The start of something new....

This month, I find myself looking back at a 15 year career working for amazing brands and business as I leap forward into scaling my own.

In October 2013, Sarah Ellis and I sat down to chat about work, life and the bits in between. So much had happened since we were at university together. The path we had predicted had gone a bit squiggly and the shape of our careers felt very different to what we had expected. Through all this change though, we had benefited from meeting new people, taking on new roles and developing ourselves in ways we couldn’t have predicted or planned. We were happy in our squiggly career and wanted to help other people to learn the tools and techniques that had helped us to grow and develop at work. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if”, we said to each other, “people loved their jobs”?

We spend so much time at work and it infiltrates our home life more than ever, a job that makes us happy and fulfilled has positive ripples in everything we do. And so, Amazing If was born to help everyone develop the skills to succeed in a squiggly career, so that as many people as possible could be in control of their career and connect with the work they do.

We didn’t have a scale plan. We didn’t really have a business plan. We just had a desire to help people and learnt that by working together, we could achieve more than we could apart.

A launch event of evening courses in 2014, lead to an ongoing programme in a now defunct members club in London. We rushed there after work every fortnight to set-up our room and get everything ready for our attendees.

The feedback was great and slowly, people started recommending us to their friends and their employers. Suddenly, we were working with enlightened leaders at Direct Line, Cook and Diageo who recognised that investing in their employee’s career development, meant they had happier, more engaged people at work. We were taking holiday and unpaid leave to work with all these different businesses and our employers (Sainsbury’s and Virgin at the time), understood that this helped us to be better, more inspired and more inspiring leaders for them.

Fast forward a few years, and that growth continued. Now, I’m Marketing Director at Microsoft and Sarah is Managing Director at Gravity Road. There are 3 children that have happily found their way into our world, a podcast with 50,000 listeners and a book deal with Penguin and more and more amazing clients who want to talk to us. The opportunity to scale our impact and help more people to develop career skills was knocking loudly and the time felt right to open the door.

So, over the next 12 months, we’re putting the foundations in place to scale Amazing If and I’m leaving that 15 year career in big brands to do it. A business that started off as a side project, is now my full time role. It wasn’t planned but it feels great.

I want to share this journey of moving from what has been a relatively safe career to something far more uncertain, of taking a side project and making it scale and of working for big brands to building your own. Whether you’re thinking about a side project alongside your job or you’re interested in starting your own full time thing, I’ll show up here every month to share what I’m learning, how we’re scaling and hopefully be a source of ideas and support for you.

I’m far from an expert, but I believe that in learning together we can be better together. Follow, share and tag others who may benefit from the journey too.

Until next month,

Helen