Nobody Tells You About the Gaps.

Nobody warns you about the quiet periods.

Not in any meaningful way. You hear about feast and famine in the abstract, the freelance cliché, but nothing quite prepares you for the first time the enquiries dry up and the calendar empties and you're left wondering whether this is a blip or a pattern. What I've learned, over more years than I sometimes care to count, is that the gaps are part of it. Not a sign that something is wrong. Just part of the rhythm of running a business on your own terms.

What I've also noticed is that lean times rarely arrive in isolation. More often than not they coincide with periods when my capacity is lower anyway. A difficult personal stretch, a family situation that needs more of me, a season where the energy simply isn't there for the full push. I've stopped seeing that as a coincidence. There's something in it worth paying attention to. The business tends to breathe when you need it to, if you've built it carefully enough to survive the exhale. That means keeping a buffer, always, non-negotiable, at least six months, and learning to appreciate the extra time rather than panic through it. A slow month is still a month. Sometimes it's the one where you have dinner with your family every night and remember why you chose this.

The pandemic taught me something I hadn't expected. When everything shifted online and the in-person work disappeared overnight, the adaptation that mattered most wasn't the tools or the platforms. It was realising that genuinely strong relationships could be built without ever being in the same room. Some of my closest working relationships, people I'd now call friends, are people I've never met in person. The team at Humberto y Lara are one example. Built entirely remotely, across time zones, and no less real for it. The market shifted and I shifted with it, and what came out the other side was a different understanding of what connection in this work actually means.

The other side of surviving the gaps is knowing when it's time to move. Not panic, not desperation, just a clear-eyed decision that it's time to get yourself out there again. Reach out to someone you've been meaning to contact. Share something. Show up somewhere. The work doesn't always find you, sometimes you have to remind people you exist.