Dreamboard to success with Leanne Bier

Tonight, we will explore all things related to dream boards. I’ve invited to join me in the studio Leanne Bier, a dream board consultant from Brisbane.

Leanne has an Honours degree in Psychology that she got more than 20 years ago, but she says that fear held her back from doing what she really wanted to do. To me, it was fascinating to hear how Leanne did what so many of us do: just kept piling on more and more qualifications instead of taking the plunge.

Use dream board to overcome the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown.

Leanne: I did corporate training and finance banking. I just kept excelling and achieving more, getting more qualifications and certifications. Inside, I kept having this dream that I want to work with people and help people. I held myself back from doing that for such a long time that after I had my child and she was five, I was ready to go back to work. 

I discovered making a Vision Board about 15 years ago.

Leanne used her own dream board to overcome the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown. She ended up starting her own business and she has been running her dream board workshops for over 2 years.

Today, I want to get to the bottom of this thing called dream boards. If we put the esoteric aside, what is it? Why does it work?

Vision board is not a list of goals to tick off or a to-do list Click To Tweet

Leanne: A dream board or a vision board – whatever you prefer to call it – is a poster board full of pictures, phrases, and ideas that have come from the heart of things you would like to achieve in your life. This is not a list of goals to tick off or a to-do list. This is really coming from a place of inspiration: this is what I would like to achieve. I like that you asked about taking the esoteric things out of it because I think the law of attraction has been very helpful for people, but it’s also kept a lot of people stuck, thinking, “Wow this is hocus pocus. How does this ever work?” 

Visual board reminding you daily of the things that you’d like to have in your life.

When you look at them, you get excited. You don’t look at something that feels like a goal or something you should be doing to beat yourself up about it. You look at it and get excited, and then what you want to do is actually take a little step towards that. 

I’m going to share some tips on how to make that vision board really inspirational for the listeners so that they can feel that inspired action that they would like to take where you start to become open to ideas that possibly were always there – what you didn’t see before and ideas that you haven’t really noticed that have been in front of you, like when you’re looking for a new Toyota and all of a sudden, you see white Toyotas everywhere.

Sia: What we’ll do right now is to go through the process. This is what you need to do before you start putting your vision board together. For our listeners, listen to this episode in its entirety. Every time we think, in real life, that you should sit down, relax, think, do something – we will say so. So once you listen to this episode once, come back and use that as a guide to actually do things. Don’t try to do them now. You might be driving, you might be doing something else – just listen to what the whole process entails and then use it again as a guide to actually create that dream board. 

What are the things we need to do before we start putting the dream board together?

Leanne: So before we start putting the vision board or the dream board together, we need to look at three things and we’ll talk about the coming year. 

Sia: Let’s take an example. I want to become a freelancer, so I’m creating a dream board that would visualize why it is I want to become it, what I’m trying to achieve, what it is, potentially, I’m trying to escape. I want to use this vision board to help me through the first year of freelancing. 

Leanne: So what you’re going to do is: 

Write down three headings on a piece of paper. The first one will be “BE”; the second one will be “DO” and the third one will be “HAVE”. 

BE

When it comes to creating a vision board, a lot of people think it’s about having stuff: the business, the money, the success – but we all know people who have the stuff and are not fulfilled. So if you’re looking at starting a freelancing business or a business of any kind, or growing your business, the first thing we would look at is “BE”. 

Who do I want to be over the coming year? How do I want to be? What qualities do I want to have in the world? Just write down three to five bullet points – we’re not writing poetry here. 

Sia: For example, saying I want to be happy. Is that something I could put on there?

Leanne: It could be. I’ll give you some examples, and remember to write it as “I am…”, as if you are already even though you may not be. “I am confident,”, “I am happy,”, “I am fulfilled,”, “I am running my own freelancing business.”

Sia: Can I write, “I am rich,” – could that go there? Is it just the feelings, the personality traits, or is it a physical thing? What does go into the “be”?

Leanne: It can be absolutely anything that you feel is going to be helpful for you over the coming year. Even though we’re talking about starting or running your own business, you – as a business owner – are your business. 

So “I am rich” – in what kind of ways? That could come possibly in the “have”, like “I want to have lots of money coming into my business.” But we first start with “being” – at a healthy weight, energetic to run my own business.

Sia: So the first one is “be”, where every sentence starts with “I am…”. And the second one?

DO

Leanne: This will be the things that you want to do. Once again, we’re not looking at a to-do list of things that you need to tick off that make you feel like you should be doing these. These are really coming from a place of inspiration. So the things that would be “do” would be what you would write if you don’t have your own business yet, like “I’ll start my own freelancing business”.

Sia: So is a “do” to achieve what I want to be and have, or is a “do” in 12 months time after I am already whatever I want to be and I have what I want to have? Where’s that “do” coming from?

Leanne: The “do” would be the things that you want to experience over this time so it could even be something you physically do, and it could be as simple as something that you’ve been holding yourself back from. For example, start my own website, or start my own online shop. A lot of women I’ve worked with have had a dream to start their own online shop and now they’re actually doing it. When they first wrote the “be”, “do”, and “have” list, they didn’t have it, so they wrote: “That’s what I want to do.”

Some people might want to travel: I’ll travel to France,”, “I’ll start a new online course for my clients.” Whatever it is that comes to your heart that you want to experience and do over the coming year. 

Sia: So just for example, what if I want to provide for my family, I want to be able to travel wherever I want, I want to be content and stop worrying about the future, I want to see my family happy or my child happy. But none of that says “I want to be a freelancer”. For a lot of people, becoming a freelancer is a vehicle to achieving something totally different. At what stage do I put freelancing in that mix?

Leanne: Well you could start in the “be”, saying “I am a freelancer”. If you’re thinking of things that you want to “do” that relate to that, it could even get down to the nitty-gritty of the actual thing you need to do to start finding out about how that works. And then when getting into the list of to-do’s, when talking about something like a vision board we’re looking at infinite possibilities.

Let me share the last thing on the list and then I think it will come together a lot clearer for you. 

HAVE

So you’ve got your “be”: how you want to be, and you’ll “do” the things you want to do. Now, you’ve got “have”.

When we’re talking about something like a vision board, we’re not looking at keeping ourselves small. If you want to have your own amazing online business or freelancing business, put that in there – describe it and actually feel how it would feel, and write down what you want to have in this. If you’re starting your online business or your freelance business because you want to have certain other things in your life, like free time for your family, write it in there: “I have free time for my family,” and “I work the hours that I want to work.”

Sia: So what if my motivation is not “have” something so I’m not motivated towards the positive outcome, but rather I want to escape something so my motivation is away from something. Let’s say I want to escape unemployment or the lack of opportunities around where I live; I want to escape the 9 to 5 job. I’m not necessarily seeing the bright future but what motivates me is not to have something, not to continue to do something that I do at the moment. How can I represent that bit in the dream board? 

Leanne: That’s a great question. Moving away from something that you don’t want is a great motivator, however, it’s always good to then decide and visualize what you want to replace this with; moving away from something towards something that’s more exciting, more prosperous, and more fulfilling, even if you don’t know what that looks like. You can then say, “I am doing work that is fulfilling for me. I’m doing work that I love. I’m working with people that are happy to see me. I’m earning great money. I’m always looked after,” even if you don’t know what that looks like straight away. If you do know what that looks like, then you’re moving away from unemployment, not enough money or a job that you really dislike.

Sia: At the end of the day, a dream board and vision board will combine all the positive and desired states of being, experiencing and having. Even though I am initially motivated to move away from something that’s really painful, on the vision board I will have the end result. When I moved away, this is where I arrived.

Leanne: Yes, you’ve described that beautifully. The other thing I would like to also mention is now that you have the “be”, “do”, and “have”, a lot of times when we are writing these things down or thinking about these things, our mind can come in and say, “Well how would that ever be? How could that ever be? I don’t know.” 

“I encourage you to think beyond what you already know.”

If you draw a circle on a piece of paper and you put yourself in the middle, imagine inside that circle is everything you already know: all your experiences, all your fears, your hopes, your beliefs, the things you’ve grown up with, the jobs you’ve had, the people you know. When you dream a big dream, like starting your own business or venturing out into something new, you tend to revert back to that circle and go, “Okay, this is what I already know. How will I figure that out? Okay, I know this person – I could phone that person. I could open this bank account. I could drive there. I could research this.” 

However, outside of that circle are a million other possibilities and synchronicities that you don’t know – that’s where the vision board comes into play. See, when you’re going through things such as magazines, you’re not scrolling through Pinterest. When you scroll through Pinterest, you’re getting ideas of things you already know. You can grab magazines from your local doctor, dentist, put an update on Facebook saying, ”Hey guys, I’m doing a project and I’d like some free magazines,” – now you have a stack of 20 magazines that you wouldn’t normally have bought. When you’re going through a bunch of magazines, you get yourself into a beautiful state; you can do a relaxing meditation and really go outside of the circle of what you already know. Pictures will come to you that you might not have thought of before.

Sia: You said we’re not going through Pinterest, and the reason we’re not doing it is that the algorithm is so clever that they will continue to serve us images that we looked and searched for previously. So if you go through Pinterest or anything else that you used to pin images that you like, you’ll create that circle of ‘this is what I know’ and stay there. Then your vision board will represent your current state of “This is what I know, this is what I can. This is how I perceive the world,” and you will miss the opportunity to open it up to something you didn’t even know existed.

Leanne: Absolutely. I would like to give just a simple, practical story. 

When I started my business, I was a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t know people in the community, so I set an intention to meet people in the community and I didn’t know what this looked like. I found a “Coffee Morning” in my neighbourhood and I said, “Okay, I’m going to go to the Coffee Morning and see what comes of it.” When I arrived, it was about 20 pensioners. My heart sank initially because I thought, “I really would love to meet other people who are going out there and doing their business.” But then I thought, “That’s okay, I’ll just go. I’m here now – I’ll share, I’ll listen and I’ll just interact.” 

After about half an hour a little old lady came up to me. She looked like my Gran and she actually had my Gran’s sister’s name. She just chatted with me and she gave me a big warm hug – it was like I’d known her forever and she asked what I do. I thought, “Oh okay, I’ve just started but now is my chance to tell her what I do.” I told her and she said, “Wow, there’s a meditation group that meets tomorrow at 9:30. Every Thursday, come with me and I’ll introduce you to the ladies. You’ll love them; they’ll love you!” She took out her phone – this is a lady in her 70s – went on Facebook, sent the meditation lady (who is now my friend)a message saying she’s bringing a friend tomorrow, and she said, “There we are, it’s done. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.” 

So the next day I went along and she introduced me to a world of new women that were all my age. All like-minded; all going after what they wanted. The point of the story is that if I hadn’t stepped out of my house that day and gone to that Coffee Morning, if I had looked at the bunch of pensioners sitting at the table and left, I wouldn’t have been open to receiving the next step or the next path to open my world up to meet these new people.

What Happens Next?

Sia: So now we have the three columns: “be”, “do”, and “have”. We sit down, surrounded by magazines. What are we looking for? 

Leanne: What we’re going to do now – and to the people who are listening, I really encourage you to give yourself a time limit of one hour  – is:

Go through the images and tear out anything that calls to you.

Sia: Okay, so I’m not thinking or looking at my list. I wrote it down before and it’s just there, but I’m looking at the pictures without trying to find a visual representation of what I’ve written on the list. At that moment in time, I don’t connect them.

Leanne: You do connect them. You’ve got your list now – your “be”, “do”, and “have” – and what you’re going to do is go through the magazines. What the person usually notices is that other things come up that they didn’t think of. You’ll find who you are, who you want to be, what you want to have; you might find lots of images related to business.

Sia: My goal when I open the magazine is to find pictures that represent what’s written down and in the process, I may discover other pictures that speak to me.

Leanne: Absolutely, and that’s the beauty about going through these magazines: finding other things and thinking, “Oh wow, I never thought of that.” All you’re really doing is tearing out the pages and making a pile, and give yourself about 45 minutes to one hour. 

The reason I say put a limit on it is because a lot of us like to go for perfection and this is what holds a lot of people back from even starting their own business. Perfection. Looking for the perfect picture, the perfect phrase, the perfect something or other. So just make a pile of everything that delights you and notice as well the things that come up that feel like a “should”. A lot of us have spent so much of our lives doing what we should be doing. We’ve done this course because we should be doing it; we’ve done this job; we’ve done lots of things we should.

Sia: If deep in my heart I actually don’t want to stay with the baby at home – I actually want to work in the office. Yes, I want to work for me but not with the baby in my lap. So I see a beautiful picture of a woman with a child and working at the same time, and it feels like this is what I should go for. Is that what you mean?

Leanne: Absolutely, yes. Someone might look at that picture and it might spur the feeling of, “Oh wow, I can have both. I don’t need to choose,” or it might confirm, “Actually, I would love to be in the office.” Then look at what society is telling us – as women or as people – that we should be doing and have the courage to step out of that and be true to what’s really inside your heart and say, ”Is this what I really would love to do or is this what everyone’s telling me I should be doing?”

Sia: So now we have 60 minutes or we have a pile of pictures and phrases. What’s next?

Make a pile of your YESes and NOs.

