From fired to 6 figure freelancer

One year ago I promised myself I’d write every week about turning my sidehustle into a 6 figure lifestyle business.

Whenever I felt like I was shouting into the void,
when I felt like I was wasting hours a day on writing for nothing,
When I felt like I was failing to convert my content into cash
I could refocus on my WHY:

I wasn’t doing this to sell courses or coaching,
I was doing this to help people.
So actually I was winning.

This promise has kept me going through the usual expected slumps of motivation and peaks of overwhelm
It’s been one year since the inaugural episode #1 of Life by Design.
It feels weird now to look back at my own promise 1 year ago.

Although I’ve made some adjustments along the way, I feel like I’ve been pretty true to my promise,
and to the motivations that started it all.
I’ve tried to be as honest as I can without oversharing,
as realistic as I can be without being condescending,
as practical as I can whilst still addressing abstracts like mindset.

A huge part of this has been sharing my own story, which is something I’ve never been comfortable doing.
But my story is not just my HOW, it’s my WHY too.

I’m not talking why I started a solo business,
I’m talking about why I spend a huge amount of my time running an education business that makes no money.

When people ask me what I do now,
it is getting harder and harder for me to give a clear answer…
I’ve been writing for 1 year.
A lot has changed.
So it’s time to reintroduce myself and share my story again.

But, no this isn’t another manufactured rags to riches story for social media.
I hate those generic over exaggerated templates you see on Linkedin.
They seem to get likes,
But anyone with any marketing savvy can spot them from a mile away.
And they reek of BS.

The last few years I’ve been very fortunate.
If I could narrow down what limited success I’ve had in life,
it would be…

1. Learning valuable skills in my youth
2. Consistently repeating good habits
3. Occasionally making the hard choice.

That’s all.

I never struggled to find enough money to eat,
I didn’t dramatically quit my job to pursue my dream with no money in the bank
I had a good upbringing and a stable childhood,
I had the usual teenage angst but nothing unusual or extraordinary.
In fact my life has been perfectly ordinary.

Which seems like a good opportunity to shine a light on some guru BS you see a lot on social media:
the curated “transformation story” is designed to make you feel like you’re lacking,
or behind,
or not making progress.

So today I’ll be sharing x2 sides of my story,
both of which are true, but have different motivations.

The value of this post will be helping you to recognise the difference between the story that is designed to teach ,
and the story that is designed to sell.

1. The first true story is the shortened version I use for social media and workshops
   a. 🎯 The goal of this is to use my own lifestyle as proof, and sell my transformation in my coaching programme.
2. The second true story is the original version I wrote in response to my coaching clients asking for my story
   a. 🎯 The goal of this is to help my coaching clients recognise what reality looks like, and adjust their expectations on success timelines, and set realistic goals for themselves to avoid burnout.

The short story

Hi, I’m Nicholas Robb, the world’s worst employee.

I run a design agency Design Hero, I write Life By Design, my education business.
The rest of the week I’m usually hiking with the dog, or in the garden building things.
That’s what I do, but not what I am.
I have always enjoyed design as long as I can remember, first as a hobby then as a side-hustle.
At school I was bullied hard because I was an introvert, I was a short-arse, and I liked all the geeky stuff that hadn’t become fashionable yet 😅

After school I studied product design and worked as an architect.
I made a difficult decision to leave the family business to do web design full-time.
I then got, and walked out, of a string of seriously underpaid jobs.
I just got fed up of working for other people.

I wanted to avoid the boss’s silly ideas, work in my pants, and be able to go outside when it’s sunny. 🤣 🩲

Everyday, I talk to freelancers who are stuck in a rut, working harder than any employee, but have less spare time and still earn less than than many 9-5ers. I fell into this trap too, because I followed all the common advice online.

I read a lot and applied everything I learned and I grew.
I started spending money on courses to get help.
A few of these were great.
But most were crap.

They all told you how to do MORE.

