Searching for Serenity has undergone some huge shifts in 2021.
From expanding my corporate work and delivering more than 25 corporate sessions to over 850 delegates this year, to delivering more 1:1 hours than I did in the first 3 years of my business combined, it has been a steep learning curve this year.
There have been so many changes, many of which will affect how I run the business moving forward, that I thought it was worth laying them out here. Partly for transparency, partly for morbid curiosity, partly to explain the rationale behind my costs revisions and adaptations to working for 2022.
A big part of it though? I have been running so fast and so far that it’s just really lovely to see those changes all in one place!
This year has really seen me go down the rabbit hole of professionalisation, taking big steps up and forward in my work, development and business. It has meant so many changes that my life is, in many ways, quite unrecognisable from even a year ago.
So, what has changed? Let’s break it down.
Employment
At the beginning of 2021 I was still employed in part time work alongside my business. Some of you know that, when I first started the business in 2016, I was working full time as a solicitor within a top 50 firm. I developed Searching for Serenity in evenings, weekends and lunchtimes, before leaving law for an indefinite career break just after Easter 2017. I received no external investment and built the business from scratch, reinvesting within the business every time I took on a new client, but in the early days this meant both trying to bootstrap the business and pay my bills, and something had to give. I took a part time job in an office in 2018 and initially worked 3 days a week. By January 2021 this had already reduced to 2 days each week and I stepped further back in March to just a single day, before leaving part time employment in May of this year.
Letting go of the safety net of a salary to be fully reliant upon self-employment has been challenging but I am so grateful to the team I worked for for nearly 3 years, working with me and cheerleading both me and my business, to build to this point.
Assistance
Organisation isn’t my strongest point and between working 3 days a week for an employer, working with clients, developing new training workshops and trying to learn, it’s fair to say that the administration and clarity of the business wasn’t the best. I’ve been so busy trying to create forward momentum that it’s often left a trail of mess in my wake. That’s where Emily comes in. She is the brilliant owner of EC Support (click here for all her details) and organisation is her superpower. Emily is currently employed 3 hours per week to help me with day to day management, emails, systems, clarity as well as helping me catch up on years of past admin. Members of The Resilience Academy are finally getting a truly accessible training hub for the 200ish hours of training we have covered over the past 4 years. My clients get their monthly update emails at gasp the beginning of each month, and I have access to more information and statistics than I ever have done before.
The more administration and behind the scenes work I can free up and give to Emily the more time I have available to do client work, which is a win-win in my book. Plus it takes Emily mere minutes to accomplish what would normally take me hours. Which is brilliant. And a touch terrifying.
As we get more up to date she will be helping me to create a whole new vault of support options and more accessible training materials
Emily is available for ad hoc hours of support so if you need an administrative sidekick, don’t hesitate to reach out to her. If she can handle me, she can handle anything!
Education
In May 2021 I went back to university for the first time in 15 years, to study the Institute of Leadership and Management Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring. I’ve returned to my old university, University of the West of England Bristol, where I studied both my undergraduate law degree and postgraduate degree to be called to the Bar of England and Wales.
The Level 7 is considered a postgraduate or masters level course and will take around 18 months to complete. It requires a full study day each month as well as 5-10 hours per week of additional study, reflective learning and record keeping. There is also a practical element, conducting around 20 hours of coaching with executive or senior level coachees, coaching supervision and observation and contribution points.
I had held off completing a professional course, initially because I wanted to be sure which direction I was going in before I spent a significant amount of time and money on training, and later because I wanted to be sure it was the right course and that I could balance everything whilst working and running two businessses.
It isn’t the easiest and I’ve just this week had confirmation that I need to resubmit some of my coursework; writing critical evaluation pieces for the first time pretty much ever in my career has been a real learning curve, but it has thrown me back to my academic roots and advisory past. I absolutely adore academic research, writing papers and presenting topics for discussion and evaluation so I think it’s fair to say you will see a lot more of this from me in the future!
