If you’d like to listen to the podcast click here, below is a transcript of the interview.
For this month’s long interview, unLTD gathered four dynamic business leaders who have chosen unique growth strategies that defy traditional expectations. Hosted by James Marriott (Freelance Podcast Consultant), this roundtable discussion brought together Laura Stead (Freelance Marketer), Russell Thompson (Management Consultant), Laura Blackburn (Founder, B Animated Studio) and Becca Morris (Managing Director, Benchmark Recruit) to share insights on why staying small works for them.
JM: First of all, let’s go around the table and meet everyone here.
LS: I’m Laura Stead, a freelance marketer. I typically work with local authorities, third-sector organisations and some wonderful small businesses. I also do a lot of training and mentoring.
RT: I’m Russ from Russell Thompson, Director On Demand. I’m a non-executive director and business planning specialist. I help business owners and entrepreneurs build more successful, efficient and effective businesses, and manage their mental health and wellbeing so they can spend less time working in their business and more time making memories with their families and friends.
LB: I’m Laura Blackburn. I own a small animation studio based in Barnsley, creating bespoke animated explainer videos, promotional videos, LED advertising and social media reels for the private and public sectors. I’ve been doing this for six years, and I love being my own boss.
BM: I’m Becca Morris, and I run a small recruitment agency called Benchmark Recruit, specialising in office support and commercial-based roles across South Yorkshire and beyond. We work with businesses to grow their teams and with candidates to help them find new roles.
JM: While I’m hosting today, this topic is close to my heart with my own business. I run Sound Media, which, unsurprisingly, is all about podcasting. I help brands enter the world of podcasting and create content as part of their marketing strategy.
The thing that connects us all is our approach to business growth. We don’t necessarily follow the conventional path of scaling by hiring more staff and expanding into bigger offices. The theme today is ‘small is beautiful’ – the idea that a business doesn’t have to be huge to be successful. Could you each give us a sense of your setup and what led you to this point?
LS: I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years now. I used to work in-house for various public sector organisations and commercial businesses. I had wonderful teams and healthy budgets. Then, in 2017, I went freelance. I loved my corporate life, but an opportunity came up, and I thought, “Why not?” Now, it’s just me. I don’t have an office. I’m fortunate to have clients who let me use their office spaces in exchange for some marketing advice on tap. I don’t have staff or anyone on payroll. Instead, I collaborate with talented freelancers and other small businesses, and that works really well for me.
RT: My journey has been a bit of a mix. I spent 25 years in the energy industry, starting with the Yorkshire Electricity Board before it became part of npower. It was a corporate job, and I grew into managing multi-million-pound contracts. In 2013, I took voluntary redundancy, and rather than finding another job, I set up as a consultant to help multiple businesses rather than just one. My experience in a troubled industry and working with big consultancies gave me a strong foundation. Since then, I’ve been running my own business, and like Laura, I don’t see myself growing beyond a one-person operation. I love the accountability and flexibility of it.
LB: I started as a graphic designer and worked at a publishing company for eight years, eventually moving into animation. They made money from the animations I created, but my wage wasn’t going up. So, in 2018, I decided to take the leap into self-employment. I set up a limited company instead of going freelance, which turned out to be the best thing I ever did. Now, it’s mainly me and subcontractors. I have two young kids, so I need to be available for school runs and family time. I recently moved fully remote to accommodate my family life better.
BM: I graduated in 2010 when there were no jobs. I stayed in Sheffield, even though it wasn’t my hometown, and I ended up as a legal secretary, which I hated. Then, I saw a job for a legal recruitment consultant at Benchmark and got the job. It was much bigger then; I started from the bottom as a rookie consultant and worked my way up. In 2020, I became co-director with Louisa, one of the founders. During lockdown, I realised I could do this for myself, and Louisa, who is still a good friend, agreed. I bought Benchmark in 2022. It had already been scaled down at the time, and now it’s just me and my cat, but I love it. I don’t have targets or staff to worry about. I’m the happiest I’ve been professionally, and I’m loving it.
JM: As for my own journey, I started work in the late 90s. Actually, most of my career was spent working in radio. I got involved in podcasting as a bit of fun when the radio stuff started to get a bit too serious. I started out in radio presenting, and then I moved into management, chasing the bigger salaries.
I found myself in lots of meetings, talking about things that, ultimately, I didn’t really care about. I got involved in podcasting to give myself a bit of a creative release. One thing led to another, and I left radio to work for a podcast company. That didn’t work out, and I found myself at a bit of a crossroads. There were points in my career when I’d thought about freelancing, having worked with and employed a lot of freelancers over the years. I wondered, “Could I do that? Could I be my own boss and not have to answer to people or deal with office politics?”
I thought, “If I don’t do it now, I probably never will.” That was in late 2019, moving into early 2020. I made the leap, and then, of course, COVID came along, and all my wonderful plans went out the window. But actually, it turned out okay – it went in a different, but still good, direction. I enjoy having the freedom I have now. I jokingly told some people that during the Euros this summer, there was an afternoon when I thought, “I’m just going to watch the two o’clock kick-off today. I’ll rearrange my work and catch up in the evening instead.”
It was all a bit of a crossroads decision for me, and I wondered if any of you had similar scenarios and what was the main thing that convinced you to take this path?
LS: Crossroads have come at points where the workload has been very high, and I’ve found myself wondering, “Should I be scaling this? Should I be hiring staff and getting an office?” At those points, I’ve managed to step back and reflect objectively, asking myself if taking on staff and getting an office is really the solution. It often isn’t. I always find myself going back to collaborating with the people I know – other freelancers or subcontractors. It’s about staying true to that model.
