north star metrics don't have to be about your business

I was recently interviewed by an MBA student, as part of an academic research study into how micro business owners and sole traders like me 'do' resilience.

During that conversation the topic of north star metrics came up - if you're not familiar with this, it's the concept that there's an overarching single KPI or target that everything in your business is related to achieving (i.e. being the no1 college in England; maintaining 5* review average amongst customers; etc).

I shared how mine was not to do with my business, but rather being able to keep supporting my family: when I started my (mis)adventures in self-employment in 2005 I was my family's sole breadwinner. Which meant all parts of my business were focussed on earning enough money to support ourselves as a household. Then in 2017 I started my unpaid caring adventures for what's now become several family members, which means that all the decisions I make in/about my business now have to relate to how I can keep financially paying the rent whilst also having the flexibility to support their changing and evolving needs.

This isn't perhaps uncommon for people who are self employed to have their work and personal life so intertwined. But the conversation made me wonder about what might happen if we started to be less polarised in general about conversations that relate to our work and 'life' - after all, for many of us, there's a constant re-mixing of how we can best honour our responsibilities to our employers/clients, and those to our families.

This isn't just an abstract idea, but one based in recent research from Carers UK, showing how the family circumstances of 600 people every day are changing in ways that mean they can't find ways to find the new 'mix' they need, and so are forced to quit their jobs:

https://www.carersuk.org/press-releases/research-more-than-600-people-quit-work-to-look-after-older-and-disabled-relatives-every-day/   

There's a cliched adage that 'we manage what we measure', so if we started to measure family and life metrics of our people within our financial and other performance metrics as businesses, might we see more engaged workforces that are also easier to retain the skill and talent of?

happiness as a freelancer

Amongst the messages in my inbox last month that landed on world happiness day (20th march 2026), was a question: what makes you (me) happy as a freelancer?

Happiness may not be as easy to spot as you might think?

I initially thought it would be easy to run off a long list, but quickly realised that my first ideas were actually more about how freelancing means I'm able to be more useful and helpful to others than I might be able to if I were salaried - but does that make me happy?

So I recast my eyes and mind over the list I'd started to compile and found 3:

3 types of happy

1) chances to travel - and if I'm lucky, with enough slack around timings with clients and train timetables to allow me to briefly dip into a new museum or gallery (as those things make me happy). However, as my unpaid caring responsibilities have grown over the last 8 years, there's increasingly less opportunity for me to be able to travel around the country as easily as I once did...

2) Working From Home means I more easily surround myself with plants than I'd be able to in an employer's offices.

3) the variety of clients and work I do means that while there'll always be some that I start to struggle with / don't enjoy the work so much, at least I know that they're not my full time, ongoing work (as some people have to face each day with bullying colleagues, and work they don't enjoy, but need to remain in to afford to pay rent, etc).

Happiness is there as a freelancer - but you may have to work to find it 

So - happiness: it can be an elusive thing, and maybe the moral is that it's on us to work on making sure we can recognise it when it happens, and try to actively create ways in which we can keep reminding ourselves about it on a daily basis (especially if we're also amongst the approaching 1 million freelancers / sole traders who are also unpaid carers).

As always - credit to people where it's due for prompting my blog posts. In this instance its Jenny Holliday, who's post on world happiness day prompted me to reflect on the above:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191264082