Towards the end of 2021 I began to consider starting my own business. My youngest child was about to start pre-school and to be honest, I wanted to earn some money! I looked into getting another job (I was already working a few hours each week working for St Peter's West Molesey) but couldn't find anything else that I was passionate enough about or that was flexible enough for me to work around looking after my children. I have four children aged 3 - 11 and it seemed virtually impossible to find a job that would enable me to see my children, avoid spending a fortune on childcare and be manageable with our already busy life. It was my husband, Alex, who gave me the idea in the first place and initially I rejected it as being completely crazy! I wasn't sure that I could do it, but a seed of an idea had been planted and I kept thinking about it. Could I start my own business?
As time went on, I started talking to friends about it and to my surprise no one said: 'don't be ridiculous - of you course you couldn't run your own business!'. The more I thought about it, the more I could see it as a possibility. My idea was to offer marketing support for small businesses. I had years of sales and marketing experience from previous jobs, including working at Ford Motor Company, and more recently I had started helping small organisations with their social media, emails and website development. I could think of quite a few friends who ran small businesses and knew that many of them either didn't want to, didn't have the time to, or didn't know how to run elements of the marketing that they knew they needed. I didn't realise it at the time, but I had found my niche.
Just before Christmas 2021 I started to think about what to call my new business. At that point it was still hypothetical: what was the harm in thinking of a name? I loved the idea of helping businesses to grow and develop. Helping to cultivate them to reach their potential. So much of marketing involves creativity - through images and text, but also thinking creatively to solve problems. I searched domains and found that www.cultivatingcreative.co.uk was available. That was the start of Cultivating Creative!
I decided to launch Cultivating Creative at the start of January 2022 and created a social media post that went like this:
Creating a little teaser for my own social network was my way of taking that first step. It forced me to launch my new business, which was what I needed to do so that I didn't back out. As it happens, potty training my son took much more time and a huge amount of effort!
After a few days I created Facebook and Instagram pages for my new business and one evening at the start of January I sent out a post on my personal profile sharing the new business pages and asking people to like and share them. I was thrilled with the response from my wonderful friends and that evening in January, Cultivating Creative launched. I was even more thrilled when, that same evening, an email landed in my inbox from a prospective client who was interested in working with me.
And I'll share more about that in part 2 of this blog post.
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