Slowly getting there

Starting a business is like learning to ride a bike.

The image returns to me time and time again. I'm on the bike without my support wheels, unwilling to take my feet off the ground and put them on the pedals. After a while I'd pluck up the courage to start pushing along the ground with my feet, occasionally lifting them up and onto the pedals for a few seconds before wobbling and putting them back on the ground to push again.

The constant loss of balance captures very well how it feels to be trying to get a business of the ground. The concerted effort represents the continual strain to market myself and obtain business.

I have been trying and wobbling for about 18 months. At times, when work got busy, I would neglect the self-marketing at my peril - wobble - and descend into stress and poverty for a fortnight.

A sense of security has been out of my grasp, and it's a pretty terrifying place to be. At least when I was learning to cycle, I could cry and get my Dad to take me home when the stress finally got too much.

But in the last few months, things have slowly started to change. And for the last two months, I have found the business becoming self-sustainable. Through a combination of referrals, regular clients, and web advertising, Copyqueen is generating its own business while I get on with writing. It means I am finally pedalling. I am moving!

I am still having terrible days, awful clients, and money troubles, but the business exists, and it keeps going, and for that I am hugely grateful - and incredibly proud.

So I guess I wanted to tell people to follow a dream, and not expect it to be easy for a second, and get plenty of headache pills, and prepare for sleepless night after sleepless night, no matter how tough you are. But do it, because - one day - it might just work out.