The course itself cost several thousand pounds and the only way I’ve managed to balance study, work and running a business is with Emily’s support. I have learned so much already and am really diving into coaching models (Gestalt is something I never thought I would understand or enjoy but actually comes quite naturally to me!), developing my toolkit rapidly, and I can already see it paying dividends with my clients. Balancing study time, costs and client availability is a challenge, particularly as it’s around one week each month spent with my head in learning, but one I foresee managing for quite a long time to come…
Professional Membership and Professional Indemnity Insurance
I am now officially a member of the Association for Coaching and as such, agree to adhere to their Global Code of Ethics, which you can access here
By becoming a member of the Association, I have access to a community of coaches and significant resources that were not available to me previously. I am also working my way through the accreditation ladder, with the aim to be an accredited Foundation Executive Coach by Easter 2022 and to an accredited Master Executive Coach before 2025. This requires a significant number of hours of 1:1 coaching together with assessed exercises, reflective practice and more.
The benefit for clients is that I am part of an internationally recognised organisation, subscribing to their ethical code, with access to a complaints process and the relevant compliance procedures. For example, as part of my membership it is a requirement to have Professional Indemnity Insurance. My PII certificate is available upon request and I am covered for up to £1million.
Over the past few years I have seen the Wild West of coaching and mentoring and my move towards education and accreditation is a reflection of how I see myself, as a professional who for many years worked within a rigorously accredited and evaluated industry, and I want to offer the same level of surety and confidence to my clients.
Membership costs £140 per year with further costs associated with each accreditation level. My professional indemnity insurance costs a little under £15 each month for current and retrospective cover. I am fully insurance all the way to the beginning of the business in 2016.
Coaching Supervision and Co-Coaching
Both coaching supervision and co-coaching form part of my continuing professional development. In order to reach Foundation Executive Coach status I must demonstrate 3 months of coaching supervision I must demonstrate 3 months of supervision at a ratio of 1:15 - one hour of supervision for every 15 hours of client work, which works out to an hour every fortnight or so right now!
Coaching supervision is provided by senior and accredited coaches who charge anything from £75 per hour to several hundred pounds per hour. I am currently also engaged in group coaching supervision at a cost of £125 per session.
These sessions help develop my technical abilities as a coach and mentor, help me to access information, resources, tools and perspectives I either wasn’t previously aware of or hadn’t considered. It is a safe, confidential space to discuss issues and to ensure I have the opportunity to reflect, develop and improve my work. It also offers me support as an individual; this whole running a business as a sole trader thing can be really quite isolating, so having a group of people around me who want to see me improve and grow? It’s priceless.
Co-coaching involves peer coaching and training, typically a discussion or training session followed by coaching triads in which I am coachee, coach and observer at various points. Again this is about perspective, reflection, iterative growth and being consistently challenged.
Co-coaching and peer coaching often has a nominal cost of £10-£20 per session although webinars and training sessions can run to far more. Coaching supervision currently costs me around £200 per month and the cost will increase as I undertake more work!
Branding, website, systems and processes
I didn’t just run my business on a bootstrap when I first started, I was the DIY queen! Everything you see on this website has, to date, been created by me. My branding and style was a bit messy and chaotic and I definitely haven’t capitalised on the information, systems and processes that I have at my disposal.
You’ve already seen the brilliant photography from Gemma Regalado-Hawkey of Gemma Shoots People (click here for all her details) but what you may not have known is that she is a branding guru (she’s going to smack me for calling her that!) and a former website developer and designer herself. As such, she is helping me to update and refine my branding and imagery (you’ve already seen hints of that over the past few months), update the website and improve the user experience, as well as consolidating lots of my outgoing work, such as branding and design on White Papers ,coaching resource tools and more.
Alongside this I have upgraded the video system from YouTube to Vimeo - this provides a more secure and smooth service without the risk of adverts being run in the middle of my training replays! I have subscribed to an audio transcription AI service to allow me to get transcription of every video and training I have delivered (which has to be somewhere in the region of 1,000 hours at this point I swear) to help improve accessibility and flexibility for you as clients.
I have upgraded and refined my member’s hub and this will get a further overhaul in the new year with new resources and support plans for you, as well as bundles and workshops for you to access as home learning.
Sustainability, accessibility and flexibility are key for me and I’m acutely aware that, in my hurry to grow my business, I haven’t always kept these at the forefront. However we all learn differently, I’m currently investigating my own issues with this, as well as different schedules, availability and capacity. I am committed to making Searching for Serenity as easy an option as possible, no matter who you are or how you learn. Burnout is difficult enough without additional barriers to entry.
