How to Deal With A 7 Year Itch
Samantha Martin — August 22, 2018 — August 22, 2018
This week I was reminded that I’ve now been self-employed for 7 years. That’s really quite a long time. But it also made me re-evaluate what I do and my income streams and how I can grow my business further and my own personal growth.
Recently I’ve been re-evaluating my income streams and the services that I offer. Since I went self-employed 7 years ago, the industry has changed a lot and more and more people are realising the benefits of working for themselves, working from home and more importantly, managing social media for other businesses. This has led to an influx of really not very good social media managers into the industry that are charging rock-bottom fees and kind of giving us all a bad name. And then you have all the experts and gurus who really aren’t helping matters.
Rather than throw the towel in until all the rubbish gets weeded out I decided that instead I would widen my income streams and change some of the services I offer.
And that’s the whole point of growing a business. Markets and trends change. And you have to change with them. Perhaps 4/5 years ago being a social media manager was the hot new cool job to have and there weren’t that many around. Now it seems like every man and his dog thinks they are one. And they most certainly think they are a social media expert after having a Twitter login for more than a day. It’s a bit like blogging. When I first started out 12 years ago there really weren’t that many of us. It was kind of quite easy to get people to read your stuff because it was such a new thing and there wasn’t the whole shilling of products like there is now. Instagram wasn’t a thing and there certainly weren’t any teeth whitening products looking for the #ad.
The point is that it is good to have a 7-year itch and re-evaluate. It could even be a 1 year or 2 years. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are constantly looking to evaluate, change, adapt and move with the markets. Because online trends can change so quickly now it is important to be able to adapt quickly. If you spend too much time being complacent about what you do and keep offering the same service, eventually time will catch up with you and you could find yourself out of business when demand stops.
Take a look at your business. Can you adapt what you do quickly to fit with an ever-changing market? Can you change yourself, learn new skills quickly to get ahead of your competitors? Spend some time examining what you do and what you can change, before you are forced to.
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