Feelings, Fairness & Friendship — with Holly Close & Sophie Bellamy

"People say that friendship and money don't mix — that it can be such a minefield. But I think the fact that friendship underlines our business is what makes it feel so successful when it comes to managing our finances."

Holly Close and Sophie Bellamy are the co-founders of Good Egg, a web design and copywriting studio. Holly leads on web design, digital strategy and tech, and Sophie leads on copy, content and SEO. They met nearly six years ago at a women's meetup in Vietnam — both from Yorkshire, both somehow ending up at the same cocktail bar organised by a stranger on a Facebook group. Their eyes locked across the room and, as Holly puts it, they've been pals ever since.

Holly is in Danang when we speak — the city where they first met — and Sophie was joining us from the south coast of Sri Lanka, where she's spending six weeks working remotely rather than face another British winter. For the first time in a while they're almost on the same timezone.

Most people will tell you that mixing friendship and money is a recipe for disaster. Holly and Sophie would beg to differ.

Two very different relationships with money

To understand the money dynamics inside Good Egg, it helps to know where both Holly and Sophie started — because their relationships with money, before the business, couldn't have been more different.

Sophie describes her background as “money secure”. She didn't really think about it growing up — which meant that when she started earning her own, she was, in her words, "really frivolous with it for quite a while." For nearly a decade, if you'd asked her what was in her bank account she wouldn't have been able to tell you. "I just, I was very like head in the sand, living day to day."

What shifted it, unexpectedly, was Good Egg. Getting more serious about the business finances pulled her into getting more serious about her own — and from there she started having weekly money dates with herself, really drilling down into what her finances actually looked like. "My own personal money journey has been a rocky road," she says, "but feels much more secure now."

Holly's story comes from a different starting point entirely. Her dad is a writer — freelance throughout her entire childhood — which meant the family income went up and down. Her mum is a teacher but was often on maternity leave or working part-time, looking after four children.

Holly explains, "we really knew the kind of feast and famine element of being in a freelance-supported family when I was younger."

As a result, Holly spent most of her twenties, right up until she was nearly thirty, adamant she would never go freelance herself. "I just couldn't deal with the money insecurity element of it." All she wanted was a regular salary. Safety. To know what was coming in. She developed good money habits along the way — always putting money away, being sensible with her budget.

And then, the more she got to grips with what it actually felt like to have a boss and go to an office every day, the more it was like, "ah, maybe actually freelancing might be all right." She made the leap. The money uncertainty turned out to be much less stressful than she'd expected. "But then I also do not have four children to look after," she adds. "I think that's a big difference between me and my dad."

How to have the hard money conversations

Good Egg started, by Holly's own admission, as "two freelancers with a shared bank account rather than like a holistic business with a financial plan." When they were setting up, the conversations were all about the fun stuff like the colour schemes and domain names. Finances barely came up early on.

What they did build, almost by accident, was a commitment to fairness — and a habit of transparency. Early on, they vowed to each other to always be transparent and communicative, even when it felt uncomfortable, "Both of us really value fairness and that kind of comes through in all of the money chats that we have," Holly says. It doesn't stop those conversations being awkward sometimes. She's not sure if it's a British thing, a women thing, or just some unique blend of everything — but money chats can still be genuinely hard.

Which is why, when the business started growing and they were figuring out payment structures, they made a rule: if a conversation ever feels too hard to have on screen, turn the camera off. Take the pressure of being watched out of it.

Sophie explains: "I think it's more like knowing that that is an option — that if I wanna bring something up and I don't really know how to do it, I can say to Holly, I feel uncomfortable, I feel awkward about this. Can I turn my camera off so we can have an open conversation?"

However, they've never actually had to use it. "I think ever since we then had that conversation, we then didn't need to use it," says Holly, "which is nice." The act of agreeing it was possible — of giving each other permission to find this stuff hard and knowing it was an option, seems to have been enough to enable continued openness on money conversations.

What it’s like to share a bank account with your pal

Sophie had tried to think of some peril around the shared bank account before this conversation. She couldn't find any.

"We both just trust each other. We know that when things pop up on the banking app, it's gonna be the legitimate spend. It's gonna be fair, always."

A lot of it comes down to visibility. Their app-based account means both of them get notifications when money comes in or out — neither of them is waiting until the end of the month, going through a paper statement with a highlighter. Holly remembers doing exactly that in a previous office job and being deeply grateful they don't have to. "Wandering around the office asking people what they'd spent," she says. "Did not enjoy that."

They've agreed some light-touch rules: anything over roughly fifty to a hundred quid, they'll just check in first. Not because they don't trust each other — just because it's good to know. And when they're in the same country, one of the happy perks of being in business with your friend is that is that all your outings together become tax deductible.

On saving for tax, they're both, in Holly's words, "very anxious about not being in a situation where we suddenly owe HMRC loads of money we can't then give them”, I think many people can relate to this. That alignment — over-saving slightly, probably more than they need to — has probably helped more than any system.

"If we hadn't both had that same outlook on it," she says, "there would probably be more conversations and more peril."

The recent pricing conversation moved them forward from ‘pricing like a charity’

Towards the end of last year, something wasn't adding up. Workloads had really picked up. New clients were coming in. The business looked, from the outside, like it was doing really well. But neither of them was coming away with very much cash.

"We were like, there's something wrong here," Sophie says.

They'd suspected for a while their prices weren't right. They had all the data — they track their time diligently, both on client work and internally — but they hadn't dug into it. Hadn't had the big conversation about what it was telling them. So post-Christmas, they scheduled one.

