I’m not in the mood for whimsical listicles right now
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The anniversary almost came and went unnoticed. My head is buzzing with so much other stuff at the moment that the 1st of July 2025 was almost upon me before I realised.
It’s an important date in the calendar because it marks 10 years to the day since I commenced my life in self-employment by strolling down to the Austrian Chamber of Commerce on Vienna’s upmarket Stubenring to register the two trades I intended to pursue: translation and PR/marketing.
It wasn’t the plan
I should probably make it clear at this point that self-employment hadn’t ever been part of my career plan. Quite the contrary: I had always assumed that I would spend most of my professional life taking someone else’s orders in an office. I would slowly but steadily climb the corporate ladder right to the top where I would crown my glittering career by…being able to give other people orders.
It didn’t work out like that. I hated corporate life almost from the off but kept on with it because I didn’t know what else to do. And frankly – just to be upfront about my own shallowness – I liked the money, the lifestyle and the status.
I always knew that this phase in my working life had a sell-by date and had blithely set that for turning 30, but that birthday came and went and I still wasn’t anywhere near having a plan for changing career to something that suited me better.
In the end, the change was precipitated not by the smooth implementation of a well thought-out plan, but through the medium of utter desperation. In spring 2015, I found myself in a job I could no longer stand and had to get out – NOW. I quit without having any other job lined up, or any real idea of where to go next. But one thing was clear: my always unloved legal career was over – for good.
With no clear path forward or appealing options apparent in the employed world, I took the spontaneous (or kamikaze?) decision to strike out on my own and set up as a freelance legal translator.
Proud of passing this milestone
10 years on, I’m amazed and so proud of myself that I’ve got this far. It’s incredible to say that I never considered self-employment a genuine option until I actually took the plunge.
My core business of legal translation took off right away and I continued to earn a nice (if modest) living from it until AI as good as killed it in about 2023, leaving me with the prospect of post editing for a living. I’ll happily do a bit of post-editing every now and again – but I knew I didn’t want to spend my working life like that. I watched on as my translation business shrivelled away like a sweet wrapper tossed on a fire.
At the same time, I knew that I could never return to the world of employment. I’d had too much freedom now. And I know how critical my own professional autonomy is to my sense of wellbeing and happiness. It’s at the core of my identity and animates and informs everything I do. In the absence of a religious affiliation, I would even go so far as to say that freedom is my faith.
Conclusion: I had to find something new to do to earn a living. My choice fell on search engine optimisation, a field which I’d been dabbling in already for several years.
And so it was that I began recasting my entire business and work life.
Christ, I had no idea just how hard it would be.
No whimsical retrospectives today
So you’ll forgive me if, on this significant day, I elect not to produce the kind of light-hearted listicle that one might otherwise write upon reaching such a milestone. One full of light-hearted wit and pearls of wisdom of the “believe in your vision” variety tossed merrily back to those considering the plunge into self-employment.
I’m just not in that kind of space right now. I’m feeling too bloody mashed.
In fact, I think there’s just one piece of wisdom that I feel like passing on right now. And it doesn’t feel much like a pearl at all – more like a stone that I’m lobbing into a pond for the hell of it:
After 10 years of self-employment, I’ve only just become a real businesswoman or – dare I say it? – an entrepreneur.
Language matters
Language matters when it comes to professional titles, and there was quite a menu on offer when I chose how to describe myself as a legal translator. I decided with purpose and clarity that I would be a “freelance legal translator”. I also felt comfortable saying that “I owned/ran my own translation business” or “I’m self employed as a legal translator”.
The label “entrepreneur” left me cold. On the one hand, this had a lot to do with the epic levels of wankiness which was going on at the time around startup culture. Everyone with half an idea, an overexcited investor and some garish eyewear seemed to be an “entrepreneur” and I couldn’t be doing with that herd mentality. I did, however, fully enjoy the irony of all these people running blindly after the startup craze while bleating out Steve Jobs’ “think different” phrase and not seeing the contradiction.
But I digress.
I did not feel entitled to call myself an entrepreneur. It was a gross inflation of the reality of my working life as a translator.
While I felt I filled the core requirement of being an entrepreneur – creating a functioning business out of nothing and earning a living off it on a sustained basis – how my translation business was built and how it worked were neither independent nor creative enough to fully justify the title.
Getting the money rolling – at a price
When I skidded out of employment into the translation business and needed to get the money coming in, the first thing I did was to write to translation agencies, applying as you would for a normal job.
If I passed a translation test and signed an NDA, it was fairly easy to get entered into their systems. Once I’d successfully jumped over those hurdles, I could just wait for the work to come in. Which it did, pretty much straight away. Legal translation was a niche in the market that still wasn’t properly filled and, with my background and practical experience in law, I found I was in demand. Sometimes, I’d have five jobs lined up and have to reject other requests. I was off to the races! It was great.
The downside to this ease of business acquisition was that I got paid a lot less than the price of the translation: the agency and the revisors of the work obviously took their cut too. Also, getting enough work to live off required you to be highly online and available. If you were sent an offer, you had to be damned quick and accept it or it would be snapped up by someone else. And by “quick”, I mean really quick – sometimes waiting 5 minutes was too long.
Not a dignified way to work or live
My working life became a story of sitting at the computer all day, afraid to go anywhere lest an offer come in when I was away. I felt like some desperate woman perched by the phone waiting for her wholly indifferent crush to call. It was degrading and anxiety-inducing. Not to mention infuriating: once, I missed an offer by just going to the toilet.
While I did have several direct customers who were much nicer (and more lucrative) to work for, for the duration of my life as a translator, the bulk of my work came through agencies. I always wanted to get away, but never quite managed it. If nothing else, the fact that I stuck this out for 7 years is the ultimate proof of how pathologically averse I was and am to the concept of regular employment.
And it was a source of shame. I never let on to friends or business colleagues that this was the way I was working, finding ways to avoid or cover up the issue.
A brutal but liberating truth
Having written all of that, it is to state the absolutely bloody obvious that the freedom that I’d imagined in self-employment didn’t materialise for me while I was working in that framework.
In fact, it forced me into admitting a truth which was at once highly unpleasant and truly liberating: as a translator, I had never been any more than half-employed. I was still at someone’s beck and call, but without the security of a salary or the guarantee of work. I was only taking half the risk, but only reaping half of the reward. A lot of the time, it was quite literally thankless. It was not entrepreneurship.
Earning my self-employment stripes
Perhaps the better way of looking at my translator life was as a “starter business”. A semi-controlled environment where I could earn my self-employment spurs before progressing to more challenging projects and businesses.
Which is where I am now. In SEO, there is no easy way forward – you don’t just register with an agency and wait for work. You’ve got to do the hard yards of customer acquisition yourself in a highly competitive and rapidly changing technological landscape where the rules of the game change almost every week.
It’s exciting. It’s tough. I often feel overwhelmed. I don’t know if it will work out long term. But that’s why I now feel fully entitled and justified in calling myself an entrepreneur.
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Related articles:
Building a new career in your 40s – this much I know
Work email etiquette – my personal dos and don’ts
I went out shopping and got busted by my own midlife crisis
On returning to writing after a success
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Image: David Cohen on Unsplash