
When you start a business, you inevitably find yourself answering people’s curious questions. It’s humbling, but you can often feel like you need to give helpful, aweinspring or profound answers. But it’s not often that I can.
‘How did you get started?’ ‘Where do you find your clients?’ ‘How do you decide a day rate?’ ‘Do freelancers really wake up at 10am covered in popcorn?’ Almost all of my answers aren’t particularly conventional, as my journey here was unusual, and long, long overdue.
So here it is.
Getting started
I did my first freelance job in October 2004. If you’re not quick at maths, that’s 17 years ago. It was a photoshoot for a goth band in a wet Farnborough underpass. And that miserable experience very quickly opened the door to hundreds more photoshoots over the next decade, including a plethora of moody bands with weird logos, marketing events with fancy snacks, weddings in pretty places, and even products like wine bottles and hair extensions (I got some free wine out of it but my hair is all my own).

Alongside photography, I started to pull in design work too. After seven years of balancing all of this on the side of various warehouse and retail day jobs, I started a more formal career in marketing for one of Apple’s premium reseller partners. They made me wear a shirt and pick up the phone a lot, neither of which I enjoyed. What I did enjoy is my exposure to big brands like Adobe, Wacom and Microsoft, and more importantly, some great colleagues who taught me valuable lessons in InDesign, Flash and HTML.
This job gave me enough confidence to leap to the next one, a FTSE 100 marketing agency where I stayed for five years. After working my way up through the team that I joined, I built a new department of creative specialists and we delivered some huge campaigns for businesses like Sky, Estee Lauder, Barclays and Emirates. During this time, the freelance work still ticked away nicely on the side, but I also had another hustle growing faster than I could really manage; a Twitter account which eventually amassed 17,000 followers.

I had found a sweet spot of spoof news articles, piss-take headlines and truly awful jokes that seemed to resonate with other bored office workers killing time on the platform. My laborious satire also worked its way into places like The Poke, BuzzFeed and The Telegraph’s ‘Top 30 Funniest People to Follow on Twitter’. Alas, like all hedonists, it got on top of me and ‘those days are over’. I deleted my account, retreating to my backup account with a humble 1,100 followers. For the most part, I look back on my time on Twitter as a massive waste of time, but it was fun, I got sent some free stuff before influencers were a thing, met some lifelong friends, and also picked up some great freelance contacts, including London’s most awarded PR agency, Taylor Herring.
They became my biggest freelance client and gave me a real boost at a time when I found myself the sole homeowner on my mortgage. But I still couldn’t even entertain the thought of going ‘full freelance’. I thrived on agency culture, enjoyed the constant connection with colleagues, and the fulfillment of managing teams large and small. I got to travel a lot too, with one agency sending me to Hong Kong, Switzerland and Germany on various creative jaunts.
By 2018, I had worked for a nice variety of agencies, from boutique out-of-town affairs to global powerhouses with brand guideline docs as long as a bible. By 2020, I still hadn’t really given much thought to doing my own thing, but had started to feel like I’d reached a crossroads in my career. Moving away from design and photography and more towards marketing, content and brand, I worked in an agency with a flat structure. So I was no longer responsible for any staff other than myself, and I quite liked it that way.
Then lockdown hit
My dining room desk has always been a beloved part of my home, and regular followers on Instagram will have seen my setup change and evolve over the years. But in March 2020, it was no longer used for evening and weekend freelance work, suddenly becoming my weekday workplace. During this time, I was one of those downers who told everyone that we’ll have multiple lockdowns and this won’t go away for a very long time. I’m sorry to say that I was right.
Keen to get comfy, I put a bit more love into my desk space, and whilst my day job became a little quieter, I pulled in some additional freelance work to fill my headspace. I already had some great freelance campaigns and brands under my belt, including easyJet, Smirnoff, Samsung, Siemens and others, but when a new job for Sky came in, something changed. I felt humbled and actually quite smug that an agency trusted me with what was to become a huge, national thing. I worked solely with the agency’s Account Director to create Sky’s ‘National General Knowledge Test’, which ultimately received over a quarter of a million platform engagements, and nationwide coverage and participation.
So there I was, buzzing from this campaign, and surprised at my sheer enjoyment of working from home day after day, just me, my wife, our cats, and the mice in the flowerbeds. Full-time work started to get busy again, and my boss and I kind of ‘met in the middle’ with a chat about my role. This was a pivotal moment which I won’t forget and I think back on it as the little nudge that I needed. Their agency was changing and I had perhaps too much freelance work to sensibly manage alongside my role as their Marketing Manager. So we agreed that I’d go from full-time employee to contractor – from five days to two.
Holy shit. It’s happening.
After a couple of days of wondering how to ‘set up my stall’ (I heard someone say that the other day and really like it), I sent emails to everyone with whom I’d freelanced within the last five years. They all replied. They all had work for me. On top of this, some kind people referred clients to me and I took that on too.
Is that a banana on your stall or are you just pleased to have customers?
The stall was full of some lovely produce and I had great customers. I had no issues with pricing, as I’d done this all before, as a freelancer and as someone hiring freelancers. But when it came to my awning and my handwritten chalkboard, what do I write? Who am I? What am I?
I’d been ‘Ben Horsley dot com’ for years and I found it quite boring. When you work in brand, you can easily slip into the rabbit hole of branding, sub-branding and rebranding yourself. So that’s what I did, and BMHS Digital was born. BMHS, my initials, but also a nod to those ridiculous American radio station call signs, already pertinent in my mind but made all the more famous by GTA’s in-game radio stations. And ‘digital’, a word I’d taken the piss out of for years, only to realise that it’s actually a great signpost for what I do.

