'I shrank my business for work-life balance'

A woman who runs an e-commerce business says she has chosen to deliberately shrink it, after finding it didn't offer her the freedom she first thought it would.

Emma Hine from Leek, Staffordshire, said after a career in the corporate world she set up her own company to get a better work-life balance.

The company, which sells greetings cards online, "started, like most business, from the dining room," she said, and grew to a turnover of £1m per year.

But the huge financial success did not equate to happiness. "For me, it was probably the worst time of my life," Hine told BBC Radio Stoke.

Hine said she did not have any time to enjoy the money she was bringing in, working 80-90 hours per week and feeling as if she had to take her laptop everywhere with her.

"Even checking emails on Christmas morning, because the business literally consumed every single minute of my day – every conversations at home was about the business," she said.

She added that she felt like her young children had to "book time" with her and she was missing school plays and other family moments.

Hine finally came to the realisation that something had to change when her youngest daughter was ill in hospital at a busy time for the business.

"I was trying to do what I could to help the business to keep going while I was in hospital with my daughter," she said.

"I knew then that this was not what we wanted. I should not feel like I need to be at work when I need to be with my daughter."

Hine added that there were lots of people who had built businesses that had left them without the work-life balance they initially set out to achieve, and she now works to help others who feel stuck in that situation.

Working as a Business Growth Strategist and mentor, she now helps business owners streamline their workload so they can achieve more by doing less.

She advised that people needed to be clear from the beginning about what they were hoping to get out of running a business, to ensure it was manageable for them.

After the personal tragedy of losing her eldest daughter to cancer in 2023, Hine said she was convinced that scaling back the business had been the right decision to take.

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