the best thing about Atomicon isn't Atomicon..?

There's an annual national event called 'Atomicon' that lots of small business owners and freelancers like me rave about, for how it's energised and enabled them to give themselves the kickstart they needed to launch their new thing, chase the dream client, or generally just do more of what they love (but never felt able to before).

It's geared around a very big day out for people, with multiple stages, speakers from across celebrity, different sectors, etc - and I've always booked a ticket to it for the last 3 years (including having already advance bought my ticket for next years' already too). But I've never signed up to it for the big day event. Because over the last 3 years, I've found that the official speaker line up doesn't really do anything for me - so surely it seems bonkers that I'd buy a ticket for something I don't get anything from?

The part of Atomicon that's better than Atomicon

But there's part of Atomicon that happens in the run up which is far more low key in comparison, and can be easy to miss - a week of on-line 'round tables', where people who've bought a ticket to attend can offer to host a 1-hour gathering around a topic of their choice: either as presentation with Q&A; open discussion; or other creative formats within the time.

And you don't know what there will be in that week, or who'll be leading them, until a few weeks before they happen.

In all of the 3 years I've been doing Atomicion, I've found these round tables have offered a real 'lucky dip' in terms of experience, insight, encouragement, and practical stuff - but I've always remembered and valued far more from these than I have any of the main day big name presentations (so much so, that I've written some of them up from previous years: https://thirdsectorexpert.blogspot.com/2024/07/blending-running-business-with-being.html). 

Another reason I'll never be (allowed to) attend Atomicon in person?

I know this sentiment may not land that well with the organisers of Atomicon - or even some of my peers who I know make the pilgrimage each year for the big day event. But as I'm already never able to attend the event in person owing to a social media post from several years ago that involved my mankini (the day's sessions are live streamed and recorded for watch again later for other people who can't attend in person for all sorts of other legitimate reasons), I figured what else have I got to loose?

How you can get in on the action

If it sounds like I've piqued your interest in this event, the lovely Andrew and Pete who are behind it all offer a discounted pricing scheme (the further ahead you buy your ticket, the cheaper it is) - and the next Atomicon in 2027 is in Manchester, on Friday 2nd July - with tickets available through this link: https://atomic.site/?aap=363 *

*other ticket links are available, but if you use this one here, I may be able to get a small recognition from Andrew and Pete, which I can put towards the costs of the stamps I need to buy, in order to be able to post Christmas cards this year...

 

Is social becoming less enterprising and more charitable?

Some people may know that I like both data and legal forms (amongst other things). I can play with both in isolation, but I particularly like combining the two because of the new insights it can offer us.

Each year I try to check in with the respective regulatory bodies who oversee the principal legal forms in use in the social economy (Charities, CICs, Companies, and Co-operative Societies), to skim through their annual reports and pull out the latest numbers on formations and dissolutions.

changing trends in who's registering what form

I share visual charts of these numbers in workshops I deliver on legal forms - not to try and influence people's choices about what they should 'be', but to offer an additional and alternative perspective that can help prompt more critical thoughts and questions so that they can ultimately be more comfortable and confident in whatever they end up being. I've been tracking this data since 2017 (nearly 10 years), and this years' spreadsheets highlight:

• the long-term trend for 'sustainability' (how likely you are to be wound up based on your legal form) shows CICs and Companies remaining roughly equal with about 12% of each being de-registered each year. This compares to charities and co-operative societies that are wound up at 3% each.

• But what's seemed to 'jump out' this year is the figures for 2025 compared to the previous trends: new CICs have been registered at a rate that's 20% higher compared to 2024, with no change in companies, (and a halving of the rate at which new co-operative societies have been registered). But the registration of new charities was double what it was in the previous year.

Which means if we're using legal forms as a proxy indicator (of sorts) to understand what social enterprises and social entrepreneurs are experiencing in their business models, this seems to suggest that there's a growing difficulty in their generating traded revenue (hence the static or reduction in the growth of 2 of the 3 legal forms that are designed to encourage trade), and a growing need for financial support in the form of maximising eligibility for grants and reducing tax liabilities (based on the doubling of new charities being registered).

less faith in the social enterprise model?

Most of us in the sector are aware of it being the worst time in living memory with regards to being successful in grant funding applications, but with wider economic pressures that we've seen growing over the last year, are we starting to also see the trading models that new social enterprises are considering reflecting this pessimism in marketplaces too? 

As always, I don't post and share these notes as a definitive position, but to offer perspectives that may hopefully help us have better conversations - and better conversations can help us create better impact (and can also include me changing my mind, as I have in the past!). 

After 20 years its time to report less impact

I've always been an advocate of social impact reporting, ever since I first stumbled across its concepts in the 1990s.

This has meant that over the last 3 decades I've helped to develop and pilot new national reporting frameworks and toolkits, deliver masterclasses for enterprises and commissioners, and be invited to share my ideas and thinking with national conferences. It's also seen me develop a framework for reporting my own business' impact, the latest of which marks 20 years of this commitment.