And then by accident, whilst looking for some suitable project management software, I found a podcast by software developer, RJ McCollam. His honest and open tales of freelance life appealed to me and he didn’t skirt around the ‘sensitive’ stuff like earnings and finance. I already knew that I wanted to build long-term relationships with great clients rather than jumping between short-term freelance projects, so his episode on ‘Retainers’ resonated like a wet towel falling from the rafters of an empty church.
Retainers
A year later, I’m so glad I found RJ’s podcast. Retainers have been the perfect structure for me. It makes it very easy for me to forecast, it makes it simple to make income tax estimations long before it’s due, and it gives me strong and stable income from clients who I’ve come to call friends thanks to the long-term relationships we’ve been able to build.

There are different flavours of retainer (I sound like an orthodontist), and there are numerous contractual details that may differ one from the other. But I approach them in the most simple way possible – some being a fixed term agreement with the option for renewal at the end, and others being more of a month-on-month rolling affair.
Retainers are also quite a neat way to slide into self-employment or starting your own company if you’ve been used to full-time work for so long. In fact, this is a big deal to me. After nearly twenty years in the safe bosom of the salary, I have the 9-5 work pattern ingrained in me. Whilst this is great for structure and discipline, it has left me with a residual guilt if I choose to have a lie-in or a late start. This was particularly prevalent at the start of 2021, where I’d find myself checking my work emails or Slack notifications at times when I should be switching off.
Setting boundaries
I quickly got better at this, initially by giving myself a big slap around the face, but also removing Slack from my phone and turning off email notifications after a certain time. I think it’s also important to set boundaries with your clients. Particularly if you have retainers in place. I work my retainers in a way that I not only do a fixed set of days per month, but a particular set of 4 or 8 hour slots in any given week, so half days or full days.
That’s not to say I won’t help or work with a client outside of their ‘window’, but it’s something I don’t want to make a habit of as I think it’s better for both of us. I don’t enjoy jumping between multiple tasks just for the sake of keeping everyone 110% happy, and I know that I produce my best work when I can focus on that work for a prolonged period of time.
With clear boundaries and good communication, you can find a firm balance of availability and privacy. I even developed an internal mantra of “I am a freelancer, not a fireman.” I’m not on-call, and my clients get the best of me when we have a clear structure in place.

Another line in the sand came when I leased some dedicated office space. My wife and I adore our small 1850s terraced house, but it’s certainly no Chequers. With us both working from home Monday to Friday, we were getting on top of each other, and I found myself in the monotonous triangle of bed/desk/sofa. Sometimes the bath too if I was feeling frivolous. So I signed on the line for some beautiful office space at what turned out to be the perfect time to do so. It’s local, one of my clients is next door, it’s inexpensive, and has been immeasurably brilliant for my motivation and productivity.
So when are you starting your own agency?
I’m not. I’ve been asked this a lot and in all honesty, I am so happy being a lone wolf. I am treated very much like an ‘extended member’ of the agencies I work with and that fills my heart with the pops and bangs that you hear from a BMW M4 with a full titanium exhaust. I love to meet agencies, help agencies, support agencies. But that’s all I need. If anything, my future may take me further down the consultancy route, but the absolute most I would do in terms of building a team is perhaps hiring a virtual assistant to help me do the bits I never get to do, like putting out more of my own content, or the niggly back of house finance or project management tasks.
I’m running out of things to cover and we are approaching 2,200 words, so I’ll wrap it up with some thank yous – like a gushing actor clutching their fingerprint-laden Oscar close to their sternum.
To my old clients – the ones who put up with me answering briefs on weekends, in the evenings, on my lunch breaks, I salute you.
To my OG clients – who jumped on-board on day and are still here now, you’re great too.
To my new clients – the ones who have helped me grow into my second year and build a vision for what’s beyond, you’re awesome.
Family, friends, wife, cats, thank you too.
And most of all, Tony the Postman, who brought me SO MUCH STUFF throughout lockdown, from calculators to cables, toilet paper and technology.
Thanks, Tone.

