Shownotes: 

Nicky Merrick my guest on this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast is the owner of a small business Pink Giraffe, a podcast host, blogger and a speaker. She is also a disability advocate and wheelchair warrior (I quote from her LI bio) creating awareness about how small businesses can be disability inclusive. Since she started the business, Pink Giraffe has pivoted a number of times to adapt to her own changing physical needs but also business requirements. What is obvious though is that she is an astute business owner who has been ahead of the curve during the pandemic when she moved her business online selling digital content to other dance costume makers around the world. 

Listen to Nicky speak about Pink Giraffe, MS and how it has shaped both her personal and business life, adapting during the pandemic and what drives her everyday. And her strong feelings on being viewed as a role model. 

If you want to know more listen here👇🏾

Transcript of the conversation:  

👉🏾 My background is probably a little bit outside of mainstream. We now know that I have multiple sclerosis, but I've actually been ill since I was about 13, but we didn't know and I wasn't diagnosed until when I was 30.So I never actually finished school. I was too ill, I never sat an exam. I didn't do any of that. I never even attended school in the final year. I don't think I did a full week of school since being 12. So I had no formal entry requirements when it came to trying to get a job or applying for university or anything like that, but it didn't hold me back. I still went on and I had success. I had some great jobs, jobs that I enjoyed and that I did well in, and after travelling in Australia for a year, a lot of peoples are like, so are you going to settle down now, Nicky, are you going to, you know, just buy a place to live. 

👉🏾 And I panicked and I thought, gosh, what am I going to do? I need to buy myself some more time. I was 25 and I thought, I know I'll go to university, that will buy me three more years where I can be independent and free and not have to worry about grownup stuff. And so I applied to University college Chester and they accepted my application based on merit and an application letter. Which was amazing because, I didn't have any formal entry qualifications, but being a mature student, I think they were able to just take me on merit. And I did a degree in journalism, which was amazing. And I learned so much, even though I didn't want to be a journalist I still learnt a lot, that I've been able to use, particularly in my business life. And in my final year, I was in the middle of my dissertation when I met my husband, who already had three children. My plan to have three years of independence and freedom resulted in me having three step kids by the time I graduated, which was obviously not part of the plan, but I would not change it for the world. I absolutely loved my family. 

👉🏾 After graduating, I took a job with a travel company, but with meeting my husband, I then moved in with him and was travelling between Chester, where I lived, my partner was living in Merseyside, my jobs was in Manchester. It was all a bit too much, so I changed jobs to somewhere more local to where I was living when I moved in with my now husband. I worked at a bank and it wasn't very exciting and it didn't fulfil me. It was just an obvious step to take because it was, pretty well paid and it was local, I was on the graduate scheme, it was nearby. But they needed to get rid of some staff and they let me go sort of last one in first one out kind of policy. And I was left a bit, "Oh, what do I do now?". 

👉🏾 And Chunky who's now my husband, he was self-employed working in the music industry and he said, why don't you start a business? There's so many things that you could do. So I did a bit of marketing, which I'd obviously learned as part of my university degree. And I set up a photography company called Pink Giraffe photography. And the name, I don't have a clear idea about where the name came from. I set up the photography company based in a summer house in the garden of the bungalow we were living in and on the little veranda at the front was this giant, it was about six-foot straw giraffe that I got from a car boot sale for two pounds. And I'd sprayed in pink one day. And. I think that's where the name Pink Giraffe came from. I used to travel around the UK photographing anything unusual, anything outside of mainstream. So I did a pagan wedding, I did a fairy festival, biker rallies, tattoo conventions, anything that was classed as a little bit alternative. That was my thing. 

👉🏾 To be honest, I don't have a clear cut answer to how I dealt with it. I think you just have to pick up and carry on when life deals you these things. I kind of felt at the time, like it was two very life-changing situations to be in, to find out you're pregnant it's like your whole worlds about to change. And to find out that, it was a possibility of MS it wasn't confirmed until after I'd had my little boy. But to be faced with those two things that could potentially totally uproot your life, turn it upside down and just change everything that you did in a day in, day out basis. 

And if you're going to have two life-changing events, why not have them at the same time, because effectively your life only changes once instead of twice. So for me, having them happen together was easier if I'd had a baby and then got MS two years later, that would have been far worse for me. 

👉🏾 I think the changes you have to make for any disability can be determined primarily by the type of disability that you have. So if you are someone who has, say an accident and become paralysed, that is an instant radical change to a life and you have to overnight suddenly rearrange everything, rethink everything, change your house, the adaptations to build so that you can live independently. Whereas with myself, with a diagnosis of MS, which we now know I've had since I was 13. This is a gradual thing, this is not waking up the next day and needing a wheelchair. This is having time to think about it. This is being able to put things in place that make it easier to cope. So one day, I thought, right I might actually need a bit of help walking, so I got a rollator and that would enable me to steady myself, walking and take a little seat if I needed a rest. 

