2018 Year Review: The Crazy First Full Year In Business

2018 was a big year for Simple & Season by anyone’s standards. I made the equivalent of my old salary…and then doubled it. I won the Blogosphere Business Influencer of the Year award. I started two podcasts. I was on Hashtag Authentic, a dream from the beginning of the business. I deepened important relationships with people I’ve met online to build a great support system. And by the end of the year, I was fully booked for 121 client work for the next five months.So definitely a lot of on paper success for the business this year. I achieved goals I didn’t know I had and am ending this year in a position that feels so much more stable than last year.

And yet.

Girl in an orange jumper and bobble hat standing in front of a log pile

And yet, as this remarkable year draws to a close, something feels off – out of alignment. While the business side of me has flourished, the human side has retracted, drawn in and curled up into a speck of self somewhere inside the layers of ‘business, business, business’. I have lived and breathed business this year, which has seen me achieve things I’m proud of, but here at the end of the year I wonder whether the cost was worth it. I'm not sure what it's all been for.Although my word of the year was ‘Steer’, I realise that although I was being pro-active and steering this ship, I was steering it with the tide rather than charting my own course. I followed the likes, popularity and money thinking that was the right direction but found myself miles off course from the business and life that I really wanted, with no idea how to get back. So for all the successes, if I think about the last year it feels crowded and muddled, rather than, well, happy.As you can tell, a lot of negativity comes up when I think of 2018 at the moment! I want to be honest in this review of the year, to give you an insight behind the curtain about what was really going on when you saw all that stuff on Instagram. But it won’t all be doom and gloom, I promise!

January, February, March

To be honest with you, I can’t remember a whole lot about the first quarter of the year! It feels like a really, really long time ago. Looking through my Instagram I can see that we went to Scotland for a weekend away (not knowing at the time it would be our last holiday until the autumn), and that I also went to my first brand event at The Florist in Bristol, something I was really proud of.

But generally Q1 was a quietly productive time for me. I’d had a spurt of interest at the beginning of the year and was enjoying my coaching with a handful of clients – although looking back at my calendar I was definitely busier with client work than it feels in retrospect. It was still all so new at the beginning of the year; I’d only really got my first clients in October 2017 so I was glad to have people interested and believing in me. That was intoxicating. That, and the feeling that I was making it work – I was really doing it.

A fond memory I have of this time is writing Campfire. I wrote it over the course of several weeks in Q1, having thought deeply about it for a long time. I enjoyed the process of having a big writing project to chip away at, drinking tea and listening to Music For Concentration. Perhaps this sticks in my mind as I am not usually one who enjoys the process of things – I like doing the thinking and planning but would prefer to skip the doing and just get to the result. Having this project that I was passionate about, and that was unpressured, was something I really enjoyed this year.

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April, May, June

The second quarter of the year is more in focus as it featured a lot of travelling for my Out Of The Woods workshops. I was in Bristol at Oak Tree Barn at the beginning of April, London at the end, and in the Peak District at The Music Mill on early May Bank Holiday. I really enjoyed the workshops. I found it so interesting meeting different people with different businesses and incredibly rewarding to teach in an in-person setting. The workshops were a massive confidence boost to me in my abilities, but also incredibly stressful to organise and ensure I was actually making money from them (more on this in this blog post). Looking back, this period feels like a highlight of the year, which is strange because I remember how lonely I felt those weekends in Airbnbs, driving around with only podcasts for company. I think that I look back on that period and like that I had a lot of variety in my work, rather than the individual moments themselves.

Q2 is also when Grow With Soul came into being. Although it didn’t go live until July, through Q2 I was planning everything and recorded the first ten episodes (meaning that some were released about three months after they were first recorded – a good lesson not to do that again!). The popularity of the podcast has been one of the biggest surprises to me this year. Within three months it had overtaken my blog as the most visited page on my site, was getting 12,000+ monthly listens and more weekly shares than anything else I’ve ever done. Your reaction to Grow With Soul, how you talk about how it helps you and how connected you are to it makes all the time and money I spend on it 100% worthwhile, so thank you so much for supporting it.

June, for me, was a turning point – it was when I looked up from the steering wheel and for the first time wondered whether the ship was going in the right direction. Part of this was because I had two weeks staying with my parents – this meant I couldn’t keep distracting myself with work and busy-ness. But it was also, mostly, to do with Jess and mine’s retreat at Wild Meadow. While there wasn’t a big ‘this is going in the wrong direction’ epiphany this weekend, it got me into thinking bigger and broader and, crucially, examining myself.