Leanne: So in the next step, you need to really go with your intuition. Take your pile, put it in front of you, and start to make a pile of the absolute yeses that you want on your vision board. Notice if it came up because it was a “should”, and just cast it out. If something else comes up and you think, “No, that isn’t really cool to me anymore,”, just make a pile of no’s and throw those away – put them in the recycling. When that’s done, you’ll have a pile of your yeses – the pile of all the pictures and the images that you want.

Sia: Does it have to be more or less balanced across all three areas?

Leanne: It doesn’t need to be. What a lot of the people who have come through the workshops have noticed is that they’re rarely surprised about what came up for them. They’re in such an amazing space that they think, “Oh actually, I had a lot of things that I wanted to have and now I’m looking at all these other things that came up.”

The most important thing when looking at the vision board is that it feels good.

There is no need to be balanced; no need to be more of this, more of that. It needs to feel good – the person needs to look at it and be inspired to move forward with that dream that they have.

Put the YES pile up on your vision board.

Sia: Do I arrange them into three parts, or there’s just my general yes pile, and I start pasting it on a piece of paper?

Leanne: You can have a great big poster board – the size doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that you can see it. Some people don’t like to stick a board next to their desk, but you can stick it on your wardrobe, instead.

Sia: What if I don’t want anyone to see it, but I want it to work for me – what do I do then?

Leanne: I’ve had women who’ve created vision journals, where you can get a scrapbook and on each couple of pages you can have things related to business, health, and family – your “be”, your “do”, and your “have”. You can create a beautiful vision journal and every night before you go to bed, or every morning when you wake up, you can look through it and get that inspiration.

Sia: Can I create whatever kind of board it is, take a photo and make it a digital board, like a screensaver? Or is that taking it away to space where it stops working?

Leanne: I think that’s a great idea! I do encourage you to take a picture with your cell phone and put it on your screensaver; put it on your phone, look at it and sometimes you’ll notice one part of the vision board and sometimes you’ll notice a different side. Make it the size that’s comfortable – as long as you can get on everything that you need. I’ve had people ask, “Can we make it bigger and bigger and bigger?” The problem with that is when it gets too big, we lose the focus; we become very splattered and then we procrastinate because we have all these different things and we can’t focus on that one thing that we’ve decided we want to move forward with.

Sia: I need to ask: what’s the maximum amount of images? We’d just given ourselves 60 minutes so we don’t lose ourselves in trying to find the perfect quote and the perfect picture. We probably then have to limit the number of pictures so that only the most important ones make the cut.

Leanne: The size of the board that I use with my participants and that I use myself is about 50 centimetres by 70 centimetres, so it’s a fair size.

There’s a lot of power in deciding ‘I want this and not that’. When people think, “Oh but I want everything – I want all these things”, you end up getting none of those things because you’re not deciding. When a person makes a decision about what they really want, there’s a lot of power in that. So yeah, there might be a few images that don’t make the poster board, but you could just put them in your journal. You might never even look at them again or you can find one image that represents that one feeling that you’re after.

Sia: Another question is how full that piece of paper needs to be. What if I only decided on six images? I have this 50x70cm piece of paper and because I only decided on a very small amount of images, I actually have those gaping holes everywhere. Is that a problem? Should I cover it with pretty pictures of non-discriminate nature just to make it look pretty? What do I do?

Leanne: The vision board itself needs to feel inspiring, so if a person doesn’t have a lot of images or phrases in there and they love it as it is, that’s great! It’s a long process, but what we do in the workshop is once all the images are on. we can decorate it if we haven’t found the phrases that we like. But really, if it’s empty and there are blank spaces and you’re good with that, it’s fine.

When I talk about creativity, there really is no rule. We’re going with what feels good. If I feel there’s too many open spaces, I would look at why that’s bothering me. Do I feel like I need to do more, to have more, to be more? If I’m good with that, that’s great – I’ve got space for something else in my life.

Sia: How do I deal with my perfectionism then, because I think you would come across quite a few people who say, “It’s not pretty enough. There are empty spaces because I’m not good enough – I couldn’t even do this.”

Leanne: Perfectionism is something that holds a lot of us back. For 20 years, I used to think that being perfect was important. Why wouldn’t I want to do it perfectly? 

What I’ve learned is that just starting is the best thing to do. 

Perfectionism holds us back because we compare ourselves to other people. We need to start getting to a place where we are not worried and concerned about judgments from other people. So if someone looked at my vision board and thought, “Oh that’s not pretty enough,” or “That’s not full enough,” I would like to be in a position of thinking that doesn’t really matter because I love it. That can then be applied to other things in our lives which stops us from taking action. 

During the workshop, I have between six and ten people. All the boards look different and everyone will walk around, look at each others’ and say, “Wow that looks great. Wow that’s so different.” Everyone is so excited and pleased with theirs because they know that they love it. It comes from the heart and we’re learning. It’s a great place to start learning to not be concerned about other people’s judgments.

Sia: So now I have my board, whatever size it is, and I have images. I think it looks pretty; they all speak to me. What do I do next?

Leanne: This is a crucial part because we can have a beautiful vision board and look at it every day, but nothing’s going to magically change. 

Start taking that inspired action.

Leanne: I’m not sure if you’ve had this experience where you’ll be in the shower and suddenly you’ll get a great idea. By the time you’re out of the shower, your old thinking has said, “Well, that’s never going to be. You don’t know enough. You’re not this enough; you’re not that enough; so-and-so knows more than you.” By the time you’re driving in your car to do your errands, you’ve forgotten about that amazing idea. 

So what I really encourage is when those ideas come, whether you’re out having a walk or taking a bath, write it down and then ask yourself, “Where can I act on this?” 

In the same way I had the idea to go to a Coffee Morning, see what happens or decide to investigate a few things online. When those ideas come, those are the ideas – when you’re in a relaxed state – that open you up out of that circle of what you already know.

Sia: I’m just thinking outside here, like you said. Having a scrapbook that you can use to post your images: it’s yours, and no one necessarily sees it. Can you then continue on and start putting those ideas that suddenly come into your head into that scrapbook and say, “Well, this idea is kind of related to that image”?

Leanne: Yes, definitely. I encourage that because a lot of times – especially the entrepreneurial, creative type who want to start and run their own businesses – we get lots of amazing ideas and then we don’t follow through on them because they become this big, long list of things to do. So write that idea down but remember, it’s not a to-do list like: “Next week I’m going to open a business bank account.” It would be an idea for a blog post, an idea to start a meetup or an idea to start or create a course – write those things down in that scrapbook or in a little journal. If it’s a great idea but maybe not for now, start adding to those later on. The most important thing is to really start to take that action.

A lot of places where people get stuck on are things like confidence and procrastination. I’d like to just share a little bit about that because I’ve had people who for 20 years, just like I did had an idea and then never followed through with it because of procrastination. It’s a great word that we love to use to keep us from doing what we really want to do. 

The thing about confidence is: we don’t start doing the thing only when we’re confident. The confidence comes after we’ve tried, made a mistake, put ourselves out there and started to get a bit more experience at it. Then we can look back and go, “Oh, I’m confident now at this.” To take that first step is scary in the beginning and you may not necessarily have the confidence to look at people outside, see their confidence and not compare yourself to those people. 

Sia: I think that’s what they say: you compare your first chapter with somebody else’s 22nd chapter and you think it’s the same. 

So, I’ll have those ideas and I’ll write them down somewhere. What do I do every week, every month with this vision board? I’ve created it because I wanted to start a freelancing career or my freelancing business. Very often, quite soon after I start, I will experience my first difficulty – my first hurdle. It happens to everyone and I don’t know how many people never recover after their first problem or their second problem. The motivation starts to disappear and becomes less and less acute; all the wishes I have, all the dreams that I have become kind of colourless when I face all those difficulties. 

What do I do? How do I use the vision board to help me out of those difficult moments that will start happening quite soon and can be quite severe? Is there a routine? Once they’ve created their dream board, is there anything that you suggest people do every month, every week, every year?

What Do I Do Now?

Leanne: What we can do now is to consider that there are things in my life that are not serving me that I might need to release, and there are other things that I know I would like to bring into my life.

Ask yourself:

What three inspired things can I do this week? 

Sometimes it might just be one thing. In the coaching community and the business community that I belong to, we do one thing a week. Write down one thing a week that by Friday afternoon, if you’ve done this one thing you can say , “Yes I feel good – I’ve done this one thing.” It could be as simple as: write a blog post, or write my “About” section on my website that I’m going to develop, or walk four kilometres every second day. Anything that you could say by Friday that you’ve done and on Friday, recap your week. Have I done that one thing – yes or no? If you haven’t, don’t beat yourself up about it.

So every Sunday evening or Monday morning, look at the one thing you want to do that week and every Friday, look at what you have done. Think about how you could do it better or different, and just be easy on yourself. Yes, inspire yourself to take that action, but we spend our whole lives beating ourselves up for the things we didn’t do right or didn’t do perfectly. 

Those three things would then be putting you in a place to start taking action.

Sia: So I look at the vision board and I see my “be”,my “do”, and my “have”. Somewhere in there is to become a freelancer so that I can travel the world and have my child with me. I want to homeschool my child because I always wanted to be homeschooled myself. While I’m travelling somewhere in Asia, I will meet my husband or my wife and we will get married – and God knows what else will end up being on that dream board. Is that when I look at it and say, “Okay, so what are the three actions or habits that I need to introduce and I need to get rid of so that what I’ve put on the dream board may come true?” Is that when I take it out of the visual space into words and actions, and where I translate it into something I need to follow through?

Leanne: Yes. Using the example of becoming a freelancer, start to look at what you are interested in – for freelancers, there are so many possibilities and opportunities out there. A person might think that they’re not sure exactly what this is and what it looks like, so I suggest follow what brings you joy. If writing brings you joy, then start writing. Say, “This week, I’m going to start writing. I don’t know how many pages but every morning for half an hour, I’m going to sit at my computer and write whatever comes to mind. The pages might start to flow or they might not, but set the timer. Then you’ve done that one thing towards becoming a freelance writer, for example.

Does My Dream Board Have a Due Date?

Sia: Is there a point where I have to retire my dream board? Do you have to achieve the goals that’s on there before you can move on to a different one, because otherwise you’re just jumping all around? Or by the end of the 12 months – because you created it for 12 months – you have to go and do a new one? It may have elements from the old one but you have to reassess. Is there like a due date for a dream board?

Leanne: There is no due date. When we talk about one year, it’s really just to bring the focus in. Otherwise, your mind will run off like naughty children. There are a couple of things a person can do. They can:

• Tick things off on a vision board when something has happened;
• Stick over it if they’ve achieved something; or 
• Create a new one if there is an “unfolding”. 

When people start to become more aware of who they are in the world and what they want, they realize either 1) that they achieve those things really quickly, or 2) they have achieved half of them and they start to change; the things that they want become even bigger and better. They think, “Wow, I did actually did play a little bit small there and I want to create a new vision board for myself.”

I’ve had women come back six months later from my workshop and create a new board straight away. They say, “Actually, when I created the first one, I wasn’t being really true to myself and now I’ve lived through that and I felt that.” 

So there is no deadline. I really encourage people to do what feels right for them – to look at if they are really achieving this and if not, what’s going on that’s holding them back.

Sia: Can you or should you have different dream boards for different areas of your life? Can you have a dream board for your business, and one for your private life? Or does it have to be one together?

Leanne: You can have one for your business. You can have one for your personal use. Some people like to create a travel vision board. If you’re creating your first one and you want to only focus on your business, that’s great.

Sia: So I want to come back to the fear, procrastination, and perfectionism because at the end of the day, it’s actually three faces of the same thing. It’s fear of failure which then leads you to procrastinate, and it also leads you to perfectionism because you’re afraid to fail. At the end of the day, we are just afraid that no one will love us because we’re not as perfect as we think we should be. We will die lonely and hungry because our tribe will get rid of us.

What can we do? All of us go through the phase of ‘I’m not good enough. What I’ve done is horrible. I don’t even want to tell myself the truth. I’m just saying I’m not gonna do it and I self-sabotage whatever it is I started because I don’t want to face the failure. Is there anything we can do?

Leanne: The fear never really goes away – we just learn not to let it drive the bus anymore. When that voice comes in that says “you can’t do it; you’re not good enough”, a lot of us are on autopilot and we don’t even realize that that voice is driving our decisions and our actions. We need to get to a place where we become aware of that voice – whether it’s our own voice or the voice we grew up with: from parents or teachers or family members.

Courage isn’t getting rid of the fear. Courage is saying, “Yeah okay, the fear is there and I’m not going to listen to that voice anymore.” Then I can be in a position where I listen to the voice and I don’t take any action or I say, “Okay, Voice, thank you. You’re not driving the bus anymore.”

Now, I have to find a new voice and this is new for a lot of people. We spend all our lives listening to that other voice. Then you become aware of it and you have to question it and say “thank you”, now replacing it with a new, encouraging voice as if you were the parent of a child or even imagining what you would say if you were a five- or six-year-old child yourself.

Sia: Let’s just recap. So what do you do when you want to create your dream board?

That’s the full cycle.

Leanne: Yes, and I would like to add something to that as well:

Find a photograph that you love and put that in the middle of your vision board – a photo of yourself that makes you feel happy and excited. That really helps it to feel like it belongs to you.

Sia: Does it have to be a photo of me, or the photo of what I want to be. 

Leanne: It would be a photo of oneself, an already existing on.

