Why I Keep This a Sideline — and What a £4,000 Raffle Taught Me About That Choice

I never set out to turn ChrisXCreative into my full-time job. That’s usually where these stories are supposed to pivot — the side project that grows and grows until you finally take the leap. Mine doesn’t. And this year, building a raffle system for a hundred-year-old carnival, I finally understood why I’ve never wanted it to.

Bewdley Carnival turned 100 this year. It’s the event I grew up watching — the same streets, the same river, generations of the same families turning up every June. For the centenary, I wanted to build something that would help it run for the next hundred years a little better than it ran for the last. So on evenings and weekends, alongside my actual work, I built the carnival a proper raffle system — one that could take money safely online or in person, never let someone win a prize after the draw had closed, and quietly refund them if it somehow did, without a volunteer having to notice and untangle it by hand.

It worked. By the end, the raffle alone had raised £4,000, with proceeds going towards four local causes: Bewdley Concert Band, Hugs, Summerdyne Nursing Home, and The William Mills Foundation — each of them set to be genuinely better off because of it.

Here’s the thing, though. Nobody paid me to build that system. And I think that’s exactly why it turned out the way it did.

When ChrisXCreative isn’t what pays my mortgage, I only take on work — client or otherwise — that I actually want to do. There’s no pressure to say yes to something I don’t believe in, and no client waiting on an invoice pushing me to cut a corner just to ship it faster. I built the raffle system properly — refund logic tested twice over, prize tracking that wouldn’t quietly lose a winner in a spreadsheet — not because someone was watching a deadline, but because I cared whether it was right. That’s a luxury full-time freelancing rarely affords you. When your income depends on the next project, “good enough” starts creeping in whether you want it to or not.

Keeping this a sideline also means I get to pick depth over volume. I could have taken on ten small client sites in the time I spent on that raffle system. Instead, I spent months in one place — learning things about payment webhooks, database quirks, and what actually breaks under pressure that no quick client job would ever have taught me. That depth is worth more to me than the extra invoices would have been.

And there’s something else, harder to put a number on. The carnival didn’t need me to be a professional running a business. It needed someone from the town who understood what mattered and was willing to build it properly, for free, because it was worth doing right. That’s not a role a full-time agency owner has time for. It’s a role a sideline does.

None of the four causes set to benefit from that £4,000 know how the raffle worked behind the scenes. They don’t need to. They just know the support is coming, and it’ll help. That gap — between the quiet, unglamorous work of getting something right, and the very real difference it makes once it’s out in the world — is what I keep coming back for. And I don’t think I’d have built it the way I did, or wanted to as much as I did, if it had been my job rather than my choice.

A hundred years ago, someone in this town decided Bewdley needed a carnival. This year, because I keep my business small enough to still choose my work rather than chase it, I got to help make sure it’s still standing in another hundred.

Chris runs ChrisXCreative, a web design and hosting business based in Kidderminster, alongside his day job — and is the volunteer digital lead behind Bewdley Carnival’s plugin suite and payment systems.