10 Things I’ve Learned in 2 Years of Running My Business Full Time

Two years ago…

I was a Content Marketer in Silicon Valley, only recently sowing my wild oats as I’d climbed the ladder from Marketing Intern to Marketing Assistant, all the way to Content Marketer.

The year before that, I’d graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a year early and smack-dab in the middle of a global pandemic, English Literature degree in hand. I didn’t have a clear path I wanted to follow: I just knew that I had ambition and the drive to excel in whatever subject matter I put my mind to. That’s how I found myself in 3D printing, worlds away from my specialty in the medieval department, in cross-continental meetings, and attending conferences across the globe.

But as I found my way, I found myself continually drawn to the world of entrepreneurship. During what little free time I had, I built up my side hustle: a business writing content and copy for publicists, PR professionals, and brand strategists. I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would grow: so much so that I quit my tech job and took the leap to write content and copy full-time.

I’ve learned a lot in these two years, and know that I’ll learn even more in the next twenty, but here are the…

10 Things I Learned in 2 Years of Running My Business Full Time

01 The Right Relationships Are Everything

Like most overachieving university students, it was easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking that my success was solely dependent on my own grit and skill. I figured that if I worked hard enough and did good enough work, I was sure to succeed. And if I failed? That was fully on me too. Starting my own business turned that assumption on its head. It only took one contact with one future client for a whole network of opportunities to open itself up to me, and that was because I’d connected meaningfully with the right person. So much of my success was due to word of mouth, and that brings me to my second point…

02 Self-Presentation is Key to Success

I truly believe that my luck in connecting with the right people had a lot to do with the way I presented myself. Even though I’d never planned on being an entrepreneur, I’d developed my own website in high school, featuring blogs, essays, and featured articles to create a sort of “digital portfolio”. Over time, these added up to give prospective clients a sense of my writing’s quality, long before I ever had portfolio pieces for the projects they were looking for. I made sure to represent myself well in the little things too, including dressing well for Zoom calls (remember, this was the start of the pandemic) and ensuring I researched connections before having a discovery call with them. That all comes as second nature now, but it really made a difference when I was first starting out.

03 Know What You Don’t Know

As a fresh graduate who was on the younger side and whose stint in a formal corporate environment was brief, I was in a unique place. I had confidence in my abilities, but not a whole lot of experience to back it up. I found out quickly that working with the types of experienced professionals who were hiring me required one thing they didn’t teach in school: humility. I’d been worried that exuding humility would belie how young I was, or cause prospective clients to not trust my skills. But that simply wasn’t the case. Humility allowed me into spaces where pride would have barred the door and made me receptive to learning from my clients while I was providing services to them. Luckily for me, my first clients were strong, amazing, compassionate women, so they made this easy.

04 Know Your Worth

The flip side of having humility is having enough confidence in yourself and in your work to hold your own. This is true in multiple facets of my work. There are many environments within freelancing where freelancers and independent contractors are underpaid and undervalued, creating a prevalent mentality that freelancers are cheap and interchangeable. I also work in spaces where all the voices in the room are experienced, educated, and impactful. If I want to be in those spaces, I need to contribute and act with poise. I also want to project the value of myself and my expertise so I can connect with clients who can benefit from my work. If I make myself small or sell myself short, clients who could be amazing fits might overlook me and would be worse off for it, because I bring something to the table that no other writer can.

05 Age Is Just a Number

I have to admit: this one was tough. It’s a main component of the balancing act between humility and confidence. I was barely 20 when I graduated from Cal, and hardly older than 21 when I stepped away from tech. But here’s the thing: I’ve been interning or holding assistant roles in marketing departments since I was 16. I worked 30-hour weeks in college (in financial technology, specifically) while taking an above-average courseload to graduate early. My client calls in tech were stuffed to the gills with NDAs. And the sum of all of this is: I had more work experience than most people my age by the time I stepped out into the workforce. That experience along with my education and work ethic adds value to me as a young professional, in addition to the tech-savviness and marketing know-how in an ever-changing advertising landscape.

06 Be Prepared For Growing Pains

All businesses come with their fair share of growing pains. But this is even more true for businesses launched by young professionals who are working on their own without a road map like I was. A fortuitous intersection of circumstances gave me the momentum I needed to take my business full-time, but after that, I was in uncharted waters. The nature of freelancing is that it ebbs and flows. New branding, new systems, new niches– I had to be on my toes, and constantly thinking of fresh ways to iterate. Since I first started my business, my website has changed drastically from a DIY WordPress template to a custom Showit template by TONIC Site Shop. My proposal system and onboarding documents have evolved to add to the client experience, and I guarantee you I tried every CRM until I found one that worked for me. All of this was a part of the process and has added to my confidence that I am providing exceptional services to the professionals that I serve.

07 Come In With A Fresh Mind

One of the amazing things about starting your own business as a solopreneur is that you get to develop everything from scratch. Sure, it involves the aforementioned growing pains. But I also didn’t come in with any pre-conceived “this is how we do things around here” assumptions. Everything I’ve developed for my business, I’ve developed because it’s truly the best way for what I do. This has given me a level of autonomy and flexibility to really think through every touchpoint in my process, and I’ve received amazing compliments from clients that prove my thoughtfulness has paid off.

08 Outsource Where You Need To

As an entrepreneur, you develop an uncanny ability to be a jack of all trades. You’re a powerhouse of one, providing the service or product, connecting with clients, closing the deals, managing the finances, and keeping your marketing endeavors afloat. If we’re being honest, it’s a Herculean task, and while it’s a reality for most of us, it’s also basically impossible. Usually, something has to give, whether it’s your social media posting schedule or the copy on your website (and if that’s the hurdle for you, I’ve got you covered). But there are some things that you are better off delegating to other people, even when you think you could do it yourself. In my case, that was my branding and website design. Sure, I could have kept going with my WordPress template and cookie-cutter Canva graphics, but those simply weren’t doing my business justice anymore, and I needed to give my business’s digital home the same TLC I would have given a brick-and-mortar storefront.

09 Work-Life Balance Is Relative

I’ve already harped on outsourcing where you need to, whether it’s to a designer, an accountant, or a copywriter like me. A lot of people will tell you that this is essential for this fabled thing called “work-life balance”, and I won’t lie and tell you that it isn’t important. But one of the main reasons I left a corporate job for entrepreneurship was because, even if I was working the same hours, working even harder, and working for more inconsistent income, my work didn’t really feel like work. That’s what so many people are chasing: the passion and the autonomy of going to work every day (in my case, sitting down at my laptop every day), and doing what we love with people who we are genuinely tickled pink to have as clients. Sure, I’m writing this blog post at 11:43 PST, but I’m excited to share this with you all and to capture the learnings of my first two years working for myself.

10 Be a Giver, Not a Taker

One of the most powerful mindsets that I’ve adopted in my work thus far is to contribute to my professional ecosystem. If you just sit around on your website twiddling your thumbs and hoping that clients will somehow find you in a sea of competitors, you’re going to be waiting for a very long time unless you’re very lucky. No matter what you do, produce something that you can share with other people about your work, whether it’s social media posts, podcast episodes, infographics, YouTube videos, or webinars– All of this helps establish yourself as an industry expert, as someone who takes initiative, and as someone who is relational. All three of these things go a long way in connecting with clients to create a sustainable business.

If you’re an established or aspiring entrepreneur passionate about running a business that resonates, you’re in the right place. Whether you’re looking for a writer to partner with who can help you elevate every pillar of your business or hoping to connect with a like-minded individual, drop me a line and connect with me today.