about the journey and not the destination.
The final dot, shall we say in this beautiful trip, is the final big leap that I took, which was to leave London after over 13+ years to move to the stunning location that is the Cotswolds, UK - think Kate Winslet’s cottage in The Holiday, if you’re not from the UK.
After fully immersing myself in all things personal growth and leaning deeper into spirituality and what that means to me (obsessed with the law of attraction and manifestation), I couldn’t be in a city any more. I needed space. I needed to be in nature. I now live in the cutest 2 bed cottage in a super rural setting with only 5 neighbours and just fields (and sheep) for miles. My office looks out over stunning Cotswold views and in fact, it looks just like the view I’ve had on my vision board for two years before making it manifest into my reality.
I’ve never ever been happier.
Here are a few tips that might help you get started:
Identify your passions and talents
Think about the things that make you happy and fulfilled. What are you naturally good at? What are your strengths and talents? Identify the areas that you excel in and that bring you the most joy. Like me, maybe it’s a case of a little idea that you have and just for fun you start doing something with it.
I love the story of Andy who had a wedding photography business which crashed during lockdown, so she sought solace in gardening which she always used to do with her Grandma and brought back such happy memories. She took numerous teeny tiny steps to follow her joy with no real business plan in mind - she now has a business where she selects mini collections of Dahlia tubers for you to grow yourself and she’s created video tutorials on how to do it. She grew her instagram following using reels from 0 to 60,000+ followers during lockdown. Her instagram success has led her to build a second business, teaching other business owners how to grow their instagram with reels, called Reels Rockstar.
So, again let me ask you, what brings you joy and what are you good at?
Research your options
Once you have identified your passions and talents, research the different opportunities that are available to you. Look for businesses or industries that align with your values and interests. Take the next small step.
Make a plan
Once you have identified your passions and researched your options, make a plan for how you will make the transition. This might include taking courses or classes to develop your skills, networking with other professionals in your field, or creating a business plan. To be honest, I think business plans are a little old school but hey that’s just me!
Take the leap
When the time is right, take the leap and start your own business or make the transition to a new career. Remember that there will be challenges along the way, but with dedication and perseverance, you can achieve your goals.
Your Next Step in your own Entrepreneurial Journey
I wanted to end this post with saying that I know the power of taking a leap of faith because I did it myself & if I can, I want to help you do the same.
If you’re ever ready to push the button to build the brand of your dreams, take a look at how I can help you bring out your superpower with my branding & website design experience. Or equally if you don’t want to do something with my 1:1, I have a whole bunch of pre-made Squarespace Templates that you just need to slot your words and images into and voila, new biz website is stylishly created.
'What if I fall? Oh, but my darling… what if you fly'
- Erin Hanson.