Sometimes, in my industry, people look at you differently if you’re not on the path to creating a huge business with a multi-million-pound turnover. If I’m not careful – let’s say I go to a networking event or spend too much time on social media – I can get sucked into that mindset and start questioning myself. But I don’t want that. I don’t want to go down that road, and I have to remind myself why.
RT: One key sliding doors moment for me was when I was made redundant 11 years ago. The strange thing is, I’d wanted that redundancy. After 25 years, I’d been positioning myself for a couple of years, planning an exit strategy. Then, one day, they said I could go. They even gave me six months of garden leave, which was fantastic. I got paid, went on holiday a lot, but then I thought, “What next?”
I almost had to go on a journey of self-discovery to find myself again. I’d been this corporate guy in a suit, and I had to rediscover the real me. I got a temporary gig as a project manager at Ant Marketing in Sheffield, and I thought I’d do it for six months and then find another job. But I loved the autonomy and freedom of it. So, I kept at it.
Over time, I’ve transitioned from focusing on corporate contracts to working with more SMEs. That’s because I saw how smaller businesses struggle to access consultancy services. Big consultancies are priced out of reach for smaller businesses, but what they offer is actually very simple. I realised I could bring help smaller business access that level of business support but at a fraction of the cost.
Something that’s come up a few times is this idea that people assume we all want to scale our businesses to the max. That perception is deeply ingrained in the business world. I think it’s worth exploring how this has influenced our journeys.
JM: Becca, you’ve gone in the opposite direction – you downsized Benchmark. I wonder what reaction you get from people, because that’s almost the opposite of what people expect.
BM: I’m hyper-aware that people might look in and think, “Oh, Benchmark’s not doing very well.” But Benchmark’s doing better than it has in years. I’m now able to be fully authentic, work only with businesses I want to, and I can work with organisations that understand and want to work with me.
When Benchmark was bigger, it had a very good reputation, but behind that were a lot of burnt-out people – me included. I don’t do burnout-inducing hours anymore. What you get is someone who isn’t exhausted, who isn’t working 12-hour days.
JM: I imagine you still have moments where you think, “It’d be easier if I had someone else to help.” But you sound like you’re clear that growing in that way isn’t the right thing for you. Is that fair?
BM: I did have a friend working with me for a while, but she left the business at the right time for her, and it was a positive exit for both of us. I don’t get any joy out of managing people. I won’t go too much into the politics, but it’s been difficult with fewer businesses recruiting due to cuts. But now I’m not losing sleep at night thinking about how I’ve got to pay other people’s mortgages as well as my own.
LS: One of the things I enjoyed in my previous roles was managing people, but I found that the higher up you get in the marketing industry, the more people you manage, and the less time you spend doing the stuff you love. I realised one day that the bits that I did actually enjoy about managing people, I can still do without employing people – seeing them develop, rooting for them, supporting them. It’s can put myself in situations where I can get the joy out of the nice bits that I liked about having people to coach and mentor and support without that awful headache.
JM: The way we use the world ‘collaboration’ feels different. We all work for ourselves, but we also kind of run agencies in the sense that we pass work to other people. You talk to other business owner about stuff and discuss the different people you’re working with. That might not on a formal basis, but for me, that’s what collaboration is all about – people helping each other and mucking in together, a bit like ‘freelance incorporated’!
Do you think the business world respects our model of working?
RT: I think there’s a generalised perspective of growth and what that means. That could be earning 500 grand a year, or employing 250 people, and I think that of that is largely driven by social media gurus who got these formulas for rapid growth. That’s far away from my values because I think that growth is a personal thing, and you’ve got to look at it in terms of what it is that you want to achieve from your own life and from your business life. So, to come back to your original question, James, I think there’s a growing respect for small businesses and how much of an important contribution we make to the economy.
LS: That traditional business model of ‘it’s all about growth’, which a lot of social media people talk about, is overly glamourised. I think there are content creators out there that almost give this kind of very false impression that that that is what you need to do. If you want to get into business, you need to be aspiring to have private jets take you to Dubai and the like. But this is not real. It’s literally fake news. I think there’s an increasing amount of people that do respect small business, but you’ve almost got to find that crowd, because it’s easier for people just to see the shinier, polished fake news version on social media.
JM: One thing I’ve not quite figured out yet is the idea of an exit plan. If you build a business that’s built around you, when you extract yourself from that business it’s not worth anything, right? It’s like you’re missing out on a potential payday. Any perspectives on that?
LS: I’ve got my exit plan absolutely nailed. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll not have a big bumper payday for selling a business, because that’s just not my vibe. When I decide to call it a day, which will be quite a long way away, I will gracefully pass my clients on to those people that I’ve collaborated with and I know it will be in good hands. I believe that my ultimate goal is to make a really lovely, beautiful living out of what I’m doing now and enjoy the income of it. I have started to put into a pension as well, a sensible thing to somewhat try and compensate for when I just opted out of company pension. Genuinely, my ultimate aim is that once I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to work on the tills in Marks & Spencer’s food hall – I want first dibs on the yellow stickers, slow-paced chat with all the shoppers and a bit of money coming in. That’s fine for me.
RT: Again, an exit plan is very personal to you and what you want. I would like to continue doing what I do in a reduced capacity, so it’s about having that successful work/life blend, not balance, because that refers to equality. Blend would mean I do what I want when I want work-wise. There are ways you can sell your business as a solopreneur, but that probably means you’re going to work in someone’s business for a while and do a lot of knowledge and skill transfers. But for me, my exit plan is reducing what you do slowly but still doing it. It’s what I love doing, so why wouldn’t I continue?
