Make it happen: The start-up guiding other start-ups to success

She didn’t quite bite the head off of that snake. In fact, she chopped it off with a long-handled scythe. And it was an accident – she actually has nothing against snakes. But all the same I would find her fearlessness and experience when it comes to dealing with potential peril reassuring if I happened to be seeking business coaching from “solopreneur” Sophie Clyde-Smith. She is a start-up specialising in guidance for start-ups.

Now 30, she was born and brought up in Jersey, where she has been known to swim in the middle of winter and once played netball for the island’s first team. She went to the University of Leeds to study biomedical science, but decided she didn’t fancy becoming a doctor or researcher and was drawn into recruitment instead. After a year with a company in Leeds, she swore she would never work in recruitment again and sought advice from a recruitment company in Jersey. But, despite her best intentions, they offered her a job and persuaded her to take it.

New Zealander Jeralie Pallot, CEO of Rowlands Recruitment, became her mentor. “I used to sit next to her,” Clyde-Smith says. “I absorbed everything from her – how she treated staff, how she spoke on the phone to clients.” But her boss also inspired her to go travelling in southeast Asia and Australia, which is how she came to end up beheading that poor old snake – while snipping off the lower leaves of banana trees on a farm in northern Queensland. She became a dab hand with killer spiders, too.

When she eventually came back to the UK, she realised she had to do something different with her life. “I often say to my clients, you’ve got your 9-5 job. But what’s your 5-9? What is your passion?” Sophie had been practising yoga and meditation and reading about wellness. So she signed up for a corporate wellness conference and pitched herself to a digital start-up, Welltodo, based in London, sharing wellness industry news online. She became their second full-time employee.

Her job consisted of doing practically everything, but one of her departments was “career coaching” to people seeking to transition into the wellness business. “It offers a lot of fulfilment to people,” she says. “Our main demographic was 25 to 40. I coached so many burned-out accountants and lawyers.”

She discovered she was good at helping people to re-purpose their skills. Her next step was to get a qualification in “Transformational Life Coaching”, which draws on psychology and cognitive science. “It’s about the mindsets that people have – and how to change that.”

Clyde-Smith found herself transformed. “I was being coached on all the things that were holding me back – my self-limiting beliefs. I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I didn’t believe in myself. I realised that none of those beliefs were true and I was being controlled by my fears.”

Based in Balham in south London, she started her solopreneur coaching as a side-hustle, evenings and weekends, and soon went full-time, adopting the “multi-hyphenated method”, which prioritises the ability to wear different hats (eg, actor-singer-songwriter-director). She soon realised that she was predominantly drawn to supporting other women who wanted to work for themselves and concentrated on giving them one-to-one coaching.

According to recent research by Freeagent, more than 50 per cent of Brits are planning to start their own business or go freelance. And for the first time more women than men (52.1 per cent to 50.2 per cent) are getting entrepreneurial. The solopreneur found herself hosting events in London with 80 women or more. “I loved bringing people together,” she says.

Then all those face-to-face meetings were suddenly put on hold by the pandemic. In the wake of lockdown, she set up a subscription service, the “Make It Happen Membership”, that enabled women to meet virtually every Monday, partly to combat loneliness but also to work on strategy and mindset.  “The idea is to take the ‘solo’ out of solopreneurship,” says Clyde-Smith. “Your beliefs can bolster you up or they can drag you down. You can be a cheerleader or you can be a critic.”

She also gives due attention to the “money mindset”, getting her clients to price their services at the right level. “Women tend to undersell themselves.” She works with people who are “mission-led”, driven by passion and a desire to help others. “The challenge is to get them to charge properly for their services.”

Sophie Clyde-Smith is now living in Jersey again and on the verge of motherhood, but looking forward to developing a hybrid on-and-off-line approach, with one foot in Jersey and another in London. She reckons that her coaching puts the emphasis on what she calls “soulful business planning”. She gets her followers to move away from “comparisons and expectations and people-pleasing” and to think more about the way in which they really want to work. “I’ve known people create a beast of a business – and they burn out. They have to create a business that fits with their lives.” She follows her own advice too. “I get to walk my dog whenever I like and am no longer slave to the commute.”

Emma Davies, professionally known as “E. M. M. A.”, the multi-hyphenated musician-producer-composer of Indigo Dream, is one of those who has made the transition from employee (in PR) to self-employed creative under Sophie Clyde-Smith’s solopreneurial wing. “Since joining the Membership,” she says, “I have had many small breakthroughs which who knows when I would have landed on otherwise. Our weekly check-ins have made me more aware of self-imposed obstacles to progress. I've realised that working on overcoming limiting beliefs involves training the mind every day.”

E. M. M. A. says her technique has been to visualise what she would like her business to look like in three months’ time and work backwards from there, in small, achievable, tangible steps. “I’ve learned the difference between setting ego-based goals, which come from a place of lacking, and making soul-based goals, which inspire and excite you to grow your business.”