It was my thirty-sixth birthday, July 2011. I spent most of the day alone at my dining room table, typing up a report on a laptop computer, and apart from one person in the morning, spoke to no-one all day.
I had ended a troublesome relationship not long before; she was difficult and the relationship was corrosive, but many good things came of it. Not least of which was that I had, with her encouragement, set up my own business as a Chartered Building Surveyor in Mat 2011. Whilst I am suspicious of her motives in encouraging me to do so, in fairness she may only have had good intentions – she too was self-employed. That she was also impossible to live with is another story.
Suffice it to say that by mid-July, just two and a half months after quitting my job and becoming self-employed, I was alone. Gloriously, wonderfully alone, not having to apologise for existing or failing to read the thoughts of another. Able to see who I wanted to see, and generally do as I pleased.
Of course, there was the small issue of money. I had none coming in, and my savings were dwindling fast. The thing about setting up any kind of consultancy is that it takes three to five years to really get established – and that’s in good economic times. This was during the crash, and establishing a property based consultancy was either brave or foolhardy, I don’t know which. I still don’t know, for what it’s worth, but I seem to be making a living.
My previous contracts of employment expressly forbade me from contacting clients of my former employers, and so I had to start from scratch. May and June had both come and gone with not a sniff of work, and I was starting to worry; I had contacted a recruitment agency in the hope of getting contract work, so that I could operate as a freelance as well as for myself, and was offered an interview at their nearby offices, an offer that I accepted. I had also approached the various estate agents in my town, although I’ve never had much joy from them – they are too concerned that I might find something wrong with a property they are trying to sell, so they don’t like to encourage purchasers to get a full structural survey carried out.
That said, I had also contacted Peter, the mortgage broker who had helped me get my own mortgage three years previously. He was a genial man, and had said that, should I ever decide to go it alone, he might be able to help - and so he was one of the first people I contacted. And in early July, I received a phone call, and had my first instruction – a structural survey for a terraced house in North London.
I arranged to visit the house, and went and carried out my inspection the day before my birthday. The following day, I woke early, walked into town and bought myself a comb-binder – possibly the most mundane birthday present I have ever bought myself. I then went home, and spent the rest of the day, until about 8pm, writing up my report, printing it out and binding it.
Now, I’ll grant that this wasn’t exactly thrilling; sat at home at my dining room table, writing a rather dull survey report – and on my birthday, to boot. It wasn’t the day or that activity that mattered – it was what it meant. Because it meant was that I was underway; a new life in which I would be beholden to none but myself lay ahead of me. It meant that I was self-employed, not unemployed. It meant that I would no longer have office politics to contend with – something that had caused me problems in previous employment. It meant that I would now have more freedom than I had had before – and more responsibility. It meant that I was as independent as a working man can be.
I’m still self-employed; and I really do not think that I could stand to go back to working for someone else.
Ben Nairn.
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