Sia: Does it have to be a recent one? Let’s assume I gained 20kg of weight in the last 12 months and I hate all of my photos. Do I still need to find something that I can look at that needs to be recent, or can I go to the photo of me when I was 16?

Leanne: That’s a great question as well because some people want to put their 19-year-old, skinny-body-self on their vision board and that’s okay as long as we’re not wanting to go back to the person that we were. It’s great if we want to lose weight, get healthy, or be back at a certain weight – if it’s an old picture and you love it and it gives you a great feeling and also lets you know that you’re the older, wiser self; you’re not the 20-something self in that photo. Or, use a recent photo that you can find as long, as long as it’s a photo of you that you love. You can even just take one with your phone; take a selfie and smile and say, “This is it. This is the new me.”

Sia: What about a photo where I think, “Ah, you know, ten years ago, this is when I was the happiest ever in my life.” Is that something we should go for, or is a selfie better than a photo of 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

Leanne:It can definitely be a photo of 10 or 15 years ago if it reminds you of happier times – maybe you were stronger; maybe you were successful or confident – as long as you can take with you what you learned to see yourself as the wiser you and not go, “Okay, well, there’s 10 years in between where I made all those mistakes.” So there’s just the energy around the photo of not beating yourself up for the fact that over the last 10 years, you didn’t succeed. It’s really looking at the energy behind the photo and just feeling good about it.

Sia: Brilliant! Thank you so much Leanne, that was very very helpful. 

Leanne: Thank you very much. I really really enjoyed sharing that. 

Sia: Always remember: once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.

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Self-branding for Freelancers

Sia: Today, we’re talking about branding, self-branding and thinking about myself as a brand when first starting out as a freelancer. 

Lauren: The interesting thing about freelancing is that you really have to have a strong personal brand because you need to stand out to be selected for what you do. But more importantly, so often with freelancing, you don’t get a chance to build that relationship with people – you’re just employed to do a job, get it done and then you’re out again. Whereas if you’re on a long-term employee, a team member or a business partner, you get a chance to really build a connection. 

SIA: This is Lauren Clement. She has over 25 years of experience working with really large advertising agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi and Ogilvy. She also worked for corporations as a brand manager and then opened her own advertising agency.

Lauren: So freelancing is an interesting one. I think personal branding is really important because you don’t often get the chance to create a proper connection and to build a relationship with someone. They just hire you for a purpose: fit for job, and then off you go and you’re working with somebody else. So personal branding enables people to connect with you without having that opportunity that they normally would have to spend time getting to know, like, and trust you before they employ you. 

SIA: So why is it important to take care of your personal brand from the very beginning?

Lauren: The biggest problem most solopreneurs or freelancers who are starting their own business struggle with is “How do I get clients? How do I get noticed? How do I get seen?” Yes, you can list yourself on Fiver or oDesk. You can do all these sorts of things but it really tends to be a race to the bottom. It’s just somebody wanting a $200 job done for 20 bucks. 

I think the power of the brand today, especially when there are so many different channels out there than previously thought – even just five years ago with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest and so on – just didn’t have the clout that they do now. Now if you’re not on those channels, not only are you not seen, you’re just not competitive. What’s worse is if you are on those channels and you’re not doing it right – you’re not consistent with your messaging, your imagery is all over the place, you don’t know how to explain why someone should choose you, you don’t know what your point of difference is, you don’t know your specific area or the niche that you want to work with, or you don’t understand your target audience. You really are going to struggle.

In the 1970s, our brains were being hit with about 500 branded messages in a day. Today, that’s closer to 5000, so consumers are overwhelmed with content. I know if I put a job up on oDesk and I ask for a particular thing, I’ll get hammered with 20 or 30 freelancers coming in and saying, “Hey, I can do it for X amount.” So in order to stand out to me on oDesk or against other freelancers, to win that work and to get great clients who respect you, pay you, and constantly use you, you have to create a personal brand that people trust – a go-to brand that people just know. If I want an animated video, or I want sales content, or I want someone who can deal with my CRM for me, then I go to you. 

So you need to be really clear with your brand today. It’s probably one of the hardest things but it’s achievable. You can do it. You’ve just got to figure out what you want to be well known for.

Sia: What you said kind of builds up on the thought that you already have something, you’re already kind of an expert. I do know it depends on how you think about yourself, and the best experts in the world sometimes think they know nothing and that no one will work with them. It’s a perception thing but nonetheless, I could guarantee you that 90% of people listening to this will be thinking:

“Well, but I’m not an expert. I’m just starting out. I’ve just decided that I really love bookkeeping. I’m not a certified bookkeeper but I could do it for other people so I want to specialize in it. I want to become a freelancer or a V.A. who does bookkeeping and project planning but I’m not an expert. How on earth am I supposed to build a brand when I’m just starting out? It’s so much easier when I’ve been going for a while and I have something to show for, like testimonials and a great portfolio – it’s half of the battle. But I’m just starting out so what am I to do?” 

Lauren: Regardless of what freelancing trade you’re talking about, whether it be a personal trainer or a V.A. or somebody doing retouching on photography, there’ll be something that you really love doing and you do it with ease. 

The First Action Step

Lauren: So a little action step you can do is just take some time to consider the thing that you want to do  (if you’re starting up) or the thing you’ve just started doing. What is it that you really find that you lose your time and you just all of a sudden go, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been doing that for four hours! It feels like just yesterday. I’m so in my zone. I’m in flow. I love this. If I could just do this for a living, I’d do this.”

So figure out what those things are and position yourself as good during those. We all know it: the stuff that we don’t like doing, we put off. We do the whole “eat the frog” thing where we go and do the dishes instead, or go shopping. We avoid them because we don’t like doing them. 

“If you can find the things that you just love doing and position yourself to be somebody who’s good at that, you’ll create that expertise.”

What’s An Expert?

Lauren: When I talk or think about an expert, I don’t necessarily think of a person that has had X number of years at doing something or that the 10,000 hours that the likes of Malcolm Gladwell talks about – although that’s always helpful. I tend to talk about the things you do with ease that other people find difficult and that’s why it’s called expertise: expert-ease. It’s the stuff that you naturally adapt to. An expert isn’t just somebody who’s got years of experience and qualifications and so on. To me, an expert is somebody who’s naturally gifted, skilled, and talented at doing a certain thing. 

I’ve got to be honest with you here: I hate bookkeeping. I don’t do bookkeeping; my husband does the bookkeeping because he loves numbers and he loves accountability. They bore me to tears. But at the same time, if I asked him, “Could you please write some content for a website? Could you come up with the brand colours? Could you do some neurobranding around this person’s images?” He wouldn’t know where to start. He could learn if he wanted to, but why would he? It’s not his natural talent. So when you think about an expert, or putting yourself forward as an expert or growing a brand and waiting until you’re an expert, just think about the things that you do with ease that other people find difficult. I find bookkeeping difficult. Anyone who loves that, to me you’re an expert.

Sia: Let’s stay with our example where the husband’s the trader and I finish his invoices from time to time. I’m with you, by the way – I hate bookkeeping. So this is a very hypothetical question right now, but let’s assume I’m doing it for my husband. You just said to position yourself as an expert but all I have to say about myself is that I I do the invoices for my husband. What’s the step from “I’m doing invoices for my husband” into phrasing it or packaging it in different words? What words do I use, and how do I go about it?

Lauren: The big thing here is to focus not on what you do but to focus on your target avatar. So you wouldn’t say, “Hey look, I’m doing this for my husband. This saved him X amount of time every month.” Yes, you could offer that to your friends and other traders that you know and chances are, your husband will have mates in the trades so you can do that by collaboration. But more often than not, you need to just focus more on what the target audience wants.

Sia: That’s what we teach people when they want to become freelancers. We tell them something similar to what you just mentioned: to talk about or write down things that you really enjoy doing or topics that interest you and that’s your target market. Let’s assume that I am into painting now; I’m a hopeless artist. I never will become a painter but I love art. I want to work with galleries and artists and I am doing invoices for my trading husband. What am I going to do now?

Lauren: Again you need to think about your target avatar. If it’s galleries that you want to work with, what are their pain points? Do they really want to be spending Saturday afternoon filling in their zero accounts, chasing their invoices, doing their paperwork? Or would they rather be going off to the buyer’s market, going and seeing that new exhibition that’s on, or going and doing a buying trip somewhere? You’ve got to focus on what they want and answer, “What’s it in for me?”. What’s in it for them is the fact that instead of them spending their time doing something that they hate, they can spend their time doing something that they love. As a freelancer, that covers every industry. The biggest thing it comes back to is how do I position myself; how do I set myself up as the expert? 

“See, the most valuable currency on the planet right now – and it’s not crypto – is time.”

Lauren: People are prepared to pay somebody else to come in and do something that they probably could do themselves just as capably, but they don’t want to. They would rather spend their time doing something else. So if you can focus your marketing and your branding on how you can not just save people time, but give them time to do the things they really want to be doing – not focussing on the stuff that you do – that’s the biggest sell from a freelancing point of view. It just makes so much sense. However, probably because you’re in the business and too close to it, that’s one of those things that freelancers seem to fail to remember to tell people: Yes, you could do all that retouching yourself if you wanted to, but do you really want to be sitting there at midnight trying to retouch photographs, getting annoyed and shouting and screaming at your computer? Or would you rather just give it to me? I can take that off your hands and do it faster than you could. 

Sia: So retouching is probably closer to my heart than bookkeeping. I’ve done retouching for friends of mine, and my tagline is: do you want to sit until midnight and scream and shout at your computer? Give it to me, I’ll do it for you. At least, that’s what I’ve done before. How do I then package the fact that I’ve done it for free, and that I’ve done it for my friends and family? Do I mention it at all, or do I just show the before and after? 

I think that’s the bit where a lot of people struggle, at least those who potentially want to transfer the skills that they’ve built up as their hobbies but they don’t have a paying client; they don’t have a logo or a brand name that says, “Look, they worked with me – I must be awesome.” All they have to show for is, “I’ve done that for free for my friend or for myself or for my husband.”

How Do You Package Your Previous – Free – Experience?

Lauren: I had to start like this, too. When I started my agency all those years ago, I had to start from nothing. So here’s the big go-to tip for people who are starting out:

“You need to get used to doing what I call beta testing.”

Lauren: So you need to go out to, let’s say, half a dozen people who you know need your services. You know that they are doing their own retouching or that they are struggling, and you know that they could do with the help. You say to them, “Look, you know, I do this for my husband. I do his books,” or “I do this is a hobby. I have been retouching my friends’ photographs from their weddings and they love the outcome.

“What I’m going to be doing is that I’ve decided I want to be a freelancer. I want to start selling my services but in order to do that, I need some case studies. I need some clients to say I’ve done some work with them. When I launch, I’m going to be charging $200 an hour (or 50 bucks an hour – whatever the price is going to be that you’ll charge).

I need six beta testers, and I’d like to do it for you for half that price, so just 30 bucks (or $40, $100 or $200 dollars, whatever your half-price mark is). I want to do that for you as long as you will give me a testimonial and allow me to use an example of what we’ve done in my profile, marketing and resume.”

So this is how you do beta testing. 

There’s two reasons why this is awesome:

1. You get great case studies. The people that you know get helped and only pay half, which is nice, and there’s a really great pay-it-forward thing going on. 
2. It also helps you work out the kinks. So when you launch, you’ve already got testimonials, case studies, and credibility – that you’re capable and you’ve managed to do these things. Now, it also helps you work out: Am I charging enough? Did it take longer than I thought it would? Did the process that I go through work? Maybe as a bookkeeper you’re thinking, “Well when I did it for that person, the struggle was getting them to give me all the receipts. Is there an app or a program that I need to get to enable them to do that? Is there a cost for that? Do I need to build that into my hourly rates?” and so on. You’re testing your services at the same time.  

MUSIC

Sia: That’s a really good example. I think it’s also important for listeners to acknowledge or understand that you really are freelancing because you’re charging money. Even if you decided not to charge money for the beta test but do it for testimonials, you’re still investing in your marketing so you’re not playing around and thinking, “What should I do? Should I do it or not?” because you’re actually already doing it. So it’s quite an easy and soft start into ramping up later. But while I’m doing this beta test, what’s the absolute bare minimum I need to have, starting tomorrow, that will help me build up my brand? What channels do I need to go through? What do I need to set up? I know it depends on the avatar but some of it will involve social media regardless. 

What Else Do I Need to Take Care While I’m Still Beta Testing?

Lauren: I do think if you’re going to do beta testing, you should charge even if it’s just half or a quarter. The reason for that is for your confidence and your mindset. As you said, the ability to get to the end of that and go, “Oh my goodness, I’m now a freelancer. I just charged six people; they paid me and I did the job and they loved it. I’ve found a better way of doing something because I’ve discovered there was a hitch in my system and my process. People are prepared to pay me money for this.”

There’s a really big mindset shift that happens when you do that. So I do suggest that if you’re going to do beta testing, don’t do it for free. Explain to the person that they’re a beta test and you want to test your services; you want to see whether it works. You’re not going to charge the whole lot, but charge something and in return they’ll give a testimonial.

1. “The bare minimum I would suggest as a freelancer is at least a one-page website. The reason for that is you need to send people somewhere to get to know, like, and trust you.” 

