In April 2005, I found myself unemployed. April 2025 marks 20 years of self-employment.
My approach (and my advice) is often to take stock of the context, look at the opportunities available, and pick something to try.
As I said in a post about the 10 year anniversary of a different milestone on this journey,
You don’t have to figure out what you are going to do with your life. You just have to figure out what you are going to do next.
I decided to try starting my own business. I didn’t really imagine I’d still be doing this 20 years later, but here I am.
One of the nice things about approaching career decisions this way is that it acknowledges that there is a lot you don’t know, and a lot you don’t control.
As you learn things about yourself and about the world you find yourself in, different options become available to consider.
Similarly the context in which you are making choices about your career changes. Those changes might be the result of actions you’ve taken: saving money, formal education, etc. Or they might be the result of luck (good or bad).
I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years. I hope my experience will contribute to your thinking and help you figure out what might work for you.
Getting started in self-employment.
It’s hard to know what constitutes “starting” but my last day of employment by someone else was 1 April 2005.
At the time, I was in a fairly stable financial situation: My partner was employed. Our mortgage was very affordable due to some luck with the real estate market.
I had a PhD in sociology, several academic publications, and 8 years experience in academic employment in the UK. I also had experience of some of the administrative/managerial aspects of academic work, having served as Deputy Head of a School of Social Sciences.
In 2 years of employment with a funding agency I had gained knowledge of how that agency and its programmes worked, an understanding of the policy environment shaping research funding, and contacts with VPs of Research and people in Research Offices at universities across Canada.
What I didn’t fully realize then, but is obvious looking back, was that I had also absorbed something about the small business mindset, along with some basic business skills, from my dad.
I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to do and no real language to describe it beyond wanting to help academics.
The financial cushion enabled me to take a risk. I used the contacts and knowledge I’d acquired in my last job to develop an initial offer: support for academics applying to that particular funding agency.
The infrastructure was minimal. I used email to contact potential clients. I hired a lawyer to draw up a standard contract. A graphic designer friend made business cards and some electronic letterhead. I learned what I needed to know about sales tax from the Canada Revenue agency website and a free one-day training session.
Learning and adjusting.
The more I worked in that space the more I learned about what academics needed and about where my strengths were.
My broader network of friends and acquaintances did not know much about academia, but they were crucial to developing my knowledge and skills around self-employment. In particular, learning how to run an online business opened up a broader potential client base.
Grant proposal development support, mainly under contract to university research offices, was the core of my business for about 8 years. It involved travel to give presentations and meet people in person, as well as remote work commenting on draft proposals.
That work was seasonal which left me lots of time to develop other services. I took online courses, joined an online community of self-employed people, and hired business coaches.
I learned that the term “coaching” probably described the kind of work I most wanted to do, and experimented with various ways of delivering coaching. I developed a couple of online short courses, some of which still exist in some form as part of The Academic Writing Studio.
I created my online writing group: A Meeting With Your Writing in 2012 to address the common frustration that people just didn’t have enough *time* to write the publications they needed to be competitive for grants.
By 2014 I was ready to take another risk: I stopped offering grant proposal development support so I could devote more energy and time to the services that felt like a better fit for my strengths. 20 years on, I have clients who first worked with me 15 years ago when their university hired me to support them with a grant application.
Time and space for life.
There were definite downsides to the seasonality of grant proposal development work focused on applications to one particular funding agency. However, that also provided the context for other life decisions.
Less than a year into this journey, we had a bit of a parenting crisis. It became clear that school was not meeting my child’s needs. My business was still small, the work was seasonal, I was working from home. I figured we could homeschool for the rest of that academic year while we figured out a new school.
In the end, we homeschooled for 10 years. This decision had an impact on the time and energy available for growing the business, but the flexibility of my work also enabled us to accompany my partner on research trips, taking advantage of local museums and whatnot to enhance our education.
Homeschooling, especially the way we did it, was also flexible. It could also have seasons to complement my busy seasons. As a teen, my kid accompanied me on some work trips, which we combined with meeting homeschooling friends we’d met online.
Instead of work-life balance, my work was integrated into my life.
The flexibility, and portability, of my self-employment also made other life choices possible. In 2014, when my partner’s mother died and many of our sheep were killed in a coyote attack, self-employment was part of the context in which we asked:
“What will we do next?”
We decided to make a big change.
My partner was offered a job in England. I was able to register as self-employed in the UK and continue to serve many of the same clients from our new geographic location.
Financial compromises.
The flexibility of self-employment was not without financial consequences.
When I started down this road I was relatively financially secure: with a partner in well-paid, stable employment and with equity in a house. This is an important context for the way I approached self-employment.
I sometimes wonder if the level of financial and emotional security afforded by my relationship meant that I didn’t work as hard to make the business more financially successful than I might have otherwise. But that wasn’t my top priority.
I valued the flexibility to explore what kind of work suited me, and to work at a level compatible with homeschooling, more than that sort of financial success.
If you are considering this path for yourself, you should know more about what those financial compromises look like.
I have never earned even half of what I was earning in the professional jobs I had before becoming self-employed. My earnings contribute less than 25% of our household income. There were 3 years in which I did not even earn enough to pay income tax.
In recent years, I have paid other people from the revenue my business generates: hosts for A Meeting With Your Writing, and an assistant to support me with social media marketing, editing my newsletter & blog posts, and related tasks. I’ve learned how to do this, and how to budget for it, on the fly, and the financial buffer has been my own salary.
I also have very little pension savings of my own, and anticipate a change in lifestyle when my partner & I retire. We have aligned our expectations to our financial reality.
The joy of self-employment.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to pursue this path. I have had the flexibility to homeschool, to raise livestock, and to move across an ocean when my partner wanted to change jobs.
I have been able to help so many people. They got grants. They published books and articles. They got promotions.
More importantly, many of my clients have reconnected with the joy and curiosity that drew them to an academic career in the first place. They are more confident.
My 20 years of self-employment has coincided with massive changes in higher education around the world, and with broader political trends which have led me to write several posts on the theme of Dystopia, Uncertainty, and Disruption.
Not only does that make me wonder about the viability of my business model. It also makes it really difficult to support academics in the way I do. There is now a real risk of moral injury for so many people working in higher education.
I am now at an age where my partner and I are making plans for the transition to retirement over the next 5 to 10 years.
I’m not giving up on the values of curiosity, community, and communication that are so central to the vision my clients and I have for higher education.
If you are considering self-employment as an option, keep in mind that you are doing it in a very different context than I was 20 years ago. Take stock of the context you’re in. Look at the opportunities available. Pick one to try.
You’re good at learning things. You’ll figure it out.
Related Posts:
10 Years of A Meeting With Your Writing!
4 years of A Meeting With Your Writing
A Meeting With Your Writing: Acknowledgements
This post was originally sent to newsletter subscribers on 18 April 2025. Sign up to not miss a post!
