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.
Consider more collaborative projects with other consultants: With my first consulting contracts, I worked with teams of other collaborators, which helped build my confidence to strike out on my own. And I realized that I want to do more of those projects, not only to work more with like-minded folks, but also to help balance my capacity to do certain projects if it’s beyond my scale.
Play bigger: The project I’ll be working on in Year Four is part of my overall goal of playing bigger. I’ve alluded to what I wanted to do in the past, but never really could pin down how I wanted the format to be until I was approached recently by someone who offered an opportunity that I’m interested in taking. Since I have a better idea of what I want to do and its format, I’m ready to move forward. Plus, this project (along with other things I have in the works) will help me better communicate my stance and to impact as many people as possible. The project itself will take some time, but I’m happy to get started.
It’s amazing how things changed from when I first shared my goals in 2011 to when I reviewed those goals five years later. I feel like I’m in a good space with my business now.
On to Year Four!
Raise Your Voice: In what ways do you want to play bigger? Share below in the comments section.
