ONLY HUMAN
Founder of PR agency Harvey & Hugo and host of our Growth Lab Darlington events Charlotte Nichols is never one to shy away from the big issues facing entrepreneurs. In fact, her PRsonal podcast is dedicated to breaking down business boundaries.
In this spirit, she talks to us about how she is managing to balance her own needs as well as her business’s needs during the painful experience of divorce.
We make all of these plans for life and for business but it’s not always the way it works out.
Business courses and books are all about setting goals. Although they’re important, I’ve realised you ultimately don’t have control over what happens to you along the way. Sometimes really challenging things come out of the blue and throw your life upside down. And although we might be business owners we are, first and foremost, people with personal lives and feelings. We have to look after ourselves when something like this affects us.
You’re failing if you’re not scaling.
As a business owner, you’re taught to dream bigger, think bigger – everything always bigger, always pushing yourself to achieve more. That’s fine in principle. It’s a good way to live sometimes, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we need to sit back, re-calibrate and listen to our own needs rather than just being on that treadmill hitting targets. It’s easy to get caught up in what’s expected of you rather than what’s true to you when life is 100 miles per hour.
I’ve realigned my business needs to suit my young family’s needs.
I’m proud of having a lifestyle business so I can be there for my young children, and having built a skilled and secure team, I have flexibility within the business after so many years of running it. Like a child, it’s been very needy over the years, but it’s always been there. It’s an extension of me and I know I can rely on me. It’s 15 years old now so it can stand on its own two feet and it craves independence so it can be there to give back to me.
Being a business owner is a bit of a double-edged sword in times like this.
I’ve spoken to friends who’ve gone through traumatic separations, and they’ve had three months full pay off work. It’s brilliant that they’ve had that support but then, on the flip side, it’s really good to have a distraction and something to focus on and pour energy into.
I still want to grow the business but not at the cost of sacrificing my values.
Having such a strong team has allowed me to work part-time while the business continues to thrive in safe hands. I’m sure once I’m through it I will be so much stronger, and it will benefit the business in some way, but right now I’ve got to focus on being there for my children.
The power of now.
I’ve had to learn to be present to help find a way out of the darkness. It’s making a big difference to my focus and I’m finding I can achieve so much more in less time. I’m making time to read more self-help books rather than business books and I’m finding they are just as relevant to my business as they are to me.
It’s really important to me to talk openly about this stuff.
The things I value in life are what I value in business: kindness, honesty and communication. I feel like I need to be true to that now. My PRsonal Podcast is all about having conversations that you wouldn’t normally have in business because the expectation has always been that we should keep things private. But that helps nobody. I’ve talked to others about divorce on the podcast and really empathised but like anything, it’s totally different when it happens to you and nothing can prepare you for it.
There’s still such a stigma attached to divorce, even though it is so common.
It does take a lot of courage to talk about it but I think the more people discuss it, the more it eradicates feelings of shame and failure that inevitably come up. One of the main things that has got me through my darkest days has been bumping into powerful, incredible women – and sometimes men – who’ve been through this and come out stronger.
I always think if it can help one person by speaking about it, it’s worth it.
And from a business point of view, it can open up whole conversations that lead you to doing business with people because you’ve made that connect. Because ultimately people choose to do business with people. We can forget the acronyms B2C, B2B, because business and life is mainly just humans connecting to humans. And sometimes disconnecting.
The BIC would like to extend a huge thank you to Charlotte for sharing such personal experience in the hope it helps others through difficult times.