It got me thinking about what drives me, what I want out of the business, and got me falling back in love with creativity. This weekend planted a seed in my head that quickly outgrew it’s skull container – the stems and brambles thickened and tangled around each other, eventually blocking out the light so that I could no longer see through them. Only now I am I picking up the secateurs to make sense of the tangle, and replant them outside of my own head where they can bloom.

It was a truly positive weekend though, in many ways. In understanding myself more, in indulging in photography, in granting myself grace. But mostly in my friendship with Jess. Following our weekend we began having long regular Skype dates to discuss our work, our minds, our souls – and then we turned those conversations into a podcast. My friendship with Jess is one of the things I’m most grateful for in 2018.

July, August, September

Q3 was difficult. I stuggled a lot with that weed inside my head; knowing it was in there getting out of control but not knowing what on earth to do about it. I was trying to think my way out of it but that just tightened the knots of uncertainty. I knew I wasn’t being what I wanted to be, but I also didn’t know what I wanted to be actually was. Something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know where to start making it better.

It was also a period in which I had intended to take some time off, but ended up booking more 121 clients than I expected and just didn’t. I remember getting to September and feeling like I hadn’t had any rest, and now it was too late because I was launching again (more on this later). I think during Q3 I was quite exhausted from 6 months of hammering the business, and that led me into a dark place.

For the first time this year, I doubted myself a lot. I had built a lot of confidence in my abilities as a teacher through my coaching, course and workshops earlier in the year, but now I was looking outside my comfort zone. The uncertainty of what I wanted to be made me doubt my thoughts and feelings and turned my self-talk negative. I took a course on writing for press, which was objectively excellent and I learned a lot, but it sent me spiralling into a really negative place. I doubted my ability as a writer, I doubted I could have good ideas, I doubted that I as just Kayte Ferris, rather than Simple & Season, had anything to offer. I struggled hugely to accept my status as a beginner, and felt as confused, unlikeable and browbeaten as I did aged 14.

Ruined slate cottages on a misty hillside

During this period I felt overwhelmed by people. I stopped replying to comments and messages, something that I have an awful lot of guilt around. I think I felt exposed, so visible and yet so raw and unsure in my feelings that my coping mechanism was to withdraw. I’ve always found it easier to broadcast, to speak to many, than to talk one on one. I think because with broadcasting you control the message and there’s no opportunity to be tripped up by an individual question, to be found out. So while I could be on Stories on Lives quite happily managing my image, I found individual conversations online quite terrifying. I hope, in 2019, to redress that balance.

And while dealing with all of that, I decided to launch two new courses and a new group coaching programme all at the same time. Spoiler: this was not a good idea. I’d been back and forth about whether to launch them altogether or have separate launches, and there was never a question of doing just one rather than three. I really wanted to do all three! But this was confusing for people (obviously it was!), particularly in September when everybody online was launching courses. I wrote about this time more in Inside A Failure, but despite the doubt and darkness it triggered for me, I’m grateful for the lessons I learned from that launch.

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October, November, December

At that brings round to the end of the year. The first half was busy: I was running Campfire in October, writing and running Smoke Signals in November, as well as running Make It Real AND a fully booked roster of 121 clients. While in Q3 I’d been dealing philosophically with that weed of doubt, in October and November it became a practical necessity. In a year of adding more and more to my work load, I reached my breaking point. That was too much. I’d been saying ‘yes’ to coaching clients and running courses because people asked for them, to the detriment not only of myself, but the quality of my work. Ironically, ‘Steer’ had been chosen in 2017 to help me feel in control of the business; I ended November feeling more in chaos than ever.

Perfect timing, then, for another break with Jess, this time to take photos for our podcast and to see Dolly Alderton on her book tour. I was open this weekend, ready to accept inspiration that would trigger a change. For months I’d been resistant to really changing the business, perhaps out of fear, out of worrying I was being rash, but this weekend I was committed to getting practical.

I’ve written about how a comment from Dolly sparked a change in my business identity, but so did a quote Jess read to me. The quote itself is inconsequential, what is important is that she referred to ‘the work’. Because with those two words I suddenly realised, “I’ve been doing the wrong work”. ‘The work’, until now, has been teaching and coaching; when I think of ‘the work’ I want to do, it’s writing, sharing ideas more broadly, teaching on a larger scale.

So here in December I feel like I’m at a 6/10 on the clarity scale – a substantial increase from the summer. I have a sort of direction; I can see the outline, I just need to fill it with detail and colour. But I’m giving myself time – things aren’t going to change over night on December 31st. Through January, while working with clients and teaching my courses, I’m going to read a bit more, write a bit more, explore a bit more. This is important, this is meaningful, so it deserves time and space to grow. Over the next few months I’ll be carefully replanting my weed so in the Spring it can bloom into a rose.