It gave us a way of earning a living that fitted around our family, rather than having to fit our family around our jobs. For that, Sam and I will always be incredibly grateful to Time For You.
It genuinely transformed our lives. It gave us something we desperately needed – the ability to earn a living while having the freedom and flexibility to be there for Charlotte.
Time For You Basingstoke are back home today after spending the last two weeks working remotely from our touring caravan – first in Herefordshire and then in the Yorkshire Dales.
We’ve still been running the business as normal, looking after our clients and cleaners, while I’ve carried on dealing with any helpdesk queries, and we’ve even fitted in some new franchisee training too 😊
But trips like this always remind Sam and me just how much Time For You has changed our lives.
When our daughter Charlotte arrived 16 weeks premature in 2007, weighing just 1lb 5oz and seriously ill with a fungal meningitis infection, our lives changed overnight. She spent her first 99 days in NICU and SCBU before finally coming home, with the first nine weeks spent seriously ill in NICU 60 miles away from us and home in Portsmouth Hospital before she was well enough to come to the SCBU in our local Frimley Park Hospital. Frimley Park was two miles from home, but it didn't have a neonatal intensive care unit. so Samantha was driven 60 miles from Frimley to Portsmouth in an ambulance to give birth. She said she had always wanted a ride in a vehicle with flashing blue lights 🤣
Over the following years, trying to juggle our careers with Charlotte’s needs became increasingly difficult. I had a 20-year career in IT involving long hours and constant site visits, while Sam worked as a Customer Services Manager for a large multi-national company. There were endless hospital appointments and times when one of us simply had to be there for Charlotte. Getting time off work became increasingly difficult, and I was made to feel increasingly guilty by my employer for needing to take that time off.
Sam started looking for a different way of life and, in 2013, found Time For You.
It genuinely transformed our lives.
It gave us something we desperately needed – the ability to earn a living while having the freedom and flexibility to be there for Charlotte.
The first year was hard work, as you’d expect when building any new business, but the lifestyle it eventually gave us was something neither of us could have imagined when we started.
In 2016, two years after starting our Time For You Basingstoke business, we bought our first touring caravan. Since then, we’ve been able to run our business remotely from so many beautiful parts of England, Scotland and Wales, while still being there for our clients, cleaners and the wider Time For You family. We’ve even worked remotely last year while on a cruise to the Norwegian Fjords!
This latest trip has taken us from Herefordshire to the Yorkshire Dales, where we even managed an All Creatures Great and Small filming-location tour, including a drink in the 13th-century pub used for the interior of The Drovers Arms, and a visit to Wensleydale Creamery.
13 years after Sam first discovered Time For You, we still appreciate every day what it has given our family.
It didn’t just give us a business.
It gave us a way of earning a living that fitted around our family, rather than having to fit our family around our jobs.
For that, Sam and I will always be incredibly grateful to Time For You.😊