🔵 more leads,
🔵 more ads,
🔵 more engagement,
🔵 more AI,
🔵 more Tiktok,
🔵 more shiny objects,
🔵 more training

I spent over £10k on courses and coaching.
And it worked.
Sort of…

• I grew my design sidehustle into a solo business,
• I smashed the arbitrary monetary target of £10k/m which I plucked from the latest guru,
• I created a plan for my lifestyle, cut my workweek in half, and work remotely from a small office surrounded by nature.

But the truth most gurus won’t tell you….
Despite those highly curated rags to riches stories you see on social, the truth is that there is no such thing as overnight success. And even when you achieve it, success doesn’t = happiness:

For more than 10 years my sidehustle made almost no money.
Before I ran my own business I was an employee.
I felt trapped, underpaid and undervalued in 9-5 jobs, unable to action my ideas, I had no control over my own time.
Been there, done that, had the heart-attack.

Everyone online has advice about how to grow a 6 figure business. But no-one wants to tell you what happens AFTER…
When I hit my first £10k month I was miserable.

I had reached 6 figures, I had more prestigious clients, I had authority in my niche; The BBC even asked me to speak at schools about careers in design.
I looked like success.
But I didn’t feel like a success.
I was totally burned out.

I had everything I’d worked so hard to achieve.
So why was I so miserable?

Because I fell for the same trap that most freelancers do:
I was trying to measure my success by my revenue.

You see, everyone promotes the startup model. Huge growth, big risk, large teams. But life is short, and then you die. If you want to start putting life first,

If you started this business for freedom,
If you want time to enjoy your life….
Then what you actually want is a lifestyle business.

A lifestyle business generates enough money to live comfortably, but with the kind of freedom most people can only dream about.
“Enough” is different for everyone.
We are all in different situations with different responsibilities and preferences.
But I realised after you have “enough” then free time is far more valuable. I realised if you want to grow a 6 figure business without the burnout, then you have to think differently.

In a lifestyle business, your revenue means nothing!

• Tell me about your profit…
• That also means nothing
• Tell me about your profit ÷ time
• Now we’re getting somewhere…
• Now tell me what you do with your spare time.
• Now you have a more accurate picture of your success.

But you won’t change your life and obtain financial and personal freedom by doing the same things as everyone else.
If you do the same things as everyone else, the only way to get ahead is to work harder.
That’s a recipe for burnout!
What you need is simple systems to automate your business and multiply your growth, without just putting in more time.

For years I made this mistake and worked like an absolute dog trying to get ahead in a 9-5 and I walked away from several promising careers to pursue freelancing with no guaranteed prospects or pay. Like many freelancers, clients ruled my life. I had a side hustle in the evenings and weekends too just to make ends meet.

I read that an estimated 60% of people work in jobs they are unsuited to or unhappy in. They just take the trajectory that life throws at them. But my ethos is that you only have 1 life, and it’s pretty short. You’re going to spend a lot of it working. So it’s better to design and plan the life you want.

I spent years reading about how the most successful entrepreneurs designed lifestyle businesses, experimenting and optimizing my business, and putting everything I’d learned into practice.
As it turns out it’s quite simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, like everyone I’m still working things out as I go, and we’re all at different points in our journey. But I see a lot of freelancers work crazy hours and are still stuck earning less than they would in a low-stress 9-5 job.

Most people start a business or a sidehustle for freedom, get overwhelmed & fit life around whatever time remains.
I want to help you design and live your ideal lifestyle, and build your business around it.
I’m sharing my own process and help other freelancers to live a life by design.

So now my mission is to help frantic freelancers to design their lifestyle then build a 6 figure business around it, without burnout.
I share the systems & strategies I used to redesign my ideal lifestyle & grow a 6 figure business that puts life first.
I now have more time to think, to make better decisions, to take care of myself, and to invest in leisure, reading or exploring with the dog.

If you’d like to learn more
I have a coaching programme for freelancers that will give you all the tools, strategies, templates and systems I used to grew Design Hero from a sidehustle into a 6 figure lifestyle business on a 3 day workweek.
I’ll show you how to design your lifestyle first, then grow your solo business to support it.

This is glossy version of my story, the kind of thing you’ll see on Linkedin or social media.

