the project

I register my one-person business, Plain Talking, on 27 January 2005. My business advisor at the time, Jade, an attractive young blond accountant and my former de facto step-daughter for a couple of years when her mother and I live together, thinks there’s a market out there for my talent.

I have no idea how much time my business might occupy or how much it might earn. I want it to feel like a hobby and supplement my three-days-a-week wage from paid employment. I get a website and 500 business cards, but the site has no callers and the cards gather dust in a drawer.

Despite that, by word of mouth, mostly my own, the business grows a little each year. My employers contract me to publish a fortnightly newsletter on the back of the A4 payslips they print for their 450 staff and a steady trickle of income flows.

Training earns more than the writing. I train volunteers to be good mentors. I train primary school teachers and mental health professionals to support primary school children who live with a parent with mental illness. The eponymous plain talking is the key; turning difficult concepts into plain English gets results.

Now I have a big ticket item, a job worth five figures: The Project. I must write something like 60 template documents, best practice and quality assured, for the peak youth mentoring body in the state. The Project has been on the agenda for five months, but I’ve lost the zest for mentoring and motivating myself to churn out yet another generic policy template is stern work.

The stress increases with every day I procrastinate.

Today I produce a social media policy, tomorrow a media relations policy. A policy a day will get the job done in two to three weeks and put a tidy little bulge in the Plain Talking bank account. It needs sustenance because at the moment it’s propping up all my other accounts—the home loan, the credit card, the fixed expenses and the current cash.

Rock on.