It’s my one year anniversary and I have one thing to share.

This week I am celebrating a business anniversary. It’s been 12 months since I opened the doors of ‘Jump on the Box’, a virtual membership community for small businesses.

One of the reasons I founded Jump on the Box was because I had been looking for a different way to share knowledge, skills and experience that I have built up over 30+ years.

Though it was important to me that the model and how this evolved could also allow me to participate in the process and be part of the community; to share in unlearning some of the stories that were not useful for me anymore. Particularly where I, like many others had become isolated by a second year of Covid 19 and in areas where I had got stuck with the same message on repeat.

There has been a lot of self-realisation, reflecting, sharing perspectives from us all and I could honestly fill the pages of a book with the whole story. Yet today, whilst I take a little bit of time to think about what I have learnt, in this one year, I want to just share one consideration.

After 20 years of managing a small company and its financial viability and sustainability, I really learnt the lesson that business isn’t about worrying and wasting time saying you can’t afford to do something.

It’s about asking yourself “when can I make this happen”, “when can I afford to get started and do this” and working on creating a robust business budget that gives you the answer to that and other questions.

I hadn’t intended and still don’t intend to turn ‘Jump on the Box’ into a big money-maker. I can see the numbers of how that could happen if I chose to start on that journey.

Nor have I wanted to grow its membership to the highest possible number I could imagine.

Jump on the Box is about connections and working together and learning together and from one another. It’s bringing the personal into business. Essentially, it’s about the formation and growth of supportive relationships, where a community, create safe virtual spaces to experiment. It’s a space to explore how we can test out our business ideas, those that stem from our chosen themes and areas that create challenges we need and want to unpack and explore.

How can I afford to do that, to invest in it if it doesn’t make money? Well, I do lots of other paid work in my business and it’s really important that there is a space like Jump on the Box where I can invest in me too and which is also available to me and others.

It’s also important to remember that when we create safe supportive spaces to work together, we build trust and rapport, we create synergy and some of us will form strong bonds. For me this has meant that, out of Jump on the Box ,I now have more than a handful of 1–1 business mentoring and coaching clients who chose to work with me and benefit from my client retainer strategy.

So, what’s next for Jump on the Box?

We’re about to embark on a two-month adventure building a strategy for each business who wants to take part and build their customer growth plan.

Then we have agreed on a spring and summer break. It feels okay to pause. To let the spring and summer and the relationships that have formed take their own shape in different directions.

I am excited about that and for me it’s another opportunity to sit in a different seat and look at the evolution of Jump on the Box and what might happen with it next.

That’s later on though. This week it’s all about celebrating.