The Freelancer Life: Meet Matthew Knight
Meet Matthew, a freelance creative strategist and innovator who works directly with businesses to help them take steps in to the future. He’s also the founder of Leapers, a support community for the mental health of the self-employed.
Our paths crossed with Matthew as The Doers and Leapers share a lot of the same values around freelance mental health, community over competition and a passion for beating freelance loneliness. One thing led to another and Matthew invited both Laura and Jess to take part in his recently launched podcast ‘No More Watercooler’. A lovely long chat later we covered everything from collaboration (our motto for 2020), working when pregnant and how to maintain a divide between work life and real life, to how we support our growing network of Doers and our We Don’t Do Lonely Days. We’re all dead chuffed with the results - head over to Leapers to have a listen.
As we chatted so much about our experiences we thought it was only fair to return the favour and find out more about Matthew and his freelance world. Matthew has a wealth of experience and is a real asset to the freelance community, his advice for anyone thinking about going freelance or working for themselves is solid gold, so let’s get stuck in.
“Ensuring that you are working well is critical, but often gets de-prioritised, after finding work, invoicing, doing the work, doing the accounts, all the other stuff that makes up life”
Tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do and how long you have been doing it for.
Hello, I’m Matthew Knight - I’m a freelance strategist, and have been working for about 25 years. I started out as a technologist, moved into the creative industries, and most recently - work directly with businesses who want to take steps in to the future.
Why did you first become a freelancer?
This is my second time freelancing - the first time around was about 10 years ago. I’d just decided to leave the company which I’d started with a group of friends, as I’d been working with the same group of people for a decade, and wanted to learn from other environments, other businesses, other categories - so I felt like freelancing was a good way of working with a variety of organisations. However, after about 6 years, every project felt harder to win, I felt less talented each time [possibly imposter syndrome], and I wanted to get back to being part of a team. So I took a perm role. I was there for about five years, and then left to look for another opportunity - but didn’t find a job that was right for me, so freelancing is what I’m doing whilst I continue to look.
You founded Leapers, a support community with a focus on mental health and Freelancers, and have recently launched a podcast. We love the concept, tell us all about it!
We started the Leapers community in August of 2017, and over the two years, we’ve grown from conversations about modern work into a more focused role of being a support community for the mental health of the self-employed.
It was clear that many of the conversations were about the ‘gaps’ in modern work - the lack of support, development and working relationships which self-employment can often lead to. Mental Health is particularly important to me, having battled with depression for over fifteen years, and at the time no-one was really talking about the lack of support in self-employment.
Employers are doing a better job than ever in looking after their employees, but there are 5 million self-employed people, and this number is growing every month. Ensuring that you are working well is critical, but often gets de-prioritised, after finding work, invoicing, doing the work, doing the accounts, all the other stuff that makes up life, and if you’re not able to work, that’s a dangerous place to be in - there is no paid sick leave when you’re self-employed.
With Leapers we are trying to do three things; Create awareness of the things you need to think about when you’re self-employed. Create tangible things which support people’s mental health when they’re self-employed tackling the specific issues that we face - for example, we have a wonderful support slack community where people can ask for help and share their concerns, we’ve just launched a podcast sharing stories from the freelance community, and in the summer we published an eBook with useful techniques and tips for working well; and from 2020, we are working with clients who hire freelancers - who cause a proportion of the stress we face. It’s 100% free, 100% open - just come along to leapers.co
Where’s your favourite place to work from aside from your home and why?
Anywhere with decent coffee and decent seating. It’s probably not best for my back, but one of those big comfy chairs which you can just sink in to. There’s a lovely space in Pimlico called Cambridge St Kitchen which I go to fairly frequently, I like sitting in the BFI Cafe too, and my local coffee shop is great as well. There are lots of brilliant options which are very freelance friendly these days, supported by platforms like AndCo and Othership, where you can book yourself a table with power. We’re also launching #worktogether this year - which is a listing of people who are open to sit together, so if you want to get away from home, you can find someone who is nearby, and share a table.
Share your struggles - what do you find hardest about working for yourself?
