I stopped sending invoices (and didn’t know what would happen next)

At the end of 2023, I stopped sending invoices.
I remember saying that sentence out loud and thinking, this is slightly insane.
Because nothing was wrong.

I had just moved from London to Verona. My consulting business was working. I’d hit my six figure revenue goals. I knew how to get clients, I knew how to deliver. It was stable in a way most people spend years trying to reach.

So from the outside, there was no reason to stop.

But I’d always told myself that if I hit my revenue goals, I’d stop and figure out what I wanted to do that was more aligned with my values and who I am. We only get one precious life and I wanted to spend more of mine on work I cared about.

For me, that had always been somewhere in sustainability.

At the beginning, I approached it the way I approach most things. Logically.
I thought I’d pivot my consulting. Work with organisations. Help them think about climate resilience. Maybe build a collective of experts around it.

On paper, it made perfect sense.
Then I had the conversations. A lot of them.
Organisations said it mattered. It wasn’t a priority.

And I was starting to notice something else. Sustainability is as vague as saying you like sports. Which sport? Played how, for whom, solving what? I’d used the word for years thinking I was clear. I wasn’t.

What surprised me was this. When I shifted the conversation slightly, people didn’t want to talk about how their company should prepare for climate breakdown. They wanted to talk about how they should prepare. Their work. Their income. Their future.

So almost by accident, I started talking about something else. What would later become IMMA Collective.

Helping people build careers that could adapt when the market shifted under them, instead of collapsing.

I could feel the difference immediately. People leaned in. They asked more questions.
A couple of people, Christina and Lexie, said something that made me want to go deeper.

“You really light up when you talk about this.”

I wish I could say that was the moment it all clicked. It wasn’t. There was no clean pivot or path. It was way messier than that.

There was no clear offer. No clear answer at dinner when someone asked what I did.
Money going out. Nothing coming in. Month after month.

That’s the worst place to get stuck, because when you can’t say who you serve or what you do, you feel blocked on reaching out. And reaching out is exactly the thing you need to be doing.

I felt it physically. I wasn’t sleeping properly. There was a constant humming kind of anxiety.

I remember walking along the river in Verona one grey afternoon, thinking, what the hell have I done. Why didn’t I just keep going. I could have kept my comfortable life instead of building something out of thin air and a half-formed idea.

I opened my bank account more than once, just to do the math on how long I could keep going like this.

A short video from the many walks along the river in Verona where I questioned my life choices. Outside beauty, inside fear of failure.

At some point I needed a way to make sense of what I was doing, or I’d have gone straight back to consulting.

So I reframed it. I told myself, this is maternity. I’d saved money for one day, thinking maybe I’d use it if I had a child. Instead I used it for this. I also calculated how much it would cost to raise a child 😅 It suddenly made my choice look way better. Don’t do it if you want children in this cost of living crisis.

That framing helped more than I expected. It stopped being “I’m not earning” and became “I’m investing in myself and those skills will pay off.” I was gestating a business. And that takes time, discomfort, and a kind of patience I don’t naturally have.

Looking back now, I can see what was actually happening. At the time it just felt slow and uncomfortable.

Here’s what I understand now. There are two ways to build a business, and both fail on their own.

Building from the outside starts with the market. You look at what people already want to buy, you validate quickly, you build something they’ll pay for, and you optimise for revenue as early as possible.

That’s how I built ventures earlier in my career, back when I worked in a venture studio and we looked solely at what the market wanted. It’s how most businesses are built. It’s what we’re taught to do, and I’ve seen it work, more than once.

But there’s a trade-off I didn’t understand until I’d lived it. You can build something that works. Clients, revenue, growth. And still end up resenting the business you built, because it isn’t yours. It works on paper but you don’t want to run it.

Building from the inside starts somewhere else. Not “follow your passion,” something more concrete than that. How do you naturally think? What do you do fast, almost without effort? What problems do you enjoy sitting with, even when they’re hard?

Instead of turning that straight into something sellable, you sit with it. You test it. You let it evolve.

This is where I spent most of 2022 and 2024. And it has its own failure mode. You can build something that’s fully yours, something you love, and nobody’s buying it. It’s honest, and it doesn’t work.

I didn’t choose one of these consciously. I lived both, in sequence, before I understood they were two halves of the same problem.

Also, a little side note. It took me trial and error to figure out what's aligned with who I am. Then I met Caroline Harris, who introduced me to Human Design. I was sceptical at the beginning, but now I wish I’d done a session with her back in 2023. It would have shortcut so much soul-searching.

A concrete example, still true inside IMMA today. The number one thing our members want is a steady flow of aligned clients.

The obvious way to give it to them would be to turn IMMA into a matchmaking platform. Connect people directly to opportunities. Act like a recruiter. It would look like the fast path.

It isn’t. The fastest way to get clients isn’t waiting to be matched. It’s learning to nurture your own relationships and network, so clients keep coming without you being dependent on anyone else.

We already share over a hundred opportunities a month inside IMMA. RFPs, gigs, roles people come across and pass on. We reach out to organisations to offer intros to our members.

But handing someone a fish and teaching them to fish are two different things. Only a fraction of opportunities go public. They’re competitive, and often the ones that pay the least. The skill of building your own offer, then knowing how to market and sell it, doesn’t run out. It compounds. That’s what makes someone antifragile in this market, and boy do we need that.

So the answer isn’t matchmaking, and it isn’t ignoring what the market wants either. It’s building the bridge between what you actually want to make and what people are ready to pay for.

I don’t think one way of building is better than the other. It’s about balancing them. There are moments to prioritise speed and revenue. There are moments you can afford to go slower and build something that fits who you are. Most of us are somewhere in between, holding both, more often than we’d like to admit.

Sometimes that looks like a bit of a Robin Hood business model: getting paid for the work that pays the bills, and using it to fund the thing you want to build on the side. More on that in the next newsletter.

If you’re in that stretch right now, stuck, slow, or uncomfortable, I don’t think that means something is wrong. It usually means something new is still taking shape. There’s no way to skip that part.

I’d love to know where you’re stuck. Outside-in, building something that works but isn’t quite yours. Or inside-out, building something that’s yours but not enough people are buying yet.

Reply and tell me which one. I read every one.

— Lilli
Founder, IMMA Collective