Holly came armed with the facts, figures, spreadsheets — Sophie describes it as "a full presentation of why what we were doing wasn't working for us." Holly had done the sums on their actual hourly rate. She'd looked at what others in their space were charging. She'd tied it to their personal goals — "if both of us want to do X, Y and Z and earn this much, we can't be doing it at this price because there aren't enough hours in the day."

Pricing had been a genuine money block for Sophie. "I'm a little bit more nervous to put prices up — I'm worried that if we put the prices up, we won't get the sales." But faced with Holly's receipts, the feelings didn't really get a look in.

"You can't argue with it," Sophie says. "Just because I feel nervous to put prices up, Holly's got facts that say that we have to. So it almost is a non-conversation. Like, yeah, that's what's happening. We're doing that."

Holly, for her part, says she was almost worried she came in too hard. "I came very fact based for our chat on pricing." But Sophie was receptive — more so than she might have been a year earlier. And the conversation turned out to be, as Sophie put it "a real moment of growth for me — it's all tangled up together always, isn't it? You need to get past the mindset stuff before you can get onto the actual nitty gritty of pound signs."

They've got decades of experience between them. The new prices reflect that.

"I definitely wouldn't have put the prices up on my own," Sophie says. "I definitely needed another egg in my corner to get that push through."

Fair doesn't always mean 50:50

Fairness keeps coming up. It's clearly a core value for both of them — in the money, in the work, in how they treat each other and their clients. But they've learned that fairness doesn't mean splitting everything down the middle.

Good Egg doesn't run on a pure 50/50 model. They've built their own system — with spreadsheets their accountant apparently finds quite baffling, since she's more used to husband-and-wife teams where it might just be a straight split. "I think she sometimes is like, what are you guys doing? Why do you have all these spreadsheets?" Holly says. "But it is just good for both of us to feel like neither of us is kind of taking advantage of the situation." Because it's not like they both do the exact same thing. "It'd be different if we were both just two window cleaners or something."

This has become especially important as their lives have diverged. Sophie bought her first home in Sheffield around a year and a bit ago — on her own, after seven years of bouncing around the world, living frugally, not really thinking about financial responsibilities to present-her or future-her. Coming back to the UK and suddenly having a mortgage changed everything.

"I swing wildly between money anxiety, which I think is probably quite relatable to most people, and just feeling really in control."

The days of "if we made some money, great; if we didn't make money, oh well" are, she says, gone.

Holly's life looks more similar to when they first met. She still lives in Vietnam with her boyfriend Dom, the cost of living is affordable, the financial pressure less acute. "When Sophie was feeling stressed about the sort of new financial situation she was in," Holly says, "I could sort of bring a bit of support and levity rather than both of us being in a situation where we were like, oh my God, we've got no money. How are we going to both pay our mortgages?"

And practically, when it's dividends time and they're waiting on invoices: "Holly will say, will you take your bit first because you've gotta pay your mortgage," Sophie says. "We'll sort of find the balance and the flow like that."

"The fact that we are in very different situations," she adds, "has actually been a massive benefit to our business."

Good systems by accident

Reflecting on our recent Money Story Project podcast episode with Nicki Coe about how often co-founder relationships break down because of communication failures, Holly explained that she and Sophie almost have the reverse problem — it feels strange if they go a few days without talking about the business.

She was struck by something else too: how Nicki had also touched on how 50/50 split can actually feel unfair. "I am really glad that because of the weird two freelancers with a shared bank account situation that we kind of started the business in, we actually haven't ever done a pure 50/50 split." Not through any great planning. "Just through being friends and wanting to be fair and wanting to be transparent. We've just come up with good systems by accident really."

For Sophie, the thing that landed was the long-term planning piece. "I haven't given myself permission to think about long term in my own brain," she says. Their lives are unpredictable, their futures open. But it sparked something.

‍"It brought up a lot of questions. It's going on the agenda."

The magic of being ‘feelings led gals’ for the finances

Holly's answer to what's best about being in business with a pal when it comes to money is about having a safe space. Someone who completely understands the business because they run it together. When money worry starts to spiral, there's someone who can say: "okay, you don't need to worry about that because of X, Y and Z — or, oh yeah, that is a bit worrying. Let's figure out together how we can stop it being a worry." "It's magical," she says. "It's just great running a business with your friend."

Sophie's response comes back to The Highly Emotional Business Owner — the newsletter they write together, via a fortnightly email, about what's giving them big feelings in their business. Being feelings-led gals, she says, has made them better business owners in a financial sense too — in a way she hadn't quite joined up until now.

"If we didn't feel like we had permission to be open and honest and vulnerable with each other, I mean, god knows what our finances would look like. We'd probably be avoiding them. I'd be back to my old patterns of avoiding all money conversations."

Holly's parting thought: "I think it's finding that kind of magic middle ground between the numbers and the feelings. You can't do those things in theory. You just kind of have to do them in practice and then see what happens."

The risks and the rewards are shared. And when a new work agreement pops into the inbox, there's someone to text, a good egg in your corner. Here’s to the next six years!

About Good Egg

Holly Close and Sophie Bellamy are the co-founders of Good Egg, a web design and copywriting studio for small business owners. Holly leads on web design, digital strategy and tech; Sophie leads on copy, content and SEO. Their signature offer is an all-in-one Squarespace website package — your copy, SEO and web design all done for you — ranging from a three-page site through to larger builds for growing businesses.

They also publish The Highly Emotional Business Owner, a fortnightly newsletter about what's giving them big feelings in business — and where they are in the world.

Connect with The Good Eggs:

Good Egg Website

The Highly Emotional Business Owner Newsletter

Instagram

LinkedIn

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This conversation is part of The Money Story Project — a storytelling space where we explore what money means, what it's meant, and how we're all learning to carry it differently. If Gemma's story resonated, consider sharing it with someone who might need to hear it too.

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