Lessons in freelance - 12 months on.

Earlier today, Squarespace (very helpfully) reminded me that my domain, my website, and my Google workspace subscriptions were all about to auto-renew. Which means that it’s been exactly 1 year since I decided to start up freelance marketing consultancy on the side of my salaried part-time job.

It seems fitting, then to have the first piece of blog content be about looking back over the last 12 months and working out where I want to go next.

The last 12 months have been a learning curve, though not a particularly steep one. I have been nurturing one client since September 2024, and I think that’s been a perfect place to start. I’ve come to realise that I’m not in a rush to go full time freelance, but that I want to make sure I’m able to grow healthily and confidently. I want to do my future clients proud.

In April last year, if you’d ask me how many clients I wanted in 12 months’ time, I probably would have said 2 to 3. If I’m being honest with myself, I could have had more if I’d spent more time reaching out. But instead of trying to win as much work as I could, I built up my knowledge of how to manage clients as a freelancer, how to overcome technical difficulties, and how to juggle multiple responsibilities both in salaried work and in freelance.

Working a small number of hours per month for one wonderful client has been fun - it’s reinforced my confidence in my skills and the value I can bring as a freelancer. It’s allowed me to learn the basics of setting up my own consultancy, and how to become a partner in an organisation’s success rather than simply an employee.

But things have to change. They have to evolve. I recently sent someone my website (the one I built last year and haven’t touched since) and they very kindly fed back to me that it was sparse, lacking in evidence of my skills, and frankly not good enough to help them decide to take me any further forward with future work. They absolutely weren’t wrong and it was something of a wake-up call to me - if I am so good at marketing, perhaps I should invest some time in marketing myself!

So I’ve spent most of this afternoon working on this portfolio site, bringing it up to scratch and populating it with some of my latest achievements. The content and the layout seemed to come so much more easily than it did a year ago - I feel so much more at ease articulating what I can do and how I can help potential clients to grow.

12 months of creative thinking, problem solving, a few expired QR codes, and a lot of coffee later, and I know what my offering actually is now. The first version of this website was a menu of skills - this one is a demonstration of those skills. And I hope that by having some original content thrown in there for good measure (read: me writing blog posts about the latest marketing trends or things I’ve seen that have interested me), potential future clients will get a much better sense of who I am. I hope they like it.

And so as I check my bank balance and gather my receipts ready for the auto-renew payments to be taken, I am particularly excited to see what the next chapter brings. I still have plenty of business cards to hand out, and plenty of social content to film and print ads to export and communication plans to write and collaborations to construct. And, importantly for me, I feel like this has been an excellent year for me to experiment, learn, and grow.

I almost didn’t let my website auto-renew - but I think that, at least for now, ellieyoung.co.uk is here to stay.

Here’s to the next 12 months - and if you’re interested in working together, send me an email and let’s see what we can do together.