And for anyone who's followed my self-reporting journey, you'll be aware that what it convers has expanded over the years - from 2 numbers and a sentence on a webpage in 2006 to a 37 page report in 2025, that's been commended by the Institute of Social Value, and Social Value International.

But this year, as well as it trying to consider the full and total scope of my impact over a 20-year period, it's also the start of my deliberately starting to make it smaller (not just in page count, but also in what I'm considering in it).

Using a milestone year as an excuse to pause and reflect

Last year was the 20th anniversary of my business' startup, and I made a decision that year to try and start taking it more seriously (on the basis that over 90% of start ups don't make it this far, and my working in ways that seem to run counter to accepted wisdom for most of this time; I also never meant to become self-employed to begin!).

And with my impact report being a key tool through which I reflect on my business model, activities, and ways of working, it's 20th anniversary is also a timely point to do some serious navel gazing too.

Changing needs and pressures

As some will know, as well as being self-employed (one of the worst things you can apparently do for your mental and financial wellbeing based on various studies), I'm also an unpaid carer for several immediate family members (also one of the worst things you can do for your mental, physical, and financial health, based on other studies).

This means that over the last few years I've had to start to uncouple myself from communities and working practices I've helped to grow and support, to try and best re-mix the need to keep earning to cover the rent (as it increases each year) with honouring my caring responsibilities (which keep changing over time). I'm increasingly having to make hard choices about what I invest not only my time, but also energy, in as a person and business - and if I can't clearly identify that it has a good chance of making a return (income) in the next 3-6 months, then regrettably I'm having to step away for the time being.

This isn't a choice that I like, nor want to make - but I also know it's one that many others in similar circumstances to me are also being forced to make, based on my occasional efforts to speak out/up for the hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers who are also self employed.

Becoming less social?

But to come back to the focus of this post - I've decide to remove the considerations I used to include for how what i did across different social media channels, have been contributing to wider impacts amongst people who engaged with them.

This isn't because I've fallen out of love with social media - but rather that I've realised that when I started to create my profiles across it 15 years ago, and then built habits around these, none of what I've done there has ever related to my being awarded contracts or generating new leads. Which brings me back to my earlier point about having to increasingly cut back on things that aren't directly helping me to pay the rent or support family members.

I'm not quitting these spaces altogether; but I am deliberately stepping back from many of the habits I'd built up in how I use and participate in them. And as this means less social media activity, then it seems only right that my wider reporting reflect this by not continuing to include consideration for something I'm not being deliberate about?

I may be back, but am still here now.

As with everything I try out, I'll be returning to revisit the decision to try this experiment in next years' annual impact report - but for now, I can still be reached through all the usual channels.

But please go check out this years' latest impact report (which includes a dedicated section on what 20 years of impact looks like), and let me know what you make of it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JcCFirEsoGTWA3CtdkICxValzJtiLpbK/view?usp=drive_link 

does delaying gratification make you more resilient?

I've recently been reflecting on my resilience practices (and how these have changed since I started out in 2005), as part of being a case study in a university research project about sole traders and micro business owners.

This has involved several in-depth interviews, and one of the question prompts in these about work/life balance pointedly asked me about what things make me happy in my life (when I'm not working). After I initially started to reference a few things, I quickly realised that I rarely (if ever) get to spend time in/on them as I want to, since the start of my parallel adventures as an unpaid carer (which started in Sept 2017). Which is why you might spot me stockpiling books and Lego sets - not because I'm ignoring them, but on basis of delayed gratification.

Various studies highlight how being able to defer our pleasure that we might otherwise indulge in today can actually help us generate more longer term future success (search for 'the marshmallow test' for the science and research). And these interviews made me realise how such delayed gratification has become a core strategy in my resilience - being able to image a future state in which I am enjoying those things that I can't now is a large part of helping me better keep pulling myself forward to the end of today and to be able to start tomorrow (especially when things are tougher than we'd care to admit...).

But I'm curious to know if such approaches feature in other people's thinking and actions as to how they build resilience in their businesses and for themselves (or do people turn more to immediate fixes like cheese boards and going for runs?).

    

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 

    

more reasons why I'm an Iolite gemstone

Last year, I talked a lot about how my business was like a toilet (and why that was a good thing).

This year, I'm likening it to an iolite gemstone.

And after some more recent researches about this gemstone, I think it's still a substance that represents me well - 

* it's strongly associated with helping people navigate uncertain spaces (the Vikings used it on cloudy days to help them find the sun) - something I regularly do through my work with clients and in my research/policy efforts;

* it's forged in metamorphic rocks in areas of high pressure (some may recall my 'tubthumping' revelations last year which show some of the challenges that I've endured in getting my business to where it is today);

* it's mythical and ritualistic associations see it stimulating vision and creativity, and enhancing insight (another feature of what I do through my facilitation practices with different groups, and in my consultancy work).

So - this year, I'm definitely an iolite gemstone; but I'm curious to know what jewel might best reflect your business or organisation?