Self Employed - The Forgotten Community
Aug 31, 2026 · 24 min · 9 segments
When you're self-employed, looking after the business can easily come before looking after yourself. In this episode of *Self-Employed: The Forgotten Community*, we're joined by **Dr Fiona Barry** to…
Fiona BarryGuestFantastic.
Dan, you and I have been self-employed for a long, long time, and we come across different business owners, particularly in the work that we do with Bridgelink.
Do you think there's more pressure on self-employed people than there would be on employees, for instance? Because you deal quite a lot with the corporate side as well, and you're dealing with employees as well as self-employed.
We do.
I think the one thing that comes to mind straight away is that self-employed people are mad.
Semi to mad.
They're just wired differently than everyone else.
They're the early riser.
They're the risk takers.
They sign the front of the check, not the back.
You know, they hate bureaucracy.
They hate meetings about meetings for the sake of meetings.
But then they're very hard to understand as well and very hard to kind of work with.
And I found, you know, for the last 20 years, if someone says to me, what is the toughest job you find dealing with self-employed people? It would definitely be hands down getting them to stop for five minutes.
Stop and think twice.
Plan and implement.
If I could get them to do that, it would be brilliant.
Did we stop? No.
You know, I found myself walking 80 hours a week because, as you know, Fiona, I would walk weekends in a band, a wedding band.
So that means it was easy to rock up 80 hours, you know.
And I was preaching this thing about stopping and thinking and planning.
Was I stopping myself? No.
What got me to stop? A pandemic got me to stop.
But then I found the difference, though, when I stopped and I thought about it and I planned, I implemented.
Fantastic.
Dan, you and I have been self-employed for a long, long time, and we come across different business owners, particularly in the work that we do with Bridgelink.
Do you think there's more pressure on self-employed people than there would be on employees, for instance? Because you deal quite a lot with the corporate side as well, and you're dealing with employees as well as self-employed.
We do.
I think the one thing that comes to mind straight away is that self-employed people are mad.
Semi to mad.
They're just wired differently than everyone else.
They're the early riser.
They're the risk takers.
They sign the front of the check, not the back.
You know, they hate bureaucracy.
They hate meetings about meetings for the sake of meetings.
But then they're very hard to understand as well and very hard to kind of work with.
And I found, you know, for the last 20 years, if someone says to me, what is the toughest job you find dealing with self-employed people? It would definitely be hands down getting them to stop for five minutes.
Stop and think twice.
Plan and implement.
If I could get them to do that, it would be brilliant.
Did we stop? No.
You know, I found myself walking 80 hours a week because, as you know, Fiona, I would walk weekends in a band, a wedding band.
So that means it was easy to rock up 80 hours, you know.
And I was preaching this thing about stopping and thinking and planning.
Was I stopping myself? No.
What got me to stop? A pandemic got me to stop.
But then I found the difference, though, when I stopped and I thought about it and I planned, I implemented.
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