1 Jun, 2022

Ask Nicole: Pros & Cons of Naming Your Business After Yourself

By |2022-06-01T10:39:36-04:00June 1st, 2022|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Today marks 6 years since leaving my employer to run my business full time.

While I no longer talk about the ins and outs of running a business anymore, today is an exception.

Six years ago, I was more excited, more hopeful, less secure in whether this will work out, and restless.  

Today, I’m more confident, more stable, pleased with how things have worked out, and still restless. 

The restlessness comes in large part due to thinking about the future, what comes next, and how I want my business to live beyond me.

One of the most important tasks of starting a business is coming up with your business name. Since I wanted to focus more on what services I wanted to offer, I kept it simple: Nicole Clark Consulting.

Six years later, I’m considering changing my business name.

Much like a newborn baby, coming up with a name that resonates and speaks to your business’ mission can be daunting.

But what’s in a name? Here are my pros and cons for naming a business after yourself:

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1 Jun, 2021

Five Years of Full Time Consulting: My Biggest Lesson Learned

By |2021-08-19T21:07:34-04:00June 1st, 2021|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Five years down…

On June 1st, 2016, I woke up, rolled over, opened my laptop, and began working. This was my first day as a full-time consultant, after nearly 3 years of juggling full-time employment with building a consulting business. Today is my five year anniversary.

What started as a Tumblr blog developed in a moment of boredom in 2011 to share my thoughts on Reproductive Justice, feminism, and women and girls of color led to me filing as a Limited Liability Company business in August 2013, with my eventual departure from my employer on May 31, 2016.

I’ve worked with some pretty amazing client organizations and partners along the way. I’m still amazed that I can say, “I worked with this organization?

In 2017, I shared 10 lessons learned during my first year of full time consulting, and not much has changed with these lessons learned five years later.

The days where I grew in frustration knowing that I had a fragmented life (doing something I no longer cared for and building my business) seem like a distant memory. I still look back on those days with gratitude because that period was one of the hardest yet rewarding of my life. Starting and running a business became less about being my own boss and more about having an idea and giving myself permission to see it through.

I will be honest and say that I’m not as inspired by what I do.

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15 Jan, 2020

Ask Nicole: Why Did You Move from New York City to Washington, DC?

By |2021-08-19T20:46:24-04:00January 15th, 2020|Categories: Miscellaneous|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

After 11 years in New York City, I moved to Washington, DC, on December 30, 2019.

I’ve only been here for about 2 weeks, but in that short time, I’ve been asked a variation of the question above.

This has been a decision I debated for over a year, and understanding the privilege I have of being self-employed with no dependents and having the ability to pick up and go, it was a decision I didn’t take likely but also a decision that I wanted to make unapologetically.

For the past 2-3 years, I traveled between my home away from home (New York City) and my actual home (Atlanta), and in the process, I realized that something was missing in both locations.

I relocated from Atlanta to New York City in August 2008 for graduate school, and while the plan was to only be there to complete my degree, I decided to stay because I felt that there was something I needed to prove to not only myself to everyone else. I wanted to prove that I could make it away from home, and while there were plenty of hiccups along the way, I succeeded in that.

I went from seeing New York City as the only place I could ever see myself to realizing that, as exciting as the city is, I needed to be in a place that has a slower pace. But when I would go home, I didn’t feel that I belong there any more than I did in New York.

I also noticed my quality of life started to take a dive. For many, the cost of living, housing, job opportunities, schools, and more play a factor in measuring a city’s quality of life, but for me, I wanted mentally present anymore in both New York and Atlanta.

So, why Washington, DC? Ultimately, I chose DC because it represented to me something I no longer had in New York and I couldn’t find in Atlanta.

I wanted a new beginning.

And like Goldilocks, when New York started to become too much and Atlanta felt not enough, being in DC feels just right.

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29 May, 2019

Play Bigger: What I’m Learning After Three Years of Full Time Consulting

By |2021-08-19T20:38:20-04:00May 29th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

On to Year Four!

This Friday will mark 3 years since I left my day to run Nicole Clark Consulting full time on June 1st, 2016.

Time flies, and it’s true what they say about a running a business: It really is like caring for a baby.

In my first year, I hit the ground running. Everything was new and exciting, like a baby taking in all of the new sights and sounds. I was trying to make up for all the time I’d spent building up my business while working full time.

