Starting your own business - an Interview with Emily Woodhouse

As we approach the end of the year, many of you will be thinking whether 2020 will be the year you start a side gig or begin your own business in earnest. More and more people seem to be having the “entrepreneurial dream”, but what is the reality? In the first of a couple of blog posts addressing the “entrepreneurial reality”, I interview Emily Woodhouse of Intrepid Magazine.

Back in 2016, Emily Woodhouse began blogging about her adventures and also offering guest posts to other women in adventure. The more these posts were featured, the more she got involved with the community and something became very clear. There are so many women and girls who are already involved in adventure, in sport and in doing great things outdoors and they were desperate for a platform on which to share all this.

So, Emily did something crazy. She started a print magazine, with no previous experience. Now, Intrepid Magazine has been up and running since January 2018 and people love it. Emily was kind enough to give up her time to talk to me about her entrepreneurial journey.

Some of the key things Emily discusses are:

• your own business as a side gig

• the motivation behind starting your own project

• dealing with the biggest pain points

• the importance of taking the first step

• Advice on starting your own business

Right, now without further ado here is my interview with Emily Woodhouse and then some closing thoughts.  

You started a print magazine, in the internet age, with zero experience. Why?

I felt like people were shouting for it to exist: that specific magazine with that specific focus. As for print, there is power in having something offline. It’s tangible – and once someone has it in their hands, you have their attention. Attention is a commodity nowadays. Plus many people prefer print for longform reading.

As for zero experience, I never let that sort of thing phase me. Either you know how to do something or you find out what you need to know and do it too. I had written for magazines before and was involved in my university student newspaper. Although I’d never actually done it, I knew where to look to work out what I needed to get started.

“Once you have other people’s money it’s like: damn I’ve really got to make this happen.”

Is this your principal source of income and If not How do you ensure you focus on something that is not your “main” job?

Ha, absolutely not. I have a full time job (now as a writer, back at the start as a data analyst/marketer) and run the magazine alongside.

Personally, I’m just the kind of person who commits to things. I guess I’m all in or not at all. There is a power in focus. But I guess it’s also partly a pride thing: I’ve said I’ll do this, so I’m going to make it happen. On the magazine particularly, it launched towards the end of a fairly miserable year. It was almost December and I wanted to give the year a turn up for the better. So I gave myself an extremely short deadline and got people to pre-order copies. Once you have other people’s money it’s like: damn I’ve really got to make this happen, no matter what.

Starting can often be the hardest step - was this project something you had in mind for a long time and was there some catalyst that helped you to commit to it?

When I went to the printers with my first issue of Intrepid Magazine, with my humble little InDesign file… well, I say humble: it was an enormous file with 96 pages of stories and images that I’d commissioned and laid up all by myself. Anyway, I arrived at the printers with this file on a USB stick and we talk. I’m half nodding at what this guy says and pretending to know what the hell I’m doing, at the same time trying to pick up useful knowledge about the printing process. And the guy asks just that: “How long have you been thinking about doing this?” I wasn’t really sure. It was December, it couldn’t have been much earlier than September - the idea certainly hadn’t even occurred to me at the start of August. But I thought I’d better pick something long-ish so I said, “About 6 months.” He leant back and raised his eyebrows, “You don’t hang about!”

In terms of a catalyst, I wasn’t struck by an idea-bolt or had any life-changing moment. It was just a growing realisation that there was a market for this idea and that I was a person who could make it happen. Many people were moaning about women not getting enough media coverage in the adventure space, but not actually doing anything more. I felt like I could make the change I wanted to see. I suppose you could say the end of the year and the desire to make something good happen before the end of it was the closest to a catalyst I got.

Many entrepreneurs actually suffer with self-doubt, is this something you have you struggled with and, if so, what keeps you going? 

It depends what you mean by that. If you’re suffering from self-doubt about if this is the right business, or if you’re the right person, you should probably be doing something else. Sure, I wasn’t the most qualified. But I looked at the hole in the magazine world and thought: I can do that. I don’t know how to do it right now, but I’m confident that I can work it out. I think that mindset really comes from adventure. If you put yourself in enough situations where you’re facing the unknown, make a mess of things but come out at the end a survivor – or even better – you gain a certain confidence in yourself. You know that whatever the world throws at you, you’ll deal with it somehow.

On the other hand, I think it is very important to continually ask yourself questions which might be considered self-doubt in the wrong light. Am I doing this right? Could this be better? Is this still aligned with the vision I set out with? Would any of these X crazy solutions to a problem work better than my current method? Unless you ask these questions constantly, you are like a blind sheep walking in your own little world, oblivious of chaos developing around you – until you fall off a cliff. That’s really where many mistakes in start-ups happen, by not asking the difficult questions.

What I really struggled with initially was lack of feedback from subscribers. It’s very odd in publishing because you pour you heart and soul and month of time into something, release it into the world and then… silence. I guess I’ve learnt that you can’t please everyone, so do what you think is the best solution with the information you have and see what happens. It’s okay to try things and back-pedal if they don’t work. Stopping or changing something is not a failure if it overall makes things better.

