Going it Alone Revisited - 20 Years Later

Some 20+ years ago, I penned a short post introducing a series of Q&A-style interviews with a handful of online friends who were self-employed. The desire? To peek under the hood of what it took to “Go it Alone” and get some advice from those that had. In the months that followed, I left one job, started another, binned that off and took the leap myself, moving from employed to self-employed, starting Nine Four in August 2005 just as my second daughter was born.

In the rollercoaster that has been the two decades since (the sale of Nine Four, divorce, family separation, becoming a single parent and discovering love and marriage again), I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with a number of those that took part in that initial interview series.

While running Nine Four I collaborated with Darren Miller, Craig Grannell and David Longworth and later, after selling Nine Four in 2015 and returning to the world of full time employment with one of my largest clients, my paths crossed again with Darren Miller (who eventually joined us as an employee) and Jon Hicks who worked with us on branding.

I look back with great fondness on the 10 years where I was self-employed through Nine Four, and I’m incredibly proud to see my old colleague Paul Cripps continue to fly the flag for the brand name that reflected the two numbers on the door of the house I lived in when it all started.

Having recently resurrected my old blog from the Way Back Machine with a little help from our agentic friends, I’ve spent a lot of time trawling over old blog posts (it’s something of a nostalgic fever dream!), and with more than 10 years of “employee” status now back under my belt - it’s probably natural to find myself reflecting on that chapter of my life through a fresh lens.

And what of the five that I spoke to back in 2005? What happened for them… some of it I know, but not all, and I’m intrigued to find out how they would reflect on the Q&A interview from 2005, and where work and life took them in the intervening period.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll share the output here on my blog, and maybe (just maybe— if I can relocate Paul Farnell) we’ll revisit that extra bonus Q&A too.

In the interim, cast your eyes back over the original series, a flashback to the mid noughties.., the year that YouTube launched, Reddit became a thing and Web 2.0 went mainstream.

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