No one said it would be easy.

When I decided to become self employed, no one ever said it would be easy. In fact, I had a lot of people warning me about the endless hours or work, the tax and account bore, the difficulty in taking time off to rest and holidays with no pay, the constant worry of where work would come from next…the list went on.

At the time I was 25 years and had never found any work situation that had made me excited and make me spring out of bed, (if that is even possible.)

I knew what I loved to do and that was to create, to make films. It made sense to me to make my work something that I loved to do, why do anything else?

For the first time, I felt the hunger. The hunger to learn every aspect of business to make this work, whatever ‘this’ was. I set out to make sure I had help where I had weaknesses. I went through The Princes Trust, The Bideford Bridge Trust and found lots of amazing courses with North Devon Plus, Princes Trust, Women do Business, School of Social Entrepreneurs and many more. I came out with a healthy grant, a 2 year mentor ship and better knowledge.

None of this felt difficult it came quite naturally to me to want to learn how to make a living from my love.

Something that has been very interesting and difficult at times was protecting my love. Once you step into Business territory you have many people telling you how to get sales, to market, to remove emotion, to hard sell, to get the biggest clients, to win, to trample your competitors. It becomes, you against the world, and the love is easily lost, is too easily forgotten. This is all good advice and often works in business, however, it doesn’t work for every business and I constantly ask myself why I am doing this, working endless hours, working hard to learn, to progress, to evolve and its for the love.

The love is the only thing that is IMPORTANT. If the love makes you money, great, if it simply makes you happy then that is more than enough.

No one said it would be easy and sometimes it’s not, but as long as you protect your love, then it is all easier than you may think or expect.

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