How long have you got? I don’t particularly enjoy freelancing, I think I’m good at what I do [which is incredibly hard for me to say], but I’m dreadful at finding opportunities to do it. I haven’t got the first clue how to go about finding opportunities, pricing myself, building relationships with clients, putting myself out there. I also second-guess myself constantly, undervalue what I do, and find it hard to keep myself accountable. I would, without doubt, prefer to be working with a partner, and have long felt like I’m missing the yin to my yang.
“The single biggest benefit is being able to spend time with my two children - I’m a single dad, so having the flexibility to work around their school day, if they need anything extra, and just generally hanging-out with them.”
Share your perks - what do you enjoy most about working for yourself?
The single biggest benefit is being able to spend time with my two children - I’m a single dad, so having the flexibility to work around their school day, if they need anything extra (my youngest had to take a sick day recently, and I was able to look after her), and just generally hanging-out with them. They’re still relatively little - I don’t have much time with them, and one day they’ll turn into moody teenagers who want to hang out with their dad, so I’m making the most of it. I also love that I’m able to spend a good proportion of my non-working time on Leapers, which I feel both passionately about, but also a sense of responsibility to the community now it has matured into something significant. These benefits, however, aren’t something exclusive to being self-employed. If more businesses woke up to flexibility, the realities of parenting, invested in their employees side-projects and passions, everyone would benefit. I’d love to see more organisations embracing their peoples’ holistic set of talents and interests and needs, not just what they’re being paid to turn up for.
What are your top tips for anyone thinking about working for themselves?
There’s five things I suggest people think about:
Financial Resilience - don’t just think the next project, but your financial future. What if you need to take sick leave, what if you want to take parental leave, what are you doing for retirement. Don’t just act short-term, put plans in place for freelancing to be a sustainable career choice.
Active Design - think about how you want to work, how you need to work, and how you should work. Put really strong boundaries in place, give yourself time to rest, don’t take on projects which aren’t aligned to what you want to be doing, invest in yourself, explore different models of working until you find something which works for you.
Support Network - make sure you have a good network of people around you, mentors, clients, friends, family, and most critically - people who ‘get it’, other freelancers, so you can ask for advice, look for wisdom. Build your team.
Working Relationships - spend time to discover what you need from working relationships, and communicate it. You’re at arms length now, things like on-boarding, support, feedback and a team are harder to get access to. It’s on you to make sure your clients are given the information they need to work with you best.
Learning and Development - don’t stagnate, it’s down to you to put a career plan in place, and keep learning, training, developing. Put money aside to invest in this, and give yourself a promotion when you’ve earned it.
Give us your top sources of inspiration and motivation…
The Squiggly Careers team at ‘Amazing If’ have a great podcast and book which has helped me no end.
I’m a big fan of the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott,
I’ve also got to say, our very own podcast series No More Watercooler is endlessly inspiring to me - it’s the stories from Leapers that fill my heart with joy. We have a channel called #littlewins where people share their successes, and I’m always so proud to hear how people are getting on. I’ll generally buy a product when one of our members launches something new, because I feel like they’re family in lots of ways.
What role does collaboration play for you?
Collaboration is essential - no matter how ‘independent’ you are, you’re always working with others. It’s a word which has lost its meaning in recent years, but for freelancers, it’s much harder to do effectively, as you’re often working in teams where trust doesn’t have a chance to develop naturally. You need to put things in place to understand those you’re working alongside, and find ways of getting the best out of each other. Personally, the best collaborations for me are those where other members of the team complement my weaknesses - I work brilliantly with people who are organised (project managers, analysts, researchers) and I massively respect the value that commercially focused people bring to a team.
What is the best project you’ve worked on since going freelance?
That’s hard to choose - I spent six months with the team at Klarna, where I made some really great friends; I got deeply embedded at Checkland Kindleysides working with their strategy team; and there was a brilliant project for P&G around marketing futures which really played to my strengths.
What were you doing this time last year? What have you learnt or how have you changed since then?
This time last year, I had just started a project with an agency who wanted to redefine their internal approach to creativity and strategy. Since that time, I’ve learned more about where my strengths are, which types of work I really enjoy, and what I need in place to work effectively.
For more information on Leapers and all things freelance and mental health visit Leapers.co and for more information on Matthew and his freelance work as a creative strategist check out thinkplaymake.co .