There are various systems and processes I haven’t even mentioned here because this blog already feels a bit like emptying your messy handbag onto the floor to search for your keys, but for example, Vimeo cost me several hundred pounds for the year, Dropbox to store all my documents costs nearly £100 a month, Otter.ai transcription costs £10 per month and so on
So where does that leave us?
I believe that all of the changes, augmentations, training, implementation and growth that I’ve shared above have not only been necessary, but in many cases overdue, in need of catch up time and intrinsic to the nature of where I want Searching for Serenity to be.
I want your experience as a client to be smooth and free from stress, with resources at your fingertips and access to up to date information as you need it. I want to be able to demonstrate my competency and, dare I say it, even my excellence, in a way that is recognisable, reassuring and brilliant. I want to be transparent, accessible and open to constructive criticism and growth during this critical period.
And yes, I plan for my name and the Searching for Serenity brand to be synonymous with growth, challenge, commitment to wellbeing and excellence in professional settings.
I want everyone to be proud of working with me or knowing me, whether you share your work with me or keep it private.
But coming down from the aspirational to the pragmatic for a moment, these developments have come at a significant investment of time and money. My expenses have increased by somewhere in the region of 700% in the past 9 months and I have gone from running the business on a shoestring to it generating it’s own minimum wage salary in costs each year.
Moving ahead, I have plans to pursue accreditation at an accelerated pace and there are further plans to return to university for a 4 years degree for something that will augment my tools, techniques and entire offering to a whole new level. I also have bills to pay and, for the avoidance of doubt, like to eat. I might even like to take my first foreign holiday in more than 7 years in 2022. I know. Don’t start. It’s a thing.
This means that I have sat down and critically assessed my costs, pricing and offerings and can announce that prices will be rising across the board (with a couple of notable exceptions) for 2022, by around 20%. It sounds like a huge leap but in most places these are a difference of less than a hundred pounds, and in fact for many clients the difference will only be around £5. For the sake of transparency, clarity and fairness, the full pricing revision guide is below and all changes will take effect from 1st January 2022.
I am resetting the ‘only one per year’ rule on Let’s Talk calls effective today, so if you have had a Let’s Talk call in 2021 and would like to book another one before the price rises, even if you end up taking the call in 2022, you can click here. My diary is now open and updated through to March 2022 (who am I? I told you Emily had me more organised!) .
If you have been thinking about working with me 1:1 then now might be the time and I’m happy for you to lock in those sessions even if you don’t have much capacity before the new year. You’ll have access to unlimited support on WhatsApp and can spread the cost over 4, 6, 9 or 12 months at no extra cost. That isn’t me doing you a big favour by the way, I can literally only offer a discount if you pay in full up front because I’m not registered with the Financial Conduct Authority to provide a credit agreement, but I appreciate it can be used as a leverage point. Also, anyone who doesn’t make that plain, please report them because it’s a serious offence.
You can find out more about working with me 1:1 here or just ping me an email at hello@searchingforserenity.co.uk. I’d definitely recommend booking a Let’s Talk call first if we haven’t spoken before; if nothing else, you get to check out me and my work at a very reduced cost and get an extra jump start session! And yes I hate the work with me sales page and it’s top of my list to update once Gemma has implemented the client journey stuff… so many spinning plates!
Finally, if you have wanted to book me for a corporate session for your team or interest group, get it signed off and under contract with me before 1st January and you’ll lock in the 2021 price. Pay in full for your event before Christmas and I’ll even give you a 10% discount as a thank you. Check out more of my corporate work here or again ping me and email at hello@searchingforserenity.co.uk
Finally, I hope that you have found this blog interesting and informative. I find it so rare that people are open and transparent; I entered the industry with countdown timers, vague promises and false urgency selling tactics. It’s something I’m still trying to detox from my work at times, so sharing the full (albeit edited for length and snooze factor) truth and why those prices are considered, developed and rising to cover costs is the antidote for me.
Plus, if you’re as nosy as me, you’ll just love knowing the details, even if they’re not all that glamorous or sexy. What can I say. That’s running a business for you!
