Since getting home to Wellington in early-November, I have had a lot of coffee with a lot of amazing people. I am incredibly humbled by the way in which everyone has responded to the news that I’ve moved into the world of self-employment.
My LinkedIn post which announced my intentions to ‘go out on my own’ was incredibly vague – mainly because when I wrote that post I was still working out how I could best work toward my goal of growing social enterprise in New Zealand. When I asked myself how I could add the most value to the social enterprises I’m wanting to work with, I realised it was a pretty difficult question to answer. Luckily, I have met a lot of wise people in the last few years who have been more than happy to help me answer this question (side note: asking for help is working so far). So, while I’m definitely still working out how I can be the best version of myself and add the most value to the businesses delivering the Good round here – I do have a much better idea of how things are going to look.
At this stage, my consulting business has a name, Seedling Consulting Limited, a LinkedIn page (with one follower – me!), a very basic Google My Business website (I’m patiently waiting for address verification so that I can actually start editing things properly (edit 31/01/20: I’ve now got a proper website!), and a broad scope of work:
- Helping people establish new social enterprises, and
- Helping people transition their existing enterprise into social enterprise, and
- Helping socially-focussed businesses with project work.
I’m calling these the three pillars of Seedling Consulting. At this stage, I’m looking at building out the 3rd pillar while I work on how I can succeed with the first two pillars which would ultimately help me achieve my goal of growing NZ’s social enterprise sector.
It would be fair to say it’s early days.. but, of course, I have to start somewhere.
Now, the intention of this blog is definitely not to be a sales pitch but, that being said, if you’ve read those last few paragraphs and thought that you could use an extra pair of hands or help on a project – let me know and we can chat in the New Year.
Lastly, to anyone reading this, Happy Holidays – have a safe and restful break and I hope you all welcome in the next decade with gusto!
I’ll be returning with my next blog post on Friday 3rd January, 2020! See you all next year.