Sometimes when we are caught up in the day to day, we can’t see the wood for the trees. Wendy Dolan, Managing Director, Swamped Media agreed to answer this month’s Big Question for Q&R.
Wendy has helped hundreds of SMEs build effective websites and spread their message through digital marketing. She started her career producing campaigns for international brands such as Nike and Dannon. In 2013, she founded Get Online NOLA, an agency devoted to helping companies make the most of the internet.
A native of New Orleans, LA, Wendy and her Sussex-born husband moved their young family to Hove in 2018. Since then she has continued to help local SMEs on both side of the Atlantic “level up” their marketing through her UK business Swamped Media.
We asked Wendy: How to find success in dormancy?
A business coach once told me that “if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking.” And man, did I take that on board! Both in business and in my personal life, I have a tendency to set goals, push towards completion, and then plow forward into the next big strategy.
Recently, I was having coffee with a colleague and shared that I felt restless, discontented and unsure of what to do next. As the caffeine dripped through my body (and onto my white top) she helped me see that actually, I was in the last few months of a massively ambitious five year plan. What I should be feeling was success.
Just shy of five years ago, my family activated our plan to uproot from our cozy community in New Orleans and plant ourselves in Brighton. We’d be leaving our friends, my extended family, and most worryingly, the small business that we’d worked so hard to grow over the previous six years.
I imagined long walks on the Downs, days spent at the seafront, quick trips away to the continent, and a chance to become more involved with my husband’s family, who we’d been living away from for the better part of a decade. But as much as I loved those romantic notions of being back in the UK, I also struggled with the reality of what it would take to build the life we were imagining.
The last five years have been hard at times. I spent the first few months gazing jealously at women chatting in coffee shops and wondering if I’d ever find my tribe. I felt isolated when I didn’t understand cultural references. I was terrified when we lost a big client who couldn’t handle the idea of working remotely long before the pandemic made that the norm. And I was heartbroken when I had to comfort my 10 year old son after he’d been teased and physically attacked for his Americanness.
But now, we’re weeks away from finishing our home renovation in a community that we adore. My marketing business is prospering on both sides of the Atlantic. And our kids, despite their quirky Anglo-American accents, are happy in school.
So that’s it. We were millimeters from achieving our five year plan. But the “constant growth” idea that I’d adopted was stopping me from seeing, much less enjoying, the success. Instead, I was focused on what’s next. How could I have MORE?
For years, I’ve told any entrepreneur who asked, that the key to not “losing the plot” in business is to take the time to enjoy the wins at work, no matter how big or small. Business, like life, can be a series of unrelenting highs and lows, and the grind can be exhausting. For me, success is sweetest when I take the time to lay dormant. To stop the pursuit of growth and enjoy the progress I’ve made so far, safe in the knowledge that the next growth spurt will come in due course.