So here’s what you need on your website:

• A great headshot.
• A great headline clearly identifying the problem that you solve.
• Those beta testing testimonials up as soon as you can.
• An outline of what it is that you do;
• Why you’re so passionate about it; and
• Who is it that you help. 
• “Click here to inquire.” or “Click here to go to my oDesk account.” Whichever channel you want to use to get the business done, whether it’s 99 Designs or Fiver – just put those all on there.
• Any examples of the work that you’ve done, even if it’s stuff you’ve done for yourself, or friends or family. 
• Put some case studies of what you’ve been capable of doing and what you’ve been able to do to date, even if it’s just a passion project. 

One of the biggest things that will outshine certificates and qualifications is passion. If you’re really passionate about something, you know that you’ll do a really good job, that you’ll finish it and be proud of the work you do, not just for the money. People like that – they like to know that it’s not just an exchange of cash for time; they’re actually getting some of your expertise, your passion and your love of what you do at the same time. 

1. “With big channels, yes, you’re right to figure out who your target audience is.”

If they’re on Facebook, then be on there. If they’re on LinkedIn, then be on there. 

Just over the weekend, someone asked me about the importance of SEO with personal branding and I said yes, it’s important to have keywords and optimization on a website. The next step is this:

1. “You do want to own Google if you can. That takes time, but you can do that with one simple step and it’s called CONTENT.”

So if you can, get yourself out there. Get interviewed on podcasts to do with entrepreneurship or creativity or bookkeeping – whatever it is that your field is. Write articles and submit them to different blogs. There’s a really good one called Smallville where you can submit a blog and then when your article goes on the site, you can link it to your own website. You can put their logo on your website and say “As published on Smallville”. Medium’s another good one to go to – it’s all free; you can put an article about the risks of employing a photographer as a freelancer, top 10 tips, and so on. 

There are some really awesome ways you can get great content out there and at the moment, content is absolute king. That’s how people find you: they read about you, or they hear about you. 

1. “The final step which I believe every freelancer should be doing is NETWORKING.”

You can network online as well as offline. Go out and find your local networking groups. There’s normally a Lions Club, Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, a small business group, an expo – something local in your area that you should be going to.

SIA: Let’s go to the step-by-step approach to getting your brand set up when you are just starting out!

Lauren: For a personal brand, there are three really simple steps. I call it The Three R’s of Personal Branding. This will help you to work out the need to get some nice headshots, some nice imagery, the right colours and so on. My specialist area is neurobranding, which is understanding how the brain sees brands. We see brands with emotion, so to know how you want to engage with people, you need to go through these three steps first. 

The Three R’s of Personal Branding 

These are recognition, reputation, and respect. Let’s go through them one by one. 

1. RECOGNITION. 

What do you want to be recognized for in the marketplace? This could be the colours that you use. I know you’ve got a number of outfits that you wear. Steve Jobs always used to wear the black turtleneck. I tend to wear red outfits. 

We actually have a physiological response to colours, like how blue is the colour of calmness. That’s why a lot of banks, online brands and iCloud-type products use a kind of blue – because they’re trying to convince you that they’re safe. So if you’re handling money or legal work or anything like that, you might want to look at blue. Orange is the colour of energy. Yellow is the colour of happiness. Green’s the colour of nurture and nature, and honesty. Black’s the colour of authority. There’s all sorts of different meanings that our brain has in the Western world to colour.

It needs to be a common theme that people can instantly recognize. An example is if you’ve got children in the back of the car and they see just a corner of the McDonald’s logo, you know they’re going to be asking to stop to go and play and have French fries because when they’ve seen the McDonald’s logo. You automatically get that recognition factor. 

So again, what do you want to be recognized for? Is it that you’re really fast or that you’ve got great quality? Or is it that you over-deliver, that you’re focused on details, that you’re great at asking questions, or you push the client outside the comfort zone? Really think about what you want to be recognized for.

So the number one thing is to just figure out what you want to be recognized for in this industry, especially if you’re going networking because the next factor, reputation, is that it comes down to how you want people to refer to you. So if somebody says, “I just need a photographer who’s really quick,” that’s awesome because that brings you to mind. “I just want a photographer who’s good with black and white,” Great, awesome, this person. That’s the recognition factor. Just get really clear on your niche and what is it you want to be known for. 

SIA: We’ve done the first R – recognition – so now let’s talk about the second R – reputation. Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about this when he says that that’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room. 

1. REPUTATION

Lauren: This is all down to how you explain who you are and what you do on your website. If you’re listing yourself on oDesk, you need to really think about what your reputation is.

Sit down and write your bio while thinking about these:

• What are they important factors of your life? 
• What’s brought you to where you are? 
• What are your passions? What do you love? 
• What are you really good at? 
• What do you want to be seen as good at?
• How do you want to position yourself in the marketplace?
• How do you want people to refer to you and to talk about you?

Start thinking about your core message – your elevator pitch. 

• How do you introduce yourself to people? What sort of words do you use?
• How do you explain what it is that you do and the value of that? 

All of this will help you get really clear on your reputation.

1. RESPECT

The last one is respect. Respect is a really simple one to win in business, but it’s also very easy to lose. You can lose respect overnight and it takes a lot longer to build respect.

One of the key factors, especially with freelancers and in the wellness industry, is that a lot of freelancers try to identify what it is that they do by the modalities. I’m a photographer, for example. I do retouching. I do colour work and I also do black and white. I do weddings, corporate events, food, headshots. I’ll come to you, you can come to me – they try to help every Mary in the dairy, and it doesn’t help with your respect. You need to get really clear on who your ideal audience is – who you want to work with. 

It’s hard because as an entrepreneur and certainly when you’re first starting out, you just want to help everyone. It’s always, “ Oh my goodness, I could do books for everyone. I could do the local fishmongers’ books; I could do the local hair salon; I could do the books for the guy who works on my roof.” But you need to get really clear on who you want to work with and who you really want as your ideal client. Who do you love being around and what sort of books do you like doing, or what sort of retouch do you like doing? What do you really want to become your expertise? What’s your niche, what’s your channel? What do you really want to own and be the go-to for? Because then you can earn respect.

For example, if you went to the doctor and you had a sore knee, you might pay the GP $60 to see him. You booked him in and he could see you tomorrow for 10 minutes. He said to you, “Look, I think you’ve really done something bad to your knee. You need to see a specialist. There’s this guy down the road, he’s a physio and he’s really good. Get in touch with him.” With the physio, you’d have to wait a little bit longer and you’d pay more money but you’d get there and you’d see a specialist talk specifically about this problem with your knee. So would you rather be the GP who sees everybody, charges 60 bucks, works all the hours God sends and promotes himself by saying, “Hey, I’ve got a surgery open, come and see me,” or be the specialist who doesn’t need to do any marketing, he’s constantly getting referrals, charges what he likes, slots them until the hours that he has and becomes the go-to. So which do you want to be with your brand – the GP or the specialist?

SIA: While I wholeheartedly support what Lauren is saying about niching down and developing a very pointed avatar, I do see a lot of businesses, both new and established, who are terrified of niching down. I, myself, have clients who want to design marketing campaigns with me and we still have this battle of niching down, and I wonder why?

Lauren: When you start a business or decide to step out as a freelancer, you’re saying to yourself, “I’m going to start my own business and it’s scary.” Your brain is shouting at you, “But what about the money! You’ve got a mortgage, you’ve got school fees! Just go and get a job. It’s safer!” Yet your entrepreneurial brain is saying, “No, I want to do this. I’m starting my own business. I’m going to face the fear and do it anyway.” You’ve overpowered the fear centre in your brain, your amygdala that feeds into your brain, and you’ve become an entrepreneur. 

The trouble is, having that ability to overpower your fear centre opens up your brain to lots of other opportunities. The kryptonite for an entrepreneur is what I call “bright-shiny-object-itis”. This is what it looks like:

“Oh my goodness, what if I added this? What if I added doing bouquets as well as doing wreaths?”

Funnily enough, I was sent a business card years ago that had this thing on a cheap man you’d hire and he would pick up your grass clippings for you, do landscaping, deliver furniture, pick up kids from school, take you to do your shopping, and take the dogs to the vet. He had a DJ booth, bouncy castle, Elvis impersonations, 50s, 60s, and 70s rock and roll band – all on this business card – and he’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

I use this so often when I talk to people about the difference between being an expert and being a generalist. I ask the question: “What if he just decided to mow lawns dressed as Elvis?” He would get on the news for that; he would get media for that and he could grow a business. He could have married Marilyn Monroe cleaning windows and James Dean washing your car, and he would grow an awesome business. But no, he’s trying to do everything for everyone, and that’s the trouble. I know that – I’ve been there myself. When I started out in business, I was doing marketing and branding for all sorts of different clients and there’s just this hollow feeling when you’re working for somebody and going, “I’m just not enjoying it. I wanted to get into this business because I was passionate about something and I feel empty inside when I do this person’s brand. It’s not feeding me; it’s not feeding my soul.”

So yes, I know it’s there – I know you need to earn an income, you need to get out and get started somehow. But in the longer term, you need to really think about what you love doing and what you want to be spending your time doing. Because if you’re going to start as a freelancer and you’re going to start spending time away from your family, locking yourself away in an office until all hours of the night doing whatever it is, there has to be a purpose behind it. You have to want to love it, otherwise you might as well just go and get a job.

Sia: So people think this is the toughest, most difficult part: branding or creating your own personal brand, when in reality, it tends to be really not all that difficult, you just think it is. I wonder what is, if there is something, really difficult – which people probably get caught by surprise by – in developing, creating, and promoting your personal brand?

Lauren: I think a lot of people get stuck on things like their colours and their logo and their brand name. They’re all important; they are a huge part of what I do. But the part that is the hardest is growing a following and getting clear on your target avatar and then figuring out who are the key opinion leaders that will affect my avatar and talk to my target audience. How can I collaborate with them? How can I join forces? How can I grow a following and get myself out there? 

It feels like you’re posting on social media and just getting crickets. You’re posting on blogs and getting crickets. You’re trying to get speaking gigs or you’re trying to get yourself out there and win lots of client work, and it just seems to take so long – that is the hard part. 

That just takes a matter of consistency in terms of doing the work to identify your target avatar, who your key opinion leaders are and constantly drawing up lists, going and seeing them, networking, touching base, making offers. One of the fastest ways to grow a following is to interview people. Find some people that you know are key opinion leaders and offer to interview them on Facebook or on a podcast, or just go and talk with them and then write a blog with them. They’ll share it with their followers and then those followers will follow you. 

So you need to really think about what the give back is. How can I connect with people who I can collaborate with and how can we get a win-win situation out of this. That does take time. I tell people it takes about three years to create a personal brand that is at the point where you’re being asked to speak and you’re being seen as the expert, you’re getting people asking you to write for them, or to speak at their events. Yes, it takes about three years and it does take a lot longer than you think it will. By that stage, your brand name and your logo is nowhere near as important as your presence. 

Sia: That’s so true. Since you started a business yourself as well, realistically what’s the ratio between spending time doing your business and working on your business to promote it as compared to actually doing the work that you charge people for – what’s the percentage?

Lauren: At the start, it’s quite a high percent that you’re spending on self-promotion and there’s an obvious reason for that: you’ve got to get started somehow. I was probably spending two days a week during promotion. By the time I added in the networking events I was going to, the work I was doing on online and on websites, getting speaking gigs, finding podcasts I could be on, it was about two days a week that I was spending on that. They weren’t necessarily Monday and Tuesday; it was probably weekends and evenings working on that while I was doing client work during the day for deadlines. 

You’ve got to be prepared to put in those extra hours to get it done. I would allow more at the start and then that’ll taper off as you get more well-known and as you do things like launch your platform, write a book, get more speaking gigs, get some clients who tell other people about you, grow a database and start marketing to them. You won’t have to do that quite so often with a full-on approach – it’ll be more about consistently making sure your brand is out there and people are talking about you. 

SIA: Back in 2011, after moving from New Zealand to Australia and with a young child at school, Lauren decided to scale down and open her personal branding agency. Lauren also recently partnered with a publicist so together, they can provide advice on how to enter and win industry awards. 

I never thought about awards as a marketing strategy for a solopreneur. I wonder, is this something a newcomer and a freelancer could consider?

Lauren: That depends on your outcome; it depends what you’re entering the award for. If you are just starting out, there are start-up awards out there. I know there’s a lot of people in the tech industry that enter start-up awards because ideally, their tech start-up is new and doesn’t have any clients yet or it’s got very few; they’re just in a prototype situation or they’re just launching, and they need some credibility to get investments and to put themselves on the map. So there are definitely start-up awards out there. There are also awards specific for industries, so there will be freelancer awards. There are also those specific within the industry so there’ll be photographer awards, copywriting awards, SEO awards, website designer awards, and podcasting awards. 

1. First of all, think about which award would make the most send to your brand, if you were to win one. 
2. Secondly, think about which would make the most sense to your ideal client so that when they see that you’re an award-winner, they can really connect with that and see that there’s value and credibility. 

For example, if you’re a mum and you’ve got kids and you’re also a freelancer, there are “Mum-Preneur” Awards out there, but if you want to be seen as a really high-quality photographer and that’s what your business is, the “Mum-Preneur” Award might not resonate with your audience. It might be better to go for a photography award. 

You just have to really decide on what the purpose is. We’ve definitely seen people enter the awards and win a Gold Award on a global stage for just their concept and their innovation. They hadn’t even launched yet; they’d just come up with a concept and decided this is what they wanted to do – this was the problem they solved. Yeah, they got recognised with a Gold Stevie Award for that.