When I entered Year Two, my business started experiencing the Terrible Twos. It literally felt like my business was running me, and not the other way around. All of the business systems I had in place that helped me during my first year were no longer working. I also compared myself to others who have been at this for a while, and I started to doubt myself a lot.

In Year Three, I started to hit my stride and realized that it’s like a marathon, not a sprint. I didn’t have to scale up as quickly as I thought and I started to give myself more grace. I became more mindful about my capacity to take on certain types of projects, and I also gained a greater focus on capacity building in addition to working with clients to implement their projects.

I also made these observations in Year Three:

  • Evaluation has been the focal point of my business, but I no longer want it to be the main attraction
  • I want to do help audiences apply Reproductive Justice thinking on a broader scale and in a variety of settings
  • While working one on one with clients has been great, I want to do more one-to-many work
  • I’m craving more collaboration and collaborative projects with other consultants
  • I did a lot of behind the scenes work in Year Three and it’s time to play bigger

So what’s on deck for Year Four? A few things:

Build up my non-evaluation services: As with many businesses, you cultivate what’s been working well. I did that with evaluation, to the detriment of my other services. So, I quietly took on smaller projects related to research and program/curriculum design and added some program sustainability components to my evaluation projects. I also scrapped the strategic planning services after taking on a few of these projects and realizing that it didn’t interest me all that much to continue this service. I’m also going to be more mindful of the types of evaluation projects I take on, with a focus being on capacity building and incorporating evaluative thinking within organizations.

Go back to basics: The main reason why people started to follow my work is because of my blogging about reproductive justice and intersectional analysis. While I’ve embedded RJ into the content I’ve created in Year Three, what I want now is to make more explicit RJ-related content by way of my blogs, future webinars, and trainings. This was spurred by the recent abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia and other states, along with more spotlight on improving maternal and infant health outcomes in communities of color. There’s a major difference between learning about RJ and actually incorporating it in our personal and professional lives, and I want to help people bridge the gap.

Finding more ways to engage people on a broader scale: Doing one-on-one client work is great, but I have a desire to do more trainings, webinars, and workshops with a broader audience. If I’m wanting to scale up, this would be a great way to do it. I also have a project that I’ve placed on the back burner for too long, and Year Four is when I’ll finally buckle down and get it started, so stay tuned for that.

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10 May, 2019

Tomorrow’s Another Day

By |2021-08-19T20:33:33-04:00May 10th, 2019|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , |0 Comments

During the summer of 2010, I was in the throes of my first job after graduating from my graduate program.

I was running out of money and couldn’t afford my apartment any longer due to my roommate moving out. I ended up moving out and placing my belongings in storage.

When you’re unemployed, running out of money, trying to find a job in a profession that you’ve only studied and didn’t have real experience in, and living in a stressful place like New York City, you’re tired, to say the least.

The best part about that time is having friends who opened their homes to me and invited me over to eat. On this summer day, the friend I was staying with invited me to join her and some of our grad school classmates for a day at the beach.

A beach in New York? Yes. Though I can’t remember which beach we tried to go to. “Tried” is the operative word, as we tried getting there by car and ended up getting stuck in traffic for hours before turning back around.

As my friend and I were getting ready to leave, I remember how excited I was. I needed a break from applying to positions where I never got a response back and getting “thanks, but no thanks” emails from recruiters.

I want to feel normal, even if it is for a day, I thought.

When you don’t have a permanent home to feel safe in, to cook for yourself in, to have your belongings surrounding you, or to have your mail delivered to, it’s pretty difficult to care about anything else. I could have easily asked my family to book a flight for me so that I could go home to Atlanta, but I was too stubborn for that. I have a Masters degree now, I thought, and I need to find a way to make this work.

Flash forward to December of that year. After a summer of struggle, I managed to land a job as a clinical case manager and had been on the job since August. I also moved into my first apartment without roommates at the start of December. Toward the middle of the month, my agency held its annual holiday party for clients.

During the party, I was standing with a few of my coworkers as we watched our clients eat and enjoy themselves and their families. I spotted several of my clients, many of whom tend to be in crisis mode when I would have regular appointments with them.

But on this day, they were fine. In fact, I met with one of my clients the next day. When I asked her if she enjoyed the holiday party, she said:

“I loved it! I love coming to the holiday party every year because when I’m there, I feel normal. Even if it’s just for a day.”

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