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Salary Story: I Left My £75k Salary To Start A Business For Myself

In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.

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Age: 32
Location: Manchester
Current industry and job title: Influencer Marketing, Founder & Fractional COO
Current salary: £65,000
Number of years employed since school or university: Nine

Starting salary: £18,000 in 2015
Biggest salary jump: from £30,000 to £60,000 in 2021
Biggest salary drop: £75,000 to £0 in 2022

Biggest negotiation regret: When you are in the earlier stages of your career and doing more entry level roles there is usually not much room to negotiate anything substantial but that being said it sucks to be paid less than your peers for the same job role. I was promoted with a pay rise from £24,000 to £30,000, only to realise that others in my team were actually on £35,000 for the same role. It was around the start of COVID so I felt lucky to still have a job and settled a bit too quickly. That bit extra would have made a real difference to me at the time. Also don’t under-estimate the wider package at the company. Many of my friends now in their 30s really value decent pension contributions when at 22 we definitely weren’t considering these things properly.

Best salary advice: Treat yourself like a business. Approach any salary or progression conversation armed with data about your performance. If you have regular one-to-ones with your manager try and keep a structure around the conversation and where you can document outcomes. Keeps accountability between you both and it should be clear where and what the next promotion is. Look at the same role in the industry and do some benchmarking against that.

Something that is becoming more and more common are businesses valuing their employees being an extension of their own brand through social media content. Particularly in start-up tech, media and marketing you see a lot of people doing “employee generated content”. It really helps develop your own network and personal brand which can do a lot of heavy lifting for you when looking to move jobs or demonstrate the added value you can bring to your current role. Your career requires strategy and long term planning and I firmly believe the future of work will mean that those with personal brands have more of an edge when it comes to formal discussions around pay, progress and opportunities.

My first job out of university was £18,000 as a programme assistant in the events industry. I got this job around three months after I graduated. There was no scope for negotiation as I was so fresh to the job market but I did really enjoy the role. Plus, to go from being a broke student to £18,000 a year meant I felt rich. A year later I was made redundant.
I secured this role as programme manager within a few weeks of being made redundant from my last job and this was a competitor company who were keep to secure the skills and knowledge from my previous company so offered me more. I also inflated my role and salary during the interview process to secure this step up in role and salary to £24,000. I stayed in this job for three years, despite hating it from around the first year.
I loved this job and making the move from the events industry to tech, so I took a role that was a little lower than what I should have taken (but on the same £24,000 salary). The training I received more than made up for it though as I had a Scrum Master qualification paid for and had the opportunity to travel to the USA twice a year.
I stepped up into this role at the same company because I was now qualified to take on bigger and better projects. COVID hit and I kept my job and got promoted (taking my salary to £30,000) so I started to feel like I was actually saving money — for the first time in my life I had a little bit of savings. By industry standards I was being paid less than what a Scrum Master in another tech company would have got but I just loved this place and didn’t want to leave.
I’m a strong believer in formal and informal mentorship. I was fortunate that a female colleague two positions above me would give me her time to talk to me about business structures, strategy and a lot around the concept of “managing up”. She gave me really valuable insights into the way C-suite executives operate, how they think and how to position myself as presenting value whenever I could. This allowed me to have more effective conversations with seniors and get good exposure to them. By the time it came to interviewing for this position (at the same company) I had laid good ground work and was clear about what I was bringing to the table. Some of the best advice I got when it comes to negotiating is to be clear, direct and don’t over explain. Money can be very emotive especially if it is you asking for it, so hold your nerve. I secured £10,000 more than I expected.
I left my last company because I had got everything I could out of it and moved into another tech company. I managed to secure another pay rise to £75,000, but it still fell within industry standards for this role. However it did not live up to expectations and found it an awful place to work and so I found myself leaving after two months.
After feeling pretty burned and upset by how my last job had gone, I decided to try working for myself and live off the savings I had built up. I had always wanted to set up my own business and I was pretty familiar with the influencer marketing industry. I knew this was a company I could set up without too much cost.

I’ve been doing it for five months now and have only just started to show signs of generating an income for myself. It is scary not having a guaranteed income and such hard work, but I am so proud of myself for leaving behind what was a very good salary to try and create something for myself.

I used all my savings to support myself and was very fortunate to have a super supportive boyfriend at the time who picked up the financial slack some months. I owe a debt of gratitude for all the support he provided both emotionally and financially during this time. 

The salary I am currently working for myself is not as high as when I was a PAYE employee elsewhere, but I would take working for myself any day of the week. The flexibility and growth I have experienced has been the biggest of my career so far. I believe that working for yourself fundamentally changes your brain and you approach work and business differently. It was a really tough learning curve for me being totally self reliant and the realisation that if I don’t show up for my business nothing happens was quite overwhelming at times. But I am so proud of how far I have come and there truly is nothing more satisfying that knowing I truly earned every penny.

I started making money from around the six-month mark of beginning my business, but not significant amounts or consistently. It took around 16 months to reach this point I’m at now and I keep a few months worth of salary in my business account to ensure I can continue to pay myself just in case. I have several different types of income streams within the business which has stabilised my income and reduced my level of cash flow stress massively. From talent management to running influencer campaigns, to consultancy and advisory work.

My advice to anyone starting out is to have a core offering and revenue model but also look to have additional streams that can prop you up too. If one client doesn’t pay, you don’t want that to be make or break for your business. I once pursued a client for five months to get paid for work which was awful. 

Also, I’m currently looking to buy my first property as a solo buyer, and it’s been harder to do that as a new business owner. I’ve had to build up my savings, evidence income from tax returns and show future earning potential. I’ll be so proud of myself when it’s done but I’d advise anyone in a similar position to find a mortgage specialist in self-employed or business directors, and to speak to them earlier than you think to get an idea of the supporting evidence you’ll need for your application. 

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