SIA: So, that’s it for tonight! Next time, join me as I discover how to use dream boards to create your business, lock in motivation, identify fears and take action in business!

Flying Solo 101 for remote freelancers

SIA: Tonight our guest is Flying Solo founder Robert Gerrish who also has been a business coach for over 20 years. Flying Solo is a community dedicated to all questions and problems of small businesses in Australia and has over 100000 members and Robert has spent decades helping Australians turn things they enjoy doing into a business they enjoy running. 
The National Library of Australia declared Flying Solo website ‘a site of national significance’, and is preserving it in their Pandora web archive since 2009.

Robert is in my view the best person to talk about mistakes most beginning freelancers make and how not to make those mistakes… You also will find out who digital nomads actually are, how to deal with the feeling of isolation when running a remote business, how best to start a virtual mastermind and why you shouldn’t worry that someone will steel your idea if you share it.

So often people are actually not sure what business it is they're starting. They start it by accident Click To Tweet

First of all I really want to know what Robert sees as most common mistakes beginning freelancer and business owners make.

Robert: There’s a number of there are a variety of challenges. And one of one of the very common ones is people are actually not sure what business it is they’re starting. And this is unfortunately more common than either of us may think is a lot of people get going on something because somebody said hey you know you’re good at this why don’t you. Why don’t you do that. Why don’t you do this for me. And they end up if they’re not careful running what I think of as an accidental business. So business kind of started not because they necessarily wants to do that but because maybe there wasn’t much else going on at the time and somebody was offering them a bit of work. And then this this can kind of be quite a fun way to start. But the problem is what it’s totally avoid is any kind of strategy and planning. So those are the kind of businesses that kind of get going but then can get into a very messy situation sometimes very quickly because there’s no planning no organisation no real kind of research. So that’s one of the key ones is not really being clear what is the business that you’re actually trying to run the next one obviously kind of hot on the heels of that is figuring out who your business is actually for. Who do you serve.

What we need to do as business owners is be very very very clear who is it we’re serving

Robert Gerrish

Now again that sounds like a fairly basic sort of comment but what happens unfortunately with a number of businesses is when we speak to our friends and family they also usually they either say what a fantastic idea. That’s just brilliant. Or they say the complete opposite because they’re scared of you kind of failing or they’re jealous of you starting in the first place. But what a lot of businesses do is that is they kind of take their friends and families comments as some kind of validation that that the business they cost is viable and that’s that really is just is just dangerous because what we need to do as business owners is be very very very clear who is it we’re serving and we need to do a good deal of research before we get started to make sure there’s enough of those people that they actually want the product or service that we think that they want and that they’re going to pay for it. So that’s the other one is marketing is is you know we do in the time that I was at flying solo we ran some fairly extensive research programs every couple of years and always always every single time the first the biggest challenge that small businesses so low in the individual businesses had was finding enough clients. So what does that say to you with that what that says to me is that they’re not clear on actually who their market is what their positioning needs to be what their messaging needs to be. So you know if that’s the kind of the key thing then that says to me again at the beginning of a business that’s where we need to in most cases do a lot more work than we currently do.

So the other thing is is I guess the other big kind of challenge with somebody starting a business is really getting a sense of how they’re going to continue to get up every day and do the work you know how who is for a lot of the people that I work with and I’m sure the same with you there are not a lot of these people are individuals that are working by themselves. They’re having to motivate themselves. How are you going to get up and do it day in day out. And this is it this is again a challenge that people generally don’t kind of spend enough time thinking about at the outset and they only realise it’s a problem when it is a problem. And that’s very difficult because if you’re in a position where your struggling to get motivated you possibly haven’t got enough clients your marketing position possibly is kind of right. I’m being very bleak here. Then what can happen is you end up with this voice in your head that’s starting to undermine your your confidence clearly and is a very tricky kind of mindset to be in when you need to be out marketing hustling promoting your business.

How will you continue to motivate yourself once the going gets tough? Decide this when you just starting out! Click To Tweet

SIA: Let’s stay her for a bit longer and dive into the challenges and solutions a bit deeper. What should we do if we discover we ended up running a business by accident?

Forget about all the stuff that you’re doing and that you didn’t want to do. What are your strengths? What is it that you’re good at.? What is it that you really enjoy doing?

Robert: Well there’s a few there’s a few questions the answer and that’s a very very very common scenario. You know the how did I get here. Is it is a is a very when I work with people I still do a little bit of coaching with people and again that’s some very common sort of comments I get is how did I get here. And then we kind of wind it back and we have a look and it’s exactly the kind of scenario that you’ve just discussed. So what I do is I say okay well let’s just put all that aside forget what you’re doing now. Forget about all the stuff that you’re doing and that you didn’t want to do. What are your strengths? What is it that you’re good at.? What is it that you really enjoy doing? And if you start if you get people to kind of go back often to it’s often when they started their work it’ll they’ll they’ll in conversation you will you will usually get to kind of the nugget. The thing that they really wanted to do.

And that’s what we have to do it as individuals that’s that’s quite a challenge to do that. But it’s a matter of sitting down often with a blank sheet of paper and going okay…

• what are the pieces I really enjoy doing
• what clients do I enjoy working with
• what tasks do I enjoy and which ones i dislike doing
• what are the things I love in general, outside my work
• what are the things I am good at outside my work
• what do people thank me for (things I do or knowledge I share with them)

Ask your clients: “Can you tell me what is it particularly you enjoy about working with me”

That’s the places that you need to pull it apart a bit. Now this is a great thing to do with a buddy is to ask somebody and also you can what you can often do very successfully is speak to the clients that you’ve worked with and ask them questions like “What do you get from my work”. “Can you tell me what is it particularly you enjoy about working with me” and you will get you will often hear things that you just didn’t realise was a skill that you have. So it is a lot of it’s kind of introspection is a look at yourself look at what you enjoy look at what you’re good at. Talk to your friends and your clients and find out what they what they think you’re good at and that should I say in inverted commas should start to put you on the right path but sometimes you know even when you go through that it doesn’t necessarily give you a kind of black and white immediate answer because just because you want to be a digital nomad you want to travel the world and no money doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily magically going to have the idea that works plop straight into into your lap you know any business takes work and takes takes personal development and takes exploration. 

The worst thing that can happen is if we end up in a business where we’re day in day out servicing a client doing work we don’t want to do that.

You’re far better to go and get yourself a job and give yourself some headspace to get back into researching and thinking and developing you know developing what it is you really want to do. 

So but the worst thing that can happen is if we end up in a business where we’re day in day out servicing a client doing work we don’t want to do that. That’s not good in that scenario you’re far better to go and get yourself a job and give yourself some headspace to get back into researching and thinking and developing you know developing what it is you really want to do. 

There’s a lot of people running small businesses that are trapped by their businesses and that’s not a good situation. 

Sia: So let’s move on to the second one which does really surprise me as so many people do not know who their clients are. And if you ask them they go like Oh well everyone’s like No it’s not. It’s scary that he’s saying it’s everyone in this there is a lot of advice about how to go about it. But somehow I think it’s not reaching people because still no one knows where their clients can we give some very actionable piece of advice maybe.

Robert: there’s a little story that I use that I’ll just show you if I may. That I think makes this point many years ago I originally actually from London that I’ve lived in Australia now for 25 years. And my my my wife’s Australian I have a family here. Here a stay. But when I when I lived in London which I did for 20 odd years it is a pretty cold grey country. Right. And so what we used to do anyone who kind of lived there is we’d generally head south for the summer. We try and get some sunshine somewhere. And a very popular place to go to was down into Spain France and Spain and Italy and places. And I never once I was on a holiday in Spain and it was one of those holidays where there was a package holiday and whether you liked it or not you kind of got little activities happening during the day on one day what the activity was just after breakfast was a self-defense course learn self-defense. And I promise you see this will be relevant to the moment.

So I did this course like a three hour course. You just learn how to kind of throw people over your shoulder and all of that. You know I thought it is a useful skill to have a bit of self defence but the thing that really stuck with me that the instructor told us and I think is so relevant for small business is he said the thing to remember is this is if you’re out in some foreign country and you’re surrounded by a gang of thugs.

There is no point just shouting for help because what are newspapers or TV channels. They’re full of stories of people who shouted for help and no one came to help them. What we need to do in those situations if you’re surrounded by a kind of a gang of thugs is you need to appoint somebody. So say you over the road with the walking the dog. “Help me”. When you appoint somebody when you give someone the task of helping you they stop in their tracks and they pay attention. They’re far less likely to just keep on walking by because you’ve appointed them.

And this is how we should be viewing our business. If you’ve got a business where you think I’d do anything for everyone. The truth is no one’s going to listen to that message. Everyone just walks on by the chance of you connecting with that message is not going to work. If you’re a designer and you say I work with businesses run by women that are looking to break into new areas with new products that improve life and health. Let’s say health and how awesome some such thing.

If you talk to a very specific niche then you're far more likely to actually be heard. Click To Tweet

If you talk to a very specific niche then you’re far more likely to actually be heard. That’s the kind of message that someone will go ah I know someone who’s doing exactly that. I’ll forward this to them. That’s the difference by having some kind of clear focus a niche your message gets engagement and gets cut through. And that’s what is businesses we need to again. The word courage have the courage to kind of nail our flag to a particular flagpole. 

Sia: You did say though that not only do you need to find the person you serving that niche that market also needs to have enough money. So while I’m running a business at the beginning and I already have clients I may say it might be easier for me to find the real market niche down and know how much money they have and how what their buying behavior is. But when I’m just starting out how honest I find if that’s a market was enough money

People don’t enough research when they’re starting a business

Robert: When you look that’s a great point when you’re starting out. I mean again part of this is research. And as a general kind of comment most people or not enough people when they’re starting a business by themselves do enough research their research is often on the job research they just get going and kind of see what happens. You know so the designer world will stick a profile up on 99 Designs dot com will respond to a few pitches so they’ll just kind of get going and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. But the danger is we go back to this other point. If you do just start working like that you can find yourself getting busy doing the work you don’t want whereas what we ought to be doing more of is research.

Now research is talking to people saying this is the kind of work. I’m looking to grow in my business. I’m looking to specialize in my business. Do you think this will appeal to you. Is this. Do you know someone who this might appeal to that I can talk to. There’s a challenge that I give a lot of clients is to kind of think of yourself as an investigative journalist. Why is there a story here. Is there a story? Is anyone going to be interested in this story?

If we start to think particularly the early days of our business like an investigative journalist are enough people interested in what I’m doing are enough people likely to want it. And are they going to pay for it. It’s we should be asking people talking to people if we’re a designer and we want to work in the let’s say in the health industry then we should be going along to any conferences full of health people and we should hang around and the coffee breaks and go up to people and talk to people.

Most businesses don’t do anywhere near enough research. They just get going by the seat of their pants; if they’re lucky a few jobs will come in and the business can start to evolve.

The more research we do in the early stages the better but unfortunately most businesses don’t do anywhere near enough research. They just kind of get going by the seat of their pants if they’re lucky a few jobs come in and the business can start to evolve. But sometimes as I say that’s a business that evolves in the wrong direction. 

Sia: In your new book 1 minute commute you do talk about solar pioneers but you do call it a movement. Is that something that is new? Is that something that he realized while you were running flying solo. What is that movement. What is it all about. 

Robert: Well it’s not that it’s not new. I mean when when we started flying when I started flying solo originally the very first time I kind of registered the domain name when this is when domain names were just becoming a thing that was in 1998 and it was at that point that I believe that people were starting to realize that actually I could run a business I could run a business remotely and I could start to perhaps market and promote my business with this new thing called the Worldwide Web. You know it was all incredibly new but it’s it was a stampede so many people around the world and particularly I looked at the US and Europe and the lost Australasia people just absolutely took to that like you know like nothing. Absolutely just embraced it. And in Australia today. So 2019 in the country in which I live over 70 percent of Australian small businesses are one person businesses.

So that’s between one point eighty two million businesses and that’s in Australia in the US the statistics are about the same over 70 percent of small businesses are one person businesses. So it’s it’s not something that’s new. It’s it’s not something certainly that I invented. It’s something I was very fortunate to kind of get in on at a relatively early stage and kind of seeing going way back then you know when I realised that this indeed was an important niche was a niece that was or a group of people that were largely being overlooked because in a lot of countries and Australia is certainly was one of them. There was no delineation between kind of micro one one or two person businesses or business that employs 25 people they were all lumped together and called small businesses. But when you actually drill down and look to in fact as I say over 70 percent of those were individuals now an individual who’s trying to grow a business or trying to run a business has very different challenges and different priorities and different goals and dreams and plans than somebody who’s running a 25 person business and through very good fortune I was some of my very early work was the subject of a big documentary show in Australia called Four Corners and that really accelerated my profile because suddenly you know I was on national TV and and talking about my work and I suddenly got really busy and through doing that what I realise is the number of people coming at me that were so low people was astonishing and they were the people that I really resonated with and have you know joyfully been fortunate to make my vocation for the last now you fifteen or sixteen years.

Lifestyle business – serves somebody’s life; a business that allows them to work doing what they want to do, where they want and with whom they want.

