The Comeback Diaries: My Journey to Financial Freedom

Welcome to the Comeback Diaries. My name’s Lee, and this is where I’m publicly documenting my journey to financial freedom. I’m a freelance SEO based in the UK, mostly working with local businesses, and this first post is a bit of an overview, covering the why behind what I’m doing and the bumpy road it’s taken to actually get this written.

The name, if you’re wondering, wasn’t exactly planned. I sat down to record an update and couldn’t remember what I’d called this challenge, so I landed on “The Comeback Diaries” because I think it ha a good ring to it, and it just stuck.

Why I’m Doing This

There are two sides to this: the business I’m actually trying to fix, and what I’m ultimately building toward.

Rebuilding my freelance SEO business from the ground up

I’ve been planning this for a long time, but perfectionism kept getting in the way, and I kept putting it off for months at a time. Eventually I decided to start a new challenge: rebuilding my freelancing business from the ground up, and documenting as much of it as I feel comfortable sharing.

Right now, I provide SEO services, mostly local SEO, but my business isn’t where I want it to be, either financially or structurally. I need to make it far more organised, with proper systems and SOPs in place, so I can deliver a consistent experience for every client, from the first sales call through onboarding, service delivery, and monthly reporting.

I’m using AI to help with a lot of this. I want to see how far I can take things as a one-person business before I have to outsource anything or take on staff. I don’t want this to turn into an agency. That’s why I call myself a freelancer rather than an agency owner. I want to take things as far as I can without employing anybody.

What I’m actually working toward

My initial vision goal is £7,500 a month in revenue. Once I reach that, I can start putting the profit into what I actually want to build: e-com. I’d already started one e-commerce store, but I had to shelve it because my freelancing revenue wasn’t where it needed to be yet. Getting to that vision goal has to come first.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really like talking about money. It’s a weak point for me. I’m quite a private person, and I don’t share much on social media, so this is a genuinely strange thing for me to be committing to. But I know I’ll get a lot from it, and if anyone else is watching or reading along, maybe they will too.

How long I’m committing to this

I initially said I’d commit to documenting this for 12 months, and that’s still the plan. It’s what I feel comfortable committing to right now. But if I’m still enjoying it by the time that comes around, I’ll happily keep going beyond that.

The False Start

This wasn’t my first attempt at getting this off the ground. Here’s what happened, and what’s changed since.

What went wrong the first time

I announced I was restarting this a couple of months ago, and then… nothing. It was a complete false start. Looking back, I massively bit off more than I could chew. I underestimated how hard it is to create content regularly, in an unstructured way, edit it, and then publish it across different platforms like Instagram on top of everything else.

I think the real problem was that I tried to make things too organised and too structured before I actually had the ability to do that. I was still completely new to content creation, and it was mentally taxing just to create something, let alone edit and publish it everywhere. I’d planned weekly videos every Sunday, which just wasn’t realistic alongside actually running the business.

Looking back, I think the early days are always going to be the hardest part of something like this, just working out what’s actually worth talking about. Last time, I put far too much pressure on myself to film things that, if I’m honest, weren’t really worth filming yet, purely to try and hit a schedule.

What’s different now

This time, I’m taking a more relaxed approach. Rather than committing to a rigid weekly schedule, I’ll put out videos when I can, which takes a lot of the pressure off and stops this feeling like I’m failing every time I miss a deadline.

I’ve also signed up for a co-working space, which has made a bigger difference than I expected. I’d been working out of coffee shops and libraries for the best part of a year since the last one I used closed down, so having somewhere to work regularly again feels like a genuine turning point. It’s given me the mental space to actually get on with the challenge and the business, rather than just thinking about it.

I’d also originally planned to put this content out across every platform: Instagram, all the different socials. For now, I’m just concentrating on YouTube and keeping things as simple as possible, rather than spreading myself too thin before I’ve even got the basics working.

The first thing I need to do now is hit my vision goal. That’s really all I have to work towards and think about, without burning out, because burning out is exactly what I’ve done before.

Why I’m Doing This Publicly

There are a couple of reasons I’m doing this out in the open rather than just quietly getting on with it.

Not a sales pitch, just a public diary

I don’t really have anything to sell you. This is more of a public diary, something to keep me accountable and give me a bit of public pressure to keep going. It’ll also be nice to have something to look back on further down the line and see how much I’ve progressed.

I’ve said before that this is about public accountability, and it is, but if I’m honest, it’s really about living with purpose.

Imperfect action over polish

I’m not aiming for heavily edited, polished videos or posts. If anything, I’m using this whole thing as a way to get over my own perfectionism and just put stuff out, even when it clearly isn’t quite ready, like some of my early videos.

I just need to stop overthinking, stop procrastinating, and keep publishing. Imperfect action, as the cliché goes. It’s a cliché because it’s true.

There’s no fixed set of steps to building a business anyway. It’s different for everyone. Sometimes you get lucky and a client lands quickly; other times you do everything right and it just doesn’t work out. But we can only really control our inputs, not the outputs.

As long as I keep showing up, documenting things, and staying accountable, I don’t think I can go far wrong. And I’m sure the videos and posts will naturally get better as I get more practice at telling this story, but that’s exactly why I’m not waiting until it’s polished to start.

Maybe building something together

I’ve been part of a co-working group before, where we’d meet virtually and just work alongside each other for a couple of hours at a time. It made a genuine difference to how much I got done. I might start doing something similar here, and if anyone following along wants to join in, maybe we can build that together too.

Where Things Stand Right Now

There are two things that have really shifted for me lately.

Getting serious about client acquisition again

I’ve let client acquisition slide for the best part of a year. I fell out of love with SEO for a while. I got burnt out with client work and started looking at other things, including the e-commerce store. But having some distance from it made me realise I’d been taking it for granted.

It’s a good industry, I’m genuinely good at it, and I like helping business owners. SEO can make a real difference to a small business, not just in revenue but in the owner’s actual quality of life. I’ve got my enthusiasm back for it, and a business is really just a reflection of its owner: if I don’t love what I’m doing, I can’t expect anyone else to want to pay for it.

So now it’s about turning that enthusiasm back into consistent outreach and new leads. It’s easy to get so lost in the figures and the day-to-day work that I forget I’m actually helping real people and real businesses reach their goals, and that’s something worth remembering.

Bringing e-commerce back into the picture

I’d started an e-commerce business last year, but it never really got off the ground because I was trying to run two businesses at once and got overwhelmed. I was in the process of quietly closing it down to focus purely on freelancing, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m restarting the e-commerce side alongside the freelancing business rather than waiting until I’ve hit my revenue goal first, which was the original plan.

I know the usual advice is to focus on one thing at a time, but that’s never really suited my personality. I work better switching between different things. The long-term plan is to build ecom stores, sell them, and build more, maybe keeping one or two for cash flow.

By the end of the year, at minimum, I want to have hit my first revenue goal in the freelancing business and have a sellable asset on the e-commerce side. If you think running two businesses like this at once is a mistake, feel free to tell me in the comments. I’d genuinely like to know.

What’s Next

This post has mostly been the “why.” The next one will get into the “how”: the actual systems and processes going into hitting that £7,500 vision goal. If you’re building something of your own alongside me, drop a comment and let me know. It’d be good to hear from other people in the same boat.

There’s a lot of work ahead and some big numbers to hit, but I’ve got a good feeling it’s going to be good fun along the way too. Freelancing to fund it, ecom to scale it, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll sell everything and see where that takes me.