If you want the full story
the transcript below is the story I reveal to my coaching clients,
The only edits I’ve made is line breaks, and remove filler words.

The long story

“How did you go from sidehustle to freelancing, to mentoring, cos that’s what I want to do?”

– Ivan, Motion designer

hmm kind of a long story

From Fired to Freelancing

Since I was a teen, I have always designed things as a hobby.
This turned into a sidehustle, so I’ve always done my freelancing I guess.
It earned me some extra pennies while I was studying at university.
Later as I went into the world of work I kept doing it as it added to my income. It never made much money, sometimes as little as £500 a year.
For most of my life it was not enough to sustain me as a career.
This is something most gurus online don’t talk about. People aren’t honest about it on social media:
Every time I see a post where someone claims to have quit their job, started freelancing a years ago and now they earn £10k/m,
I want to shout:

“Did you, aye? BOLLOCKS!”

It’s a harmful myth that makes people feel crap about where they are.
We all have different starting points, different responsibilities and advantages/disadvantages.
But the truth is if you want you grow your own business, if you want true freedom, if you want to escape the ratrace…then it takes many years of working hard for little reward.
Most people aren’t willing to work hard for no return for a few months, never mind a few years.
Every “overnight success” you see is just action + consistency + time.
It took almost 10 years for my side-hustle to earn enough money to sustain me.
Every year, my clients, and my earnings, grew tiny bit by bit. Eventually, it reached a point where I started to glimpse it as a full-time income.
I remember during lockdown I was officially furloughed, but unofficially I was expected to work on the sly.
Around this time I think everyone had their “great awakening” and we all had a glimpse of what life could be, outside the status quo of the commute, the 9-5 etc.
A lot of people had no work to do whatsoever. For months! This blew my mind!
I watched people go nuts. People were drinking more, bored out their minds, addicted to Netflix.
But they also had time with family. Time to get outside during the day and walk in nature.
At the time I resented the fact that I had to work, but in hindsight I think it actually saved me.
I’m not made to be idle. I don’t think anyone is.
So with a little more spare time, I started reading books by the masters of lifestyle design:
Tim Ferris’s 4 hour workweek, the 80/20 rule, the compound effect, Hell Yeah or Hell No, Free Time and more. you can check out my reading list
I read every day, I read like a mofo, and then I read some more.
This opened my eyes to what is possible.
Most people aren’t even aware of what is possible with the right knowledge.
Read every day for 6 months and you won’t even recognise yourself.
Apply what you learn every day for 6 months and you won’t even recognise your life.
Reading opened my eyes.
I became dissatisfied with the idea of working a 9-5 the rest of my life, of being underpaid, undervalued, constrained in my hours and actions.
It no longer seemed tolerable.
At that point I thought; “if I can just get x2 clients a month at 1k each I could quit”.
It lit a new fire in me, and I remember calling up enquiries on the way to and home from work, and designing logos for £120 on my laptop on park benches during lunch breaks, my hands were so cold I could hardly work the mouse.
I was working pretty hard. I think this is a necessary stage in growing your side-hustle into a career.
But it’s not sustainable. Eventually caught up with me in a big way…
My boss found out I was side hustling and he didn’t like it.
I never hid Design Hero, but I never shouted about it either, for obvious reasons:
Most bosses don’t like their employees to have their own motivations and aspirations outside of the job.
Most bosses expect employees to be 100% loyal and dedicated to putting more money in the company’s pockets, instead of helping themselves first.
But loyalty should work both ways; I was underpaid for the number of roles I was filling;
I was a web designer, coder, project manager, social marketer, SEO and more.
I’d been promised multiple raises, commissions etc for a while, which never materialised, I was getting pretty fed up of waiting already was watching my Design Hero income.
I started wondering if I could make the leap to full-time freelancing.
Then fate made the decision for me:
Some of my work won some awards, I posted it on LinkedIn. My boss found out about Design Hero.
At the time I was working remote from home, and I made the fatal mistake of calling an enquiry for Design Hero during work time.
It was my failure and I shouldn’t have done it. I failed to maintain a proper separation between work and my sidehustle; something I was normally very strict about.
I justified it because I often worked late and overtime for my 9-5. I never asked or expected to be paid overtime for this, working hard is just part of who I am. So I didn’t see any harm in swapping the time and making it up later.
But it was a conflict of interest, he found out and fired me on the spot.
I don’t blame him, he was a nice boss.
he was just hurt as he felt understandbly betrayed and that I was living a double-life.
He wasn’t wrong!
I was working full-time and working my side-hustle on evenings, weekends and even lunch breaks.
My heart was with Design Hero rather than my full time job.
He even offered me my job back.
(I still can’t decide if this was altruism, or if he’d realised he’d have to hire x5 people to replace me. Anyway if you’re reading this I’m still very sorry, it brings a blush to my face just wrting about it).
I decided it was way past time to make the leap.