And there are people running a business by themselves and those businesses are largely lifestyle businesses. Now when I talk about lifestyle business I don’t mean the typical image of somebody lying in a hammock with a laptop but I’m talking more about a business that serves somebodies life a business that allows them to do what they want to do where they where they want to do it with whom they want to work. That to my mind is a lifestyle business that regularly reliably consistently puts food on the table and brings joy and pleasure. That’s that to my mind that is a lifestyle business.

Sia: So would you say that lifestyle business is what digital nomads are all about. 

Robert: Well digital nomads are certainly within that. I mean it’s the digital nomads are but a tiny group of people that are and you know Lucky Them that generally is people that are fairly kind of free of commitment in terms of often family and property and schooling and all those kind of things. And so they’re able to move around which is clearly beautiful. I’m a come I’m at the other end of this sort of digital nomad I guess I’m nudging towards the grey nomads you know and I’ve got a business I can move around with now my my child is finished school so you know I can start to move around so you know I think they are they’re certainly a group of lifestyle businesses but you know I do a lot of work with a number of bookkeepers and a few of those are I guess you would call them digital nomads they call themselves grey nomads they drive around Australia doing. Remotely looking after a number of bookkeeping clients and they’re able to do it whilst touring the country. It’s not practical for them whilst they’ve got kids here and grandkids and commitments to necessarily go overseas with it. But they can do so digital nomads are a very fortunate group that are able to traverse the world.

There are unique challenges I think being a digital nomad because you’ve if you’re trying to grow a consistent kind of solid revenue then you know it’s not easy. If you’re moving around the place you know we’ve seen today. The Internet doesn’t always play nicely. There are there are challenges to maintain your customer base be be that selling services or selling products. You know there are unique challenges. If you’re a digital nomad and people that do it and make it work I think fantastic. But at some point they may want to settle down somewhere and that’s when the business can maybe shift needs to shift a little and be a slightly different business. 

Sia: Now in your book you mention that one of the myths of solopreneur is that it is lonely. But I do know that a lot of people who live abroad and start their own businesses either if they’re nomads or not they do complain about feeling lonely and being feeling isolated because your friends not necessarily understand what you do you may not even have friends in the country you’re currently living in. So from what you’ve seen and you had a forum dedicated to solo interpreters coming in and connecting so from all the experience that you have for what you the tendencies you see now can you give us some advice on how to go about the feeling of loneliness and maybe how to find buddies accountability bodies where you are. 

It's not the businesses that's making a digital nomad lonely it's the fact that they're a digital nomad Click To Tweet

Robert: Yeah sure. I think the thing there I we should make a distinction or certainly I say distinction. It’s not the businesses that’s making a digital nomad lonely is the fact that they’re a digital nomad.

So we have to be realistic as to what we can expect from our business. Our business is our means in most cases are our means of earning revenue of of being able to live the life we want to live. But we can’t and shouldn’t expect too much from our business our business is just our business. But if we’re if we’re in a foreign country and connection is an issue I don’t see that as being a thing that’s necessarily related to business. It’s just the fact that you are a stranger in a different country and you don’t know anyone.

So we should look outside of our business is one of the key things. I mean there’s a there’s a tool that I use of people that say you’re probably very familiar with which is is called a wheel of life and it’s basically if you imagine a circle on a sheet of paper a dog in the very centre and you break it up into what are the kind of the key aspects of your life and connection with other people health and wellbeing plus prosperity fulfilment all of these are the kind of things that should go in there and work. His work is one aspect of that but I think if it’s connection and community then I would say to you that yes your business can and should support that but don’t put all the pressure on your business to give you that.

If you’re in a in a foreign country and your your you’re feeling lonely and disconnected will maybe go to meetup.com, find groups that are of interest to you and commune with people you know the thing with with most businesses most one person businesses is businesses grow largely through word of mouth so there’s one person talking about your business to somebody else.

Now people only talk about your business when they actually get to meet you in some shape or form. Now it might may well be online through through Instagram or Facebook or whatever but it’s key and very important element is also meeting people face to face.

So what I would say to somebody who is if they’re in a foreign country and they’re bashing away at the business they’re feeling lonely is shut your laptop down and get out go out and commune go out and join a group. Look at hobbies that may interests that you have and start to see if you can grow those within the area that you’re at. Don’t put all the focus or all the pressure on your business because what can happen if you if you try to get too much from your business too much of your of that kind of pie of life if you like that kind of Wheel of Life if you put all the pressure on your business if you’re not careful you’ll start to fall out of love with your business because you’ll consider that your business is not providing your business doesn’t shouldn’t provide everything. If you’ve got a business that. Does provide you a mass then that’s fantastic and that’s brilliant. But we shouldn’t be looking to our business to do absolutely everything but to go back to your other point about some connection and buddies.

What you will often find and certainly you know that the thing with discussion forums and you’re right we started discussion forums on flying solo in 2008. I think the membership now is up to about one hundred and twenty thousand. It’s a wonderful place to talk and share your experiences. A wonderful place and one thing that you’ll find with a lot of these online discussions is that people genuinely like to help each other and a lot of people hesitate because I think Oh if I go and tell them that I’m struggling in my business or if I tell them my idea someone is gonna run off with it.

These are these are fears that actually aren’t helpful and. And in most cases ninety nine point nine percent of the cases it just doesn’t work like that. People are there to support you but they have to know that you need support. So I would certainly say yes speak up on online forums. If you’re in a country that you don’t know but there’s maybe an Internet cafe that you go to or a popular place that you go to put little notice up there saying hey I’m you know a digital nomad if you’d like to meet up and just have a chat about life and work and travels you know start your own group. If there’s not one there start one.

If you don’t want to do it sort of physically where you are then most certainly yes reach out to other people around the world and say hey you’re doing a similar thing that I’m doing in a year in the country X I’m in country Y. What about we get together once a week and just have a chat on Skype and just see how we’re going you know share what our challenges are and these if you actually kind of put your head above the parapet of it and make the suggestion that maybe we could get together we could buddy with each other. In my experience you’d be amazed how many people are waiting for someone like you you know but we have to take the action.

The thing that is interesting as I mentioned to recently or a few minutes ago that you know my son has recently finished school so he’s a young teenage boy now. What does a young teenage boy do most today. Answer He lies in bed right. That’s kind of what they do and they’re waiting for life to happen. And as we both know see if that’s not how the world works. You have to go out and and commune with the world. You have to take part in the world. You have to get out there. You have to be engaged in the world.

One of the biggest most successful things that a business person can do who’s feeling lonely and struggling is they shut the computer down get out go out and meet people go out and see people go out and understand more about where you are.

And one of the biggest most successful things that a business person can do who’s feeling lonely and struggling is they shut the computer down get out go out and meet people go out and see people go out and understand more about where you are. And it will pay you back in spades. You know there was some research done in the firm. I think it was the University of California recently that showed that our generation of ideas increases by up to sixty eight percent. When we’re out walking now that’s a staggering thought. But our generation of ideas increases by 68 percent just by the action of being out walking. So sitting at your desk staring at your laptop and getting yourself you know potentially a bit fed up. Is not the solution. The solution is to get out and engage with the world and that’s when opportunity you mentioned sorry. You mentioned it. 

Sia: You mentioned you know if you can’t if you don’t want to do it where you are you can do it online and when you started describing you know agreed to maybe to a Skype call once a week once every two weeks. That to me sounds like something I became very popular maybe a few years ago and those mastermind grapes. So if somebody were to go and look for those bodies what should they look out for what kind of body should they look hard for how can they best connect because I agree a lot of people fear that oh if I start sharing with you what I’m doing asking you for advice you may run away it was my idea.

Most people are not spending their day looking for ideas a pinch from other people. Click To Tweet

Robert: Well running away with an idea is is a fear of frankly of somebody who has often is not terribly experienced in work and has and is could do with a bit of a confidence boost. Most people are not spending their day looking for ideas a pinch from other people. That’s just not how it works. But what we. You’re quite right masterminds have been around since Roman times I believe and they’re still extremely popular. The way to do it is is to be the person that has the courage to say how you feel where you are and what you’re looking for what. Unfortunately a lot of people do is they hesitate. These kind of hold back and they wait for somebody else to invite them to do something. Now if you’re going to succeed in your own business you can’t be that sort of person. You need to be the kind of person that takes the lead in the same way that here you are. Here you have decided you are going to run a podcast you are going to find gas you are going to interview gas. You haven’t sat back waiting for people to suggest that you do it. You’ve done it. And the same thing is true with with masterminds. If you want to surround yourself with people that are going to be supportive then be the leader be the person that puts the first note out there and says Hey I am currently based in Bangkok. I don’t know anybody here. I’m good. I’m doing some freelance design work for other people around the world but I just love to meet up with a few other people that are maybe looking to explore how to grow their business how to add extra services how to get involved in networking if any of you have those kind of issues or might be able to assist in any way. How about we meet for a coffee next Friday morning at 9 o’clock. The skills that I could bring to that meeting are I am very good at x y and z. You know so you can share some of your strengths and also be be willing to talk about what it is that you’re looking for. It’s only when we see people that actually are open and honest and transparent about what it is that they want that is allows other people to come in and help. 

Sia: What do you look for somebody in the same field as you or would you look for somebody in other fields.

Robert: It doesn’t matter. It matters not at this stage when you’re talking about a mastermind group. We’re basically looking to start conversations with like minded people it doesn’t matter what field they’re in if you put restrictions on the kind of masterminds particularly if you’re in a fairly remote location you don’t know anybody then it’s unlikely to work. Whereas if I said to you let me think about this now okay either I don’t know a great deal about you here but let me assume that your a creative person. Let me assume that your good with words you’re good with language. But let me make an assumption that you’re not great with financial management. I’m just making this stuff up right. 

Sia: You do know me.

Robert: Just make it up. Okay. So if that were the situation and if my issue whether I felt that I needed financial management I needed to understand finances if I’d put if I’d kind of suggested that I’d like to meet with someone who’s in a similar situation to me or is in as you know in that they’re running their own business in a remote location. The challenges I’ve got are financial management I’m pretty good with marketing communications but I’d really like to get some tips on financial management. I’d love to have a chat with you even if it’s not your expertise perhaps together we could work it out. That’s the kind of language I’d be using because the thing with that is that if again if you put a restriction sir and he wants to speak with other people in the creative services industry or any want to speak with people like that it’s your your cutting down the the likelihood of there being people. But what what what often happens in the world let’s say I’ve said that about you now if you then can set up a you know a mastermind group and you start and you said what I could really look what I really need is a bit of help with with financial management. And to be honest it’s not my strong point but I’ve been in business a long time now. So I kind of know where to go for help. So I would know where to send you felt I know what books that I would direct you to. So people if they are interested and sympathetic and engaged with you and what you’re doing in your business if you sit around a table with four or five people in IT degrees of separation there will be somebody around that table who has a solution for you that could lead to something that will really help you. And it might be buying a book it might be oh I noticed there’s a little workshop going on at the end of my street. I got a free pass to an online course or here’s a course of I did a few years ago you know. But if we try and restricts it then then people will read it and go That’s not me so I won’t go. And that doesn’t that doesn’t help. 

Sia: Very last question I do ask that quite a few guests on this show how do you know if business is actually not for you and you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur or is everyone if they try and find the right fit can be interpreters. 

Robert: No I don’t think it’s I don’t think it suits everybody at all. I think some people actually really miss the kind of the structure and discipline of being in a business they like hanging around the water cooler and speaking to friends and they like teamwork. You know it’s so though it doesn’t suit everyone at all. How do you know. Well I guess you know if it’s if it’s kind of making you a bit miserable and if you think you could have more fun working for someone else then you know maybe it isn’t for you.

If you find that getting up every day, finding clients, managing them, handling the work and making sure you get enough food on the table… if all of that just exhaust you – then maybe running business is not for you

I mean I would say to you that the the number of people that I meet now is probably not the time to go into the whole entrepreneur thing but but kind of starting to work on your own and generate some income that does not make you an entrepreneur. It makes you know someone who’s is trying to have a go at building a business that’s that’s a good thing but it’s not strictly speaking an entrepreneur. But if you find that getting up every day finding clients managing them handling the work structuring it make sure you got enough food on the table if all of that just ties and exhaust to you then maybe it isn’t for you maybe go back and you know often what it points to is it is it is a skill set. Or a bit of a skill set that’s kind of missing. So for a lot of people when I speak with people and a kind of coaching capacity in quite a few occasions I’ll say to them you know ah I’m not sure that you should be running this business right now. You know it strikes me that there is it would be beneficial for you perhaps to go back and work in someone else’s small business for a while and learn a little bit more about structure and finance and marketing and then come back to it again.

You know it’s just because you’ve decided to do it doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. And one of the biggest and there’s lots of talk of business failure. Most of it is grossly exaggerated and it’s usually exaggerated by people that are trying to sell you the professional services to help your business.

The reason that most businesses don't work is because it gets too hard. ~ Robert Gerrish, Flying Solo Click To Tweet

But the reason that most businesses don’t work is is because it gets too hard. It just gets too difficult and people go you so this I might as well just go and get a job. And that’s why a lot of businesses closed this because it all gets too hard and most businesses happily do not close know more businesses succeed than fail. It’s an important thing to remember but those that do fail often it’s because it gets too hard. So if that’s the case then just park it for a bit. That’s not to say you’re not going to come back to it but maybe you need to go back and work with someone for a while and just learn upscale a little bit learn a few more things and then come back to it again. You know my belief is if you are a small business person then Small businesses is in you and it will come back to you.

