I wanted to be an artist. Apparently I’m also the IT department.

There are quite a few jobs involved in running your own business. For me, painting and drawing are a couple of them. Some days, if I’m lucky, I even get to do them.

The rest of the time I’m the photographer, accountant, website builder, social media department, cleaner, marketer, packer and person who’s supposed to know what’s going on. That last position remains unfilled and I’m unsure if that will ever change!

When you build a business around something you love, you know that there’ll be other things to learn. I just hadn’t realised how much time I’d spend learning them while the thing I actually know how to do sits untouched.

I can draw the detail in an animal’s face. Getting a picture of it to display properly on a website, however, can apparently take as long as it took me to draw it in the first place.

There are hours of Googling. Hours of YouTube. Someone tells you it’s “really simple”, so you follow their instructions, pause the video seventeen times and eventually discover that their screen has a button yours doesn’t. You find another tutorial. That one looks promising, until you get halfway through and realise it doesn’t work either or that they’re trying to achieve something completely different from what you are.

By this point, you’ve learnt six new technical terms, solved nothing and started taking it personally. Meanwhile, the paints haven’t moved.

That’s one of the hardest parts: spending a whole day working and feeling as though you’ve barely done anything, because the work you meant and wanted to do is still waiting. You’ve been busy, your brain’s exhausted, you haven’t made any money and you haven’t got a finished painting to show for it. You’ve got a slightly improved menu and a headache.

And when there’s only one of you, it can feel so lonely sometimes.

There’s nobody beside you who’s seen every failed attempt or knows how long you’ve spent trying to fix one small thing. Someone visiting your website might click a button without giving it a second thought, not realising that getting it there involved an entire evening and some swear words.

You do sometimes wonder whether anyone knows how many hours have gone into it all. Whether anyone will notice. Whether it’s worth it.

I’ve had those thoughts while building this website. I’ve built the whole thing myself, without anybody else doing it for me. It has tested my patience and there have been plenty of moments when I’ve wished I could hand the problem to someone who knew what they were doing. Unfortunately, I checked with the IT department and that’s me, so no joy there!

But slowly, things have started working. Something that made no sense has become something I understand. I’ve fixed things I didn’t know I could and I have been what might seem from the outside as disproportionately pleased about a working button. I know what it took.

I’m proud of this website because I can see my own effort in it. I remember what I didn’t know at the beginning, and I can look at what’s here now and think: I did that. Other people might never see every hour that went into it. But I still get to feel that achievement. I’ve made something for myself and my business that I once thought was beyond me.

And there are other small business owners and sole traders out there doing exactly the same thing. Making their products, answering enquiries, learning unfamiliar software and trying to photograph something before the decent daylight disappears. They know how a “quick job” can swallow a day. They know why a tiny bit of progress can feel enormous.

So if you’re doing all of this on your own too, I might not know the details of your particular battle, but I appreciate why you’re celebrating that button.

I hope you get to do the job you actually started the business for tomorrow. I’m hoping to paint!