Written by Lilach Bullock
The refused four-day week
I asked my employer for one day back a week after my daughter was born and they said no. I was a training manager by then, after years as a legal secretary, and the answer felt final in a way that made staying pointless. I did not have a plan, a website or a client. I had a refusal and a newborn, so I started working for myself as a virtual PA, at a point when fewer than a hundred of those businesses existed in the whole of the UK.
The first business
The work I could offer was small at first, typing and diary management for other people’s businesses instead of my own employer. Within what felt like months I had five women working in my kitchen and I was on the phone to ten different agencies asking them to send more people, because I could not keep up with the work coming in.
That business moved out of the kitchen and into offices. I was named Best Mumpreneur of the Year, had tea with the Prime Minister’s wife at 10 Downing Street, and eventually sold the business. None of that was in any plan the day I got told no. The plan was one afternoon of typing to cover the shopping, then another, then a business.
The wheelchair
Years later, after building a consultancy whose clients included IBM, Twitter and Dropbox, the pandemic hit and then my back, which had been giving warning shots for years, gave out completely. A herniated disc put me in a wheelchair. Type 2 diabetes followed, the weight piled on to morbid obesity, and the pain dragged in about two years of depression where I let almost everything go, including the business.
That is when I started asking myself plainly whether what scared me was a fact or just a story I was telling myself. Most of what I believed then, that I would never work again, that the pain was permanent, that the business was gone for good, turned out to be story rather than fact. The fact I could work with was smaller, a few more steps on a short walk, one meal without sugar in it.
The physical rebuild
I quit refined sugar completely, which for a chocolate addict made the first six weeks grim, and built from there. I lost 55 kilos. I went from the wheelchair to a walking stick, then walking further, then lifting weights, then hiking, and I run now. The diabetic markers reversed. None of it happened on a timetable I could have written down at the start, because there was no shortcut version on offer.
The business rebuild
These days the same check runs before I drop a client or change a price. It ran again when the sponsored income my website had earned for about a decade vanished inside a single quarter. The story on offer was that the site was finished and so was I. The fact was smaller and more workable, so I removed around 1,300 low-value pages, cleaned up the technical side of the site, and went back to publishing and emailing consistently. Passive income grew 573 percent between its lowest point in February and the end of July, and July alone included 37 completed paid jobs, not one large order carrying the whole number.
The same question ran through the wider rebuild of my consultancy after my pipeline collapsed following five hard years. I spent about 110 hours across several weekends building AI systems to cover work a team used to do, for publishing, the newsletter, and sales call preparation and follow-up. Revenue came back to 340 percent of where it had fallen to by the first quarter of this year, and the sales cycle shortened from 45 days to 18. Lately the same check has meant moving my own pricing from hourly to outcome-based work, because that was the fact sitting in front of me, not a fear about what clients might say when I raised it.
Author Bio:
Lilach Bullock is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.