Content is a fundamental part of any marketing strategy. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. The channels you choose are entirely up to you, and will vary wildly depending on your market, but the subject matter must be engaging, value-driven, and in my view, entirely cliché-free.
Business blog pages suffer from two things: lack of originality and lack of consistency. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve visited an agency’s blog area only to see that they gave up after posting their first three, one of which was a meet the team feature. About the office dog. Understandable though. At times it can be hard to secure internal resource to drive strong and unique content, and it can be even harder to get buy-in from stakeholders who don’t see the value in content.
That’s why I was glad to get the okay from Kyan’s founders to run with an interview series on fintech – an industry with strong ties to the agency through the events they run and the clients they work with. My idea was simple: an interview a month, with influential leaders heading up disruptive brands or new ventures. Thankfully, there is no shortage of mavericks in fintech, and I was lucky to secure eight brilliant people to take part in this series.

This would have been very easy to run via email or a Google Form, but where’s the fun in that? I endeavoured to meet each individual in person, to record the interview, and to take their photograph. In fact, for every single encounter, these just felt like coffee chats with friends rather than a series of questions fired one after the other. Everyone was so accommodating of my time and my mission, and I got to see the many beautiful spaces in which these people spend their working hours, whether the smart and sophisticated offices of Starling Bank or the cool and cultured Camden home of Yulife.
Three or four interviews into the series, I was seeing some common threads in how great leaders drive their teams and bring bold and brave ideas to market. There was no talk of ‘the hustle’, or ‘fake it ’til you make it’. Just good, honest work by people determined to bring better security, wellbeing and flexibility to consumers who were desperately fed-up with mediocre digital products in the personal finance space.

The personal way in which I conducted the interviews built up some great ‘micro-friendships’ with those I spoke to, the knock-on effect of this being that they all happily shared the interviews with their own networks once live. The engagement from that quickly adds up, more so if they shared it again from their branded channels, which 80% of them did. This personable and engagement-focused mindset quickly paid off, with Kyan picking up inbound leads from the series. Ultimately, this is what your content should be doing for your business – not just looking and sounding great, but being able to attract new business.
I’ve pulled out some of the key messages from the interviews below, with further links to the full series. Please have a read, and if this helps in any way convince you, your business or your boss that content is important, then great. If I can help you build a strong and original content strategy, drop me a line: studio@bmhs.digital

Megan Caywood, CTO, Starling Bank on collaboration.
“I find that London in particular has a very collaborative ecosystem. I love that in my day-to-day job I get to meet with a lot of different companies. Silicon Valley is great for tech and venture capital which leads to lots of entrepreneurs flocking there, but London is actually more conducive for fintech.”

Michael Rolfe, CEO and Founder of Yoyo on validation.
“The best thing you can do when you start anything is to validate. Validation is about selling the idea. Have you got enough people that believe in what you’re doing? They should be saying yes to your idea and therefore look like customers, look like employees, or look like people that are going to give you money. These are the people that are going to go with you on your journey.”

Edmund Hargreaves, Deputy Editor of Moneywise – cool apps don’t reach all demographics.
“The challenge that fintech has now is to take that next step. They’ve built their cool infrastructure, they’ve built the cool apps, and they’ve got the ideas for reaching people. The next step is getting people access to the real valuable services that they need. Opening it up for everyone — not just people who can afford an iPhone, people who can already afford a house.”

Melanie Palmer, CMO at Exo – AI isn’t taking over.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a moment when we don’t need people anymore. I think human interaction is really important. We see it a lot more of taking away the bits that humans don’t really need to be doing and giving you more time to have that face-to-face contact.”

Josh Hart, CTO at Yulife – users come before technology.
“User experience design for the finance sector is what it seems to be all about at the moment. Tech execution is incredibly important, but I think there is also the feeling that the products give you. The emotional journey that you take your users on is just as important, if not more, as the technical and UX prowess.”
You can read the full set of interviews via Kyan’s site here:
Tech Tales №1: Megan Caywood, CTO at Starling Bank
Tech Tales №2: Jonathan Lister Parsons, CTO at PensionBee
Tech Tales №3: Josh Hart, Co-founder & CTO at Yulife
Tech Tales №4: Edmund Greaves, Deputy Editor at Moneywise
Tech Tales №5: Will White, COO at Loot
Tech Tales №6: Elise Nunn, COO at Plum
Tech Tales №7: Melanie Palmer, CMO at Exo
Tech Tales №8: Michael Rolph, Co-founder & CEO at Yoyo