But we shouldn’t struggle and agonise and you know make ourselves unhappy or unwell if we’re in a situation that we’re just not enjoying.

SIA: If you found this interview with Robert useful then you probably will also enjoy his latest book The 1 minute commute which should help you start your freelancing journey without making any oblivious beginner mistakes! 

See you next time with more goodness for freelancers and those who just want to start their solo business…

HOW DARE YOU CHARGE FOR THAT?

Our guests tonight are Ankita Sodhia, Liz Steiner, Marielle Reussink and Linda Clay

 “No one would ever pay you what you’re worth. They’ll only ever pay you what they think you’re worth.” ~ Casey Brown Click To Tweet

That’s Casey Brown in her Ted Talk. When I heard this phrase – «They only pay you what they think you’re worth,” it struck a chord with me and I wanted to look deeper into the question of self-value and charging for your work.  How many of us think “I can’t charge money for that. I am not good enough yet”? How many say “I can’t charge that much, no one will pay me that, I will end up having no clients and will go out of business”?

If you recognise yourself in any of that, welcome. Welcome to a very large club. A lot of people running business say exact same things over and over to themselves in their heads and out loud, every day. And by the way, this mindset is not limited to freelancers and solo-preneurs. Start-ups are afraid to charge their users as much as you are afraid to charge your client.

Tonight, I am talking to four guests that went the road or helped others travel the road from self-doubt to business confidence. I want to find out how to know if you are actually are made to run a business, how to overcome the fear of charging for your services and how to charge a good rate even if it means that you have to charge above the market already with your very first client.

So let’s start at the beginning. We all know and say “not everyone is cut out to run a business,” but I think if not most of us, then quite a few, hope in secret that they are absolutely are made to run a business. So what are there signs that just maybe business is not something you should pursue?

Linda: How does somebody know if they actually feel ill? It’s uncomfortable for them to do what an entrepreneur does, which is take risks to put themselves out there. More risks than you would if you were in a job and you have that kind of gut reaction that you can’t do this. To me, that’s the biggest sign ever that they shouldn’t be in that. A perfect example is my daughter. She does not want to do anything. She’d be a great entrepreneur but she likes that safety and security of having a job.

SIA: This is Linda Clay, a business coach and lifestyle strategist from Seattle in the US and she helps women create and run businesses, so the right person to talk about what it means to be a good fit for entrepreneurship. But also, more importantly, how to deal with the unpleasant feeling that entrepreneurship and business might not be right for you, how not to feel a failure.

Linda: I don’t think it’s a failure. People have to understand: just because it fits Jill over there in the corner or Joe in the other corner, it doesn’t mean it’s right for you as a person. And I think part of the mystique out there is that we think that all these things that people are doing are the best thing ever to do when in reality it might not fit you and that’s OK. Part of what happens is that we don’t live into ourselves.

We really don’t pay attention to what we actually want because we’re hearing other people telling us what we really should be doing.

MARIELLE:  In our society, we’re just made to feel like being an entrepreneur. That’s what you should aim to do. And if you’re not cut out for it, you kind of suck. A lot of people feel guilty if entrepreneurship is not for them. And so I always say to people: it’s not cut out for everybody. And that’s totally fine.

SIA: This is Marielle, a digital agency owner from South Africa who currently lives and works in Singapore. I caught up with her because I heard about workshops she runs in Singapore that help people figure out if they are cut out for business and how to go about becoming an entrepreneur the right way. Marielle didn’t plan to run business workshops when she started her agency, but a business story of her marketing client touched her personally and changed the way Marielle approached all her work with clients from then on.

MARIELLE: It’s actually a bit of a sad story. When I started working with her from the beginning, she was so excited and passionate about her project. It was just extremely contagious and I helped build the brand, that entire story, websites, market etc. So I really was part of her journey from day one. And then she did extremely well. Hence she had an extremely successful but unfortunately at the back of her mind she always had this doubt whether she was really cut out to be an entrepreneur or not, and that struggle really never went away. At some point that fire in her eyes that just went out, she was no longer excited about her business, she actually hated it.

SIA: Usually we see businesses failing because the product wasn’t right for the market or because the message is not right or maybe some fundamentals were missing when setting the business up. But in this case, it was different.

MARIELLE: With this business, it was the right product. It had such a high resonance, such a high follow-up with people and it was the right thing for the right time. She was so successful with her business. So if she had had the foresight on how to scale this and to avoid burning out and crashing into a wall, I think not only would she have been able to be a happier person, I think she’d enjoy that journey more herself. She would have been able to help so many more people with her business. For me, this is a great case study because it illustrates that it’s not just about what to do and essential financial questions, it’s also a lot about yourself.

Up to 30 per cent of companies fail for personal reasons

Looking at this question deeper, actually, up to 30 per cent of companies fail for personal reasons. A founder starts to lose passion or focus or actually burns out. A lot of people already burned out working really hard on their business before they make a single dime. That means you’re not doing it right essentially.

SIA: This story about a client losing interest in her extremely successful business impacted Marielle so much that she went on to develop an exercise that she now does with everyone who attends her entrepreneurship workshops. Marielle worked with over a hundred founders and with the sad story of an abandoned business still fresh on her mind, she distilled what she has observed into 6 main characteristics that increase, in her opinion, your chances of success as an entrepreneur.

6 main characteristics that increase your chances of success as an entrepreneur

1. Grit and determination

MARIELLE: The first one is, of course, grit and determination. You have to have grit and determination on the day when the going gets tough – and it’s going to get tough on a recurring basis because you always have curveballs thrown at you. If you have that, it gets you through it. It carries you through those struggles because you just have that unwavering belief and thrust force behind you to achieve your goal to make your business a success.

2. Risk-taking

Then, risk-taking. As a founder, you need to be super comfortable with not knowing what tomorrow will bring, with not always having all the information. And sometimes you need to take the plunge. You need to sometimes make decisions quite quickly with the information that you have, and you need to be comfortable with that. It might be the wrong decision, and you need to know that as long as nobody dies,  you can fix it. You will find ways to fix it but you need to have that bravery.

3. Decisiveness

Decision making is linked to risk-taking. Some people really just don’t like making decisions or don’t like making them fast as well. If you have a struggle with that, running a business might be really challenging for you because it’s essentially about making decisions every single day. So if you take ages to make every single decision, you might just lose track of the market and the opportunity. You might just be your own stumbling block at the end of the day. It’s important to be able to overcome whatever is holding you back in terms of decision making, and there’re some cool tools that can help you with that.

4. Enjoy problem-solving

Problem-solving is supercritical. As an entrepreneur, you’re constantly solving some of the problems and here.

There’s a level of creativity that needs to come in as well. So often it’s not necessarily path A or B but actually, path C that was not even obvious to take. You need to think to really find that cutting edge for your business.

5. Ability to ask for help

Number five is seeking support and asking for help. I think we don’t talk about this enough in entrepreneurship. Having the skill of knowing when to ask for help and who to ask for help sometimes can be the make or break. Honestly, nobody’s expecting you to know everything. Nobody is expecting you to be an expert on law and finance and product design from the get-go. Nobody can fulfil all of these different roles. So if you don’t know how to do something, talk to people honestly, as this is the best source of information. And of course, do a lot of googling. Ask experts in the field. What I find so fascinating is how happily a lot of people just give their advice and their recommendations from entrepreneurs just because they want to see other people succeed. So one of the things I did when I started out on my journey is I talked to a lot of tax consultants and lawyers to try and understand what were the implications of different start-ups. I got so much great advice, and I never paid for any of them. So don’t be afraid to ask for help.

6. Self-motivation

And lastly, self-motivation is really critical because if you’re not motivated to do your work on your own project and you can’t get out of bed and there’s no deadline looming over your head – well, what can we say?

SIA: Risk-taking, creativity, being able to ask for help – it may sound like it’s only applicable to big decisions and pivotal moments. But in reality, your mindset, your approach to challenges and uncertainties impact your success in every tiny thing every single day. 

Later in this episode, we will hear personal stories told by successful entrepreneurs that will show us how these personal characteristics play out. But for now, let’s return to Marielle and the challenge of self-motivation which basically is another word for the ability to pick yourself up after a blow.

MARIELLE: If you don’t work on your business, nobody else will.

So if you’re not motivated to work on your own business, it’s not going to happen. Essentially if you’re working on your own business and you’re fulfilling your own passion and your own dream, this shouldn’t be a challenge; but for some it is. If that’s the case, you need to ask yourself why is that? Why are you struggling to self-motivate to deliver your projects or your service? Because if it’s really something you enjoy, it shouldn’t be this hard. And then sometimes it’s just a question of do you rejig how you deliver your business or do you maybe outsource parts of your job that you don’t enjoy.

SIA: So what Marielle is saying is that you need following six characteristics: you need grit and determination, you need to be able to take risks, make decisions, be a creative problem solver and have the ability, the courage to ask for help and be able to self-motivate.

MARIELLE: So those are the six characteristics that I see that all successful founders have and embody. If you have them, you have a much better chance of making it.

SIA: Here is how Marielle suggest you find out if you are cut out to run a business. Write these 6 characteristics we just talked about down on a piece of paper on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side opposite each of them write down how much of each of these characteristics you have demonstrated already, and, most importantly, how thinking about each of the characteristics makes you feel.

MARIELLE: We ask you to think of your own personal example from your own personal experience in terms of grit and determination. For example, how have you displayed that in the past and, much more importantly, how did that make you feel? Was it extremely difficult or did you feel elation and an incredible sense of pride when you overcame a problem and solved it? Did you feel that exhilaration as a result of it? It really is a feeling-base exercise. The point is to take you back in your mind to that situation that you’ve gone through, demonstrated the skill, and then to ask you to really think about it. How did you feel? Did it make you feel comfortable or was it out of your comfort zone? Then rate yourself on your feeling: is this really your comfort zone or not really. This is where self-honesty and self-awareness is really important. So if problem-solving is not your comfort zone, then be honest with yourself: OK. This is an area I will need help with if I want to do my own business or decision making.

MARIELLE: Feedback from people who had gone through the workshop and this exercise is like that. At some point, they just get this overwhelming sense of “This is not actually really right for me”. Coming to that point and admitting that to yourself is tough. If you at point three and you start sensing that if you really take yourself back into those situations and you don’t find your comfort zone, I would say, you should probably ask yourself whether this is really right for you. At the same time, I obviously don’t want to discourage anybody. It’s just you’ve really got the deck stacked against you. If you don’t represent a majority of these skills or if those skills don’t come innately to your nature, you will literally fight your personal nature, probably every day.

SIA: We continued our conversation with Marielle for quite some time, and I was really curious to find out what people do in those workshops if they discover a few areas where they are quite weak, areas they really don’t like doing, but they still don’t want to give up on their business idea. That’s when Marielle shared another exercise that she often lets people complete after they got their insights on whether they are cut out to be an entrepreneur. She calls this exercise “Writing a founders job spec”.

As a founder, you’re employee number one. You should have your own job spec. Click To Tweet

MARIELLE: I think a lot of people always forget: as a founder, you’re employee number one. You should also have your job spec: what is your role in the business and what should you be taking care of. That should be based on your skills, knowledge and experience. And if you don’t have all of the skills that you need, then you need to identify how are you still going to manage that area of your business. If you were to write your job spec at the beginning of running your business, you could already identify: Okay. I am not a super-duper accountant or I have no idea about the legal framework that I need to put behind my business. These are two people I need to talk to and possibly hire to run my business. And if that’s so, I need to find the money to do that. Then if I need to find the money to do that and pay myself, then I need to think about my pricing and how much do I charge to make all of that happen. This takes us back to pricing. Pricing is so important and I think a lot of people don’t think critically enough about pricing. It’s not just about how you value a self or market rate, but also how much do you need to make to pay everybody and yourself to sustain your business. That should be the first point, and then you work backwards. What should you charge and how much do you need to sell.

SIA: Marielle makes a really good point. When you start your own business, you’re not paid for your time anymore. The only thing that customers care about is what value you provide, what transformation you can make in their lives.

You must charge by the value you provide.

And you must also charge enough to ensure your needs are met so that you can invest in the necessary things for your business.

Linda: A lot of people don’t place value on their knowledge. They don’t place the value on themselves. So that’s one of the things that you have to look at: how valuable is your time and how valuable are you. And if you feel that you’re not, then you get caught in that cycle of giving away your services for free, charging way too low because you just feel that they’re not going to buy. That’s how you come across so that energy is out there that you don’t have the faith and the belief in yourself to charge a higher rate.

I take my clients through a process of sitting down and writing down all their achievements that they’ve achieved throughout their whole entire life. All the way back to the algebra test they aced when they didn’t think they could because I want them to see that on paper. Or words that people like to say that your voice is telling you … is not necessarily the reality.

You’re an expert in the things that you’ve already gone through because there’s always somebody there who hasn’t gone through those things yet.

When you start looking at your achievements and all the things that you’ve accomplished, right there you’ve become an expert in the things that you’ve already gone through because there’s already somebody there who hasn’t gone through those things.

Remember when you were in kindergarten and you walk to kindergarten and you were getting used to all that and then you notice the fourth graders and they had the special recess. They got to play on the special equipment. They knew it all because they were in fourth grade and you were only a kindergarten student. So as any person going into any type of service-based business, there’s always those kindergarten students out there that know less than you because you’re further along in your path. So you’re exactly where you should be with the knowledge that you have. And as you grow your business and as you work with people, you actually gain more knowledge and become an even higher and better expert up the ladder.

