11 things I've never revealed about running my business.

11 years ago today, I started a business I built up and sold over 6 years. On this day I always reflect upon the huge impact this had on my life and so I thought i'd share 11 secrets I've never revealed about this experience.

1. I couldn't afford bus fare.

While many people know the story of my mum getting sick and me needing to pay the bills, few know just how dire this situation was. One of my very first clients would meet me in Sheffield town centre for coffee and to discuss updates. I literally could not afford both the bus fare and the cost of buying the client a drink and so would walk three miles there and back.

2. I didn't know how to produce CGI.

That same client contacted me because he was excited about something he'd seen in my portfolio, which was CGI. He saw this as a premium way in which to create corporate videos. The element that he was looking at? It was a stock footage item! While I did have some CGI skills, I did not have the infrastructure or skillset to produce what he was asking, but given the situation I found myself in, I said yes anyway. While I would never condone businesses lying to get a sale, sometimes you have to gamble. I spent the next weeks scrambling to ensure I could deliver what he wanted, and nearly all of my spare time was devoted to learning Maya inside and out.

3. I sold video production on ebay.

In the early days of my business I joined up to any and all freelancer websites, put classified ads out, was on gumtree and craigslist and even ebay. In fact I produced 4 videos by selling my services through ebay! Sometimes you have to try something and see if it works.

4. I had 35 people working for me.

Like many business owners, after a smallish taste of success in my first year, I had ambitious plans to grow. My business plan was to grow our portfolio of work as big as possible, in as short amount of time as possible with the thought being that this would lead to bigger clients later. I always describe this as being my biggest mistake in business. Managing 35 people working across the globe (my business was still 100% remote at this point) meant I spent nearly all my time on skype calls and firefighting and not enough time on projects. The plan was ultimately successful in that we skipped a few years of progression, but the stress was not worth it.

5. Two years in and I couldn't afford heating.

While the business was growing and successful, the profit margins were razor thin. The house that I grew up in was next to an alley and so our heating bill was extremely high, and so despite having a thriving business I could not afford heating and rather than get in debt we simply bought thick blankets and tried to stay in one room at the time. Sadly this is a story which may resonate with a lot of people this winter.

6. Two of my biggest clients were complete luck.

Three years into my business and we started to work for bigger and bigger clients. But in two cases this was not by design or prospecting, it was purely luck. In both cases we stepped in last minute (and at a very low cost) to save a project or do some filming, and after we had done a good job, those clients rewarded us with more and more work. In both cases we had no idea who the end client was, but this eventually led to working on an international car commercial! A lot of entrepreneurs like to rewrite their history and act as though every little success was by design, but more often than not there's luck involved.

7. I owned a render farm and a server and a recording studio.

My business was all about small profit, high volume for the first 4 years. That meant I had to invest in infrastructure and so at 23 I owned a render farm in India. (The cloud didn't really exist at the time, or not to the scale that we needed) I owned a server just for our web development service and a recording studio for presenter-led videos. I mention this because today it would be insane for any business of my size to have that level of infrastructure. We really take for granted just how much SAAS and cloud storage has changed in the last 5 years and just how flexible options are for growing businesses.

8. I continued to eat canned food until year four.

While my mum eventually got better and I moved out, I continued to live frugally for years. My food budget was ￡15 a week and was predominately canned foods. This was mostly from a fear that somehow I would end up in the same situation I dug myself out of. The reality was that I was actually out-earning everyone in my immediate life, but because i was living frugally no one ever treated me differently on a personal level, professionally though...

9. People started rumours about me and my company.

While I had always played my cards pretty close to my chest, at a certain point it became obvious that I must have been doing something right. Friends and employees began to tell me about gossip that was circling around. There was one established local competitor in particular who seemed scared of us, which was funny because the bulk of our clients were abroad. I've seen a lot of business owners get distracted by this type of thing or get upset about it. My take is that people aren't jealous or petty, it's just that they don't understand why they are trying hard and not seeing success and therefore others must be cheating in some respect.

10. I was offered 2 feature films and 2 TV series.

We were always a B2B media business, but there are very few people who know how to produce 100 videos a year and so we were often invited to work on creative projects. This included two feature film animations. One being an animated adaptation of the graphic novel "100 days of Simon" and the other being the life story of Sai Baba, which would have been in Hindi. We were also offered a late night TV talk show (which we did do some development work on) and a comedy show for network TV. As you might imagine, all of these projects were very exciting and my team were really hoping to take these on...and so naturally, I turned them all down. People were not happy with me, morale took a big hit, but we had a particular niche and set up and I think all of these projects would have been expensive mistakes. Sometimes the most difficult thing as a business owner is knowing when to pivot and knowing when not to.

11. I got rid of anyone with a bad attitude.

For the majority of my life as a business owner, I had 9 people working for me. This is not a lot of people considering our workload and everyone had a part to play, and often multiple parts of multiple projects. I needed people who were adaptable, willing to learn and were not precious about what we were doing. Life in corporate marketing is not always sexy. Your clients are ventilation systems and franchises. I quickly realises that one bad apple could quickly spoil the others and so anyone who didn't fit the mold of what we were trying to do was quickly got rid of. I never enjoyed it, but i always knew it was the right thing to do.

So there you go. I guess from the above I would give the three pieces of advice:

1. There are a lot of entrepreneurs reading this who are quietly struggling, even where their business may be doing well. You are not alone and should not feel like a failure because you didn't become the next big thing over night.
2. There's a fine balance between trying new things, being open to new opportunities and safeguarding what you stand for and what you're good at.
3. There's a fair bit of luck involved in any success, big or small.