Looking back now, as a boss myself,
I think it’s naive to think that people who work for you won’t also work for themselves.
This is even more true now as living costs outpace the rate of pay.
There’s a certain type of person who is always learning.
Who picks up multiple valuable skillsets. Who takes initiative without instruction.
Who questions “Why”? Who stays curious, works hard and outgrows their job title again and again.

If you are someone like this, then most bosses at small businesses can’t afford to pay you what you are due and you’re probably destined for freelancing or solopreneurship.

I try to keep this in mind. If my team have aspirations, instead of trying to stop them, or making them think they have to hide it, I teach them, help them, and advise them.

From Freelance to agency owner

I see being fired as a turning point where my income took a quantum leap over a short period of time.
Looking back, I think this route gave me an advantage over other designers:
Because my time was so limited I was forced to work differently:
I didn’t have hours to call clients, to chase enquiries, to churn through the admin, to chase invoices.
I had to work smart not hard.

I thought now that Design Hero was my only job I’d have loads of free time.
But it turns out your tasks expand to fill the time you have. It even has a name: “Parkinson’s Law”.
I reached my first £10k/m and I was miserable. I was totally burned out, and maxed on time.
I was working for myself, I’d reached 6 figures, I’d achieved everything I had everything that I’d strived for.
So why was I miserable?
It was a critical realisation for me:

After you have enough, more money won’t make you happy.

This cliche is so commonplace it’s practically gospel.
But it’s one of those one’ you have to experience first-hand to understand.
Many never earn enough to learn this lesson.
It’s a good problem to have. Certainly better than burning all your time to make enough money.
‘Enough’ is different for everyone. But it’s probably less than you think:
I have a theory most folk would be much happier earning £60k/yr on a 3day workweek than £120k+ working 5 days.
After that point, time quickly becomes far more valuable to you.
You’ll find yourself spending what would have previously been obscene amounts of money, just to buy back your free time.
So I built systems, automations, scheduling, templates etc. to 10x the limited time I had.
Every time I did a task I would spend twice as long trying to figure out a way to avoid having to do it again.
This was the foundation that allowed my business to scale without me putting in more time.
1 year after being fired I had periods where I made more in 1 month than my whole annual salary.
Nevertheless, there’s a limit to how much you can grow by yourself…
By that point, I’d spent ten years building websites, and I had to continue to support existing clients, whilst finding new ones to grow my income.
It became so that I was spending more time on support than growth.
So my first hire was someone to help me with small support tasks for WordPress sites.
This I guess is the first step towards an agency:
Moving from doing everything yourself to having help with fulfilment, so you can free yourself up to work on big picture tasks, growth, sales, systemizing your business etc.
By the next year I’d managed to optimize my business down to a 3 day workweek.
I still prefer not to think of myself as an agency owner.
I still think of it as a solo business, but I guess since I do have a small team,
I’d describe Design Hero as a micro agency for startups.
Yet I have to face the fact that I do have a small team under me,
and I spend more time running the business, building systems etc than I do doing design these days.
It’s a new set of skills to learn, new challenges, new problems.
Life is always learning.
In a solo business, you ARE the business.
So personal growth = business growth.
They say being a manager is watching someone take x10 longer to do the job half as well as you would lol.
But as always you have to think super long-term. If you take the time to train, and to teach, with patience, it pays off in the form of more freedom.
I teach every freelancer as if they were a student of mine, and were paying for my time.
I take the time to review, critique and explain everything I do for them.
I record my work, explain my thinking, outline the strategy, the Why, and the Why nots.
I teach the soft skills like client management, policy settings, boundaries etc, all the difficult stuff that they don’t teach you in design tutorials on Youtube.

