Success Interview with Suzie Rees

Some of you may know that I’ve started to talk to fellow female business owners about why they started their businesses and how they measure success. In this post, you can either watch or read the interview with my latest guest Suzie Rees.

Interview Transcript

Welcome to success interviews. This is where I chat to a fellow female business owner to find out more about why they started their business and how they measure success.

Today I have the lovely Suzie Rees here. I met Suzie last year at a local coworking space and we’ve become friends. She’s also been a client of mine.   

Since 2020, Suzie has been a freelance fundraising consultant specialising in grants fundraising for small international development charities. She’s been working in fundraising for well over a decade and in 2019 was awarded Fundraiser of the Year at the National Fundraising Awards.    

Why did you start your business?  

I have worked in fundraising for charities and from 2011 to 2020, I was employed by charities supporting them in applying for grants and yeah helping them get money in for their work.  

I started my business because somebody asked me to. It wasn’t that I have always wanted to have my own business. In 2019 I had my daughter and she would only ever take naps lying on me, so I had a lot of time when I was sitting around. I couldn’t really do anything. Normally I like to be rushing around, doing things and I couldn’t really do anything. I couldn’t even read a book but I could listen to audiobooks so I spent lots of time kind of listening to audiobooks and thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and as part of that I came up with this idea that one day I would like to be a fundraising consultant. I’d known a couple of people who’d done it so I knew it was something that existed.   

I don’t set long-term goals. Generally, I’ve not been someone who has a five-year plan or anything like that. So, I set this goal and after I’d set this goal I happened to be talking to a friend of mine, someone I used to work with and he had ended up leaving the charity and being a corporate fundraising consultant, which is a similar thing. I said to him one day I’d love to do that, I just said it to him in a really offhand way and he was probably the only person apart from my husband that I’d told about this goal.  

My friend is a very well-connected person and he was also a chair of trustees at another small charity and they were looking for some freelance support with grants fundraising. He said can you come and do a day a week to support us with this on a freelance basis?  

So, I did that alongside my employed work and then someone else I knew heard that I was doing it and asked me to do another day’s work and it sort of went from there.   

How do you measure success for yourself within your business and personally?  

I would say my definition of success is making enough money to support myself and my family is one side of it. I have no goals to make huge amounts of money that’s not really something that feels important to me. As long as I know I’m comfortable.  I don’t want to take on too much work. I’m terrible at overcommitting. I find it hard to get that balance right of having not too much work, not too little work. 

Success for me would be to get that balance right. So I’ve got enough fulfilling but also enough downtime for family and hobbies and everything else around that. It feels like a constant battle as a business owner to get that balance right. Success for me is having that flexibility, having the right level of work and then enough time for everything else in my life.  

What one tip would you give to your younger self? 

I think it would be that starting a business is an option because when I was at school, I just felt like there was this path of I’d go to school, I’d go to university, I’d get a job and that was just what people did and I thought to start a business, you had to invent something and then you sold that thing.  

It was never presented as something that people could do. For my daughter, ss she grows up, I would make sure she knew about all these different things you could do, and how having your own business is a really great way to get that balance and flexibility. To have more understanding of what it actually means to start a business, it’s not just having to invent a product like James Dyson. 

I wasn’t exposed to people starting businesses around me. Nobody in my family has done anything like that before I think that would be the main tip. 

Thank you so much and thank you for sharing your tips and your journey with us. 

Watch the Interview