Starting at the beginning

Starting my business journey - the first steps in to the unknown.

I am writing this 2016 blog post, now, in 2019. This post is written mostly from recall, as will most of my posts, so apologies if some of the information, dates & times are a little… hazy.

… and here we go

I’ve never been particularly good at dates. I struggle with birthdays, milestones, anniversaries, etc. However, there are 2 dates that stay in mind.

29th January, 2016 & 1st February, 2016.

29th January, 2016, this was the last day of full-time employment with the last agency I worked at for 12 months.

1st February, 2016 was the first day of my self-employment and the start of the most wonderful, stressful and craziest time of my life. I always knew self-employment was never going to be easy and starting a business was never going to be a walk in the park.

In fact, the first complication happened before I even handed in my notice.

I had agreed to set up Interpolate co with a friend of mine, Ben C. He was a good friend and still is a good friend of mine. He taught me everything I know when it comes to frontend development. He had a good business head, he was likeable and ambitious. We were a good fit to start a digital agency, something we had spoke about for the few years we had known each other. We had both worked at Digital Agencies, big and small and knew that starting our own agency was what we wanted to do.

With that in mind we bought the domain www.interpolate.co and came up with a plan to a run our own agency, but most importantly, run it how we wanted.

I handed my notice in, spoke with my bosses (who were very accepting of the fact I was going to start my own agency) and Ben C did the same. Or, so I thought…

Ben was looking to marry his long-time girlfriend at the time of our “master plan” and decided that making the move to self-employment wasn’t the best thing for him to do at that time. So instead, he took a promotion, a pay-rise and we both went our separate ways.

So there I was, 2 weeks of my notice period left and my business partner had left before we even got going.