“We spend so much money on university fees but can learn far more trying out a business idea.”

How do you deal with some of the biggest pain points of starting your own business? 

• Running the Show - you have to wear all the hats
  Well I don’t consider this a pain point as such, but it can be quite overwhelming to have everyone coming to you asking questions. There have been times where I’ve been physically afraid of opening my inbox because it’s like walking into a room of hundreds of angry people shouting at me to do something. The trick to this is to set up good processes and get rid of yourself as a blocking point. Empower people to solve the problems for themselves.

• Getting Funding
  The magazine is entirely self-funded. I pre-sold to check there was enough interest to make it viable. But I also pumped quite a lot of my salary into it, trying to make it work at the start. That was quite hard to rationalise, the longer it went on! But I kept reminding myself that I was in control of the situation and could stop whenever I want to. Plus think of it as an education! We spend so much money on university fees but can learn far more trying out a business idea. That means you’re winning regardless.

• Managing your time
  I have become a ninja when it comes to task and time management. My entire life is in a sort of bullet-journal-on-steroids. There are no pretty pictures or calligraphy, but it works a treat. You have to be really strict about what’s important and what’s actually you creating “busy” for yourself. Learn how to say no to things that aren’t time well spent. I also try to hunt for “big dominoes” - things that will take out a whole load of smaller tasks in one hit.

• Marketing
  All our marketing is really by word of mouth. I ran some Facebook ads on the initial pre-sell test but after that it’s grown organically.

• Minimising impact on your main source of income
  Just set yourself boundaries. Decide before hand how much you’re going to put in, how long you’re going to try it for until you have to call quits and stay true to these agreements. Breaking even on the front end will also help your stress levels enormously!

What are the biggest challenges / the most daunting thing you have faced on this journey?

Gosh that’s a hard question. I’m coming up with a bit of a blank so I guess just starting the whole thing rolling. Starting a business is a huge challenge in many respects because you’re creating something from nothing. If you think about it in terms of physics, all that energy needed to keep the ball (your business) rolling has to come from somewhere. You provide that energy. You haul your idea up to the top of a huge mountain and push it off. But you have to carry it from ground zero to get it up there to even start.

Is Intrepid magazine in a good place now and What would you like Intrepid Magazine to achieve?

That kind of implies that something is either in a good place or a bad place – which I don’t agree with. Intrepid Magazine is always growing and changing and improving. At the moment the challenges are different to the ones I started with. We’re always adapting and taking tiny steps in the right direction, day by day.

The aim is to become the go-to place for reading about women in adventure and outdoor sports. Whether that’s in a news-style “what’s happening now” or a longer form read. It’s a platform for the voices of these women, so that they can tell it from their own perspective, not one twisted by mainstream media.  I’d also really like it develop it as a stepping stone for people trying to get into the industry.

Do you see this as being a full-time project eventually and has this influenced you in any way?

Um, well I don’t really think about it that way. What does full time even mean nowadays! I certainly don’t want it to become a 9-5 job, but then I’d say it’s one of several full-time projects I’m working on at the moment! I’m building a team, but I’m certainly not empire building! If anything, I aspire for a business that it’s easy to step back from and go off adventuring when I want to.

Have you been able to lighten your work load with help from others?

Absolutely. I’ve been very fortunate to receive help from others along the way, on an almost entirely voluntary basis. They do it because they believe in what we’re trying to create here. Currently Sarah does all of our design work and laying up the magazine pages, Cara proof reads all our articles, Eve and Faye are doing a great job of developing our free online content. We all have other work commitments and without a wonderful team, I can honestly say the magazine wouldn’t have got this far.

How did you go about recruiting help from others?

In some cases it was spotting something that needed specific help and recruiting for it through our newsletter. But mostly, it was people coming direct to me and offering skills and help.

What advice would you give others looking to start their own business on the side?

Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. That’s a bit cliché, so let me explain what I mean. Decide why you’re doing something and remind yourself of it regularly. Are you doing this to become a millionaire? Are you doing it to change the world? Are you doing it for fun? Be a bit more specific than that, but make sure you’re clear on the essence of what this means to you. Write it down even. Then keep questioning what you’re doing against this original goal. It will help you keep on track through the chaos.

Also, if you’ve been sitting on this entrepreneurship thing for a while, you’ll have probably read other people telling you just how hard it is to start something up. I did too and let me tell you: no book can describe just how much effort it is. You are essentially creating something from nothing and it will feel like complete chaos for a lot of the time. Because you don’t really know quite what you’re doing, but you’re acting – taking little steps at a time towards better. That is completely normal. I’d worry if you felt like you had the perfect product right from the start, or if you waited until you knew exactly what you were doing before you took the leap. Sometimes, you just have to jump.

You can follow Emily on Twitter here and don’t forget to check out Intrepid Magazine.

Author: Thomas Smallwood is an outsourcing specialist. Having worked in companies around Europe, from the support desk to the boardroom, he founded bizee.co to help small businesses grow through efficient delegation to skilled virtual assistants. He is an award-winning blogger and a passionate advocate for mental health awareness.

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.