ANKITA: When I came up with this “charge for value strategy,” it was a result of looking inwards at myself.

SIA: This is Ankita, she is a digital marketing freelancer in Thailand. I want to know how she came up with her value-based pricing when she just was starting out over a year ago after a successful career in corporate marketing.

ANKITA: When you are going freelance or going to start your own business or thinking if anyone is going to pay me for what I have to offer. I think the exercise I went through mentally and maybe even physically was like asking people: Am I good at what I do and is it something that other people will think? Would it add value to their life? Would they find any use?

Ask yourself: Am I good at what I do and is it something that other people will think? Would it add value to their life? Would they find any use? Click To Tweet

Asking myself this one basic question led me to look at myself and think what I have achieved in my career thus far. What are some of my milestones and highlights, what were the peaks when other people or my colleagues, friends, the family had something good to say about what I do… In a way that made me seem unique. It sounds like a very soft approach to building a business, but for me, that was really important because it helped me build my self-confidence. So that’s where charging for value began for me.

The first question was: Am I good. Do others think I’m good?

That was where I started to realise that I have value, I have something that the person sitting next to me doesn’t have. That’s where the whole charge for value strategy was born. Then, jumping off that, I had to do some market research to see what is my market value in terms of a monetary amount, what is the current rate of the market in Thailand for freelance consultants or digital marketing consultants. What are they charging and then, where do I fit on the spectrum in terms of my skill, my expertise, the niche market that I want to serve.

SIA: Right now Ankita sounds very confident, and her process of coming up with a value-based pricing sounds like a simple mental exercise. But it wasn’t that easy. Ankita is a Thai-born of Indian descent who after high-school went to the US to do her masters in Advertising. When she came back to Thailand, she suddenly found herself caught between two worlds: she was seen as a local by the recruiters but she didn’t feel Thai anymore, she saw herself as an expat with a different outlook on life, different values, work ethic and international professional experience.  She was caught between the two worlds. And because of her dual identity, she also had to benchmark her skills and process against both local and expat freelancers.

ANKITA: I’m seen as a Thai, I mean I’m Indian by culture. But I grew up in Bangkok. On paper I would look like a local, the companies would say, yeah, you grew up here, you finished your high school here, you’re basically Thai. Yet I felt like the education was so different and all the experience abroad as well as what I gained, and it made me different. So that’s where the internal conversation with myself started.

Part of the internal conversation was like: OK, you have to find your compromise with accepting what other people in the local hiring scene would perceive you, and then try to find a happy medium with who you think you are and what value you can bring. I kept telling myself that no matter what, I should not forget my own sense of self and self-confidence in the work that I have done: not to forget what I’m passionate about, what drives me, what gives me ambition, just to settle or to get something in the local market.

SIA: So what Ankita is saying is that making a mental list of all achievements and of all skills is a good starting point. Talking to colleagues and family to try and identify what actually makes a difference to others, what value your skills have created for others is also a good thing to do. I think that her focus on what value she can create for others and what she can bring to the table helped Ankita to establish herself in a digital marketing market that is plagued by undercutting. She does charge above local freelancers’ rates and she makes a point by educating her clients how much more they get when working with her.

I really liked the story Ankita shared about her very first experience pitching a potential client. And I invite you to use her argument when next time you get into the conversation about your fees.

So one Sunday afternoon Ankita and her husband went to have a pizza in a beautiful, quaint restaurant hidden in the back streets of Bangkok… The French owner came over to her table to ask how the pizza was, and they got into a conversation about the restaurant’s website and promotions the owner was running and all those marketing things. Mark, the French owner of that place, was quite struggling to agree and accept that marketing needs so much more money compared to that he thought he could afford, and that paying freelancer on top of the budget would not make much of good business sense. And then Ankita came with this brilliant line.

ANKITA: You have to think of it like how you hire your chef because of their specialty and their ability to make these world-class pizzas – that’s what people are coming for. You won’t think twice about spending on a good chef because they’re bringing value to your business, they’re making it special. You have to think about hiring someone for your digital marketing or for any marketing need or just anyone that you’re adding to your business to bring value. Yes, the money, the number or how much they cost you is important. But if you start to see it from the perspective of what value they bring you and how they can help you grow your business in the way that you want, then that’s worth spending on.

SIA: That was Ankita’s first-ever pitch. She liked how it felt and sounded, how it connected with her values, and from then on this became her “thing”.

ANKITA: I decided that when I approach this whole thing, I’m not going to undercut anyone else who are offering the same services. I’m not going to compare myself. I’m going to go with this value-based approach. Having a conversation with him gave me the confidence to then use that to pitch to a new client, and then I managed to land my first client because of this first pitch.

SIA: It’s interesting that both ANKITA and MARIELLE kept saying that you should try and avoid working for free at all costs. But this is so hard to do when you’re just starting out.

LIZ: I was really young, I had maybe one or two years of work experience and my PhD, I had the typical female thinking: can I really charge for this? There are so many experts out there who know more. But afterwards, I found out that this is often not true because some people just sell themselves really well. They don’t necessarily have to be better than you. Maybe just better than us at selling themselves.  

SIA: This is Liz Steiger. Now she is a seasoned serial entrepreneur with a fitness app, e-commerce store and consulting business under her belt. But her story starts quite a few years ago. Liz studied economics and wrote her PhD about the Chinese economy, she spent a long time in China learning the language and getting to know the business scene over there.

While she had a corporate job and at the same time was often asked to provide consulting and advise as an expert in all things business in China. It took Liz a few years to become conscious of the effort, time and financial investment that went into her becoming an expert and that she needed to be rewarded for her effort.

LIZ: And I did a lot of this actually for free and every time when I did it for free, I was like, OK. Great to see this like so much knowledge that I had to learn by living that, by learning the language, by giving a lot up, and all this also impacts a private life, how often you see your family if you have a relationship and all this. Then, in the end, you don’t even charge for the things that you learned by giving up a lot of things. The older I got, the more I saw around me, the more I was like “OK, well, I can’t keep doing this, otherwise I will always be on the losing side of that”.

SIA: After a few years, while working in Shanghai as an expat, Liz came up with an idea for a fitness app geared towards local Chinese market (and you can hear more about her success story in our 1^st episode). She was very successful in developing and launching her product. The app allowed her to quit the job and become an entrepreneur. At the same time requests to come and help, come and advise on different projects kept coming in. Liz was ready to start charging for her experience. But even though she decided to charge it didn’t mean she had the confidence to actually do it. One thing Liz talked a lot about is her ability to ask for help and advice when she needed it. One day she was asked to pitch for website development and Liz did what she does so well – reached out to an entrepreneur friend for advice.

LIZ: We were just having coffee together. I called him and said: look, I want to talk about this with you. Honestly, I don’t even know if I’m the right person. I don’t know if I can do this, what if they ask for a certain feature that I can’t do myself. At first, we went through all the points that the project would involve. And then he actually said: First, I don’t understand why you think you can’t do it. It was a feature on that website that I could not really do myself. He said: you know how many agencies out there just outsource it to somebody else? Just don’t even talk about it. And I know that you can do this feature because whatever you do, you always work really hard. It will work. Don’t worry. This should not be the reason, this is a very minor thing, maybe a half a percentage of the whole project, but this half-percentage made me doubt the whole thing.

SIA: So what Liz and her friend did was to go through what the project would require, they looked at what Liz has already done before similar to the web site project and discovered it was just a very a small part that she didn’t know much about and that made her so nervous and doubtful.

I think the most helpful insight though came from the realisation that pretty much everyone out there wings it to some extent and as long as you know where to find experts to help you deliver the overall thing – you should be fine. Like Marielle said it before, ”figuring things out and thinking outside the box is so important for the entrepreneurial success.” And here’s the proof.

So Liz went to pitch for her very first consulting gig and it turned out to be a good experience that she also charged for, and more importantly, that website feature that nearly made Liz wanting not to apply – that feature wasn’t important and didn’t cause any troubles.

In our conversation with Liz, the topic of male versus female entrepreneurs kept coming up and Liz kept sharing her observations about nearly opposite ways of dealing with the fear of failure that she has seen in her male and female friends and peers. There was one example of her recent conversation with a male friend that was quite powerful for her.

Failure and fears are normal.

LIZ: I asked him: how do you deal with failure and all these fears? And it took him really long to answer and then I actually realised that he himself didn’t think as much about this topic as I do. And then he said: “Failure and fears are normal. If you’re an entrepreneur or even if you have another job. So this is something that has to be part of our lives and we need to deal with it. We can’t have ourselves impacted. When I look at the project, I make my calculations. I think how can I get there. And if I say that in that year I want to make a million dollars in revenue, I know I can make it.”

And I was just sitting there, I was like “wow you really say that?” I would never talk like this. How do you know that you will make it? He just said: because I’m confident that I can do it. I need to believe in myself. And so should you.”

We doubt ourselves so much and very often for no reason Click To Tweet

From what I’ve seen… so many female consultants, businesswomen, leaders: we doubt ourselves so much and very often for no reason. There are so many studies out there that show that we are very often overqualified, that we work harder. We just need to get this out of our system to doubt ourselves. And even I myself need to work on that because it keeps happening

SIA: Liz is a successful entrepreneur, so her life keeps presenting her with challenges and opportunities to either lose her confidence or to pick herself up and become more resilient. What Liz became good at is to focus on what she did to solve an issue instead of dwelling on how and why she got into the problem and what this might say about her business abilities. Just a few weeks before our conversation Liz’s eCommerce site crashed during a product launch.

LIZ: The web site kept crashing and I couldn’t really fix it. And of course, if you rely on a website to sell products, you get nervous because every day that this website doesn’t work, I lose money. And then you keep obsessing about it.I tried to fix that for two days which ended up one day I spent only in the house in my pyjamas from morning until night obsessing about the code. The second day I still tried to fix it; it didn’t work. And then on my blog, other things also kept crashing. It was a malware thing

SIA; While the site kept crashing, her marketing launch campaign kept pushing new customers to the web site, and people kept texting Liz “I can get my order, I can’t pay, what’s happening”. But Liz couldn’t offer them any solution other than just ask to place their order over email. On the second day, she felt the sky was falling down and to break the spiral of desperation and helplessness she went for a run.

LIZ: I tried to relax and tell myself: Look, if you now lose your confidence, it’s gonna be over. I always remind myself about one story where losing my confidence and being nervous did cost me a lot.

SIA: Quite a few years ago Liz was preparing for her driving license test. In Austria, where she is from, you can drive supervised by your parents or a driving instructor from the age of 16. One day her driving instructor had to pull the handbrake to avoid a crash. This sudden danger and the fact that she didn’t see it coming scared Liz and left a big dent in her confidence. Then the day of the driving test came…

LIZ: This potential of an accident triggered something in me, that always when I was in the car with somebody supervising advising me, I got really really really nervous. I lost my confidence completely. And then on the day where I was supposed to take that driving exam I was shaking. I was so nervous I couldn’t even think and then the guy who was taking that exam with me, he then said: OK Mrs Steiger, now just switch on the light in the car. I was so nervous that I couldn’t even switch on the lights. I forgot everything. I was completely blank.

SIA: Liz failed the test.

LIZ: I failed my driver’s licence exam and not because I didn’t know how to drive. It was just because I talked myself already before that into being nervous, into losing my confidence and it actually cost me the whole thing.

SIA: Tonight I asked all my guests what they think about working for free when you just starting out. And we heard anything from “don’t ever do it” to “sure, that’s the easiest way to start.” But Linda has, I think the most pragmatic approach to this internal question about “free work” and I hope her answer is something you might find useful.

Don't give work for free – develop a scholarship program instead Click To Tweet

Linda: I have given work for free for people. I usually get an exchange of something, such as a testimonial. This was when I was first starting out. But I believe that you should also find that middle ground. If you totally do things for free, yes, you get caught in a cycle and it is very difficult to get out of that. So my recommendation to my clients now is you start your business, you get paying clients and then you develop a scholarship program so that if you want to help people and service them, that you have money coming in in order to help you.

If you’re a coach and you’re giving away free service and you’re putting out all this effort to help somebody improve their life or build a business and they’re not doing the work, you can get resentful. If they have to apply for a scholarship to get your high-end product, then there they’re putting an effort into purchasing that. But in a way of a scholarship, it gives you the opportunity to help somebody who really has that desire to better themselves or create a business. You have a vision, they have a mission, you’re not ending up with people that don’t appreciate it.

SIA: So tonight we have a few takeaways. First one is how we can try and overcome our inner voice of doubt. I think it was Linda who suggested we write down all the nasty things we say to ourselves in the head and then we right down opposite each of those negative statements: how that statement is wrong and what we have as evidence that the negative statement is wrong.

I liked how Liz compared the negative voice in her head to a friend who always talks you down and if that voice was from a friend – you would never keep that friend around, not for long at least. Maybe this is how we should approach voices in our heads.

Value is not what you think it’s worth: it’s how much of a difference does your service make in your client’s life Click To Tweet

Another tip I personally am taking away from this episode is the approach to pricing your service for its value. And the value is not what you think it’s worth: it’s how much of a difference does your service make in your client’s life. This positive difference is all it matters and is the only measure of the value you provide and what you can charge.