👉🏾 And it wasn't until a couple of years later that I needed a wheelchair and then we got the wheelchair, but it was very important for me. I was scared of getting in it because I thought once I got in the wheelchair, I would never get out again. And I've been in a wheelchair for about 10 years now, but I still walk about as much as I'm physically able to. And that may be very little, but those little steps are important to me in my mindset and my ability to live independently. I still need to hold on to that little ability that I have. So the adaptations we needed for the house took several years to put into place. I have level access throughout the front door and the back door. I have a wheelchair lift that takes me from the study here, right up into my bedroom. So I can stay in my wheelchair and get everywhere in the house now. I have fully adapted wet room as an ensuite to the bedroom. Which means if I am bed bound, I can still manage and get to and from my wheelchair between the bathroom and the bedroom. So having those things in place over several years, it's much easier to deal with 

👉🏾 I think I did learn some lessons early on. I started my business in 2007 and there wasn't the access to online communities that we have now. So the only other small business owners that I met were at local networking events, which tended to be groups of middle-aged men who were either trying to be entrepreneurs or a plumber or a locksmith and electrician. And at the time I was making fairy dolls as part of my business. So I would turn up at these networking events where there'd be all these men in suits and there'd be women really dressed, trying to sort of compete with the men. And I was there in like a tutu carrying fairy doll and I did not fit in, whereas now in the online world there's space for everybody. And there are so many different ways to access, help us support for businesses. 

👉🏾 But I think what I learned early on is not to take it personally. And I think this is a good lesson for life in general. I had one incident with a supplier they designed and made business cards and they made an error. They made a mistake, there was a capital letter missing. It was in the wrong place, it wasn't quite right. And it took all my courage to go and I was in my late twenties at this point and I went to see him and I had to tell him that I wasn't happy, and it was so hard and he really made me feel like it was all my fault. Which it totally wasn't and now I think, gosh, I could have given him what for, but at the time I was so unsure of myself that I went back to my car sort of with my tail between my legs thinking, "oh gosh, you know, I should've done this differently. I should have said something earlier. I shouldn't have allowed this to happen". And I cried, I sat in my car and cried. And then I sat there and I thought,"Oh, Nicky, do not let yourself do this. Do not let this be the beginning of your business". I was about two weeks into my new business and I was not going to let that be the way my business was defined. And I'm happy to say no one has ever made me cry since, I'm much stronger in business now. But I think you have to go through these little experiences to build a thicker skin and to get the confidence so that you can carry out your business without being personally upset and affected in the way that I was at that time. 

👉🏾 So, I'm in a bit of an unusual situation and that I kind of got a six months advance on turning my business into a digital business. I had been making dance costumes for the last sort of three or four years, primarily making dance costumes for competitive pole dancers. That was what I specialised in. And I loved it, I still love it. I absolutely love creating costumes and seeing people on stage and seeing their face light up when they see the magic of the crystals and sparkling and twinkling onto the lights, that is totally my thing. But physically it was getting too hard, I was really struggling to get them finished on time and I would never let a customer down. I've driven costumes to the other side of the country to deliver them to people. I have driven to a competition where someone was competing to let her try on her costume for another competition because we couldn't get together. I do not ever want to let people down because these girls put so much into their competition and everything goes towards that big day and the music is selected, the costume is chosen and they all have to come together. So if I didn't get that costume finished in time for the competition date, I would be really letting them down. 

👉🏾 And what happened about four years ago, was I was finishing a costume for a girl and we were due to go away camping for a few days. And I said to my husband, I'm going to get this finished tonight. I've got a few weeks before she competes, but I want to get it done before we go away so I'm not thinking about it. Also where we were planning on going camping was not too far from where she lived and I said, I'll go drop it off to her on the way. So we did that and I dropped off the costume. While we were camping I went blind in one eye, it's a condition called optic neuritis, and it happens when you have MS. It can happen not everybody with MS will get optic neuritis. And I ended up in A&E and in hospital for a while. It took three, four, maybe five months for my eyesight to fully recover in that eye.

