EP.13 Remember Why You Started

What happens when your lived experiences don't just shape your life, but change the way you do business? Welcome back to Running in the Dark – the podcast about business, not running. We're kicking off Season Two with the incredible Charlotte Dawson, an interior designer and business owner who lives with KT syndrome. Running one business is challenging enough, but Charlotte runs two, all while navigating life with a chronic health condition. What makes Charlotte's story particularly powerful isn't just her extraordinary resilience. It's how she's taken her personal experiences and brought them into her professional life, creating a design business where empathy, understanding and accessibility are at the heart of what she does. Alongside her interior design business, Charlotte also runs a design mentorship programme, guiding people through their own home renovations and giving them the knowledge and confidence to bring their ideas to life. In this episode, we explore business, resilience and the value of lived experience, challenging the idea that there's only one way to build a successful business. Because sometimes the experiences that make our lives more complicated can also give us a completely different perspective on the world. This is Running in the Dark. Real businesses. Real people. Real conversations. Find out more about Charlotte: Interior Design: https://www.instagram.com/chestnutinteriordesign Renovation Room Design Mentorship: https://www.instagram.com/renovation.room  

Running in the Dark is back for Season Two Running in the Dark is a podcast about business, not running. And this season, we're shining a light on something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough: running a business while living with chronic illness, disabilities and other health stuff.  I'm Katherine George, a business owner living with Sjögren's Disease. For a long time, I thought I was pretty alone in navigating the challenges of running a business alongside a chronic health condition. It turns out, I was wrong. In Season Two, I'm joined by business owners and entrepreneurs who share their experiences of building businesses while managing chronic illnesses and ongoing health challenges. We're talking about the realities, the difficult days, the unexpected challenges, the successes and everything in between. We're not pretending it's easy. Just honest conversations about business, health and how we manage both.  Listen to the trailer, subscribe to Running in the Dark and join us for Season Two.

Everyone thinks when you’re working hard at running your business that you will have loads of money. The reality is often very different. In this episode, Katherine highlights the times when you will have no money as a business owner, as well as ways to prepare for them. Cash flow issues are the obvious one, but there's another time you will have less money that is rarely talked about, and often forgotten. 

It happens to all of us. It’s the... “while you’re at it, could you...?” conversation that happens when you’re already halfway through a project or completing a service. Sometimes it’s a five-minute job, often it’s not, and you end up working extra for free. In this episode, Katherine explains the key to handling potential client creep – it's simpler than you might expect. 

In this open and honest interview with Katherine, Lyssa-Fêe Crump shares her story, her experience living with a number of health challenges including PoTS, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and Narcolepsy, and balancing these alongside her success in her professional life.  Lyssa's Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyssafeecrump/ https://www.instagram.com/lyssacrump/ https://hiyield.co.uk/ https://www.potsuk.org/ https://www.ehlers-danlos.org/ https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/

In the first of the interview episodes focusing on entrepreneurs who are balancing career success with health challenges, Katherine has volunteered as tribute to go first. Diagnosed with Sjogren’s Disease in 2022, she discusses how she has grown her business and how her health has impacted on how she's managed her agency since her diagnosis.

When you are running your own business, it’s important to remember one thing: the reason why you started. This reason is personal to you, whether you want to escape the 9-5, spend more time with your family or something else, but it should be something you remind yourself of frequently. In this episode, Katherine expands on this and explains why this is crucial as an entrepreneur. 

It sounds obvious, but it is crucial as a business owner to actually take a break, book a holiday or give yourself time to rest. In this episode Katherine emphasises the importance of setting boundaries, avoiding burnout and making time to live your life away from work. 

Your business is growing, developing and, from the outside, everything looks amazing. But, with growth comes change, and what happens when you actually start to fall out of love with your business, your work is giving you anxiety and you actually dread showing up to work? It’s rarely spoken about, but Katherine shares her very real experience of this, and how she changed things in order to fall back in love with her business again. 

It happens to everyone in business. You’ve discussed a project or service, talked about prices and even sent the final confirmation and then – poof! - the customer ghosts you. You chase, you reach out, but you get nothing back. At some point down the line, they suddenly reappear and want to start tomorrow. In this episode Katherine shares how to handle this very common situation, rather than let panic set in.