From Agency Owner to Mentor

At this point I had enough money to live comfortably. I had systemized a lot of my business so I also had free time.
At first I used this time for leisure.
I hiked, I played video games, I worked in the garden, I took bike trips, and I even did a bit of lifestyle design;
I looked at my childhood dreams and got into motorsport in a small way. It was a great summer.
But I’m not made to sit still.
I started to feel a creeping anxiousness that I couldn’t explain.
I used the Five Whys to work through it to figure out what I was feeling and basically, I found that I was bored.
It’s like video games: When things get too easy, you get bored.
People need a challenge. So I sought my next challenge and took time to think about my life and what I wanted to do.
I sought something which would give me a sense of purpose, of how I could do something with meaning.
Just as I never set out to be an agency owner, I never set out to be a mentor either.
Teaching my team naturally led into teaching other freelancers.
I was already recording training, doing daily teaching and coaching to nurture my team’s skills.
My freelancers kept telling me that instead of my paying them, they should really be paying me, just for the stuff I was teaching and mentoring.
I wasn’t fishing for complements, several of them said this unprompted. So I thought there was something in that…
I figured a good way to do that would be to help other freelancers navigate the problems I’d already had.
I was already getting questions on social from freelancers on how to solve some of them.
I repurposed my social accounts for my coaching platform, I write every day about running a multi-six-figure business on a 3 day workweek,
and I share the systems and strategies I use every day in Design Hero.
I write about all the problems I’ve had, how I solved them, and how to do it without getting burned out.
(spoiler alert, I still get burned out sometimes!)
But people get value from the content, they contact me to ask me questions, just like this, and I give them answers freely, and then I ask them if they want further help.
That’s how I got into coaching.
It doesn’t make much money.
it gives me purpose to help freelancers.
I try not to let it become a business;
I write for the sake of writing and nurture the habit.
I treat it the same way as I did Design Hero when it was still a sidehustle:
Instead of focussing on profit, I treat it as getting paid to learn about coaching, and learn my audience’s problems.
I’ve been trying for about a year now.
They bring their problems, and I give them solutions that have worked for me, and I check-in to make sure they are working through the problem to a solution.
I’ve noticed they often bring me the same problems, and that they often aren’t aware of what the real problem is.

I’m sure there’s more to it that I’ve forgotten, but that’s the broad strokes!
If you’d like help along this journey, reach out for a chat, I’d love to talk to you more about it.

Be aware of the sell

Both my stories have a soft sell,
but the first story is designed and tailored to sell,
The second is about educating and managing expectations.

I pride myself that my story is “honest”,
At least more honest than most gurus.
But…

My story is still a sell in disguise, just as all stories are.
The story is a transformation journey:
where you are now vs where you could be.

Most stories you see on social are a sell in disguise.
Often the sell is hidden behind “value”.
But at the end of the day,
everyone is selling something…
Including me.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling.
I wouldn’t sell my coaching services if I didn’t believe it helped people.
I sell a solution to the painful journey I’ve navigated myself.
I help my students go from frustrated and burned out, to wealthy with free time.
My testimonials from my students speak for me in this regard.

But I want you to be aware of the sell everywhere you go,
And with your newfound wary awareness,
you can guard yourself against feeling like 💩 when you hear about “overnight success” from another guru online,
or compare yourself negatively to their progress.

That “speedy progress” is in fact what most gurus are trying to sell you,
packaged as a course, or training or whatever.

Speaking of my coaching,
if you appreciate the honesty,
if you find yourself in the situation as I was in my journey
and if you’d like to see more behind the curtain, you can book a chat with me.
That’s about as “hard sell” as I’ll ever get.