👉🏾 Had I not taken that costume to that customer the day that I did, if I had just left it until I got back from the camping trip. I would have ruined her competition and I don't think I'd have forgiven myself for that. And that gave me a big wake up call that perhaps my disability and my illness has got to the point where I have to make some big decisions about my business. So I decided because I loved the industry, I wanted to stay in that industry. So I decided to stop making the costumes, but to set about helping other costume makers with their business. So often someone who makes costumes is generally come into that business because they either make for their children or themselves or people they know, and someone else sees what they've done and goes "Oh, Wow, could you do that for me?". And that's how they come into it. Effectively they're turning their hobby into a business. And so I want it to help those people with the business side of it. I've been in business for much longer than I have been a costume maker. I've had lots of different businesses from running a nightclub, photography company to running a cleaning business. I've done a lot of different businesses over the years. And I felt I could really help people with that aspect of their business and help them step up into being more professional rather than a hobbyist that just gets paid. 

👉🏾 And so, before COVID happened, my business had gone through this change of being a digital business. So all of a sudden everyone else was going, oh, we have to just work online now. And I'm like, yeah, I've had six months practice at this, come on, bring it on. Which was great for me, but unfortunately, my clients were all dance costume makers at the time and all the competitions, all the shows, they were all cancelled and not all of them have come back yet. So it affected my clients. So I set about, working out how I could help them through COVID.  

👉🏾 My job stayed the same, but I had to change what I was putting out to my audience because their jobs were changing and their ability to work the way they were working was changing. And I did notice a lot of businesses just took up the challenge and went for it and they put in changes, they started making practice wear practice wear and they started looking different ways they could help their customers. And some of them just sat back and went, oh, well, I'm just not going to do anything then. And I know which businesses are still trading now and which ones have struggled to get back into the flow. I wrote my first e-book in the first month or two of COVID lockdown. And that was just 10 things you can do in your sewing business right now. I wanted it to give my clients and audience. 10 really easy to implement things that they could do that didn't directly relate to processing a customer's order. So I launched my ebook and that went out there and that's how I started helping people in the first lockdown. 

👉🏾 It's pretty much identical bar one thing. So our son is almost 12 now, and he's never been in school, we have always home educated, as a choice for his education. So the homeschool thing didn't really come into it. So we just carried on, I'm pretty sure he didn't even notice there was a lockdown to begin with because he was quite into gaming and he was on his computer with his friends and a lot of his friends are around the country and all around the world because they were the home educated children. So they didn't really notice what was happening with the school system, because they're just not aware of it. I was working from home anyway, so that didn't change for me. 

👉🏾 The one big change we had, is that my husband, who was working in the music industry all the events finished, before lockdown started, all his events were cancelled. And he primarily works in the live music industry, outside broadcast, live events and auditorium type events you know, like at Doncaster dome, for example, is one place where he worked. And so that all finished. Fortunately for us, he has his HGV license and was able to take a new job, being an employee for the first time in years and he is now a truck driver and he still does that full time, but he works away Monday to Friday. So he lives in his cab, he's what they call a tramper, which is a lovely term isn't it. For someone who sleeps in their truck Monday to Friday. That was a big change for me personally because he's also my primary carer. 

👉🏾 I'm very fortunate to have a PA carer, who's also one of my best friends now and she is incredible and she comes and helps me throughout the week. But Chunky is always here because he worked from home, other than when he was on a gig, he would do a lot for me around the house. And I think had our son been a lot younger, I don't think I could've done it, but with him being older now he's amazing, and he really steps up when his Dads away, he does what needs be done. On a weekend he's like a regular 11, 12 year old and he's like no I'm not doing that. I'll do it later. One sec, one sec do it in a minute. But in the week I asked him, can you do this, and he's like, yeah sure, and he does it. My husband doesn't believe me that he's like that in the week. 

👉🏾 So there has been the income support scheme for self-employed people. And I was able to access that. But with the changes that happened in my business with reducing the costume making and then bringing in the new business, my income had dipped in the prior years. And so it hasn't been an amazing amount of support. But that's kind of part of what I was experiencing anyway. I knew that I would have a dip in the income with switching to the way I was working. I would have to build up a whole new audience of different people that I was selling to. So I kind of just accepted that for what it is. And I think when you're self-employed you kind of used to just been able to deal with your own issues. I think it's very different, if you have a premise. And I know that small business owners that actually have a premises where people go to like a hairdresser's or a cafe and a pub or that kind of business. I think the support has been valuable for them because there are a lot of ongoing costs that they will still have to pay for. Which for me, I didn't have a lot of those outgoings, so I wasn't affected as much and feel extremely privileged to be in that situation. 

👉🏾 Yeah, It is hard, isn't it? It is hard. And I think businesses are so varied these days. There are so many different ways you can be a small business owner, that one rule, and one decision by the government was never going to suit everybody. It was never going to be the perfect fit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. 

👉🏾 But I think there's been a definite split with people....