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First Things First!

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Everyone would like to be there own boss, right?

Our story started back in February 2014 after the birth of our twins, Charlotte and William. We already had a son Samuel 5 years old and a daughter Emily 18 months old when the twins were born. As you would expect we received lots of beautiful gifts one of them being a paper cut of our family tree with all of our names on a branch and our dog Bella at the bottom too! This was probably my favourite gift and one that inspired me.

A couple of weeks after the birth of our twins I suffered a huge relapse of a Neurological condition called Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy or CIDP for short that I suffer with. I was off my feet for a couple of months and with 4 young children to care for James had to take time off work.

James at the time worked in sales and one thing lead to another that he didn't hit a couple of months sales targets due to not being at work and caring for our family that he lost his job.

Anyway this was the catalyst we needed to spur us on in our dream to be our own boss and so Celebrate Your Way was born when we purchased our CO2 Laser engraving machine!

We spent a lot of time being busy fools and being 'messed about' by several people who we thought would help us, one being a web designer who after 4 months of going backwards and forwards decided that he couldn't actually make us the website we wanted so we decided to part ways.

I always had the idea that being self-employed would be easy. Well you can pick and choose your hours and you don't have anyone to answer to so you can come and go as you please.

How wrong was I.

As our accountant likes to tell us 'The first year we were just playing at it' and I do agree. We spent a lot of time designing, sourcing suppliers, insurance, thinking about packaging, printing business cards and flyers, thinking about how to get our name out there, a logo, how to create a website that wouldn't cost the earth, the list really does go on and on.

There have been a lot of learning curves along the way and being disciplined to work during the evening after a long day with the children or at weekends is hard. We even plan family holidays around our quieter months or take long weekends rather than a 2 week summer holiday just so we don't get behind with orders or enquiries.

I can honestly say that we truly didnt appreciate the things that we would need to do or think about to get our business off the ground or the time that we would need to put in.