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.

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.